Redemption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.