The Second Lap

Indoorsanity

2012-01-16T23:36:00.000-05:00

How do you describe a race so ludicrous as this other than to just spit out that we raced sixty-eight and a quarter laps (um, really more, we’ll get back to that) around an indoor square track and called it a half marathon. Two hundred and seventy-three rather sharp left turns, which left behind a never-before-seen blister count on the feet. Where does one start with an event as odd as this?

How about with a guilt trip? The quandary of this circumambulation is that it became a cross between an item in a running magazine advice column and some old fashioned Catholic guilt. Let’s back up and recall why I subjected my bones to this oddity in the first place: as a stage in the Assault on New York.

Some might say I’m opinionated. Some might say I’m overly frugal. (No, really?) Putting those together, running wickedly expensive races has never held much appeal. I’ve tolerated the high price of the Boston Marathon because it is, after all, Boston, the Granddaddy, each running a fulfillment of a dream from my younger First Lap days, and because, being right in my back yard, other than the entry fee and twenty bucks to park for the expo, there are really no other costs.

New York, on the other hand, racks up an even higher entry fee than Boston. Credit the union labor in the City, I suppose, though in all honesty, the massive logistics of pulling this off in New York City make the price somewhat understandable. Add travel cost to what is never a cheap destination, and, well, I’ve always just said the heck with it. There are plenty of other races.

But there is an undeniable appeal. Not because it’s a World Marathon Major. Chicago, looping through the Loop upon Midwestern flatness, elicits a yawn. London and Berlin, nice I suppose, but I can go to my grave without having run them and not feel unfulfilled. New York, the city I loved to hate while growing up Upstate, yet the city that can’t fail to get your heart racing, and not just because of the creepy dude in the shadows somewhere behind you… New York, I’ve come to the conclusion that at some point I’ve got to run New York.

The rest falls into place easily. In a little over a year I’ll hit the next big age group, which means this is the final year of my forties, which means hardware is harder to harness against those forty-year-olds, which means I might as well do a big race this year where winning anything isn’t a possibility anyway, as next year I’ll be mapping out races with the best age group trophies. And as it turns out, New York’s guaranteed entry standards, which allow you to bypass the lottery, are tightening for 2013. I’d still make it with my current times if I can repeat them this year, but what about a Native Guide? Assaulting a mega-event like New York is a lot less daunting with experience at your side. Enter Rocket John, who’s run New York a few times, and knows his way through the maze of twisty shuttle busses all the way to Staten Island.

Except that Rocket John has had a couple of rough races of late, and didn’t have a New York qualifier, so we had to get him one. Since New York allows you to qualify with a half-marathon, which we can slip in any time, we had to find one, and soon, since we didn’t (and still don’t) know when registration opens. And I had no desire to travel to some far-flung place for said event.

Enter Smuttynose. Fact is there are darn few half-marathons in New England in the winter. There’s a reason for that. Most sane people don’t run half-marathons in the New England winter. And there are even fewer on a Saturday, which I prefer so I don’t have to blow off my church band. But there it was, tucked in the online race listings: The Smuttynose Palooza Indoor Half-Marathon, brought to you by the Loco guy, Mike St. Laurent. Sixty-six laps around a one-fifth-mile indoor track in nearby New Hampshire. On Saturday. In January. We had a ticket for our Assault on New York.

Race day arriveth. Race day? Seriously? Somehow it wasn’t. Not only was it a strange race, but our only real target was to get John under an hour thirty for New York, training run pace, and my legs were still shredded from last week’s five thousand meters in flats. Result: Zero pressure. The whole thing was loosey-goosey, even the course, which somehow grew from the advertised sixty-six laps and change to sixty-eight plus. Seems nobody had ever truly measured that fifth-of-a-mile track for USATF certification before, and much to their surprise it took five-point-two laps to hit a mile. Well, they promised to count our laps for us, so whatever.

The Question of the Day was how to run this thing. Rocket John favored a conservative start, juicing it up later. I’m not very good at juicing it up in a race. On a training run, sure, but late in a race it just doesn’t happen. If I need a time, I know I’d better bang on out there and put some in the bank. This is where the magazine advice column comes in. Do I stick with John? After all, this was about getting him a time. Or do I run a race? This wasn’t an important race for me, but after all, it was a race with a real live race entry fee. Oh, dear running etiquette expert, what do I do?

Rocket John, ever the gentleman, seemed to give the signal to go run it. We went out together for the first mile or two, kinda’ hot. He dropped back, and I motored on, inspired by the tall guy in black hanging off my flank. Not that it mattered, we were running second and third, not in contention to win (and in this odd event with two heats, a guy in the second heat would beat us all, leaving me third overall). But the competitive part of me took over, and I determined that Man in Black wouldn’t pass. He didn’t. But John fell well off the pace, faded, and missed his hour thirty.

Oh, Catholic guilt! What have I done? Did I let him down?

Truth is, had I stuck with him, I couldn’t have spurred him to make up the nearly five minutes by which he missed it. Then again, had we gone out slow and conservative as he’d planned, things could have turned out very differently. We’ll never know. Assuaging my guilt is the knowledge that he’s got another half planned in March, which should leave us enough time to get into New York, and I can pay him back by joining him for some major training before then.

Meanwhile, in the race… With John faded, distance growing between me and the Man in Black, and the leader well ahead, the rest became a mental game. Count the laps into each mile (with the mile markers scattered around the track due to the newly discovered five-point-two formula), click a split. There really was no other way to deal with this. You can’t simply follow the lap count to sixty-nine (they counted the first quarter lap as one). You’d go loopy. It’s like climbing the big hill back to the house at the end of my training runs. You have to break it into manageable chunks.

Besides, I had to keep track, since the race organizers’ promise to count our laps itself got lapped. In a race where we lapped people continuously, electronic counting was the only possible way to make this work. But John and I had inadvertently rung up a lap during our warm-up. We thought it would be cleared before the start, but the previous relay heat ran slower than planned so we started before they finished. Result: No clearing of the system possible, and Rocket John and I had an extra lap on the boards. Intrepid race management tried to fix this mid-stream, but didn’t get it right. Further, I fouled up my watch as well, and didn’t realize that in re-syncing, I de-synced.

Six laps to go. But they announced I had eight. Say what? Four laps. They said six. I’m done. They say two more. No choice but to run two more, we’ll sort it out later. And later we figured that we both had it wrong, each by one in the opposite direction. So yes, I ran a half marathon that was about thirteen-point-three miles long and my last-lap kick was for naught once we pulled the splits and realized we had to shave off that last circuit. It cost me a perhaps half a dozen seconds in a race where I landed only a dozen clicks off my best, south of a buck twenty-three. But clocking that in a rather casual effort on somewhat shredded legs can’t be a bad thing. And besides, they made it up to us; the Smuttynose was on tap (forgive me Father, I sinned and spilled one!) while we cheered on our friends in the second heat.

Splinched!

2012-01-11T21:28:00.000-05:00

In retrospect, I really didn’t need this race. It was a somewhat foolish race. I’d raced twice the week before, I’m racing the week afterward, I didn’t need yet another. But it sounded like fun, if your idea of fun is subjecting yourself to pure agony for a while. And it was fun, at least other than the agony bit, and other than a few days later feeling in real life what I appeared to be in a photo taken by Dearest Daughter the Younger: Splinched.

For those unfamiliar with the term, splinching is Potteresque (from J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter world) for accidentally leaving a bit of yourself behind when you pop into or out of one place to somewhere else directly, skipping the pesky spaces in-between. Efficient transport, if it could be done for real. Apparating and disapparating as it’s known in that space. But if not done just right, you splinch, which is not a good thing, unless you like parting with an arm or a leg.

DD the Younger recently saved her pennies to treat herself to her very own digital camera, which Dear Old Dad thought was a bit odd since there was one in the household at her disposal, but her artistic side wanted to experiment with video and image features that the stock unit didn’t provide. In short, it wasn’t cool enough. OK, Dad can handle that, set a goal and execute. Fair enough. One said feature of said new gadget was the ability to take panoramic photos without the annoying need to paste together eight images that inevitably don’t match up due to lens imperfections and operator tilt. Push the button, scan the scenery, and the camera locks on to stable points as you pan, meshing many strips of image together into one glorious whole.

If you’re a runner, or the offspring of one, or, in this case, both, this leads to an obvious question: What happens when I aim this at Dad as he races past? And the answer is really rather amusing. Most of the time you get a mess, but now and then you get the timing just right, and you get Dad, or at least parts of him, many, many times (twenty-five in fact as seen here, click on this one to see it larger) as he slogs on by. And he’s never in those pesky spaces in-between. Indeed, not knowing any better, you might think he was apparating repeatedly. And sometimes, when only bits of him appear – a leg here, an arm, half a chest without a back – you might say he splinched.

I found this picture to be quite amusing, and a couple days later I found it to be downright prescient. Because a couple days later my hamstrings were screaming in a way they haven’t screamed in a long time. I’d better back up a bit here…

Running with Greater Boston hasn’t really enhanced my training, since I don’t live in Boston where most of the workouts occur, and the time and logistics of getting there make it relatively unworkable. But racing with them, even in this short time, has brought plenty of new and interesting adventures: cross country races including the trip to Nationals, returning to the track for the New Year’s Eve mile, and this past weekend, a chance to hammer out a 5000 meter on the track. Ponder: Why is it that we never call it a 5000 meter on the road, and we don’t call it a 5K on the track?

By any name, this was to be the first time I’d ever run 5000m on the track, and even though I knew I’d be slow relative to the field of youngsters, in light of recent racing personal bests, I smelled a breakout. I consider this distance to be a sprint, and it’s been pretty much constrained by what appeared to be a natural speed limit. Put it on the track, controlled environment, following on the quick mile of a week back, and perhaps it might be time…?

The simple answer is that it didn’t happen. The emotional answer is that it was a poorly executed race. The complicated answer is that it still could have been my best five kilometers, despite not being the ultimate fastest, and despite having come in dead last.

Yep, dead last. So far behind the young fast guys (who lapped me incessantly) that they were lining up the next race when one of the officials happened to notice that, Hey! There’s still a guy out there! Now, considering they had an official dedicated to counting our laps, and he was dead accurate, I can’t quite figure out how this got by them, but whatever. They moved out of my way, and I crossed the line dead last, nearly dead. Not so bad as dead last in a road race of hundreds, this was merely seventh of seven, the result of a thinned field of numerous no-shows and the eighth guy, the only other master in the race and someone I would have bettered, dropping out in a generous gesture to give me the honors.

Poorly executed? First lap, too fast. First mile, too fast. Second mile, on target but now lagging, gasping. Third mile? Flesh barely congealed to the bones, falling apart, grunting, pace falling through the floor. Final result? No PR. Four seconds over my best. But we’ll get back to that.

I’d though the track would be a controlled environment, a way to even the pace, remove the vagaries of the road, reel in that breakthrough. Instead, it was relentless. With no ups or downs, it offers no momentary rests for the weary bits. And on a two-hundred meter oval, twenty-five laps, one or two seconds per lap cause an insurmountable change in the result. You’re constantly and cruelly reminded of how you’re falling apart, the difference between cruising and falling apart being separated by mere seconds. When the laps rose to forty-four seconds with nothing in the reserve tanks, I knew I was toast.

But the irony is that being four seconds off my best on a guaranteed accurate course makes this arguably my best, despite my dissatisfaction with the course of the event. My fastest was on a net downhill course. And numbers two and three, both two seconds between the fastest and last weekend’s, were on the same course known to be wildly inaccurate, those times resulting from my best estimate adjustment courtesy of Google satellite photos; in short, they might be quite wrong.

Matters not. Like the mile a week prior, I now have a track 5000m under my belt, and a place to work from. Clearly more track workouts are in order to improve that speed limit. But the adventure of trying this new event was what attracted me from the start. What we runners see as fun is a little different from the rest of the world. No regrets.

Now about that splinching bit… I can only theorize that racing a full five kilometers in the Hot New Shoes, the Saucony racing flats / spikes is to blame. I can only guess that the lower heels on these minimalist tires changed my leg geometry enough to stretch the living daylights out of everything on the back side, resulting in hams on rye a couple days later. Slice my legs out, I think they’ve been splinched. And in this condition, I note, a half marathon coming in three days? Yeah, whatever, bring it on. It’s what we do.

Busy Weekend Bits

2012-01-05T22:30:00.024-05:00

Last weekend’s bang-bang racing double made for more stories and tales than a mortal human could absorb in one sitting, even one used to my verbosity. Having told the tales of the tape a few nights back, I offer here some tales of, well, amusing bits.

Reunion: Saturday being an open meet, you never know who you’ll meet (pun intended). It would be easy to say that pretty much everybody was there, though that’s a bit of a stretch. Let’s just say there were a number of surprises, all pleasant. Besides a great turnout from my newly adopted Greater Boston club, also present was a customer of mine with whom I’ve tried to line up a run for some time, a young lady who ran on the track team I coached a few years back, and most pleasantly, one of my biggest smile-generating coaching subjects, Nick.

Coaching middle school teams at a small Catholic school is, as I’ve noted before, is generally not an exercise in high-brow athletic accomplishment. It’s a joy of course, which is why I’ve done it, but the focus is on fun, fitness, and personal improvement, not championship attainment. Yet each year I’ve had the pleasure of having one or two gifted athletes, offering the chance to push those few a little harder in the limited time we got together. These are the kids that you can push harder because they want to be pushed, they respond, and they grow into it.

Nick was my star of the Class of 2010, and now, as a sophomore at a nearby Catholic high school, he’s met significant success in various sports but has now gravitated to a running focus. Makes my heart all warm and fuzzy, it does… I’ve cheered as I’ve heard of his exploits since graduating from my team. And there he was, cheering me on for a change!

Nick, your coach is very proud of you!

Collecting the Forward Payment: On the topic of never knowing who you’ll meet comes this interesting story. Back in November, the USATF New England Cross Country Championships was my first race with Greater Boston. I arrived somewhat lost and confused, not exactly the deer in the headlights since it was daytime, but not far off. My apprehension was quickly broken when another GBTC master recognized me and pulled out of his back seat the shirt I’d designed for the Wolves race I’d directed for my local Highland City Striders club a couple years back.

At Saturday’s meet he related that something stuck in his head from that day and he’d finally remembered what it was. He recalled my race so fondly because I’d made a point of mailing him his medal after he’d had to depart shortly after the race. The irony was that there had been debate in our club on whether to do this, with several advocating that if winners couldn’t stick around for their awards, well, too bad, not our problem. My take? You callous fools. How hard is it to mail a medal and make someone happy? I exercised race director’s discretion and mailed the uncollected awards.

Two years later, I was now teammates with the recipient of one of them. He remembered, and appreciated it. And I was so pleased to know that a simple act brought happiness. It’s common to talk about paying it forward. Just do what feels right. It might come back to you.

Wicketh Funnieth: I hath to thay, thith ith my favoith thtory.

Sunday marked the fourth time I’ve run the Freezer Five, and the third time I’ve scored a masters award. There are a bunch of things I love about this race, but I’ll mention two in particular. First, I love the awards, which are both useful and cool, being sweatshirts with what I think is a great logo, and second, I love the awards, because they’re consistent yet varying, so I’ve built up a great colorful collection which just increased in size by fifty percent. As you can see, I now have three: 2007, 2008, and 2012.

It wasn’t until a couple days after the race, however, that I noticed something a little amusing…

2007 saw the 26th annual Freezer Five. Sweatshirt award pictured.

2008 saw the 27th annual Freezer Five. Sweatshirt award pictured.

2009 saw the 28th annual Freezer Five. I missed it due to foot surgery.

2010 saw the 29th annual Freezer Five. I didn’t make the podium that year, still coming back from the surgery break.

2011 saw the 30th annual Freezer Five. I missed the race that year.

And then…2012 saw the 31th annual Freezer Five.

Look closely at that sweatshirt. Yes, the thirty-oneth. Not making that up. Thirty-oneth.

Ah well, I love this race anyways. And I’m looking forward to seeing if next year is the thirty-tooth.

Finally, Absolution: Finally, being, as noted, Catholic, I must offer a confession. Forgive me readers, I have sinned. I looked it up, and discovered I’d lied. As it turns out, I ran a few open meets the summer after my freshman year of college, the summer of ’82, just as my First Lap of running was coming to its faded end. So no, it wasn’t quite thirty years since my last competitive mile, merely twenty-nine and a half. And it wasn’t high school. And you don’t care. But my conscience is cleared. Now I’ll go say a few Hail Marys and we’ll call it a night, OK?

Amen.

Bang Bang!

2012-01-02T21:47:00.000-05:00

Two common phrases contradict. Go out with a bang. Start off with a bang. So, which is it going to be? Why decide? Bang Bang! Do ‘em both. I can’t recall the last time, if ever, I’ve raced on successive days. Certainly I’ve never done it in this weekend’s style: race the last day of 2011, then again the first day of 2012. The result? Last year, out with a bang. This year, in with a bang.

Two very different bangs, though, both superficially and on a deeper level. Superficially, a mile on the track versus five on the road – something new, something old. Deeper, flat out flooring it versus a mental game of persistence – something raw, something cranial. Still, bang bang.

Saturday (make that 2011) saw my return to competitive racing on the track for the first time in about thirty years. Or as Greater Boston teammate Joe put it, “The last time you raced a mile, most of the people in this building weren’t born yet!” And there were a lot of people in the building, the event being the “Mini-Meet”, which was anything but mini, at Boston University’s delectable 200m indoor banked oval. Mini? How about fourteen heats of the mile with about a dozen in each? How about my forecast of 5:15 placing me clear down in heat ten? (And yes, it’s fastest to slowest.) This was not mini by any means.

Oddly, my intent wasn’t to run this race at all, but to join my GBTC brethren in Lou’s Relay, an annual four-by-sixteen-hundred-meter relay extravaganza. Except our Teammate Number Four came down with an unidentified ailment and bailed. Though we could have scored a new fourth, the mini-meet was so over-maxed that had we waited for said Headline Event, the new year would be encroaching across Europe and several of our spouses would have been encroaching on our lives for our absences from home-side holiday festivities. So we jumped into the open mile.

Truthfully, this was a relief. While our relay team wasn’t intended to be highly competitive, I would have been in the slower half of the team, and more importantly it was my intent to test out the Hot New Shoes (see previous post). Racing in shoes never worn, yes, I know, bad idea, but opportunities are few, just go for it. Still, had they inflicted unbearable pain and agony, I’d rather they merely crippled my own mile than dock the team’s relay performance. So a flat-out mile was just ducky with me.

And flat out it was. Not only had I not raced on the track in thirty years, I hadn’t run on a track so small since then, either. Two-hundred-meter laps fly by so fast that with the pedal to the floor I couldn’t even think to look at my watch for splits. Bang times eight. But I didn’t need my watch to know that I don’t have the rhythm of a mile down yet. It was pretty obvious that I faded around lap six, slipping from second to my eventual seventh place 5:13 finish in the heat of fourteen, after a tenuous moment nearly going down on the last turn after being pressed against the rail by a passing competitor. The laps are small, they fool you into thinking they’ll pass in an instant, and they do, but those instants get harder and harder.

Flat out. Too fast to think. Give me some time on this one, I’ll figure it out. But, um, wow, bang.

Oh, by the way, the shoes? Like driving a turbocharged GTO. In slippers. Delightful.

Sunday (make that 2012) was a whole different, far more familiar game. A rushed return to an old favorite, the Freezer Five, a relatively flat and known accurate five-miler which, prior to this fall’s New England Cross Country Championships, was the site of my personal best at that distance. Rushed in that our church band doesn’t usually play the first Sunday of the month, but we were on, and no, of course we didn’t get the “fast” priest. Finish the last song, drop the guitar, and drive rapidly. Perhaps the adrenalin of just getting there was a boost to the system?

In the back of my mind was the nagging question of whether this was a good idea at all. Race successive days? Risk injury? Or simply die an agonizing death on the course?

Warned by a friend of a fairly stiff headwind on the outbound leg, I figured my fortunes would be boosted by latching on to a nice moving windscreen for the first two miles. And this is where this race got cranial and deep right away.

A little background here. My race performances have been doing what I call “compressing” over time, meaning my pace in the longer races is coming down closer to that of the shorter races, but the shorter races haven’t been getting much faster, they being compressed against my top speed in track workouts. I’ve seen this as sort of a speed limit, and have started work to break through it, hitting the track for a few sessions of mile repeats lately, the theory being that if I can raise the speed limit, I may be able reach a comfort zone that then allows a higher limit for the five kilometer sprint, and open up some space for compression at the longer distances to continue. In this respect, the previous day’s flat-out mile may have been a benefit.

Off the line it was apparent that others were also looking for nice moving windscreens, which made it hard to get one for myself. I’d already fought three-quarters of a mile of wind before a true drafting opportunity arose, but the pair ahead of me were holding a pace just a hair hotter than I felt capable of, and kept creeping away.

Mental game time: If I let them go, my effort goes up and my performance goes down. If I stay with them, I have to consciously turn on mini-sprints to continually close the gap, mini-sprints when I’m already at a pace I’m not certain I can sustain for five miles. But in my mind I now knew that my track speed limit had just risen, blasting away that longtime 5:30ish limit with yesterday’s 5:13. So tell myself that these mini-sprints aren’t out of the question.

It’s debatable whether I actually gained any wind advantage out of this, but it kept me glued to these guys, both of whom I eventually beat. After the lollypop turnaround, the expected return-leg tailwind reversed itself – of course, what else would you expect? – mom nature offering only more resistance. But by then, despite the lack of mile markers, I knew I had a shot at sub-thirty, a goal secretly unstated and a plateau never achieved. Place didn’t really matter at that point for anything more than pride. It was merely a game of mental will to drive up the last small hill and press home. You know when you’re pressing the limit when you need to think about whether to swallow (or otherwise eliminate) accumulating gunk and risk losing the oxygen benefit of a single breath or just let it fly where it may, but that’s pretty much where I was.

Payoff. First five-miler below thirty, and twenty-one seconds below, for five-fifty-six pace. And I’d wondered whether it was a good idea to race. Bang.

It’s Twenty-Twelve. Have a bang bang year.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2011-12-30T23:47:00.014-05:00

Movie and musical themes keep running through my head that zero in on what could be seen as ironies or could be seen as a train running a little fast on a downhill grade. Picture the movie drama (the film has been made, I don’t recall the name, never saw it); he’s going too fast, will he make it to the valley safely? Or will there be a spectacular fireball, consuming countless extras and movie props, and of course our hero?

A simpler image is the end of the Blues Brothers movie: the demise of the Blues Mobile. Admittedly this low-brow flick still stands as a favorite; my tastes are not entirely cultured. What a vehicle! Cop tires, cop motor, cop suspension, and it pulled off amazing feats, but when it reached its limit, the end was sudden. Instant, violent disintegration. Everything fell off at once.

Notwithstanding the easy comparison to the finale of a bad day marathoning where only the wheels fall off, I sometimes wonder if I’m not pushing my body like the Blues Mobile, only to have everything fall off at once. Knees buckle, ankles snap, heart myocardially-infarcts, lungs implode, a gelatinous blob is left pulsating on the race course somewhere, best removed with liposuction equipment. OK, it’s not likely, but should it happen, man, what a way to go.

Am I pushing a bit hard? Well, the year closes with a list of notable events, most of which I didn’t foresee coming. Since I’d failed at covering two thousand miles in the previous years, I skipped that in favor of the odyssey of running every street in town. Perhaps I was too busy studying maps to recognize the long-term change in intensity that set in, and here at year’s end I’ve covered not two thousand but twenty-six hundred miles, averaging fifty a week. Beating my thought-to-be out-of-reach annual record from age seventeen. Surprise.

At the end of the Marlborough map coverage, along came, quite by accident, a streak of running every day that now stands at two hundred and twenty-five days and, winter-be-willing, offers a shot at that other seemingly untouchable youthful mark of three hundred seventy five days. Can’t say it’ll happen, but even being this far in, surprise.

After scraping the three hour mark at Boston and serving up a heat-slowed Buffalo, I could have reasonable expected my pre-surgery marathon PR was a memory. Along came Bay State. Surprise. And following on that, racing with Greater Boston. Surprise. In Seattle. Big surprise. In the Nationals. Absurd surprise.

All of which leads me back to the question: Is this a reasonable new reality, or a path to implosion, Blues Mobile or otherwise? Another musical theme kicking around the cranium is a far lesser known one: an old Harry Chapin tune called Mr. Tanner. No relation to Rocket John, this Mr. Tanner is an ordinary local Ohio guy blessed with a rich voice, who at the urging of this friends cranks it up a level and sings a concert in New York. The big time. Except he’s good, but not big time good, and he comes home chastised to nothingness by the critics and loses his will to share his talents publicly.

That tune certainly went through my head on my way to Seattle. But I didn’t come home in disgrace, and the body hasn’t imploded yet. And frankly, I don’t really care if I get beat up a bit on the bigger stage. I’m just glad to have the opportunity to be there.

So to the last theme, borrowed from Python: And now for something completely different. Last night I treated myself to a pair of spikes, or when said metal bits are removed, racing flats. (Actually, my cross country team treated me with their generous season-end gift certificate.) I haven’t owned a pair of these since high school. Slippers with weapons, as Keith at the running store called them. And tomorrow I’ll test them out, racing a 4 x 1600 meter relay on the indoor banked track at Boston University, the first time I’ve raced a mile since high school. It’s been over thirty years. I have no idea what I can do, but I’m eager to push the body and try to find out. I feel like a kid again! Granted, a kid with achy bones and cholesterol meds, but you get the idea.

The movie and musical themes can make you worry, but it’s up to you to push past them, ignore the pessimism, and continue to drive to new adventures. Aging doesn’t have to mean retracting from the abilities of youth if you don’t let it.

Come to think of it, all the Blues Brothers really needed was a good mechanic.

Going Loopy in Seattle

2011-12-16T23:32:00.012-05:00

So first, let’s get one thing completely straight. This was the National Championship (technically, the USATF National Club Cross Country Championships), but there weren’t any entry standards. Given the right circumstances, mainly a club willing to have me and my willingness to get my bones to Seattle, I could have run in this at eight minute pace. Or slower. Indeed, in the masters’ race, there were plenty who did, seeing as the masters race includes not just us forty-somethings but fifty-, sixty-, and seventy-somethings. The race video reveals more than a few departing the starting line at a leisurely pace. So getting into Nationals wasn’t in itself an unattainable feat.

That being said. when I report that I finished 152nd of 356, frankly, so what? Reporting that I didn’t embarrass myself, beating about a third of those in my five-year age group (48th of 68), well, that’s nice too. It proves that moderate-size-fish-me stepped out of my local small pond and dove into an ocean of serious competition. It says I ran a respectable race but, as expected, I’m nowhere near the apex of this game. No surprises.

All that aside, the reality was that last Saturday afternoon I did stand at the start of the National Championships. Not exactly on the starting line, as each team’s starting box was about one-point-four people wide, so as fifth man I was a few feet back, but certainly at the starting line. Just being there? Wicked cool. Racing with the likes of these guys? Just like the commercial: Priceless. And qualifying standards or not, I was there because I’d run well enough to be asked. I’ll take it!

Running with a team with the historical cachet of Greater Boston is somewhat heady in and of itself, even though they’re all normal folks, and nice ones at that, who’s company I truly enjoyed on the trip. But leaving the hotel on Friday for our course scouting expedition, jogging in a pack of twenty-five-plus bright red Greater Boston jackets through the streets of downtown Seattle heading for the light rail was an unexpected high. Runners tend to be individualists. Buck the trend. Don’t follow the crowd. We’re different. But when it is your crowd of like-minded individualists in a visible show of force on the other side of the country, it’s all about team, and it’s a rush.

Seattle’s serious lack of winter daylight seemed to bring race day about that much quicker. Thirty-seven packings and re-packings of my race-day backpack later – who says I’m not obsessive-compulsive? – we were walking into the Jefferson Park golf course (with many thanks to City of Seattle for allowing us to trash their golf course). First surprise: An admission fee! Not for us, of course, but imagine that, people would pay to see us run! Second surprise: A real-live printed on glossy-coated dead trees program! With our names in it! Now, in the age of instant publishing, seeing your name in print has long lost its luster, but still, the Wicked Cool factors kept stacking up right alongside the myriads of cool jerseys from teams across the country. Nationals!

The starting line stretched wide across the second fairway, making a drive for the green rather tricky. Sixty starting boxes crammed into a hundred and fifty feet at best; really one person wide, though some teams tried putting two on the line. But even to get there, one had to pass through the officials’ tent and be inspected for proper and complete labeling; this race carrying more identification requirements than any I’ve seen before. Besides the standard front-side number bib, we were also required to wear a second copy of our number on our left hip, an age group identification bib on our backs, and not one, but two chip tags, one on each shoe. In other words, they’d be able to track us down if we ran to Oregon.

From there, five two-kilometer loops. The first a little different, the next four identical. No hills to speak of beyond a few mild slopes. Simple. So simple, that as a marathoner, I didn’t care when I learned the race was ten, not eight kilometers. Yah, another lap, so what?

Well, five laps is a lot when you’re burnt by the end of the second, that’s what.

Obviously my goal here was to run the best I could, deliver the best place possible for my team, and walk away proud. But wrapped inside was another nugget: a score to be settled with a rival from neighboring Lowell, a rival who’d beaten me the night we met this past summer, and to whom I’d returned that favor at the New England Cross Country Championships. This was the rubber match. Beat “Bad Dog” E.J. Period.

Turns out the Lowell team started only a few boxes to our left. Within a few hundred meters, as I danced and jumped to stay upright in the starting rush, memories of being gored by spikes in high school (from which I still carry scars) returning to haunt me thirty years later, I’d picked up E.J.’s distinctive gray locks to my left. By the first turn he’d dropped in a stride behind me. Game on.

The reality was that I wasn’t in this race from the perspective of a serious contender. I’ve already noted my unembarrassing but unimpressive finish places. I was at capacity, all cylinders firing, not much more I could do if the earthquake hit and I had to run faster to escape the collapsing ground just to live another day. Had someone, anyone, crept up on me to pass, I can’t say that I wouldn’t have let them.

But not E.J. He’s not getting by. No matter what.

In his mind, a similar scenario. Anyone else, would he, could he have hung on? Unlikely. But for him, let Cattarin go? No way. No matter what.

And so it went. Loop one. As I told my cross country kids, run the first one hard and say, “Oh crap, I’ve got four more to do!” Loop two. Oh crap, there are really three more? This really is ten kilometers, not just five easy loops. Agony set in rapidly. E.J. stuck like glue. Some guy in the woodsy section of the loops kept screaming, “This is NATIONALS! Show ‘em what you’ve got!” The course slicked up, this being Seattle it was damp to start and became more so as the drizzle accumulated, and first one, then another runner went down in front of me on the lower turn; without spikes I now had to choose my route carefully, step light and sure, as well as sprint like the world was ending. Four loops. Hang on. He’s going to smoke me on the final stretch, I just know it.

But I won’t let him. Flail. Break things. Risk permanent heart damage. Whatever.

A teammate watching my finish (after all, I was fifth man, and as epic as this was for me, they were all done minutes earlier) said simply, “You were all over!” The booth review of the tapes makes it look almost smooth (for those of you who actually followed the video link, it’s about sixteen minutes into the show). All I can say for sure is that E.J. was ten feet back. Two out of three, game, set, match. For this year at least.

Had I been in his shoes, I would have had the same reaction he did: win or lose, neither of us would have run the races we did without each other. For me, it was a minute and a quarter off my best ten kilometers, though to be fair I haven’t run all that many of them. And it wasn’t embarrassment, or humiliation, but instead exhilaration.

Nationals!

Final Irony Department: Following on my previously reported Nerdism of my annual mileage effectively matching the crow-flies distance from my front door to Jefferson Park, another nerd-like bit arose: Saturday’s race was day 206 of my streak, and those of you who knew all the area codes before they proliferated into an unmemorizable morass know that 206 means Seattle.

Dad, You're Such a Nerd!

2011-12-05T23:46:00.001-05:00

One of the biggest races in my life looms a mere five days away. I’m not nervous, I’m nerdy. At least that’s what Dearest Daughter the Elder said when I told her what I’m about to write here. Frankly, she’s right. I celebrate cerebralism ceremoniously.

That race is the USATF (USA Track & Field, so technically it’s “USA-TF” but I always find myself thinking “US-ATF” and wondering why there aren’t Federal agents knocking on my door looking for booze, smokes, and guns, but I digress…)…right, where was I…USATF National Club Cross Country Championships in the Land of Dampness called Seattle. Where, I note, the weather forecast looks cool, crisp, and fine for Saturday.

I’ve come to grips with my presence at such a lofty event. In recent races I’ve played with the age grading system and the fact hasn’t escaped me that my times, scaled to my lofty age, edge to the high end of the seventies on the performance level percentage scale, where eighty percent is labeled “national class”. So while I haven’t truly hit national class, I’ve come close, and therefore it’s not absurd to show up at a national level meet. But adding the word “championship” to that meet knocks me back to the absurdity classification. On the other hand, subsequently adding the word “club” brings me back into the realm of “the bouncer won’t kick you out at the door, because you came with these other guys”. True, I am “B Team” relative to the level of the top performers on the Greater Boston Track Club Masters team, but the fact is that I’m ready, willing, and able to travel to be a part of the team, filling out the fifth man spot, and fifth man is just as important as first man when it comes to cross country scoring. My job is simple: run my heart out.

That settled, I’m just hoping that my heart isn’t constrained by some of the other achy bits of late; the right hamstring, the left hip, the left knee, all complaining a little of late, but when is there a time when something isn’t complaining? It’s called age, and we deal with it. Last week I hit the track with local training partner Issam to hammer out mile repeats, and the results were encouraging. My target then was simple: make six minute miles feel comfortable, because my goal in Seattle is to string something close to six of them together, which would deliver a ten kilometer personal best by far and hopefully a decent placing for Team GBTC.

Uh, yeah, that’s ten kilometers for this race. Up till a few days ago, I’d thought it was eight, like the New England cross country championships. Suddenly I figured that out. Not that I mind at all, longer to me is better, but I did find it a bit embarrassing to be planning to travel all that way and not even know the distance of the race. And on the topic of traveling all that way, we get to the title of tonight’s posting.

It occurred to me the other day whilst clicking off the miles that an amusing irony was hanging out there, just waiting to be identified by the truly obsessive compulsive type that I am. I had an inkling that some numbers were about to line up. On return from my run, I hit the web to test the theory, and sure enough, there it was…

From my doorstep to Jefferson Park, Seattle, site of Saturday’s festivities, as the crow flies, two thousand four hundred and sixty five miles. For those of you seeking the instant replay to verify the call on the field, we can zoom in a bit without giving away too many state secrets to verify this is the actual point to point distance. From my doorstep…

To the starting line in Seattle…

Two thousand four hundred and sixty five miles.

And here’s the nerdy bit. As of this morning, my mileage total for the year is two thousand four hundred and eleven miles. A mere fifty four miles short. Not exact, but pretty darn close. Had I noticed this a week or two back, I could have piled in a few more and made it perfect, but at this point it’s too close to race day and the body needs some rest, so I’ll settle for a few short runs between now and then and end up around thirty miles off. Still pretty close, within a margin of error, close enough to point out the irony. I’ve literally run to Seattle.

Telling Darling Daughter this brought on the title comment. True. Guilty. Nerdy. Proud of it.

But fitting. It’s been a year that’s brought a number of satisfying racing successes and already by far a Second Lap annual mileage record, and barring injury, will shortly bring an all-time record surpassing those youthful days. All of this led up to the call up to the GBTC team, which opened the door to toe the line at a race called National Championship, which I’ve come to grips with but still feel a big “wow” every time it comes through my head. All those miles, about two thousand four hundred and close to sixty five of them… Indeed, this year I’ve run to Seattle.

Let’s race!

Rocky Mountain Reward

2011-11-22T23:34:00.010-05:00

John Denver obviously wasn’t a runner, or if he was, he was acclimated. I’ve just returned from a week in mile-high Westminster, Colorado, a space on the map about ten miles north of Denver who’s city limits sign claims the same five-thousand-two-hundred-eighty foot elevation as its famed urban cousin. This is somewhat disingenuous, as unlike Denver, which has a city center at which to measure, I was entirely unable to locate such a thing in Westminster. Locals confirm that the place has no center, it is merely a district of sprawl without a heart, so to speak, and it’s relatively hilly, so claiming to be exactly a mile high is clearly marketing. I could be cruel and say that it’s got all the charm of Dallas’ northern suburbs but with better scenery, but as I said, that would be cruel.

In any event, I really didn’t expect that mile-high bit to be a factor. I hike four-to-five-thousand-footers regularly, and that’s strenuous. I’ve never noticed the effects of altitude anywhere south of seven-thousand feet. But then again, the only other time I’ve run at altitude was the very first summer I’d returned to the sport, and truth be told, with the pace I was running at that point, I probably couldn’t have told the difference. A glance at my log shows only three runs on that wonderful trip to Yellowstone, one slow, two untimed, so who knew?

Monday morning’s outing chalked up the eighteenth state I’ve run in. I’ve set foot in forty-nine, and flown over Alaska, but “have run in” is another tally altogether. Yes, another useless statistic. As the Doobie Brothers once sang, it keeps you runnin’… But putting another notch in the sole of my shoes was about the end of the goodness. It was one of those just plain awful runs, and if I hadn’t found a trail to get me off of the abysmal six-lane speedways and maddeningly winding secondary streets, laid out intentionally to break the grid but resulting in a maze you don’t dare penetrate for fear of never escaping, well, other than getting off-road, it was just awful. Stiff, slow, uncomfortable, unpleasant. And even the trail, a spot of hope, faded from dirtness and petered into leg-crushing concrete.

Ever wanting to be the optimist (but not always succeeding), I wrote it off to the stiffness of hours crammed into a middle seat on a packed plane, the resulting soreness in hips, knees, and various other parts, and the nasty fact that our conference convened at a nearly unconstitutional seven-thirty AM. With sunrise at six-forty-five and work running till well after dark (recall those six-lane speedways, evening runs were right out), you do the math, squeezing runs in was clearly going to be a challenge all week.

It’s got to get better, right? The stiffness will wear off in a day, it couldn’t have been altitude as we’re not really that high, right? And even if it was, give me a day or two, I’ll get over it, Tuesday will be grand, right?

Not.

Six-twenty AM. Back to the trail. Whereas on Monday’s short jaunt I’d found an access point and followed it inbound back toward the hotel, Tuesday I ventured outbound. Must be some scenery out there, it’s a trail, right? Well, perhaps there is if you come in May, but in November, it’s dry, brown, bleak. Nothing but dirtness. Not to mention incessantly windy and cold. Traversing a moonscape pock-marked with prairie dog holes, the residents of which are very tough to photograph with a cell phone camera, though I tried over lunch one day. And never far enough to escape the sound of the speedways. And passing by the wastewater plant, to boot. Another miserable run. Close to seven-forties. Highly unpleasant. Friends, it was a trend.

Another day, lather, rinse, repeat. Colder. Bleaker. Ventured further, passing under one of the many six-lane speedways. Near a creek, a trickle, providing life to a few brushy trees, barren not due to lack of leaves as would be the case back east, but simply barren in general character due to the near-desert conditions.

Two more days in this place, and knowing that the hotel’s location offered no other even remotely attractive or mildly safe alternate routes, the upcoming two more slogs down the trail didn’t beckon, they hung like a duty. So Thursday demanded a change. A mile north, a sprawling high school, oddly with three tracks. Why three? Beats me. I picked the one furthest away to get more of a warm up.

Six-thirty AM, on the track. I don’t know if that’s ever happened before. Started beating out eight-hundreds, my pace workout of choice. And like Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, pretty much awful. By this time I’d resigned myself to the fact that fifty-two-hundred feet has an impact. So does a twenty-mile headwind in the backstretch. And the half-dozen intervals I had time for would have ended in yet another unsatisfying workout, save one thing.

By luck, not by choice, I’d picked the track that was perched on the side of a long west-facing slope leading down to a wide lowland expanse, stretching fifteen miles or so to the front range. Beyond, the summits of Rocky Mountain National Park scraped the pre-dawn sky. I’d gotten glimpses of them throughout the week, but only now had the alpine-induced cloudbanks cleared. As they were, they were simply spectacular. Longs Peak piercing the center of the range, Fairchild Mountain, at thirteen-five, the highest summit I’ve hiked (photo circa 1992), to the north, and Wild Basin and it’s cadre of summits, where on that same trip nearly twenty years ago, my hiking companion and I went off-trail through the summer snow nearly to the Continental Divide. All painted in brilliant fresh white. All bringing back fabulous memories. Already a worthy reward.

The west-facing slope didn’t just slope down to the west. It might seem obvious, but it sloped up to the east. With my attention on the summits, and the windy backstretch, and my inability to get more than one of those eight-hundreds under three minutes, I wasn’t really thinking about

that fact. But what it meant was that before the sun rose on me, it shone over the top of the slope and simply ignited those summits in a downright brilliant yellow-orange that rivaled the richest color you’re ever lucky to see at sunset. And then some. The effect exceeded intense. The week’s misery wiped away in a moment. For as much time as I’ve spent in the mountains, still, shock and awe. Fulfillment. Oh, if I’d had a camera then, rather than the lame shot taken mid-day from the office with mid-day lighting, not that it would have captured the intensity anyway, but just to try.

So that’s what John Denver was thinking.

Trapped in suburbia, beaten down by a week of short nights, bad runs, wrecked sinuses from half-percent humidity, solid days of sitting, the inevitable excess of business-travel food, trying desperately to work the slugs out with some speedwork that wasn’t producing much of the word speed, and, oh yeah, losing feeling in my hands from the cold to boot…It just didn’t matter. Those mountains on fire made the trip worthwhile.

Friday’s run? Back to the trail. Simply didn’t matter. Reward already gained.

Running Through the Mud Into the Sunset

2011-11-16T23:41:00.001-05:00

This one is tough to write. When time allows, I dive into this creative hobby of mine. I’m certainly not doing it for fame, considering the vast number of people who don’t read this blog. I’m doing it because I enjoy the writing, enjoy painting pictures with words, sharing the experiences, and to an extent, reliving the experiences. But this one is sad, because the experience has come to a close, and I’ll miss it. For at least this phase of my life, I’ve hung up my cross country coaching hat.

Dearest Daughter the Younger graduates from her small Catholic middle school in the spring, which means that barring an extended period of unemployment or a second stint during retirement, too far away to ponder, this is the last year I’ll be coaching the team. Squeezing it into my personal and professional schedule has been challenging, and just can’t be justified if my kid isn’t on the team. But rewarding? You bet. I will miss these kids and the fun – and honor – of serving them.

Coaching middle school kids in an endeavor that is rooted in personal motivation is an exercise that ranges from frustration to sublimity. These aren’t finely tuned athletes seeking fame and scholarships; they’re smart enough to know there isn’t much of either at this level.

They’re normal kids, good kids, kids who are there in many cases because their friends are there, usually not because of any inherent natural giftedness (though to be fair, I’ve been fortunate to have a few cases of that, too). They’re kids who are motivated enough to get out and do something beyond homework and video games, but not necessarily motivated enough to keep running when behind the trees, out of sight of the coach. They’re not old enough yet to care whether they get

enough exercise even though I talk to them about lifelong fitness, because the health issues of not doing so are still completely foreign to them; they’re on their youthful free ticket.

Despite these challenges, I’ve been honored and overjoyed to have every wonderful one of them.

In a school the size of Immaculate Conception, there simply aren’t many fall interscholastic sports choices. In fact, there’s exactly one. So from the kids’ perspective, if they want to do something, it’s cross country or, well, cross country. (To be fair, we don’t live in a desert, there are city-wide soccer programs, karate schools, you name it, but within the school itself…) And from the coach’s perspective, there’s not a large body of students to draw from, so depth is not a word that enters into the equation. Assuring enough runners to score a team in a meet is the primary goal. Speed, endurance, and raw guts are not qualifying characteristics.

Put these equations together, and you get a team that spans a third of the student body and ranges in talent so diversely that assembling any workout such that the kids are somewhat in sight of each other can be perplexing indeed. Were this high school, I’d send them out for five to ten on the roads, and I’d see them most every day. This is middle school. You can’t send a fifth grader on the roads, you can’t send them far unaccompanied, and you can’t, for that matter, send them far at all. But you’d like to give the older kids a solid workout and maybe, just maybe, prepare the faster ones for some racing success. But you only get to do this a couple of times a week over a short season.

It comes down to changing your criteria of success. Success can’t simply be winning, because our team of seventeen drawn from fifty-some students isn’t real likely to wallop a public school team of forty drawn from a pool of four or eight hundred. Success has to be defined at a personal level.

A few years ago I decided to take up the guitar. I taught myself a little and then signed up for a group lesson at a local school’s adult education program. My instructor would constantly remind us that we weren’t going to play like Eric Clapton. The only thing that mattered, he’d pound into our heads, was whether we were playing better now than we were last week, last month, last year. Measure success on your own scale. Make it personal.

And so I take that message to my charges. Are you stronger, faster, healthier today than you were last week, last month, last year? A little more experienced in the ways of racing? Are you moving ahead? I challenge them at the start of the season. Look where you are now. In our short two-month-long season, where can you be? How do you measure it? Are you aware of your fitness level? What’s your resting heart rate? How far can you run? What’s your race pace?

You’ve’ got two months. Go. And remember, you only get out of this what you put into it.

Over the course of the season, they transform. The more gifted runners realize that they really can start running and just keep doing it. I’m a player coach, I’m out there with the kids, even the afternoon after the marathon, I want to show them it’s worth the effort and you can run through the inevitable aches and pains, on good days and bad.

Early on, sending them out for a mile brought groans. Late in the season, some were suggesting we extend our runs. And even the social runners-to-be, who’d stop any chance they found themselves out of sight, discovered the joys of social running, the pack motivation, the mobile coffee klatch as I like to call it, and found themselves running longer than they’d ever expected they would.

And they all got faster. Relative to themselves. All of them learned how to push just a little harder each time. They learned that racing isn’t always comfortable, indeed, it shouldn’t be, but it’s always rewarding. I’m one who believes that if the message isn’t received, it’s irrelevant, and it’s better received if it is fun, so I gave them some practical and fun race advice: Run the first quarter mile hard, then say, “Oh crap, I’ve got to do this six more times!” Then do it again. And again. And they loved it, and they did it.

Two months later, when we closed our season at the annual Central Massachusetts Catholic Championships, we scored three individual medals and our boys bested three of the seven teams, a best-ever finish for the school, at least in the years of my involvement. We scored numerous race pace personal bests. But more importantly, we scored fitness, fun, pride, and joy.

Because the now infamous Northeast October surprise snowstorm was bearing down on us, already pelting us by the time the last race finished, the meet organizers wanted to hand out the medals immediately as runners came through the finish chute to get them home quicker ahead of the weather. I objected, and offered to do the announcing, quickly, for a proper awards ceremony. The shouts of unbridled elation at the calling of each name by the kids from all the schools, not just ours, were alone reward enough for the effort to get our teams to that point. It feels good to contribute to joy.

They said thank you to me in a way I didn’t expect and that knocked me flat, by presenting to me a plaque that wasn’t just beautiful, but that let me know they’d actually listened to my coaching mantras. Remember, hills are our friends, dig deep, and leave nothing in the tank. How many times I’d said that, shouted that, screamed that. They told me that they’d heard, and that it mattered. They allowed me the opportunity to leave a stamp on them, and for that I am honored and forever grateful.

How do you say goodbye to that?

Running in Circles

2011-11-11T23:35:00.015-05:00

Age is a funny thing. It is in many cases entirely detached from visible reality. I was indulging in a rather la-tee-dah (and thus overpriced) hotel restaurant dinner with clients and colleagues at a conference this week when the age topic bubbled up, and I learned that the customer sitting next to me, whom I’ve known for many years and thought of more or less as a college kid (since he started working for this customer straight out of school) was in fact thirty seven.

Wow. Time flies. If he’s thirty-seven, then I’m, well, I knew that already. We’re running in circles around the sun faster than we think, but by actually running, perhaps we have a better shot at denial of the lap count.

With this in mind, Sunday found me running in new circles and running in circles, literally. Joining up with the Greater Boston Track Club masters’ team opens up a whole new circle of potential friends, training partners, rivals, and inspirations. New circles like that are healthy. And we spent the day, a gem for New England in the fall, chilly and a bit windy, but brilliantly sunny and crisp, running round and round at Franklin Park in Boston, referred to as Boston’s Mecca of cross country, but more aptly described as one of the least easy-to-find well-known places in New England. No roads that you’re likely to know go there, yet somehow we found it.

Once you get there, you’re only halfway home. My publicly stated fear for this, my first race with the GBTC, my first USATF cross country race (for those of you watching at home, that’s USA Track & Field), and the first race I’ve run with the word “Championship” in the title since high school, was that it would result in Total Humiliation. My unstated fear, having looked at the course map, was that I’d simply get lost and confused, a deer in the headlights in the woods, lapped perhaps and thus uncertain which lap I was on. It didn’t help that the map was evilly oriented with north shooting to the east-northeast (note my handwritten caption on the margin). The men’s masters’ eight-K course combines four laps, each a little different, reminiscent of the old Adventure game of early computing, “A maze of twisty passages, all different.” Had I not pulled out my crayons and colored my copy, I might be wandering the Franklin Park Wilderness yet, or worse, become trapped in the old bear cage on its namesake hill (which actually is an old bear cage, leftover from the relocated zoo), which we all agreed would be a fabulous spot to film a horror flick.

But I’m happy to report that the USATF New England New England Championships didn’t result in Total Humiliation. In fact, it was a fun day, and though certainly not notable within the field, it was for me a pretty good time, indeed, if once can assume a reasonably accurate course, which, given that it winds through the woods is a tough bet, but also given that it’s a USATF Championship and they are, after all, the Course Certification Gods, a decent bet, it turned out to be a personal best.

I can sum up this race rather simply: I ran a decent five kilometer race. Unfortunately, the race was eight kilometers. The last three were an exercise in hanging on for dear life.

There’s nothing quite like the fun of an open field start, though oddly, a mere ten minutes before race time, there were virtually no runners on the field. Even the GBTC veterans found this a little weird. Within minutes, they materialized, we lined up, no time for nerves, we were off, and I was hugely relieved to find myself in the middle of it. Not the end. Clearly the middle.

Lap one. Non-descript. But hey, check it out, I’m running in this thing. I’m not clattering across the road crossings like my spike-equipped competitors, but I’m in this, and holding my own. Hot diggity.

Lap two. Climb Bear Cage Hill. Bearly a nubble in my book, but the biggest in this course. Picking off a few. But mile two slows.

Lap three. Into the woods, the Wilderness, hardly a wilderness, but a cute name. Back out, and over the drop back onto the plain of the starting field. A nasty little drop in itself, combined with a tight turn, combined with mud. As I’m about to make some witty remark about how our knees are too old for this, someone beats me to the punch. These guys are OK. Pace restored.

Three miles down, and frankly, I’m toast. Like I said, I ran a decent five-K. Wouldn’t be a personal best, but probably within twenty seconds or so. But we’re not done. So I resolve that I won’t let myself lose any places from here on in. After all, cross country is about placing and scoring more than time. It’s tactical. Or it’s supposed to be, or could be, if you’re not toast. And I am toast. Buttered.

Lap 4. Holding even to original place. Down one. Even again. Down, up, down, losing track, but never more than three down. Then back to Bear Cage. Hills are your friend. Pick ‘em off. One, two, three, back to even. Topping Bear Cage, I am not looking too happy in the pro photographer shot that I can’t reproduce, but can link you to. Pretty close to the RTYP zone. If you must ask, Run Till You…yeah.

In the article I’ve yet to write about the team I coached this year, which I do promise to write as the kids deserve it, I’ll tell you about the fabulous, absolutely perfect Thank-You-Coach plaque they presented to me at our after-season pizza-fest. On it they inscribed the mantra I worked into their heads all season: Remember, hills are our friends, dig deep, and leave nothing in the tank. Crashing down Bear Cage Hill, busting my lungs back to the starting field, I am thinking about my kids. I can’t fail to be true to what I’ve barked at them for two months. This finish is agony. But I must. Round the final turn, it’s a mad dash across the field. Dig deep, kids. Dig deep, coach. Leave nothing in the tank.

From somewhere within came a kick, I know not from where. I know not how many I picked off in the last hundred yards, but it was at least one, maybe two, maybe three. Thanks kids, without this memory, I can’t say I’d have found those last drops in the tank.

Spectacular? Of course not. Translating my eight kilometer time to five miles served up the PR, a big smile. Beating the guy who nipped me for the masters at a summertime local five-K, big smile (though now he’s pledged revenge, game on!). Racing with the new team at a whole new level, big smile. But fittingly put in my place, that being, “Not bad, but certainly not spectacular.” Mid-pack amongst this school of fish, forty-fourth among eighty-three. I wasn’t a scoring runner, but I did finish mid-pack within the GBTC team as well. Held my own.

Curious about the effects of age, I ran some analysis on the results, and found that no matter how I sliced it, I came out pretty much in the middle. Plenty of those I beat were the older masters, and plenty of those I trailed were younger. It wasn’t absolute, but it was pretty clear that age matters. We are running laps around the sun. We are denying it by running laps around the park. Our laps are slowing down. Yet we persist, and until we can’t, we will.

And at the end of the day, it was fun. Fun to race with these guys and be a part of a venerable Boston tradition. Fun to watch the big boys in the open race afterwards, passing by in a pack after lap one so tightly clumped that the ground literally shook. Fun to have the family out for the party. And fun to know I didn’t get totally kicked in the teeth.

So with that, I’ve tossed my hat into the ring and signed on to accompany the team to Seattle where, barring disaster, I will be the fifth man; yes, scoring, yes, it will count. Total Humiliation still looms as a possibility, but only in exchange for the lifelong excitement and memory of having toed the starting line of a race with the words “National Championships” in the title.

Bay State Aftermath – The World Changes Quickly

2011-11-03T23:22:00.003-04:00

It was oh so recently that my cruise through Lowell, Chelmsford, and Tyngsborough on that gloriously gorgeous fall day rang up a personal best at Bay State. A mere two weeks later, glorious fall became premature winter here in New England, and only now, nearly a week later, are almost all of the lights turned back on. The world changes quickly.

It was oh so recently that my running life was, to paraphrase Tip O’Neil, as local as all politics. A mere couple of weeks later, my local life has stepped up a notch, thrusting upon me an opportunity both fabulous and frightening, to go well beyond local. The world changes quickly.

So a number of tidbits and stories, as well as a few Earth-moving events, have followed from that day in the sun, contributing to tonight’s theme of rapid changes. We’ll start with rapidly changing fortunes.

Shortly after the Bay State finish, alongside pages and pages of half-marathon results, up popped the first page of full marathon results. Fifteenth place was an eye-opener, and confirmation of my time sealed the day’s story, but it ended there, or so I thought. Said page reported yours truly as the sixth old fart, trailing five other forty-somethings, and so naturally I went home.

I should have known better. Only two weeks prior I’d cashed at Wineglass as an overall master, and should have recalled that Bay State likewise awards the overall masters before chalking up the age group winners. Sixth, after peeling off the overall winners who finished in the money, would translate to third in the age group. No cash, but hardware. And I’d gone home.

But it got better. The results were wrong. The first master was listed as second, and so on, which deposited me in second place in the age group. It said so right there on CoolRunning. Or as they say, I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true.

But it got better still. A few days later I received an email from the race director congratulating me on my age group victory. Yeah, first place. Seems one of those old farts wasn’t old at all, just erroneously coded. And I’d gone home. So I missed my moment in the sun at the awards gathering, but I’ve got a trophy or plaque or something heading my way sometime soon.

With change at this rate, in a few more days I might just get a check after all.

But getting there was a result of the luck of rapid bodily changes. I’m no stranger to last-minute pre-marathon injury woes, and this time it seemed to be happening again. A scant two days beforehand, inexplicably, with no prompting, obvious injury, or whatever, the left hip went south. A few hundred yards into a slow pre-race taper-down jog, and big pain invaded. The dangers of age, perhaps, though I’m not in the hip-replacement zone just yet! The next day, still sore. The marathon? Didn’t feel a thing, I’m happy to report. Adrenaline? Endorphins? Who cares, it changed, this time for the better. But two days later, it changed again, and it was back, at least for a while. How exactly does that work?

Yet the biggest change came in another post-race email, this one from a runner a couple of towns away. Apparently the scouts had been watching. It was effectively the call-up, the draft, the invitation to the big leagues. Someone at the venerable Greater Boston Track Club, the very same of Bill Rodgers and Alberto Salazar fame (see, I wrote about Alberto and Dick Beardsley a month back, then met Dick, and now Alberto’s club comes a’calling, is there a pattern here?), yes someone over there noticed an old fart running a pretty quick marathon and inquired, pray tell, would I like to run with their masters’ team?

Growing up in Upstate New York, where I was a Mets fan (Red Sox Nation take note, I didn’t like the Yankees even then), well, this was the emotional equivalent of being handed the Big League jersey, come on and pitch in the shadow of Tom Seaver, or better, Tug McGraw, because as he used to say, ya’ gotta’ believe. Invited to don the red singlet with those plain words, “Greater Boston”.

The world changed very quickly.

Emotion Number One: Are you KIDDING? Wow, that’s, umm, that’s just so, umm, wow. WOW.

Emotion Number Two: Are you KIDDING? Me, run with these guys?

I can’t say I feel entirely adequate in this role. Many of these guys are simply awesome in their abilities. But as I was told, and clearly is true, they need depth, especially with masters who have lives and busy schedules and more injuries than the young’uns. And so there I was on their web site, signing up and forking over dues, and there I was on the USATF web site, becoming an officially designated member qualified to run in their races, and there I will be on Sunday morning, running the USATF New England Cross Country Championships in Franklin Park with that Big League jersey on. And if Sunday ends in something slightly kinder than Total Humiliation, there’s another interesting opportunity being dangled: toe the line as fifth man to assure a team score when they travel to Seattle for the USATF National Cross Country Championships. Yes, the words “me” and “national championships” in the same paragraph. Yes, it strikes me as pretty far-fetched. But as I wrote to my local club friends, when opportunity knocks, you need to go out with the ship unless it’s got the words “Exxon Valdez” painted on the side.

With the world changing this rapidly, the pre-Halloween snow storm that knocked out power to my entire city, most of my state, and a good portion of New England was just piling it on thicker and deeper. Bring on the change, we’ll just have to see how this all pans out.

Delivered Back To the Sub-Three Zone

2011-10-21T23:27:00.008-04:00

Yes, as is often the case, my posts on marathons are themselves marathons. If I could endure the race, you can endure the article. Hang tough! Press through to the finish line!

There’s an old saying that the best thing about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is that it feels so good when you stop. I’ve come to believe that the secret of a strong marathon is simply denying yourself that pleasure of stopping the punishment. Of course it’s not so simple, but you get the idea. It’s very hard to maintain the intensity. Conversely, it’s very easy at any number of points throughout a race of that length to dial it back, reduce the burn, ease the pain. At some point it usually becomes a physical necessity. But most of the time it’s at least in part a conscious decision, and denying yourself that pleasure is frustratingly hard to do.

I recall somewhere around mile six of the Buffalo Marathon in 2008 telling myself that yes, this was hard, that’s just the way it is, get used to it and keep doing it. I burned a personal best that day.

Around mile four and a half this past Sunday morning, as the adrenaline of the start wore off amidst the few Lowell-to-Chelmsford slopes that constitute the hills of the Bay State Marathon, along came a small coterie that would provide the inspiration to deny myself the pleasure of dialing it back, and in the process, define this race. My guardian angels in neon green, giving me the boost I needed to get used to it and keep doing it.

I burned a new personal best on Sunday morning, finally eclipsing that three-year-old pre-foot-injury-and-surgery mark from Buffalo. A week prior, one of my club-mates had sent me a kind note following my Wineglass Half, proclaiming that I was defying age. Crossing the Bay State finish line, complete with a little fist pump with the iota left in the tank, I thought of his comment. Getting back to PR-zone, three years later. Defying the passage of those three years and the insults of injury, repair, and recovery. Satisfaction doesn’t cover the feeling. Elation is closer.

How this unfolded is worthy of, well, a blog posting of somewhat marathon length. Just get used to it, keep doing it, and read on.

Since I’m not paid millions to trash talk like an NFL linebacker, I try not to say much before these races. But it’s pretty obvious that the Prime Directive, a.k.a. Goal Number One, was to finish, never a given even with this being marathon number fifteen, and since the Wineglass Tragedy of ’08 that’s been modified to read, “Finish in one piece”. Unstated Goal Number Two was a Boston ’13 qualifier minus twenty minutes, to assure stress-free entry under the New World Order of Boston registration. With my approaching encroaching of five completed decades by the time ’13 rolls around, which conveniently recaptures the five minutes I’d otherwise lose with the new qualifying standards, my nut remains three and a half hours, meaning Goal Number Two was three-oh-anything. Stretch Goal? A return to sub-three land. Maybe, lining up the stars, I might have it in me. Certainly not certain. That’s why it’s called a stretch goal.

You’ll note that Personal Best wasn’t on the agenda.

Three hours is six-fifty-two pace. Simple plan, peg six-thirties, and keep doing it, leaving enough in the bank to overcome the inevitable late fade – negative splits simply not being in my dictionary. But to state the obvious, a marathon is long. And for me at least, a single six-thirty requires effort, let alone a marathon full of them.

One. Didn’t succumb to the usual starting gun stupidity. Started the running tally of seconds in the bank below six-fifty-twos. Two. Three. Bang on. Up seventy one seconds. Four, into the few rolling hills. Lagging just a bit. Mild concern, knowing that five’s got hills too, then six through eight offer up what’s typically the most headwind-prone stretch of this course, leading to the famed Tyngsborough bridge. And while not horrible, the winds were not insubstantial on this day. Need to hold this pace now. Can’t let the slip start this early.

At this moment of mild concern, they arrived, sent like angels when I was in need. Three of them, the pair of he-and-she angels in neon green accompanied by a third who would in the end earn his sub-three by a mere second. Our long and fruitful relationship started with one of my typically goofball comments, this time about being blinded by the light of their matching singlets. Game on.

I’m not one to labor in silence. Most will tell you I’m one to chat your ears off. Having dropped in with this newly formed coffee klatch, it was time to cement the team. “Since it seems like we’ll be spending some time together, I’m Gary.” Angels sounded off, Kimberly and Ryan (though I called him Brian till that embarrassed Eureka moment viewing the results post-race), and Will, our token international element, settling for Chinese since we had no Kenyans handy. We gelled pretty quickly, and it was just the boost I needed. Despite the hill to Chelmsford Center, mile five returned to six-thirty, as did six, as would many more.

Off to the races. Except that it got a little weird quickly.

Four people hammering a marathon at six thirties, knowing there were twenty-some left to cover. This was not your casual “I’m going to run a marathon” charity runners’ gang. This was relatively serious business. Thus I thought nothing of it when we hit mile five and, having mentally incremented my in-the-bank tally, noted verbally that we were over a hundred seconds ahead of three hour pace.

“Don’t say anything about time! I don’t want to hear anything about time! I just want to run!”

This would not have been an uncommon comment on a Saturday morning stroll with my club-mates or a jog with the kids I coach. This was certainly odd to hear in this venue. Kimberly’s objection was nothing if not vehement. She revealed this to be her first marathon, which of course lured me to foolishly annoy her again by noting that the pace was a bit hot for number one, which as you’d guess, brought on another deserved chastisement. Hey, I learn slowly, but I learn, and I gladly complied, shifting to non-verbal mode to track my race from then on. When God sends you guardian angels, you don’t complain if they’ve got an oddity or two.

Ryan revealed his true self at the next water stop. I might as well have been jogging nine minute miles considering the way he bolted ahead to partake of the facilities, and just as rapidly re-captured us on the other side. I wouldn’t piece everything together until much later, but it turned out he’s a low-two-thirties guy who was just out to pace his girlfriend. Barely sweating. As such had no objection, indeed was downright gracious, to my drafting through the breezy stretch.

So we’ve got an absolute ox of a runner, a bastion of running power, and his lady friend smoking two-fifty-something having never even trained marathon distance, let along raced it, and who doesn’t want to hear about any time reference shorter than a season. Fine by me, don’t upset this apple cart, because it’s working.

By the Tyngsborough Bridge I’d slipped a few feet up on them. It just seemed sort of rude to tailgate for too long. Past my family on the outer-loop backstretch at mile nine, Darling Daughter the Younger using mom’s knitting clicker-counter to report twenty-first place to me, back into Lowell for the turn at mile twelve onto the Rourke “permanent temporary” Bridge (it’s a temporary span that’s been there since 1983!) which constitutes a gentle but lengthy climb when heading southbound. Off the bridge to start the second lap of the outer loop, which meant back into the hills, this time starting at fourteen rather than four. Pace holding till then.

Fourteen. Grades. (Hard to call them hills, really.) Lagging just a bit. Mild concern. Was this the start of the inevitable decline?

And there they were again. Angels are like that. Right at about fourteen and a half. Almost the same spot as the first time we’d met, just a lap later. Once again, right when I needed them. Inspiration to hold the pace. Wind breaking through the breezy stretch. Kimberly still hammering an impressive pace for marathon number one. And Ryan still bolting off now and then like we’re standing still.

As Jake and Elwood once said, we’re gonna’ get the band back together.

Six forties now, but still steady as a rock. See lap one, repeat. Slipped up a few feet on them at the bridge again, rejoined, slipped up, rejoined. The results show us crossing thirty kilometers dead together, at 2:02:32. It was beautiful while it lasted.

I’m guessing we split up around twenty, though I can’t really recall. By this time I knew Kimberly was running second amongst the women, and I was rooting for her to take the whole thing. Seriously, how cool would that be? Shortly before twenty-one I passed what might have been the women’s leader, taking a walk break but then re-starting at a decent pace, differentiating herself from the laggards we were lapping, but it wasn’t at all obvious. And past the Rourke Bridge we threaded our way past the half-marathon laggards. Or were they walled-out bonked marathoners? I lost count, and didn’t know I was picking up places, as were they just a bit behind me.

Twenty-three, the watch registered seven-flat. So much for finally running that marathon with every mile under seven. It was around here in the 2007 race that I was challenged not to hang on for dear life but to speed up. Time to make this the nadir of the race and turn it up for the last five kilometers. Time for desperate measures. Time to sing.

Singing isn’t really possible under these circumstances. Call it barking. But I had a cool tune my church band is working up in my head. The words are simple: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” with some embellishment here and there. It’s the tune and the rhythm that make this one work.

I frightened a number of lagging walking half-marathoners by barking. PRE! PARE! YE! THE! WAY! OF! THE! LORD! Not trying to be the God squad or anything, but drawing strength from being willing to shout this out. And drawing strength knowing I could still rustle up some humor, shouting, “KEY CHANGE!” at the appropriate musical moment, which conveniently corresponded to passing two strolling back-of-pack halvers. Twenty four and twenty five, nailed, the latter back down to six-forty. Mental math, a PR is possible.

Except that twenty six turned south not just directionally but operationally. The Aiken Street Bridge offered up a headwind powerful and unwelcome. Felt like nine-minute pace. And a half mile to go, all Hell broke loose. Not the typical fatigue of the wall, but generalized agony, institutional style. Uber-cramping. Alarm bells. Generally, coyote ugly.

Fine. It’ll still be a great time, but a PR wasn’t in the cards today anyway, right?

But at the twenty-six mile mark, Mr. Timex of the Wrist reported that even that agony was still sub-seven-minutes. Now if THAT was under seven minutes…

Run your brains out, you idiot.

And the clock at the finish gave it up, personal best, just by a few seconds, but, well, who knew?

Of course I looked like death warmed over at the end. It’s a trademark by this point.

I didn’t see this coming, but it was a good truck to be run over by. 2:54:03.7 officially. Point seven? Shirley! You jest! Even I can’t handle that degree of accuracy, just call it 2:54:04. 15th of about a thousand, picked up six places since mile nine, and though I didn’t realize it before I left, an age group award which I hope they ship out or let me know where to pick up.

Most satisfying, I’ve never run a marathon at such an even pace, so smoothly executed. And until the last few miles, I had my angels to thank for that.

I’d almost forgotten about them. But shortly after I sat down in the med tent to work out the cramps, into the tent they came, Kimberly and Ryan, my angels. She’d struggled late, gutted it out, came in a minute and a half later, and won it on her very first try. Thrilled to learn she’d cashed. And deserving of every bit of the adulations heaped upon her. My congratulations and gratitude goes out to both of them.

Tidbits and stories from along the way will follow in future posts.

A Pre-Marathon Rant

2011-10-13T23:28:00.008-04:00

Wineglass is a happy memory. My flesh has finally re-warmed from the frigid aftermath of heading back onto the course in hypothermic weather, soaked to the skin. I’ve already spent my winnings at least four times over: 1. Gee, this paid for the entry fee – exactly! 2. Gee, this covers the gas and tolls – in a Prius, pretty close to exactly! 3. Gee, I’ll send a donation to the Dick Beardsley Foundation – which you should do too (even if you don’t have a check to give away – exactly!), and 4. Of course, I must take my family out to celebrate this windfall, which, when all was said and done, came out to fifty smackeroos – once again, exactly! Next racing target? Bay State, this time the full marathon, coming up Sunday morning.

But enough of that, I need to rant. I’m calling this my pre-marathon rant. Don’t mistake this as having anything to do with the Class Act that is the Bay State Marathon. It doesn’t. I’m just ranting, pre-marathon. Because I’m about to run a marathon, while others are, well, …

/rant on

The other day I was returning from afar, driving my blue green-mobile (a somewhat azure-shaded Prius, blue green, get it?) through a nearby neighborhood. Being in electric mode at the time, I snuck up on a couple of guys out for their lunch-hour run and gave them an amused wave when they finally noticed me creeping up behind them. Just around the bend was another woman in rapid human-powered motion, and I smiled at the prevalence of runners streaming forth from the nearby Intel facility. My vicarious runner’s high quickly vanished thereafter.

Beyond the runners, a mild traffic tie up lay a couple hundred feet ahead, centered on a stopped school bus and a bunch of parked cars we had to negotiate after it moved on. And why the parked cars? Because the moms were there, three of them, each collecting their respective Junior, and loading each into their Enormous SUVs parked at the bus stop. On an utterly gorgeous day, I must add. Being motive myself, I couldn’t tell you if said Enormous SUVs were idling or not, though I’d lay a bet that at least one, and probably more, were. Even if not, that’s not really the point here; this is still rant-worthy.

First, the disclaimer. Of course I don’t know these people’s life stories. Of course, each might have a special reason for their chosen vehicles and actions that day. Mom Number One’s family might own a contracting business which needs that large vehicle for hauling equipment to job sites (though none of these luxurious Land Yachts appeared scathed by actual work). Mom Number Two might be on a tight schedule and have to snag Junior and race across town for something more important than purchasing a latte at Starbucks (I’m being kind here, see?). And Mom Number Three could be sporting a medical condition which causes sudden death upon sustained contact via rubber soles with asphalt.

Yes, each of these people might have had every reason in the world for what they did. But I’m guessing at least the majority of them didn’t. Because when I’m out running, I see this all the time.

Let’s review. It’s a beautiful fall day. Sunny, cool, comfortable. And it’s lunch hour, which means these are True Juniors getting off the bus, likely kindergartners or perhaps pre-K, and here in our fine Commonwealth, as in most states, the law provides that the younger the kid, the closer to home they will be deposited by said yellow transport. So it’s a reasonable bet that Home Sweet Home was probably a quarter mile away. Half a mile on a bad day. (Indeed, in the “I see this all the time” category, I am thinking of another place I run frequently where I see this behavior consistently where the bus stop is at the end of a street that is only a quarter-mile long, so we can hold these truths to be self-evident.) And none of these mothers, nor any of the Juniors, appeared impaired, at least so far as I could tell as I crept through the clog. And I note there was no Mom Number Four sans vehicle, nor any additional Juniors; the described condition here, bus-to-DVD-equipped-SUV-cocoon, was unanimous.

And so we have it. Government panels mandate the removal of sweetened beverages from schools. Councils investigate the marketing of junk food to kids. Experts scream about high-fructose corn syrup. All of those endeavors are worthy. And we won’t even mention those who continue to deny that mankind is driving climate change, as fourteen inches of rain dump not once, but twice within two weeks on various parts of Upstate New York. I’ll skip the global warming aspect of this other than to emphasize the behemoth size of the vehicles because this is a pre-marathon rant, not a pre-climatic-Armageddon rant.

The bottom line is that mom picks up Junior in the Enormous SUV so he doesn’t have to walk the quarter mile home from the bus stop on a beautiful fall day. And we wonder why Junior (and mom) are getting fat.

Let’s bring the marathon back into this. I don’t expect everyone out there to run a marathon. I don’t even everyone out there to run, period. But for the love of liposuction, do something to positively influence your health (which, if you’re reading this, you probably do, so my rant falls on converted ears, but I must rant nonetheless) and more importantly, to influence your offspring’s attitude toward physical activity. Because otherwise, the future portrayed in the movie Wall-E, a world filled with immobile corpulent flesh-bags, isn’t so outlandish.

/rant off

This being pre-marathon, Bay State looms a few days off. I haven’t run this one since 2007, and I am looking forward to going back. Sadly, they’ve traded the wicked cool stadium finish for a more standard street finish, the benefit being that runners won’t have to climb both up through the seating and back down to the street post-abuse. That was, in my view, a small price to pay for a very cool conclusion, but I’ll go with an open mind that the replacement will probably be grand.

And my readiness? Well, after a torrid September, I’m as ready as one can be who more or less forgot to start serious training until six weeks prior. But as my starting point was relatively ready to begin with, I can hope that three hundred miles last month and Wineglass as a successful tune-up will translate to a good day Sunday. As always, I have my goals, but you won’t hear about them till the day is done. All I will say for certain is that the forecast looks good. But weather is never certain. So we’ll just go for a run and see what happens.

Innocence Lost?

2011-10-05T19:35:00.000-04:00

News emerged recently of an experiment in Europe that appears to show neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. While I count myself among the naysayers who fully expect an erroneous edge to appear in the methodology, which will re-vindicate Einstein, the possibility that this did happen has relevance to this weekend’s event in my running adventures.

How, you ask? Well, it’s twisted, but let’s have some fun. After years of racing, I cashed in. It was only fifty bucks, and it came with a shirt and a nice bottle of wine, but it was cash (OK, a check, but you get it). And I didn’t have to sell my blood to science to get it. I won it fair and square. For a person of my age, this carries the obvious implication that I’ve lost my amateur status. Innocence lost! Nobody today would care about this, but when I was a kid, that would disqualify a person from the Olympics. Ah yes, the days when the Olympics were oh-so-pure and amateur-only, except of course for the Russians and East Germans. Now, about those neutrinos?

While on my run yesterday I pondered, what if we could harness them to bend time to bring back my youth, when I could then train for real when I still had the speed, rather than take twenty years off, but keep the competitive experience which maturity has brought, and yet get around this troublesome fifty bucks that would knock me out of the ’84 Games?

Yeah, that’s a little over-dramatic, and I know the logic is twisted and the physics are questionable, but it was a fun mental meander and it was cool winning the bucks. OK, back to reality.

Reality was forty-one degrees with a cold breeze and a ton of rain in Campbell, New York (that’s Camp-Bell, mind you, not like the soup). Reality was briefly kind when said rain miraculously took a half hour off for the start of the first-ever Wineglass Half Marathon, the new alter-ego of the venerable Wineglass Marathon. Reality turned the spigots back on before we’d covered even the quarter mile from the start back to staging headquarters at the Campbell School. And those spigots slowly increased their flow throughout the race till we crossed the finish line several pounds heavier than we started. It’s not uncommon for me to return home with a sopping bag of evidence proving the folly of wicking fabric. It’s rare that said evidence holds only sweet rain rather than toxic sweat. In short, it was more or less miserable. But also fast, both from being devoid of heat issues and from the sheer desire to get it done and get out of the weather.

The funny thing is that in six plus years of running, I’ve clocked fourteen marathons but had never done a half. So no matter the outcome, Sunday promised a Second Lap PR. But when the dust settled, I had to pull out my scrapbooks and look up the one and only half I had done back in the first lap days. Took a while, but there it was: the Delhi-to-Andes (NY) Half Marathon, December 16th, 1979, age sixteen and a half. A net downhill course, and I remember it was my longest and one of my better races. And I beat it on Sunday, thirty-two years older.

Truth be told, I beat a lot more than I expected on Sunday. Niece Kristin picked this, for her a home-town race, as her second half marathon, and I, feeling somewhat responsible for her adopted propensity to self-inflict pain, agreed to travel down to make it an event.

And try out a half. And pop in a tune-up for Bay State (full marathon) in two weeks. And maybe knock off Rocket John’s club half-marathon master’s record. A buck-twenty-five was the target, a hair under six-thirty pace. Maybe if the stars aligned, an age group spot in the generous five-year tranches, a reasonable hope, yet certainly not assured with eleven hundred registered.

But the way this fell out, I was never in a position where I couldn’t count my exact place. That ranking was never lower than seventh, then after picking off a pair, one of whom looked distinctively masters-aged and thus a worthy target, and who appeared vulnerable early on yet took maddeningly long to rope in, up to fifth, then surrendering one spot at mile seven to settle into and remain in what to me was a somewhat shocking sixth place finish.

I admit I broke one of my cardinal rules in the last five miles. I tell my cross-country kids, don’t look back, it’s a sign of weakness to your opponents. Listen to the crowd for when they cheer for the next guy. But I was hearing nothing. And the course sported a few tight turns, one nearly a one-eighty, late in the game. I had to look. Nobody. And a huge gap ahead as well. In fact, more than a minute on either side at the finish. Which made the newly laid out finish – a change that I like to think I was perhaps somewhat responsible for after Faceplant ’08 – almost eerie.

Like turning onto Boylston Street at Boston, the Wineglass finish now turns onto Market, the main drag of Corning, for a three block straight shot home that seems interminable, but is in fact only a third of a mile. Like Boston, the finish arch looms what seems an eternity away. But unlike Boston, where even at the three-hour mark, you’re among huge crowds of runners amidst thousands of cheering fans, here there was nearly complete solitude and silence. The neutron bomb meets the race finish. A wide open boulevard, parked cars eliminated. Nobody in front of me, nobody behind. And where there should have been blocks of fans, owing to the weather, nearly a vacuum till the last block. Cold rain almost numbing the senses by this point. Hammering down the double yellow line. Feeling like I was watching myself from the external cameras. Ethereal.

Yeah, sixth of over nine-hundred finishers. Surprised me, too. And the third overall master. I knew I gave up a master’s spot when Costas took me down at seven, but didn’t realize till the results were posted that the next man up was also well aged. Mattered not, the top three masters cashed. Amateur status gone. Innocence lost. No complaints.

While the place took a bit to sink in, the time was equally satisfying. Rather than the targeted six-and-a-halves, the first eight clicked off around six-twelve, feeling downright springy. When some leg fatigue set in, the fade was only back to close to my planned pace. A buck twenty two and a half at the end. I can’t say this will translate into a strong full at Bay State, but it can’t hurt.

Rocket John told me I’d love the distance of the half, and he was right. You can run your heart out, but you’re not destroyed like after the full. It’s a game of maintaining pace, not of tapping all capacity. I did love it. Thirty-two years later. Faster than last time. And I’ll have to do it again.

While my capacity wasn’t tapped out, my body heat was far more depleted by the conditions than I thought. After a quick chat at the med tent with Dr. Phykitt, the very same who patched my face back together three years ago, I headed back onto the course to reel in niece Kristin as promised. The cold was simply stunning. Into the breeze with a dual-shirt-load full of utter drench, shorts drench, shoes, socks, headband, gloves, hair, everything drench. Forty-four-degree drench. Dangerous drench. After a mile plus, finally warming a bit, I reached the last water stop and in a fit of amusement had the unique fun of working a water stop in a race I ran for ten minutes or so until Kris appeared and we brought it home, for her a race that also exceeded her expectations. Fun, but not so smart. Stunningly cold again. Uncontrollable shaking while stripping in the parking garage. Probably the closest I’ve been to hypothermia ever.

Thank God they served soup.

Bearded Postscript: I’m going to have to write more articles comparing my adventures to those of well-known people. Two weeks ago I wrote of my race at the Forrest, and mirthfully compared it to Dick Beardsley’s 1982 Boston Duel in the Sun. I swear I did not know at that time that he was to be the honored guest at Wineglass. Yet there he was at the entrance to the expo, signing books (which, sadly, he ran out of by the time I came out with my number). I couldn’t resist pulling up that recent blog post on the smart phone for him.

Fame doesn’t mean you can’t get a kick out of fun coincidences. He was truly tickled, he was a truly nice guy, and we had a truly fun chat. Dick, I was sad to see a DNF next to your name, and wish you the best in your in battle to recover from those injuries. Come on up to New England for a recovery run!

Hmmm… Now, if I can make this work again, imagine the interesting people I could meet!

Bridging the Generation Gap

2011-09-29T23:42:00.000-04:00

You can tell that there’s a new generation gap and that I’m on the wrong side of it merely by the fact that you don’t hear the words, “generation gap” anymore. That tag phrase of my younger days separated us rambunctious youth from our supposedly conservative elders. Today, there’s gen-X, gen-Y, gen-whatever, but that old phrase seems to have landed on a heap of buggy whips.

Now I’m the supposedly conservative elder, though the term conservative invokes in me a visible wince. No, I don’t mind mixing my politics with my running. Why, just yesterday I enjoyed the mirth of running past what apparently had been someone’s grand idea but now sits as a failed development, ninety percent empty land, scraped clear and scrapped, a bad idea that brought ruin to all who touched it. Sound familiar? The road was aptly named Tea Party Circle. But I digress.

So let’s drop the conservative and just stick with elder, and let’s consider the generation gap for the moment not as the differences between me and my ancestors or descendants, but between me now, and me then. Part of the fun of being on the Second Lap is comparing today’s reality to those First Lap days or youthful yore.

Amongst the five billion web sites, the billion that claim to be “social” as it’s the current buzzword, and the two percent that acknowledge athletics (I made up these numbers, of course), there’s a site out there known as Athlinks. I found it several years ago while engaging in the nearly universal vanity of Googling myself. Here was a site that had mined quite a few race results and knew a surprising amount about my running.

Not being exactly shy and reserved on the web; after all, this is a public blog displaying plenty of rants, raves, and depravity, I am nevertheless a decidedly anti-Facebook, anti-Twitter type, in the former case objecting to a private company explicitly abusing personal privacy for financial gain, and in the latter case objecting just because it feels better than having to know if my friend is eating a ham sandwich at the moment. While I acknowledge some value in both, I cringe at the lemming-like way that people have flocked to these services simply because everyone else did. Can you spell Time Sucker? And who hasn’t received a Linked-In invitation from someone they’ve met once at a conference and will never see again? Seriously, folks… And along comes this social networking site that just happened to be running-related, so that made it OK?

Well, the logic goes that all of those race results are already out there, so there’s no compromise of privacy, and I don’t have to tell them much more about me, nor to I have to actively use it (though some of the stats and comparisons it offers are downright tickling to the OCD streak in me), and it is, after all, sort of a backup racing log should all of my technology-based records here suddenly go black. So yes, I exist on Athlinks. And it’s pretty good about picking up probably two-thirds of my races without any help.

Where is this going, you are asking? Wasn’t this about a generation gap or something? Well, yes, and we’re ready to go there now.

To Athlinks, my life started with my first marathon in the fall of 2005. Or at least it did until a few months ago, when much to my tickled amusement appeared a race result for me from…1982! And it was no error. June of 1982 to be exact, the Vestal XX, a local twenty kilometer studded with hills, hills, and more hills. A race I’d wanted to run for years back then, but never did until I’d been off to college for a year and returned in pretty marginal shape, the fading days of my First Lap as the running sapped away and my training became less and less consistent, leading to that twenty-plus-year gap. My generation gap. First to Second Lap gap.

When it first appeared on the site, I was amused that my performance from 1982 – averaging seven and a half minute miles – was rather weak compared to what I run today, until I recalled that 1982, post-freshman year, wasn’t exactly representative of what I could do a year or two earlier. Still, it’s comforting to know that thirty years later I’m able to work myself into far better shape than I could then, and stick to it far more consistently despite the uncertainties of real, non-collegiate life.

I pulled out my log from that era and read up on that race. I’d gone out intentionally slow with a running buddy for the first half, then turned it on for the return trip. My recollection is that the second half was all downhill, so when I read in my log that I was “ripping it home” and see the pace specified, I chuckle since I intend to run significantly faster for the entire half marathon – on the flat – that I’ve got slated for this Sunday morning.

Thirty years later, I’d love to run against myself from back then.

There are some things I know I’ll never touch from that era. Burning the final quarter mile of the two-mile down around sixty seconds. Not going to happen. Spinning a mile in something close to four and a half. Ditto. Speed like that is toast for me. And thank God I will never do another race-walking mile.

But there are things from those days that I am reaching and surpassing. Age brings focus and determination that crumbles endurance marks. I’d never run a marathon in those days, now number fifteen looms. At six and a half years, I’ve stuck to this on a consistent basis far longer than in the early days. And this month, in the desperation of catching up on fall marathon training, I’ve finally busted not just my Second Lap but also my First Lap – and all time – monthly mileage mark, which will culminate tomorrow when I hit three hundred miles for the first time in my life.

This, like everything, is relative. A running co-worker tells me that he logs that kind of mileage regularly, so it’s no big deal in the universe. But it’s a big deal to me, as it will be if I ever pass the other remaining endurance and capacity marks of my youth.

Two-seventy-nine in January of 1980, meet three hundred in September of 2011. There’s one hole of my generation that’s been bridged. I take back my opening statement. I’m not on the wrong side of this gap.

Sort of a Duel in the Sun

2011-09-18T23:23:00.000-04:00

OK, so it wasn’t exactly Dick Beardsley and Alberto Salazar in the famed 1982 Duel in the Sun at Boston, but it was, for me, one of the more exciting races I’ve run, and certainly one of the most pleasing. And like most events that fall into that category, who knew it was coming?

Let’s get the mystery and suspense out of the way first. I managed to retain my title as the fastest yokel in our small pond known as the Forrest 5K, chalking up only my second win in Second Lap history (bar runs don’t count!). Once again I was the beneficiary of the alignment of the stars; nobody truly fast showed up. Some really good competition, mind you, but had I jumped into the five-K just one town over yesterday, I would have been smoked five times over and finished close to two minutes off the pace. So this was no Herculean feat. But hey, a win is a win.

The fun – and the exciting – parts are how it came about. The pleasing part comes with the numbers, which, as you might expect from your OCD-prone author, need some massaging to reveal their deep inner truths. We’ll get to that.

Frankly, I came close to abdicating the throne without a fight. For reasons unexplained, the race organizers chose to move said event an hour earlier, leaving me with the uncomfortable choice of blowing off my church band or blowing off my small pond title. The balance of goading from various parties weighed on the side of title defense. OK, the band will survive.

Defending my crown was in truth a rather ludicrous idea. The only reason I held it in the first place was the dumb luck of who didn’t show up last year. So said defense was effectively ceremonial. Not to mention I’d just put in a hard twenty-two miler two days prior, and didn’t really expect much from my over-trained legs. But the race was small last year and hinted at being small again. Online registrations, nicely posted and visible, were thin, to put it mildly. No heavy-hitting names stood out, but then, who’s to say I’d know them if they were in there.

One name that did stand out was Issam, my challenger from last year’s race. There are two races every year on this course, the other being early in the summer, which I’d missed due to vacation. A little homework revealed that Issam had run the June edition and kicked his time down close to what I’d run last year. But hey, I’d also pushed my five-K down over the summer, so…? Now, getting smoked by someone out of your league doesn’t inspire a top performance, nor does being alone out front. But the idea of having this guy back, who’d pushed me hard through the first half last year, was sweet. Bring on the rematch!

Then what to my wondering eyes should appear this morning in the registration line, no, not a sled with tiny reindeer, but none other than Rocket John. Rocket John, who to my memory had smoked me in every race shorter than a marathon. Rocket John, who reminded me of his speed during a brief – and quick – warm-up. Rocket John, who I hadn’t talked to in a few months while he healed up a few injuries, but here he was, he’s back. Yeah, so defend, deschmend, it was nice to hold the crown for a year, it’s pretty much over now. I vowed to just try to hold on as long as possible.

Which is pretty much what happened at first. Off we bolted, sucking cop car fumes, John, Issam, and yours truly. Leading for the first couple of tenths, Issam inches off my left flank. Then John going a stride up, Isaam and I elbow to elbow. Round the corner into Phelps Street, the three of us stuck like glue. Ripping my lungs out to stay in contact with John. Issam’s right arm glued to my left. A real dogfight, and we’re only at a half a mile. A dogfight? More like hanging on for dear life to stay in contact, expecting John to turn it on at any moment.

Out of the blue, another set of footfalls. A youngster in our midst! He seemingly effortlessly weaves between John and I and into the lead. Oh please, guys, I’m at full bore, you turn it up a notch and, well, good night. Resignation, it’s looking like a typical age-group day. But that still means fighting off John, and for the moment I’ve forgotten that Issam is young enough to fall out of my tranche. I’m looking at third in my age group. Well, it’s hardware.

The early mild upgrades passed, we reach the first major rise and hit the mile in – yee-haw, five-thirty-nine. Issam is still glued to my left. And I mean glued. We’ve never varied more than half a stride since settling in a quarter-mile out. Then, and I don’t really recall when or where it happened, it was probably at this rise, not only the youngster but even Rocket John are no longer in my forward vision. Hills are your friends, I tell my middle school cross country kids. Today they seem to be. I bleed hills. I’ve taken two of them on the hills. Confidence rises a bit, but I’m burning up at this pace, they’ll probably be back, and Issam, Issam, we’re literally banging elbows. Neither of us cares or is offended. In our grunted breathing I sense he’s eating up this duel as much as I. I can’t shake him, nor he me. We alternately test each other with half-stride bursts, the other always answering. Beardsley. Salazar. But even they ran one in front of the other. If this race had crowds, they’d have a treat to behold. Alas, along these stretches, nary a soul.

I’ve never run a race like this. The two of us played Siamese twins for a solid mile and a half. Even around the turns. Splitting only momentarily as I had to swing wide around a car to avoid crunching his space, but rejoining within seconds.

Last year he’d faded early on the climb up Cook Lane. This year he stuck like glue as we neared the crest. A tenth, maybe two, to the top. If he stuck with me over the apex, no telling what would happen on the way down. Up is in my blood, down, not so good. Now or never…

I don’t know if I surged, he faded, or both, but suddenly the trance was broken, my left arm was free. I didn’t dare look back, even as his footsteps faded, which took quite a while. Reactions from the sparse crowd didn’t offer up the usual verbal hints to the span of the gap. And what of Rocket John and the Youngster?

All you can do in this situation is do all you can do. Sounds redundant, but there’s no deeper thinking. Just haul. Dig deep. Ignore bodily alarms, drips, and other inconveniences. And kick it around the corner, into the parking lot, over the line. You’d kill yourself if you lost it there.

I’d learn afterward that like last year, Issam dropped back more than I’d expected. I had twenty seconds on him at the end. But he sliced thirty off his previous best on the course; truly impressive, and a trend that extrapolated will be hard to counter down the road.

Had I known the gap, I might have slacked it in. And what a glorious reason not to look back, but to just assume you’re about to get re-smoked. Because that final push brought me in, at least on my watch (official timing experienced some challenges, so this is the best I’ll get) dead heat tied with the best I’ve ever run on that course, a time from three years back, three years younger, before the famed foot follies, while in my peak condition. Converted from the long course back down to a true five-K distance (I warned you that the OCD would come back into this), it was only my third sub-eighteen and only a couple seconds off my Second Lap best.

You don’t do that when you’re so far behind the leaders that you don’t care, or when there’s nobody pushing you. You do that when you’ve got awesome competitors of similar ability around you and you find yourself in that rare epic duel. My hat is off to these guys, and would be even if the order of finish had been reversed.

Desperation is the Mother of Excess

2011-09-15T23:08:00.000-04:00

How does that phrase go? Something, I think it was necessity, is the mother of something else. Seriously, I forgot the phrase and had to Google it, and it’s invention. But I was thinking of it because my catch phrase of late is a perversion of said idiom.

I’m not quite sure how this always happens, but it always happens. Over the years my attitude toward the marathon has shifted from pipe dream, to awesome and slightly fearful goal, to challenging race, to a motivating goal for the fall and spring seasons. Except that somewhere along the way, the idea of the race as the motivator for the training leading up to it somehow gets lost in the vagaries of the calendar.

There are two simple explanations. First, summer is always busy. The concept of summer vacation doesn’t really hold water in the real world, when even vacations entail a lot of effort to pull off. Pile on top of that a couple of business trips that made August evaporate, and, well, how is it that September is half over already? Second, October – a.k.a. marathon season – is just ages away from summer, right? Except it’s not, really, it’s separated from summer by the single month of September. My mental process, no longer tuned to the shock and awe of my early marathon attitude which dictated detailed and careful training planning for the race, somehow repeatedly fails to comprehend that twelve weeks prior to a mid-October marathon lies… what’s that? Yes, the middle of July.

Who’s thinking about marathon training in July? Certainly not me. It’s summer. It’s hot. It’s just not conducive to marathon-think. And suddenly it’s the end of July, it’s only ten weeks to the fall race, and I’ve hit a double-digit run just once in the last month. So I obligatorily crank out a fifteen as August dawns and vow that I won’t miss the up-ramp this year, that by the close of the month I’ll have worked in a bunch of something-teen runs and maybe already crack into the twenties, and this time I’ll get those three or four twenty-somethings in. Except, as noted, August evaporated.

And so it is September, Bay State, this year’s target race, is a mere six weeks and a few days away, and – gulp! – that fifteen a month back still ranks as the longest thing I’ve seen since Buffalo.

Kids, this is not good.

And so, as the title suggests, Desperation is the Mother of Excess. Crank it, baby, we’ve got ground to make up.

What resulted over the last two weeks was a little unwise, a little stupid, a little abusive, but let’s face it, a little invigorating in that I blew out a few personal marks and frolicked in the land of compulsion. And it ain’t over yet.

What better way to kick it off than with a double on the month’s opening day? Eleven in the morning, speed work in the evening. Two days later, force the twenty-something. On a day when, frankly, even the first mile stunk, but Desperation is the Mother of… I repeat myself. Twenty one stinky miles later, at least the first one was in the books, at least I had the ‘time on the road’ workout logged, even if the pace wasn’t pretty. Two days later, race the local ten-miler. Two days later, another fifteen. And of course more on the in-between days as well. This big-one-every-other-day cadence topped out at eighty-seven miles for the first seven days of the month, a new mark for me, as I record my ‘biggest weeks’ as any seven-day span. Life doesn’t stick to Sunday-to-Saturday schedules, nor do I.

But since that was the first seven days, it set up a shot at another oddball record I keep. Yes, the OCD side is coming out strong, now! I call it the “fastest to one hundred” (or two hundred). As in, fastest from the start of a month to that mileage total, and the previous mark was ten days. After eighty-seven in a week, the body couldn’t really stand thirteen the next day to make it in eight days, but covering that in two days seemed do-able and would still set a new mark.

Another business trip loomed on days eight and nine, complicating the task, but knowing where I’d be on day nine, I’d spied on the satellite photos a fine-looking canal-side towpath to run that morning. To my dismay, it was pretty short, a mere two-point-something to the far end, but knowing I wouldn’t have a lot of time, that was to be the day nine run. Which meant that if I were to make one hundred miles by day nine, I’d need, oh, um, well, I never quite figured it out exactly what I needed for day eight, simply too frantic, no time.

In football they call it a broken play when things don’t go quite as planned yet they still work out. Day eight, pouring rain and no time in the morning, trundle off to Albany, do that for which they pay me, get out of town to my next destination, slip in an evening run plenty long enough to assure reaching the day nine goal, and… broken play. Completely stymied on the ‘get out of town’ bit. Leftover flooding had closed bridges, funneling traffic into my path, bringing the world to a dead stop. Half an hour, a quarter mile of progress, not even on the highway yet.

This is the joy of running. Any time, any place. I bailed out of traffic to a hotel parking lot, changed, and hit the roads. An hour later, I had my run in, and traffic had lightened. And irony of irony, late that night at the hotel, when I charted out where I’d run, by chance the distance worked out to exactly what I needed so that the morning towpath run would hit one hundred. Exactly. Which it did, one hundred in nine days. I couldn’t have planned it better had I actually planned it.

Marathon training desperation? You bet. Excess in response? Absolutely. Tapping into the power of geeky number-crunching obsession? Priceless. Bring it on, there’s still the second half of the month to go!

Perspective

2011-09-01T23:39:00.002-04:00

Perception is reality, and I dare not get deeper on that topic since it’s an endless vortex, but perception depends on perspective. Everything depends on how you look at it. And how you look at it really defines how you approach it and who you are.

I found myself on a streak this summer, sort of by accident. Sometime in June I noticed I’d run every day for a while, then it was a month, two months, then the old Second Lap record of seventy two days came and went, next thing you know one hundred days was looming, arrived last week, and was surpassed. In the past few weeks alone The Accidental Streak has survived a colonoscopy (yum!), an Adirondack Death March, and Tropical Storm nee Hurricane Irene. Tonight as September starts to unwrap itself, I stand at one hundred and six days since May nineteenth. (And by the way, I applaud club-mate Jim whom I learned was just as crazy as I, having gone out for his run at about the same time as I on Sunday morning as Irene closed in, a “drenched-in-sixty-seconds-and-loving-it” adventure that he enjoyed as much, if not more so, than I, you go…)

So, back to the Accidental Streak. I’m prone to be amused at this. Not proud, just amused. Proud would imply that this is something remarkable. It’s not, other than the fact that it might be a good motivator to keep getting out there, and possibly a remarkable way to do foolish things to my body, though I am pretty well convinced that the occasional days of three to four mile jogs around the neighborhood really count for days off.

There’s one of those perspectives. Three or four miles at a leisurely seven and a half pace is a day off. Most “normal people” would spew a heavy guffaw at such a statement. You do what?

But let’s take the other perspective. You’ve only done how little? At one hundred and six days straight, I’m still two hundred and sixty-nine days short of what I did back in 1980 in the First Lap days. Over a solid year. But hey, I was a teenager, had none of the responsibilities of the real world, you know, easy to dismiss. Or not. Who’s to say there weren’t plenty of things getting in the way back then as well?

And we’ve all read stories of people who’ve run every day for ten, twenty, thirty years or more. I marvel at how they got around the red-eyes to Europe, the medical procedures, the Conferences from Hell, the flu. Perhaps they don’t have lives, though I suspect they do. To them, running every day is just a way of life, like waking, eating, (we hope) showering, and sleeping. I can’t say I’ve reached that. There have been days when slating in even a half-hour jaunt has been a challenge. So in perspective, what’s a hundred or so?

On my recent trip to the Adirondacks, I had the pleasure of linking up on one of my runs up the Lake Road in St. Huberts with a young lady who screamed ultra on multiple dimensions: her education, her profession, her running, even her marriage to yet another über-runner. From my perspective, her tales of past and upcoming hundred-milers, twelve-hour races, ten-hour training runs, and so on simply boggled the mind. To her perspective, it’s just what she does.

I mentioned my Couchsechraga Death March of two days prior, and added with amusement that after the eleven-hour, sixteen-plus-mile, three summit mudfest, I’d hit the road for a quick three to shake out the joints, because I figured that from her perspective, it would be just that - amusement. I didn’t mention the Accidental Streak. In the context of her adventures, it seemed rather silly.

“So you’re streaking?”

Her response surprised me a bit, and it struck me as to the power of perspective. To almost anyone else, the Death March itself would seem absurd. The idea of going for a run following the Death March would be grounds for an in-patient assessment for long-term commitment to a lovely place where flowers grow and the sun shines and nice men in white suits ascertain you’ve taken your meds and are peaceful and sedate and no longer hurting yourself. From her perspective, it was a completely normal thing to do, entirely within the realm of what normal people – to her – did in normal times. I didn’t have to explain myself. She got it.

Adding this to the plethora of times I’ve had to deflect comments about my tiny-bit-larger-than-average fish status in my somewhat smallish local pond, or in other words, yes, I may hit the top three or five in a local five kilometer, but no, I’m really not fast, just lucky that nobody else moderately quick showed up, and won’t you consider the really fast guys out there of whom I too look upon with wonder…. Well, her response got me thinking over the last couple weeks about the power of perspective.

You control your perspective. You decide what’s normal within your scope of reality. You obviously accept physical limits – or perhaps you don’t accept them without first testing to see if they’re real – but aside from that, if you decide that it’s completely normal to run X miles in a month, or X miles at a time, or X times a week, or whatever, whether running-related or not, you decide that. Work – and push – your own limits, not those that the world seems to have put in place and imposed on you. And when you set your version of normal, accept it as just that: normal. Don’t let either the derision, whether serious or in jest, or the lauding, impact your definition of normal. Just strive on your own dimension. Set your own perspective. Enjoy its freedom.

The Power of No (Subtitle: Mud)

2011-08-24T23:48:00.010-04:00

I’m not playing the Company Man but perhaps the Corporate Gods for whom I work are onto something. My firm recently rolled out a new marketing slogan, “The Power of We”. It’s supposed to highlight what can be accomplished when people are empowered to work together collaboratively (and of course, make them want to buy our collaboration-enabling technology). A bit corny? Perhaps. But consider the opposite, “The Power of No”. It’s powerful, and we (not the corporate we but a more personal we) had to defeat it last week.

The Power of No. It’s easy to say no, to find reasons not to do something, and frankly, sometimes it’s prudent to do so. In the case in point, there was a fine tipping line between the prudence of saying no and saying no because it was an easier, more comfortable choice. But what’s interesting here is that the Power of We defeated the Power of No. And it took We to do it.

Yes, this is a hiking story, but it can be applied to just about anything, including running, so it graces the pages of said running blog.

About this time of year my clan usually slogs up to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and go peak-bagging (alternated with swimming and doing generally nothing, all good things), but this year we had the pleasure of an invitation from our neighbors to spend a few days at their family camp house in New York’s Adirondacks. Sort of a tacit part of the deal was that I’d strike out with their teenage son on some significant hike, since his clan isn’t into the bigger stuff while he, at the ripe old age of fifteen, is already closing in on completing his Adirondack Forty Sixers. Not that this was any skin off my back; indeed, I live for this stuff.

Now, the Adirondack Forty Sixers is a somewhat quirky list of summits. As you might guess, there are forty-six of them. Not too dissimilar from the forty-eight New Hampshire Four-Thousand Footers, except that the Forty Sixers include a few mistakes. Knowing that surveying has been a rather precise science for a long, long time, I am somewhat mystified as to how they got these so wrong, but they did. In fact there are only forty-four summits in the ‘dacks that reach or exceed four thousand feet, but one of them, MacNaughton Mountain, wasn’t believed to be four thousand feet and was therefore left off – and remains off – the list. Three others, however, which were erroneously believed to be four thousand feet were put on – and remain on – the list. Two of these, Blake and Cliff, just miss the golden altitude. And then there’s Couchsechraga.

Every list has its “insult” summits. In the Whites, they are Owl’s Head and Isolation, two summits just barely over four thousand feet – so you have to do them – and so far into the woods that you wish you didn’t. In the Adirondacks, Couchsechraga is the “insult” summit. So far into the woods, and not even close to four thousand feet (how did they get this so wrong?), but you have to do it. And to make the slap in the face even harder, you have to pass over a forty-two-hundred-foot ridge, descend eight hundred feet, then climb again to reach its paltry thirty-eight-hundred-foot summit. Then retrace your steps to get out. And all of this is on herd paths, unmaintained trails sporting all sorts of injurious and mucky joys. The name is Algonquin for “Dismal Wilderness”. It shows.

Well before our departure for the ‘dacks, Intrepid Young Hiking Partner provided me a list of the peaks he needed to bag. Nestled in that inventory was Couchsechraga. A quick jaunt to my favorite ‘dacks hiking reference site reminded me of what this was all about. Sixteen and a half miles. Mud. Herd paths. Mud. Climbing up streams. Mud. Bogs. Mud. Three summits to cover in the Santanoni Range. Mud. Did I mention mud? Yes, mud.

That’s easy. No. Plenty of others on his list. And as I don’t get to the ‘dacks all that often, the chances of me finishing my Forty Sixers are slim. So I don’t care a hoot about Couchsechraga.

But Intrepid Young Hiking Partner worked me past the Power of No, and the plan was set. We beats No, part one. We would do this, and we would do it in a single day, unlike most who backpack in, camp, and accomplish these summits in a sane manner.

The day before our planned adventure, we didn’t get rain. To steal my daughter’s favorite adjective of the moment, we got Epic Rain. A solid day of constant downpour. Streams around the ‘dack house, normally dry all summer, ran to overflowing. Not steady rain through the night, but absurdly intensified rain, all too apparent as I half-snoozed on the screened sleeping porch. Dry and comfy, but pretty much like listening to the rain on your tent. With the clock set for a quarter to six. Groan.

Six AM. Intrepid Partner is wide awake and surfing the NOAA website, insisting that the rain will move out shortly. Age & experience versus blind youthful energy. We’ve just had Epic Rain. We’re looking at unmaintained herd paths, read, plenty of *wet* foliage to soak us to hypothermia. We’re climbing streams. We’re crossing bogs. We’ve read of the legendary mud. On good days. Which this is not.

No. This is just not prudent. And frankly, I’m not keen on spending the day soaked to the skin.

But Intrepid Partner wouldn’t hear it. OK, perhaps we target an alternate summit, but we’re going to that distant trailhead, an hour away. And en-route, once again, he brings me around. We’ll give it a shot. Couchsechraga and the Santanoni Range. We beats No, part two.

Seven forty AM, the rain stopped twenty minutes earlier, and we’re on the trail. It’s four and a half miles on “real” trails, which means only that we’re not yet getting soaked from encroaching foliage, but the mud is already legendary. These are not trails. These are routes through swamps.

We reach the start of the herd path. Within fifty feet we’re faced with a twelve-foot crossing of a beaver pond on a floating, loose log. It’s deeper than we can find sticks to provide balance. Gingerly, we make it, only to find ourselves brushing through brush along the pond to find the path. Soaked already. Didn’t I tell you, NO?

Yet many drips, splats, slips, and a mile of climbing a stream later, we reach the ridge at a place called Times Square, as it’s the central meeting point of the herd path in and the three paths leading to the three summits. Of course, we drop a ball we’ve brought along. It is, after all, Times Square.

Next, it’s off to Couchsechraga, the toughest objective first. And here’s where the funny part happens.

Five minutes from Times Square, nearly four hours into the muck and mud and slick and slop, having topped the ridge at forty-two-hundred feet and now heading down towards Couchsechraga, we find the path entirely, completely, unavoidable, and deeply, flooded beyond passage. And the Power of No strikes the other way.

Intrepid Young Hiking Partner seems to have had it. He actually suggests giving up on Couchsechraga. He says no.

This is really the point of this whole story. In life, we lift each other over the hurdles we face. We can’t do it all alone, no matter how strong we think we are. We all have our moments of weakness, moments when our resolve loses resolution, moments when the Power of No takes over. Each of us would have abandoned this effort at one point or another. But as We, we can press on.

I knock some sense into him, plunge into the thick alpine spruce brush, and beat a path around the flood. We beats No, finale.

You know the rest of the story. Couchsechraga succumbed to our assault, including passage over and back through the famed bog in the col between her and Times Square. The other summits, Santanoni and Panther, subsequently became check-marks on our peak lists. We emerged nearly eleven hours later, wounded, abused, sore, caked with mud, our boots carrying enough water inside that we no longer cared what we stepped in, but immensely satisfied. Later examination of photos on various blogs compared to what we experienced only confirmed that we’d made this passage at absurd water levels of the type possibly only after Epic Rain.

But the Power of We overcame the Power of No. Depend on the motivation of your fellow runners and those around you to carry you through the tough points, in training, in races, in life. Give it back when you’ve got it and they need it.

Oh, one more thing: After this concluded, yes, of course I ran a few miles. Can’t let the streak die just because of some silly little Death March, can I?

Fork in the Road

2011-08-08T23:28:00.004-04:00

I popped out of the house at eight-thirty this morning for a short three mile meander around the neighborhood. Despite being brief, slow, and untimed, it was one of the more significant runs I’ve logged in quite some time. On its own, it was significant just to go out when I did. To add to that significance, I came across a fork in the road. Really. A crushed, abused, metal, very real fork, ground into the pavement. It got me thinking.

We have a habit of pressing on and putting the bad news out of mind. The financial markets are melting as I write, finally realizing the bad news we as a global society have put out of mind – that we’re in collective debt hole a mile deep from overconsumption and frivolous irresponsibility. It’s something you can’t ignore, or it will get you in the end. And I’d been putting my own bad news out of mind – that nestled between the healthy heart and endurance and all that jazz, a problem has been brewing; a health problem that nobody likes to talk publicly about, but that you can’t ignore, or it will get you in the end.

I’ve stated before and will echo again: if you want a good scare in life, Google your symptom. Six plus years ago, doing that was enough to spur me into returning to the running life. Yeah, so sometimes fear is a good thing. Certain bodily events evoke fear by their very nature, multiplied by the implication of what they might mean. This time, that Google search returned everything from trivial to terminal cancer. I couldn’t put it out of mind any longer, brought it up in my last physical, and heard what I didn’t want to hear yet knew would be the answer: So what if you’re not fifty yet, doc said, you’re going in for the scope. Yeah, that scope. As in the scope operated by a gentleman named Ben Dover. OK, enough with the bad puns, we all get it now.

With the Big Event on the line for eleven this morning, despite being in the late stages of the joys of preparing for the grand experience (which, I’ve got to say, really did not live up to the billing of horribleness conveyed to me by many – perhaps it’s because we runners are already used to dealing with extreme bodily events?), at eight-thirty I informed my Lovely Spouse that I was going for a run. Knowing me well enough, she didn’t bother to question my sanity.

I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that my current eighty-one-day haven’t-missed-a-day streak wasn’t on my mind, but this was about more than that. This was about telling myself that I wouldn’t let myself be beaten either by the fear of what I might find out in a few short hours or even the nerves about the procedure itself. This was about positive thinking.

Thus the appropriate irony of finding that fork in the road a few minutes later.

Once my head cleared of insipid “fork in the road” jokes, I boiled the find down to two forks. First, while you always hope to take the healthy fork in life, life will at some point send you down a path where something will go wrong, no matter how healthy you are. That’s for fork in the road you can work to forestall, but can’t avoid forever. And second, when faced with that path, you have a conscious fork of your own: fold or fight.

Life chose to send me a curve ball, and in two hours I’d be injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected, to plagiarize the one and only Arlo, followed shortly thereafter by the news of what was what. I resolved right there, about a tenth of a mile of thought past that battered fork, that whatever came of it, good, bad, or ugly, I’d deal with it. If it was truly ugly, even if it was an unwinnable fight, I’d deal with it, and pray to have the emotional strength to post a shining light.

It’s all well and easy to write this now. The procedure was a breeze, the caregivers were angels as they always are, and the diagnosis was not ugly at all, being on the trivial end of the range of Google-listed outcomes. I would not have to fight that fight. A little more work to patch up the internal wound perhaps, but nothing requiring emotional or physical heroics of any sort.

But I’m glad I had the time to think about it. I’m glad that the running mind fueled enough defiance to get me out on the road in the face of something nobody looks forward to, at a time of high emotional vulnerability. I’m glad I found that fork, which made me think it through and steel myself for whatever might come. I’d hazard that someone upstairs put that fork out there for me.

The Spoiler

2011-08-04T23:38:00.005-04:00

How often have I finished a local race in second or third place and lamented that a fast guy or two happened to show up that day? As an experienced (read: older) runner, I don’t expect to win – heck, a top-few finish in any race is worthy happiness – but in a small local race where the possibility, however remote, exists, it’s a nice thought. Or at least snag the masters’ crown. And even though last fall, after five years of trying, I finally did notch that win, it’s still a recurring theme.

Now, a big race is another matter. Dream on. We’re just talking about the home-town events. And getting beat by the young ‘uns is to be expected too; coming out on top of the old guys’ rankings is enough of a thrill. And if I lose it to a local guy, that’s life, we hang out, chit-chat, and know we’ll see each other again at some future race. It’s a friendly crowd.

No, the annoying cases are when the guy who shows up to take the crown is an out-of-town ringer who just happens to drop in on your home-town race, spoils the party, and walks away with some honor that coulda’ shoulda’ woulda’ been yours (remember this posting?). Well, this time it was my turn to play the spoiler. No, I didn’t win, but I did snag the top of the masters’ podium, deprived the locals of a bit of hardware, and even met a new friend in the process. Score…

Set the scene: Business trip to New Jersey, the nice part (really, there are lots of nice parts), looking at four days of sitting in a room getting educated. Read, four days of desperately trying to keep my eyes open. This isn’t a condemnation of the speakers, who did a great job. It’s the physical reality of my body, which, when not engaged, shuts down in fifteen minutes flat. Sometimes I think that everyone else is wide awake and it’s only me and it must be some horrible disease that will kill me next week. Probably I’m just not noticing the others dozing as well.

I always make a point of getting my runs in while traveling, but I’d never done the ‘seek out a local weekday race’ thing before. But coming off the Reading FORR 5K a couple weeks back and having decided that I need more short races to sharpen my speed, I figured an evening dash would be just the thing to further that goal and shake out a day’s kinks from sitting all day long.

Travel Monday, sit, sit, and sit, and by Thursday I’d downright need a race, so a race I found in a little town called Mt. Tabor. That was the target, till I discovered that our agenda of having to sit, sit, sit (and we did not like it one little bit, he said, channeling Seuss), was to extend into the dark hours Thursday night. Rapid reassessment, a little more web hunting, and thus emerged alternate target, the Tuesday night Branchburg Recreation National Night Out 5K in, not surprisingly, Branchburg, New Jersey. A mere sixteen miles from the office and a seven fifteen PM start. Piece of cake.

Yah, but this is New Jersey, where traffic aspires to hither-to unknown dimensions. So it wasn’t a piece of cake, but I made it, and found myself in a place I’d never heard of, with people I’d never met, at an event that was really about getting the locals out – nearly three hundred locals of which a glance at the results hints that fewer than fifty came from more than a town away. I wasn’t just the outsider, I was, even better, the conspicuous outside, sporting as usual my club jersey. Of course nobody had a clue where the Highland City Striders came from, and nobody asked. The excitement for this race was the cross-country preview, with the local youngsters lined up to duke it out in a pre-season test. I’d noticed that from looking at last year’s results and looked forward to have a bunch of fast kids to push me.

And it was, in short, a lovely night. Hot again, yes, but a lovely course through a lovely park with a lovely trail section, shady, soft underfoot, with a bunch of fun twists and turns – glad I jogged it ahead of time so as to avoid bouncing off various trees – and even a lovely cross-country start, dashing across a field from the wide starting line, a few curses emitted here and there when the golf cart we were chasing led us slightly astray of the path off the field, but still, just plain evocative of the word lovely, enhanced by a large and enthusiastic cheering section.

As expected, there were a lot of fast kids. As hoped, I didn’t see any fast old farts, but I wasn’t about to look back to verify that. Just keep swimming. Most importantly, there were enough fast kids that once the field settled in, there was always someone to target. In fact, I’d say that the field depth was just right. Too many and it’s meaningless to pick ‘em off. Too few and it’s unrealistic to catch the next one, way far out front. This crowd was just right. Constant motivation. Double motivation, in fact, as it’s sweeter when you can pick off the seventeen-year-olds, and at least a half dozen fell over the last two miles.

At the two mile split I knew it was a decent night. How decent I couldn’t then – or now – say, since this wasn’t a course that would pass the USATF White Glove Test. Plenty of undelimited inside turns. Virtually unmeasureable trail sections. But no worries. Call it close enough. Call it happiness crossing the line a quarter-minute faster than the last one two weeks back, which had been my fastest in years. Maybe it was short, who cares. Eighth of nearly three hundred, and took the masters by a wide margin. Cooler, the scoring company included a “PLP” – Performance Level Percentage – rating in the results, a computation that scales your time to your exact age. I’d seen this concept before on an individual basis, but not included in the general results so you could compare yourself to everyone else of any age. Smoked them kiddies. Sweet.

Now, the funny thing is that I wasn’t the only spoiler. I was the old fart spoiler, but there was another, the young spoiler, or shoulda-been spoiler, Dan from Minnesota, posted to Jersey for a summer internship, and in a weird twist, we finished a mere seconds apart. After knocking off the half-dozen kids, he was next in my crosshairs before we ran out of runway. Figure the irony that of three hundred local runners, the two from afar finished three seconds apart. And he too should have deprived the locals of some hardware in his twenty-something age group but for an administrative error that cruelly deprived him of said medal. Ah well, he took it well, no biggie.

We figured all this out in the post-chute chit-chat, and to my amusement I found he was planning on Thursday night to hit Mt. Tabor, my original target. It would have been sweet not to have had those meetings. Three seconds apart on Tuesday called for a rematch on Thursday, but sadly, not to be. The rematch will have to wait till Dan nails his Boston qualifier, which I’m confident he will, or I find myself in Minnesota, hey, you never know.

And then? While my co-workers were (probably) out drinking in the bars, shoulda’-been spoiler Dan and I hung out on in Branchburg, New Jersey on National Night Out, downed cheap and tasty burgers whipped up for charity, enjoyed a summer night while the town selectmen battled the town cops on the softball field, and swapped running stories. What more could one ask for in life?

Unfinished Business

2011-07-31T23:35:00.007-04:00

Sitting on my desk now for nearly a year is a note from a friendly and generous gent at Sport Science (www.sportsciencewear.com). That note came in a package with a pair of samples (read, free, always good, thanks!) of their product, that being clothing, in this case shirts, made from their super-double-secret fabric that feels like cotton but is said to perform like tech wicking material. All of this came about because I replied to their “targeted promotional email” (a.k.a. spam that is close enough to what you’re interested in so that you don’t get annoyed and don’t discard it immediately). Their email made a comment about having an ice cold Guinness after a race, and I reprimanded them on suggesting such an insult as putting a Guinness on ice. Apparently they were amused and got the point, one thing led to another, blog was mentioned which excited dreams of potential social media promotional opportunities (I cannot tell a lie, I fully disclosed the extent of my admirably non-massive readership), and said samples showed up for self and wife. I’d promised to give them fair shake and a potential mention here to my scads (scientific term that sounds large but barely breaks two digits) of readers.

Life got in the way, injuries interrupted training, next thing you know it was fall and long sleeve weather, and, well, said shirts didn’t get a fair testing until spring, at which point Sport Science pretty much forgot I existed (I don’t blame them) and my blog posting became so time challenged that spare column inches never appeared. My guilt has not exactly been overwhelming, but, well, it’s time to right that omission, or at least get that note off my desk. After all, they did send me free shirts.

So, are those shirts up to the task? Short answer: It depends. Longer answer: Sort of.

These togs are billed as the most comfortable shirt you’ll own while still being the best performing. On the comfort, utterly no argument. The fabric is so pleasantly soft you’d never mistake it for a tech shirt, and frankly, it beats most cotton shirts. On performance, a mixed bag. I’m a heavy sweater. I can’t help it, I’m half Italian, we sweat at the sight of a light bulb. On a hot, humid day, complete soak-through is the norm. Tech shirts can’t wick enough when the Army Corps of Engineers is needed to manage the flow. Nor, can I say, does the Sport Science shirt. My impression? It got sweaty wet like a cotton shirt. I will say that because of its soft consistency, when wet it wasn’t nearly as annoying as a cotton shirt. But it didn’t, to my judgment, wick like a wicking shirt, or dry out as quickly.

Nevertheless, any shirt is going to get wet, and if that’s going to happen, no big complaints if that shirt is still comfortable when wet, which this is. But there’s one bigger complaint I’ve got that has nothing to do with this garment’s performance: it looks like a cotton shirt. And any serious runner who sees someone running in a cotton shirt almost immediately makes an assessment, and that assessment typically isn’t good. That fool’s out in cotton. Amateur! I know there’s nothing scientific about this, and I’m the last person to worry about impressions or peer pressure, but it’s true, this just doesn’t look like a running shirt. Shame on me, but it has to be said.

All in all, for what it is, and for me it’s a good active-day shirt (read: big hikes and so on, but not really running), it’s not bad. And though it’s still a bit pricey, at $22 on their web site (pricey at least when compared with a drawer full of race tech tees, obtained for the price of admission), that price is, to my recollection, down from what I recall was the going rate last fall when they sent me the samples. So I say thanks to the Sport Science folks for the samples, and wish them well in their quest to make the world more comfortable.

How Hot Was It?

2011-07-28T23:31:00.001-04:00

Yeah, it was hot last week. It’s summer, get used to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m completely in the global warming camp. Al Gore has it right, even if I couldn’t see his appeal back in the year 2000. The right-wing Fox-News-brainwashed set isn’t just all wet, they’re leading us all to being all wet by ignoring our impact while stronger storms rage and Greenland gets ready to cause the greatest tsunami of all time when that ice cap slides.

But as for last week, it was just hot, as happens a few times each summer, and the media had their field day. Newscasts singled out the number dead, without mentioning that many of them probably would have been dead within a month anyway, and the Weather Channel delighted in the opportunity to show pictures of sweaty people. That’s the twenty-four-seven news world. To be fair, in other parts of the country it is downright miserable. I just spoke to a colleague in Dallas who noted it’s their eighteenth day of one-hundred-degree-plus temperatures. But that’s Dallas. It happens. And no, I can’t fathom why anyone lives there.

Here, we had a couple days strung together of ninety-five plus, capped off by a hundred and two last Friday. Only today, a week later, do I feel like I’ve recovered from the abuse I heaped on my body through that stretch. It so happens that I accidentally got myself on a consecutive-days-running streak some time ago – back in mid-May to be exact – and while acutely aware of the risks of overtraining and injury from such an endeavor, and proceeding carefully as my body has withstood the assault (after all, an easy three or four is as good as a day off), I’m just a day from matching my Second Lap record of seventy-two days straight set a few years back. I mention this because something as entirely irrational and obsessive as a two-month-plus streak comes in real handy when it’s miserably hot and it’s wicked easy to just say the heck with it and sit out a few days. A streak keeps you moving. So yes, I ran through the heat.

Even more obsessed, I raced through the heat. On one of those ninety-seven degree days a co-worker and runner friend of mine had his day in the sun as race director for his local 5K, an event I’d missed last year while he’d run my 10K, so in the spirit of reciprocal support I’d signed up. From my afternoon meeting on the forty-eighth floor in Boston, the air was simply solid, non-penetrable, turning normally gorgeous view of the world into a quasi-melted grayish mush. Woo hoo, baby, race day! But by evening race time it was merely in the low nineties, and I’d discovered the secret to dealing with that kind of heat: spend a few minutes in the port-o-john, and when you come out it feels downright cool.

Racing in the nineties means your warm-up feels dreadful, you’re glad there’s a stiff wind even though you know it will blow in your face when you least want it, and you expect nothing on the performance meter. It means that in a mere 5K, you run out of gas at two-and-a-half, which I did, though by that point I’d fought back from as far back as seventh to my final fourth-place finish in the hundred-thirtyish field. It means that when they give out nicely imprinted pint glasses for the awards, you’re really bummed that there’s nothing to put in them. But they made up for it with many gallons of slushies, a perfect touch. And despite the late fade, I notched my best 5K time since the Famed Foot Follies of ’08. Certainly not no sweat. There was plenty of that. But no complaints.

Probably the most descriptive portrait of the week’s heat, though, came the following morning, the day we topped one hundred, though I got out early enough that it was merely in the high eighties with two hundred percent humidity. Setting off for an eight miler, the combination of heat, humidity, and having raced twelve hours earlier simply wiped me off the map. I have to go back a long time to find a training run when I needed to stop for not just one, but several walk breaks. And by six, my shoes literally squished from the sweat, audible to Dearest Wife sitting on the front steps as I ran past down the street. Cry me a river. No, don’t bother; I created my own, running down the front steps. Yum.

For days after these experiences, even when the temperatures had dropped to pleasant, my pace ballooned and the fatigue couldn’t be ignored. Only tonight, nearly a week on, did a good speed workout shake out the cobwebs. Heat will do that do you. Get used to it.

Milestones

2011-07-22T23:14:00.000-04:00

I love my Prius. Who can’t love fifty miles to the gallon? But it, like most newer cars, is lacking one of the true joys of life: a real odometer. What kid – at least what kid who grew up before the age of digital odometers – didn’t love watching those numbers all line up and roll at once on every big milestone. It was like one nine grabbed the rest of them and pulled as hard as possible. You could almost hear the creaking (and often could hear a satisfying click). A thousand was cool. Ten thousand was awesome. A hundred thousand – the complete

rollover – was an epic event, worthy of documen- tation. When newer, more reliable cars added that sixth digit, well, even better. Well into my adult years I still loved these events enough to pull to the side of the road and record them. When my trusty Corolla rolled over for the second time, well, geek nirvana. Rollovers are cool events.

Or they were. The world is digital now, like it or not. No more pops and cracks on your LPs, even after you’ve lovingly cleaned them with your Discwasher (c’mon, admit it, you remember it, you owned one, and you even used the special cleaning fluid they provided). No more faded sounds on those long distance phone calls. And no more rolling over those odometers; a digital blip and it’s over. I tend to miss it, since the single multi-purpose display is usually on the trip meter. What a loss.

But milestones are still cool, and they are the reward of being geeky enough to keep track to know when they occur. A big one came around last week: ten thousand miles.

Like every number, it needs to be qualified. Ten thousand miles (of running, of course) since I started up again in March of 2005. First lap youthful miles excluded, records just aren’t that good from those days, and given the twenty-plus year gap between then and my second running career, they just don’t matter all that much. Ten thousand miles as close as I can count, recognizing that the measurement of every run has its vagaries, though as measurers

go, I’m pretty obsessive about getting it right. If I’m off a little, hey, who’ll care, heck, who’ll even know? I’m satisfied that it’s close enough for my count, and that’s all that really matters. But ten thousand miles, each of which has been logged in the Mother of all Spreadsheets, cross hatched, re-analyzed, tallied in multiple columns and categories, and otherwise overused in a probably unhealthy manner.

Ever the geek and thus knowing this was coming, I planned the day-before run by strategically adding a few blocks so as to end on a nice even number. At day’s end I sat at nine thousand nine hundred ninety six, knowing that the club planned a speed workout the following day and that it’s exactly a mile to the track, at least via the route I knew I’d use. Which I did, and from there, twelve laps of no-stop intervals (and yes, I ran in lane two since it’s a four-hundred meter rather than a quarter-mile track), and there it was. I’d let the club know it was coming and told them that bells would not peal nor would the Earth shake, but of the few club-mates showed for the event, one did bring the ceremonial bell for the finish of lap twelve, and ding-a-ling, it was done. As the bell ringer put it, without scheduled maintenance, no oil changes, no nuthin’.

Ten thousand miles. The odometer rolled over. I hitched a car ride home for the pleasure of ending the day with all those zeros on the dial.

Ironically, the following day brought another rollover: a trip back to the old home town where a subset of my classmates were gathered for our thirtieth high school reunion. After a few of these, the subset has stabilized on the usual suspect attendees, many of which I had little contact with during those school years but still find it fun to see and chat up in rollover year increments. The subset is as a rule looking visibly older, and in many cases, visibly larger, with a few exceptions. There was Eric, hobbling on crutches but obviously fit as it was a mountain-biking wreck that busted his foot. Kim, fit and slim and, what a surprise, running. And Dave, making his living doing what I call real work, building decks (my only-half-joking threat of what I will do when I’m sick of technology), but showing that active work, active life pays off. It’s milestones like this that make reflection on milestones like ten thousand miles even more compelling. We can’t stop getting older, but there’s nothing saying we can’t push off the decline for a few years.

Go roll over a few training meter dials and set a few milestones of your own.

This is Not Retirement, This is An Opportunity

2011-07-13T23:18:00.007-04:00

Pro sports players hangs up their cleats or skates or racquet and move upstairs to become announcers. It’s so common that it’s a non-event. It’s the graceful – and profitable – way to retire. This Sunday I had my chance to pick up the microphone. But I’m not a pro, there was no upstairs, and I’m not retiring. Still, I had a wonderful time.

Cut back to Maine, noting last week’s posting, specifically, the month’s first incursion into Maine, to the conference in Portland. It’s day’s end and, speaking engagement long over, we’re packing up the trade show booth as it’s time to go home, or at least down to the ship-turned-restaurant docked at the waterfront for a little après-conference chit-chat (which, as I noted, turned decidedly toward running, much to my amusement). But first, in the mayhem of moving those boxes, the cell rings.

While it rings…make a sudden badly edited cut to a few weeks after the Maine trip. I’m walking through downtown Marlborough with Dearest Daughter the Younger, having just overstuffed myself on tasty samplings at our fine city’s restaurant festival. I’m stopped by a somewhat older gentleman who introduces himself by telling me, “You don’t know me…,” but in short, he’s noticed my recent publicity surrounding Run Marlborough 2011, he was a member of the original version of our club many years back, he’s run over fifty marathons, and oh, did you hear that person shouting out, “Go Marlborough!” at mile fifteen of the Boston Marathon? I had, and was puzzled as to who it was. Yes, that was him, he saw my club jersey, and unbeknownst to me I had an additional rooter.

I spent the next few minutes after this most pleasant conversation explaining to DD the Younger how these things really only start to happen when you’ve planted yourself and resisted the American Urge to never stay in one place for too long. In two days it’ll be twenty-six years since I moved to Massachusetts, and nineteen here in Marlborough. Connectedness brings joy and serendipitous meetings, and sometimes interesting opportunities.

Back to that phone call in Maine. This was one of those moments; connectedness paid off. It was Chris, or Run Marlborough fame. Yes, I know I’ve only known her for six months or so, but the chances of these connections increase exponentially with time. Her offer is one of these things you’d never see coming. How would I like to be an announcer for the upcoming Marlborough Triathlon? She knows the guy who does it, his partner is unavailable, and he needs help. She told him I’d be perfect for the job. And get this: they’ll pay me.

This is the kind of question that makes you say, “Huh?” The Marlborough Tri, though only three years old, is a pretty big event in town. And while I know swim, bike, and run, and have done a miniscule amount of the first, a decent amount of the second, and of course you know about the third, I’m not what you’d call a triathlon expert. Heck, until this came along I hadn’t really figured out that there’s no vowel between triath and lon. But would I do it? You bet, sounds like fun. And get paid? Heck, if you stretch the definition of running to this event, this would only be the second time I’ve earned a dime from my vice, the first being when I sold my blood for science a few months back. And to be fair, when the day was over and the speakers and amps and cables were lugged and packed, said pay was no doubt justifiable. Do what you love, the money will follow so they say. Well, I could never live on it, so this surely can’t be retirement, but it’s a happy bonus.

Sunday morning dawned perfect at Marlborough’s boathouse on the Fort Meadow Reservoir. This wasn’t moving upstairs, it was moving down the hill, since water has a tendency to gather in low spots. Four hundred athletes filtered down from the high school at the top of the hill to rack their bikes and prepare to take a dip. And I honed my announcer voice, not too smooth per Steve’s advice, calm down, take it slow, clear, enjoy it. In truth there was quite a number of things that had to be broadcast to the wet suit crowd while spinning the tunes to set the mood (can you still call it spinning on an iPod when there’s no longer even a CD, let alone an LP, in use?), so the corny cracks I’d thought up about being allowed to cross the border into neighboring Hudson on the bike route without clearing customs had to be shelved. No worries. All fun.

The fact is, I love to be in the middle of things. I look back thirty years to high school (yes, it’s been that long) and recall how I had much more fun at the church bazaar when I was working than I did when simply attending. And that’s never changed. And, like connectedness, involvement gives rise to unique experiences. Like the chance to help a hero.

There’s little more than can be said about the Hoyts. Dick and his disabled son Rick are known globally and an inspiration to millions. Dick, working on his eighth decade, pushes Rick in the run, carries Rick on a special two-man cycle, and tows Rick in the swim. And for that swim, Dick’s inflatable boat was leaking, apparently damaged in its previous outing. The floor wouldn’t hold air, which wouldn’t prevent it from floating, but Rick would be a bit less comfortable sagging into the drink. A few of us pounced on the situation, and I can’t minimize how good it felt when I found the leak and donated my ever-present duct tape (which makes the world go round…) as a temporary fix. Minor event? Absolutely. Symbolic impact? Priceless.

And the main event? Utterly cool to watch. After the first wave start (there were five waves), Steve headed up the hill to the bike-to-run transition and finish line at the high school while I called the action at the lake. My ever present Ace Support Team worked the iPod and helped pack the gear once the swimmers were beached, at which point I joined Steve up the hill to call the run transition and the finish. Steve’s audio setup was impressive, with wireless mikes and speakers everywhere, to the point where my wife commented that my voice was everywhere but she had no idea where I actually was! Steve’s engineer-mentality precise methodology in everything down to packing his trailer might drive a Type B personality mad, but to my Type A engineering mind, it was comprehensive, effective, and a thing of beauty. And calling out the finishers, especially the home-town athletes, including Chris who (Woo Hoo!) won her age group, was pure schmaltzy fun.

Would I do it again? Time availing, you bet. Am I, as Chris insisted I would be, itching to do a triathlon? Ah, the complexity, the equipment, finding the venues to train, the this, the that, the jury’s still out.

Photos from the event can be seen here.

The Merry Month of Mostly Maine

2011-07-09T23:45:00.007-04:00

I think I’ve forgotten how to blog. No, seriously, three weeks have passed, I’ve lost the list of topics and ideas that’s always haunting my desk, reminding me of the articles I’ve yet to write, and each day ends without my having found time to write. Well, whatever. Get on with it. It’s ketchup time, so let’s catch up.

It’s early June and I find myself in Portland, Maine for a conference speaking engagement, so that means a jaunt around Back Cove, rapidly elected Best Spot to Run while in Portland. Ever the social running animal, I am tickled when someone pulls a u-turn to catch up and join me as a potential compatible training partner. Cullen and I burn a fast lap around the cove before he peels off and I head for the conference. The day starts with one great social running connection, and hours later finishes with another as kindred running spirits find each other at the post-conference reception and make the normal types around us roll their eyes. One of these days I’ll get a chance to read Paul’s wife’s running blog and will then provide a link here.

It’s a mere few days later in June and again I find myself in Maine, Augusta this time, and it’s a cool sixty eight degrees at three in the afternoon. Post customer meeting I find a remote parking lot, change from Network Man costume to Racing Man costume, and head south to join my club-mates for the Mr. Bean race back home in Worcester, a small event among the best crowd in town. Sadly, between Augusta and Worcester, sixty eight becomes eighty eight, and the prospect of a cool evening race becomes a steamer. A fortunate delay to the start due to some crossed signals gets us down to the mid-eighties and we race, popping in a third place finish and top master in a race with no master’s division. Or awards, for that matter, because it’s that kind of race. Run, have a beer, have a great evening. It’s all good.

Poetically, I should start this next paragraph by saying that once again, I find myself in Maine, because I did, however not just yet.

First, I find myself across town for our club’s Third Annual Running With the Wolves 10K. Perhaps we can tie this to the theme by calling it a Main(e) Event? Gloriously, I am not the race director this year. My sole worry is scoring. Back office stuff. Spreadsheet weenie stuff. My kind of stuff, made even better working in partnership with Oh-So-Capable Wife. What a team! Heading out the door to the race, I spy a string of Christmas lights oddly sitting out in the basement in June. They make for a festive night,

which becomes more festive when our Bruins take game seven during our after-race party. Nothing like a big win while amongst friends. A night that can’t be beat.

And now I return to that theme, so incongruously interrupted.

Not two weeks since my last foray, I again find myself in Maine. Each incursion is deeper than the past, first Portland, then Augusta, and now my clan’s home-away-from-home, Mt. Desert Island. For Father’s Day, I give the kids an extra two hours to find a rock on the beach for me (forecast celebration mode based on past experience, actual results did vary) and head to the other side of the island to meet the local club, Crow Athletics (Why the name? Because crows are tough, found everywhere, and refuse to get out of the road, so sayeth their web site. Well done.) …for their Sunday morning run on Acadia’s carriage roads. One guy shows up. But that’s all I needed, he’s my age, runs my pace, and has a twenty-miler in mind, more than enough to accompany me on the eleven-mile circuit of the Around the Mountain carriage road I’ve got targeted. Steve and I fight a stiff north wind climbing along the west side of Parkman and Bald Mountains to reach the open vistas afforded from the north side of Sargent Mountain. Spectacular is a lame word to describe the scene. A few hours later, Father’s Day givings received, I return to the same mountain with the clan and accomplish a first: around the mountain and then over the (same) mountain on the same day. The wind is even stiffer, the views are even spectacular-er, and the day is capped by Darling Daughter the Youngest getting me out for a second run of the day, a practice we continue throughout the week and beyond. She’s been bitten by the bug. What a Dad’s day!

A few days later in Maine, having run around a mountain, I get the bug to run up a mountain. Beech Mountain is a mere eight hundred and forty feet, pretty much starting at sea level at Long Pond, so it's no Everest but it's a pretty good climb. Better, it is only a few miles from the cottage, though getting there involves a pretty significant climb and drop all its own. Running the trail turns out to be more or less impossible, and I quickly drop to a power walk until the trail levels out near the top, but in sixteen minutes I’m on top of this family favorite. Daughters ask me later what I did next, and are amused when I tell them I spent twenty six seconds on top, then ran back down via the south ridge, tripping only once on the way down in a spot where God conveniently provided a very large tree exactly where my arm flew out to catch myself.

Four days of glorious weather in Acadia in June is really cause to buy a lottery ticket, and indeed our luck runs out. For the latter half of our week’s vacation the wind blows hard onshore and turns the air to the temperature of the North Atlantic. Wicked cold, but really quite nice for running, other than the wicked wind. Maine turns into a sixty mile week. And the skies open on the last day, so we bag our hoped-for hike and high-tail it south. Needing to stretch our legs, we find ourselves in Portland, and being in Portland, we come full circle from whence this article started and take a family walking lap around Back Cove.

Thus endeth the Month of Maine, which would have been even more poetic had it happened in May, but it didn’t. Life’s puns are not perfect.

And now, caught up more or less, I make the final note that I had the pleasure of joining my partner in insanity Chris today as she completed her version of the Run Marlborough quest. For me, I’ve somehow accidentally been running for fifty-two days straight, an unintentional streak that started a few days before I finished that quest back in May. The circle closes again, and so will I.

Vindication!

2011-06-17T22:36:00.000-04:00

Time flies so rapidly when you’re swamped. Truly timely topics upon which to opine stack up, but I’m big into chronology, so first in, first out, let’s get to the bottom of the stack (assuming you pile things on from the top). And that would be… Vindication!

Let’s go back in time, my golly, almost three weeks have passed since that Any Given Sunday in Buffalo (and no, I’m not a big NFL fan, I just like the phrase, though yes, I do watch the Patriots if they’re winning, and yes, dear reader, I do owe you the honor of catching up on your writing as well, but I digress…). Right, where was I? Yes, Vindication! It’s a wonderful thing.

Yes, it was a hot day in Buffalo. Yes, it was a humid day in Buffalo. And yes, I largely blamed said conditions for what could only be described as a horribly executed race, a race with splits so entirely not negative that, well, you couldn’t write a script for collapse much better than what I turned in that morning.

The firm that did the chip timing was kind enough to set up mats every 10K, which only served to remind me just how bad it was. First 10K, under forty one minutes, six and a half per mile. Good start. Second? Nearly forty three, approaching sevens. Crashing already. Third? Pushing forty six, up to seven and a half pace. Leaning toward the Death Shuffle with a quarter yet to go. And the fourth? Don’t even talk about it. Fifty minutes. Eights. Booyah. My pace chart would have been beautiful had it been a progress chart for summiting a major peak.

Blame it on the heat. Everyone was feeling it. I noted that it was my perception that despite the crash, few passed me in the second half. But I really wasn’t sure. Perception is pretty lousy in the high miles of a marathon, especially one as rough as that one.

Ah, but that scoring firm took splits every 10K, and reported them for everyone, making for a truly huge results document. Eagerly I attacked said tome seeking that vindication. And I found… bafflement. At 10K, they spotted me in 41st place. But for the next 10K, they again reported 41st, then again 41st for the third, 38th for the 4th, and 37th for the last leftover 2K. Lovely to be sure, except that I finished 32nd. Go figure.

Puzzled, I sought out truth and justice. And to their credit, the fine folks at Score This! (I love that name) replied very quickly. After some give and take, push and pull, yin and yang, what emerged was that they reported each runner’s relative performance for each 10K. So for that 3rd 10K from 20K to 30K, I ran the 41st fastest for that leg. Someone who may have been twenty minutes behind me but bolted for a few miles from twelve to eighteen would have affected that number.

Interesting, but useless. I really don’t care about that guy who left it all on the course and sprinted the last two kilometers to record the tenth fastest final 2K en-route to his 200th place finish. What I really care about is what place I was in at 20K compared to what place I was in at 30K.

Again to their credit, after some more push and pull, said scorers absolutely agreed. And decreed that they’d change their reporting for races going forward. A small victory for the forces of truth, justice, and useful data. Better, they sent me the raw data from their mats, and I was able to do my own analysis to answer that question of, “Was it the heat, or was I a wimp?”

And the answer, to paraphrase Dick Nixon, “I am not a wimp.”

Vindication.

As it turned out, at 10K I was in 41st place, but eight of those in front of me would not finish (DNF). You can argue this either way. Finishing the race by definition means beating a DNF. But it’s nice to consider your performance against those who ran the whole race.

At 20K, four of those eventual DNFs had already DNF’d, but I was in 39th place, so I’d lost two places to the survivors. So sad. But this was before the calamity began at the half. That’s where I really, really, wanted to know what happened. And…

By 30K, up to 35th place. Three more of the DNFs dropped in that leg, accounting for three of the four places I picked up, which meant even when my pace dropped to seven and a halfs, I still picked one off. Woo hoo!

And at 40K, the eighth DNF was gone, and I’d moved up exactly one place to 34th. It wasn’t that simple as I know there was a little passing and being passed going on, but the net was even.

Finally, in that last 2K, I nailed two more to close it out in 32nd place.

OK, that’s a lot of numbers, so if you’re still reading, you’re either resilient or bored with time on your hands. The point? From start to finish, eight dropped and I picked up another net spot, but in that ugly second half, even excluding the DNFs, I gained ground. In other words, it really did hit everyone. In other words, it really wasn’t just me. This doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t exactly a great race. But it does tell me that given the conditions, I’ve got nothing to complain about.

Vindication. Sweet.

See it Live! My friend Mike, who calls himself the Why Guy, has created a motivational web site with video interviews of marathoners known as WhyMarathon.com. He’s done some great work, even after you give him some leeway for allowing my worn-out voice to grace his pages. Check out the video interview he conducted with me right after the race in Buffalo by clicking here, and consider pulling him in for some motivation at your next gathering!

Any Given Sunday in Buffalo

2011-06-05T23:21:00.000-04:00

The old saying in the NFL is that on any given Sunday, anything can happen. Into Buffalo I went, sailing off a strong Boston, enjoying a strong training streak – indeed, today, just a week later, I hit one thousand miles for the year, well ahead of expectations – and just plain feeling strong. And found myself anything but strong, mired in a struggle-fest. Never before have the wheels come off so early in a marathon. Any given Sunday.

There’s really no mystery to it. It was hot. Not hot as in the average Joe flocks to the beach hot, the electric utility makes their capacity fears public hot, or there are air-conditioned shelters open for the elderly hot, but marathon hot, which means much warmer than you want. As in, it probably hit eighty by the end hot. They didn’t give out space blankets afterward hot. And you didn’t care hot. Because once you weren’t running, it felt wonderful hot. But when you were running…

To think, my concern had been that the forecast showers would have made things wet, soddened the feet to blisters, and chafed the pointy bits. But the overcast that would have generated such wetness would be oh so welcome, since a rise into the seventies was predicted. And things were going so well, too. The cloud cover didn't disappoint,

making for a pleasant morning on my arrival downtown at six AM. Hope abounded…

But no, it’s never that simple. Half an hour later the clouds didn’t just part, they vanished, just like that. Looked up, no trace of them. Hello? Throughout the race the sun would be so strong as to give me a trace of snow-blindness at one point. It multiplied the impact of the humid warmth, broken only by the predictable breeze on the last six miles southbound, which was, of course, in our faces. Not that we were going fast enough at that point to care.

I can point to the word hot and lay waste to any blame. The fact is, the wheels were already loose at the half. They fell off only a few miles later. But despite the crumble, few people passed me in the second half – and for the few that did, I probably took about an equal number back. Yes, it was hot, and it affected us all, and even the Kenyans up front (with whom I got a good mug pre-race) were a little slower than usual. All of this is true, and all of it contributed to the result. But I have to take some personal responsibility, too.

I made a pretty foolish mistake. I can’t say whether it really made a difference or not, but it was still pretty foolish. I forgot to take into account that since I last ran this race in 2008, they’ve re-engineered the start so that the full and half marathons now start together. In the past, they started in parallel, a block apart, which was fun as you’d see the other pack briefly as you passed the cross streets, like watching a race in strobe effect. There they again! And again! And a few blocks later the packs would meet up and head on their merry way.

The downside of that coolness was that the two groups were offset by a tenth of a mile or so, which made the mile markers rather confusing. Whether that was the reason or not, now the races start together on their first-half journey. But this never occurred to me when the gun sounded, as I tried to place myself roughly where I was used to being in this race vis-à-vis the starting pack. And I couldn’t figure why the ignition burners failed to ignite. The body seemed to be dragging, refused to get into gear, and this was only at the half mile! It was looking like it was going to be a long day, (which, it turned out, would be accurate).

Then we hit the mile in six-oh-two. Yeah, six-oh-two, as in 5-k pace. Oh, criminy. No wonder it felt so hard. Emergency dial-it-back time.

By the time I stabilized back to sanity pace, we’d burned through the brief few miles along the waters of Erie which that morning had a wonderful watery scent, the only cool stretch of the run. Once we turned inland, the heat was on. Who’d have thought I’d notice the supposed hills of this course, really just a series of overpasses in the second ten kilometers? By about the third one, alarm bells were ringing. When a large looming building cast a long shadow over Exchange Street around the ten mile mark – and I noticed and appreciated it – it was all hands on deck, she’s going down, mates.

Probably the toughest bit was not taking the out. It was right there. It was so easy. Coming up on thirteen, because of the combined courses, the half marathon finish loomed a mere couple hundred yards away. It was like Jesus being tempted in the desert. Just cross the line. Be done with it. You know you want to.

I could claim it was marathoner’s perseverance, but in large part it was the fact that my uncle, gracious provider of local lodging and hospitality as well as race support services, was stationed at mile seventeen with fresh bottles of rocket fuel, and I didn’t know his cell phone number to let him know I wouldn’t be showing up. Sometimes I’m so ludicrously practical. Soldier on.

I’ve written previously how the perfect marathon is recorded with a blissfully level splits chart, while the nightmare is the constantly upward sloping highway to hell. You already know where this one went. By the half, the trend was already set, and when mile thirteen topped seven minutes (already? awww…), there was no denying it was already seriously unattractive, and rapidly progressing past one-, two-, and three-bag status directly to coyote-ugly. The coyote in me motored on, taking a few walk breaks at the water stops, and actually putting on a little burst at the end.

When I’ve told this story over the past week, this is the part that annoys people. OK, all this drama for a three-oh-nine and change. You battled the heat? You tanked? And you nailed the twenty-minute-below-Boston-quali

fier that lets you sign up on the first day come September? Well, yeah, but let’s not forget the three-flat at Boston, and that Buffalo’s course usually wins me a few minutes back. Was it fast by my standards? No. But am I OK with it? You bet I am. No complaints. In fact, I find it kind of ironic

, since my goal for Boston was three-oh-anything and I nailed the low end on that day whereas here I squeaked the high end.

The day’s toll on the field was pretty grim. A thousand started the full marathon and then the flies started dropping. Sixty seven souls succumbed to the temptation and called it a day at the half. A full dozen who were ahead of me at the 10-K and plenty more behind vanished from the final results. In the end, only eight hundred seventy one crossed the line, an attrition rate of about a seventh. Of those survivors, I landed in thirty-second place, and fourth in my age group, but once they peeled two off for the overall masters’ awards (warm hard cash, it was a hot day, remember?), they handed me an attractive second place trophy complete with a little spinning thing on top that’s provided hours of mindless fun. All in all, not bad for a thousand-mile odyssey.

Tidbits: In the, “Don’t think you can do something embarrassing just because you’re far from home,” department, the day served up a number of small world incidents in rapid succession. Amidst five thousand

runners in the half, full, and relay, what are the chances that the first person I see after parking the car at six AM is the young gent, Cody, with whom I shared pasta the night before (and who, I note, destroyed his goal time in the half – you go!). We shared a warm-up jog, came to a stop, and the next person we encountered was Raj with whom I’d chatted extensively at the expo the day before. Off for a second jog, and we hadn’t gotten a block before running into former co-worker Kevin. And of course there was my friend Mike who snapped the fine race pictures herein (thanks!) and recorded an interview at the finish for his cool motivational web site, but at least I knew he’d be in town.

Questum Completum

2011-05-28T16:37:00.000-04:00

Let’s cover the important stuff first. Chris, my counterpart in the lunacy of Run Marlborough 2011, has signed on as a follower of my blog. Not that it really means anything, but it’s symbolic, because that makes ten. DOUBLE DIGITS BABY! I can smell that book deal in the works… If I could figure out how to do same to hers, I would, but I don’t think she counts kills the same way – at least those that are not squirrels.

Now, about that Run Marlborough 2011 quest? Finite. Completum. El Dunno (La Dunna?). With family, a few friends, and Mayor Stevens on hand to greet and congratulate us, plus the

lion’s share of Marlborough’s press corps, we sauntered into downtown, cameras whizzing, much to the confusion of motorists blatantly obstructed. OK, no police escort. No worries. After two hundred and eight – point six – unique miles amidst over nine hundred miles logged to date this year, I can handle a little traffic.

And it was a perfect day to wrap it up. The rains, the cold, the misery of recent days magically parted, replaced by a glorious spring day. After trotting carefully on mildly wounded ankle to our designated meeting spot (to which Chris drove! ..the horror…OK, she’d already done her workout), we found ourselves ahead of our designated schedule and thus wandered a bit, checking off a few roads still left on Chris’s shrinking list. From there, it was all downhill to the last half unrun block, that block I’d worked so hard to avoid the last five months, to our ceremonial finish in front of City Hall.

Goofy? You bet. Media mongers? Maybe we were. But was it fun? Absolutely. It was something we’ll look back on and blubber about to our grand-offspring, if they’ll stop texting long enough to listen. Now, I think this is where I say I’d like to thank my wife, my family, all the members of the academy, and so on…

Mayor Stevens lamented that had she known of the beforehand, we would have been deputized as a road survey crew. Truth is, I told her, the city does a pretty good job on the roads. Truth is, I’m of the view that she’s done a pretty good job on the city, and I’m sad to see her leave at the end of her term. But time moves on, and so must we, so the natural question was of course, where to run the next day?

For the record, I ran to the bank to deposit the only money I’ve ever made running, the small stipend paid for being part of that cool Boston Marathon study. I guess this means that after our moment of triumph, I turned pro. Sold out. Went commercial. Yeah, I can only wish, I don’t hear the phone ringing with sponsorship deals.

The media? Front page on the Metro West Daily News (yawn, again?) in another masterfully crafted piece by fellow runner reporter Paul. And a feature on local cable TV channel WMCT, watch the video here. When you know these things are coming, there’s a big cringe factor, hoping they won’t latch onto something stupid you said. Both pieces, I’m pleased and relieved to say, made me smile cringelessly. And let’s not forget Chris’ blog post, also worth a read.

Next up, the gun fires in a mere fifteen hours on the Buffalo Marathon, as I write from uncle’s back porch on what would be a lovely day for almost everything but running a marathon. What a difference a few hours make! Traveling westward yesterday, the trusty Prius temperature thingy recorded NINETY ONE DEGREES passing Albany, and FIFTY TWO DEGREES passing Rochester a few hours later. This morning dawned cool and foggy, ideal for an endurance event, but said event wasn’t this morning. Already today it’s turned summer. And tomorrow? Too warm, too humid, and probably rainy enough to wet and chaff the toes and pointy bits. Probably not a day for hammering it out the gate, but once we’re off, so are all bets.

It’s Called A RUNway, DOH!

2011-05-24T23:00:00.022-04:00

The quest nears its conclusion. In fact, late tomorrow the mayor of our fine city will be waiting on the steps of City Hall as Chris and I roll down Main Street. For me, covering the final half-block leading up to City Hall which I intentionally left untrodden will complete Run Marlborough 2011. For Chris, it’s a ceremonial finish, as she’s got a few roads left, but she is kind enough to put up with my wish to put an exclamation point on this endeavor now.

But first, some silliness is in order.

We determined to run every road in Marlborough. We struggled with the definition of what constitutes a road. We each answered that question in our own way that made each of us happy. We both made goo-goo eyes at the Forbidden Interstates, and Chris is determined to find a way to make them happen, and when she does, I will be there. And then we eyed the last big road-like expanse of pavement in the city that clearly wasn’t a parking lot.

Yes, the airport.

Now, we’re not talking Logan (more accurately, General Edward Lawrence Logan Boston International Airport, if you’re into naming trivia, but you’re probably not). We’re talking Marlborough Airport (sadly, spelled without the ‘ugh’ on its sign, but again, I wander into naming trivia).

Marlborough Airport is the oldest continually operating commercial airport in Massachusetts (take that, Logan!). It’s tucked in between the local favorite garden, ice cream, and mini-golf center (yes, all rolled into one) and the U-Haul rental agent. It has one runway, pegged by Wikipedia at 1659 feet, with a fence right at the end, and a STOP sign on the fence, for good measure (and one at the other end, too). As if, when you come in too hot, and you have no fuel, so you can’t make another pass, and you’re desperately trying to get ‘er down, but you’re running out of pavement, and you see that sign and say, “Gee, I’d better stop before I take out that passing Verizon truck!”. But hey, I appreciate the humor, and it does make it easier to see the fence I suppose.

So it’s not big, but it’s ours, and we're proud of it. And it was just too sweet to resist.

One phone call to owner Bob Stetson and we were invited as honored guests. Apparently a few people do read the local paper, and he had seen our article and knew of our depravity. We thanked him then, and we thank him now again for his hospitality in allowing us to have this bit of fun.

Bob met us on arrival a couple of mornings back, arrival via a circuitous route of course so Chris could pick up a few missing roads on her list (and departure later via another tortured twisted path, where we actually found a road neither of us knew had a name). Chris’ mom also popped in to act as Designated Photographer, along with Bob and his friend, the Other Bob, who also snapped a few pics. So first we snapped off a few mug shots…

Chris, Bob the Airport Owner, and Designate Photog Chris’ Mom

Chris and Gary Preparing to Fly

…And it was time to taxi to the runway! Yes, that’s a house in the background, but look carefully and you will see runway markings.

Lined up, we really didn’t need tower clearance. With a ceiling of low hazy clouds, the chances of getting buzzed like an Alfred Hitchcock movie were effectively zero…

And we’re off! I carried my mini-camera and took plenty of bad shots, mercifully filtered out. Here’s a decent one of Chris revving up the engines as we sprint the runway…

Our Designated Photog captured the takeoff roll…

But mysteriously we didn’t gain enough lift to get airborne, so it was time to spin it around and head back on heading 320…

Perhaps some new techniques were in order to get aloft?

Lest you think it’s only me who’s entirely daft, no, we both flew. OK, I goaded her into it…

First flight successful, time for a last posed mug shot!

As I then commented to Bob, he may have owned the airport for many years, but only now does he finally have a RUNway!

A Second Lap - For Real

2011-05-19T23:41:00.002-04:00

The results arrived about two weeks ago, and I just haven’t managed to squeeze them into the story line until now. They were, in a word, wicked cool (in New England, that’s one word). And in a way, they relate well to a Second Lap blog namesake story for the week.

The results of which I speak are my results from the medical study I participated in for the Boston Marathon. I’ve yet to see the aggregated results of all us guinea pigs, but that will take some time. Meanwhile, I’m happy with mine.

Said study sought to explore whether cholesterol meds, known in the med biz as statins, might have any impact on certain blood enzymes synthesized during heavy exertion. These enzymes happen to be markers of injury to both general muscles and cardiac muscles, so an impact on the enzymes could imply an impact on cardiac response to the heavy exertion of a marathon. Or in other words, what better way to gain some ammunition to respond to those naysayers who love to point out that someone collapsed and died in last week’s Lower Slobovia Marathon, so why would you do that do yourself?

Oh, and as a bonus, I needed to get my cholesterol checked anyway, and this way I got it done for free. What’s not to love?

So first the easy part: my cholesterol hasn’t looked so good in several years. The total was down, but better, the HDL, or good cholesterol – the one that you can boost through exercise – read, running – hit an all time record high. And not only are both of these good news, but the ratio between them, which is really the important bit, was just plain beautiful. One word: Booyah!

Now the complicated part: the enzyme du jour is called creatine kinase, or CK for short. Your muscles spit it out when they are, well, in a word, pissed at you. You beat them up, they spit it out. You beat them up a lot, they spit out a lot. The lab finds it in your blood, they know you’ve done something mean, nasty, and ugly.

But there’s more. There are several flavors of CK. Without getting into the actual names, which I can’t, because I don’t know them, there’s MM (M&M? Plain or peanut?) and MB (Melon Balls?). Most of your muscles spit out MM – in fact, almost all of their CK spit is MM save about 1% MB. Your heart, on the other hand, spits out 30% MB when it’s mad at you. That’s how they tell you that you had a heart attack when you thought it was just bad fish – your elevated CK-MB percentage is a dead giveaway. Do you see where this is going?

Run a marathon, and your muscles are going to spit out CK. If it’s CK-MM, you beat up your body. If it’s CK-MB, you beat up your heart. The latter option, of course, being bad, scary, a mean thing you’d rather not see. And that’s what the study is looking at. Did we guinea pigs beat up our hearts? And if we did, was there a difference between those of us drugged up on statins versus those healthy dudes who score 125 on their cholesterol tests without even studying? It would be sweet justice, now, wouldn’t it, if we druggies were to win that battle. But I don’t know the answer to that. All I know at this point is my own numbers, which gave me the second big smile of the day, after reading the cholesterol report.

Before the beating, my CK rang in at a leisurely 143, in the normal range of 44 to 196, all MM. That alone is cool enough considering that we runners’ constant level of workouts would probably make the average Joe’s CK take flight. But whatever. Immediately after the beating, when tested right at the finish line in the med tent, it doubled to 303, still all MM. Muscles still trying to figure out what just hit them. Starting to spit.

The next morning’s draw, cha-CHING, 980. More than six times the starting level, and over triple the post-race traumatic reading. (And I’ll bet it rose higher the following day, the day of ‘max burn’ muscle pain, but I know not…). So the machine works, it spits as prescribed. Cool enough. But the wicked awesome (like wicked cool, that’s one word) part is this: 99% M&Ms, 1% Melon Balls.

Verdict: I beat the crap out of my body, but my heart just plain didn’t care. Or, in practical terms, the next time someone reminds me of the guy who collapsed at mile twenty five or something like that, I will blind them with science. And run away smiling.

I can’t wait to see the results of the whole study!

Now, what about that namesake story?

Last week found me in Cambridge, over the river from Boston, for a seminar slated to run till just past noon. Having no further meetings booked, you know that of course I planned a mid-day run in place of lunch (which was consummated as a PowerBar wolfed down on the drive home). Said run, besides taking advantage of a perfect spring day, was engineered to remedy a gap of horrid dimension in my running life. Despite living a mere marathon from Boston, despite running into Boston five times now in the high miles of a certain rather well-known race, I’d never run Boston’s most famous and beautiful run-o-drome, the paths around the Charles River basin.

I headed out from Kendall Square toward the river, not entirely certain how to find the best paths, and was thus thankful to link up with a Native Guide as I hit the road, Todd from Belmont, who worked in Kendall. His pace was a bit slower than mine, so I gladly slowed to a social ramble while trying not to drift back to the quicker zone; it’s simply not polite to kill your guide. I probably talked his ears off, which is hard to avoid when your partner is breathing a lot harder than you, but other than the guilt of burdening him with my ramblings, it was a truly lovely circuit, pretty much all that I’d expected it would be. On the Boston side, he led me the quickest way off the streets and onto the paths along the Esplanade. On the Cambridge side, we skirted mere feet from the water along worn unpaved paths. We made the turn at the BU Bridge, one bridge earlier than I’d planned, but probably a better choice based on traffic. With about six miles under our belts, we approached the spot where a hard turn to port would take us back to Kendall, at which point he announced he’d stop there and walk it in as a warm-down.

Feeling that I’d already overloaded his chat receptors, I decided I’d leave him in peace for his warm down, and I’d continue just a bit further, making the turn where the basin angles northward, then head back into Kendall from the east. But plans change…

Around the turn, the broad sidewalk narrowed to squeeze under the Longfellow Bridge, and it was at just that point I needed to squeak past a lady I’d been catching up with for the past quarter mile. “Excuse me, coming by on your left,” brought the unexpected response of, “I’ll have to try to keep up with you,”, and somehow in the half block between there and the spot I intended to peel off, we were chatting. OK, I figured I’d take the next turn instead, and, well, next thing you know, yes, I ran the second lap. Just like the name of the blog. Another pass through Science Park back to the Boston side, another meander through the Esplanade. Another lovely conversation companion, Mary from Charlestown, with compatible views on kids, education, faith, heck, bring your husband over, my wife would love this, we’ll sit on the deck and chat for hours, the world’s a mess but we’re sane, that kind of meeting of the minds. Serendipitous. On top of a perfect day, a wonderful venue, why not go around again just to enjoy the moment?

She peeled off on the Boston side where she’d parked, and I took the Harvard Bridge this time instead, adding another four for a leisurely ten mile ramble on a perfect day. And in the last solo mile back to Kendall, I reminded myself how lucky I was that I’ve been blessed with the health and fitness (now you see the connection with the first half of this posting, right?) that grants me the freedom to just say, what the heck, let’s not waste a wonderful opportunity, let’s just go for a second lap, because I can. Count your blessings.

Watery Adventures

2011-05-14T23:55:00.011-04:00

This week’s blather, which was supposed to arrive in your hot little hands early this week rather than at the tail end, was supposed to be of the back-to-back races bookending the previous week: a local 5K on Sunday to kick off the week, and a local 5 miler Saturday to close it. Sadly my prepaid registration to the latter went down the drain, somewhat literally, when circumstances removed me from Saturday’s expected Wicked Hills of Clinton and instead deposited me three hundred miles asunder in mom’s Wicked Flood of Basement for what can only be described as a sucky weekend. As in suck, suck, suck up that water… Hey, at least I got in some upper body work hauling furniture up the stairs…

And I did get in that week-opening 5K and laid down a start-of-the-season benchmark time to suck, suck, suck me to the track this summer to chisel it down. The Westborough Spring Fair 5K was the kind of event so casual that oddly, the starting line was perpendicular to the direction of the race. Not as in, start, run fifty feet and bang a left, but as in, here, line up right at the edge of this driveway, and trample the guy on your left when the gun goes off. Really. Yeah, I thought it weird, too, but whatever. Out the gate a local ringer ran away, never to be seen up close and personal again, so I focused on holding a reasonably strong but more importantly steady clip on the simply-themed course: halfway all uphill, halfway all downhill. Unlike the Tri-Valley a few weeks back, a persistent set of trailing footsteps kept my motivation turned on, and while I couldn’t hold back the youngster lady in the final stretch, I’ve no complaints over taking third at just a hair under 6-minute pace.

But as Arlo Guthrie famously noted, that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came with a tale of a watery adventure, or at least water-related, and a water-logged basement seemed a good lead-in.

You regulars of course know of my Run Marlborough 2011 quest – technically our quest since linking up with Chris (new visitors are encouraged to review chapters 5 through 8, there will be a quiz later, or just read this). You know that I’m getting very close to finishing up. And you know that along the way there have been those places that have been hard to judge between being a road or not, whether they are accessible or off limits.

Which brings us to the fine facilities of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, or MWRA in local lingo. These are the folks that supply a good chunk of the Bay State with tap water that, at least here in Marlborough where we tap them for about a third of our supply, is simply superb stuff. And why is it so good? One part of the puzzle lies at the southwest corner of Our Fair City, straddling the borders of two adjoining towns. To the casual observer, it’s the Taj Mahal, a uniquely attractive industrial facility. To the discerning eye, it’s the John J. Carroll Water Treatment Plant. To me, it’s a location within Marlborough that has roads. A mile and a quarter of roads. But roads that I determined were off limits to the quest, based on the fact that there is a manned gatehouse at the main entrance. And water is pretty tense stuff in the post-9/11 age. So these roads which defined the southernmost limits of the city remained visible only on Internet satellite photos, and had acquired that sad brown color on my progress map indicating, “Not gonna’ happen.”

But one of those serendipitous moments arose a few weeks back at the Tri-Valley 15K. Chatting with a total stranger runner, somehow the topic came up, (how? I cannot say…) and said total stranger runner noted he’d previously worked in Marlborough and had hiked the area around the plant, including on the roads, and that nobody cared. Hmm… A little cross checking confirmed an old memory that the Sudbury Valley Trustees maintains the Crane Swamp property abutting the MWRA, and indeed one of their trails coincides with the MWRA access road, so apparently they really don’t care. And a little more cross-checking using methods that shall remain classified seemed to confirm this. Bingo. We’re in.

Since the front gate was indeed, as noted, manned, the back gate would be the target. I knew from running past it previously that it was a simple vehicle gate, clearly not built to prevent footed creatures’ passage; indeed, nicely landscaped and wide open to stroll around. OK, so they man the front gate to only allow in trucks that have been blessed, and beyond that, no worries. Made sense.

Still, best to be low key. The place operates twenty-four-seven, but you can guess that the weekend would carry only a skeleton staff. And not just any weekend. I chose Easter Sunday. After our church activities were completed, we had no plans, so what better day to penetrate the lair? There’d be nobody around. Heck, there was nobody even on the roads.

Having not hit the gym since before Boston, I had Darling Wife drop me there, only to find that they are bold enough to recognize a religious holiday and had closed early. Bad for my upper body, but good for them. So no lifting, but I set off on my mission to penetrate the lair of Fort MWRA.

Now it’s worth noting here that it was only six days after Boston. While I was over the immediate muscle burn, I most certainly was not recovered. After last year’s Parade of Injuries, I had no intention of overdoing it and restarting that cycle. And this route would require roughly a ten miler, pretty much the outer limits of what I’d subject my body to at that point. I hit the road with a fair dose of guilt about even planning ten, but the lure of the lair was too much to ignore.

It’s times like this when a fun story looms that I find myself unable to avoid slipping into the present tense…

I head for the south edge of town. I locate the back (west) driveway into the MWRA Lair, not as simple as you might think, since there are no identifying signs. There’s a simple vehicle gate that one can simply walk around on landscaped ground. Clearly not an intended impediment to pedestrian traffic. No worries. I swing around the gate and penetrate the outer limits. Level 1.

A short way in is a sign, “WARNING, DANGER, CONSTRUCTION ZONE, NO THIS, NO THAT, and… NO JOGGERS”. OK, so, first they didn’t say NO because it’s the MWRA, they said NO because of construction, and a quick glance confirms there is clearly no construction going on. Second, I’m a runner, not a jogger. They clearly weren’t talking about me. I penetrate deeper.

Scanning for Evil Eye Video Surveillance cameras and seeing none, I press on. I’m across the railroad tracks and past the first little building. To me, it’s like attaining Penetration Level 2. I won’t say the hairs on the back of my neck prickled, but it was mildly anxiety producing. Still, no klaxons, no copters, no SWAT team screaming, “Take OFF your running shoes and walk out slowly!”

But then, when Level 3, the Inner Sanctum, the Prime Directive – the loop around the filtration plant itself – is in reach, I am foiled! What I never noticed on the satellite photos was an item that looks like a shadow (see inside the red circle). Guess what? It’s a fence. A good old American eight-foot-high locked chain link fence. And a mighty fine one at that. None of the cheap zinc-coated steel, no sir, this is the MWRA, and this is the finest black enamel finish chain link that money can buy. A beautiful fence. But locked just the same.

So now I have a quandary. I really don’t want to backtrack all the way out the way I came. It’s a full half-mile in, so a backtrack will add a mile, and this run is as noted already planned as too long for only six days after Boston. So I decide I’ll skirt the outside of the fence, heading eastward along the north side of the plant, and make a hasty retreat out the main east entrance. Yes, the manned, gated one. I’d planned to brazenly run out there anyway. Hey, I’d be leaving, not going in, right? Just smile and wave…

And so I skirt, but it’s a struggle, as immediately outside the fence, the ground slopes steeply down to a canal. The footing is tough, and my feet are slipping nastily sideways in my shoes. I’m grabbing trees, clinging to the fence, wondering if this is setting off alarms someplace. But I make my way all the way along the north side of the plant…

…to the bridge over the canal to the east exit. Where I discover a bigger problem. You see, the fence is connected to the bridge. You can’t get on the bridge unless you climb the fence, which is clearly something I won’t do as that would pretty clearly constitute a level of active penetration (nice word for trespassing) that I won’t cross. Nor can you scurry up the bridge abutment and over the concrete rail, as (a) this is almost physically impossible, and (b) it would constitute hopping the fence….

So now I’ve got a bigger problem. Whereas I didn’t want to backtrack before when I was still on the west entrance road, now to backtrack would be even worse, as I’d have to navigate the steep slope scramble again, back along the fence, and add the road mileage. But I can’t escape, either, since I can’t get onto the bridge. So I scramble down the rock scree to the canal, duck under the bridge, and start running east along the canal. I’m feeling pretty tense about the whole fence-clinging thing, and I’d really like to get away from the property before I start hearing the baying of the hounds. But the canal is MWRA property as well, and I am, as you might guess, on the wrong side of it. It isn’t big, but it isn’t crossable either without getting very wet, and seeing as this is the MWRA and it’s their holy water, they’d probably frown upon anyone wading across. So I’m now running away from the plant as quick as reasonable on a trail along the south side of the canal, wondering how to get to the north side, back into Marlborough.

Around a bend, in about a third to a half mile, I come upon a sort of dam-like structure with a tiny zig-zag plank bridge on top and a rickety pipe rail to hold onto. It’s my only hope, so I tiptoe across it. Nervously.

But I’m still not out of the woods, as even though there are lovely jeep roads to run, there’s a rail grade and impassible brush between me and the road to the north. No way out, except to continue east, under the interstate, which turns out to be a real construction zone which I must navigate through, then find my way on a construction path to Northborough Road near the structure in the upper right of the photo below. At which point, it turns out, after all this, I am now completely fenced IN, and therefore despite my rule of never hopping a fence in this quest, I have to do so to escape. Fortunately, it’s a low fence. I am free!

To say this is not how I had planned the afternoon is an understatement. But I didn’t get chased, I didn’t get arrested, I saw no reports in the local paper of a suspected terrorist trying to penetrate Massachusetts’ water supply, and you can bet that I re-colored the half mile west access road from brown to blue on the Run Marlborough 2011 Official Quest Tracking Map.

And after all, what’s the quest all about other than to avoid the boredom of the same old runs?

Boston Tales, Part 2

2011-05-06T23:04:00.003-04:00

[ Ed Note: At last, the fourth entry in the Boston Trilogy. The marathon commences! ]

When last we left off, well, we left off kind of mid-stream, since even long-winded me couldn’t bring myself to foisting three solid pages on you at once. On with the rest of the Boston tidbits…

Well, La-Ti-Dah To You: New to this year’s overpriced Addidas clothing expo feeding frenzy was not just this year’s Boston jacket (yes, I have one, a gift from a highly benevolent manager), but a second jacket emblazoned, “Boston Qualifier”. Yes, the fact that eighty percent of all Boston runners are qualified isn’t enough, apparently we now must separate ourselves from the rabble of those charity and club-number runners. The horror! Sorry, I don’t buy it (and didn’t buy it). Don’t tell me not to respect people who (a) are willing to scrounge up thousands for a good cause, and (b) are willing to be out there on the course for twice as long as I can handle. Later in the week during our family R&R on Cape Cod, we spotted someone sporting said Nose-In-The-Air garment. Despite my usual Runners’ Turret’s which prompts me to strike up a running conversation whenever the opportunity arises, I just had no interest.

Best Sign Awards: First, the person who really wanted to send a deep message but couldn’t quite put their finger on it, and therefore made a sign that just said, “Inspirational Running Quote!” And second, the person who didn’t want to discriminate in who they supported and held up the sign reading, “Go Random Person!”

Damage Report: More blisters than usual. Blame it on the different socks. But the biggest wound from the event? A nasty internal bleeding bruise from a blood draw gone bad the day after the race. I’d signed up for a medical study examining the impact of statins (cholesterol meds) on certain muscle enzymes under heavy exercise scenarios. Interesting topic, though I’ve yet to see the results. Post-race, in the med tent, being dehydrated, I had no veins and they had to use the back of my hand. For the day-after draw, no such problem, but man, the ugly results of that still linger, more than two weeks hence.

Shout-Outs: Speaking of that medical study, a big shout-out to Amanda A, key driver of said medical experiment (save that bruise, no runners will harmed in the making of this event), who completed her first marathon two weeks after Boston. I guess you can’t hang around all us crazies and not have it rub off. Another shout-out to niece Kristin K, who completed her first half marathon on the same day. Sadly for her, she does share my gene pool, so it’s not just proximity that’s driven her to this vice. I smell a full in her future someday.

Trumped in the Nearly Three Club: I’ve had plenty of reaction to missing three hours by a mere seven seconds. Most see it as a disappointment, but for me, with four sub-threes under my belt, it’s a victory of rationality, the seven seconds a curious irony. Irony runs deep and wide, though. While on the Cape, my wife pointed out an apparent runner at poolside, who turned out to be Coloradoan Eric Cameron (#1619) of DogGoneRunning blog fame. Fame, you say? I’ll give him the title on the assumption that we all deserve it. Fact is, I’d actually heard of him, and he of me, he knew of my bionic foot! I’d read his blog on rare occasion, and we’ve shared the same stage contributing material to Chris Russell’s podcasts. Another ‘go figger’ moment. Not to mention he’s a man with my style of insanity, singing, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood” as the gun went off – a tune I’m frequently prone to expelling – from the other side of my starting corral. Had I only heard it… Anyway, point is, he landed at? You guessed it, three hours and seconds, thirty-six in his case. And not to be outdone, while on a recovery jog a little later on the blissfully flat Cape Cod Rail Trail, a chat erupted with Ashley G, training to hit the Olympic B standard at Vermont City, who’d run New York last fall in – yes, she trumped me – three hours and one second. She’s since nailed two-fifty. Go Ashley, go!

King & Queen of the City: My partner in the insanity of Run Marlborough 2011, Chris Johansen, not only finished her first marathon, but had a grand time doing it, and her four-oh-nine landed her the top time of three women from Our Fair City. Our local paper lists everyone who ran, but the vaunted Boston Globe lists only the top male & female runners from each city and town. Not only was this a big thrill for her, but to have the two city-covering quest crazies filling those two spots in the Globe was, well, I won’t say touching (you can get arrested for that now) but pretty cool.

Relive The Experience! And finally, we closed the day with the Boston Experience. Since my clan meets me in Newton Lower Falls and has never seen the start, after the bus ride back to Hopkinton I took them down to the high school for a walk around of what had been, hours earlier, a sea of thirty-thousand, and tried to relate to them the environment, as evidenced by the sheer number of remaining port-a-johns. After that, a quick trip to the starting line, dodging traffic for Darling Daughter the Younger to get a matched set, a starting line shot to go with her finish line shot of a few days earlier. I can see this being transformed into a theme park experience! Live the dream!

Boston Tales, Part 1

2011-05-03T23:37:00.004-04:00

[ Ed Note: The third bit on Boston, Stories Part 1. Part 2 follows in a couple days! ]

Two weeks hence, I haven’t even wrapped up the Boston stories, and more topics stack up in the “to write about” pile. A local 5K on Sunday. A couple of big races for some friends and relatives. The end of my Run Marlborough quest in sight, including a comical adventure trying to turn a few brown (off-limits) roads into blue (covered) ones. But for now, focus! There’s Boston fun to relate! So now, in no particular order, the chef will prepare for you a series of little tastes…

Boston By The Numbers? There were 26,907 registered 24,338 starters, and 23.879 finishers. All big numbers, which makes finishing in 1,538th place satisfying. 1,436th male, 127th semi-old fart (45-49) male. On a global stage, I’ll take it. But better, this year they used the three-digit numbers, so my bib #1798 really meant (roughly) a 1700th to 1800th seed, which means I finished a bit ahead of my seeding, which pleases me. With the second corral start this year, I did feel as though I was with the right crowd, staying with them, not passing nor getting passed en masse. What do you know, the system works!

Finding a Wineglass in a Haystack: How do you find someone in a crowd of 24,338 official starters, plus bandits, volunteers, spectators, and various other living creatures? With a code word, of course. For several years I’ve been trying to meet – in the flesh – a Carolinian runner named Mike who’d made my acquaintance via the online running community (bib #1396 for those of you stalking along at home, and no, that’s not his wife, just an event model whom he sent along with the mirth of inducing jealousy!).

Each year, it’s never worked out, but this year he devised a plan. As we were starting in the same corral, he offered that he’d stand in a particular corner and yell, “Wineglass!,” proving that yes, he’s actually read my blog. Well, when you wear your sunglasses, the clouds arrive, when you bring your umbrella, the sun shines, and when you have a plan, you don’t need it. Walking toward my corral, yet while still a distance away, I had a funny feeling, looked to my right, and there was Mike, walking right beside me. Just like that. We had our moment, he went off in pursuit of a 2:45, and though he didn’t make it – heck, he only ran a 2:50, he fought the epic battle to get there and wrote a truly entertaining account on his blog.

Another “What’s the Chances of That?” But that was the second, “No Way!” moment of the morning. Walking from downtown Hopkinton to the Athlete’s Village, I struck up a chat with a runner who identified from Columbus, Ohio. I mentioned that my 76-year-old cousin (sadly, only by marriage, I do not share his gene pool) is still running marathons and was one of the few remaining survivors who’d run every one of the thirty one Columbus Marathons. To which this gentleman responded that he was in fact the reporter in Columbus who’d run the story on that rarified collection of veterans. Out of 24,338, I meet the guy who interviewed my cousin in Ohio. If my cross-checking is correct, he was #8083, Jeff Hogan. As I often say, I can’t make this stuff up!

Where’s Waldo? And Who’s Jason? For miles late in the race I heard the crowd screaming “GO JASON!” just behind me. And I mean for miles. And I mean screaming. Now, I know that people shout names when they see them on shirts, but the intensity for this guy was amazing. Mayhem, I tell you. The Beatles arrive in America. The Who in Cincinnati. Bieber Fever. Hey, wait a minute, his name was Jason, or no, duh, he was a Justin, umm… On that line, I was beginning to think there was some highly recognizable celebrity close behind me, but being late in the race, I had no desire to expend the energy to turn around and look. The professional photographers solved the mystery; in one of their shots (copyrighted, so I’ve snipped only the tiniest bit for this forum, bad me, bad!) appears none other than Jason himself, indeed with a huge “GO JASON” emblazoned on his bright yellow shirt. Only two digits of his bib showed, but it wasn’t hard to search the BAA site and identify #3362, Jason Baer of Burlington VT. The crowd lift worked, he ran a 2:58 from the 4th corral. Nice race, Jason.

Springsteen Anyone? The tune Darkness on the Edge of Town came to mind as we passed through the final insult of the Boston course, the drop through the tunnel under Massachusetts Avenue. I’d always thought that the final climb out of that pit would be the insult, but it’s not. It’s the dark. The tunnel crosses under a wide street. It’s fairly narrow, low clearance, and after three hours of high effort in the bright sun, when nothing in your body responds quickly to any stimulus, your eyes don’t adjust to the dark. It’s like going blind for ten seconds. It’s oddly disorienting.

What a Difference a Break Makes: Prior to that pitch into the black, I took my second walk break just before mile twenty-five, at what I truly do believe to be the biggest insult of the Boston course, the measly thirty-foot (if that) climb up the Mass Turnpike overpass. It was here that as I previously noted, I consciously put my sub-three at risk in exchange for finishing in one piece. After the race, a friend – who’d started in the same corral and therefore was on the same relative timing as I – noted he’d seen me walking and was a mere ten seconds from catching me when I started running again. He laughed at my suggestion that he should have shouted and we could have finished together. Having not taken a break, he lost a full three and a half minutes from that point to the finish compared to my final mile. I’d have to say my investment in that break was worth it.

Boston Analyzed By An Engineer

2011-04-25T23:16:00.003-04:00

[ Ed Note: The second of several planned bits on Boston. ]

It’s a week since Boston, and about three days since I intended to publish the second in the Boston story series. So it goes. But while writing schedule may have suffered, recovery and training have not. I looked at the log and realized I’d gone ten days straight – yes, I ran, albeit short, slow, and flat (did I say slow?) the days after Boston – and so today was to have been a designated rest. A real rest, as in no running, no nothing, not what I often convince myself is a rest when I’m just out slow with the gang, having fun, not working, virtual rest, but let’s face it, not real rest.

But love knows no bounds – in this case Darling Daughter the Younger’s love for her Marathon Hero Idol Ryan Hall – and she found herself inspired while reading his book late this afternoon ( the autographed copy from the expo) and announced she wanted to go for a run. My kid wants to run? How can I refuse that? Of course, a couple miles slowly with her is well and good, but then I’m warmed up, so why not tack on a couple of ‘homey eight-hundreds’? It’s a bit over half a mile around the block, with a good hill, and a couple of those at 5K pace made it into a workout. So much for the rest day.

But it’s all good. Other than a slightly noticeable hamstring – really nothing more than a ‘slightly aware that the ham exists’, not a worrisome issue – Boston recovery has been a breeze. The two-day burn came and went with relatively minor intensity. The blisters – more than usual to be sure, but none torn – shrank away, and I found myself on a twelve miler yesterday, trying to penetrate some roads in the city that had seemed impenetrable, but on a tip I’d heard might in fact be otherwise. Well, turned out they weren’t, but the adventure that ensued, which included a rock scramble, a treacherous canal crossing on a dam-like structure, and an escape through a construction zone and over a fence, made for an interesting outing.

And the point of this is? Feeling good, I’m going to Buffalo, using that comp entry from last year’s injury deferral, looking at Boston as a training run for the real race through the flatness of Western New York. The app went in the mail today. So it’s worth analyzing what really happened at Boston to assess where I stand for the next one, now slightly under five weeks away.

It’s tough to compare marathon A to marathon B. There are just too many variables, and any statistician will tell you that you don’t have enough data points. The old rule of thumb that says if good ol’ N is less than thirty then no meaningful analysis can be made, is really tough to overcome. Thirty marathons? By the time you reach that, you have changed. So just give it up. You get the idea. But Boston 2010 and Boston 2011, it turns out, are worth comparing. I did so almost accidentally, and a few good lessons seem to have emerged.

Gut feel goes a long way most of the time. Gut feel said that last year’s race was stupid fast at the start and degraded nearly continuously, whereas gut feel said that this year’s race was much steadier, a smarter race, one that even though a bit slower and not sub-three, I was more pleased with from an execution standpoint. Gut feel turned out to be somewhat wrong. This year’s race was a bit smarter, but more by accident, and more the same than different.

I’ve got a standard spreadsheet for marathon splits. (Those who know me well are either laughing or groaning at this comment, they know I’ve got a spreadsheet for pretty much everything. Yah, well, love me anyway and get over it!) Said standard spreadsheet charts out each mile’s pace, and also runs a five mile average to smooth out the bumps and lumps.

The perfect dream is a relatively flat line, holding pace, with strong (even if not negative) splits, all the way to the end of the rainbow. That rarely happens to begin with, and with the back-end-hill-loaded course, it’s pretty darn improbable at Boston. The best I typically hope for at Boston is a steady line through sixteen to where the hills start, then a slow, controlled rise in the average pace through Newton.

At Boston 2010, the chart was about as bad as I could imagine. The crucial pink 5-mile-average line resembled the Mount Washington Auto Road; uphill the entire way. Though the result was a pleasing 2:58:47, I never even considered it to be anything approaching a smart race.

Over a copy of 2010’s spreadsheet I began to punch in my 2011 splits. To my surprise, they weren’t only pretty darn close to identical, they were in many cases faster by a few seconds. But there were subtle differences (and amusing similarities):

Starting in corral 2 rather than last year’s corral 1 meant there was real traffic at the start. Rather than last year’s stupid-fast 6:15 / 6:17 first two miles, this year congestion held me to a leisurely 6:41 before settling in at 6:25. Thirty-five seconds lost, but in a fair trade, I settled into a sane, stable pace, with the pink line a bit flatter into Newton Lower Falls.
(Yes, that was a pit stop just before the mile 6 marker, same spot both years!)
Going into the Newton hills, my average pace was only about a second per mile slower in 2011. I actually won back some of the time lost in mile 1 traffic.
The real difference? The walk break just before Heartbreak this year, not needed last year. Worth the cost, as it sustained me until mile 25, where I took a break both years.

So, an extra walk break and a slower start, which at Boston is a smart move even if accidental, and the result was a minute and twenty seconds slower in 2011. Which begs the question, why the extra break?

Training logs answer that pretty easily. Last year, four months of solid base, versus three this year. Last year’s average training pace a bit quicker than this year’s. Last year, both twenty-miler training runs were at a strong sub-7:10 pace, versus this year, both were challenging for various reasons. The result is therefore not unexpected.

But after Boston last year, things went south. Injuries arose. Looking at my log, I can reel them off: Achilles, ankle, calf, hamstring. Things got ugly. Training suffered.

This year, knock on wood, Boston recovery has been easy. Things feel good. Average training pace is down in recent weeks. Should all hold up, I’ll have that fourth solid month of base on the books by Buffalo, along with the equivalent of four twenties leading into that next round.

Why not milk it? Let’s go to Buffalo.

More Boston to come – tales from the course and what not!

Boston 5

2011-04-19T22:57:00.000-04:00

[ Ed Note: The first of several planned bits on Boston. How many? No idea… ]

Boston Number Five is in the can. For the world, the results were spectacular. For me, they were not in that class by any means, but satisfying nonetheless.

The Exalted Governing Bodies of the World won’t call it a world record due to Boston being point-to-point course, which certainly was a factor with Monday’s tailwind, and net downhill as well. But nobody will deny the brilliance of the fastest marathon ever run – indeed, the two fastest marathons every run, as even second place blew away the world’s previous best, and the four fastest Bostons to boot.

The Exalted Governing Bodies of the World could care less about me, which is just fine as I’ve had more than my share of publicity this year. And while the tailwind undoubtedly made it just a little easier to maintain pace at times, I needn’t worry about whether that or the net downhill course will affect my record, since I set no records, world, Boston, personal, or even personal Boston. Nor did I even break three hours. Spectacular? Not by a long shot. Yet I am entirely satisfied with the race.

About that three hour thing though? Darn close. Amusingly close.

In a race of even numbers – the day pegged my month-to-date at exactly 125.0 miles and my trailing 7-day count at exactly 50.0 (trailing 7-day is a method I use to gauge training intensity, since defining a week as, say, Sunday to Saturday assumes a normal schedule which doesn’t exist in the real world), …on such a day of coincidentally even numbers it would been just plain poetic to nail three hours exactly. And I almost did. After the dust swirled, the official net time recorded three hours and seven seconds.

You know how you look at the results of a large race like this and see the guy who finished at 2:59:59, and say, “Look at him, he broke three!” and the poor bloke who ran 3:00:00, and say, “Ahh, pity, he must be kicking himself!” that is, in many cases, perhaps appropriate, but for me, it really didn’t ring up any disappointment. Would two-colon-anything have been nice? Sure. But I elected to take three-colon-something and survive with a smile.

Just prior to mile twenty-five, where Boston slaps you with the evil little hill to climb the bridge over the Mass Pike – the evil little hill that most Boston veterans will tell you is far more insidious than Heartbreak or even the climb out of Newton Lower Falls – my body said to take a walk break, my second of the race. Having taken sixty seconds prior to Heartbreak and having reaped the refreshing benefit it provided for the next five miles, I knew that one more break would allow me to finish relatively strong, rather than dangerously woozy. (One word: Wineglass.) I also knew that one more break would probably give away the day’s potential sub-three. Wineglass avoidance or sub-three? I’m completely comfortable with the rational decision, and my nose isn’t broken to prove it.

Not to say there wasn’t still a chance of cracking the barrier again. I cut the planned sixty-second walk break down to fifty and revved up the engines for the final push. For the last one-point-two I gave it what I had, and coming down Boylston, for a time thought I might pull it out. Not to be. But not to worry, either. I knew my fitness level wasn’t at last year’s level and I didn’t expect sub-three. I hoped for three-oh-anything. Three-oh-oh certainly fit the bill. Satisfaction.

Especially considering that I never hit the groove in this race. As an event, it was as fabulous and exciting as any – perhaps better, as the crowds seemed larger and louder than ever – but as a race, it was grueling. You’d like a marathon to be a cruise through as many miles as possible before the real hard work begins. Twenty would be great, more even better. Eighteen? Better than fourteen. You get the picture. Monday? I had that feeling for maybe three miles, if I exaggerate a bit. From that point on, I felt like I could have cut the engines at any point and join the ranks of the tourists. My senses said I’d have to back off, call it a day, joined the jog-fest. But mental inertia kept me clicking them off at pace, eight, ten, halfway, a dozen to go, ten left, shrinking it down.

When I passed my family at Newton Lower Falls at sixteen (photo), it was obvious to me at least, even if not to them, that a mighty struggle didn’t just loom ahead, it was already well down the path to miniseries status. But somehow, outside of the two common-sense walk breaks, my pace didn’t suffer too badly, and the death shuffle never materialized. Somehow that marathoning mind just kept telling the legs to keep the pace.

Adding all of that up and coming out at three flat? I’d be a fool to be anything other than happy.

More Boston to come – tales from the course, analysis, and what not!

Can't Stop the Train

2011-04-17T13:43:00.000-04:00

Nothing can stop the train now. It is what it is and it will be what it will be. I won’t go so far as quoting the Eagles and saying it’s a peaceful, easy feeling, but it’s a calm in knowing that tomorrow will come, all twenty-seven-thousand of us will go for a run, and that will be that. Granted, unlike other highly anticipated events of great magnitude like the arrival of our darling daughters, I could just turn tail and flee, but that’s highly unlikely.

Speaking of darling daughters, there’s nothing like a different perspective to turn what’s become a somewhat repetitive event into something much more fun. No dad looks forward to the day when his daughters start making goo-goo eyes at the boys, but that’s another train that can’t be stopped, and if goo-goo eyes must be made, all a dad can hope for is that they’re made in good directions.

Well, dad is happy. Darling Daughter the Younger took a bit of a fancy to the American King of Marathoners when he ran past her at Newton Lower Falls last year – and she snapped an awesome picture to boot:

That certainly livened up this year’s Boston Marathon Expo. Admittedly, while I wouldn’t miss it, there is a lot of sameness to the event after five years, and I wasn’t expecting much different as she and I headed into the city.

But not fifteen minutes after we’d snapped her... [ed note: Loud crash! …Neighbor’s patio table takes flight in wind squall! 20 minute broken glass clean-up later…]...

…um, where was I…right…we’d just snapped Darling Daughter’s picture with a larger-than-life yet fully cardboard Ryan Hall, and had just purchased his book – autographed copy, mind you – when over the PA came the announcement that the man himself would be appearing shortly.

C’mon, think about it, when you were a teen, you know you never got the chance to really meet your idol, right? So imagine how excited you would’ve been to get that shot?

Yes, this was fun. And really only about a twenty minute wait. And Ryan is probably about the best role model you could ever hope for: grounded in faith, dedicated to excellence, and yes, for my daughter, a decent looking guy even sporting this year’s cropped hairdo. If Darling Daughter were running the marathon on Monday, she wouldn’t’ need to worry about impact fatigue or injuries, she’d float the whole way.

And let’s face it, I didn’t mind meeting, and getting my mug, with a runner of Ryan’s caliber. Who, by the way, was considerate enough – in the midst of a thousand people bearing down to see him – to ask me how I thought my race would go.

And how will it go? As usual, I have no idea. On the plus side, my training has been pretty solid this time, and my average training pace has come down nicely in recent weeks, indicating a better level of fitness than I’ve enjoyed

in some time. On the minus side, none of my long runs were particularly strong, and a small health incident a few days ago has my head a bit worried, though I know I’m prone to that head thing. On the external factor side, the wind that just caused my writer’s interruption a few minutes back is forecast to be at our backs tomorrow, at least until we top the Newton hills where it’s always notoriously in your face.

All I can say is that the train pulls out tomorrow morning. No stopping it now.

Gloss Over the Imperfections

2011-04-13T23:31:00.009-04:00

It’s the usual time when I lament about how the last weeks prior to the marathon are not falling into the pattern I’d like. But this year I’ve got a convenient way to gloss over these imperfections: spin. Yes, the media engine seems to be in full gear, so I’ll just use that glow to ignore the less-than-perfect realities of life.

The week before is supposed to be quiet, restful, relaxed; a time not only to taper down the training, but ratchet down life. Extra sleep, no late nights, avoid the exhausting days. That’s why I’m writing on the train out of Manhattan, on the return trip of a marathon out-and-back-to-New-York day that won’t end till late tonight, after another late night last night, only to turn around for another day on the road tomorrow. Quiet. Restful. Relaxed. Yeah.

But isn’t this is what we train for in our daily life? (Train? No, really, that pun wasn’t intentional.) It’s all about trying to find the time slices to fit in the miles between all that beckons from the real world – dealing with less-than-perfect conditions. So having all of this come down in the week before Boston really isn’t that big a deal. All things considered, however, I’d rather get the extra sleep.

If sleep isn’t a reward this week, a little visibility may be a consolation prize. I’ll simply gloss over all the imperfections of the week with some good old fashioned PR. Spin. Buzz. Yes, Andy Warhol is spinning in his grave as I’ve clearly already exceeded my fifteen minute allotment of fame this month, and it’s not over yet.

A week back, the story of Chris and I running our city hit the local paper, a day later than expected, but masterfully crafted by Ace Reporter Paul. The fun started rolling. Just a few days after that, said same reporter called to get a few comments and quips on marathon training in general, not targeted at our strange city-wide coverage quest but on somewhat more normal people running the race, so a mere six days after Big Newspaper Exposure #1 came Big Newspaper Exposure #2, this time gracing the front page of the Sunday edition, with a near-life-size shot of yours truly running at you down page A9. You’d think they’d be calling in the subscription cancellations left and right by now. But it gets better (or worse, as your opinion may hold). The editor of the weekly local dropped me an email that she’s going to supply even more ink in tomorrow’s edition.

I really need to give my agent a bigger Christmas tip this year.

The gloss obscures the imperfections. Like the fact that somehow I forgot to start my pre-marathon taper last week. Instead, after the Tri-Valley 15K (speaking of which, nice picture the race organizers sent over to me, yes, there I am in tights when everyone else is in shorts – hey, I was comfortable, so who cares?…)

… I popped in a sixty-two mile week, which for me at least is a pretty significant number. There just seemed to be a lot of interesting places to go, so I went, and the ten-milers, quick ones at that, kept chalking up without really trying.

First came a “scrap sweep-up” run, adding a bunch of little roads to my coverage map (and to my chagrin, missing one, so I’ll have to go back), including a small road into a warehouse park where there stood an unoccupied building, lined on both sides with huge truck doors making it see-through, clearly vacant – even its concrete floor removed – just begging, begging, begging… well, there’s a first, running through a building. Hey, why not? Next up, a run up an abandoned country road at the corner of the city that I knew connected to another road on the grounds of a (private) farm, and I hoped connected via a nice obscure corner of that farm. Not to be. The connection went nearly over their front porch. Oops. Just smile and wave, boys, smile and wave. And finally, an utterly gorgeous run on an utterly gorgeous morning along a couple of lovely reservoirs with a few lung-buster climbs tossed in for good measure. We live for those kind of runs. But bang, bang, bang, the ten-milers kept coming, and suddenly it was a mere nine days till Boston without really starting to taper. (Oh, and for the record, along the way, I did return to Memory Lane it did indeed bring back memories; clearly I had done it before. This time I just remembered.)

So it’s not the kind of taper I’d like. But why stop there? If you’re going to overcome hurdles, bring ‘em on. Which is why, for reasons I’m still questioning, I’ve signed up for a medical study surrounding the marathon. Now, I know the real reason is because it’s interesting. The exercise physiology team at Hartford Hospital is looking into whether there is a link between statin (cholesterol medication) use and certain muscle enzymes which can be a marker of (or perhaps involved in) muscle damage, including damage to that one key muscle, the heart. Having once seen this particular enzyme flag high on a blood test a few years ago (though not anywhere near dangerous high), and having been told that it was probably because of significant exertion (read, running), I simply couldn’t resist the temptation to see this number jump off the chart in a ten-minute-after-crossing-the-Boston-finish-line measurement. Boring for many, wicked cool to me.

But the downside? The baseline. Yes, I need to give them some blood before the race. Not much. Perhaps half a percent of all I’ve got. They assure me it will be to no impact. And they even let me move it up a few days for more recovery time, though red cell replenishment doesn’t happen that fast. But in an endeavor where I know I will push to my roughly-fringed edge, I am still apprehensive about anything more than a hangnail.

All in the interest of science, though…

So, a badly executed taper, an overly busy week, and a bloodletting to boot, all obscured by a flurry of flashbulbs. What a way to roll into Boston! OK, so life isn’t perfect. Come Monday, the weather is forecast to be, well, whatever it decides to be. True to form, it crept onto the 10-day forecast as perfect, degraded to rain, returned to perfect, and has now again degraded to showers. Whatever. We’re going out for a little run, and we’ll just sit back, see what happens, and have a good time.

Track me on www.baa.org, bib number 1798. First wave start is 10 AM; from second corral I’ll be over the line within a minute.

Coming Together?

2011-04-02T23:44:00.008-04:00

In just a few hours I will be either tickled pink or embarrassed as all get up. I suspect the former, but one can never rule out the latter. It took two weeks, but I finally met my counterpart, and the easiest way I can describe our meeting was that it was, well, a scream. Two overcharged Type A personalities being queried by local reporter, frantically scribbling notes in an attempt to keep up with full-combat conversation while trying figure out what makes pure wackiness tick. But as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself.

At last posting I’d discovered there was another lady in town with the same twisted quest of running our entire city. What gnawed at me since discovering I had a map-blanketing alter ego was that I’d met one of her clan years ago, but couldn’t recall who, when, or under what circumstances. Her family name, Johansen, is well known to me, since the street on which I live is named after her grandfather.

So where had I met her? Had I met her? The “how” part came clear a week ago when I ran past the home of a friend from my church (in a furious snow squall, I note) who happened to be on his deck (yes, in the furious snow squall, I can’t explain this), who shouted to me that he knew I was doing this crazy quest. Being accustomed to explaining to people why I am running past their homes toward dead-ends on obscure spurs, this was an amusing first. He then added that his niece was doing the same. Light bulb! It was through him that I’d met a Johansen.

Well, turns out it wasn’t the same one, but as they say, everything is relative; Chris is indeed related to the one I met in some way, shape, or form that I can’t quite pin down. But more importantly, one thing led to another and we finally came together at the office of our local daily news on Friday. She unfolded her soon-to-be famous paper map (seen here) while I popped open the laptop to show off the results of my Google Maps arts & crafts sessions. And the goofy stories flowed. Now seriously, when is the last time you ever heard two people independently come to the conclusion that continuously spinning around at the ends of multitudes of cul-de-sacs starts to wear on your hip sockets? Or both harbor secret dreams of goading our local police chief into setting up an escorted “Run the Interstates” morning? Ms. Mayor, you listening? Could be some fund-raising going on for Our Fair City… Notably, I did forget to mention my other strange thought of running the runway (after all, it is called a RUNway) at our tiny local airport.

Close to an hour and a half passed in what seemed to be about ten minutes. Pity the fine reporter trying to tally the score on this verbal tennis match. The mystery of what he did or didn’t capture won’t take long to be revealed. His work will arrive on my front walkway in about six hours, and I’ll rejoice, cringe, laugh, weep or a little of bit of all of the above. And no matter the outcome, we’ve come together and opened a new friendship.

And while on the topic of coming together, with Boston a mere two weeks out, things do seem to be coming together. Not to sound like someone talking about a shutout in the third period of a hockey game, but I’m starting to feel pretty good about my overall condition for the first time in quite a while. The pesky injuries seem to have subsided, and my comfort zone training pace has quickened again over the last week.

A week and a half back saw my sixth anniversary running, ninety-two hundred miles later. Last Saturday was the last long one before Boston, a twenty-two miler with an unusually slow stretch in the fifteen to eighteen range as my training partner Rocket John struggled through a rare rough day, but after his retirement I felt good, cranked the volume for a few more miles, and for the first time all season felt fresh after being out that long. The next day, 800 meter repeats at the track – how else does a runner celebrate his birthday? The next day, the casual equivalent of a 5K race with our CMS pub friends in Worcester, with miles two and three at six flat and five-fifty. The next two days, quick jaunts at surprisingly pleasing paces, and the next day (if you’re counting, we’ve reached Thursday the 31st), closing the month at 231 miles, second highest total in these last six years.

It’s finally feeling good. I feel like it’s all coming together.

This morning pretty much sealed it. A few club-mates and I meandered down to the Tri-Valley Boston Tune-Up 15K in lovely Upton, Massachusetts. My 2nd time running it, their 31st time holding it. Did you get that? 2-31. And I was handed bib 231. After that 231 mile month. And I’ll add that one of my club-mates finished 231st. I swear, I can’t make this stuff up. It’s an omen.

With the ups and downs recently, I didn’t expect to be near last year’s time, but you just can’t allow those kinds of expectations to get in your way. A few miles in I found myself right on last year’s pace. But the race developed rather oddly, with the leader pack splitting off within a mile or so, leaving me strangely alone in the universe in the field of 300. From that point on, I was completely and uninterruptedly lonely. A long view to anyone ahead, and no footsteps behind, nobody to push me, which made holding a hard pace that much harder. At my 15th place finish there was about a minute gap on either side of me (nice picture of the start on the results page!). When, in the midst of this loneliness, much to my dismay, I had to stop for – of all things – a blown shoelace at mile six, the gap was so large that I lost no place, though it certainly cost momentum. The irony? I counted out twenty seconds lost for the lace, and came in nineteen seconds slower than last year. Coulda’ shoulda’ woulda’, tie yer’ foolish shoes better next time you fool. OK, so no personal best, but no complaints either. It’s all coming together.

Not Alone in the Universe

2011-03-18T21:54:00.000-04:00

There’s big excitement in

our household this week as my darling daughter, elder edition, took the stage in a principle role in her high school’s production of the musical Seussical. My baby belted to a full house the duet Alone In the Universe in front of unspeakably proud parents (the link is a generic rendition, no recording allowed at her show). On today’s eleven plus miler, I couldn’t get that tune out of my head. Alone in the Universe. Except that a couple hours later, I found out I’m not.

Oh, how nice, you’re thinking. He actually has a friend, you’re thinking. He’s not entirely a freak, you’re thinking. Well, no, that’s really not the point here. In real life (whatever that is), I’m not at all alone in the universe. This is about my Run Marlborough quest.

I already knew that one of my club buddies has taken up the challenge since I more or less goaded him into it on New Year’s Day, but he’s more on the quiet side, not prone to public ramblings like that which you currently read. And I feel somewhat responsible for his burden, which I think he’s enjoying but if he’s not, that old Catholic guilt is ready to step in on me. What have I done to him?

No, more fun than that is I’ve discovered there is another here in my city engaged on the same quest entirely of her own volition. Crazy as I without my coaxing. Kin, perhaps.

Another club-mate dropped me a note recently that a reporter from the local daily had called her, knowing that she was in the know about local running goings-on. Did she know about some lady he’d heard was seeking to run every road in Marlborough? Well, no, she did not, but she knew of my quest, and set up the contact. Now, I’d just been in touch with a different reporter from that same paper for their annual Boston Marathon participant gallery, and they’d just sent a photographer to my house this morning to get a shot for said feature, when their other reporter rang me up about the Run Marlborough quest. This is getting amusing…

Truth be told, right up to the point when the (Run Marlborough) reporter called me today, I figured this was a case of mistaken gender identity (not too uncommon, this is, after all, Massachusetts). A skinny winter runner in tights, unidentifiable in cozy running top, warm hat or balaclava, shades, the works, effectively with no skin exposed, and often with voice croaky from the cold on top of that, well, I wouldn’t feel insulted if someone checked the wrong box on the runner sighting survey that day. It happens. It doesn’t affect my manliness. I swear.

(OK, I admit that such a mistake by a matronly waitress when I was a teenager prompted me to grow the dumbest looking mustache you’ve ever seen, ruin many otherwise decent photographic images, and probably pushed my chances of mating out five years, but I’m over that and it worked out in the end. So enough of that.)

But no, the reporter told me, there really is such a person, and she too has a web presence to document her dingy doings. Sound familiar?

This is just too cool.

OK, so a quick check of her web site shows that she counts roads whereas I count miles, she uses a Garmin while I’m a bit of a purist with a plain old watch, but she goes low-tech and marks her paper map with a highlighter while I have a twenty minute Microsoft Paint arts & crafts session after each run to update my online version. And a little web sleuthing turns up the ultimate irony that she works for my company’s arch-rival. Yeah, so what, this is running, not work, I can deal with that, though we may have to fight about inclusion of the –ugh on the end of Marlborough. Anyway, this is just too cool.

Said reporter promises to set up a meeting so we can compare notes on our irrational drives and he can document to the world our wacky motivating missions. Should be fun, stay tuned.

Meanwhile, how about that quest? Well, I’m having a grand time. To date, I’ve covered one hundred forty-five “unique” miles in the city and counting (out of four hundred forty total since January 1). I still can’t tell you what percentage that is toward completion, nor do I really care. I pondered calling the DPW to ask just how big a challenge this was but decided I’d rather just run. I’m guessing a good two-thirds, distance wise, but there are enough odd segments in enough odd places that I can still see adventurous roaming in my future for some time. So far I haven’t taken a run within the city limits this year that hasn’t included some new ground, but it is getting tougher as the map fills up. And that map to date looks like…

My methodology hasn’t changed. Every run must be anchored at home, either starting, finishing, or both. That was easy early on, now it’s getting tougher not just because of the logistics of reaching various parts of the city, but remembering where to go to hit the day’s target roads when I get there, and remembering what I have and haven’t covered when my route invariably changes along the way. When you get home, chart your course, and realized you were miles away and missed one small cul-de-sac, so you have to go back, well, you get the idea. More fun.

This also requires complete recollection of where I’ve gone – without that GPS remember – which is usually pretty easy despite the many dead-ends and odd turns. My mind just works that way, somehow. Though the other day I did have a lapse and couldn’t for the life of me remember whether I’d turned down a certain cul-de-sac. Irony of irony, that road was (I swear I am not making this up,) Memory Lane.

The Count Shall Not Be Three

2011-03-09T22:56:00.001-05:00

If you don’t get the reference to, “The count shall be three, and three shall be the count,” you’re sadly deprived and need a dose of the Holy Grail. Rent it, borrow it, whatever. But don’t let the count reach three. And certainly five is right out.

It’s crunch time in the roller coaster of training. Boston is a mere forty days away. Part of me feels pressure; I am clearly not in the shape I’d like to be in with a marathon so near. Part of me, says a healthy, “So what?” Last fall’s “Walk-on Marathon” was a zero-pressure joy, excluding of course the agonizing part. I’ve nothing to prove, really. So long as I come out the far end alive, kicking, and without facial scars and a broken nose, I’ll be doing OK. Go with it, enjoy it.

Nevertheless, I’d rather be in my best possible shape going in if for no other reason than to reduce the length of the agonizing portion. (How is it we manage to minimize that bit when wistfully reminiscing about these races? Perhaps it’s the ultimate denial. But I digress, as usual.) So it’s that time when I need to cram in the long runs that I wished I’d started earlier but know there were perfectly legitimate reasons I didn’t. And it’s that time when I really don’t want interruptions to my training, which means it’s the time that work goes haywire. Life is like that. Make lemonade.

January and February, despite being deluged waist-deep in white stuff, in truth turned out half decent. A buck sixty per month, average training pace sneaking slowly down, culminating in a fun day at Hyannis and a coveted clamshell award. And just like that, it’s spring, at least by my March 1 definition. Sun shining, daylight savings time almost here, weather warming, open season for easier-to-schedule training runs, joy and bliss run amok.

You wish. It’s never that easy; it’s always something. March first arrived gorgeous, sunny, mid-thirties, a great day for running, so I thought as I headed to the east edge of my city to cover some new Run Marlborough quest turf, flying, loving every step. You can see this one coming. How I hadn’t noticed the wind buffeting my back is beyond me. Call it endorphins. But the long westward slog home into the chilling gale sidled well beyond the edge of brutal. Botox was never so effective. Complete facial immobility. Or as I might have tried at the time to say, something sounding like, “faaaa-haaaalll immmaa-irrriiiheee”. I seriously worried about black frostbite spots. Happy spring!

Just another day escaping the office, I suppose, but it set up what rapidly threatened to be one of those training interruptions I so don’t want right now. Miss a day, that’s rest. Miss two, that’s stiff. Miss three, and on day four you feel you’ve lost ground. At least I do. Miss the fourth and, well, things get mental at that point. So when the next day dawned with even stronger wind and I sat it out, the count was one. The next rolled in utterly gorgeous, but I found myself chained to my desk, and traveling in the evening to boot. The count was two. Friday jarred into existence at five AM in a hotel room in Connecticut with a serious prospect of the count becoming three, three becoming the count, and so on. Hurl the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch into my training continuity.

One must creatively resist. The day called for an achingly early rendezvous with the work wonks, a hop to Hoboken (at least rewarded with a beautiful view of the Big City, bad cell phone photo with finger almost cropped out), and a Friday escape back north ahead of traffic. The plan was simple: sneak one in on the return-trip after splitting from my work buds. Like all of these opportunistic adventures, timing was everything. Get in, get out, get the run in mid-afternoon before the late afternoon conference calls came around, and the count shall not become three. A little night-before research works wonders. The plan was set. The primary and alternate targets identified. The go-bag packed. The expected timing choreographed.

But the customer decided to not stop talking. For an extra two hours. When the customer wants to talk, you listen. He pays the bills. When you’ve traveled that far to see him, you really listen. It’s a long way to come back the next time. By the time we walked out in the shadow of Manhattan, the plan was shot. The count was headed to three. Having escaped New Jersey, fed ourselves, and parted ways, it was pushing three thirty, the bewitching hour after which I’d be locked in conference calls till five. Darkness would arrive shortly thereafter, not the time for strange locale adventures. Damn the torpedoes, put on the tights anyway, you never know.

Forty minutes later, target in sight. And that target was? Well, sometimes the most intriguing places are right in front of you. Anyone who’s driven the Wilbur Cross Parkway through Connecticut knows the tunnel (though probably few know it’s now called the Heroes Tunnel, after “heroes of all kinds” following September 11). It’s not long – a mere twelve hundred feet, but it is the only highway tunnel in New England, outside of the urban tunnels of the Boston Big Dig. I’ve passed through it hundreds of times. And always wondered…what’s on top? The answer is West Ridge State Park, Hamden, Connecticut, and I intended to check it out. But with the target in sight, traffic was crawling past a fender bender, and the Bluetooth in my ear carried dynamic discussions of deals to do, dashing dreams of discovery.

And then, a funny thing happened. A rare, almost unheard of thing happened. An event so cosmic, so unexpected, I could hardly believe it happened. An hour-long conference call suddenly ended only twenty minutes in. The count shall not be three, provided of course that the mountain wasn’t still covered with a foot of snow, still a distinct possibility.

A few minutes post-call, I’d found the park entrance on a surprisingly tiny street with utterly zero fanfare. This is not, apparently, a real popular spot. Gated and deserted. But plowed, or at least one of the two roads from the entrance was plowed. I’ll have to come back some time to check out the other.

Being gated at the bottom meant starting with a hill climb. The perfect therapy after twenty-four hours of travel. Within a few hundred yards I found myself running over the highway tunnel entrance, cars flying at me at seventy yet missing by thirty feet of vertical. A few switchbacks and the ridge was attained.

Spectacular? No. Pleasant? Absolutely. Scattered views through the trees for miles and miles, hampered only by the haze of the low sun, the highway a distant trace, lakes to the west, the skyline of New Haven to the southeast. Plowed, melted, clear and dry soft pavement, the way roads become almost spongy when rarely used, lined with patchy snow. Quiet and entirely abandoned save one lone soul out for a walk, foolishly absorbed in his cell phone and MP3 and paying dearly with a near coronary when he didn’t see, hear, or otherwise sense my approach. Out for a few miles till the plowed section ended and snow and ice overtook the footing, signaling time for the back portion of the out-and-back. Reverse ridge run, scream down the switchbacks, back in the car as dusk overtook the shady glen of the park entrance, and two more hours with the heat cranked to melt the sweat on the ride back home.

Another small victory over the forces that get between man and fitness. At least this week, the count shall not be three.

Redemption

2011-02-28T23:34:00.016-05:00

I want my nickel back. I feel like I’ve been redeemed. It started happening over the last week, and it really happened yesterday in Hyannis on our lovely Cape Cod. Well, usually it’s lovely, though not really yesterday, but I’ll get back to that.

I’ve felt a bit like a refugee of late. Injuries, work schedules, life events, and this brutal weather have kept me at arm’s length from my club. And though those were the primary reasons, I can’t deny that a couple of bent feelings here and there between various and sundry parties didn’t help matters. It’s hard to get enthusiastic to break out of a pattern which involves the comfort of running mid-day when it’s much warmer and return to those early club runs on a brutal winter mornings when there are sore spots in the camaraderie department. But whatever the cause, I simply hadn’t seen much of them of late, and I didn’t feel anywhere close to speed anyway until just recently, bringing on that refugee feeling on both the social and physical scales.

How many times have I goaded my readers to just get out there? It was time to eat my own dog food. A few deep conversations patched nearly all the social issues, a few club runs including one of those late-night reflecto-vest-and-blinky-light-under-the-moonlight varieties that are just so wacky that you can’t help but enjoy them (thanks, Danno!), and life returned to pretty close to normal. Half redemption.

Just in time for Hyannis, one of our club’s favorite events. Where, as Jake and Elwood would say, we got the band back together. Same bat channel, same bat race, same bat master’s team, but a result that tickled me pink (or perhaps that was just the effects of the wind). By day’s end, redemption complete.

The Hyannis Marathon, Half-Marathon, 10K, and Marathon Relay extravaganza drags four to five thousand people to an otherwise deserted Cape Cod in the dead of winter (how dead? …even the Burger King in Hyannis is shuttered in February) to punish themselves in really bad weather. With a formula like that, how can it not be great? I suppose there have been times when the sun has shone on this event, but I haven’t seen that happen. Granted, my sample size is only two, but so far I’m batting one thousand. Last year the weather was pretty ugly. This year it was wicked ugly. It’s an omen when your trip starts off by dodging the snowplows on the interstate. No worries, the forecast called for an end to all things falling an hour before post time.

Cape Cod was still lovely, but only when you managed to find a vista visible through the gray. Through the snow. Through the rain, the drizzle, the wind. They lied, of course, those accursed weathermen. But when don’t they? Weren’t they an underground group many years back? Perhaps to there they should return?

Can’t change it. Ignore it. Just run it. Off we go, same team, same order. Rocket John on lead-off, Danno anchoring to bracket the ends. Dave the G-man and myself in the middle. To me, leg three is the best. Hyannis is a double loop, so leg three starts right outside the hotel. So how great is that? You can stand there and watch the fun and mayhem of the start without worrying about standing in line at the port-o-johns, then hang out in the warm hotel for another hour and not even have to be transported anywhere to start your leg. It’s the best of both worlds.

Last year I’d done forty-six and a half and thought my pace was about six-twenty. This year, coming off refugee status, I’d long decided I’d be happy, no, thrilled, with six-forties. Now, the long story of the day is how the starting line was moved, how the finish chute was re-arranged, how the exchange zone might have moved a bit so the leg might have been a hair shorter – no more than ten or twenty seconds – but shorter maybe, how I re-measured later that night and couldn’t for the life of me figure how I figured last year’s pace, how…you get the idea, typical OCD runner syndrome stuff. The short story is how this time the splits clicked off in the six-twenties every time save the mile with the biggest rise, which was more than compensated for by putting down the hammer in the last mile, and how I handed off to Danno at a hair over forty-five flat. I’d gotten it backwards. Last year I should have been happy having broken through six-forties. This year I hit the low six-twenties. Surprise.

In what I thought was my present condition – not that I’ve even now figured out what that present condition is – I never expected that. I know my present condition isn’t even close to being ready for Boston, less than two months out. That condition hasn’t hit an eighteen miler yet, and even coming close a week back hurt way too much. But at least that condition has a little more zip than I thought.

Redemption.

After a fifteen minute breather at the Craigsville Beach exchange zone, Rocket John and I headed out in the biting wind – worse on him for having hung out cold and wet since leg one – and circled the remainder of the course, piling on dearly needed pre-Boston training miles, smiling nicely at the spectators unknowingly cheering on a couple of guys out on a training run. At a Rocket John pace, of course, which, on a fifteen minute breather, was more than a bit arduous. But these are the things that make us stronger.

When the results came in and the coveted clamshells were announced, truth be told, I was in the shower. Missed my thirty seconds of fame that day. Matters not. One happy team, repeat master’s champs, and one redeemed (and mind you, clean) runner.

Eight Weeks

2011-02-10T23:38:00.001-05:00

Some say there is no free lunch in life. I disagree; occasionally there is, but I bugged out of the meeting yesterday as they were hauling it in so I could fit in a run instead. On my return I found a few pieces of cold, hard, very tired pizza, but they tasted like heaven after that run. We’ll get back to that.

Eight weeks seems to be a magic threshold for my body. I can’t generalize for anyone else, but repeated experiments in the lab of life strongly hint that it takes my body about eight weeks to change its metabolism. Eight weeks off, and things pretty much go to hell. Eight weeks back, and I start to emerge out of struggle mode back into the fun zone.

After the New Hampshire marathon at the start of last October, I knocked off to let the pesky leg heal. As you regulars know, it sorta’ kinda’ maybe didn’t, but that’s not the point. I sat out October, which wasn’t so bad, at least physically. Then, save for a few test runs mid-month, I sat out November, too, which got pretty bad, at least physically. (Mentally it totally stunk, but that’s to be expected.) And just to put a dot at the end of the sentence, along came Thanksgiving to contribute a few thousand calories just aching for some miles to make them feel wanted, but alas, instead wallowing in useless stupor, forced to find homes in undesirable places. By December the damage was done. My metabolism slowed down, my weight crept up, my resting pulse moved a few notches closer to a standard human. And most of that happened in the last week or two. It takes eight weeks.

God has a wry sense of humor. It takes eight weeks to heal an awful lot of things like the stress fracture I thought I had (not that I ever really figured it out, even now). Funny how the standard healing time lines up so nicely with the standard go-to-pot time.

By December I’d had enough, or more precisely, hadn’t had nearly enough, no really, hadn’t had any…I mean running of course, and I had to have it, leg be whatever it will be, so early in the month I hit the road again. In eight week off mode. And it was a struggle. Take a week off, you’re rested. Take two, you’re stiff. A month, you’re not fast, but… Eight weeks? Feels like you just got started again. And it doesn’t come back quickly. The entire first week back I repeatedly circled my smallest “regular” loop, a mere three and three quarters miles. There were days I thought I should have brought the fuel belt to have a Gu handy around mile two.

As a charter member of the obsessive compulsive runners’ club, I track my training pace, yes, in a spreadsheet. It’s revealing in that I don’t target any particular pace – for the most part I just go out and run how I feel – but by seeing how the month’s average pace falls out it tells me a lot – quite accurately, I’ve found – of where my fitness level is. Having already watched this metric rise unhappily over my injury-ridden summer, the tape told the tale pretty accurately through December and into January. It’s not that the numbers went all that high, and true, most folks would quite pleased with my “down” months, but when I run those slower paces I expect to feel like I’m out for a casual cruise, maybe a club run, certainly effortless. Instead, after eight weeks off, I’d repeatedly come in from what felt like a massive effort to find I’d barely broken seven and a half minute pace.

Until last week. Then something started to click. Not an undeniably distinctive click, but a soft, moderately perceptible click. Muted by three feet of snow on the ground, but a click. Barely breaking seven and a half pace suddenly turned into pretty consistent seven and a quarter pace. Still working hard, still not a cruise in the park, but a noticeable change in result.

Eight weeks since that reboot in early December. Never fails.

Which leads back to that free lunch. Trapped in a conference room for a few full days of training (read, no time to run before or afterword due to daylight constraints) we did a working lunch the first day, offering no break time to sneak out for a run. Free lunch, yes, but just cold sandwiches that would have been perfectly happy an hour later on return. But no dice, no time, no run.

The second day I was determined. It looked like we’d take a real lunch break, so I jumped the gun fifteen minutes early, burst out the door headed for the locker room, and, oh crap, along comes Mr. Caterer with a hot lunch today, nothing fancy, just pizzas, but an hour and a quarter leaves a pizza in sad shape. Eat hot fresh pizza? Or run, oh how I hate to give up free food, and that stuff won’t be pretty when I get back…?

Just go, you fool.

And am I glad I did. I don’t know quite what happened. I pushed about as hard as I usually do, I worked the hills on the new loop I was trying out which served up a couple of hearty rises late in the eight plus miles, did the lightning shower dress sneak back in thing, and found said tired, gluey, coagulated, off-tasting, entirely unappetizing leftover slices of pie. And sat down and ate them while measuring out the course and calculating my pace to find I’d turned in my first sub-seven-minute pace run since September. Woo hoo. Best pizza I’ve had in quite a while.

Eight weeks. The fun is returning. Hyannis Marathon masters team relay in just over two weeks. Let’s rock ‘n roll.

So Busted

2011-02-05T21:52:00.005-05:00

What’s in a name? Or, what’s in a road? Or more precisely, what is a road? In pursuing my Run Marlborough 2011 quest, that’s the key question. It might seem obvious, but believe me, it not.

From a distance, the world is a smooth, pleasant, easy to define place. Just look at those clean lines of the roads of Marlborough. It should be easy to trace out the roads to be covered, right?

Silly you. Come closer. Everything starts to get fuzzy.

Take, for example, the snippet below. Circled in the upper right is Royal Crest Drive. It’s an apartment complex. But it’s got a street name. Is it a road? Is it a parking lot? Some parts look like roads. Some look like parking lots. It’s private, yes, but many roads in New England are private, never deeded to the city. For that matter, in other parts of the country, entire neighborhoods are private. But they’re still roads.

Or look at the circle in the upper left. Maplewood cemetery. Dead folk. Lined up. Accessed by roads. Small ones, to be sure, but roads. Or driveways? Who can tell?

Now, kids, draw even closer, and look at the grainier underbelly of our world in the snapshot below. Within a half mile radius we can pick out a gaggle of Google geo giggles. The circle on the left? No road on the map. But guess what? There’s a road there. If your browser resolution allows it, check out the property lines on the Google map. You can see it if you look closely. And you can really see it – and run it – if you go there. But unless you live there, you won’t see it until you get there. Surprise!

The next circle to the right? Our beloved rail trail. Is it a road? Well, no. But is it one of the best running routes in the city? You bet.

And the next one to the right. Unnamed spur. Another famed cul-de-sac? A driveway? No, none of the above. It doesn’t exist. Who knew? And this isn’t even an obscure spot. The road it spurs off of (or doesn’t, as the case may be) is well travelled. I pass that way often, in car and on foot. Did I ever think to look for said spur? Not until recently, because I never looked closely at the map there before. You don’t tend to look for something that you didn’t know was supposed to be there because it’s not. (Disclaimer: Come spring, I might find things that don’t exist…).

And finally, the circle on the right, Hollis Street. Pretty obviously a street from looking at the map. Wrong again, friends, it’s absolutely a parking lot. Though I’ll probably run it anyway, if for no other reason than in honor of Dr. Foot Doctor, who’s offices it serves.

And we won’t even get into the industrial section that covers most of the western part of the city. The vagaries there defy classification.

Every part of the country has its geographical oddities, so it’s not like these questions are unique to New England. Bottom line is, I just have to make a call. I err on the side of running it if I can, but I reserve the right to eyeball it and choose to ignore it. I won’t claim every call is right. I’m still getting my tour, and I’m not seeking entry into the Guinness Book of World Records or even a column of Runners’ World, so who cares?

With that backdrop comes the story of So Busted.

Like the unnamed spur shown above, I’d identified a curious spur on the western end of town. Satellite photos showed two houses situated about a tenth of a mile down something that might be a road, or might simply be their driveway. A visual was in order, so I made a pass one day only to find the result inconclusive. Wooded, snowy, vague. No street sign, but no mailboxes at the end either. In short, impossible to determine.

When in doubt, if there’s no armed guard or gatehouse, go for it. It’s easy to apologize later. “Oops, wrong turn!” goes a long way. A quick shout of “Every street in Marlborough in 2011” wins instant smiles. Just run it, nobody will notice or care anyway. Right?

And so last Saturday on a winding trip to the gym, I turned down said snowy lane. Not a soul in sight, just the crunching of my shoes in the snow and my huffing steam breath to keep me company through the tree-lined way. And at the end…

Of course. One of the residents of one of the two houses was sitting in his idling car right where the lane split into two obvious driveways. I’d planned to turn around at that spot anyway, but hoped to do it anonymously. Busted. Wave, turn, and run. So much for anonymity. Well, nobody shouted at me. Or shot at me. I’m home free.

Not.

Thirty yards from the main road, oh come on, you’ve got to be kidding me. Someone turns into the lane. With the snow banks, it’s only a car wide, I can’t exactly hide. They slow to let me pass, I scurry by. I do the preemptive friendly wave, the woman waves back. I can’t make out the other person in the car, but something rings a bell, but then again, the cold air in the contact lenses makes things fuzzy sometimes, who can tell, and I’m not stopping to check. I’m so double busted, I’m outa’ there.

Finish the run at the gym, put in my upper body work (yeah, like after a month, I’m huge, right? Another big NOT). Dearest wife picks me up as planned. On the drive home I tell her my story of double busted and she laughs at my ignorance of the world. I know geography, she knows people.

Of course the woman in the car was familiar. Those weren’t just people we know. Those were people we know very well. That ring-a-bell woman was the mother of my greatest coaching success (mostly his talent and drive, not so much my coaching) and of course the other person in the car was, well, how dim could I be to have not caught on to that? And yes, that was their house. And no, I had no idea. Hey, it was out of context. Never saw that one coming.

On the flip side, she later related to me that it’s not unusual for people to wander down their driveway – yes, it is a driveway – precisely because it’s hard to tell it’s a driveway. As it was, she didn’t really give it a second thought that someone was running down it. As it was, she couldn’t tell who was under the winter togs, but somehow figured out that if that someone was crazy enough to be out running through the winter snow, it must have been Coach. That, to me, was a real tickler.

Busted indeed. But a little wiser to the fabric of my community, and armed with one more fun tale.

Tricks of Cartographic Geometry

2011-01-31T23:33:00.001-05:00

Hump Day has come and gone, and it’s all uphill from now on. I can smell spring. I can smell it through the three feet of snow on the ground and the foot and a half that’s coming in the next two days. In my twisted logic of enduring the dark days of winter, which I call the 60 Day Challenge, January 30th is halfway home, Hump Day, spring is on the way. Of course this year I probably won’t see it when it gets here as the windows will be buried in white stuff. But no matter.

Yes, it’s been quite a winter, like the mythical white-out of my youth in Upstate New York when the snow piles were so high and it was miles to school uphill in both directions and so on, you know the drill. We’ve just wrapped up the snowiest January on record since the cloistered winter when my oldest daughter was born, a winter when it seemed to snow six inches every three days. This year, it’s more like a foot once a week whether you need it or not. Same result, we don’t need to travel to Utah, we live in our own version of Canyonland. The roads are narrow and visibility is nonexistent. Never mind the piles at the driveway corners, there are places where the simple roadside plow piles are higher than my head. I’m depending more than ever on the graciousness of local drivers, and I’m happy to say that their politeness is entirely unlike what you hear about New England drivers. Perhaps it’s pity.

And into this I blindly dove into my Run Marlborough 2011 quest. What was I thinking?

I was thinking of a grand tour of my city. And I’m getting it, though it’s tougher to plan good routes than I counted on. Besides daring death in the sinews of our streets, I’m hitting plenty of spots where the plows’ best efforts just haven’t cut it, no fault to them.

One characteristic of my city that’s become rapidly obvious is that eighty percent of all streets built in the last thirty years are cul-de-sacs. Sounds good in the real estate ad: quiet street, no traffic. Translate to Run Marlborough 2011: Must run each one out and back, double your mileage, and with no traffic on them, the snow hasn’t melted. Winging a circle at the end of a cul-de-sac sounds simple. It’s not. They’re all ice, and any running turn on ice shy of a quarter-mile radius brings about fears of a do-over of Robert Cheruiyot’s horrible fall at the end of the Chicago Marathon. OK,that’s a bit of a stretch, but suffice to say it’s dicey. And forget about your pace.

Ice aside, Marlborough’s plethora of dead ends adds to the geometric challenge of the quest. It’s easy to look at the map and say, oh, it’s about five miles to the furthest extent of the city that way, so I can hit the far end with a ten miler. But it doesn’t work that way. Ten miles gets you there and back, but unless you plan a lot of ten milers, (in itself not such a bad idea) you simply won’t cover many streets. A run a bit back served as a fine example. I targeted a few streets on the northwest edge of the city. Once there, about five miles out to reach and cover those two streets, I started wandering back. Being early in the quest with very little “blue space” on the map (I’m coloring in the roads I’ve run in blue), every road is an oyster, low hanging fruit. And every road is lined with cul-de-sacs.

So, do you run them now or skip them? The mission of the day accomplished, I’m just heading home. But if I skip them, well, there’s no way back to them – they are, after all, by definition dead ends – except to retrace the road I’m now running, which means the miles back home really aren’t very effective toward reaching my goal as I’ll have to cover them again. But if I run them now, well, there’s a lot of them, and as noted, each one gets doubled – out and back. Reality is I am not recovered from my nearly two month break, and I am certainly feeling these longer runs, so there’s a limit to what I can take. Not to mention that special treat of playing Cheat the Zamboni at the turnarounds.

Long story short (and since when have I ever made a story short?), or really, long story long, that mission to hit two streets on the far end of town – a ten mile jaunt – easily turned into a full half marathon, even skipping a ton of the ‘sacs. Likewise, Saturday’s run from the gym after the upper body workout, already feeling a little rubbery, saw dead ends and other various oddities of real estate turn a swoop through the southwest corner of the city into another thirteen miler.

I’m not complaining. Indeed, I’m celebrating. I’m seeing bits of town I’ve never seen. (Sadly, the newer bits are excessively boring, far too many in-your-face McMansions.) I’ve yet to run a single one of my ‘standard’ courses since the start of the year. And purely by these geographical accidents I’m stretching my distances back upward after that long break through October and November. Surprise, a hundred and sixty miles this month. Ba-da-boom. Eighty two of them ‘unique miles’ in the quest. It’s a cool adventure, a great motivation, and it even comes with the fun of an arts & crafts session afterward, coloring in the map.

Quest on, Wayne.

I Hate To Say I Told You So

2011-01-16T23:34:00.001-05:00

If you’re in the running community, there’s a good chance you’ve heard by now that the 2011 Boston Marathon sold out in a record of something close to eight hours. Not weeks or days, but eight hours. Unprecedented, right?

Well, I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.

I haven’t gotten around to telling my part of the story till now, but it’s worth telling. For those not attuned to this process, I’ll provide a little history first. Until two years ago, Boston registration was a leisurely pursuit. The problem was qualifying, not signing up for the race. Once you’d qualified, sometime over the course of the winter you strolled over to the Boston Athletic Association website and signed up. No big deal. But that changed in the fall of ’09. The 2010 race filled rapidly and registration closed by mid-November after only about nine weeks. Shock and sadness hit the procrastinator corners of the running world.

Happily, no shock or sadness hit my corner. I registered promptly, got into the 2010 race, and came out of it with a 2011 qualifying time by a comfortable margin. So while others were banking on good performances in their fall marathons last year to get a qualifier, I fretted not about my summer of injuries and just noted when registration would open, October 18th.

Reality always intervenes. We are beholden in many ways, to our families, to our communities, and in a large part to our employers. So when the folks who write the paychecks say you are condemned to go to Hell (Las Vegas) for the annual rah-rah conference, you really don’t have a choice. And the date of the conference? You guessed it: October 18th (or, to be more accurate, it started on Sunday the 17th, but that’s not the point).

Now, being in Vegas, I could hope to take advantage of the time zone, since registration opened at 9 AM Eastern, and pray that at 6 AM Pacific I’d have a computer in front of me and I’d be able to register. But I wasn’t willing to take that chance. I could have also hoped to just wait a few days and sign up on my return, but it’d be a solid week’s delay seeing as we’d planned a hiking trip to Zion National Park after the conference. And I knew, I just knew, that I wouldn’t have a week.

How did I know? Two simple factors. First, think out of the box, and second, think logically like a lemming.

Nobody conceived of Boston selling out instantaneously because it hadn’t happened. In fact, I can’t think of any race I’ve participated in doing that. I’d say it’s pretty rare in the running world, though I guarantee there are plenty of data points to prove I’m wrong. But a co-worker of mine who’s into ultra mountain bike racing has told me plenty of stories of races he’s tried to enter – races which, considering the support requirements and course limitations of off-road cycling races, are much more limited in size. He’s told me stories of five hour sellouts. So, think out of the Boston box and recognize that it certainly could happen here.

But why would it? That’s easy, because people were surprised by last year’s November sellout, and they won’t wait this year. In effect, last year’s closure re-wrote the rules, which now read, “Do it right away, or else.” And it’s Boston, so they’ll make it a priority to do so. Like lemmings. Smart lemmings, in this case.

And just to add an exclamation point to this perfect storm, let’s not forget that Icelandic volcano that kept a whole bunch of runners away last year. They’ll certainly be back with a vengeance.

I hate to say I told you so, but I knew it would happen.

So a few weeks before Registration Day and before my Journey to Hell, I wrote to the BAA and explained my predicament. Folks, I’m going to be out of town with no laptop, uncertain if I can even get on a computer and even if I can, I’ll be held captive in meetings all day, and I know in my bones that this race is going to fill up fast. What can I do?

There are few documents in your life that you feel are worthy of framing and hanging on the wall. In my office? The college diploma. The proudest of the awards given to my ancestors. The stock certificate good for thousands of shares in my bankrupt former employer. And I am tempted to add to this list the email I received from the BAA, who politely replied that it would be entirely unprecedented for the race to fill up in three days, and that in effect I had nothing to worry about.

They never saw it coming.

The good part of the story is that they’re good folks, and when I insisted on not waiting, they provided a paper application which I could have at their office by the 18th, which of course I did. And off I went to Hell, where that Monday night my wife told me the news of the eight-hour sellout. By that evening, the BAA site which would typically list about forty entrants between my town and its neighbor Hudson listed exactly one. Me. Shock and awe.

The picture has gotten a little brighter. It took them a few weeks to work through verifying the web entries, and that count has now risen from one to eight between our towns, but it’s still only eight, instead of fortyish. Sadness, because it won’t be quite the same without the big local contingent.

So in the end, I’m in. And I’m in because I refused to believe what the BAA believed about their own race. All in all, I know it sounds a bit arrogant, but I can’t help finding that a bit funny. I hate to say I told you so.

The irony here is that despite holding one of those prize entries, if things don’t heal up pretty soon my participation will be in jeopardy anyway. But I’ll still have a fun story to tell.

A Bear of An Opportunity

2011-01-11T23:01:00.002-05:00

It’s that magical day, 1-11-11, and at 11:11:11 AM this morning I was…running. And at that very moment…nothing happened. Maybe I have to wait for 11-11-11.

Time is a funny thing, even if you’re not enthralled by Stephan Hawking and some of the more twisted cosmology articles in Scientific American. To paraphrase one of my favorite movie lines from A Fish Called Wanda, yes, I do read it, but no, I don’t always understand it. Apart from cosmic oddities and time zone confusions, the time that really matters to a runner is the time of daylight (other than on Reach the Beach weekend, of course). Once daylight is gone, the complexity of getting in a run rises steeply, so we tend to squeeze every moment of daylight we can find.

Last week found me in one of the nicer sections of New Jersey, so I’ll spare the Jersey jokes except to note that when I was there last summer, I found it quite annoying how local planners decided that in an upscale area, straight sidewalks were just so passé and had instead installed artistic yet inefficient zigzag versions. Aside from the hammering that a concrete sidewalk already imparts on your legs, add to that some lateral hammering on your knees as you try to stay in-bounds on their pedestrian mini-golf course. I’ll take my chances and run in the roads, thank you very much.

But this time of year, those sidewalks are irrelevant under the snow, and the challenge is daylight. With an eight-to-five training session, there’s sorry little sol-time left for a run. On Day One I tried the early morning approach, but even equipped with Day-Glo and a blinky light, I had to delay my start until racing commuters had an even shot of noticing me hugging the sidelines of their tracks. That made time tight enough that I decided Day Two would have to be a rest day, sans run.

Or would it? To my delight, they released us from our bonds of learning earlier than planned with the generous intent of letting us beat the traffic. Not expecting this, I wasn’t equipped for a run on the run, but as I made my way north toward the New York line, it occurred to me that I just might be able to squeeze one in. But where? Seriously, I may be addicted, but not to the level of wanting to make a rave run through some non-descript Jersey suburb.

A little mental cogitation brought the Hudson Valley into the realm of possibility, and Bear Mountain State Park popped into my head. Beautiful mountain setting high above the Hudson, far enough from New York City to be free of crowds and pollution, vast vistas, perfect, if I could make it in time, with that daylight clock ticking. But that is, after all, why God invented Google, Droids, and GPS, right? Voice command to Google: Sunset Poughkeepsie New York Today. Like magic: 4:30 PM. GPS: Take me to Bear Mountain, how long? You’ll get there about twenty after four. Hmm, no time to spare, no restroom stops, need to dig the clothes and blinky light out of the back lickity-split, should have 30 minutes of dusk before blackness, most certainly do-able, the challenge was on.

I must confess that while strategizing and fighting traffic, not realizing the sound was turned off on the Droid and not noticing the reminder that popped up, I completely spaced and missed a conference call I was supposed to be on at four. Well, it wasn’t critical. Carpe Diem.

Now I am on a mission. Every minute counts, especially since I haven’t been in the park since, well, I’m not sure if I’ve ever been in the park. Near the park, yes, but in it? So I know not where I’m going, save what the Gods of Google Maps can serve up, nor where to run. But I imagine parking near the summit and running the roads up top, soaking up the views as the daylight fades. And all is going to plan. Traffic is with me. I’m picking up a few minutes, pulling into the park with daylight to spare. No gate, no fees, good thing, I’d hate to have to pay for forty minutes. I’m following the park road up the side of the mountain, beautiful woodland and, frankly, nothing else. No place to pull off and park. No visible trail markers (even if the trails weren’t snow-covered, running unfamiliar trails at dusk would be a really bad idea, it wasn’t the plan, but it would have been nice to know they were there). And worst: the roads I’d seen on the map leading to the summit and other interesting spots? All gated, unplowed, inaccessible. Excitement turns to dismay. All I can do is drive.

I’m down the other side toward the river valley, hopes of grand views crushed. I find the “recreational center” portion of the park, eerily abandoned in the cold months. Darkened buildings, maintenance vehicles scattered in a big otherwise empty parking lot. And – what’s this? – a runner next to his car in the far lonely stretches of that lot. I wish I could say he too was heading out, and that I had a serendipitous run with a native guide, but he’d just finished up and was leaving. He did offer up a few tips, and the comfort of knowing I wasn’t the only whacko running the park on a cold winter day.

On his advice, I headed north to run the paved path around Hessian Lake, civilized to be sure but still a lovely spot with cliffs rising from its west edge and crazy patterns in its frozen surface. I figured it was about a mile around and envisioned taking one lap easy then turning some near-mile repeats to put in some speed I’ve been so sadly lacking. But the west side wasn’t plowed and presented treacherous icy footing as it rose over those cliffs. Certainly no speed was in order here; indeed no second lap was in order when it became obvious that a slip while perched above the thirty-foot drop to the ice could have dire consequences.

I left the lake after one lap and traversed a half-snowed field, surprised to note that among the seemingly dead park was a brightly lit ice rink emanating the sounds of a lively puck match, then reached the main road which I’d earlier eschewed in the waning light but now saw as my only chance to log a few miles. Considering the place was effectively abandoned, I judged the traffic risk minimal and headed up the hill far enough to indeed get that Hudson Valley vista I’d imagined an hour plus earlier. It wasn’t the top of the mountain as I’d hoped, but it was a sweet reward nonetheless. A view, a workout, a day to feel good, snatched out of the hands of the expectation of a sedentary runless office and windshield day.

The rest was anticlimactic, but it didn’t matter. An easy cruise back down the hill, an added loop to gain some extra distance which sent me through the maintenance garage area – from heaven to hell in one mile flat – another run out and back on the plowed edge of the lake, and darkness was complete. The ride home, long, of course, but it wasn’t a day without sunshine, it just didn’t matter.

On Another Topic Department: Already an irony has popped into the not-yet-two-week-old Run Marlborough 2011 challenge. Through a long story that needn’t be recounted, I had a need to drop a small item at a stranger’s house – not that she was strange, just that I didn’t know her or where she lived. But I knew she was in Marlborough, and this was an obvious opportunity to direct my run into some new streets to darken another chunk on the RM11 map. With only four local runs in the books for 2011, surely this quest would take me to uncharted territory. And sure enough, the recipient reported that she lived on a small obscure back street, rarely traveled and largely unknown outside of a two block radius. But, wouldn’t you know, it was just the neighborhood I’d already woven through on my second run of the year. Go figure.

Run Marlborough 2011

2011-01-02T23:29:00.001-05:00

An idea has been brewing in my head for a few months ago, and yesterday I launched it. It’s pretty simple, nothing Earth-shattering, unworthy of much note, but should provide for some interesting times. I’m calling it Run Marlborough 2011, my goal of running every street in my city this year.

We goal-driven Type A’s need something in our sights to egg us on. For the past few years I’ve set performance-based goals, and by and large I’ve done rather well by them, save for one which has frustratingly eluded. Ran the first marathon, check, ran enough of them to feel like a real marathoner, check, went sub-three, check, even had the fun of breaking the tape in a local race this past fall, check. More importantly, got in shape, check, lost weight, check, dropped the cholesterol meds significantly, check, regained a lifestyle missing since youth that’s just plain good for my head, check. By and large, it’s all good.

The one that’s eluded is purely esoteric: the two-thousand mile year. Since hitting nineteen hundred in 2007, which spurred me to aim for two grand, something’s gotten in the way each year to prevent cracking that psychological barrier: the snapped tendon in 2008, the time off after surgery in 2009, and this year’s parade of small yet annoying injuries, leaving me at a bit shy of sixteen hundred for the year. I could take another stab at it, but reality says it won’t happen this year, and worse, it’d be foolish to try. I’m still not whole. The leg is still hurting, even to the point that I might have to break down and pay a doctor to tell me what I pretty much already know. So another course is in order.

Thus was born the idea of quality, or at least variety, rather than quantity. Call it the poor-man’s fifty-state-marathon circuit. Face it: day in, day out, we all do it, we run the same roads over and over. Where I live, on the edge of a small city, I’ve got some really nice courses for those repeats, and I really don’t mind seeing them again and again. But it’s always interesting to see new places.

My adopted home of Marlborough, chosen courtesy of meeting my wife, a native, twenty years ago this year (and we still laugh at how on the night I met her I expressed my dislike of the place which I’ve now grown to love), is not a terribly small place. It’s a city of a bit under forty thousand which encompasses twenty-two square miles, but is twice as wide as it is long, making for a longer reach to the farthest extents. I’m lucky for this endeavor to live relatively close to the center, yet from my home, it’s 6.1 miles by road to the most distant road point, a fact that I hadn’t researched ahead of time, indeed hadn’t checked until a moment ago while writing this article. What I also haven’t researched is how many miles of roads my fair city holds. That’s right, I have no idea. Nary a clue. I suppose one of these days I should call up the fine folks at the DPW and ask, but I’m not sure I want to know. This is not about quantity. It’s an odyssey.

Of course, I have to impart some methodologies to define the challenge. No map is entirely accurate, but I’ve got to have some sort of standard. I spent a few minutes (OK, I admit, a few more than a few) assembling a montage of Google maps into a single bitmap covering the entire city with enough resolution to identify and mark every road. Much to my chagrin, it topped out at eighty six megabytes. Two days into the challenge, I’ve started to color in routes traversed:

In a version reduced enough to post here, you can’t possibly see the detail, but you can get an idea of the plan from the first two day’s tracings. The red lines outline my city. Home base is the end of the blue line furthest north on this map.

If the road is on Google Maps, I’ll try to run it. If I get there and it’s not really there, c’est la vie. If I find something that’s not on the map, I’ll run it as well. Parking lots don’t count, but if the map shows a road into a parking lot, I’ll try to cover it. If it’s gated, well, I have no plans to get arrested. And I doubt I’ll get a police escort to do the Interstates. But hey, by the end of the year, you never know, right?

It’s also my intent that every run will either start or finish at home, preferably both, but since I joined a gym on the west side of town for that cross training I’ve so needed (and yes, my arms hurt right now, thank you), and since I intend to run to or from the gym when I can, I’ll allow the one-anchored variety. But driving to some far extent of the city and doing a small loop is right out.

This isn’t a publicity thing or a fund raiser, but if I inspire you to give money to some good cause, so be it. What I’d rather see is a few others taking up the challenge as well. Adventure loves company.

And so on that note the challenge started with a very pleasant bang. New Year’s Day was an unseasonable fifty eight degrees and I so wanted to run, but I also so wanted to join my lovely wife for a New Year’s kickoff stroll. As a compromise, I told her I’d walk the first mile and a half with her, then depart on my run while she finished up. As we approached the spot of my departure, as if on cue – I couldn’t have planned this if I’d tried – around the corner came Bill, my runner friend of Reach the Beach and New Hampshire Marathon fame. Perfect!

Bill and I wandered the city for an hour, and on Day One already covered roads I’d never seen. There’s nothing quite like the look on the face of a resident of a dead end as you run past them with obviously no place to go. Most non-runners just don’t get it when we run by, but a quick shout of, “I’m running every road in town this year!” on New Year’s Day simply lights up faces. As for Bill, I may have my first convert.

Right now that map looks very, very big. But I’ve got three hundred and sixty three days ahead of me, and plenty to see. Oughta’ be fun.

A Quarter Lifetime

2010-12-29T17:43:00.000-05:00

Ahh, year’s end, that time when many reminisce the good and lament the bad of times past, and makes promises for times forward. How dull. Let’s not do that. Instead, just one pop back in time, a peek forward, and let’s be done with it.

A couple weeks back I had the opportunity to haunt my alma mater, dear old RPI, or, as the politically and market correct types would now prefer you to say, Rensselaer. I had a meeting a few miles down the road on a mid-day Friday, and afterward, with the prospect of nothing but windshield in front of me for the next few hours, I elected to make hay of the remaining rare solstice daylight. I popped into the far corner of a parking lot, transformed from Meeting Man into Running Tights Man, and headed for campus.

I hadn’t been back in quite a few years, and I hadn’t run on campus since my First Lap days. Even then I’m not sure I ever did the campus tour on fleet foot. The idea just seemed cool, somehow, so in the midst of glum students trudging through finals week, off I set on a trail of memories.

How many times had I made that same trudge over the footbridge crossing 15th Street? The truth? Plenty, but fewer than I should have; my class attendance record wasn’t stellar. How many times through the wind tunnel of the walkway under the engineering center, now made longer and worse by the addition of a new building about the time of my departure? But save that new building, the main campus really hadn’t changed. Past the Holy Church of Computing – a gorgeous old “chapel”, or mini-cathedral as you prefer, transformed into the computing center, which had always struck me as odd – what kind of statement was that? Off the far reach of campus where the new media center, the only other big main campus addition, hung off the side of the hill like a bloated whale suspended high above Troy. Inside, I’m told it’s amazing. Outside, I can’t, even with great charity, compliment the architect.

As with any self-respecting college, RPI sits on a hill, indeed a pretty good sized one. Agony to the students, joy to a runner. After winding most of the way down to the bottom, Sage Avenue offered a great workout heading back up. Memories of the Troy garbage truck which lost its brakes on that hill and crushed a professor friend’s classic VW Beetle one sad day. A quick tour of the dorm area that was home for three years, then up the next hill to the field house, campus apartments, home for my last year, and up and above the massive new stadium. Troubling, in a way, that a school with such a focus on mental power has succumbed to mere athletics as an area of growth. But who am I to complain, when some of our best times back then were following our beloved hockey team, even if most of the players, or ‘pucks’ as we called them, were mostly undecided humanities majors lost amidst a sea of engineers? Indeed, I was one of three, yes, count ‘em, three students who made the thirty-hour marathon trip to catch a few games in Grand Forks, North Dakota. And I’ve never regretted it.

Back down the upper hill, past the wonderful campus church – nothing beats a college church, where only those who want to be there bother showing up – to finish up at the student union. The abused tables inside looked to be the same ones as when I left, but otherwise the place was a seriously brightened version of what I’d left behind.

Twenty five years since I left the place, save a few visits here and there. Seems like a lifetime, but in fact it’s only a third, or a quarter (if you’re lucky) of a lifetime. There are times I think that, approaching fifty (OK, still more than two years out), I’m “getting on” in years. Then I think of all that has transpired in the twenty five years since I left those undergrad haunts, and know that with reasonable self care and a bit of luck, chances are good I’ve got another twenty five before things really start going off the end of the steep slope. At least I hope. But presuming that to be the case, imagine how much is left to enjoy ahead!

I can’t stop the curve ball from left field. Just ask sis about that. But reasonable self care is what I can do to control that which is controllable. Even in my somewhat down state of coming off a year of injuries, the string of which isn’t over yet, I’m still in far better shape today than before I started running almost six years ago. And in that spirit, yesterday my wife and I signed up at a local gym; she for the workouts in general, me for the opportunity to finally put in some resistance and cross training. To kick it off, I ran the four and change to get down there today and put in half an hour working the upper body. I’ll hurt tomorrow, and feel good about it.

What will this time look like twenty five years from now?

Learning Who You Are

2010-12-09T23:27:00.001-05:00

The tedious struggle to put my body back into one uncracked piece continues. It’s two months since I started taking time off to let the might-be-a-stress-fracture-might-not-but-umm-who-knows leg heal. After four weeks, it still felt injured. After two more weeks, not much better. I am now, perhaps foolishly, lightly hitting four a day with little discomfort – but not zero discomfort – on the theory that since rest didn’t heal it, why rest? Perhaps more time would do it, but I need some fitness and I need to burn off the five pounds that adhered rapidly to my mid-section during the break. So I’m treading the thin line and saying my prayers.

Four to six weeks off is enough time to get you out of the daily mode of getting in your workout. Sadly, no, I don’t cross train, though I know I should and am looking into a gym, but for now, four to six weeks off is, well, four to six weeks off. But as I’ve written in the past, running is part of the definition of who I am. I know that. I know it always will be, even if there are big breaks. Twenty years off didn’t kill that. A few more weeks, a few months, even a few years, if it came to that, won’t – I hope – kill that.

While these thoughts were knocking around in my head, I spent a day in the car with a co-worker traveling to an out-of-town appointment; the typical ‘drive for eight hours, see the customer for one’ kind of day we sometimes in endure in our business. But it was a great day as he too is an avid runner, so the conversation was lively, and – talk about bonus material – he’s a runner who also writes a blog. I bring this up not only because I find his writing enjoyable, but because of a particular article he told me about during that long slog through Vermont. It’s all about knowing who you are, knowing that you’re a runner. It’s here and well worth a read. After, of course, you’ve finished reading my article first.

By adulthood, we think we’ve figured out who we are. But have we? Do we really know what defines us? What we can do? I’d suggest that we do have a pretty good idea what defines us, and part of what defines us as runners is that we understand that we probably don’t really know what we’re capable of. We know that we will test ourselves and constantly try to answer that question.

Which, in a circumspect way, brings me to my kids. Not my own kids, per se, but the kids I coach at my daughter’s middle school. (The sharp eyed among you may have detected that previous references to my daughters’ middle school have now shifted to my daughter’s middle school, since older daughter has moved on to high school leaving but one in the middle school, and yes, I am a charter member of the Eat Shoots and Leaves Militant Apostrophe Usage Goon Squad. But I digress.) At their age, they really don’t know who they are. They don’t define themselves as runners. They don’t know what they can do, and for the most part they don’t know the self-lifting power of testing themselves to find out. In two short months, starting at ground zero and seeing them only two or three times a week, I can’t turn them into lean, mean, running machines, but I can try to get them to explore the dimension of testing themselves.

In the past several years, cross country at Immaculate Conception School has become cool. How cool? So cool that over a third of the eligible kids ran on the team this year. So cool that the school administrators let the kids leave their school uniforms at home on a meet day and wear their cross country jerseys instead. So cool that we even snagged a couple of the cheerleaders onto the cross country team this year. Memories of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ come to mind.

When better than a third of the kids are on the team, you’re going to have plenty who don’t land in the same chapter with the word fast. Plenty who are taking a walk break before the half-mile mark. And plenty who are there for the social aspect. But it doesn’t matter because they’re out there, rather than at the mall or in front of the video game console.

Designing workouts is challenging when for some of them, motivation flags after a couple of quarter-mile sprints, so I try to instill from day one that the only competitor that matters is themselves. Let’s face it, with a school of two hundred kids from pre-K to eighth grade, it’d take a miracle to get the depth needed to win a lot of meets (though being a Catholic school, we can hope that our Miracle Applications do at least get reviewed upstairs). So why focus on beating the other guys? Just beat yourself.

And this year, they really did it. But not by just edging a few seconds off here or there. A few of the kids, and yes, I have to boast, my daughter was one of them, redefined themselves. It was clear that a lot of these kids saw themselves as slow. It never crossed their mind that they might be anything else. Then, a lot of them figured out they didn’t have to define themselves that way.

I watched at one meet as the gun went off and a good-sized chunk of our team lumbered out for a jog, well behind within fifty yards. By the end, many had picked their way to mid-pack. They weren’t slow. They just thought they were. I had to step out of character and chide them afterwards – always a dangerous thing to do with the fragile motivation of middle schoolers – and remind them that the race starts when the gun goes off.

By season end, many of the kids were running minutes – even up to five minutes – per mile faster pace than where they started. Not improvement, but redefinition. Going from fifteen minute pace, barely more than a quick walk, to nines, isn’t just an improvement, it’s recognizing that you’re capable of running when you didn’t think you could before. Dropping from a nine-to-ten minute jog to the sevens means you’ve learned how to race. Or better, learned that you can race. I recognize that because I’ve felt it. That day at Bay State, when at mile twenty-three, my companion told me to speed up and it dawned on me that a marathon didn’t have to just be endured but could actually be raced. Like that, these kids were having Eureka! moments.

Late in the season, my star protégé from last year, who this year as a high-school freshman is burning up the courses on his varsity team, dropped in to visit his old team. Always the silent giant, I goaded him into making a few comments to the team. He focused on that message that I’d drilled in so many times: You just don’t know what you’re capable of. Varsity gave him a new level of challenging, and again he was finding out.

By testing themselves, my kids learned a little about who they weren’t, and a little more about who they were, or at least who they could be. For any coach, amateur or pro, that’s a big check mark in the job satisfaction category. For any runner, it’s one of the reasons we love the sport.

First to Last

2010-11-27T23:22:00.003-05:00

If you’re going to jump off a cliff, you might as well make it a high one and make the leap effective. After all, what’s the point of simply breaking a leg or something? Do it right, do it big. And so two months after my first win at the Forrest 5K, I crossed the line (almost) dead last at the Thanksgiving Day Pie & Glove 5K in Corning, New York. First to last in two months flat. Except this really was no cliff jump, this was a triumph.

The bad news is that I didn’t run it. Couldn’t, really. The pesky leg injury that I’d so hoped was healed in my last post in fact hasn’t healed. A few short test runs back in mid-month convinced me that yet more time is needed. They also worried me that those few short test runs may have re-injured or at least somewhat set back the healing. Maybe medical technology does need to be engaged at some point here, if for no other reason than to put a definition on the length of the break I need to be whole again.

But having running off the table didn’t have to take this new family tradition off the table. I elected to walk it instead with sis, who just a week earlier had wrapped up months of treatment – surgery, chemo, and radiation – in her battle with breast cancer. She’s kept a positive outlook through the whole fight, and while I know this will make her blush a bit, I’ll say it because it’s true: she’s set a fine example of how to take on this tough challenge. And what better way to cap off what we hope is her victorious fight than by getting out there on the roads and covering the distance. Speed didn’t matter. I was proud to walk with her. And of course I let her – and my wife – beat me across the line.

All that being said, this was a new way to do a race, and it was, quite frankly, a lot of fun. No fretting about what to wear. It was cold, windy, and snowing lightly, so just bundle up. Who cares about performance clothing? In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had more race-specific clothing on at one time ever, not to mention in a race. Lessee, Stu’s 30K t-shirt (cotton, of course!), Reach the Beach hat, Boston Marathon jacket, Central Mass Striders gloves… I was a walking billboard. In blue jeans. Yep, race gear!

No fretting about arriving in time to warm up, hit the porta-johns, suck down a Gu, no fretting at all. We showed up about thirteen minutes before the gun, grabbed our numbers and high quality gloves (it is, after all, the Pie and Glove, and yes, you do get gloves), and wandered to the back of the pack.

The gun? Oh yeah, sure, whatever. Let’s go for a stroll. With numbers pinned on us. Kind of silly in a way, but let’s face it, the weather wasn’t so great and without those numbers sitting down on the pre-registration table with our names on them, we might well have stayed home. Instead, though it wasn’t a run, it was still a good bit of mild exercise and a fine dose of guilt alleviation for the coming feast.

And we chatted. And wandered. And watched all the people running when the course doubled on itself. And had a fine time.

At one point sis asked what I thought of all those people struggling to finish a race at the back of the pack. That’s easy. I hold them in the highest respect. They’re not on the couch. They’re out there. Speed simply doesn’t matter. And frankly, I certainly don’t want to be on a marathon course for five or six hours – they’ve got to be respected for their determination.

But on this day I was behind all of them – about eight hundred of them – save five or so walking behind us. So what? Sis, we believe, and we pray, has beaten cancer, and walked 5K at a decent pace to prove it. Hats off to her (at least when we got back inside and it was warm enough to take our hats off).

I am, however, going to have to hold her to her promise to run it next Thanksgiving.

Fractured, of a Sort

2010-11-12T23:49:00.002-05:00

I’ve let you down, I know. All eight of you (I’m being optimistic). Never before have I put such a fracture in my writing schedule, and I hope to not do so again. But I blame this fracture on what else – ? – a fracture. Of a sort, or so I think. Not that I deserve an excuse. Fracture or not, there’s been plenty to write about, even ignoring the national embarrassment of the tea party, topics which I’ll try to visit in the next few weeks. But I’ll claim an excuse anyway.

One aspect of the Walk-On Marathon I neglected to mention in my last posting long, long ago was the Magic Shoes. Ironically, while tooling down the highway earlier today, I was listening to one of Chris Russell’s podcasts where he addressed the question of whether to wear racing flats in a marathon. His answer, completely logical, was, “Not if you haven’t tried them on a long run before.”

Of course, common sense says don’t change anything on race day. I know that wisdom well, but did exactly that last month: changed something on race day, and specifically, ran it in the racing flats, or in my case, the near-racing flats, the frighteningly yellow and gloriously airy New Balance 904s. A bad idea if I’d been racing, but as I’ve said, the New Hampshire Marathon was anything but a race for me, and knowing that going in made it a fine time to test out the idea of wearing racing flats for 26 miles – racing flats I’d never worn out of the lower half of single digit mileage. But racing flats that had – perhaps – helped me win the Forrest 5K with their liberating lightness, and which might possibly help carry a hopelessly undertrained old fart through an unlikely marathon.

And they were great from the standpoint of perceptible reduced mass, though being considerably less meaty than my usual tires, I fully expected more foot fatigue than usual. I was not disappointed. Or at least I was not wrong. By twenty miles in, yes, my feet weren’t too happy. But then again, neither was the rest of me, so the experiment was inconclusive. On the other hand, my leg injury was completely silent all day. On the third hand, my knees were uncharacteristically tender. Was it the shoes? Hung jury on all counts.

What was conclusive was that while the leg didn’t hurt that day, when I hit the roads a few days later, it was unmistakably uncomfortable. Having nursed this particular wound since late August, having gotten through the marathon that really wasn’t supposed to have been, and having no big events on the schedule in the near future, I made the command decision that I was, in fact, riding a stress fracture and that it was time to heal. The fact that my knees were sore as hell made the call considerably easier. Maybe the shoes contributed to making it easier to make that decision. God works in weird ways.

It was pretty tough deciding to take a solid month off for an undiagnosed injury. I don’t like taking two days off consecutively, let alone a week, let alone – a month? A break longer than any since the surgery? Having not seen a doctor?

Truth is, if there is pain in the middle of your shin, your choices are pretty limited. Shin splints, stress fracture, or alien intervention. While I can’t rule out the latter, the remedies for the first two are pretty much the same: rest. The only difference would be the duration of said rest, and it is of course frustrating to not be certain, but the reality is that I could spend a lot of money and time to see doctors, get a bone scan, await results which would probably be inconclusive. Been there several years ago, done that, got the chance to watch radioactive atoms die on my behalf, lighting up the monitor with a cool image of my bones, but still didn’t really know in the end… And the answer will be? Rest. And by the time all of this medical wonder was done, I would have already spent a lot of time at… Rest. So why be American? Why throw money and medical technology at something that will, if rested, heal; something that there’s really nothing else to do about anyway?

Penning my name on the Injured Reserve list meant giving up my publicly unspoken but very real goal of a two thousand mile year. I’d been on track through the first half of the year, and while I’d fallen a bit behind through the summer of injuries, said goal was still within reach. I’ve had my eyes on that one for a number of years, but something has always gotten in the way. And so it would be again.

I tell the kids I coach that you can’t worry about running tomorrow or next week; you need to worry about being able to run next year and through the next decade. It’s good advice, but like most good advice easier to give than to live by. This has been a good exercise in chugging a bottle of my own medicine.

Four weeks. Uncharacteristic guilt in eating. Crabbiness, just ask my wife. Fear that every little jog – casually across the field while coaching my middle school cross country team, across the parking lot in a hurry, and so on – would cause re-injury. And the irony and insult of traveling to my company’s annual sales meeting in Hell (er, I mean, Las Vegas) and in the first hour upon arrival running into three colleagues telling me that this year they’d brought their running gear to run with me…and I can’t. Just about killed me.

And then the angst, is four weeks enough? At t-plus four weeks, I hit the roads for a test jaunt, and still felt a twang in the shin. Harmless test? Or would that reset the clock? Another four weeks? Please, no!

Another week, another road test, this time no pain. Hope. And a few days later, a trail run with one of those colleagues I’d had to deny in Vegas, trails being ostensibly gentler than roads but in truth, this being New England where we grow rocks for fun and profit, not. And in the last quarter mile, a twang. Oh miserable angst. Say it ain’t so.

Tomorrow I’ll give it another roll and see how the dice land. It’s just going to be dicey for a while. I just keep telling myself that a fracture in my training is a blip. While I’d like to be running next week, I’d rather be running next year and next decade.

Walk-On Marathon

2010-10-06T23:24:00.006-04:00

[ Ed. Note: Yes, it’s another marathon-length marathon story. They are marathons, after all, right? If I could endure the race, you can endure the article! ]

My club-mate Bill (photo at the end), who lit me up on the forty-dollar New Hampshire Marathon, and whom I can blame for this whole adventure (or better, thank), described my participation in this race as a “walk-on marathon”. I think he got it right, so long as I add, “walk lots” as well.

Admittedly, I was ridiculously casual about this race. It’s not like I’m not in shape compared to the general populace, but I certainly wasn’t in shape for a marathon, at least not what I consider marathon shape. But I really didn’t worry about it. After all, after my summer of injuries, I wasn’t going to do a marathon this fall anyway. Then, enter Bill’s idea of the forty-dollar marathon, which to me was an easy price to pay for the motivation that a looming race will bring. If you don’t run, if you lose it, who cares? Forty bucks!

As for the motivation, it worked. But my body got in the way of consummating that motivation. This was a crash training program if ever there was one, and in the end, I crashed. After putting in a seventeen miler of only moderate strength a few weeks back, I knew I needed another long one, twenty minimum, twenty two preferred, to be anywhere close to ready. Instead, I spent the last two weeks barely running, save that sweet win at the Forrest 5K and some light workouts with the cross country team I coach, rather certain that I had at least half of a stress fracture. No long run, no certainty that things wouldn’t go snap, crackle, pop at some point. Now there’s a way to head into a marathon. What, are you crazy?

Well, yes, of course, but not that crazy. Those two weeks of rest gave me some relief from the pain and a reasonable confidence that my skeletal structure would hold up. So since I really didn’t care how fast or slow I ran the race (which is what I said publicly, but to an obsessive like me, that’s a bald-face lie; suffice to say this was as close as I could get to not caring), off I went to Bristol, New Hampshire for the fun. When asked my goal for the race, I simply answered, “Finish without anything breaking.” Simple goal. Walk on. Run marathon. Return in one piece.

After days of the remnants of a tropical storm passing through, Saturday dawned utterly gorgeous; brilliant sunshine, crisp air around fifty degrees, even a few bits of foliage not stripped from the trees by the passing storm. Gorgeous yes, but not perfect. Windy as all get up. Wicked windy. Nasty windy. And that ingredient, mixed with a wonderfully hilly course and my astoundingly fabulous training regimen, this walk-on marathon turned into one of the toughest I’ve run.

I’ll jump ahead here and tell you I loved this race. I love small town races in general. I love the attention from the staff from the race director on down, the casual atmosphere, the easy logistics. The folks working the finish line, med tent, and goodie table afterwards were all wonderful. The one-man band belting out Sweet Home Chicago as I was recovering from the finish line woozies – and though being helped to walk it off by a staffer, able to dance and sing along enough to give everyone a good laugh – was a perfect ending treat. And the folks at the water table at Shackett’s Market at mile twenty three, where I simply had to return afterward to bring home some famous homemade donuts to the home clan, were a joy to chat with. My thanks go out to all of them.

I say this ahead of time so you know that I’m not grousing about the imperfections. They come with the territory in small town races, and you accept them and enjoy anyway. And a typical imperfection – inconsistent mileposts – surfaced quickly. Sure, it was a hilly course, and yes, as noted, the wind was wicked and wild, but the variations that kept popping up on my mile splits were pretty hard to correlate to course conditions, which meant that I really wasn’t sure what I was running, whether I was being foolish, dog-slow, or what was really happening to my pace in the high miles with splits all over the map (see chart). Not that it really mattered, but it made it more interesting, more mysterious. And my suspicion was verified in the second half, where I found the distance between the half-marathon mileposts (which started out near the turnaround point) and the full marathon mileposts, which should have been a consistent tenth of a mile, varied considerably. Small town race. Loved it. Enjoy anyway.

To appreciate this adventure you have to visualize the course. It starts with two miles uphill, rising north out of Bristol, and continues north up the east side of Newfound Lake. There are plenty of sweet views across this gem of a lake, but few views of flatness other than the surface of the water. At eight and a half, it leaves the main road to cut west across the northern edge of the lake, and in doing so traverses the hilliest section, a series of jolts that include some Franconia-style painful downhills. Passing through a spot that can only evoke the word, “lovely”, Hebron Common, it hits an out & back to Sculpted Rocks, a cool geological oddity which we checked out on our drive-the-course tour back in August. Passing through Hebron again, one is treated to another significant collection of hills heading south along the west side of the lake before closing the loop and re-connecting to the outbound route to drop the last two miles back into Bristol.

Now apply that to the day at hand. Hills, hills, and more hills, and a stiff wind from the northwest. Nine miles north, a preponderance of uphill, and entirely into the wind. Despite per-mile variations induced by unpredictable mileposts, on average running sevens, not wicked fast, but not bad considering my awful training, quasi-injured state, and the conditions. The wind, the incessant wind. I’m churning north, longing for the turn, thinking I’ll be out of the wind…

Now, the astute among you are saying, “But wait a minute, you said it was a stiff wind out of the northwest, and you told me the course turned to the west.”

You’re smarter than I was. For some reason I was convinced that once we turned off the main drag, we’d be out of the wind. No accounting for lack of brains here. Maybe it was those pesky endorphins interfering with logic? In any event, we turned off at eignt-point-something, and turned west, smack into the wind again.

I should make a minor correction here. When I say we turned off, I’m exaggerating a bit. This was a small race, two hundred forty, and the lead ranks were sparse. Translation: It was a lonely race. After a couple of brief stints with companions in the early miles, by seven or so it was me, the howl of the wind, and an occasional spectator. I was in tenth place, and in tenth I would stay until seventeen. If not for the out & back section, where I got a view of the nine in front and a good deal of the field behind, it would have been lonelier still.

Thus followed a headwind struggle clear to the turnaround at Sculpted Rocks, fourteen miles in. And mile fourteen tossed in a nasty climb, to boot. But once the turn was made, watch out! Downhill, downwind, down went the pace. Man, those folks running the half marathon, which started up near the turnaround spot, had a heck of a day with a full-race-long windy kick in the pants. But of course I wasn’t running the half. Life just isn’t fair sometimes.

The wind carried me into the high teens, and then it was pretty much over. Having not run more than seventeen since Boston, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion what would happen. I was just pleased it held off as long as it did; after all, my calves had been threatening to cramp since ten. Before I hit eighteen, the fatigue set in and I started taking 40-second walk breaks, which surprisingly didn’t balloon my pace that badly, as I was still making good steam while running. Knowing the last two miles were downhill to Bristol, I told myself it was only a race to twenty four, then a free ride. By twenty three, the walk breaks stretched to 60-seconds and the miles came agonizingly slower, bursting over the eight-minute barrier, pushing nines. Twenty four finally arrived, and the downhill began, but cruelly brought little relief. Twenty six needed two walk breaks, the second coming when the woozies hit. After Wineglass, I simply don’t play games with the woozies. So what if a mile goes over nine? Beats a broken nose.

How is it we marathoners can endure such agony and leave with such great memories? There’s no denying that the last thirty minutes, no, perhaps even the last forty-five minutes of this race were awful. But I loved this race.

Somehow despite the extended eight-mile-long mighty struggle phase, I managed to lose only four places, landing fourteenth, and fourth master, though since the first master was second overall and took a top-three award, I scored the third-place master spot. Walk on, medal, go figure. And so marathon number twelve is in the books. Of my twelve, this was my fourth slowest at 3:15:56, but completely satisfying nonetheless. It wasn’t pretty; indeed, it was downright ugly in the high miles, but I walked on and turned in a Boston qualifier for 2012 (with fifteen minutes to spare, in case they tighten the requirements), taking the pressure off for next year.

And the funny thing is that the leg about which I was so worried never spoke up throughout the entire race, not even in the ugly high miles where all efforts at holding any sort of form degraded to total junk. It never hurt a whit after the race. A couple of days later I can feel it a bit, but it really does feel better than before (though yes, I will rest it now). Apparently medical science has found a new cure for injuries. Beat them silly.