This One’s Gonna’ Leave a Mark

A week after last Monday’s Boston Marathon, this morning’s run was so cold and breezy that braving it in shorts with no jacket seemed like a pretty bad idea for a mile or two. And two days ago, it was cool and comfortable enough (well, comfortable is questionable as it rained pretty solidly) that clubmates who ran an alternate local marathon – one run on a flat rail trail, a notably un-Boston-like course – turned in times so stunning that they made me feel a tad bit the fool for running Boston’s hills instead (oh what coulda’ been, right?), even before factoring in the weather. Plus, it should be noted that those alternate marathoners only got to their race after a two-week delay since on their original date, a week before Boston, their course was inundated with over a foot of snow.

Cold, cool, even a snowstorm, so goes New England in April. Except, of course, for one day. As seems oh so typical, the stars aligned and Marathon Monday rolled around as the warmest day of the month (really, I checked the weather service history), so the dress of the day was decidedly summer. And in the chain reaction that only a marathoner can truly appreciate, add a few more degrees, baste with full sun, sprinkle in the major-marathon logistics which mean a lot of exposure even before the gun fires, and the heat multiplies its effect on your body in ways you don’t expect.

A few miles into this one I thought, “Yeah, this one’s gonna’ leave a mark.”

For most, once the marathon is over, days pass before taking that first tentative stride to get back on the horse. Or weeks. For me, I prefer an active recovery. People think I’m crazy (hint: not wrong), but I’m usually out for a run, albeit very slowly, the next day. And while I did get out for several miles of walking with Dearest Spouse both on marathon evening and the day after, it was, unusual for me, an extra day till I rambled out at uber-slow pace for a little recovery jog. That sounds like a trivial difference, but it’s not; it was indicative that this one was, as I’ve now said to many, was a tough day at the office. Even a week later, the legs are still heavy and a few surprise gifts from last Monday keep giving, making clear that my thinking early on was accurate.

Interestingly, once my quads stopped screaming – a hallmark of any hard marathon effort, enhanced by Boston’s downhills (and let’s face it, if they don’t hurt, you probably didn’t try hard enough) – the initial injury that signaled just how tough a day it was reappeared from the painful haze. Usually, you go into these things knowing your weak spots and what you expect to break, so when those spots start to cause grief somewhere between miles one and twenty-six, you’re not surprised. But the left quad going nuclear well before mile ten – as in, not simply feeling tired or worn but just plain injured – was a surprise. Followed by the left calf going into spasm as early as sixteen. And these were piled on the obvious issue: did anyone mention it was hot?

Despite all this, Boston 2024 wasn’t a train wreck. The result wasn’t what I figured I was in shape to turn in, but given the conditions, it wasn’t half bad. Had I not already been qualified for next year’s dance, this still would have requalified me by over twenty minutes. So really, no complaints. But as the forecast for mid-sixties jumped in the last two days to around seventy, married with the full sun that’s a special treat of the nearly shadeless pre-emergence-of-foliage Boston course, it was ugly just standing in the starting corrals. The addition along the “Perp Walk” (the trek from the Athletes’ Village at the high school to the start area) of several gallon-jug sunscreen stations plus volunteers armed with the spray-on variety for backs and shoulders was a huge and appreciated plus, but not burning doesn’t convey staying cool.

Knowing cool wasn’t in the cards (unless, of course, you think my middle name is Cool, in which case I suggest you’re delirious…) I opted to hit the first half at whatever felt comfortable, not actively backing off, since with the coming hell of the late miles already predetermined, slowing early would only mean being out there longer. And indeed, the first half rolled out at a decent clip, cutting down the miles remaining, before the body had a chance to start reacting to conditions. Yet I couldn’t escape feeling as though I simply wasn’t trained as well as I thought I was. Later I’d hear that feeling echoed from many others. Everything was harder.

Which is intriguing precisely because most of those people, myself included, concluded that we were in fact trained as well as we thought. In my case, since last posting to this venerable, or if not venerable then at least long-lived chronicle, I’ve raced the first three of the USA Track & Field New England Grand Prix series – having irrationally decided to try to complete the full series this year – and turned in three pretty good days. At the Bedford Super Sunday 4 Miler, the New Bedford Half (a perennial favorite), and the Frank Nealon 15K (also a favorite), I certainly didn’t win anything – that’s a near impossibility in the super-charged competition of the Grand Prix – but all three resulted in age grade ratings in the upper seventies, pretty much where I’ve historically camped out save for a few eighty-plus races a few years back. Plus, I was actually on track with logging long runs this spring, rather than my typical, “Oh, I’ve got a marathon when?” eureka moment followed by jamming in a few twenties. Sure, the last few weeks leading to the race were a little scattered (but experiencing totality of the eclipse up in Maine was one of several good reasons for training interruptions), but all in all, right up to our morning-before shakedown in Hopkinton, I couldn’t have been in much better position unless I shaved a decade off the sixty-one years I’m hauling around.

But by Framingham, well, ugh. This one’s gonna’ leave a mark. So, soldier on.

Twenty minutes of thin cloud cover heading into Natick offered brief respite, but quickly I’m back to searching out what little shade bare trees can offer (there being just one brief pine-forested section leading into Wellesley). Somewhere past the halfway mark, or maybe even before (it’s cloudy, my mind, that is), the left quad springs a leak, so to speak, with a sharp muscle pang amidships. Yeah, it hurts. Where’d that come from? Who knows? Damn the torpedoes. Soldier on.

At Lower Falls I almost miss Dearest Spouse and Dearest Offspring the Younger (and Wonder Dog), and never have a chance to yell to them to expect that the next ten miles are going to look rather alarming on their tracking app, not that they would hear what I say anyway. Almost immediately on passing them, the left calf starts to spasm. The walls start closing in. Soldier on, we’re counting down now.

Into the hills the walk breaks start. I’ve done enough of these to know they’re refreshing (not exactly like Junior Mints, but…) and usually, in the long run, help your time. Or help you to not completely unravel. Today, more the latter. Break on Hill One. Break on Heartbreak (but never at the top, the TV news crews like to camp there). Soldier on.

Beacon Street is seventy-five miles long, I’ll swear under oath. A spectator offers to lend his bike. It’s tempting. I’m toast. Another break, fortunately timed before I come upon my volunteer clubmates manning the street crossings around twenty-three. The break makes me look like I’m in good shape. Fooled them. Really, it’s seeing them that lights up my smile. Huge lift. Soldier on.

Kenmore. A mile to go. On another break. Coming up on the Boston Strong bridge, I think of the year of the bombings, I think of David Ortiz, a.k.a. Big Papi, shouting out to a packed Fenway Park, “This is our fucking city!”. I don’t just think it, I shout it. The woman next to me, not quite on a break but not moving much faster, shouts out, “Let’s fucking do this!” and we both take off for the Mass Ave underpass. You take inspiration where you can find it.

Around the corners, onto Boylston Street. I’ve been watching my watch, doing the math, ever since things started going to hell back in Newton. While my time today won’t matter a whit – as noted, already re-qualitied, and nobody will judge times on a day like this – pride never dies and I’m thinking that I’d rather the ten-minutes digit not flip over to the next higher integer. I’m counting minutes, counting seconds, and I know I can’t take another break. And the crowd goes wild. No, wait, it isn’t the crowd (though they were wild, all day), it’s the calf. It’s going full-on spasm. If it seizes, that digit will flip, or worse. I shift into upper body running. Over-exaggerating arms and shoulders to will myself down the street, taking stress off the leg muscles. And it’s working. But time is tight.

Twenty feet to the finish line, just when you think you’re there, you’ve pulled off another one, out of nowhere some Wing Nut decides he’s going to hot-dog for the photographers in the finish line bridge. He tosses is arms in the air and cuts left, right into me. What. The. Hell.

No lateral control at this point, and no mercy. I give the dude a mighty shove with all the mass I can garner from my wimpy little fun-sized frame. Two-armed heave, shove the dude aside, hope he doesn’t hit the pavement (he didn’t) but don’t care if he does (sorta’ wish…). On the finish line video you’ll never see this if you don’t know it happened and don’t look really closely. But seriously. What. The. Hell.

And like that, it’s in the books. Fifteenth Boston, thirty fifth (official) marathon. It’s a habit. Oh, and that digit didn’t flip. Not by much, mind you, but math is real. Like birds. And climate change.

A week later, yep, this one left a mark. That quad pang is lessened but still there, so yeah, that wasn’t overuse, that was something that went pop. Run gingerly for a while. The legs are still heavy, so while my brain may hope I’m recovered, the body is still tired. But that body is old and it fought through a difficult day. And marks will fade.

Finally, a fun note to wrap this up: Remember that bit about watching my watch toward the end (which, I note, is memorialized in the Overpriced Marathon Pichas That I Never Buy)? Well, I leaned later that simultaneously, in a galaxy far, far away, Dearest Offspring the Younger was watching my progress on the (much improved, pretty downright real-time and accurate) app. Said Offspring to Spouse, “Do you think Dad’s going to make it in [before that digit flips]?” To which Spouse replied, probably right when I was checking my watch for the eighty-third time, or possibly when I was body-blocking the Wing Nut, “You know your Dad. He knows exactly how much time he’s got.” Ah, so true, so true. Touché.

Postscript

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this year’s was the worst Boston Marathon expo I’ve ever seen. Other than the Montana-sized primary sponsor booth with astoundingly costly stuff, there was a lot of open floor space and little running related content. But hey, you could buy a new roof, gutters, or windows. Or dog food (OK, people run with their dogs, but c’mon…). You could be assaulted by at least a dozen highly aggressive vendors pushing pain relief (at least that was running related). But if assault became a problem, the North Las Vegas police force had a booth. Really nice guys, great respect, and had fun chatting with them, but they had a booth? But the weirdest? You could get your hair done. Seriously. At a stand of about twenty hair styling stations. And another set of them, nearby, similar. And yet another booth doing weaves and extensions. The writer at this link described it well. A completely different kind of What. The. Hell.

Note: Most Excellent Photo @Mile 24 courtesy of Rod Hemmingway, Photographer Extraordinaire.

Going the Distance?

Recently I opted to skip a race that my local club had targeted and descended upon en masse. Based on the results, it looked as though had I gone I’d have had a pretty good chance of walking away with the Fastest Old Fart medal, though there’s certainly no assurance of what coulda’ woulda’ shoulda’ happened. But I let it slip away, c’est la vie. Sure, it was cold as hell that day, but that’s not what held me back. As one of my club-mates put it a few days later, I took a principled stand and chose to give this one a pass. Go ahead, call me an elitist, I can take it. 

Let’s come at this from another angle. Those of you outside the New England running community who actually read these essays (which, if you drew a Venn diagram of said audience would result in an infinitesimally small intersection) probably don’t know of a regional magazine – yes, old school real-live printed on dead trees – called New England Runner. It’s a labor of love by the folks who drive it, and seriously, subscribe. Send them a few bucks. They deserve it.

In this month’s edition of said venerable publication, the also venerable Dave McGillivray, he of Boston Marathon and many other sources of fame, posted a column discussing the accuracy, or lack thereof, of GPS measurements of race courses. His article is of high merit; most of his points entirely accurate, though some I would dispute a bit technically because I’m an OCD geek. Only a few really raise the eyebrows, like suggesting that a runner missed the start or finish lines by fifty feet (five feet, sure, but fifty?... seems unlikely, but remember this). But the merit of his arguments aside, he focused on the GPS aspect and didn’t address a key point: a lot of race course are short or long because a lot of race directors just don’t care or don’t know they should care. 

Let me counter the previous statement by saying that a lot of runners just don’t care, either. And not caring is their right, and you may rightly and happily place yourself among that crowd. I don’t. 

What’s the purpose of racing? If your point is to prove you can run a distance, I’ll give you that close enough is probably close enough. Your office mates who have a hard time getting across the parking lot hear “half marathon” and don’t care if it was a tenth of a mile short (frankly, they probably don’t know what length it should be to begin with). If your point is to have a fun outing to run with your friends, again I’ll give you that close enough is probably close enough, though I would hazard you can do that for free (so long as you don’t need Yet Another Cheap Sweatshirt or various other swag) pretty much every day of the week or with your club or local buds. But I hold, in perhaps what you might interpret as a snobbish tone, that neither of those are racing. if your purpose is to race, by which I mean you care about your performance, which means you need to measure your performance, then a race director that doesn’t care is, quite frankly, ripping you off. 

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of reasons to show up at an event, the most common non-truly-racing one being that you want to support the cause that the event is being run for. If that’s your gig, fork over some coin to fight E. Harvey Thripshaw’s Disease while going for a run, once again, that’s your right. I’ve done it gladly (well, not for Thripshaw’s Disease, but you get the idea). But notice I used the word ‘event’ here, not ‘race’. When asked to come to a ‘race’ that’s not a race, where I am at best lukewarm to the cause (not saying it’s not worthy, but there are more worthy causes than any one human can ever support), my reaction is decidedly tepid.

I recently partook in an event, and in this case I clearly call it an event, because I wasn’t racing. I was pacing, meaning that I didn’t shell out any cash – my volunteering was enough to score the Cheap Sweatshirt and post-race banana. It also meant that I didn’t care about my time other than bringing home my fellow paced runners within a minute of their target, while distracting them from their exertions with lurid and obscure stories. Such a task should have been fun and easy, since we pacers only pace at paces where we are not stressed. Fun it was. Easy was a little more of a challenge since the course was not only almost certainly short, but because only five of the thirteen miles came in within two percent of their advertised one-mile distance. 

Wait a minute, you doth protest, two percent? Aren’t you being at the very least persnickety, bordering on curmudgeonly, and edging well past nit-picking? Answer? No, I’m not. 

First, let’s hop back to Mr. McGillivray’s statement that you might have missed the start or finish line by fifty feet. I found that almost laughable, but let’s presume it’s plausible. Fifty feet is only one percent of a mile. Two percent is a hundred feet. So yeah, two percent is a lot. 

Second, when you’re pacing runners for an hour-fifty half marathon, two percent is ten seconds per mile. Our job is to bring our sheep home within a minute of, but never a second over, our pace time. Being off by ten seconds a mile over thirteen miles makes that kind of tricky. But hey, that’s our job, right? And besides, two percent is probably within the margin of error of the GPS watch, even having been extremely careful in pegging the splits exactly at the mile markers. 

Trouble is, that two percent error range applied to only five of the thirteen miles. The other eight ranged up to six and seven percent, swinging wildly from long to short. Now you’re up to, and occasionally exceeding, three hundred feet and thirty seconds off in a single mile. 

After this roller coaster of inaccuracy, which made it tricky for me and my fellow pacer to agree on how to compensate, it was no surprise when the finish rolled near with my watch reading notably short – whereas, here I am in full agreement with Mr. McGillivray, said watches will usually read long. And that short measurement included some weaving and dancing in the last half mile to coach people in and make sure I didn’t cross the line too soon. 

Yah sure, I hear you say, these things happen. But those folks paid for a half marathon. Many of them probably wanted to better their performance from previous half marathons they’ve run. How can they do that when their course was likely a minute shorter than a real half marathon? They have not gotten what they paid for. 

Certainly plenty went home happy to have run something close to a half, happy with their intentionally cheesy Christmas-themed swag, and utterly thrilled that they had the chance to witness the vendor tent near the finish line offering artisanal IVs in any flavor including cherry (yes, this happened, and yes, I looked it up, and yes, it terrifies me as it should you, and no, that wasn’t the race director’s fault, though I did make up the part about cherry). But had I paid for and raced that ‘event’, I would have been bewildered at best. 

Then this happened. The post-race survey. Now, kudus for even asking for input, since many races don’t, but this one made crystal clear, if it hadn’t been before, that this was a consumer event, not a race. For the question, “What motivated you to register?” there appeared six options plus “Other”, and not one of those six made any allusion to the concept of a race. It’s a tradition, it’s a bucket list (I hope they meant a half-marathon, not this particular event), to get fit, to recover from illness, just to say I did it, and, of course, for fun. Nothing wrong with any of those. But don’t you think that a race survey should have the option of saying, “To achieve a time or performance or place goal”? 

Who cares if the course isn’t accurate if you’re not really holding a race? 

I’m staying away from the fact that this event was put on by a for-profit event promotion company, because to be fair, I’ve partaken in some of said company’s events that were in fact quite well done. And because, as the conclusion of this story will show, this problem is not limited to or tied to that for-profit situation. I’m also leaving names out to protect those you may view as guilty. 

Remember that principled stance? The race I took a pass on? That one was a local 5K raising money for a good cause.  I checked the web site and noticed it said it was USATF sanctioned, which, since I have a little background knowledge here, I can tell you means essentially the organizers had obtained liability insurance through USA Track & Field. A good thing, to be sure. But if they knew enough about USATF to utilize their sanctioning service, certainly they must also know that the real prize is a USATF course certification. A USATF certified course has been measured by accepted standards and can be assumed to be accurate. Huge. (I note there was no other language on their site indicating ‘wheel measured’ or any other nod to having paid attention to whether their 5K was 5K.) 

So I wrote the race director and politely asked that since I noticed they were sanctioned, were they also certified? Frankly, I expected the answer to be no, because certification isn’t a trivial exercise. And had it been, I would have accepted that answer; after all, it's a local 5K fundraiser.  But I was taken aback by the actual answer, which was no, but was followed by, and I quote, “Out of curiosity, why do you ask?” 

Parse that. We’re running a race and we have no idea that there is value in showing our course is accurate. 

It’s one thing to get to a race and discover the course accuracy leaves something to be desired, but when you know up front that the organizers haven’t made it a priority… well, as the airlines like to say, we know you have other choices, so in this case, yeah, other choices. 

Reports from friends who ran the event indicated that the course was pretty close. How close? Who knows? Meanwhile, I penned a polite response to the race director, reproduced below, and took the principled stand. I can’t say that I’ve always taken this stand in the past, nor can I say that I’ll always do so in the future – chances are good that I’ll let many imperfect races into my plans; it’s a case-by-case decision because as I said, there are lots of reasons you might participate on any given day. But it’s always your choice where you spend your time, effort, and dollars, and if you truly want to race, you’re on solid ground if you insist that the folks putting on the event are in fact holding not an entertainment event, not a fund-raiser, but indeed a race. 

Thanks for the response. Course certification assures an accurately measured course and is a HUGE asset for any race. Without it, no time can be relied on to be valid for any purpose, whether personal, club, or any other sort of record.

There are far too many races where “close enough” is the approach. “Close enough” is simply not close enough. I don’t mean to sound elitist, but as a moderately competitive 20-year veteran, if I’m going to pay for a race I want to know I can count on accuracy and validity for personal and other comparisons.

Thanks