Little Victories

[ Ed Note:  Yep, this race was a month ago.  But this is about stories, not news.  If I’ve done this right, it just doesn’t matter.  (repeat: it just doesn’t matter!) ]

Part of my strategy of aging is to take victories where I can find them.  Sometimes they’re small.  But you still walk away with a win, at least as you defined it.  Age will get me some other day, but… not today.

A few weekends back brought the Special Agony of a Road Mile, a rather rare event these days, but one that the leadership of the USA Track & Field New England Grand Prix series thought would be a fun twist on the usual annual race series.  Fun is, in this context, a questionable word; phases like diabolical and evil genius come to mind.  But so it was to be; the best indication it was “fun” being that not a single participant I spoke to thought this was in their wheelhouse, so we were all in the same boat of, hey, whatever, let’s go get us some agony!

Leading up to this, my training had left a lot to be desired.  A persistent issue with the left heel, of which Dr. Foot Doctor assured me that nothing was broken, just yet another round of chronic tendonitis, brought both quantity and quality down notably.  As such, I’d run no track workouts for weeks leading up to a race that was, in effect, a track workout.  Nothing like being prepared!

I’d been balancing that injury against life for a while (and still am as of this late writing), pushing into races while backing off on training, repeatedly hoping the thing would heal, but just as repeatedly beating it up again, so of course, it didn’t.  I’d like to think I’m smarter than that, but let’s face it, I’m really not.

Since recovering from Boston, this tendon-induced see-saw has produced a couple of Mostly Meh races – first in Clinton on the famed Hill From Hell (Meh yes, but still took the 60s…and 50s…and 40s… but hey, it was a small race, right?), and then in Harvard (the town, not the college), on the other famed Hill From Hell, where in a repeat of last year I missed the 60s crown by seconds thanks to holding back on the killer downslope due to… of course, the heel.  To be fair, those bracketed a decent 5K at the Grand Prix series in Needham, so it hasn’t been all bad.  Just mostly.

But I certainly wasn’t in top form when along came the USATF-NE Grand Prix race series number five, a.k.a. the accursed Road Mile.

Please, God, no.

The last time I raced a road mile was a good ten years back, and that barely counts since it was all downhill and a tad short.  And to be fair, there was a track mile around that time, with not entirely horrendous results.  But that was in another lifetime.

Plus, the mile is universally recognized as a not-fit-for-human-consumption distance.  It’s too short to go aerobic, which is what we distance runners do, but it’s too long to go anaerobic and survive on your bloodstream oxygen.  You’re going to suffer.  But dumb as a mule, I’ve set out to complete the Grand Prix series this year, a feat for which you’re designated an “Iron Runner” and awarded a season-end tchotchke, so there was no backing out.

Through the mysteries of the Grand Prix scoring system, I went into this in third place amongst the sixty-to-sixty-four collection of fossils in New England.  I knew that wouldn’t last, and it didn’t; spoiler alert, I slipped, though surprisingly by only one slot – remember, this was in nobody’s wheelhouse.  And I can’t complain about being ranked among the foolish fossils of New England.  Aren’t we on the theme of Little Victories?

There’s a “Loop Road” behind Hopkinton (Massachusetts) high school, a school that most runners know only because it hosts the Athlete’s Village for the Boston Marathon, that happens to be mostly – but not entirely – flat (we’ll get back to that) and almost exactly a mile around.  When the USATF-NE people were trying to find a place to bring their evil idea to life, this venue jumped out and screamed, “Pick me!  Pick me!”  I was, frankly, relieved, since if I’m only going to race a mile, I’d hate to drive two hours, and this spot happens to be only twenty minutes away.

But the Gods of Road Construction intervened, and half the loop went off limits, so we ended up with an out-and-back; half a mile out, around a mini-traffic-island-loop, then half a mile back, which turned out to be slightly uphill.  How, you ask, can you make a mile sprint even worse?  That’s how:  Add a u-ey and make the third quarter – the worst in any mile – an upgrade.  Joy!

The plan was to have a separate heat for the masters men, USATF only (they ran a separate race for the non-USATF “All Comers”), and I tried to explain to Dearest Spouse how, in the absence of the usual masses behind the USATF speedsters, she should expect to see me pretty far back in the pack, read, damn near the end.  Then at the last minute, a lifeline, because the event had grown so large, they split out the sixty-plus USATF men into a separate heat.  Fifty of us, ranging sixty up to a ninety-year-old.  Cool!  I won’t be last!  OK, so this wouldn’t be quite so embarrassing.

Warming up for an event like this is simply not possible.  Outside of marathons, my fastest mile is almost always the at end of the race.  This isn’t age, it’s genetic, and goes back to my high-school days, where I’d be tagged for the track two mile which, for me, consisted of seven laps of playing with my food and one lap of beating up my rivals.  So on that Sunday, I figured five miles of warm-ups might suffice to get my bones close to loose, but certainly wouldn’t have the pumps primed.

It's hard to build a full story around a race that takes but a few minutes.  We’ll work it down to bullet items (gloriously not bulleted, because really, outside of work emails, they’re no fun – and they’re probably not fun there either).  Commiseration with my fellow fossils before the gun.  Mild shock that after the gun I wasn’t instantly several light-years behind the leaders.  Hitting the quarter-mile, on the downslope, where the race organizers thoughtfully posted a race clock, at a pace that made me think my “below X minutes” might be possible.  Coming off the downslope to the flat, passing Dearest Spouse, who’d honed her photography aim on earlier heats.  To the turnaround at a pace that a mere quarter mile after “maybe under X minutes” quickly turned that to “then again, not”.

And then the race began.

On the return trip, with the field pretty much sorted out and already in agony (did you notice the prevalence of the word “agony” in this article? …it’s not by accident), I am passed by… heck, I don’t know him, but this is a team sport (I didn’t mention that before, but it is) and he’s wearing a jersey of a team that’s likely a contender… and besides, he passed me, and I still have pride if nothing else… and this cannot stand.

This is a good time to point out that as I’ve aged, I’ve discovered my inner Rafa Nadal, that is, it’s easier to grunt than to keep silent.  If that makes no sense to you, it would take too long to explain, but Dearest Spouse will understand.

I am grunting.  Bigly.

Said rival I learn later is named Paul, though I did not know that at the time, but that’s irrelevant at the moment.  Did I mention?  I will not let this stand.

As the upslope makes itself known, that third-into-forth quarter-mile being the reverse of the initial first-into-second quarter-mile downslope, I dig deep.  I think of those middle school kids I used to coach:  Hills are your friends.  And I grind past Paul.

But we’ve still got a quarter to go and he doesn’t intend to go down easily.

I can feel him off my shoulder.  I can smell him (figuratively, not commenting on hygiene) coming back to re-take the lead in this micro-race.  Because the universe has compressed to this micro-race.

No.  Just no.  In the universe that has shrunk to the ten-foot radius around me, I’m not going to let this happen.

In the last tenth, the course flattens, bends to the right, finish line, hold this dude off.  Everything gets tossed in the furnace. Which at my age isn’t a lot, but it’s what I’ve got.

Little victories.

It really didn’t matter in the end.  My team beat his team by six seconds, even after accounting for our respective team leaders, both of whom are built on Alien DNA, so if he’d been a half-second ahead instead of a half-second behind, we’d still have won the team competition.  And the time that the race officials recorded didn’t make sense based on what was on my watch, and even if it had, I wouldn’t have broken that “X” minute mark.  And I wasn’t that pleased with the actual number, whether mine or theirs.  But none of that mattered. In this tiny universe, I told myself I would beat Paul.  I made sure I would beat Paul.  And I beat Paul.

Little victories.  Take them where you can 

…

Photo Credit for the 2nd photo: Leslie Poitras, https://www.facebook.com/I.Run.Run.Ran

This One’s Gonna’ Leave a Mark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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

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

Going the Distance?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks

 

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.