Mercenary

There are races that you target, key races that mean something in the great scheme of a life of running. Then there are races that you jump into in the hopes of lifting your established team, your clan so to speak, to some level of perceived greatness, like the Grand Prix series. And there are races that are simply local fluff or fun. But every now and then come the days when you’re really just a hired gun. Not that you’re really hired, of course; real money doesn’t change hands, but hired in the sense that you’re brought in to do your job, to load the dice. I guess I’m quick enough – not in any big pond, mind you, but perhaps in some small to moderate sized ponds – that I get that call now and then. Jump on our team, we need you, we need to kick someone’s butt. Yup, just call me One-Eight-Hundred Runner.

Thus it was I found myself riding to the unlikely destination of Canton, Massachusetts, to run on a team supporting the Pappas Rehab Hospital for Children in an event to support the same institution. All I knew about this team was that it had apparently been snubbed the previous year by, of all people – horror! – the caterers! While this event was certainly a fundraiser for the hospital, it wasn’t a fundraiser in the as in hit up your friends, but rather a fundraiser as in big supporters anteing up the sponsorships because little supporters – like us – will show up and because it’s a great thing to do. For me it was simply a chance to jump into a grudge match and help settle a score. My clubmate and his friend who works for the hospital – a fine institution recently renamed in honor of Arthur Pappas, most popularly known as the Red Sox’ doctor but in truth someone who accomplished oh so much more – needed to be sure they didn’t get beat up by a bunch of burgermeisters again.

Those burgermeisters, by the way, deserve great kudos, even if they were our targets for the day, as they were one of those big supporters. Foley’s Backstreet Grille in Stoughton annually dedicates their support to this kids’ haven to the extent that they close their restaurant for the day to send their staff to support the race. That’s pretty much unheard of in the restaurant biz. On top of that, every category winner walked away with a gift certificate from their fine establishment. You can be jaded and say that’s just a way to drum up business, but in total, it was a lotta’ dough, or wings, skins, burgers, or whatever.

Whatever, indeed, because for the moment, they were to be vanquished. And I was brought in to help with the cause.

One of the aspects of being a true mercenary is that you don’t really know the rules and you don’t really care; you just do your job. Admittedly, once I learned about the hospital, I did indeed care, but I never did learn the rules; we just did our job, we being myself and a few others from my local club. We vanquished those chefs. But we didn’t know then and I still don’t know now how the scoring was done, nor do I know whether I made a difference in that score. That’s when we pull out that word again, whatever, because, well, yea, there were burgers, dogs, and beers to be had ex-post-race-oh. Mission accomplished, good enough for me.

Our recruiter Paul led us to believe that nobody competitive showed up and that it was an easy, flat course. After all, said he, look at last year’s winning time! Mercenary Matt and I loosely pondered the idea of a one-two walk-off; and though he politely avoided anything remotely approaching trash talk, I knew clearly who’d be the one and who’d be the two in that scenario (hint: I’m old, he’s not).

Never believe the marketing. It wasn’t flat. Not brutal, but not flat, either. And it was a tad long, which explained at least a bit of last year’s winning time. While the course was certified, a certified course is only guaranteed not to be short. It can be a bit long (or sometimes crazy long, recall the nine-point-four mile Boston Tune-Up 15K). On top of that, the marshals sent us off course – avoiding a cut-through on the certification map – within the first tenth of a mile. Ah, the joys of small races. Courses aren’t perfect, mileposts aren’t either (by their postings, my second mile clocked in under four minutes, um…), and even the flag got stuck when the veteran color guard tried to hoist Old Glory pre-race. Again, whatever. As Belichick would say, do your job.

It was obvious by the time we’d circumambulated the hospital grounds that a few real players had, as we’d suspected while reconnoitering the pre-race gaggle, shown up. One-two certainly wasn’t in the cards. Heck, coming up on the mile mark I had a dog – yes, a dog – breathing down my back side. Between the idea that a dog might overtake me (dog owners, don’t be insulted, I know they can be fast) and the adjoining idea that his owner could be on my tail while repeatedly shouting, “Heel!” while I was gasping for enough oxygen to hold the pace, well, it wasn’t comforting.

Fido faded, I took out a few folks on the first significant rise and shortly thereafter, and spent the rest of the brief adventure (five-k’s are just too short and too fast for my liking) staring at Mercenary Matt from thirty seconds back. No chance of catching him, nobody threatening from behind, just grind it out.

About this time I recalled that my fellow mercenary and I had made a pact a couple weeks back to join motivational forces over the summer and hammer out enough track work to shave our respective five-k times down. About this time I realized that the target time I’d agreed to was more than a bit unreasonable. About this time it occurred to me that on an age-graded basis, I’d have to run the race of my life by summer’s end to pull it off. But at this moment, I decided I’d be happy just being within a minute of that irrational goal, so even with no threat, I swung what little hammer I had and came across the line looking so God-awful, as the finish line picture would reveal, that I made a mental note to try and smile at next week’s race (spoiler: I did, sort of, but that’s the next story).

That imagined one-two walk-off became a four-five placing as we were roundly thrashed by those fast guys who weren’t supposed to come to this race. But still, fifth out of a few hundred, even if a bunch of them were just there for a walk, well, it’s respectable for an aged goat (and yes, I took what I’ve come to call the Somewhat Fossilized Division). And that idea of being within a minute of my miniature Impossible Dream even sort of materialized, if you took the long course into consideration. But considering that my age-grade rating on this one bordered on what I think of as my ‘gold standard’, the thought of knocking off a whole minute from a short race by summer’s end... Well, let’s not think too hard about that for the moment.

Burgers, beers, and the accumulation of enough awards among our carpetbagging crew made for a fine outing, and forced us to start planning a return trip to the area just to eat our winnings (after a run, of course). It even allowed me to forgive Paul for his sins of marketing, since he too walked off with a certificate to add to our edible prize pot. And there will be next year, since I suspect the caterers will be seeking their revenge.

Happy Mercenaries

Meanwhile… Boston Follow-Up: Check out this seriously excellent video on the Boston Monsoon Monday Marathon experience from my buddy Chris Russell’s friend Eric (Eric made the video, Chris narrates and stars, so to speak). It’s fifteen minutes of your life well spent. Enjoy it here.

Frozen Food Department

[ Ed Note: As is often the case, postings on marathons themselves become marathons. Pace yourself, there’s a lot to this story! ]

A week later I cannot begin to figure out how to describe this experience. The usual question I get is, “Have you warmed up yet?” to which I reply with a crack about having completed the swim portion of the event (funnier if you know how weak a swimmer I am), and thinking to myself that every subsequent blast of wind since that day has evoked a PTSD-like sense of dread.

I’ve run twelve Boston Marathons and twenty-eight marathons overall, plus a few more I think of as unofficial. I’ve run over a hundred and fifty races. I’ve gone hypothermic several times. But I’ve never seen or experienced anything like what hit us last Monday. Nor has anyone I’ve spoken with. Not veterans of twenty or more Bostons. Not those who remember forty. Many have said this was the grand-daddy of all one hundred and twenty two, so far as the impact on the runners.

If you’ve been under a rock or just don’t follow this stuff, the perfect storm intruded on our party. To a runner, purgatory is cold rain, and hell is cold wind-driven rain, and perfect hell is all of the above escalated to a level of intensity that drops both jaws and internal core temperatures. Anyone who has qualified for Boston has run and raced in cold weather, in rain, in snow, in wind. We get it, we deal with it. This one was different. I’d rather race in the single digits – been there, done that, just a few months back. I’d rather race in snow on a thirty degree day – snow gets you wet, but most blows by, brushes off. Neither penetrate like cold, wind-driven, heavy rain.

Boston rained from the start, rained for the duration, and only ceased raining to allow interruptions of stunning downpours that exceeded the definition of rain. Marathon Monday (dubbed Monsoon Marathon Monday by a friend) dawned with a fresh coating of snow and ice on the ground, barely rose above that frigid temperature by the start, and never attained even the slight warming that was forecast. As I passed mile twenty-four, the thermometer still read forty-two – and that dial would drop even lower by the time friends passed it later. The fateful day started with a true-to-prediction stiff headwind that proceeded to deepen its attack throughout the race. The Weather Channel had forecast finish line sustained winds at nearly thirty with an ominous orange GALE WARNING banner on-screen, while the local TV news pegged expected gusts at forty-five. Neither were overstated. All were head-on, save for the brief two blocks of Hereford Street when ironically the canyons of the city spun the tempest around. A tailwind rarely registers as anything other than the lack of resistance. The intensity of that one-minute long hind quarter boosting reprieve spoke volumes of its power.

No clothing worthy of an attempt at racing the distance could stop the assault. Those who opted for the shelter of more clothing simply accumulated more refrigerated coolant against their skin. Those with wind gear became sailors, which might have worked well if they’d had the time and space to tack their way upwind, but that wasn’t an option. Slower folks in the charity-runner range may have enjoyed the luxury of worrying less about minimizing their clothing for speed and performance, but paid through their extended exposure time. And the post-bombing elimination of the Hopkinton baggage check once again haunted this race; save for throw-aways, my wardrobe choice had to be made by seven in the morning while my front yard was still white and icy.

I opted for minimalism, recalling the 2007 Nor-Easter race when temperatures rose more than expected, and the 2015 gale, when similar, though as we’d learn, nowhere near as intense, conditions brought on hypothermia but not until well past the finish line. Racing shorts, one long-sleeve wicking shirt with a racing singlet atop, a thin beanie, and glove liners for some protection but minimal water absorption. And cheap throw-away expo shades to try to keep some of the liquid bullets out of my eyes. Of all that, only the beanie truly worked as hoped.

It goes without saying that the dry shoes I’d brought to the Athlete’s Village and donned on my way to the starting corrals were wet shoes – at least not muddy, but still wet – by the start, and soaked shoes by the mile mark as attempts to avoid not just puddles but pools and streams and floods quickly became impossible to win. So drenched was the course that runners often coagulated on the non-flooded paths between tire depressions, leading to more traffic dodging and more bump-and-grind than I’ve seen in a marathon ever. That was just one more ingredient in what would quickly become an energy expenditure equation that couldn’t be balanced.

Things got weird fast. Within a mile, my numb legs made me question whether I had, in fact, put on my shorts that morning – something I’d joked about while Dearest Spouse drove me to the race, being buried in voluminous quantities of pre-race warmth and unable to recall what sat at the bottom of that seven-layer taco dip. Cruising Ashland, I was certain that said shorts had to be drenched and must be riding up to my hip joints, giving those interested in well-aged thighs a cheap thrill, because I simply couldn’t feel them. You shouldn’t have to look down to verify the location of your clothing, nor should subsequent downward reconnaissance reveal a truth entirely in contradiction to what your nerves are telling you. The shorts hung normally, it was the legs that really weren’t there.

But a few miles later, the opposite developed. Now, my exposed quads insisted they felt the presence of fabric – tights, track pants, whatever, hard to tell – but the unmistakable sensation of fabric brushing over them. Again, the visual confirmed a complete neural disconnect, they were, indeed, still quite (as intended) naked. All I can fathom is that the winds were strong enough to drive sensation down hair follicles below the upper layers of chilled numbness. Weird.

While they may have been transmitting wildly corrupted data from their sensors, at least the legs worked – not terribly well; in the cold numbness I simply couldn’t break beyond a tight, choppy stride, but they worked – at least through the first twenty or so miles. Hands, on the other hand, rapidly became useless. Manipulating the zipper of my mini-pouch became a quarter-mile effort. Simple actions like clicking off splits on my watch became an engineering challenge; fingers failed and only a thumb was strong enough even for that tiny motor function.

And then there was the acoustics. The wind drove even sounds into cognitive dissonance. Repeatedly I puzzled why runners approaching me from behind were carrying cowbells, only to realize that the sounds were coming from the dedicated drenched devotees lining the course – out there even in these conditions – right alongside. Fool me once, it’s a curiosity. Fool me repeatedly and there has to be physics involved, probably mixed with a dose of reduced brain capacity.

Meanwhile I was already shivering; not superficial oh-that-gust-was-cold shivering, but deep, core, inner shivering. By Framingham. Mile six. Twenty to go, and the winds were nowhere near their apex. My mind, usually focused on the math of time in the bank and pace required to reach any of several goals, could think only of the rate of heat loss and whether there’d be any fire in the soul by Boylston Street. And no sooner would my racing efforts start to turn up the thermostat ever so slightly when the skies would open – about every twenty minutes – in unspeakable deluges that instantly saturated every pore and bloated every liquid-holding fabric fiber with the equivalent of an ice bucket challenge.

Despite all this, I was having a pretty good race. How’s that you say?

After the horrendous traffic of the first mile, partly an artifact of my first-ever second wave start (I’ve always been in the first) and partly an inexplicable mix of incompatible paces by people who had supposedly been seeded by time but now were reacting to the conditions in a myriad of unpredictable ways, I settled into a target pace range that would bring me back to the first wave for next year’s race. Save for a slight and entirely acceptable slowdown on the first Newton hill, I held that range till Heartbreak. On target, cylinders firing.

At mile eight, one of my rocks of the race, perennial fan Cori was there, as always, come thick or thin. I’ve been doing this race so long that she’s gone from single (might have that timing a little off) to married to mom to her kid being old enough to make a poster in my honor (though sadly I didn’t see it till later). That kind of support and spirit keeps me coming back.

Around mile twelve, I picked up a CMS teammate, a young woman I recognized but didn’t know well, and glommed on to her steady pace under the theory that two CMS jerseys were better than one and it might give us both a boost, and perhaps even a few hoots from the crowd. About the same time, while tracking her, I passed my New York buddy the Brooklyn Barrister, up for his first Boston, and having what I’d find out later was a day that hurt to even read about – worse than even what the weather dished out. It wasn’t till I’d overtaken him that he spotted me, but being slightly blinded by the dim and rain-streaked light of the cheap shades, I was hesitant to spin around to see him for fear that I’d trip over something I could barely see, instead shouting and hoping he’d join me. “I’m laboring!” was the last I’d hear from him till he recounted his own personal nightmare a few days later.

At sixteen, Dearest Spouse was out there. I’d given her dispensation to skip this one, but love and dedication know no bounds. I couldn’t even give her the joy of sidling left, out of the shortest tangent path, to swing closely by, as everyone was huddled on the right, on the inside track of the curve. Even though drafting wasn’t terribly effective, not drafting was worse. Swinging wide into the wind just seemed unthinkable.

Heartbreak hurt, Heartbreak slowed me, but Heartbreak didn’t kill me. Shortly thereafter, cold killed me. The heat equation hit zero balance coming down the back side, and systems began to shut down. Past the Graveyard, through Cleveland Circle, those repeated dousings had taken their toll. Staying vertical became the challenge. I knew my hometown club, Highland City, was manning the pedestrian crossings at twenty-three and twenty-four. That bit of coming familiarity was a bigger boost than you’d expect; it was cathartic to holler, “This SUCKS!” to friendly faces, especially one friendly face who was, to my spirit-lightening humor, wearing a rubber-ducky kid’s swim float around her middle. Little things. Thanks, peeps.

At forty kilometers it was walk or fall. I stumbled from there to the twenty-five mile mark, a mere two tenths of a mile that seemed to take a lifetime. Irony of ironies, there happened to be a timing mat at both forty kilometers and twenty-five-point-two miles – the mile-to-go mark – so this lowest point was forever memorialized in a really bad pace readout. One more brief walk coming out of the Mass Ave tunnel, that Divine Wind of Hereford, about six years to get down Boylston Street, and it was over. Requalified for next year. If I lived that long, which at that moment, wasn’t certain.

The human body delivers far beyond what anyone can expect of it.

Crossing the line, my core temperature must have been low enough that even the gigahertz of my brain’s processor had slowed. My vision, already obscured by the throwaway shades that I could never find a calm enough stretch to discard, flickered as if the frame refresh rate on the video screen had been turned down by half. My legs wouldn’t have held another few seconds past the moment a medical volunteer appeared to provide support. From him to the next volunteer to the wheelchair scooping me up just as I was going down – not knowing if I would faint, vomit, cry, or all three – to the slightly warmer environment of what I’d later term the Frozen Foods Department of the medical tent, probably took less than a minute, but who knew? Time wasn’t registering. Another volunteer stripped my sogginess from the waist up, piled on layers of Mylar (and thankfully one real blanket), and put a cup of warm sugared water in my mostly non-functional paws. I have no idea how long I stayed, and the ordeal wasn’t over. Having finally displayed just enough motility and lucidity to gain walking papers, there still remained the task of navigating the finishing chute and picking my way through barricades and crowds, hauling a bag of leaden clothing and clad only in soggy shoes, soggy shorts, and a couple layers of thin film (sadly, without that one real blanket).

But I’m here, writing this. I survived, as did everyone else. I had it bad, but others had it worse. A record number hit the med tent, but nobody was lost. I made it to that Finest Hot Shower You Will Ever Experience, also known as the Squannacook post-race party (unending thanks to them for their efforts of bringing this together every year!). My time wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either, but frankly, nobody cares. The winning times were the slowest in decades. Most of the elites dropped out. Speedsters I know all faded out in the high miles, not, I suspect, because of the traditional wall, but because, I’ll bet, their core temperatures collapsed as did mine, and they too found it nearly impossible to function. But I did, and they did, and still some absurd number like ninety-five percent of those who started, finished.

The human body delivers far beyond what anyone can expect of it.

They’ll be talking about this one a decade from now, maybe multiple decades from now.


Snippets:

Like most marathons, there are too many stories to fit in one marathon-length narrative. Here are a few bonus tidbits.

Mud Shoes, Dry Shoes: In a pre-race email, the Boston Athletic Association relaxed their stringent policies on what could and could not be brought to the Village and clarified that a pair of dry shoes would be allowed and indeed would be recommended, expecting muddy conditions at the Athlete’s Village. (Long-time readers will recall how I took them to task on this very issue in 2014 and their then-stalwart response; this message was welcome and long overdue.) The sea of mud, exceeded in my memory only by a legendary hike in the Adirondacks, delivered as promised. By the time I’d forded the muck pit and shoehorned myself into a patch of space, I was pleased to see that many heeded the call and wisely equipped themselves. What I didn’t expect was to then see people all around me donning those dry shoes while still in the tent – while still needing to re-cross that Rubicon to get out of the tent. I can’t tell you how many people I advised to wait until they reached pavement before making the switch. I just can’t explain this gap in their logic. (Further note: While I was changing in the Hopkinton High parking lot, someone with a BAA jacket came by and did an impromptu video interview – no idea where that landed…)

Of All The Gin Joints, You Picked This One: Yes, I shoehorned myself into the middle of the mob-scene of the tent in the Village. Yes, I found a patch of ground, laid down an old Mylar sheet, and invited another runner to share the space. Safe and dry till it was time to leave for the race, right? No, suddenly a torrent came down on the middle of our Mylar, and looking up, amongst the vastness of the canvas, was one hole – yes, one – that had been taped up, and that tape had just come loose and yes, it was right atop us. Go figger.

Rubber Ducky: I’d see my clubmate with her rubber ducky float down at mile twenty-three, but I missed my chance at the village. As a last-minute extra layer of pre-race warmth, I’d pulled an old terry bathrobe out of our basement heading-for-donation bin. Once ensconced in the tent and having removed my rain layers to expose this fashion, I took a walk over to get some snacks and suddenly realized how appropriate it was to be wearing a bathrobe while we were all taking a bath, so to speak. The crowd soaked it up (groan, pun intended). Oh, if I’d only had a bath brush or a rubber ducky.

Wrong Date? Why does it seem every year that Saturday morning before the race turns into a delightful morning for a marathon? Happened again this year. The day after wasn’t bad, either.

Small World: I always love the variety of people at this global event. Sitting directly around me in the tent at the Village were people from Montreal, Paris, Monterrey Mexico, and Portugal. Closer to home, at the last port-o-john stop near the start, I asked the guy in line with me where he was from and he answered, “Binghamton, New York!” – my home town. My amusement at that multiplied when the guy behind him then said, “Me too!” Technically, the second guy was from about twenty miles away, but who’s counting. And no, they didn’t know each other.

Field Day for Bargains! I’ve never seen more stuff – and in this case, lots of good, expensive stuff – discarded on the course. As clothing soaked up more and more water, it was abandoned. The quantity of fancy running gloves was staggering. But the only thing I’d like to retrieve is the discount coupon promised by the marketing director of a major trail shoe manufacturer that I met on the bus to Hopkinton. Whoever you are, I know your brain was probably erased by the day’s experience, but if you read this…trail season is upon us!

Time for a Nap

Well then. Four races in six weekends, with a solid, if not somewhat agonizing, twenty-one-plus-miler tossed in on the weekend between the last two, It brings to mind one of the few phrases I know in French: Je suis tres fatigué. I give no assurances that I spelled that correctly. Indeed, my French is so poor (read: close to non-existent) that I used to threaten to try to speak it to win arguments with an old college buddy. Faced with the prospect of hearing me butcher the tongue, he’d give in rapidly on almost anything.

But yeah, I’m a bit fatigué (fa-tee-gay), or tired (if you too don’t speak the unpronounceable or don’t care to pull up Google Translate). Part Four of the Race-Your-Way-To-Boston Training Plan is in the books. This last episode was a bit long – but we’ll get back to that later – and it wasn’t that great (though the number crunching hinted it wasn’t that bad, either). But it’s in the books, and Boston now looms a mere nine days away, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

True to form for New England, the lead-up to Boston has been anything but comfortable. Just yesterday, well into April, my evening run was comfortable only due to a liberal piling on of heavy clothing, a lesson learned the previous evening when a howling wind turned our club run into what felt like the coldest outing all winter, even recalling the Groton Marathon at One Big Degree. I’d say it was me, but pretty much everyone was cursing from start to finish. So of course I expect the Boston forecast, currently on the damp side of the fifties, to turn evil and soar to the seventies or eighties by Patriots’ Day. That’s just how we roll, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

The week leading up to this last racing episode was probably more exciting than the event itself, at least if you’re a nerd. Besides hitting a landmark birthday which wins me more time on my Boston qualifier (which already happened, since it applied to this year’s race), and besides crossing the anniversary of restarting this lifestyle, I hit an obscure milestone during that long run a couple of Sundays ago. The run wasn’t as smooth as I’d have liked for the last pre-Boston long one; one of my Squannacook buds came out seeking new scenery and a decent pace and I struggled to provide the latter. But about four miles in we had a solid Nerd Moment when I passed, cumulatively since starting up running again thirteen years ago (I don’t include the youthful days since my records are sketchy at best), one lap around the planet. Twenty-four thousand eight hundred and sixty miles. At least that’s if you measure over the poles. Since the Earth bulges slightly at the Equator (spinning will do that to you), it was another fourteen miles to that related milestone. Crossing both marks on the same twenty-one-plus miler conveniently eliminated the niggling question of which day to peg it to. Now I guess you could say I’m truly on the second lap.

But nerdly joy alone couldn’t get us up the simulated Heartbreak Hill I’d tossed in for Adam. I’d warned him that any run from my place pretty much had to end uphill, and Hosmer Street at mile twenty-one pretty much did us both in. Being a week off New Bedford and having struggled through most of the day’s slog (we’d later argue over who was killing who), I was burnt toast by the end, but save that one last race, the Boston training cycle was in the can.

Ah, that one last race. Being the rare Saturday event, it was a short week’s recovery after the long run, though I’m not sure a long week would have changed the outcome all that much. All I can tell you is that when I toed the line for the seventh time at the Frank Nealon Boston Tune-Up 15K, I wasn’t feeling like a spring chicken. But hey, the sun was shining, everyone who was anyone was there, and we were having a grand time chatting it up on the warm-ups, hanging around, and at the starting line – or well behind the starting line, since this was again a Grand Prix race; translate, every ringer in New England is in the house and you’d be a fool to line up in front.

It didn’t surprise me that they’d moved the start as I presumed they needed to accommodate the expected larger Grand Prix crowd. It did surprise me that they’d moved the start to a spot that seemed considerably farther away. And it surprised me more that they also moved the finish beyond the old one as well. Having logged a half dozen circuits on this course, I’d checked and rechecked and was convinced that their old course, which I believe was certified, was accurate. And a Grand Prix course sort of has to be accurate. So going farther on both ends didn’t add up, but, well, I’d have to deal with that later, it was time to go.

The best way I can describe a Grand Prix is that about a mile in, a mile that I covered at a stupid fast pace yet still had a veritable army in front of me anyway, a mini-gaggle of young studs from some unknown team passed by on the left. These were highly competitive smokin’ fast twenty-somethings and even they were exclaiming to each other, “Can you believe these Grand Prix race starts? Holy cow, look at all of ‘em up there!”

I look at these races as a source of inspiration for top performances, since you know there will always be plenty of people at and above your level. But on this day, inspiration wasn’t going to overcome the lead-up. Within a couple more miles, I was toast. Baked. That little pop-up thing they stick in the turkey had popped. Put a fork in him, he’s done.

Teammate Phil, whom I’d bested in our last two match-ups, caught up around two-and-a-half. I cranked it up to go with him for a half mile, but there was simply nothing in the tank. Fourth race in thirty-five days, six days since that planet-encircling ambulation, well, je suis tres fatigué. My mile splits settled back to ho-hum and I lowered my sights to a back-up time goal.

Long story short, even that didn’t happen. Each five kilometer stretched out worse than the last, and to add an insult, topping the last rise just after the eight mile mark, I cramped. Seriously? A lot of things – even weird things – happen, but I never cramp. But it was just that kind of day.

I actually didn’t look all that horrible in the finish photos, but let’s face it, by then, I’d dialed it down and dialed it in. No wow factor on this day, kids. Nothing to see, move along. Time to look forward to Boston.

The clock said “PW” – Personal Worst – and while it was certainly pretty low on the excellence in execution scale, I wasn’t quite sold that it was an the all-time bottom-scraper. There were, after all, those relocated start and finish lines. A quick casual measurement pegged the course as obviously long – not a big deal for a typical race, but surprising for a certified Grand Prix race course. Adjusted for the distance, it wasn’t quote a PW – some vindication – and subsequently applying the ‘Dude, you’re an old man’ age-grading tables, it really wasn’t that bad after all. But was I happy with it? Hey, look at the bright side, on a day like that, you don’t have to stick around to wait for the awards.

It did occur to me that these four races, Hyannis, Stu’s New Bedford, and the Boston Tune-Up, fell into a pace trend that, when plotted against the race distances (seven, nine, thirteen, and eighteen miles), actually made some sense. While not exactly aligned – New Bedford somewhat beating the trend, or Stu’s somewhat behind, depending on how you view it – one could construe that some extrapolation might give me a hint of where Boston might land. Since I don’t like to bore you with numbers (save the diameter of the Earth, which is hard to leave out), I’ll just say it was pretty much in line with what I sort of think I might kind of be able to maybe do. Perhaps.

So, readiness? Who knows. Stuff hurts, as it usually does, though I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that stuff hurts more than usual. Seeing as I now qualify to move into most adults-only communities, I guess that’s not surprising. But I still refuse to deal with it. Indeed, I still feel like I’m waiting for my Adult Card to arrive in the mail any day now. A week out, the forecast for Boston is damp and cool with a tailwind. Two out of three (I could live without the damp) ain’t bad, I’ll hope it holds true. What I really need between now and then is to go easy this week, rest, or maybe just take a nap.

Degrees of Difficulty

And he sticks the landing!

Yeah, I guess the simple swan dive is easy, at least if you’re a diver, as might be the basic gymnastic vault, if you’re a vaulter (or, I guess, if you’re talking about the landing, you’d be a devaulter, but I digress…). It’s when you add in the ‘elements’ that things get more difficult. In those sports, and probably others, they call them degrees of difficulty. We runners have our own version of degrees of difficulty, like the number of degrees on the thermometer, the degrees of tilt in the course (fancy verbiage for hills), and the degrees of the compass determining from where the wind howls. In Stage Three of the climb up the mountain of Boston prep racing, the New Bedford Half Marathon served up an interesting combination of those degrees.

But before we get into the pain and the pleasure of the race, let me pause first and say a few words about New Bedford. Yes, they’ve got the Whaling Museum and yes, the associated national park (seeing how the place is always windy, it’s no surprise they built a seaport there; people way back when may have lived in what we now see as a black and white era, but they weren’t dumb). And yes, I’m sure they have a few other gems that I’m not thinking of at the moment.

But New Bedford is not high on the list when you think of rockin’ places or economic wonders. It’s a struggling town, struggling economically as are all New England fishing towns, struggling with more than its share of addiction issues, and, well, just plain struggling. It’s no ritzy seacoast tourist town like Hyannis. It’s worth noting that I’ve had the pleasure of doing business with some superb people there recently, and after I’d penned the start of this paragraph, but while I was still pondering whether to make such a statement publicly, those New Bedfordites told me the same thing, unprompted. It’s no secret, it’s no insult, it just is.

But therein lies the beauty. When a couple thousand people descend on Hyannis for their annual midwinter race-fest, outside of the race itself, the town yawns. Half the town is empty, being summer homes sitting lonely in the winter, and the other half of the town is just plain used to visitors. So sure, we get some support in the streets, but it’s not a big deal. But when a couple thousand people descend on New Bedford for their annual running extravaganza, it is indeed a big deal. It’s an event. Or as Arlo once said, friends, it’s a movement.

New Bedford rolls out the red carpet. The local support is nothing short of phenomenal. I can’t think of another race outside of a big city marathon with more fans along the route – and not just friends of the runners, but local residents, making a big effort to get out there and make noise. The volunteers – it’s all volunteer, but you’d guessed that – are second to none in friendliness and enthusiasm. The cops on the road – paid cops, I’m sure – are more into this race than any other I know; seriously, these men and women voraciously cheer, and this is a Grand Prix race, which means I’m nowhere near the front of the pack by the time they see me, and they’re still into it. And there are stretches where even the bars – yes, on Sunday morning – seem to spill their patrons to add more rah to the rah-rah. Add in post-race chowder and what more could you ask for?

I hear you say, “How about some decent weather?” Well, yeah, there is that. Though by New Bedford standards, this year was actually quite lovely, though still challenging. Last year’s gale found me working with a local cop to try to re-right the road closure signs downtown. Last year’s gale had a buddy comment that if the wind had suddenly stopped during the waterside stretch through mile ten, we would have all fallen down, so intense was our lean. This year, by contrast, delivered brilliant sun and seemingly mild wind. Seemingly. It’s all a matter of degrees, remember?

Twenty-five degrees isn’t really that cold, when less than three months back I was racing at five, casually marathoning at one, and running in the negatives. But factor in that this is a decent-sized endeavor – north of two thousand runners – with someone complicated logistics: parking, race headquarters at the YMCA, and the start/finish are separated by a few blocks, making for a lot of forth & back. Then add in the tweak that they close off the start line twenty minutes early and force entry to the corral from the rear, so if you want to be anywhere near the line, you’ve got to be in the corral – read, no room to keep running to keep warm – early. Top it off with the fact that you’ve got to dress for hot and cold, depending on your direction versus the wind in any given mile. And again, as noted, this one is Grand Prix, part of the annual New England USA Track & Field team and individual championship scoring, so yeah, it matters to get it right.

Daring youth did this one in shorts and singlets. For me, the older I get, the colder I get, so even tights, a double shirt plus the racing singlet, and my haute couture contractor-grade trash bag atop that couldn’t stave off pre-race shivers and shakes. I wasn’t alone; in a telling scene, ten minutes before the race virtually nobody was near the starting line, since it was in the shade. A half-block back a gaggle of shivering runners huddled in the northernmost diagonal slice of sunlight peeking over the downtown edifices. The two young ladies who belted out pre-race anthems certainly had impressive pipes, but on days like this, one would have sufficed; I’d be perfectly happy if God Didn’t Bless America and the bombs simply burst in the air. Let’s just get moving and generate some heat!

Funny things go through your head when the gun goes off. A quarter mile in, while still surrounded by hordes of people who’d mostly kick my butt in short order, it occurred to me that in my pre-race dance, flitting between parking, the Y, warming up, stripping down, and of course the port-o-john, I’d never even looked at my shoe laces since dressing at home hours earlier. Typically I don’t don the lightweight racing shoes till I’ve reached the venue, so I know that I’ve tightened and tuned, but this time I’d fiddled and diddled with different shoes at home early that morning, seeking the one that would least agitate the large patch of missing skin behind my left heel, courtesy of a snowshoe outing in somewhat ill-fitting boots a week prior. Now, as we barreled north into what was proving to be more than a mild breeze, instead more of a face-freezing wheeze, crap, those shoes felt loose. It was kind of a, “Did I close the garage door when I left?” moment. There’d be nothing worse than losing a minute or two before we’d even hit the mile mark. Pray to the God of Friction and hope for the best…and yes, they held on.

Go to a race once and you’re experienced. Go to a race twice and you’ve got it down cold (in this case, pun intended). This being my third outing, it was my civic responsibility to pass on tribal knowledge, and I’ve coached a number of people, including the fast young lady who carpooled down with me, that the hills on this course aren’t severe. Two early on, when you’re fresh, and one at the end, long but not steep, a welcome chance to fire up different muscles for that last push to the finish, but nothing to worry about.

Wrong, and Wrong.

Wrong Number One: Yeah, there are three up front. Small sin, I know, but I should know better, and staring at number three, I knew I’d lied to her. I also knew she wouldn’t care, but to an OCD type, that’s a mark. And amidst those climbs, remember those degrees of difficulty? The opening stanza, heading north, is almost always into the wind, but as we curved to the west, I got the hint that the northeast wind I’m used to was in fact decidedly northwest. That doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but it would prove important in the final push. At this early stage, it just made those two, no, make it three early hills a bit tougher than planned. Yeah, but we’re fresh.

No worries. Miles four through seven brought southbound shelter, the wind seeming to vanish but actually gently padding us from behind, our skin no longer abased but instead warmed by the almost-spring sun, an utterly lovely stretch save the fact that there’s no rest, you can’t break the intensity. I pondered the absurdity that this crowd, myself included, considers a half marathon to be relatively short; by five miles in you’ve only got a mere eight to go, so you’re thinking borders along the lines of speed as opposed to survival. I had a little help on that count, having heard on the ride down that a clubmate had run a solid time in a half earlier that morning a few states to the south. While his time was utterly irrelevant to mine, I knew that our racing capabilities have been similar of late, so I put his pace into my head as a benchmark. Having lost a bit in those opening hills, the southbound stretch was the perfect opportunity to bank precious seconds against that meaningless but focusing goal, knowing that I’d need them in the gnarly bits to come.

Which leads us to Wrong Number Two: That last hill? Yeah, it is a big deal sometimes. Those ninety degrees from northeast to northwest meant that while mile ten, the usual gnarly bit heading north along the water, was windy as usual (though not nearly so ugly as last year), the respite that usually comes by passing through the floodgate (shown on a lovely summer day, courtesy of Mrs. Google) and back inland didn’t show up. Instead, the wind aligned itself straight through that floodgate portal, and straight at us as we steamed just west enough of north to turn that last ‘no big deal’ hill into a long, agonizing, extended gnarly bit.

Let’s just say that it was strong enough and cold enough that even wearing shades, my eyelids were frozen enough that a good hard blink at the wrong moment would have probably flung a frozen contact lens into the gutter. And let’s just say that in pictures from that climb, well, I pretty much look like hell frozen over.

But once you top this thing, it’s only a quarter mile, half of it downhill, let it fly, body parts flailing, wild abandon, and it’s done. My carpool companion carved out her best and took our local club record, which she proudly held for exactly seven days before it was taken back by her club rival. I set no records but closed it out more than respectably, nearly an age-graded best (because, let’s face it, real bests are probably long in my aging past), and had the pleasure of learning I’d notched the fifth scoring slot as our Central Mass seniors team ran away with the win in this year’s first Grand Prix team competition.

Meanwhile, my local clubbies keep me sane, or I drive them insane (the fun pose in this shot was my idea), or we meet somewhere in the middle while this bodily-abusing crazy climb to Boston nears its finale. One more push, one more tuning race to go, then on to the big dance to Boylston Street. The gods are actually calling for decent weather for the last of this four-race series. So, with fewer degrees of difficulty, can he stick the landing?

Stu’s is a Rite of Spring?

Mother Nature is cackling uncontrollably. That is, of course, when she is not weeping.

A current theory – just a theory at this point to my understanding, though one that makes good sense to my fairly scientific mind – is that the rapid melting of the north polar ice cap and the significant warming of the Arctic (which is much more significant than changes at the mid-latitudes) is contributing to increasing instabilities in the temperature differential that maintains the location and flow of the jet stream. This weakening of the control mechanism results in wild fluctuations of the stream, leading to extreme weather patterns including the now-famed Polar Vortex and its cousin, our ten-day deep freeze around the turn of the year (remember the one-degree Groton Marathon?), and yes, these late season whopper storms.

So yes, as you read in our last episode, I declared Spring! a couple weeks ago. And yes, I (more accurately we, Dearest Spouse is an awesome teammate) shoveled two feet of white-tinged Spring! this week. And yes, this was the third whopper in twelve Spring! days, the first landing my neighbor’s spruce in my side yard, the second so heavy and wet that had I not gone out at midnight with a twelve-foot aluminum pole (in a lightning storm, mind you) to knock down snow, half our trees would now be nude (and in that one, an hour later, the lights went out on Broadway, allowing us to finally test that generator we bought years ago), and the third storm? Yeah, two feet, at least. And we had it easy. Oh, those poor blokes on the sea-level-rising coast…oh my. Spring!

Somehow, the seas parted in the middle of all of this, and a gaggle of brave souls embarked on the famed lap of the Wachusett Reservoir known as Stu’s 30K. Eighteen-point-six miles of pure joy, interrupted by what one might euphemistically describe as a smattering of hills. That is, if one were as utterly blind to reality as…well, I won’t go political here.

Stu’s is basically an Old Home Day, tough enough to only draw out the die-hards, not fashionable enough to generate the hordes of a marathon, and strategically placed to serve as an ideal training race for Boston and, as a bonus, usually catch the crappiest of weather – a distinction it shares with Hyannis and New Bedford (which is forecast to kick off tomorrow after a thirteen-degree overnight low). Three hundred and nineteen people finished, plus the (fairly small) relay, plus those unfortunates who didn’t reach the end, so let’s call it four hundred, and it seemed like a solid two hundred of them were Best Buds. Look at it as a grand reunion and the outcome almost doesn’t matter. But the outcome was positive.

I’m in a somewhat weird zone where, despite having been doing this for thirteen years (as of next week), I have no idea what I’m capable of at the moment. It’s a pretty fair bet that my fastest days are past, but who knows? It’s a pretty fair bet that I can do a bit more than I think, but who knows? And it’s a pretty fair bet that there are a limited number of abuse sessions left in the left knee, but – you guessed it – who knows? So, bringing this down from the abstract to the rubber-meets-the-road plan, a road that I hadn’t run in six years, was, well, a pretty fair bet to be a total crap shoot. And in a thirty kilometer race, you’d better have a plan. In that light, I planted an arbitrary number representing a possibly achievable pace firmly in my mind, or at least firmly enough that it meant nothing more than thinking I’d try it out and see what happened.

Karma strikes conveniently. Trundling toward the start, a fair amble from the warm confines of the host school, Old Home Day produced a chance encounter with youngster who recalled that we’d passed more than a few miles together two springs ago at the Sugarloaf marathon. And wouldn’t you know, he had that same arbitrary number planted in his mind. Uncertainty loves company. Moral support. Or a shared journey into hell, if our arbitrary number turned out to be absurd. We quickly sealed a mutual support pact and I unleashed my usual stream of gallows humor while we huddled from the wind on the line awaiting the signal.

Stu’s first mile is flat as a board – probably the only mile in the race anywhere close to level (save a brief stretch along the lake at mile eight) – so early Irrational exuberance was almost a given. Our starting pace made a mockery of our plan; the God of Adrenalin can easily put a half minute in the bank early on, but sanity set in a mile later, and that arbitrary pace seemed achievable even as we worked the first big climb. My partner in crime drifted ahead; I let him go. I’d reel him back in around eleven when I was feeling surprisingly strong and his fortunes were flagging somewhat.

And that really is the tale of this tape. Cutting to the car crash, since locals and long-time sufferers of these diatribes all know about this one – plenty of hills going up, downhills that are steeper and shorter than you’d like and therefore don’t give you nearly the payback you’d like for the work you put in up front, and of course, the Dam Hills at the end, screaming down alongside the Wachusett Dam, climbing back into Clinton, then at eighteen miles in, climbing back to lake level to close the circuit – well, yes, we know this course borders on sadistic, the tale here was that I poked the graph at that target pace, and it worked. I beat that target pace, and while it wasn’t easy, and those late hills hurt like they always do, I wondered if there might have even been a bit more in the tank. Photos from the race lack that usual Death Warmed Over look; indeed, I look like I’m having fun – not just early on while still in a chatty pack, but even alone mid-race. To be honest, except for those last hills, I was. Even the finish shot lacks that certain post-race devastation. So as a Boston preview, it was a good omen, knowing of course that an extra seven and a half miles to reach Boylston Street will be no trivial difference.

One of the bright notes that led to this bright assessment was the relative oddity of the rather robust north wind. For the second time in as many weeks, the previous being Hyannis with its odd reversal, this day brought the leftover from Nor’Easter Numero Dos, who’s precipitation had departed days earlier but who’s winds persisted. Common sense tells you that you start this race on the east end of the Wachusett Reservoir and make a counter-clockwise lap to the west, but common sense is a bit misguided. The first half is really southwesterly, shifting to nearly due south. I had this in the back of my mind as we cruised those early miles, knowing we could be living the false dream of the invisible hand of the tailwind, only to be crushed at the hairpin turn to the north at the top of the big climb just past mile nine. The rest, save the last mile, would be into the wind.

And it was. Not terrible, certainly not New Bedford style, and even moderated a bit as we traversed tree-sheltered neighborhoods, but certainly a factor, especially late along the lake, presenting a stiff in-your-face obstruction. That screaming downhill along the dam, which should have put another half minute in the bank, just plain didn’t.

But by and large, the body held up, the pace held down, and even at Old Home Days where all of my fast buds showed up, I still managed third in the Semi-Fossilized division; third which, in my view, provided a sweeter prize than those over-achieving first- and second-placers won. Their wine and gift cards will be gone in a month, but my sweet Stu’s hat, killer cozy, seriously built for running, and sporting the crazy Stu’s course profile around it’s lip, well, that’s swag worth the pain.

Two down, two to go, halfway up the mountain. Mother Nature is clearly playing with her food, but Spring! will show up sometime, and hopefully stick around long enough to give us a non-eighty-degree Boston.

[ Ed. Note: Today marks five years since we lost John Tanner. Take a few minutes to re-read my post on this giant of a man, and keep him in your thoughts. ]

A Quarter Way Up the Mountain

A week ago, the climb ahead seemed daunting. Eight weeks to Boston, knees hurting (hurting? heck, knees crunching!), the gains of last fall seeming fleeting – here one day, gone in a slow arduous slog the next, and four, yes, four planned races to surmount before – oh yeah, there’s a marathon to be run, and a marathon where once again I’m stepping in without a qualifier for next year. Just to add gravy to that rosy outlook, I fully expect when the Boston seedings come out that this will be my first year not starting in the first wave, which will make notching that qualifier just a little bit more difficult. And just to add even more flavor to that mountain, other than the first of the four slated lung-busters, they’re not short races, either.

This is a new normal. The speed I could conjure up just a few years ago really isn’t quite there most of the time, but then again, with the benefit of Boston’s age graded qualification requirements, I more or less don’t need it. I need steady, I need smart, and frankly, starting back a bit will probably only serve to knock my stubborn brain into behaving for the first five miles.

Meanwhile, there are those four races between me and Hopkinton, or at least there were. Now there’s only three, one knocked off this weekend and knocked off in decent, if not spectacular, fashion, one that simply has to be done out of tradition. My offspring had better never choose to get married or reproduce nor shall any family member be permitted to pass through the Pearly Gates on the last weekend in February so long as the Hyannis Marathon Relay continues to be held. But we’ll get back to that.

Time flies when you’re having fun, right? I must have been having a lot of fun as suddenly two months have passed with nary a peep on this story stream. I’d like to tell you of grand adventures of running prowess, but I’ll have to settle for a lot of enjoyable runs with my peeps and an unconfirmed record for my coldest run. It was hard to tell just how cold it was that day at sis’ place in the old home turf of Upstate New York, since my phone hadn’t updated in a half-hour and there was no local thermometer handy, but said phone told me that the town to the left of me was five below and the town to the right (to which I ran) was even colder at minus nine, and I was stuck in the middle with few. Degrees, that is. Anything in the neighborhood would have broken my Second Lap, (read ‘adult’) record of zero, and I’d say my teenaged maximum chill of four below was in play, but we’ll never really know, will we?

Having survived that one, it’s all ice jams under the bridge now since March first signaled the end of the Sixty Day Challenge and therefor it is, by my rules, my edict, spring. I celebrated the day in shorts on a perfect fifty-degree morning in New York City on an early morning dozen-mile grand tour of New York’s finest bridge crossings with the Brooklyn Barrister. Then a mere day later, ah, spring in New England, the wind is howling, my neighbor’s pine tree is in my side yard (on the ground, mind you, it's not supposed to be there), and bombogenesis is wreaking havoc with every utility pole and coastline in the state. If you guessed that I snuck out for a few miles in the midst of the mayhem you would of course be playing an easy bet; the sneaky little streak that I’ve said little about (since I hover somewhere between, “This is a great motivator,” and, “This is killing me,”) is now over five months old and couldn’t be stopped by a little ‘ol epic storm of record proportion. But that streak has gotten me through the winter, and the end of winter of course brings us back to Hyannis.

Winter fulfilled its contract at Hyannis, a race that more often than not runs cold and generally nasty, and this one was cold in the worst way. I often say I’d prefer to run in a twenty-degree snowstorm (or for that matter, even colder on a sunny day) than forty and rain. And as Dearest Spouse likes to quote her grandmother, “Oh, did it rain.”

Forty and rain, worse, forty and solid, sometimes heavy rain, even more worse mixed with wind, penetrates like nothing else. There is no clothing that really defeats this, especially when you’re racing and you can’t seal yourself in a plastic cocoon (which I did at least for my warm-up, in a procured hand-me-down trash bag because I was too clueless to remember to bring my own). Once the cold water penetrates to your skin, it sucks the warmth, sucks the life, sucks the very soul from your being. Death soon ensues. (OK, that was a bit melodramatic.)

Wineglass Half 2011. Martha’s Vineyard 2013. Boston 2015. Hypothermia makes for days you remember. Hyannis breached that threshold once before, a week after that chilling Vineyard expedition, when windy cold rain left me blue – no, not sad, but blue – on return to the headquarters hotel. To be fair, it was my own fault, since I insist on the tradition of running the back half of the course as a warm-down (or chill-down) of sorts, turning my seven-mile leg into a half marathon’s worth of miles.

This one ranked on the blue scale as well, but with some special twists. On the positive side, for the first time in eight outings, Hyannis’ notorious wind reversed itself. That probably gave my largely westbound third leg a little tailwind boost (and I did turn in a decent enough pace to call this a decent enough race), but it made the largely eastbound back half – when the rain seemed to redouble its rate – rather gnarly. So when life gives you frozen lemons…? Sing. I conjured up every rain- or sun-related tune I could muster and belted out (and I mean belted) key lines whenever I passed course marshals, soggy fans, and the slower-paced half-marathoners. A favorite? La La Land’s “It’s Another Day of Sun!” Bystanders either loved it or menacingly reached for their phones.

By that point it just didn’t matter; I was soaked clean through. Somewhere around mile three in the race proper there are a couple of spots on the course that are notorious for road flooding, though even in a typical wet year you can skooch past the inky depths on the muddy sidelines. Road flood number one offered such an escape, but road flood number two, overwhelmed by the immensity of the precipitation, offered no safe alternative. Skooching looked quite certain to bring on a face-plant disaster, so damn the torpedoes, batten the hatches, we’re going in. In, as in at least seven or eight strides across, and easily more than five inches deep. As I said, just didn’t matter.

Prior to that dunk-tank experience, I’d taken the baton in a state of shock, my second leg arriving – what? – in the lead of the relay. Let’s be fair, our first leg, the Mad Moroccan, is a ringer of the first order, and our second leg, a last-minute fill-in for our injured second man, outdid himself as well. Lining up in the zone next to a couple of tall lanky twenty-somethings, I had nowhere to go but down, and indeed lost two spots over my seven miles. Truly, I felt no shame in running close, but not quite as fast, as a couple of kids half my age.

That left Anchor Danny to bring it home which of course he did, though amusingly I rolled in only a couple of minutes behind him, having foregone my usual post-leg rest-and-catch-my-breath reprieve in favor of getting moving on the back half before my blood stopped flowing and even more cold crept in. I’ve always threatened him – tongue-in-cheek of course – that if I ever caught him in his race to the finish that I’d beat him up, take his baton, and bolt for the line. This year’s cold made it almost plausible.

All the pre-race drama of finding a sub for our wounded warrior and wondering if anyone would show up to challenge our now eight-time divisional win streak was of course, in the end, inconsequential. We actually did have a competing team in our division this year who turned in a quite respectable result, but our collection of misfits somehow managed to turn in our best combined time ever and take third overall of the roughly forty teams out there. Plus, we had the longest team name of any of ‘em. If that ain’t a win, I don’t know what is. So there.

So rack up another clamshell. It hasn’t moved downstairs yet to join the collection of the seven who came before it. Give it time to absorb its new surroundings.

One down, three to go. A quarter of the way up that mountain of preparation for the annual big spring party on Boylston Street. Battered, bruised, and beaten, but still in the game. Besides, it’s spring. And I like climbing mountains.

Who Was That Masked Man?

On a good day, I can run into someone I’ve met many times and be utterly clueless as to their identity. That’s why, as Dearest Spouse likes to remind me, I went into a sales-related job (engineering, mind you, but still sales engineering). My local clubmates will confirm this failing; it takes at least four or five meetings of a new arrival for me to recall them, and God knows I try. My more distant clubmates who I see only infrequently will laugh even more heartily. Every time I show up for a Squannacook event, it’s like meeting a whole new crowd. They tolerate me anyway.

That’s on a good day. But it’s been absurdly cold of late. So add multiple layers of clothing including face-obscuring and ear-muffling headgear, blinding sun mixed with eye-slitting wind, and perhaps a good dose of fogged-up shades, not to mention enough fabric to disguise the most basic body shape clues, and all bets are off. I could run – and chat – with you for a couple of miles and still not have a clue who you are. Don’t believe me? Ask my CMS clubmate Scott, with whom I did just that while warming up for yet another go at the Freezer Five on New Year’s Day. I swear it didn’t even sound like him, let alone was it possible to see who was hiding under all that breathable fabric (note, that’s me, mid-race, under the blue fabric and the red hat, but you’d never know). Only two miles later did I figure it out, much to my chagrin. Let’s just say I’ve grown accustomed to the embarrassment of my typical delayed revelations.

In that vein, it’s no surprise that I had no idea whom I was facing off against at the end of that race, and had no concept that it mattered for anything more than using that unidentifiable heavily-clothed object as motivation to shave a few more seconds off my clocking for the day. But I can elevate garden-variety cold weather masking to an art by piling on my special brand of cluelessness.

As it turned out, it mattered quite a bit, and even more after a surprise sweetener was piled on a bit later. But at the time, all I knew was that I was dragging a pair of legs that had just run a marathon the day before through a five miler that started at five degrees into a biting and sapping headwind. By the end, at least I had that wind to my back, but on the final small hill – usually my strong point – the masked man I was chasing put ten yards on me and I momentarily figured I was frozen toast. But we’ll get back to that.

Yes, I’d run a marathon the day before, and yes, I counsel all my running friends not to race for a while after a marathon. But let’s be clear; that marathon, the rapidly-increasing-in-fame Groton Marathon, was by no means a race, so none of the requisite micro-tears lacerating various muscles, none of the quad burn, none of the typical damage that the body-consuming effort of a raced marathon brings on. Still, it was twenty-six miles on the legs.

And I should note that running the Freezer – my seventh outing on that icy venue – was a fallback of sorts. For the last month or two I’d entertained the somewhat whacked idea of following up Sunday’s marathon with another on Monday – another casual event to be sure, but still fifty-two miles on the legs. Groton is held on the Sunday after Christmas, and the New Year’s Boston Marathon run is held, as you might guess, on New Year’s morning. This year’s calendar put them back-to-back, offering up a special challenge for the feeble of mind. But when Monday morning’s forecast was for four below zero and significantly devoid of the warming power of sunlight at six in the morning, I opted to defer this year’s Boston run and await the tropical five-degree sun-drenched (and windswept) relative warmth of the Freezer’s eleven o’clock start.

Groton hadn’t exactly been an overheated sweat-fest. A largely unidentifiable group of a dozen and a half heavily wrapped bodies set off at nine at one – nine in the morning, that is, with one whole degree on the thermometer. But the air was mostly calm and the sun was bright and frankly, we were pretty comfortable – at least till we hit the three-mile westbound stretch through Ayer, when the air decided to be most decidedly not calm and we were most decidedly not comfortable – but that too passed.

As is typical for the Groton gala, few of those who started intended to run the full distance; all were welcome to pick their poison, whether full, half, quarter, eighth, or a few miles down the road with the dog. But also as is also typical for Groton, the Squannacook crowd took good care of us enroute, with replenishment thankfully kept in warm cars after the first pre-cached goodie stop served up GatorSlushies and SnickerBricks. (Snickers, I must say, once warmed above Brick form, make for terrific fuel. What are the forms of matter? Plasma, gas, liquid, solid, and SnickerBricks.) A whopping four of us wheeled in from the full course at ten degrees to be greeted with a warm car and hot chocolate reportedly sporting some Irish enhancement. Ahh…

While this was entirely a casual slog, it did provide a notch of confidence restoration. Boston now looms about a hundred days out. I hadn’t touched anything over twenty since Gate City, and on that day, the part over twenty was best forgotten. So though we stopped and tanked up every five miles or so, it was still a decent indication of whether my body would revolt in the high miles. I remembered to click the watch for our stops this time, and was pleased to see that each segment actually got a little quicker, culminating in the last five where I had to be a little antisocial and break ahead of the group to stretch out that chronically complaining left knee. This was no speed fest but let’s just say, net of the breaks, I feel good about heading into Boston ’18 without yet having a qualifier for Boston ’19. And of course, we all got Chris’s signature medals…

It really wasn’t the thought of launching on another one only seventeen hours later that stopped me. Nor was it the thought of having to rise at five in the morning to do so (full disclosure, Dearest Spouse and I did not make it till midnight on New Year’s Eve, so I would have had plenty of sleep). It was the thought of doing that at four below zero in the dark that pushed me over the edge. Five extra hours and nine extra degrees was a Faustian bargain – because by running the Freezer, I’d actually have to try to run fast – but I bought in.

When the gun went off in Sterling, despite that nearly two-mile warm-up, my legs just didn’t work. The lunacy of racing less than twenty-four hours after twenty-six miles wouldn’t leave my mind, but it was also entirely possible that the rock-like consistency of shoe rubber in an already minimally-padded lightweight racing shoe was playing havoc with the physics of stride mechanics.

Whatever, I bought in; it was too late to change my mind.

Outbound was uneventful. After The Sorting (the inevitable settling after the mayhem of the start), I crept past one Gore-Tex puffball and then just held my turf into the headwind, picking around patches of black ice stubbornly hanging on since our last storm. After the lollipop turnaround, the wind became a bit of an ally, but not a cooperative one. At one point, trying to emulate those mysterious one-car crashes that make you scratch your head and say, “How did they do that?” I nearly fell off the road thanks to a combination of steep crown, black ice, and a surprise gust. Nobody around me. Nothing in my way. Would’ve been good and embarrassing.

But all in all, this was just a race for the day after a marathon. The split markers were uncertain, but even if marginally accurate, my split times weren’t spectacular, which was fine, because, as I said, this was just a race for the day after a marathon. Start the new year, get one in the books, go home empty-handed but feel satisfied and smugly superior to all those hung-over blokes.

Still, coming up on mile four, there were three guys (guys? people, gender undeterminable) in a line not too far in front of me. That racing gene kicked in. Oh damn, I just can’t not do this, can I?

First one, seemed to be fading a bit, clicked him off fairly easily (yes, they’d all turn out to be hims).

Second one, took a little more work, had some time to chat. I think telling him that I’d run Groton the day before made him just say, oh, hell, this dude is off the scale, just let him go.

Third one, this guy wasn’t going down easy. Three quarters of a mile to go. Slight downgrade, into a vale of sorts, I crept up on his shoulder. Third of a mile to go, last bit on the course that resembles a hill, and I’m a hill guy, this was my time to move. And he put ten yards on me. That’s what twenty-six the day before does to you, even if you didn’t race it.

Topping the rise, staring at his back, this is where you have that, “Do I really want this?” moment. Do I care? Or, as I’d been thinking only a few minutes earlier, do I just go home knowing I’ve kicked off the new year in the right direction and be happy?

And then you have that, “Whatever…” moment and the racing gene kicks back in.

A quarter mile of straight flat to go, culminating in this course’s famous, icy, don’t-fall-on-your-*** very sharp turn into the school and the finish chute. Legs with twenty-six and a warm-up and four-and-three-quarters of a race on them suddenly and inexplicably felt loose and almost loopy. Whoever this heavily-packaged person was, he slipped behind me. Knowing I’d need to slow for that treacherous turn, I left the engines on full till the last moment, stayed vertical around the bend, and wrapped it up.

In other words, we had ourselves a real-live race. He’d put up a helluva’ fight. And then I went back into clueless zone, more or less the theme of this story.

The usual post-finish mutual pats-on-the back commenced, each of us congratulating each other, the vanquished uttering kudus, the vanquisher exclaiming how we couldn’t have finished that hard without each other’s push (entirely true), thankful that the situation turned this from just a nice way to check off New Year’s Day into a real racing story.

And I have no idea who I just raced to the death and who I’m talking to.

In fact I have no idea who that wrapped up athlete was until I’m back inside, raiding the goodie table, he walks in, and I realize not only that it’s my CMS teammate Phil, the very guy who’d greeted me when I first arrived at the race (and I hadn’t really connected who he was at that point either), but I’m also chatting with his wife who’s tending the post-race comestibles.

And I still haven’t figured out why any of this is significant.

Nor do I until a race official walks in with the first page of results, I catch a glance, and realize that Phil, who’d I’d thought was in his forties, was in fact a year older than me, and that our battle to the death was the battle for the age group. Since there’s only one award per age group, that little face-off (in the cosmic sense, though it was an Epic Battle in my warped mind) was worth the coveted Freezer sweatshirt award (my sixth, but to be fair, there were years early on when the top three in each age group got them). And to my surprise, since the men’s senior age division was the largest registered group, the race crew tossed on a gift card, a sweetener for the winner of that largest division. (And just for an exclamation point, we both knocked off the first fortyish youngster.)

I train to improve my abilities, yet none of this cures my basic inability to hold onto names. Places? Got those. Can remember almost every road I’ve been on. Meet you tomorrow? You’d better reintroduce yourself the next day. It’s just how it is.

So I can’t tell you that if Phil had been in shorts and a singlet with fully visible features that I’d have known I had to take him down for that cotton garment. Thus I’ll stick to that racing gene. If it’s in front of you, I’d advise that you go for it. You never know.