Eighty-Five Days

In seventy-eight days, I’m getting notably older.  Yes, this piece is titled eight-five days; that was a week ago, and we’ll get back to that.  As the quirky band They Might Be Giants noted years ago, between then and now, I’m even older.  So are you.  And now you’re even older.

But yesterday morning’s run, a quick club five-and-a-half miler on a chilly thirty-degree morning, didn’t make me feel older at all (not that there aren’t some that do…)  Yesterday’s struck me as both unique and not so unique at the same time.  Arriving late as usual, I pulled in just as the crew pronounced Go and headed out, so it was a quick dash out of the car, zero to sixty faster than a Prius (which isn’t hard), to settle in with the tail end of the two-dozen-ish pack.  After a re-group at the far end of the out-and-back route, I cruised the return trip near the front of said pack, hung for ten minutes to chat as our soldiers filtered in, opted to forego the post-run gathering, jumped in the car, and headed home.  Elapsed time about an hour.  And on the way home it occurred to me that I wasn’t sweaty and I wasn’t entirely certain I’d even gone for a run, though I knew I had (no, we’re not talking early-onset Alzheimer’s, just that I felt no impact from the effort).

One could posit a similar thought for today’s outing, a bit more ambitious club ten miler at what, for my recent abilities, registered in at a fairly zippy pace.  And though this time I couldn’t claim lack of sweat, again, as I left, I certainly didn’t think, holy heck, that was ten miles.  I was just pleased to have logged a solid workout with good friends.

In fact, this morning twenty, count ‘em, yes twenty hardy club-mates showed up at a hair over twenty degrees (you can count ‘em degrees, too) and hammered out those ten miles.  This crowd doesn’t blink at these things.  Go ahead, ask your co-workers and friends if a cold Sunday-morning ten is their idea of fun.  Go ahead, I dare you.

You may be what you eat, but you are also what your peoples see as their norm.  And I love these peoples.

And so, the fact that in seventy-eight days I’ll hit a milestone that makes most people lament their impending (if not already in progress) demise, I’m just looking forward to being in a new age class.  And I love that lack-of-dread feeling.

Don’t get me wrong, as I’ve said many times in this column, neither I nor my compatriots are immune to the ravages of time.  I can’t outrun injuries, illnesses, and little gifts from the medical gods like those blood clots a few years ago, and my demise may come tomorrow.  But meanwhile, sixty is just an opportunity.  It’s time to line up the jets to see what that opportunity may unfold.

Owing to some of those injuries and hibernation from COVID, my race count in 2020 was, wait for it… One.  And that one, the virtual Boston, doesn’t in my mind count as a race (hint: we didn’t race).  For 2021 it was… Zero.  And until my zero-dollar deferral entry at the NYC Marathon broke the logjam (and also proved that staying away from crowds due to COVID had been a good idea), the goose-egg was still on the board for 2022.

The problem with going three years without racing is that you forget whether you remember how to race, and you also lose track entirely of what you’re capable of doing in a race.  The only way to learn how to race is to race.

Wait, I’ve been doing this for how long?  And I still feel like I need to be re-educated?  Go figger’

New York at least reminded me that I remembered how to manage a day at the Office of Marathon Execution, even if the results, thanks at least in part to those epic fails documented in this space, weren’t exactly what I’d aimed for.  I learned that I still knew how to manage what a race throws at me, but that event didn’t tell me what I could do.

So it was that a few weeks later I toed the line for our club’s famously hilly Thanksgiving weekend ten-miler.  No expectations, no pressure.  Just exploration of the possible.  And I found there was at least something possible, though it wasn't yet pretty.  What I targeted for a pace and what I turned in were about a half a minute apart from each other – in the good direction – but I certainly wouldn’t call it well-executed.  This was a case of being fried by Mile One and holding on for nine more.  Still, the only way you learn to race is to race.

A week later I did something I hadn’t done in three years and dusted off some lightweight racing-ish shoes (would my feet even work in those virtual slippers?) to test out what a race really meant.  This time with a team of old Squannacook friends (old friends, and just plain old, too) at the Mill Cities Relay, a team that had no reasonable expectation of winning anything, so again, no expectations, no pressure (really, all about the post-race!).  Just see what you can do with skinny shoes and only five miles in front of you.  And again, the pace targeted and the pace attained were a half minute off – again in the good direction.  And this one felt good.  Another race, sort of, and starting to learn to race.

Cut to New Year’s Day (the day after joining the Squannies for a casual half marathon – because resting the day before a race is always a good idea, right?) it was time to try out a real race (no offense to my local club, the ten-miler is real, it just wasn’t real for me).  Back to an old haunt, the Freezer Five, with real starting and finish lines – not a relay leg, another five-miler in skinny shoes but this time with a benchmark, a test of sorts as to whether I’ve re-learned to race.

It was hardly a Freezer, clocking in at a screwed-up-climate fifty degrees, but with a stiff headwind on the outbound that made for a challenging day and necessitated adjustments on pace and split expectations.  The end result was about the same pace as Mill Cities, and a full five minutes slower than what I’d clocked on this course ten years ago, but hey, that was ten years ago.  Whatever number was on the clock this time, I felt the racing drive, maintained the intensity (the Death-Warmed-Over look on my face in the race pictures proves that), and even took out a younger friend at the finish line that I didn’t think I’d ever beat again (I have to assume he had a bad day).  So yeah, I think I’m learning how to race again.

But here’s the kicker:  Being at the high end of my age group, them there’ youngsters knocked me off the podium.  But had I been eighty-five days older, I would have won my division.

There’s an opportunity out there.

Loose Ends Department

Revisiting my rant on the NYC Marathon, where I tried to stay positive but didn’t succeed all that well, I lament, was I fair?  Did I overblow this?  Was the shuttle fiasco (the COVID super-spreader event) just a darker shade of normal?  Did I imagine the whole thing about traffic and fellow runners’ poorly predicted and/or overly optimistic finish times?  Was my criticism of New York’s entirely unpoliced self-seeding system unwarranted?  Did I come across as callous and elitist?

Answers:  Yes, I was fair.  No, I didn’t overblow this.  Callous and elitist?  You’ll have to judge that.

Let’s start with the shuttle bus disaster.  One word:  Crickets.  Not a peep from the New York Road Runners.  I foolishly expected communication about this fiasco.  A simple, “Gee, we’re aware of this, and we’re sorry,” would have gone a long way.  But… Crickets.  I reached out to them and got a tepid form reply and nothing since.  And there’s never been a follow-up survey on the race itself, just the one I cited last time that asked only about sponsors.

But was it only me?  No.  My patron saint of the gorgeous pictures from the ferry wrote:

Very disappointing about the bus situation; some colleagues from work who also ran it mentioned that they 1) were 45 minutes late to their corral so had to start in a later wave due to bus snafu, and 2) overall finished 30-45 min behind their goal / expected pace.

Next, how about the seeding and the resulting traffic?

I took Dearest Souse’s advice and punched in a few bib numbers from my corral to see how those folks fared.  What I saw confirmed what I’d experienced.  Of the first ten I looked up, only two finished remotely near the seeding time for my corral.  But because it was a rainy day and I was resting to recover from COVID, and mostly because I'm a nerd, “punching in a few bibs” became an analysis of the hundred bibs in my range.  And the results were…affirming and infuriating.

Recall I submitted 3:55 as a seeding time and came in about three and a half minutes ahead of that, so I was pretty much spot on, despite all the obstacles in my way.  So, Wave 3 Corral B was in the 3:55-4:00 range.  And of the hundred bibs in my range, merely twenty made it home by 4:10.

OK, I hear you, it was warm and muggy.  That explains people sagging late (I too sagged late).  It doesn’t explain people sagging at five miles, or sooner, like walking up the Verrazano at the start.  And I hear you say, but Saint Beautiful Pictures just said that the ferry bus fiasco made people run behind their times.  But only a portion of the runners took the ferry.

The average finish time in this group (86 finished of the 100) was 4:44, fifty-three minutes behind me.  And the average place was 22,488, 14,950 places behind my finish.  My estimate of passing 14,000 people wasn’t far off.  Three people had a really tough day, taking over six hours, and that skews the numbers a bit, but not much.  Only four finished ahead of me.  Seriously?

So no, I didn’t imagine that, either.

And though this is a trivial point, I also mentioned how anti-social the field was and lamented that I had only one meaningful chat through the entire twenty-six miles.  As fate would have it, that one friendly guy, Johan, referenced in my previous post, concurred, after reading that post, wrote:

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I think you described it best, why I did not enjoy myself as much as I might have (or did in a previous marathon).  I must agree – not many people were chatty and that took away from the experience.

So no, I didn’t imagine any of this.

Does this change anything?  Of course not.  But it does make me feel better to know that I wasn’t complaining idly.