B Game

Bring your A-Game, they say, whoever they are. But sometimes you have to bring your B-Game. Or worse. And that’s not the end of the world, so long as you can still fire up a game to bring, especially as you get older and creakier by the day. 

Since last we met, a lot – and I mean a lot – has happened. A whole bunch of blog posts have been started, never finished, and never published. When famous people do that, three hundred years later someone finds the unfinished manuscripts, literary critics go wild, and Sotheby’s makes a small fortune auctioning off crinkled papers. Not likely in my case. More likely you didn’t notice. But a lot has happened, including, if I may, a bunch of A-Game races that came with stories all worth telling, had I only completed the task. Now they’re just old news. But a smattering of vignettes is worthy here, so… 

Never being too old to try something new and stupid, in July I tried Sleepless from Seattle racing. Having volunteered for over a decade and even been race director for our club’s big summer 10K, this year I figured it was finally time to sign up and race it, which I did. And the day after paying up, Dearest Spouse and I made our west coast plans to visit Dearest Offspring the Elder, plans that had us flying home overnight on race day. Let’s call it unfortunate planning. So, after some utterly sublime Pacific Northwest trail running, it was red-eye time, and no, I cannot sleep on planes, so the resulting sleep deprivation, multiplied by subsequent hours in the sweltering afternoon sun setting up for the race (still gonna’ volunteer, right?) ensured I looked and felt my best by starting gun time. This was not a new experience worthy of becoming a habit. 

In stifling heat and humidity I managed to win the Old Farts Division and set a couple records, and had the fun of looking utterly unhinged while shouting to course-side supporters that my One True Desire was to be horizontal. By the way, that beer in the parking lot offered up by a clubmate was probably the Most Sublime Beverage of the year. You know who you are, Sarah. Thank you. 

August served up two USA Track & Field New England Grand Prix races. These USATF races are basically Royal Ass Kickings since every ringer in New England shows up, but the competition inspires performance, and as such both came out rather pleasingly. Five miles at Bobby Doyle in Rhode Island, ten miles at the New Hampshire Ten on a brutally hilly course landed a few more club records along with some trademark Death Warmed Over finish photos. Inspired by chasing those records, I had to go back on the course at New Hampshire post-race to retrieve a few body parts that flew off near the end. 

And then in October came the USATF marathon championships at the Cape Cod Marathon. This event was my first marathon way back in 2005 and, notably, inspired creation of this blog. Returning eighteen years and nearly four hundred blog posts later was sweet. But the new course now runs the last five miles flat-out into the wind; why, oh why? Having burned five minutes off my Providence time, Dearest Spouse was surprised at my early arrival in downtown Falmouth, but even more surprised when my first words were, “Well, that was a train wreck!” based on the actual train wreck of the last five miles into the wind. Yes, it’s all perspective, but hey, another club record, and, go figure, third in the Old Farts at a USATF championship race. 

In short, it was a good run. A-Game, all of ‘em. It’s fun to hit a new age group. But then things went, shall we say, a little south. And the last two months have turned B-Game at best. 

Now, my club-mates would look at my recent results and say, hey, not bad at all. But I look at them and say, yeah, respectable, but not what’s possible. And thus we get to our point tonight: the reality of racing into your sixties. After all, continuing this adventure into advancing age is what this column is all about. The reality is that you run into headwinds, not just literally at Cape Cod, but figuratively from unexpected angles. And what happened in the last couple months was clearly an unexpected angle. So let me violate HIIPA rules and tell you a story. 

Three letters: UTI. Not being one to leave undefined acronyms hanging out there, for any of you who don’t recognize it, Urinary Tract Infection. You hear about your female friends having these. You don’t usually hear it from your male friends, unless they’re about eighty. You’re hearing it now. They suck. 

What do they do to you? Fever, chills, night sweats like you’ve never swam through (sleeping on towels), and ruining any semblance of decent training. Running? Sure. Running at any pace that will prepare you to toe the line to race? Not even close. 

How do you get them? Well, we’ll get to that. It has nothing to do with morality or exotic nations. 

Right about the time I took a flu shot and a COVID booster, strategically planned for the week after Cape Cod, life went downhill fast. The first couple day seemed like those shots knocked me for a loop; after all, I’d never done both at once, and though I’ve been Team Moderna throughout COVID, this time I had to go Team Pfizer for availability, so I figured that was the source of my distress. And this brings up one of the big problems in any human life, young or old. There is no control group on what’s going on inside your body. It’s a sample size of one. What would have happened to the Parallel Me who didn’t get those shots? 

But those micro-chip laden vaccines had nothing to do with it, and by the time I’d figured that out, many sweat-soaked bedsheets later, I was downright relieved to see those e-coli counts emerge from the pee cup and be told to start sucking down antibiotics. At least I knew what was going on. And things got better. For a while. And then they didn’t. You’re seeing this coming. Without getting graphic, it was ugly. Thirty seconds into any run, well, it was time to run into the woods…but ineffective. Yes, it was back, UTI Round Two. Essentially this meant six weeks of getting out to run, but never feeling good, never getting in any quality training. And I blamed it on the UTIs. But there was another angle.

We old guys have a weakness. It’s a grape-sized thingie that likes to swell up when we get old, keep us from peeing, and on occasion kills us (fear not, we’re not going there, but having lost a friend that way just a couple years ago, my head certainly did for a while). There’s an entire industry built around prostate meds, and while I’m pleased to be on very few meds compared to my age peers, my count is not zero; this is one place where I am compelled to support Big Pharma. 

There’s another thing, and that is, as a pharma advertisement that I saw probably thirty years ago said, but for some reason has stuck with me all that time, the pill you take was never tested. 

Before even starting Antibiotics Round Two in response to a lab test in which everything known to man appeared in my pee including strontium, PCBs, green paint, Dijon mustard, DEET,  and several other mysterious substances, one morning I very suddenly and magically felt better. After about seven weeks of agony. As in, like, wow, how did that happen? 

What happened was that the day before I’d shifted from one ninety-day batch of meds to the next, and discovered that the previous batch seemingly was no better than sugar pills. Useless. Having burned out one bottle and moved on to the next, the change was instantaneous. Overnight, everything was better. Cheap crappy meds, resulting, um, retention (sorry, not being scientific here), was almost certainly the cause of all of this… UTI One, UTI Two, weeks of misery and crappy running.

Am I pissed (pun intended)? You bet. But you can’t get time back. It happened. (For the record, the mail order pharmacy offered to refund my four bucks, like that would help.) And the result was that instead of returning to decent training after Cape Cod, what racing savvy I had faded into daily slow jogs. 

Which meant that on Thanksgiving, when I’d signed up for the Stow turkey trot, where I knew the course and more importantly knew it was certified and accurate and simply hoped to hit my pace from the Bobby Doyle five-miler from August… No dice. Did I win the Old Farts division? Yeah, but it wasn’t what I was shooting for. No strength, no zip in the legs, no hammer to put down. 

And a week ago at the Frosty half marathon that my local club opted to target, and which I signed up for the week after that body-parts-a-flyin’ New Hampshire Ten and anticipated great things, results, again, respectable. Second in the Old Farts. And a really fun day out with the buds. Not unhappy. But not what I’d hoped for. 

Both times I just hoped for a sliver of what went down in the summer races. But alas, neither were to be. Legs have no zip after two months of just-barely-out-there training. 

Bring your A-Game… and I did in July, August, and October. But Stow and Frosty? B-Game. 

Which brings us back to the philosophical aspect of this column, where I say, “So what?” Life is going to toss curve balls at you. Eventually one of them will bean you in the brain and it will be Game Over before you have a chance to say, “Game Over.” I have to admit that in the depths of my recent ordeal I had fears of much worse, and UTI diagnosis fell clearly in the, “Oh, just that,” category. As angering as it was to realize that yes, this was caused by someone’s serious negligence, that goes away when you realize you’ve figured out the cause and it isn’t the start of something seriously bad, and if the worst result is that I ran decent but not quite to target in the last couple races, I am seriously lucky. 

Because I only have a couple more decades to expect that to continue. I hope. 

You can’t bring your A-Game every day. Celebrate the B-Game days. Even the Cs and Ds. Because they’re still game days.

Vindication

Once again time escapes; it’s been a month since the event that spawns this tale, but if I’m doing my job, it’s a good story whenever it sees the light of day, and time should be irrelevant. After all, Hamilton had been dead for over two hundred years before Lin Manuel Miranda got around to telling his story, right? So I’ll try to weave a compelling tale of blame, redemption, and vindication, tied together by, of course, time, that’s worth ten minutes of your time. Maybe toss in some suspense, mysticism, and murder (Murder?!), just for intrigue.

Blame! For six months I’ve been vocally (yes, my clubmates sigh, very vocally) blaming the New York Road Runners and the New York City Marathon for what I considered to be a substantially suboptimal performance in the Big Apple last fall. That blame sprang from the many reasons I’ve documented on these pages which moved the needle from “there were a few issues”, typical for any race, to “I’m never going back”. Suboptimal wasn’t just an opinion but was quantified in a disappointing time, and though I’d told myself (and anyone who asked) before the event that time wasn’t important, that New York was simply a grand tour, an adventure finally achieved after ten years of almost comically not running, let’s be honest here. Yours truly doesn’t typically pay to go for a run and not care, at least somewhat, about time. In the back of my mind, I had a pretty solid view of what I expected. But it didn’t happen, and while I alone had to own it, I found plenty of really good reasons to blame New York.

Redemption! My inbred Catholic Guilt kicked in saying I should simply own it; plug my pie-hole, and not blame someone else. Besides, how could I claim I shoulda’ coulda’ woulda’ run “Time X” – all but for New York’s epic fails – when in fact I hadn’t run “Time X” in many years? Stand and deliver, or shut up. Cue the video feed: Providence Marathon, a few weeks back, I stood, and I delivered.

Vindication! I am vindicated. My guilt assuaged; my blame justified. New York, that one was indeed on you, because at Providence I ran “Time X” and then some. And rather decisively got back in the game.

Let’s not grow outside our shoe size though. As pleased as I was with the way the day turned out, slicing twenty-five minutes off the Tragedy of the Five Boroughs, I later ran into an old teammate from my Greater Boston days and learned that he, just as well ripened as I, eclipsed my Providence time by nearly half an hour at Boston. So much for being the fastest old fart in town. Not even close. Which reinforces that this story isn’t about a marvelous feat; it’s about that vindication, and confirmation that this racing-into-the-age-of-decrepitude game isn’t over. Not yet.

Suspense! Twenty-five minutes off New York sounds (and was) great, but having any idea of what time to expect in any marathon is a crap shoot at best. The funny thing about the marathon is that every one of them – every single one – is a mystery. You really have no idea. You can’t race them every other weekend like short races (if you are inclined to spend a lot on race entries). If you’re going to race a marathon, truly race a marathon, not just cover the distance, your body can only handle it a few times a year. And your fitness changes constantly. So each time you do it, you don’t know where you stand. And it’s worse if you’ve had a long break since racing one, which was the case for New York, and since that didn’t turn out to be much of a race, it was the case again this time.

Mysticism! Then again, if you’re into spirits and ghosts and things like that, there was an omen that gave a hint that the gods were smiling on us. I regularly devour the Washington Post online crossword puzzle, and one of their offerings is the “Mini Meta”, a series of six small puzzles throughout providing clues for and culminating in Saturday’s meta puzzle with a zig-zag answer. That week’s answer – on race eve? You can’t make this up. Providence. Seriously?

Enough sensational introductory words, on with the story!

New York was my return from a long marathon break, thanks to injuries and COVID, three and a half years, not counting the quasi-virtual-not-a-race Boston of ’20 (official, yes, it counts, but certainly not a race). Thus for New York I set my goal – the one I wouldn’t tell anyone about – conservatively. And missed it. I tanked early, around seventeen. Erase those New York problems (Blame!), and I figured I could reclaim about ten New York Minutes pretty easily. So, mental note, Providence goal – the one I told very few about – let’s reclaim those ten minutes. And then, maybe a bit more.

In the starting corral I conveniently found the pacer whose target would have delivered sixteen minutes ahead of that New York result. Ten minutes plus a little aspiration. Seemed reasonable, even though the day promised to be a lot warmer than anyone hoped (and it would hit the eighties by early afternoon – hot when I was out there, hellacious for those not already off the course, not to mention that the weeks leading up had been unusually cold so nobody was truly acclimated). I made quick friends with the pacer. Made friends with the those to be paced. Wondered if I’d hold that pace. Because, as I said, every one is a mystery (Suspense!) and you just don’t know.

OK, let’s go.

I never saw that pacer again. After Black Cat, back in March, where Mile One was a bit irrationally exuberant, this time I made a point of going out comfortably. After all, that race had been a mere twenty miles and I’d turned into burnt toast by eighteen; this one had those pesky extra six. And this time the start didn’t seem fast; on the contrary, people were flying past, making me wonder if I was sandbagging it. But even cruising carefully, my pacer was gone, apparently long behind me, and I didn’t care because I was comfortable. The Mile Two photo (thank you races who just give away the photos with the price of admission and spare us the incessant spam from the photo hawkers!) looks, well, comfortable. (Yes, non-marathoners are permitted to puzzle at that statement. Comfortable. Grin.) Pace angst alleviated, mile one clocked in about where I’d hoped, a shade slower than Black Cat with the hope of lasting a bit longer than Black Cat. And just having Black Cat as a comparison – well, priceless, and it went through my head how fortunate I was to have had club-mate Paul sell me his spare entry to that derby.

And then a funny thing happened on this day at the office. Nothing. There were no big events. No alarm bells. No crises. Just humming along. It brought back that old advertisement (which is worth watching!) from the eighties about the piston engine goes boing-ditty-boing-ditty-boing but the Mazda rotary engine goes mmmmmm…. I know you have to be of a certain age to appreciate that reference, but isn’t this column all about being of a certain age?

Up hills, down hills, click, click, click. The big hill at mile six I’d scoped out on a course preview with clubmate Sam a few weeks earlier? Less than ten seconds off mile one. The downhill on the far side of that one? About ten seconds quicker than mile one. The nasty sharp rise at twenty leading into the long climb to twenty-one, still a mere ten or eleven second lag. Training chits were being redeemed. The engine hummed. We (me and whoever happened to be alongside at any given moment) chatted idly while I ignored (or more accurately, managed) the heat, which intensified slowly but surely, and we soaked up the course, which really was lovely, especially the lilacs, oh my, the lilacs. On my death bed, let me inhale lilacs!

Dearest Spouse positioned herself at a nifty spot where we’d pass twice, first arriving from the east, then the west, and heading out first to the south, then the north, covering all four points on the compass. The first time, around mile ten, I was chatting up a fellow traveler who I’d find had later dopped some forty-plus minutes off our pace. The marathon will do that to you.

Shortly thereafter, I spotted my pacer, except it wasn’t the same pacer I’d met at the start. It was the guy ten minutes ahead. Not really certain it was a good idea to be not just sixteen but twenty-six minutes ahead of New York, I held back a bit. Brain, recalculate expectations. Really, should I be that far ahead? At New York I’d fallen just a minute and a half shy of re-qualifying for Boston so that was really the only “must notch” item on the list. Everything else was gravy. Avenge those ten minutes, then… Did this make sense? We weren’t even at the halfway mark. Was another New York style (is that thin crust?) mile seventeen crash coming?

But everything is relative. Twenty-six ahead of New York was still more than thirty behind where I was in the bad ol’ days, and the bad ol’ days weren’t so long ago. Brain said it’s wasn’t irresponsible to be in this neighborhood. So sure, let ‘er fly.

And the Mazda goes mmmmmm… Click, click, click. Post-race analysis would show this as one of the most consistent marathons I’ve run, even splits save a late (and small) blip which didn’t show until I stretched out the graph axes.

That pacer? I really couldn’t avoid catching him. And once in the fold of his flock, I’ve got to heap on the praise. He was the definition of a terrific pacer, chatty, encouraging, vocal at every mile marker, a pied piper leading his band of merry men and women. I was a few strides in front of his gang when we passed Dearest Spouse again at the Four Points at mile sixteen, and I stuck with our little posse up the slap-in-the-face at twenty and the climb to twenty-one, along the stretch of supreme ugliness (really the only unattractive spot on the course, otherwise, did I mention it was lovely?) from twenty-two onto the bridge back over the Seekonk River back towards downtown. (Seekonk! Home of what our club nicknamed the “Not the Murder Motel” where we bunked the night before, in contrast to the place they’d stayed for a previous race in the area, which apparently was the Murder Motel…but I digress…but I did tell you I’d wind murder into this somehow?) I only lost touch with Herr Pacer around the end of mile twenty-four when the last of several PUDs (Pointless Ups and Downs) finally started to do me in.

Perspective here. Fading a bit in mile twenty-five is nothing to complain about. For that matter, even twenty-five clocked in within ten seconds of mile one.

And the Mazda goes mmmmmm…

Sure, twenty-six was ugly, but it’s supposed to be. And Providence had a special treat in its back pocket, a short, sharp climb halfway up Statehouse Hill a tenth before the finish. Nasty indeed, and well played, Providence, well played.

I may have lost my pacer (this time ahead of me) but lost less than a minute off his clip by the finish. So, twenty-five minutes ahead of New York rather than twenty-six, no complaints. Dearest Spouse, not expecting that outcome, had hung around at sixteen to cheer on our clubmates, and barely made the finish to witness those iconic final Death-Warmed-Over moments. Admittedly I did see it as a possibility, but kept it quiet. And I doubted it back around eleven, but got over it. The marathon is a mental game. Yes, you have to be able to physically do it, but you also have to be able to convince yourself that you can, and stop yourself from stopping yourself.

It took a few minutes to resolve the mystery of whether there were any other old farts ahead of me, the answer to that being a satisfying no. The next closest sixty-something was seven and a half minutes back, so yes, first race as a sixty-something, chalk up a win. We’ll take it. But more so than the win, which was sweet, was the redemption. Since the knee injury back in ’19, the resulting gap in racing that spanned into and beyond the COVID era, doubts were sown and grown. That Sunday in Rhode Island reminded me that it ain’t over till I decide it’s over. Take that to your bank of inspiring thoughts. Don’t let yourself accept that it’s over.

And as for that vindication? Well, New York was hot, but Providence was hotter – less humid perhaps, but full sun the whole way. New York had its bridges for so-called hills, Providence had a few decent climbs (mile six to seven alone eclipsing anything on the New York course) as well as a number of those pesky PUDs. So as for conditions, let’s call it a wash. But unlike New York, Providence didn’t screw up on even a minor, let alone an epic, scale. (Granted, Providence’s logistics paled in comparison to New York, but what they had to do they did well, save perhaps for a curiously long course). That alone bought me those ten minutes. Vindication, indeed.

The rest we’ll chalk up to not letting the fat lady sing. You age, you hit a milestone (sixty!), you inevitably have gaps, injuries, and you doubt what you can still do. Don’t. Just don’t. Go out and test it and see what happens. Take it back. Oh yeah, and let yourself go mmmmmm…

The Worst Possible Day

Sixty?  How the hell did that happen, and why wasn’t I notified?  And how did weeks go by before this little ditty saw daylight?  Time is flying, so I must be having fun, right?  Truth be told, when any of these articles make their way out of the cage matters to me but it’s irrelevant to you so long as I repay your donated ten minutes with a good story, right?  So I’ll give that a shot.

I’ve always preached that one of the joys of this sport is the concept of age groups, which give you the opportunity to start all over again with a fresh new game as that time flies.  And as one of those new games – the sixties – edged closer, two things were apparent:  first, that once that day came, I should get out there and race, and second, that the last thing I’d want to do just prior to that big day would be to race.  After all, why spin your wheels getting beat up by a crowd almost universally younger than you when you can wait a few days and beat up a crowd almost universally older?

I blew it on both ends.  I raced on the worst possible day.  And to make it worse, twice since then, the universe has thrown races literally at my feet and I haven’t raced.  So much for my own advice.

Less than a week after the big day – a day so advanced that it doesn’t even qualify me for AARP, been there, done that long ago – a half-marathon paraded itself, not once, but twice (out-and-back) past the door of the fine abode in which Dearest Spouse and I had arrived the previous night.  And only two weeks after that, another half-marathon paraded itself within a block of the door of Dearest Offspring the Younger’s new home, with enough turns in the neighborhood that with a brief walk, that one passed twice as well.

And I wasn’t in either of them.

But the day before?  The day when I rang up at fifty-nine years, three-hundred-sixty-four days?  Less than twenty-four hours prior to the moment of my arrival (the one time I didn’t complain about showing up at four in the morning)?  The day of several well-known races in New England that I was determined not to race?  The Worst Possible Day?  Yeah, I raced on that one.

It occurred to me to try to find a technicality.  Surely there must be some way to wrap legalese around the whole Gregorian versus Julian calendar thing and claim I’d in fact hit sixty a day early.  No dice.  Even a careful reading of the history of this astronomical mess wouldn’t get me out of that hole any more recently than about a hundred years ago in Turkey (the last country to switch off the Julian calendar, in 1927).  But hey, September of ’52 – 1752, that is – when the United States switched over and skipped over half the month must have been a hoot, though we wouldn’t have had a Labor Day parade.

OK, so I wasn’t sixty yet.  Besides, why rush it?  Ninety is just around the corner anyway, right?

But let’s work backwards.  The first swing-and-a-miss came at the Jersey Shore, two towns down from, and a short boardwalk stroll up to, the famed Asbury Park, during a reunion with the twisted minds I had the pleasure of hanging out with back in college, the crew that gave Rensselaer its infamous underground satire publication known as The Polemic.  The true joy of the weekend was that they haven’t changed, just as twisted, just as much fun, and well worth renewing those ties.  But the disappointment of the weekend was seeing all those runners parading past the beach house.  Twice.  To borrow from The Boss, the cops may have finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better than they do, but she didn’t send her clairvoyance ahead of time so that I’d know there was a race going on.

My angst at missing out (that’s AOMO, not FOMO, mind you) was multiplied when I checked the results and found that based on my half-marathon split from the previous week’s twenty-miler (the one I shouldn’t have run, remember?), I would have taken my shiny new age group by over five minutes.  And this was no slouch of a race, it was two thousand strong, just in the half.  But hey, the weather was dreadful, chill off the ocean, rain, and wind, wind, and did I say wind, so I didn’t really want to be out there.  But, well, let’s be honest.  Sure I did.

Then it happened again two weeks later.  This time I had a couple days’ notice; had I been paying attention, I’d have had more, but context is everything.  I’m sure that USA Track & Field announced the national masters championship half-marathon long ago, but who knew I’d be in Syracuse that weekend?  Once I knew my plans, that last-minute email with last minute top-o-rack pricing, and uncertainty of schedule during our brief visit to Offspring the Younger, well, swing and a miss, strike two.  As it turned out, we did walk the block to the course, plus the extra half mile to see a second pass, and while I wouldn’t have won this one by a long shot, disasters aside I’d have likely hit the top ten percent of similarly-ripened old farts in a quasi-national-class race.  AOMO redoubled.

Coulda’.  Woulda’.  Shoulda’.  But hey, they were fine weekends anyway.  And I’ve still got one hundred and nineteen months of being sixty-ish.

But weeks earlier with merely one day left of being fifty-ish, the equation added up differently.  Why race on the very last day of your class and have to go toe-to-toe with folks ten years your junior?  Perhaps because it’s that much more fun if you can proverbially kick them in the shins?  Or you could say, rather than avoiding that day like the plague, why not give it one last shot?

There’s an easy way not to race:  just don’t sign up.  When race day gets closer and the price goes up, if you’re like me and of frugal mind, well, who wants to pay last minute prices (read: Syracuse)?  But even those best laid plans can be foiled.  When a club-mate mentioned he had entered one of the races of the day, the Black Cat Twenty-Miler in Salem, Massachusetts (there’s also a Ten-Miler, those who race the twenty are just twice as stupid; having finished the ten-mile course, being dumb enough to turn around and do it again) and having changed his plans, he couldn’t use it.  The race organizers were pleasant and liberal with their transfer policies, so in a fit of stupidity I bought him out of his bib.  Yep, let’s race on the worst possible day.

It wasn’t entirely on a whim.  With no Boston Marathon on my calendar year, I’ve instead targeted a smaller regional marathon a few weeks further out.  A twenty-mile race would be a great shake-out.  It was just a really bad day to do it.

Being, as noted, of frugal mind, I’ve never been one to sign up and pay for a race simply to cover the distance.  Maybe if I lose my mind enough to join my ultramarathoning friends that will become a goal, but for now, if I want to run twenty miles, I just run twenty miles and don’t pay for the pleasure of doing it.  If I’m going to pay, I’m going to put in an effort.  So even though this race was intended as a shake-out, I figured it too warranted a shake-out.  And said shake-out, two weeks prior on the Boston course (wrapping up with good ol’ Johnny Kelly and compadre Dan) turned in the pace I targeted for the race, so, um, revise plans, I guess.  That’s what shake-outs are for.

Plans revised, our merry band including a very large club contingent headed for Salem, and when the festivities commenced it was now perfectly rational to head out on that sunny, slightly breezy morning at a pace that would have seemed a bit hot only two weeks prior.  And it was my intention to head out a bit hot.  After burning off adrenaline in the opening blocks, it was time to settle into the hard work – not just the physical, but the mental work of remembering how to race these distances.  The New York Marathon, for its various failings, wasn’t a good test, so really this was virgin ground after that long injury and COVID gap.  What kind of pace can I burn?  What can I sustain?  And though I didn’t admit it to anyone, the truth was I hadn’t written off my age group.  Even on that last day.  After all, it’s a (paid-for) race.

Black Cat isn’t a huge event, about five hundred total, sixty-forty on the ten milers versus the stupid folk, but since all run the first ten together, it’s big enough that you really have no idea where you stand.  Save a small loop in the first mile, it’s an out-and-back, and for the feeble-minded, another out-and-back.  Approaching the first turnaround, you see the leaders coming at you, and you wonder, ten or twenty, and how old does that dude look?  And what about the couple of fifties guys in my own club who I know are pretty quick?  Where were they at the start?  Now, wait a minute, don’t get ahead of yourself, you’re still the old man of the class here.  But seriously, how old does that dude look?

The turnaround – somewhere around five and a half – was a bit odd in that it really wasn’t there.  No cone, no sign, just an oddly placed water stop (at the turnaround?).  I shouted out, “Where’s the turnaround?” and got the very strange answer, “Where ever!”.  Um, really?   In a race?  That, and the oddly mismatched mile-markers – four and fourteen, seven and seventeen, and so on – all spaced a quarter-mile apart, led me to believe something was a bit amiss and it was; the course came up short; but otherwise the organizers ran a fine event (remember that liberal transfer policy!) (and food, food, plenty of food!).

But that aside, I couldn’t figure where I stood at the turnaround.  Nor could I be sure who was behind me, or how far, since again, tens and twenties, cats and dogs, Hatfields and McCoys, all mixed together and all on the other side of the road outside of my range of visual acuity.  But hey, I’ll figure it out on the second lap, right?

Meanwhile, around mile seven a clubmate crept up on my shoulder, or should I say someone crept up, as I had no idea who it was at that moment.  All I knew was something gasped and wheezed something along the lines of, “How the hell are you going to do that for another ten miles?”.  Before I realized who it was and realized he knew I was going twenty while he was trying to finish ten before hitting his expiration date, I responded vaguely, “I have no idea, it’s a voyage of discovery.”  Poetic I suppose, but I really had no idea what would happen in the second period.  Truth was, I was surprising myself with the steady, and still somewhat hotter than expected, pace. 

The thought of gauging my place on the second time around was a fine idea that had no legs either.  Approaching the second turnaround, again the leaders were obvious, but again, how old does that dude – going the other way, on the other side of the road – really look?  Then a new twist, the “sunshine starters” – the slower folks they allow to start an hour early, got mixed in.  You’d think you could tell the difference between a race leader and a sunshine jogger but after the first ten or so fast folks, it’s not so clear.  Some of those leaders slow down.  And some of those sunshiners have spurts of motivation.  I resigned myself to having no idea where I stood, but taking solace in the fact that that slightly hot pace was holding up.

Two hundred twenty-milers get pretty spaced out and lonely by the end, but after a painful last couple of miles (they should hurt, it’s a race, remember?) I came up on, well, how old is that dude?  At that point I didn’t care, take no chances, take no prisoners, take that dude down, and I did.  News flash, he wasn’t fifty-ish, it didn’t matter.  News flash, I didn’t care, it felt good.  And news flash, sure, I would’ve won the sixties by over twenty minutes, but guess what?  I wasn’t sixty.  I was fifty, and got beat by about ten minutes, but kicking all the rest of the fifties in the shins to take second wasn’t too disappointing.  On the worst possible day to race.

 

Eighty-Five Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s an opportunity out there.

Loose Ends Department

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

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

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

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

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

Next, how about the seeding and the resulting traffic?

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

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

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

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

So no, I didn’t imagine that, either.

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

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

So no, I didn’t imagine any of this.

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

Fifth Time’s A Charm

Say something positive, she said, after hearing my rantings over all the things that went wrong at Sunday’s New York City Marathon. As usual, Dearest Spouse is right. Stay positive.

Positive: I failed to break the world record. I finally ran this thing. It took five tries (the bib on my back proved it), and you may recall my previous post where I posited that should I miss on this fifth try, zero for five just might be a record. But the record of futility was not to be. It happened. 

Positive: The odyssey through the five boroughs that is the New York City Marathon is an epic journey, an unparalleled experience, a bucket list event. It’s an entirely different character from Boston, which leads you from the Hinterlands to the Big City; this one is a journey through cultures and neighborhoods and cityscapes that are perpetually changing and delighting the eye (in most cases). Starting on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, astounding in scale when you’re not in a vehicle (and amusing as the EZ-Pass gantry keeps flashing as it photographs all those runners without transponders), through Brooklyn’s skyline which dazzles like Emerald City with vistas of soaring towers perfectly aligned to the avenues, through Queens over the 59th Street Bridge, which, despite what the others will tell you, is NOT a significant hill (nor was the Verrazano for that matter), to the almost hominess of the brief stretch through the Bronx, nothing spectacular, just fine folk cheering you on till you cross the Last (****ing) Bridge, and on to the dramatic finish in Manhattan and Central Park. This was something I had to do, and it was an amazing day. 

Positive: I returned to racing not only for the first time since COVID (not counting the virtual Boston), but also since the injuries of the summer prior. And yeah, I’ve still got this, even if I am a hell of a lot slower now. I remembered all that tribal knowledge gained over the years of managing heat and water and pace and all that jazz, and the marathon racing mindset (even if slow and not truly racing) came right back. I loved being back in that zone. 

And then, also Positive: The COVID test I took Thursday morning. Yep. Those 50,000 friends I hung out with Sunday? Apparently not all of them had my best interests in mind. My two-and-three-quarter-year streak of avoiding the ‘rona has ended. Symptoms are mild, no major worries – went for a run, did yard work, hacked up a lung. I should’ve known when they blasted out New York, New York at the start that they were singing, “Start spreadin’ the germs…” 

So I’ve done my duty to go positive. But there were a whole bunch of things that were positively not positive, two of which seriously impacted the outcome, one of those being, well, inexcusable. I can’t tell the tale without going, um, let’s say, anti-positive. 

Despite my complaints about certain aspects of the Boston Marathon over the years, I have to say I’m spoiled. The Boston Athletic Association has this game figured out, or maybe it’s just Dave MacGillivray we have to thank. The New York Road Runner’s Club’s execution of the New York City Marathon? For an event billed as the largest marathon, period, an event that has been staged for over fifty years, I expect you folks have the big things figured out. Minor flaws I let slide. But…what happened Sunday wasn’t minor. 

First things first: I will never ever ‘dis’ the volunteers. Thousands of them. Every one giving it their all. Every one of them awesome. I thank them. I praise them. Chalk up another positive. 

But the professional organizers who hung me and thousands of my compatriots out to dry and hamstrung many of our race performances? Thumbscrews for you. Inexcusable dereliction of duty. 

That’s a pretty serious charge there, so let’s go into it. In New York, you can reach the start on Staten Island by taking a bus from mid-town Manhattan or by finding your own way to the tip of the island and taking the ferry, which sounded like more fun (there are other options, but we’ll simplify). Off the ferry it’s a twenty-minute shuttle bus to the starting village. Or at least it’s supposed to be. 

To this point, my day was going swimmingly. Awake? Early (even slept well). Out of the hotel? Early. On the subway? Train rolled in as I cleared the turnstile. Ferry? Again, early, slated for the 7:00 but on board the 6:15. The ride? Phenomenal, hanging out on the rail in a mild breeze, the company grand, the views of the city and the Statue of Liberty divine, our Coast Guard escort showing off with speed-boat joy-ride loop-de-loops (awesome pic courtesy of fellow runner and ferry-mate Lily!), what a trip! Docked at Staten Island, all is well. 

And then it all went to hell. 

I struggle to understand what came next. There simply was no plan at the far end. And it’s not like they haven’t done this so many times before. Who was asleep at the wheel? And why have we heard nary a peep of apologies since? 

We walked off the boat into an unorganized mass of humanity stretching a city block and a hundred people deep. No lines, no order, no guidance, no assurance you’d ever get out. On the far edge of this mass, a string of buses would pull in with no defined stopping or loading points and the mass would surge. After several surges, the mass morphed from pleasant to so tightly compressed that you couldn’t squat to rest or stretch your legs, let alone sit. The clouds burned off and we broke out in sweat, dehydrating before even arriving. Everyone tried to be polite, but order didn’t simply break down, it never existed. Another string of buses, we’d shove forward a foot, with forty yards to go. But with no order on the loading edge, no lanes, no safety barriers, just a swarming mass, even the buses had a hard time slipping in, compounding the situation. We found ourselves jammed hip to hip, far more intimate than even friends should be. Runners fruitlessly raised hands yelling, “Wave One” or “Wave Two” and tried to slice through to board, and we tried to oblige, but it just wasn’t possible; they missed their starts and had to join later waves and fight the traffic, oh the traffic, we’ll get to that part of the story, trashing their goals. Still having a mask in my pocket from the subway ride and for the bus, at some point I realized this was no longer an “outdoors” situation and I donned it, knowing I’d missed any window to avoid COVID exposure. It’s no surprise I’m now coughing, popping Paxlovid, and have a voice made for late-night radio. 

Two. Solid. Hours. 

Two hours standing jammed crammed baking trashing my legs, wobbly and fatigued before I finally boarded a bus. Having started the morning early on all counts, I stumbled into the starting village a mere ten minutes before my corral was scheduled to load, hyper-fatigued, having missed pre-race nutrition and hydration (in part due to the odd layout of the village where water was hard to find, but to be fair, the starting corral system was phenomenal), and trying hard to compartmentalize what had just happened into the “it must have been a bad dream” box while my legs and body quivered. 

Let’s back up for a moment and recall that over the last few years, I slipped from rather competitive to entirely not. But over this past year, I was starting to feel pretty good again. While I never expect to return to the low-three-hour range, never mind the old sub-three days, I came to New York with no public goals but a back-of-the mind thought that I could probably notch a qualifier to return to Boston. And sure, the forecast was for too warm, but experience pays, I could manage that (and I did). But I didn’t expect to have to manage being wiped out before the race started. 

But then we’re walking onto the Staten Island Expressway, and who cares? Start spreadin’ the news! I’m leavin’ today! I want to be a part of it! New York, New York! To hell with all that came before, we’re running across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and I’m in geeky engineer heaven, staring up at the towers, scoping the drop off the side to the harbor, humanizing the normally violently vehicular space. This supposed biggest hill, which truly rises to about two hundred and fifty feet, is so gradual that as a born-and-bred hill runner, I don’t even notice. My first mile split sucks, but that’s more due to traffic than the fact that I’m rising to the top of the bridge. 

Ah yes. Traffic. Problem number two charged to the New York City Marathon, and, to be fair, many of its participants. Because yes, there are fifty thousand people you have to get through the streets of New York, and that’s hard, so there are a couple of things you do. 

For starters, crowd control. There is not an inch of the Boston Marathon where the crowd impinges on the race. In contrast, there were numerous places in New York where crowds didn’t know what the curb meant and nobody was assigned to tell them. The fans were wild, loud, supportive, multi-cultural, inspiring, fantastic. But they didn’t seem to realize that we really needed those streets. In places the course was no wider than a lane and a half, if even that. It felt like the running of the bulls in Pamplona. 

Second, revisit the self-seeding system. This is hard, and I’m not sure what the answer is; maybe, with my big-city-marathon experience limited to Boston, which is based on qualifier times, maybe I’m just not used to being in the masses of a major marathon? Narrow lanes wouldn’t be a big deal if most everyone was moving along, but that wasn’t the case. 

Since you’re seeded on your self-predicted time, it would seem that never has there been a group of people more out-of-touch with their abilities than the participants of this marathon. I can’t quite fathom how so many of those seeded around or ahead of me were so slow – nor can I fathom the numbers of walkers, even early on, and how many of them seemed to have no clue to move out of the center of the course. At some points such as heading up the 59th Street Bridge, I’d estimate ninety percent of the field was walking. Sure, it was warm, and sure, that impacts some people differently than others, but that doesn’t explain what I saw. 

The numbers were staggering, as was the impact. Long-time readers know I try to avoid quoting numbers; this is about telling a story, not numbing you with stats. But numbers tell the story here. Consider that the time I forecast, which was only a few minutes slower than what I ran, slotted me for a bib in the mid-twenty-eight-thousands (out of about sixty thousand bibs). But I finished around seventy-five-hundredth (out of nearly forty-eight thousand finishers), a rough gain of twenty-one thousand places from start to finish. Of course, many started in different waves, so the more accurate measure is that I finished at about fourteen-and-a-half-thousandth based on (first wave) gun time, or in other words, I passed fourteen thousand people. If you do the math, that’s one person every second, and even if you assume a bunch of unassigned bibs and no-shows, both likely, you could drop that to passing three folks every four seconds, a rather insane amount traffic. 

In short, I was weaving around someone roughly every second. 

Layer that atop the crowd control issue, toss in more than a few sight-impaired runners with triple-wide two-guide entourages (don’t get me wrong, those folks are amazing and I don’t bemoan their guides, I bemoan the narrow course), and there were places where I was literally stuck. This race became a twenty-six-mile game of tag, deking left, swooping right, surging into gaps, backing off from blocks, every few strides. Exhausting! 

Alright, I hear you saying, you can’t blame the race for runners being out-of-touch with their inner gazelles, and you’re right. This is, to be fair, hard to fix in a marathon where most do not have to qualify. But may I suggest, dear organizers, that no matter how a runner gets into your race, if they can’t provide an actual half- or full-marathon time (just for seeding, not for entry), maybe you don’t entirely trust them to make it up themselves. Provide guidance, which I don’t recall seeing during the sign-up process. Maybe extrapolate from their ten-kilometer time. I really don’t have a good answer, but try something, because what you’ve got doesn’t work. 

But let’s move to the third traffic issue: And this one’s entirely on you, New York. 

New York rightly welcomes “streakers” – those who have finished a large number of previous New York Marathons. They’re obvious, they wear back bibs with their finish count, which is great. But New York puts them up front, even in the first wave. Ask anyone who has completed thirty-something of any race, and after you notice that they’re well ripened, you’ll hear them tell you they’ve slowed down and shouldn’t be up front. Hey, I’ve had my first corral days too, but guess what? I’ve slowed down and I shouldn’t be up front, either, no matter how many times I’ve run a given race. Many of these folks looked like they weren’t going to make it another block. And there were a surprisingly large number of them. More obstacles that just didn’t have to be. 

I know I’m sounding like the elitist, but… passing three people every four seconds on an unnaturally narrow course. Let that sink in. 

Adding this up, the pre-race bus melee leg trashing followed by agonizing and energy sapping unnecessarily thick and funneled traffic from start to finish meant my zone of solid performance ended about five miles earlier than it should have, around seventeen rather than in the twenties. Shortly after meeting Dearest Spouse on First Avenue (best. picture. ever.) (and about the only open part of the course), both calves announced they were really pissed off by all this extracurricular punishment and started twinging. With nine still to go, knowing that twinges beget full on cramps, I had to back off despite having plenty in the cardio bank. That outside stab at a Boston re-qualifier faded, save one last push near the end to try to reel it back in, which did in fact lead to a brief full-on calf seizure.

One might say you can’t draw a straight line from one of these events to another, but, well, yes, you can.

But let’s finish this by going back to positive. I wasn’t in any way unhappy with the outcome. Crossing the line and knowing that the rigors of the marathon were reduced to a good day’s work is a feeling I can’t deny is deeply satisfying. I’d made the tour, soaking in the grand and the obscure along the way. And after the race (did I mention the fans were, other than crowding the course, amazing?), strolling through the streets of Manhattan (which Dearest Spouse navigated like a pro and found me easily), I was truly heartened by the support of the city. We had about forty blocks’ walk back to the hotel, and on almost every streetcorner New Yorkers congratulated, extolled, fist-bumped, or in some way expressed their adulation. Thank you, New York, that almost makes up for the COVID!

Bucket list: Check, done, number thirty-two in the books. 

Repeat list: Nah. 

Short Takes 

Personal Worst: Not counting the virtual Boston of 2020, which was an official marathon, but I just can’t call a race, this was my slowest marathon. Yet interestingly on an age graded basis, it was only close to my slowest, edging a post-injury Boston and my very first one at Cape Cod. So in other words, seventeen years later I’m back where I started. 

It’s Just Not the Same Game: I’m used to Boston, where the time I ran would have me soundly crushed in the results. In New York, it put me at the top twelve percent in my age group, and I’m in the last year of that age group. It’s just a different world. 

Bad Vibes? Really, No Vibes: Part of the fun of a marathon is chatting it up with your fellow runners. While we did that a-plenty through the pre-race ordeal and again in the post-race walk-off, I’ve never experienced a less social crowd in-race. Part of the problem was that I was blowing by nearly everyone around me. Of the small subset near my pace, far too many were buried in their ear-pods and oblivious to all around them, something I highly frown upon. Of the remainder, several just didn’t respond when I tried to start up a conversation. Which makes it all the more notable that the ONE runner I had any decent chat with starting on the 59th Street Bridge and heading up First Avenue, Johan from the Netherlands, ended up in the shot that Dearest Spouse took on First. I was able to track him down and was pleased to hear he ran a personal best. 

It Was Only Us, Really: It's worth noting that those who used other offered transit options to the start had no idea what we ferry folks had just lived through. 

By The Way, Mile Markers Matter: Yeah, one more gripe. It didn’t surprise me when I missed the six- and seven-mile markers, as I often miss markers (and New York’s were annoyingly right on top of water stops, so taking a split while navigating water stop traffic, not the best arrangement). As such I expected the split on my watch at mile eight to look like three miles. Instead, it looked like about two and a half. There was no way that number made sense, and there was no possibility I’d have taken that split if there wasn’t a mile marker, so, um, yeah, what’s with that? Missed nine, so let’s find ten and I can reset my mental pace with easy divide-by-ten math. And there it is on the left side, the ten-mile marker, click the watch! Wait, what? Ten seconds later, there’s ten again, this time on the right side (and if you’re thinking, New York has three course groups, green, blue, and yellow, this was two miles after they merged, so that wasn’t it). Two ten-mile markers, ten seconds apart? Why is this so hard? 

You Call This Recovery? Knowing we’d be kicked out of our hotel Monday morning long before our afternoon train, we packed in backpacks to go mobile. Mine grew obscenely and probably weighed in at twenty-five to thirty pounds (not that Dearest Spouse’s wasn’t significant also), and with that behemoth on my back, somehow our brief city stroll turned into an eight-plus-mile odyssey. 

Why Tell Us? Tell New York Road Runners: You survived my moaning. Why am I telling you, not them? Well, the post-race survey arrived Tuesday. Good, I thought, I can unleash about the bus fiasco. Nope, it was all about, “What did you think of our sponsors?” Seriously. Nothing about the race itself. Just about the coin. Sad.

Going For the World Record

When I was a kid, we would actually read the Guinness Book of World Records. There was always a copy around the house and I seem to recall we’d actually buy a new one now and then, expecting to see new and interesting factoids, yet it seemed each version had the same creepy picture of the guy with several-feet-long fingernails (which, with the birth of the Internet, is no longer shocking of course). Sis may recall all of this differently, but it matters not since this paragraph is, after all, just a set-up.

Because I’m going for what I figure must be a world record. I’m certain it’s not in the aforementioned book. But it has to be a record. And I’ll be very happy if I fail in my attempt.

People try for years to get into the New York City Marathon. Year after year they enter the lottery, they get turned down, they try again, they get dinged again. I, on the other hand, have had a different sort of New York problem: I keep getting in, but I’ve still never run the race. Not Did-Not-Finish, mind you. Did-Not Start. Did-Not-Show-Up.

Four times. How many people can say that? And now I’m going for a fifth.

I’m in again, and if I don’t run, well, seriously, can you think of anyone who’s been registered to run New York five times and has never run the race? That’s gotta’ make the Fred Lebow edition of the Guinness book. But as noted, I’ll be happy if I fail in this attempt because, hey, after all, it would be cool to finally run New York.

For the record, I’ve never had to deal with the lottery. My entries have always started as a qualifier – for which there aren’t all that many slots in New York, but they do exist. And from there they’ve all gone south in one way or another. First time, skipped due to an injury. Then came Hurricane Sandy, but I took the refund rather than the deferral (yet they still sent me shirts and medals – very sweet of them!). Third try, another one skipped due to another injury, though that time I took a deferral, which landed me in the next edition – my fourth try – which was body-slammed by COVID. For that one I took yet another deferral and, fighting injuries at the time, pushed it out a year to this year’s race. And whaddaya’ know, along comes the registration window and I am finally feeling like I might make it marathon distance by fall. Plus, as I was pondering whether it made sense to shell out another New-York-sized entry fee, it occurred to me that I’d opted not to take the refund the last time, so when the invitation came in, it rang up at zero dollars. Two words: Saw-weet! So here we go, attempt number five. I waltz into either Central Park or the record books at oh-for-life.

Now, I hear you saying, what’s all this talk about marathons? Didn’t you walk away from Boston just a few months ago? Haven’t your injuries of late pretty much hinted that marathons might not be the best idea for a frequent hobby? Yes, I hear you saying that. And yes, I did walk away from Boston, including my continuous streak, which means it’s now harder for me to get back into Boston. And yes, going back to the old days of three marathons a year are probably not the best medicine, but hey, now and then…

And besides, you’re missing the point. After a few years of struggling with all sorts of injuries – my last race was in the fall of nineteen and resulted in a torn meniscus, followed the next summer by more injury struggles that led to far more cycling than running (which, in the first year of COVID was just fine with me), and followed by yet another summer of barely running – well, after all that, I’m finally mostly back in one piece. I’ve put in a few consecutive months of decent training, and while I’m still sucking wind, I’m actually starting to feel like a runner again. In short, I’m a few years older but I’m not dead yet (and still looking in awe of our clubmate “TB76” who’s still running strong and inspiring us at yes, that age).

At this point, my perspective is entirely different. I might well compete again, but I don’t have to. Those “lost years” of injury fog – which, I note, weren’t lost at all, due to the cycling and lots of hiking which notched a few lifetime goals – notched me up a few years but also in the age grading tables, which have always been my measure of reality. You can’t just compare today’s pace to five years back and lament, because your tires have five more years on them. And using those beloved tables, even yesterday’s training run, had it been a race, would have ranked with some of my lower-end ten-miler races from years back. So my wind-sucking of today isn’t really that bad. And next year, when I hit a new age group, well, I’ll never say never, it could be fun to seriously toe the line again. Because Dearest Spouse thinks I don’t have enough award crap in my office already (not).

But as noted, I don’t have to compete, I can just enjoy. I’m loving just going for the runs. Our club runs have never been more fun, because as for pace, well, I just don’t care, it’s just great to be out with friends (COVID sort of taught us that, you think? …and it also taught us that if you didn’t run today, who really cares if you shower?). Really, as for the marathon thing, other than knowing I have to remind myself how I used to keep going for twenty miles, the rest doesn’t matter.

So, New York won’t be like the marathons of old, tweaking and tuning and fretting the training, the gear, the logistics, the everything just to get it all right for that great time. It won’t be a body-punishing death-warmed-over struggle to shave off a couple more minutes. I’m just going for a run. I’m going to soak up the five boroughs. I’m going to see a million New Yorkers. I might even, at the suggestion of my native New Yorker running buddy the Brooklyn Barrister, even do something as cheesy as putting my name on my shirt just to rile up the crowd and have a little – no, scratch that – a lotta’ fun. I’ll get there when I get there. And if I waltz into Central Park instead of the record books under the category of Non-Completion, it will in fact be a waltz.

Remind me of that so I remember to do a little dance step over the finish line.

State of the Unicorn

There comes a time to walk away. There also comes a time to accept that it’s OK for someone else to walk away. I’m not running the Boston Marathon this year. No unicorn this year. Don’t ask me to convince you that I know what I’m saying. I know exactly what I’m saying. Yes, I’m qualified for this year’s race, and yes, I’m entered (and paid for it), and no, I’m not showing up.

This ends a fourteen-year run of qualifying and running every year. It ends my ten-year-streak status that gets me in with a simple qualifying time rather than having to make the time plus the ‘cut-off’ (which makes qualifying harder, being over seven minutes this year). It ends a chapter of my life that frankly, I never expected to happen in the first place, but it was grand, it helped define me, and it will never leave me. Hella’ run.

I’m fine with it. But it’s become clear to me that some of you I’ve spoken with might not be fine with it. Let me be blunt: please get over that. You need to be fine with me being fine with it. Stop being amazed. Stop trying to talk me out of this. I’m thrilled that I’ve had this experience. Be thrilled with me. I’m not dying. I’m good.

First and most importantly, my body says no. Too many parts are saying that it just doesn’t make sense to pile on that additional wear and tear. From here on, I run for fun. I run for joy. I run when I can without too much ensuing damage. But the “hinges” (as a friend I hadn’t seen in years referred to them the other day) are requesting that I don’t punish them further at the moment just to cover the twenty-six into Boston for the fifteenth (official) time. I just don’t need to.

That’s the second part: I’ve nothing to prove. I’m not going to run fifty of these, or forty, or even twenty-five. Any of those numbers are a grand achievement. But so is fourteen. How many people have run fourteen consecutive Bostons – each time as a qualified runner? (Hint: I don’t know, and I don’t care.) I’m thrilled with what’s happened since that first one in ’07, the one that was almost cancelled due to what at the time we thought was an awful storm (oh, if we’d only known what was coming!). I’m thrilled at the levels of success I’ve had along the way. There are no woulda’ coulda’s in my rearview mirror.

The body says that if I push my training hard enough to do anything more than jog the race, various parts will rebel. At the moment, it’s the left Achilles, and also the left knee, but at any given time of late it has been any number of parts. But things have always hurt in the past, right? Given better timing, might I have worked around some of these issues? Sure. This time, though, those aches and pains not only intersected with training, but had I pushed it, would have likely pushed off other life goals. You can’t hike mountains if you can’t even walk, right?

Age? Of course, but that’s not admitting defeat, just management. Wear and tear from years of pounding the pavement? Yep, but I wouldn’t trade those miles for anything in the world. I may have wounds, but I also have the wins, actual, metaphorical, and emotional, and I’m still in fine mettle compared to the average Joe my age. (Have you seen poor Joe?)

So why not just jog it? Take that victory lap? In one word, Delta. And in a few more words, the ratio of Delta to gain.

Don’t get me wrong. The Gods of Boston are trying to do the right things. For this year’s race, you have to be vaccinated or test negative. But wherever you set up a security periphery, there is danger at that edge. You can’t get in to get your bib until you’ve met medical mettle. But you’ll be among crowds to get to the med tent to show your vaccine card or get your test. And those crowds will come from places like Mississippi (with apologies to vaccinated folks in Mississippi, but no apologies whatsoever for the unvaxxed). So you’re still in a crowd, and it’s still, um, Delta. (And oddly, it seems you can go into the expo no matter who you are, but hey, I could be reading that wrong, and I could skip that anyway as there aren’t as many freebies as in the golden age anyway).

So there’s a risk. But life is a risk. We fly, we drive, we eat fast food, and certainly none of us realized the risk of getting blown up in ’13. But we take those risks for reasons. Here, there’s just not that great of a reason.

If I had a chance in hell of re-qualifying for next year, that would tilt the equation. But there isn’t. Running Boston this year was always going to be a joyride, a victory lap. Jog out number fifteen, spend a lot more time high fiving the crowd, maybe soak up the scream tunnel a little more, do those crowd waves, you know, live it up, soak it in.

But why risk it in the age of Delta? Not just me, but why put Dearest Spouse at risk? And Dearest Offspring the Younger, who now being just an hour and a half up the road, we tend to see more often (the Elder being six air hours away is reasonably safe from any foolishness I might propagate). It’s just not worth the risk for a shirt and a fun run, especially when my drawer of shirts runneth over years ago. And the crowd will probably be rather meager anyway.

So let it go. Let the Achilles heal (they take way too long) so I’ll be running in the winter, the spring, and beyond. Make sure I can continue to hang out with my running buds, the best friends one could ever hope for. Ponder that I might be dumb enough to even jog New York next year, since I’ve got a reserved entry thanks to my fourth attempt at running it was again cancelled (and if I register and don’t run it again, I might set a record for not running New York five times – that’s gotta’ count for something, right?).

At the end of the day, Boston is just a race, and I’m not willing to risk “Long COVID” and propagating the next mutation of the virus, let alone the health of my family, for just a race. It’s changed, too. Once the ultimate mecca, the grandaddy, the pinnacle of marathoning, well, it still is, but it’s also become just another product, marketed incessantly in order to expand its brand. Yes, the race almost died in the seventies when prize money emerged at other races and Boston resisted, so yes, you have to keep up with the Joneses at some point, but this year’s pitch for their virtual event shed all semblance of glory and stature. To refresh you, they advertised a virtual event well before they announced what the real event would look like. They offered an absurdly large number of entries – I believe it was seventy thousand, though I haven’t fact-checked my recollection. For a hundred and twenty-five bucks – I kid you not – you could go for a run on your own. A shirt was fifty more. I can’t lie to you: that blatant money-grab lowered their stature in my eyes more than a few notches. This on the tail of last year’s virtual event mobile app which featured pre-loaded glamour photos of supposed participants, which, if real, were amazingly and consistently genetically superior to average-looking marathoners, and which, as a marathon app, failed to cover the basics like measuring the course accurately (it rang up twenty-four for me) and submitting results successfully (I had to do it via email to the support team). It does make you wonder where the priorities lie.

Then there are the realities of COVID. While they are holding the event this year (others are still cancelling, most recently Mount Desert Island marathon which again threw in the towel in the face of pressures on the local medical system due to the virus), it’s not all that much of an event. Unless you’re an elite, there is no start this year. There’s no Athlete’s Village. The bus drops you off in Hopkinton, you walk to the start, and when you get there, you go for a run. We all knew that with chip timing it never really mattered when you started, but the start was the event. Even if you were in the second or later waves, you heard the announcers, saw the flyover, felt the excitement. Now it’s kind of like a garden fountain, buses hauling runners from Boston and dropping them to drizzle back to Boston in a continuous flow. One almost suspects you could get to Boston, get on a bus, and just do it again. All we need is the little statue of Buddha next to the stream as the water trickles down the rocks, waiting to be pumped back to the top.

And not to mention, the community of agony will be gone. I can’t count the number of times I’ve shared snacks, cups, and whole water bottles with my fellow runners. We always instinctively trusted our strong bodies to overcome any passed pathogens. No longer. I wouldn’t even want to be behind someone breathing heavily. Mississippi again (and sorry again to Mississippi vaxxers). And it’s not just me. If the Gods of Boston thought it was safe for you to be close to your fellow runners, there would be a real start. There isn’t, because it isn’t.

So this summer I’ve focused elsewhere. Some cycling again like last summer to be sure, but more toward the mountains, where I’ve wrapped up some significant life-long goals. Within a three-week span I wrapped up the Adirondack 46ers, the Northeast 111, and the New England Hundred Highest summit lists, the latter a truly unique experience, finishing on the Canadian Border at Boundary Peak. (True, when arriving for my annual physical a week later and being asked whether I’d been out of the country, having hiked for three miles along the border – and back – the answer took a little explaining.) Those goals were nearly forty years in the making.

My point is that the restless adventurer soul isn’t going to curl up in a corner and dry up because I stop running one race. I may hang back for a while, let various parts heal, and return at a little lower intensity, but return is most certainly in the cards. Probably not to Boston, but hey, been there, done that. On to the next chapter.