Contrasts

A couple weeks back I snuck out for a lunchtime run, which isn’t unusual seeing as I’m fortunate enough to work from my basement office and enjoy a two-flight-of-stairs commute on days when I’m not seeing clients. Granted, I pay the price on other days, but at least in my office there’s no worry about whether amenities are available like a post-workout shower.

On that particular day I sauntered down to the high school track and proceeded to launch into the workout prescribed by one of our Greater Boston coaches. The day’s excitement was a series of twelve-hundred-meter runs at a target pace that shouldn’t have bothered me, but on that day felt entirely unworkable. After one, I groaned at the prescribed number and questioned whether I’d hold out, especially doing the workout solo with nobody to egg me on. Deal with them one at a time, I told myself, and eventually I clicked off the appointed count, pleasingly picking up the pace a second or two on each. Completion of this most minor goal – one workout – brought satisfaction.

A bit less than halfway through this test, onto the field arrived a high-school phys-ed class. I half expected to be expelled in a frenzied concern that I might be a child-molester, but neither the instructor nor the students seemed to care about my presence. Slog on. And observe.

What I observed was that the activity of the day was Ultimate Frisbee, and what ensued was a seriously low-energy version of what could have been great exercise. The cones were laid out, half of the participants donned the obligatory red pinnies, and they were off…slowly. Well, some of them, at least. I counted twenty-two students in the class. I counted ten who actually played. The other twelve – over half of the class – were excused for some reason or another.

Keep in mind that all walked onto the field. None were on crutches, in casts, or otherwise visibly impaired. I can bet that my assessment of bodily functionality was wrong on at least one or two of them who probably did have some sort of ailment or legitimate woe. But I’ve got to question twelve of twenty-two being considered unfit for fitness. Four sat in the stands and soaked up the sun; call it Vitamin D therapy. The other eight split into two groups of four and “walked”, a word I place in quotations because the pace at which they edged around the track wasn’t measurable.

Unmolested, I continued my twelve-hundreds, pausing for two minutes between each to regain some oxygen and sanity. During one such pause, when a group of boys happened to happen by, I casually inquired obliquely, “On injured reserve?” They responded in the positive. My lighthearted invitation to them to join me on the next rep met with expected incredulity.

It’s probably wrong for me to judge, but I can’t avoid it. There’s simply no way that fifty-five percent of that class was unable to play a seriously low-energy form of tossing the Frisbee. With no specific knowledge of each individual case, the blame can be distributed in all sorts of directions: the kids themselves, parents, teachers, administrators, the culture of lawsuits, you name it (at least the culture didn’t overreact and kick me off the track!). But in the end it’s really easy to observe that it’s little wonder we’re facing a fitness and obesity crisis amongst our population.

Contrast this to what I observed on last Saturday in a park near Springfield, where over a hundred athletes gathered to relish in the joy and pain of racing across fields and through trails at the Western Mass Distance Project’s Cross Country “Festival”. A festival might be an odd description, through a festival has music, and Zeppelin blasted from the sound system as we raced from the field start, and a festival gathers friends, which certainly qualified, and a festival has people doing what they love, so perhaps the word fits the bill. People come willingly to a festival.

None of these folks showed up because they had to. No phys-ed grades were on the line. And while there were a few cash prizes available, the reality was that few were in line to claim them. The rest were there for the love of the sport, for their own fitness, for the sheer fun of it. No t-shirts, no swag, and as with most trail-based courses, not even an assurance that you could compare your time to anything else you’ve run in your life. Just come out and run, and they did, with the friendship aspect uniquely captured in a multi-team group shot after the main event (and this was only the men, there were more) (go ahead, try to find me, I’m in there!).

Frankly, it was a pretty mediocre race for me as well as several of my traveling companion teammates. Coming off the previous week’s race and a mid-week hard twenty-three miler, the last big one before New York, I was feeling the pain of a number of bumps and bruises, and my performance reflected that – it certainly wasn’t one to write home about. My compatriots found themselves in similar situations. To add to our results ambivalence, we all found something a little odd about the course splits which seemed to imply that every one of us tanked wholesale in the last mile. But we simply didn’t care. We enjoyed a gorgeous day in the park doing something healthy, running around with friends.

I got to thinking about the motivation of this group compared to the motivation of that phys-ed class. I often told the middle-school kids I used to coach that if I didn’t run every day that something hurt, I’d rarely run. As much as I stepped onto the field in Westfield with various bits hurting, I can make a pretty good guess that a lot of those other guys, even the young, hearty and hale ones, were in similar stance. But unlike the fifty-five percent in that gym class who for the pain of a hangnail (I theorize, of course) copped out, here the bruised and battered dove in instead. We make these choices every day: dive in and play the game, or sit out and go stale. I make the point in regard to fitness, but you can extend the metaphor to any life endeavor.

We can’t fool ourselves into thinking that our choice to dive in makes us invincible. The fact is, we’re all going to reach our end someday, and we may reach it in ways that surprise us. Runners do have heart attacks, runners do get cancer, diabetes, and all sorts of other mean, nasty things, and one of those things will beat each and every runner, some well before we’re due. Contradictorily, some of those who loll, laze, live hard, and generally take the course frowned upon will see their hundredth year and beyond. Statistically there’s really no logic to it.

But isn’t it worth putting up the good fight and enjoying knowing that you’re stretching your odds? Which side of the contrast do you want to be on?

Shout-Out, or perhaps a Bail-Out, to niece Kristin, about to embark on her first full marathon within hours. Your first marathon is always a memorable adventure, but it will be hard to top this one: she’s running the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington with Hurricane Sandy bearing down on the city. This will truly be an interesting day. Send the Marines, put a smile on your face, and have at it. You will have unbeatable water cooler stories on Monday, that is, if you can get back to your water cooler… Go Kris!

Clean Sweep

This one has been a long time coming. Forty-nine months to the day, to be exact. Not that I started counting back on the 13th of September, 2008, when last I recorded a 5K Personal Best. But having come within seconds of that now nearly antique mark several times, most recently this past June, this quest had long passed the threshold of frustrating. I don’t consider myself a terribly effective short-distance racer to begin with, and knowing that speed is the first thing to go as you age, this was the runner’s equivalent of a biological time bomb.

Why, you ask, would it matter? After all, it’s a given that at some point, each PR previously set will become my last PR ever set. I certainly won’t be cracking these times when I’m eighty. I could die a satisfied runner with the numbers already in the books, right?

Yes, except for this one item. It was a matter of pride. You see, my local club, the Highland City Striders, maintains a list of club bests, and before yesterday, I owned all the masters marks (for that matter, all of the marks – period – since nobody in other divisions had bettered them)…except one: that pesky 5K. And just because I had all the rest, I wanted that one, too.

For that one, the record belonged to a club-mate who’d recorded a performance from years before I knew him, indeed several years before what we often think of the “modern incarnation” of our club, which has gone through several phases of life stretching several decades (and since we have utterly no knowledge of top performances notched in those earlier generations, this is an entirely artificial accounting, but…), his in fact being the only record on the books not from the “modern era”. That mattered not. What mattered was that his performance was precisely ten seconds faster than the mark I hit back in September of 2008. And when I came within ten seconds at age forty-five, I looked forward to clipping off those seconds and snagging that spot in the books in short order. Instead, a month later, that famed foot tendon snapped, and it was a long time before I was even coming close again, years that by sheer aging shaved speed potential.

Cut to the present day, and reality was that the months were ticking away to when I’d miss that shot. Age Fifty looms in under six months, and while I can snag the “Best Overall” time any time I’m capable from here to eternity, my window to own the age forty to forty-nine masters records was closing. And winter, with unpredictable racing conditions, also nears. It was pretty much now or never.

Never will never come, because Saturday was now. It’s done. The barrier is broken, the forty-nine-month Personal Best drought broken at age forty-nine, and with enough to spare to snag that club masters record. And so for the time being at least, I’ve got the clean sweep: five-K, five-mile, ten-K, ten-mile, half- marathon and marathon.

I don’t kid myself into thinking that this is either important or eternal. It’s neither. Our local club is a wonderful bunch that I love to run with, but it’s not a highly competitive crowd. In contrast, I’d never touch a single record in my Greater Boston racing club, where one of my masters compatriots just aced an incredible two-thirty-six marathon. And besides, someone will come along and better these marks. After all, that’s what records are all about. But for the moment, it’s a fun achievement.

This momentous event unfolded in the hamlet of West Acton, Massachusetts, which I like to call Wacton, at their Oktoberfest 5K, a largely local affair but made interesting by two twists: an invitation from one of my Greater Boston friends, a local resident, to join the fun, and the discovery that both my neighbor and his son planned on tackling those mean streets. Said neighbor was embarking on only his second race, having pulled off the impressive feat of dropping sixty pounds in nine months, and said neighbor’s son is none other than the famed Intrepid Young Hiking Partner. These things are always more fun in gangs.

As races go, this one had some quirks, most notably that the course crossed a commuter rail line a quarter-mile from the start, which forced us to hang around till the expected train passed through – notably late. So much for timing your warm-up. And that start, when it came, was a little confused, with one-too-many commands confusing us Type-A Obsessive Compulsive folks toeing the line. I’d have to say it was the first mass-false-start I’ve ever seen at a road race, and yes, I and about fifty of my closest friends probably got a second’s jump on the actual command to Go! And another second’s jump before they managed to get the gun to fire. These things happen and matter little. What did matter is that the course was advertised as wheel-measured accurate, and my post-race checking proved it to be spot-on. That, combined with a cold, crisp, and sunny (if a bit breezy) morning, made for an ideal day to assault a forty-nine-month hunger pang.

As is often the case in local races, by a quarter-mile in we’d already pretty much fallen into our finishing order. GBTC Long Tall John ran away with it, we let some other guy come in second, followed by yours truly, Kristen who’d take the women’s title, and another GBTC teammate Kris, incognito in black but solid in performance. With no mile markers, chasing a time was challenging, especially after breaking from Kris, and later Kristen before the two-mile mark (and there was a Kyle hanging around briefly as well, so while this may have been a 5K, I was surrounded by 3Ks, which was OK) (groan). In the battle of the Ks, Kris would outkick Kristen, giving Greater Boston a pleasing one-three-four finish. And both of those guys would give me a serious shortness complex in the post-race snapshots.

The homestretch was insidiously mildly inclined with a sprinkling of headwind tossed in for spice, and featured a slight bend in an otherwise straight shot such that the finish wasn’t visible until it was too late to make up any lost time. In other words, it wasn’t even worth glancing at the watch. Just go, go, go some more, and hope, and… crossing the line the show clock read three seconds under that club record! It was done!

Officially, they actually pegged me at five seconds under that record, a full fifteen off my previous best. I might quibble about whether I deserved those last couple of seconds based on the confused start, but it mattered not, it was done. Ironic too, since when I wrote of the last time I set that PR, way back in ’08, I closed that piece with a suggestion to “lighten up, and go slice 15 seconds off your 5K.” If I’d only known it would take so long!

Joy!

A few weeks back, while still mired in the Interminable Slump, the annual Forrest Quasi-5K was fast approaching (I call it the Quasi-5K because everyone knows it’s considerably over 5K, though with a great picnic afterwards, nobody cares). I couldn’t fathom racing anything, let alone a short one that would require – gasp! – that I’d actually have to run fast. But having won it the prior two years, I felt there was sort of an expectation that I’d defend my crown, the tiny little local crown that it was. What to do?

An obvious solution appeared: Darling Daughter the Younger had the desire to dip her toes in that puddle. Double bonus! Family time, and the complete elimination of all pressure to perform. Race day came and I ran a warm-up with my local club-mates merely for the fun of running a mile with them, certainly not due to any need to warm up. Race time approached without a care in the world; no timing of that last bathroom stop, no chugging a gel fifteen minutes ahead, no last-minute strides or stretches. Just hang with the crowd, chat it up, and, oh! They said go, let’s go for a run. This must be how the other side lives. It’s really not bad, not bad at all.

The irony is that a couple days before the race, along came what has proven to be the dramatic end of the Interminable Slump (hereby rechristened the Terminable Slump). There was great rejoicing, but the plan was in place, the Forrest would not be a race. Time was irrelevant, no watch, no worries. Darling Daughter scored an age group medal, making the day and unqualified success. And a fine day was had by all at the famed picnic. I’d already considered the day a total winner, having just relaxed and soaked it up, and then when I pulled down the pictures from my mini-camera I’d carried during the event. I was treated to this absolute gem of one of my local club-mates in action.

One word came to mind: Joy. Anyone at a hundred paces could tell from this shot what was going through her head. Indeed, when I sent this to her, she responded, “I did not realize how much fun I had had until I saw this picture!” And therein lay a great theme: Step back and recognize the joy that our sport, our lifestyle, can bring to us, if we let it. Fast times are great, but there is so much more, and so I share a few tidbits on my mind.

The Joy of Letting Go – Because We Can! This is, of course, what started the whole theme. The fact that we don’t have to push every day; that we can just go out for a day of fun, and leave it at that. It just doesn’t matter, so enjoy it.

The Joy of Excess - Because We Can! On the other hand, we do crazy things. A good portion of my running friends just experienced another Reach the Beach, that thirty-hour two-hundred-plus mile odyssey through New Hampshire. I skipped that one this year, but celebrated the end of the slump by hitting DAY FIVE HUNDRED of my streak, and that day turning a planned twenty-three miler into the longest run of my life, twenty-seven-point-two. Yeah, a marathon and a mile, and too bad it didn’t count or I’d have my Boston Qualifier less twenty for 2014. Excess? You bet. Love it, because we can.

The Joy of Relief, Part One – Go Jump In A Lake! A few weeks back, Rocket John and I headed out for a dozen or so, and it was great – for about five miles. After that, it just wasn’t pretty. Hotter than expected, both of us fading, still a mile or two back to the ranch as we passed by a local lake, and we figured…why not? Off with the shoes, into the lake, utterly perfect. Sweet relief, and freedom like you’re a kid again. You simply can’t feel so good as when you bounce from feeling so bad. The lows make the highs so much sweeter.

The Joy of Relief, Part Two – It Feels So Good When You Stop! So what if it was chemically cured? (I just hope the cure sticks!) The slump is over! To steal a line from Monty Python, I’m not dead yet. In fact, I feel good, I feel like I’m flying. What was it I just said? You simply can’t feel so good as when you bounce from feeling so bad. An old friend used to say it was like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop. Relish the high!

The Joy of Great Friends – And Benefits! (No, not friends WITH benefits, this is a family column.) I’ve often said that running with friends is just a mobile coffee klatch. We get to know the best people without having to endure a golf cart. They’re active, they’re interesting, they’re involved people, and hanging with them sometimes has unexpected benefits, like last weekend when our local club supplied judges for our city’s famous annual Chowderfest. Now, this event has been a highlight of my year for as long as I’ve known about it, a veritable feast of the best we have to offer. To have the opportunity to sit as an official judge was, well, let’s just say I can die happy now.

The Joy of Living Vicariously: In a sport where actually winning is pretty rare, we certainly have rivals whom we like to race against, but we don’t worry about their successes, we celebrate them. Big or small, running friends’ triumphs lift us – indeed goad us on to our own. That’s quite different from most sports where one side wins and the other clearly loses. We can all win, and this week has brought plenty of that good news and lots to celebrate.

My accomplices in last fall’s Bay State Marathon, Kim and Ryan, crossed the line together to win – for real – the Half-Moon Bay Marathon out west in the California fog. My rival E.J. smoked a 5K personal best time that makes my mouth drool a deep shade of envious green. And my neighbor Greg, on his weight-watcher quest combined with a couch-to-5K plan, achieved it non-stop at the Forrest, and is already plotting his next conquest. They’re all an extension of the energy we share with each other, providing each other with little sparks, and I am thrilled for all of them!

The Joy of Classic Little Moments: On a totally different tack, while running past a nearby school a couple days back, I was not a bit surprised when a mother with her little ones oh-so-safely strapped in back proceeded to cut me off as she raced out of the school lot. Experience has shown that it’s usually those moms so worried about how people drive around their kids who are the worst offenders around others on foot, like me. Whatever, I’m used to it. I dodged, gave her the usual barking “YO!” and an arm-shrugful of disgust, and carried on. Only to have the mom who trailed her and watched the whole thing pull out, pass me on the street, and shout out, “You tell ‘em, Gary!” I have no idea who it was. But hey, really… cool!

And The Simple Joy of What We Do: Day in, day out, we find an hour, strap on our shoes, and just go. Many if not most days I have no idea where I’m going when I depart. I’ll decide that in a mile, when I decide how I feel, consider how much time I’ve got, assess the weather, my mood, the phase of the moon, whatever. It just doesn’t matter. We just run, and absorb the joy. So turn off your MP3, stop staring at the four square feet of road right in front of your feet, look up, soak it in, and find the joy.

Nyah, Nyah! God Gave Me An Extra!

I might be premature in saying this, but we may have reached Slumpus Terminus. One word: WOOT! But first, an interesting tidbit along the way of getting there, which starts with a cut to a seemingly unrelated topic…

In my business of technology, there are consulting houses who’s very names turn heads. Needless to say, vendors such as my employer spend many cycles trying to convince these Industry Gods of our own Godliness. Said Industry Gods therefore hear an awful lot of corporate blather, and, speaking as one who cannot stay awake more than about fifteen minutes in a meeting where I’m expected only to listen and not participate, I can only imagine the scale of their agony living through endless days of Death by PowerPoint. It was thus with great mirth that I read a report from one recently, where instead of reporting on technology, they reported, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, on what to do – and not to do – when presenting to them. Rule Number One was not to put up a slide that says, “Our people make the difference.” Having worked for many firms whose corporate overview decks obligingly include this bit of inanity, I laughed out loud at the consultant’s decree that, [sic] “Unless you’ve bred some mutant DNA, we’re pretty sure that all firms that come before us have good people. Don’t waste your time claiming otherwise.” Touché!

Here’s the funny part. I’ve got a bit of that mutant DNA in me, so I learned this week. Take that, Industry Gods!

What does all this have to do with running, the slump, and the price of oolong tea in Tibet? Dear reader, think back to the Adventure of the Cardiac Ultrasound, which stemmed from seeing Lady Doc. Another outcome of said visit was a strategy to attack the Pesky Left Achilles, now in an annoying painful state for a solid six months, long enough to cross out the word acute and write in chronic in crayon. On top of the squishy New Balance shoes I’d procured a few weeks prior to ease the pounding and potentially heal the beast, Lady Doc packed me off to x-ray the heel (which turned out to be just fine) and to be made to heel at the hands of a good round of physical therapy. So as I padded around in the slipper-like Squishy Shoes, I also submitted to the skills of my new Sadistic Practitioner, so dubbed because the name Physical Terrorist (my last PT, also of the same fine firm) was already used, and because it is a kinder version of a name one of her former patients involuntarily emitted while enduring her painful goodness.

Several myofascial release scrapings (painful, but it’s good pain), and many wonderful minutes spent on the electro-stim later, progress was obvious, but a new worry arose in the front half of said abused podiatric appendage, a pain weird and strong enough to have me dreading a stress fracture. With the New York Marathon looming, I kvetched until Darling Spouse reached her tolerance of grouse and insisted I get it checked out, reminding me of our new, “Damn the torpedoes, we’ve hit our deductible!” status. Yep, she’s right on that one.

Dr. Foot Doctor (you do remember Dr. Foot Doctor from the Famed Surgery of ’08, right?) to the rescue! Here’s where the right guy makes all the difference. I could have called Lady Doc, who would have been happy to pack me back to Local Hospital to x-ray the front of the same foot (can you get foot cancer from two x-rays in a month?), and a day or two later heard that the radiologist reported there were indeed no cracks, but nothing beats one stop shopping with the famed father of foot features. No, nothing beats having the x-ray machine in the back room, then walking twelve feet to the exam room and studying the ghostly images together, working out the mechanics and strategies to recover. And nothing beats getting in on six hours notice (big thank-you!).

When all was said and done, it made sense. The knee bone’s connected to the leg bone and so on, and using such logic we surmised a pretty plausible principle for the pain, which stemmed from trying to deal with the Achilles with the Squishy shoes. It did not, I repeat did not, seem to be related to the fact that we found an extra bone in my big toe. There’s that mutant DNA. Yep, God gave me an extra one that you probably haven’t got. Nyah!

Now, this isn’t entirely rare, but it’s not entirely common, either. A little web research turned up the fact that there isn’t even a solid agreement on the number of bones that you’re suppose to have in your foot – one site said twenty-six, another twenty-eight. But several sources did acknowledge that a percentage of freaks (my wording, of course) in the universe have extras which appear in various places in the foot. My special little stowaway is known as an Os Interphalangeus, one form of the class of “accessory ossicles” (which I think are frozen drippy things that form off decorations you hang outside your house in the winter, oh, wait those are accessory icicles). Said ossicle has apparently been living under the joint of my big toe for God knows how long, never paying rent, never doing the dishes, just adding weight to my stride – at least a gram or two, clearly enough to add a microsecond to my marathon time.

But frankly, I thought he was kind of cute on the x-ray image, and I’ll let him stay.

(I trust you’re thinking, “Gee, two weeks in a row he’s showing off pictures of his innards, what a weirdo!” Guilty. I find this stuff ultimately fascinating.)

In any event, many good things came of this beyond pride in another element of uniqueness and a chance to reconnect with Dr. Foot Doctor. I walked out with the confidence that nothing was broken, a roll of kinesiology tape (no, that’s not a mystic religion), and a script for a kicker dose of anti-inflammatories that in a mere day have me thinking they’re either magic or the best placebo on the planet. And they’re not even on the World Anti-Doping Agency banned substance list! Double bonus!

But before I’d popped a single pill, I hit the roads after seeing Dr. Foot Doctor and hammered one, breaking a four-year-old personal best on a training course that I run several times a month. The power of positive thinking! Another solid one yesterday, and nearly twenty this morning, and suddenly New York in six weeks doesn’t seem like a problem.

Slumpus Terminus? I sure hope so. Let’s hope it sticks!

Eighteen Again

Through a twisted series of events, I was told that I’ve got the heart of a healthy eighteen-year-old. After duly professing my love to Tina the technician for her assessment (and wishing that other parts of my body imitated that condition), I’ve had some fun with this convoluted story.

Revert to my review of Joey Keillor’s book Run Great When it Counts; High School. In that review mentioned that I took some of his advice. His book addresses a topic I’d never really considered: the unique blood-iron-levels required in endurance athletes, entirely aside from standard anemia, and how this metric is generally overlooked yet often implicated in poor performances. His recommendation was simple: It’s a quick test, just get it done. Uncover the problem or rule it out.

Not only did this seem potentially plausible, but I knew I had a few additional unique characteristics (I’ll spare you the gory details) that could up the likelihood of this being a factor in the now-you’re-bored-of-hearing-about-it slump. And a few days later I heard about this same issue from a club companion, unprompted and independently. My racing buddy specifically brought up the problem of foot-strike hemolysis, or micro-bleeding through the feet that can occur with high mileage on asphalt – gee, sound like me? Stars aligning, time ticking toward that fall marathon, I needed to find a way out of this slump, so let’s just do this, do it fast, and find out.

But I’m what one might call an activist when it comes to trying to contain medical costs. I take the intent of the high-deductible insurance plan to heart, which tries to make us smarter consumers of health care services. Call it economic patriotism, call it core frugality, whatever, but I boil when I see pharmaceutical companies doing their best to convince the public that everyone needs treatment for toenail fungus. I cringe in the face of so-called defensive medicine, where tests and procedures are run in the interest of avoiding future lawsuits. So my first step was to call my insurance company and verify that this was not an extravagant test. Based on their assurance that it was indeed inexpensive, (which turned out to be a total lie, but that’s another story), I rang up Lady Doc’s office in early August and explained my wishes with no economic guilt.

With this background you can appreciate my dismay when the response was both a great delay – please come in for a visit first, and we can schedule you in four weeks – and the recommendation to pile on a bunch more tests – cha-Ching! I had neither time to waste nor desire to soak the my wallet or the medical insurance system. What followed was a somewhat comical series of negotiations, during which I came to recognize that she was clearly right in that it made little sense to address my complaint of a performance slump with simply one simple test, and her office came to recognize my sense of urgency and agreed to move forward in advance of our planned visit. And heck, that high deductible was about to tumble anyway, so go ahead, pile it on! I changed my stance from medical frugality to damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and obligingly gave up several trillion red cells in the interest of science, the end result of which was to prove that there was utterly nothing wrong with me, at least not that a blood test could determine. I had plenty of iron and all kinds of other stuff floating around in me, and no discernable lack of anything. OK, so now at least we knew.

Time flies when you’re documenting adventures, and by then it was time for that office visit anyway. Lady Doc and I had all kinds of great chit-chat, bringing a few grins to the young resident accompanying her on her rounds. I learned a new word, bradycardia, the name given to an abnormally low pulse so typical of runners, like mine which dips into the high thirties and beats when it feels like it, sometimes at mildly odd intervals. But importantly, Lady Doc took a sincere interest in trying to uncover what, if anything beyond my head, was ballooning my training times. The best we came up with was those pesky cholesterol meds, which we decided I’d knock off of for a while just to see (so far with potentially promising results, we’ll check back in on that in a while).

Meanwhile, back in the White and Chrome exam room, Lady Doc decided that a baseline EKG wouldn’t be a bad idea, slump or not, for a nearly fifty-year-old guy. (Fifty! Yes, it’s coming.) Now, Lady Doc, like any other doc, deals with a daily stream of non-athletic (read: normal) people, sick, aged, unhealthy, out-of-shape, and it is easy to chalk up this EKG decision to sticking to the medical norm. After all, as a marathoner, pretty much the last thing I worry about is my heart. But I had to agree that no matter how fit, there’s always that chance that there’s something going on, and besides, we’re all going to die of something, right? So wire me up, bring it on!

Two EKG machines later (apparently we killed one, they all have to die of something, right?), we’d produced a single sheet with a bunch of squiggly lines that looked to me exactly like, well, an EKG. A perfectly normal EKG, because unless they are filled with flat lines, they all look pretty much perfectly normal to me. But I’m not a doctor, she is, and there was one eeny-weenie little bump that indeed did not look perfectly normal to her.

I do like my doctor, and I have a feeling that in a convoluted sort of way, she appreciates my quirky involvement in medical topics where she is clearly the expert. And I appreciate that she finds herself in a predicament in cases like mine: balance the fact that this guy is highly fit and conditioned against the fact that he’s basically fifty and has a funny bump on his chart. I could stand there all day long and promise I would never sue her, and she could even believe me, removing this from the realm of defensive medicine, but as a doctor, she really can’t ignore this. “Look,” she says, “this is probably nothing, but we should be sure, and I’m not the expert here.” And so off goes my collection of squiggly lines to the cardiologist.

Just saying the word cardiologist, when you’re a marathoner, evokes funny emotions. Aren’t those the people who get involved only when things are really ugly?

She reports the next day that the cardiologist said, “Look, this is probably nothing, but we should be sure.” She explains that said chart bump hints at thick heart walls, also known as cardiac hypertrophy, a possible sign of, say WHAT? Heart disease?

We’re all going to die of something, right?

But a little medical web sleuthing – usually dangerous for anyone remotely prone to hypochondria – turns up yet another new phrase for my vocabulary, Athletic Heart Syndrome, which, as its name implies, is what happens to your heart when you train a lot. It’s all good, but on paper, specifically EKG paper, it looks a bit like, well, heart disease. And it’s exactly what you’d expect: bradycardia – that low pulse, arrhythmia – irregular heartbeat, and, wonder of wonder, an enlarged heart, a.k.a. cardiomegaly, including that enlarged heart wall, a.k.a. cardiac hypertrophy. Got all that? There will be a quiz later. In short, your heart’s a muscle. You work it and it gets bigger and stronger and just doesn’t have to work very hard when you’re not working it. Go ahead, be proud.

But we’ve got to be sure, and so I am booked for a cardiac ultrasound. I’m ever so mildly apprehensive – hey, you never know – but pretty confident this will be an academic experience. And at this point I am really happy that my deductible has been met.

Long story preserved from becoming painfully even longer, it was a blast! It was so just plain ultimately wicked cool, wicked pissah cool as we say in New England, that I’d do it again just for fun, if it weren’t so darn pricey. There’s little that can compare to watching your own heart, the pump of your life, chug away happily on the screen. Tina the technician was more than happy to oblige my child-like curiosity and explain every angle, every image, every valve and movement, and while she couldn’t pronounce a verdict, she was happy to point out the lack of all the typical woes she sees daily. Further, while she promised that the medical imaging department would supply my hoped-for souvenir CD (which they did, and several images of heart valves and so on are scattered herein), she invited me to snap stills and videos of the screen with my phone as we went along. Oh my golly this was just plain fabulous!

It almost goes without saying that the report came back the next day with a verdict of, “Not going to die, doesn’t have heart disease,” which I translated into, “Athletic Heart Syndrome, yeah baby!” But I pretty much knew that before I left, having asked Tina, “If you didn’t know I ran or anything about me, would you be able to tell from looking at these images?”

“Well, no,” she started, much to my dismay, but then continued, “I’d assume I was looking at a very healthy 18-year-old.”

Ponder if you will, how this came about. I’d really had no plans to see my doctor. But a simple bit of advice in a coaching book – one aimed at teens for that matter – led to, via this twisted path, a pleasing confirmation that all the energies we put into running really do produce benefits. Seriously, I don't really believe my heart is eighteen, but I know it's not typical nearly-fifty, either. Sweet.

Run on, my friends, run on.

Midpack of Lies

Seemingly overnight, with the change from August to September, my body seems to have decided to begin its emergence from The Slump, and with it, my mind seems to be emerging from its drought of blogging motivation. Suddenly I am faced with more topics than you, my reader, probably wish to see in such a concentrated stream. So bear with me as I mete these out over the coming days. Let’s start with the timely stuff first.

What’s this most timely of items? I’ve got a serious bone to pick with a major politician who has sullied my backyard. Play politics all you want, but don’t lie about your running exploits and expect to get away with it. You simply expose yourself as a morally bankrupt jerk.

Let’s back up a bit. What happens when running and politics cross paths? On the local level, it just means I run, rather than drive, to the polls to vote, as I did today for Massachusetts’ oddly scheduled Thursday primary. The kind ladies covering Ward Six don’t seem to mind my sweat, especially on a day like today when few realized there was actually an election, and thus they’d go for anything to break the boredom.

But what about on the national level? There’s been a long history of politicians who run, some who have made it quite visible. Back in my First Lap days, the Secret Service had to find a few guys who could pop in a few miles with Jimmy Carter. (And what do you know, he’s still alive and kicking!) Since then there have been many others. When on the fence about any candidate, knowing that they’re fitness-oriented, specifically runners, certainly says something about their character to other runners. And with all the spin and rhetoric that flies constantly in political circles, often it comes down to a judgment of character. Character matters.

Let’s stop here for a moment. If you see me on the street and we talk politics, you’ll know quickly where I stand. If you really want to scour past postings, you can get a hint. But I’m not going there tonight, I’m going to character, specifically where it crosses into my world, the world of running. I tell you emphatically that I would publish the forthcoming rant no matter who the candidate to blame was, and whether I felt they were Pure Evil or Goodness and Light (though as I noted, since this is about character, following this doozey if would be hard to characterize this person as Goodness and Light).

While they say all politicians lie, I don’t believe that. There are a few honest ones out there, though debatably it’s hard to be sure. There are plenty of arguments about what constitutes a lie, a fact, a spin, a twist, a deception, a slant, or what the definition of the word ‘is’ is. But while it’s hard to prove honesty, it’s easy to prove the opposite when someone steps into your realm of expertise and spews forth obviously recognizable lies.

Which brings us to the man who wishes to become our Vice-President, Paul Ryan. As I said, I’m not going to discuss his politics. This is a running blog, not a political soapbox. But as a running blog, I feel a bit of an obligation to help keep my sport pure. And Mr. Ryan has entered my world, come into my backyard, and dumped crap all over it. Major foul. Fifteen yard penalty. Red card. Ten minute major, game misconduct. And a full disqualification.

What am I talking about? Ryan went on a national radio show and said (I may not have the words exact), “I was fast when I was young, I ran a marathon in two-fifty-something.” His staff confirmed his claim.

Except, of course, that he didn’t do that. Not even close. The folks at Runner’s World set a staffer on the hunt and found the truth. He ran one marathon, Grandma’s in Duluth, 1990, as a twenty-year-old college student, in FOUR-OH-ONE-TWENTY-FIVE. He was a solid mid-packer, but that, apparently, wasn’t good enough for the image he was trying to put forth, so he became a liar from the mid-pack instead. Caught red-handed, he was forced to confess – at least to the press. He’d better take it up with his pastor as well. I think there’s a commandment thing going on here.

Now, this tidbit didn’t get a lot of press. To the average Joe on the street, what’s the difference? They guy said he ran a marathon and he did. Time? Schmime! (Is that how you’d spell that?) But to a runner, a marathoner, a marathon racer who actually has run a two-fifty-something a half-dozen times, this is a mind-blower that exposes moral bankruptcy.

First, anyone who runs a marathon remembers it. It’s a life experience, sometimes a life-changing experience. And while I know people who have run so many that they can’t always recall each one (this is a mental exercise I do on some runs, trying to recall each of my seventeen marathons and the times), I don’t know anyone who doesn’t recall their first, especially if it was their only. They might have the time a few minutes off, but they know what they did. Cape Cod, October 2005, three-twenty-nine.

Second, anyone who has run a marathon cannot possibly confuse a sub-three-hour marathon, where you are racing the distance, with a four-hour marathon, where the ordeal centers on tactics to achieve the distance. Runners I know who run four-hour marathons view a sub-three the same way I view elite marathoners’ performances. It’s something to be respected, awed by, and recognized as a gift that’s simply not evenly distributed among the population. No four-hour marathoner I’ve ever met could possibly ever assert they’d gone sub-three, just as I could never possibly assert I’d run sub-two-twenty.

Finally, any runner with any self-respect is proud of their accomplishments for what they are, fast, slow, or otherwise. Am I impressed with a two-thirty performance? Of course I am. But am I impressed with a four-thirty performance as well? More than you’d know. I see people achieve their marathon dream coming from very different places with very different talents, but universally displaying dedication, motivation, and just plain guts. Whenever they get there, they are winners. And let’s face it. I don’t want to be out there for four and a half hours. I’ve got tremendous respect for those who keep at it for so long until they reach their goal.

This doesn’t just apply to marathoners. This applies to anyone who gets off the couch and runs any distance to better themselves. You’ve got my respect, and the respect of any other runner who’s strapped on a pair of shoes and gotten out there.

But lie about it?

I’d settle for Ryan admitting he didn’t recall his exact time. I’d settle for him getting it wrong by a few minutes (indeed, he got the date wrong by a year, who cares?). I would have been impressed solely by the fact that he had run a marathon – and he did run a marathon. But to turn this into a self-serving, massive, and outrageous lie which one has to believe was intended to build up his P90X fitness related image? This simply can’t be dismissed as a misstatement. The word pathological comes to mind.

This isn't about Republicans or Democrats. This is about personal integrity and honesty to our sport. You’ve not only offended runners everywhere, you’ve thrown away any shred of self-respect. That’s not what marathoning or running is about.

Links on this abomination:
Runner’s World
Grandma’s Marathon 1990 Results
NBC News
Fox News
New York Daily News
Gawker.com

Location! Location! Location!

Tonight, I take a jog to the course of my usual discourse. A jog is probably an appropriate choice of words, since in my continuing state of extended slump, a jog is about the most I can muster. Yet while I remain in the midst of what my countless readers (countless because I can’t stand to count such a small number) may rightly perceive as a slump-induced blogging drought similar to, but in no way as severe as the Midwestern drought, just as like Hurricane Isaac is at least briefly interrupting the dryness, there are hints of my own relief on the horizon. But I digress needlessly. Rather than blather on my own woes, I’ll blather on someone else’s prose.

I hold in my hands a copy of the slim volume, Run Great When it Counts; High School, by Joey Keillor, an author I’ve never met but who is a friend of a friend who is an amazing and rare person, that is to say, she actually reads my stuff. We’ve got a tradition of meeting up, family to family, on an annual basis in a secure undisclosed location where we both prefer to vacation, and this year’s event was a delightful reunion as always. The topic arose of her friend’s pending publishing, and several weeks later said volume landed on my always-overloaded reading pile.

I’d like to tell you that as a famous blogger, piles of promotional equipment, supplements, clothing, books, and bags of cash arrive on my desk weekly. I’d also like to tell you I’m retiring to that island, having reached Romneyesque levels of wealth as well. Neither being true, I’m still easy to sway into providing a quick review of the few perks that come my way, and as a result, I set immediately to intending to publish said review.

That was in July. It’s now September. You know how it goes.

Catholic Guilt sets in as usual. Joey’s work (can I simply call you Joey? It’s so much easier…) is targeted at the high school runner, and good press for his efforts would of course be most effective before the high school running season kicks off. Well, I missed that deadline, but teacher, dear teacher, I swear I have a good excuse. You see, I tried to follow some of Joey’s advice myself, and hoped to have the story of its success or failure ready to include in this story. Alas, that has become an adventure in itself, and a story for a future post. Check back later.

But as for the work itself, my reaction when I read it, both initially, then again to retrieve tips to use personally, and yet again to garner points for this piece, was to compare it to the old real estate adage: Location! Location! Location! In real estate, the finest business can fail when placed in the wrong place, and the lowliest hovel can become a commercial hotbed in the right spot. In coaching volumes, the finest, most authoritative, comprehensive, and superlative work is utterly useless when it sits on the shelf. The most mundane, simplest, and basic work (and in no way do I imply that Joey’s work is such, just making the example here) can carry the value of gold if it actually gets read.

Did you notice that I mentioned I’ve effectively read this book three times? I chide my daughter for re-reading the same books over and over. Her reply, quite logically, is that she likes them, and I really can’t argue with that, but from my perspective there are so many books on the stack to be read and so little time, how could you do that? But here’s a book that I’ve read three times, because I could (and admittedly, because the third time was to complete my homework here, but still, because I could).

Joey has written a book aimed at high school runners. My daughter notwithstanding, she being unique among teens as the giant sucking sound in the middle of the library, most teenagers are not big readers, and given the suggestion by a coach or supportive parent to actually read a book, even on their sport, are quite likely to set it aside and ignore it (at least until it becomes a more palatable diversion than that term paper due in the morning). But Joey’s packaging is the key to the success of this volume: It’s slim, non-threatening to the non-voracious reader, barely over one hundred pages, and organized into quick tips that can be read in five-minute segments. It’s a collection of sound-advice sound-bites for the distracted and overtaxed world of the five-minute attention-span teen. He’s nailed it: Location! Location! Location!

And the advice is pretty good. It’s not sophisticated, highly scientific coaching methodology. Instead, it’s solid common sense. If you’re in high school, you might not have thought about all these things yet (ah, the teenage brain, as seen from the perspective of dad…). If you’re well beyond high school, these points are not only good reminders, but you’ll find that they ring true with many of your own experiences.

Joey doesn’t try to boil the ocean. As the title implies, he focuses on the key goal of surviving the season and peaking when it matters, rather than, as is all too often the case, peaking early and crashing late. Is this real? It took me back thirty-two years to the two state meets I made it into during my senior year in high school And the results? Tanked at cross country states on Long Island in the fall, and tanked again at winter track states at Cornell’s Barton Hall the following March. I always liked to blame that last one on dental work the week prior, but let’s face it, I tanked, and Joey’s advice probably would have been helpful at the time.

So what does he cover? Sound logic, like relying on your body, your brain, and your feelings, rather than devices and fancy schemes. Knowing when to back off, and how to back off, to preserve top performances all season long. Remembering what racing is about, which is beating the other guy, not hitting a certain split (which is, of course, much more applicable to the high school runner than we veterans in large road races). Being confident in your own training and abilities, and being aware that there are no secret formulas. Accepting that while there are many training strategies, nobody has ever truly proven one to be superior, so common sense and confidence take precedence; and not letting yourself get spooked by stories of what the hero across town supposedly does since it’s probably not true. Strategies for preparing in the off-season, including what struck me with some amusement as a thinly disguised use of a quasi-streak (his recommendation of keeping constant daily mileage) to both prepare and motivate. And attending to your health, both on simple, and on some more sophisticated levels.

There were a few things I found somewhat annoying in this work, such as the author’s tendency to refer to various tips throughout the book solely by number that left me baffled and often not motivated to flip the pages to decode these cross-references. The section on stretching and strength, while certainly not invalid, seemed so compact as to appear almost as an incomplete afterthought. These are minor nits.

But there were tidbits I utterly loved, such as the perceived exertion chart, relating how you feel to the comparable workout intensity. I’d just read this back in July and laughed about its description of 100% effort, race level intensity, as “All out, spent at the finish, gasping for air, you can’t wipe the spit off your face,” when a day later, halfway through the Carver Five-Miler, I realized that I really couldn’t wipe the spit off my face. Yeah, kinda’ gross, Too Much Information I know, but the point is that Joey nails reality. He nails it when he drills in that there is no secret training formula. One of the columns I’ve never gotten around to writing is the answer to people asking me what my formula is, and the answer is there isn’t one. No amount of reading specific workouts in Running Times provides better benefit than a few motivated companions and just about any combination of hard work on the track.

There are points here that are clearly targeted at the experience level of a high school runner. Don’t carbo load for a 5K. You won’t dehydrate in a mile. Understand and work with your realistic talent level. And so on. But there is a lot of good stuff that is easily lost on any runner in the heat of any racing schedule, not just the inexperienced youngster, but even the grizzled veteran. I took one of the health suggestions to heart, and the story is still unfolding with great blogable potential. But that will have to wait for another night, as we’re already over quota here…

The bottom line is that if you’re looking for a comprehensive, sophisticated guide to all things running, training, and racing, this is not your solution. But if you’re looking for a practical approach that will actually get used, especially if you’re a coach and you’d like to get into the head of your athletes whom you know have more talent than the time to think about how to work with it to their best success, Joey Keillor has assembled a handy package here.

Click here to go to Joey Keillor’s website.
Click here to view his book on Amazon.