Not Alone in the Universe

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

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

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.