Chasing Spiridon

Race Report: Foot Traffic Flat Half

2011-07-04T17:03:00.000-07:00

Every race distance deserves respect. Run a 10K hard enough to where you’re ready to puke on the person grabbing your finishing tag at the end, then work at whittling down that time. This is no less a running challenge than the just-finish marathons many people do. Still. Stepping up to a half-marathon after a spring sprinkled with 5Ks, 5-milers and 10Ks definitely gave me a tingle of excitement today. Plus, it’s a pretty big crowd at the Foot Traffic Flat Half, capped at 2,000, with some fasties among 'em.

Conditions were perfect for the early-morning race out on bucolic Sauvie Island: sunny, temperature around 55 and a little breeze from the north as we got going around 6:50 a.m., 15 minutes after the full runners took to the roads. Temps quickly jumped into the 60s – and it hit 70 by noon – so those running the full might have faced some heat issues. Remember, this is Portland, where most before-work runners have been enjoying gray skies and 40s and 50s all through their marathon build. Acclimation is a key factor in faring well in hot weather (or cold, for that matter), and through our cool, soggy spring there was little opportunity for most people to prepare for so much sun. Of course, living the luxurious life of a freelancer, and preferring to do my running in the afternoon or early evening, I had an edge in this regard. Plus, today, well, by the time my half was over the sun was just beginning to really crank.

So: Do you need to hear about how early I had to get out of bed this morning in order to make it onto the island in time for the race? About the fireworks the night before when I was trying to fall asleep at a decent hour? About the warming up, the hitting of the porta-potties, the marveling at the diversity of the gathered and all that other pre-race stuff? I didn’t think so. But, yes, in order not to disappoint I will say a few words about that bit of baggage every hardcore runner carries into a race: expectations.

I’d been running more frequently the last few months, but total volume was down from the glory days of aught-nine – What days! – due to the ankle that rankles. Most runs had been in the 5-8 mile range, with literally nothing over 12. My biggest week was in the low 40s, a pittance compared to the 70+ weeks I regularly hammered in 2009. But the quality had been pretty good, with those shorter races and tons of hills – so I went to the line thinking I had a shot at sub-90, if all went well, even if it might only be 1:29:59. That’s well off my 1:28:51 half-marathon PR, but if I could manage to sneak under an hour and a half on light training and come away with the ankle still connecting the foot and the leg, hey, I was more than ready to take that.

Nothing that happened over the first few miles suggested to me that I’d do better than I had hoped. Per habit I let the race excitement carry me to a couple of quick opening miles, 6:38 and then 6:39, as I glued myself to some people who looked like they might be my speed. Except for one who fell away, they weren’t: They pulled away in Mile 3 as I settled down to a 6:54 split, followed by a 6:56 on Mile 4.

Yep, headed to 90 minutes or thereabouts, I was thinking as we hung a U-turn on a short spur to the course before rejoining the big loop at the south end of the island.

Then, heading northeast across the island in the middle stages of the race, I actually began to wonder if I might not make 90 minutes. I wasn’t dying, but the breeze had picked up and at several points was right in our faces. I tried to shield myself by tucking in behind a tall guy in a red shirt – he had been just in front of me much of the way. Then another guy came and hooked alongside him, so I had the two of them to draft behind. That helped a bit, as did their chatting; it was just running talk, but listening to it helped give my mind a break from the race. Mile 5 (before we hit the wind) was 6:46, then came 6:50, 6:57, 6:55 and, for Mile 9, 6:56. The chatting duo pulled away a few times and I didn’t strain to keep up. They looked stronger than me and though I never explicitly said it to myself, in the back of my mind I believe I was anticipating I would fade. Nothing dramatic, just the gradual leaking away of pace, a second or two each mile, the way it usually happens as longer races ware on. But I wasn’t worried: I just wanted to stay calm, stay comfortable, enjoy the fresh summer morning and let the race unfold. That’s kind of a cool thing you get to do when you aren’t gunning for a PR.

But things took a strange turn as we bended south for the last quarter of the race.

With the wind at our backs, I caught back up and then went on ahead of my erstwhile compatriots. I checked myself to make sure I wasn’t being stupid, but all the feedback was thumbs up. I wasn’t killing myself. I was pushing, but I was cruising. Mile 10 was a 6:39. Hitting that marker, feeling good, knowing there was just 5K to go – I was damn near elated. I can keep this up for 5K! I told myself. Ninety minutes was in the bag and I wondered briefly if a PR might be possible. But the calculations proved daunting to do and, anyway, I was simply having too much fun to care. So I maintained the pace. Stepped it up a little, actually, doing a 6:35 on Mile 11, matched by another 6:35 on Mile 12. The island is pancake flat – duh – and the finish area had long been within sight. Now I could smell it. I motored on past the Red Lizard aid station around 12.5 miles, figuring it was too late to make a difference and would just slow me down.

A quick digression on nutrition: Nailed it. Drank water or Nuun at I’d guess four of the seven aid stations. Ate my own Gu just beyond the four-mile mark. Grabbed a Hammer Gel around, hmm, the nine-mile mark? I’d done several half-marathons without much in the way of carbs, and it might be that boosting the intake made a difference today. Hard to say based on one trial, of course, but seemed that way.

Back to the race: Way back around Mile 3 a guy in an orange singlet had gone by me looking very strong. He had come back into view around the 10-mile mark, and provided a nice target during the final stages of the race. I was closing on him, and closing on him, and closing on him. As we turned into the Pumpkin Patch entry, where the race started and finished, I had the margin down to 10 yards or so. Wasn’t able to get him, but he did me a big favor over those last few miles, staying strong and pulling me along.

My Mile 13 split was 6:28, then came some 31 seconds for that dastardly remaining 0.1 mile to the end. By my watch, it all added up to a 1:28:19. Officially, it was 1:28:21, a half-minute PR.

Which sets up kind of an interesting situation for me tomorrow. See, last week, frustrated over months of persistent pain despite my best efforts to take care of it, I made an appointment to see a podiatrist about my ankle (it’s actually my ankle and foot). That appointment is tomorrow morning. I’m thinking a half-marathon PR 24 hours earlier might not be good for my credibility when I describe this injury! Any sane person, any doctor, would have to ask: Are you truly hurt? I don’t want to get into a long discussion of the injury here. I will just say that in 10 years of doing endurance stuff with great fervor I’ve never really been sidelined by anything, so you can be assured I’m pretty good at both taking care of myself and toughing out the owies. But this is a weird one: It doesn’t get much worse when I run – today it was a minor nuisance, and I was able to put it out of my mind almost the entire way – and it doesn’t get much better when I don’t run. But it always at least kind of hurts, and sometimes hurts quite badly. Mainly, I’m seeing the doc because I want to be sure that running – which I can obviously do, though with some discomfort – isn’t risking turning whatever this is into a completely debilitating injury. I’ll try to follow up with a post on how the appointment goes. Meanwhile, wow, the warm glow of a PR. It’s nice.

Official Results:
1:28:21
6:44/mile pace
60/1639 overall
54/571 men
2/56 M45-49

UPDATE: Was the Flat Half course short? There has been much discussion of that possibility in the days since the race. Runners were consistently reporting Garmin readings from a tenth to two-tenths shy of the required 13.1 miles (or 13.1093787, to be precise). My own reading was 12.94. I'll be exploring course measurement issues in a future post, so I won't get into details here. But this message on the Red Lizard board strongly suggests the Garmins were wrong and the course was indeed 13.1.

UPDATE II: Alas, the Flat Half distance dissection was not complete with that previous update. A subsequent and very solid-seeming measuring of the course brings us back to the 12.9X guestimate. The upshot: This was a damn good run on fairly sketchy training, but no PR. If the course had been a true 13.1, I would have come in around 1:29.

New York: Slow to Arrive

2010-11-30T22:34:00.000-08:00

Typically, I’m on this stuff within a few days. Run it, think it, write it. But NYC … NYC was different. NYC wasn’t a race, I guess that’s the main thing. It was a foray, a Northwest-Northeast cross-country weekend bolt, a visit with friends, a tour of the metropolis. There’s no tale of running derring-do to tell. No bid for sub-three glory here. As a runner, I arrived in a shambles and was glad not to leave in whatever a degraded shambles is called. I ran four or five times in September, did a 15-miler, hmm, three weeks before the race? Then I ran once or twice more in the 10 days before Race Day, November 7. This was for the simple reason, as I explained earlier, that my body, this summer past, said: Enough, emphasizing the point with all manner of woes. So as far as a goal went, it was to survive the race without any of my issues blowing up, to return from New York not on crutches, not in need of immediate surgery, and then able to go about the business of not running for a long time while the injuries healed. And this has come to pass, or, at least, is unfolding.

Despite missing a PR by one hour and ten minutes, there’s very little more I could have asked of the 26.2 miles from Staten Island through Brooklyn, Queens, into Manhattan, over the East River to touch toe on Bronx soil before returning to Manhattan, and on into Central Park for the finish. I freaking adored the crowds. All of us were heroes, fasties and plodders alike. In Brooklyn especially I remember feeling the crowd in a way I hadn't in a race since Boston. And First Avenue was everything I hoped it might be, a big gambol up the broad boulevard. It was there that I finally hooked up with Steve. Forty-thousand runners and we found each other. I got a big kick out of being next to my old pal as he crossed the finish line in a time more than a half-hour better than what he’d done at Berlin, his previous marathon. And it was pure delight to be greeted by Mary Anne’s then-4.97-year-old daughter, Mara, afterward, who eying the finisher’s medal dangling from a ribbon around my neck squealed, “Pete, you won!”

Indeed I had. I had jetted from Portland to New York, had dinner with Mary Anne, then met a succession of her cool friends, spent time with the aforementioned cutie-pie Mara, as well as her father, the inimitable Miro…. And when it seemed like there would be scant Steve time, we ended up with several hours together the day before the race, and he got to meet Mary Anne and she him, and I was glad for that. It was just a swell weekend. Not that I don’t have a complaint! Call me a wimp but I’m never doing the New York City Marathon again. I do not want to sit my candy ass out in the early-morning cold at Fort Wadsworth for three hours before taking off on a marathon. Great race. Stupid pre-race.

A little album of pictures I took during the race is online.

Autumn Leaves: Among Real Runners

2010-10-31T16:49:00.000-07:00

Nothing like a concurrent 50M/50K to make you feel like an absolute slacker for racing 10K. But given the circumstances, I was happy to be able to do anything at all yesterday. I'd barely run in the past two months as the bill for hammering four consecutive PR marathons in just over nine months, from September 2009 to July 2010, finally came due.

It was right after that 5K PR at Nike HQ when things began going to hell. My left hip stepped up first: There was a period there of about a week where simply walking caused stunning pain right in the joint. I'm not sure if whatever was causing that problem subsided or if it was just overwhelmed by the next injury: the left foot/heel/ankle/Achilles. (I've been plowing through DVDs of "The Wire" recently, and whenever I think about my left foot/heel/ankle/Achilles, I hear Bunk muttering, quietly but with great power and resonance, "Motherfucker.") I'm vague about pinpointing this ailment's location because its location, unlike me recently, moves around a lot. I won't bore you with excruciating detail as to its meanderings (and the ever-shifting amateur diagnoses I rendered) — there's enough about this post already that's excruciating — so I'll fast-forward to right now: I don't think it's primarily an Achilles problem, and instead could be a bone spur in the heel that's aggravating the Achilles as well as, intermittently, the heel, ankle and part of my left arch.

The good news is that it didn't actually hurt that much yesterday out at Champoeg State Park for Autumn Leaves, the final race in the Oregon Road Runners Club's 2010 10K Series. This place is about 45 minutes south of home, in farm country about halfway between Portland and Salem, right on the Willamette as it twists its way up the valley toward the Columbia. The 50 folks started at 6 or 7 a.m. but the shiftless 10K crowd didn't go until 10 a.m. The morning was mild, in the low 50s, and utterly still. The ground was wet and sitting in the car before the race, playing Scrabble on the Kindle with Niko while we waited for go time, an occasional wispy rain that took about 10 minutes to obscure our view through the windshield fell.

Onto the race: This course was a little different than the Champoeg 10K course we ran in March, trading a mile or so of paved bike path for single track mush. That made it more fun and maybe a tad less fast. In any case, I acted as though nothing had changed, including my fitness: I tore through the first kilometer as though I were still in good shape, turning in a 3:42 split. And then came a 3:50. One guy was way out front but I was in a good group that appeared gunning for sub-40. My March time was 39:49, so why not join them, right? I'll tell you why not: running between zero and 15 miles per week (and more often zero than anything else) won't cut it. As I labored, slowing gradually, off they went. From the third kilometer on I was pretty much alone, overtaking ultra runners and watching ultra runners on the out-and-back portion of the course approach and go by.

Mostly I agonized, my legs and lungs protesting the injustice, the sheer inhumanity of making them race on no training. But once or twice my mind flashed back to 2007 when, eight months removed from my fifth marathon and having done no run longer than 13.1 miles since, I took on the 50M at Autumn Leaves. I remembered that during that very long day of labor the 10K runners provided an odd sort of boost as I cast them as unworthy warriors among we the heroic ones willing to take on the long run. Do your cute little 10K and then go home and have beers and watch football and pretend like you're a runner in front of your friends, they might even believe you, I said to myself. Just stay out of my way as I take on a real challenge. I didn't actually believe any of this, but during a 50-mile run you take advantage of every little bit of empowering inspiration you can find.

So how about it, 50-mile and 50-kilomter people: Were you mocking me? Wouldn't have been inappropriate on the second half of the race, that's for sure. After splitting the first half of the 10K in 20:10, I crawled to the finish in 21:39, adding up to a 41:49. This was my slowest time of the six Series races I ran, but I'm happy enough. Doing the Series was cool, because the ORRC people are so nice and friendly and each race had a unique appeal. Also, being signed up for the eight races was a good motivator to get out there and do them (although, in truth, my biggest problem is probably racing too much). I made six out of the eight races, missing Hagg Lake in May because it was the day before the Eugene Marathon, and I am not that hardcore, and missing the Garlic Festival in August because it was the morning after the Friday night Catnip 5K, which I barely finished due to the aforementioned injuries. My Series six:

January 3: Y2K — 40:23
March 6: Champoeg Park — 39:49
May 31: Up The Lazy River — 41:44
June 5: Run For The Roses — 41:00
September 25: ORRC Best Dam Run — 39:41
October 30: Autumn Leaves — 41:49

Now it's onto New York for the marathon. I know, WTF am I doing running a marathon in this state of disrepair? Eh, I'm not racing; I'm just running for fun. Gonna visit an old friend and colleague and tour New York with my bud Steve as he tries to shave a big fat slab of minutes off his first-time marathon time. Then, upon my return, I might get on the horn and make an appointment to see a doctor about that foot/heel/ankle/Achilles.

Best Dam Run Elevation Profile

2010-09-25T21:52:00.000-07:00

Saw several references, in the days leading up to the race, to the Best Dam Run 10K course as "downhill," but never saw graphic or numeric evidence. Not that I didn't buy the claim, I was just wondering how darn downhill it was. Having now run the race, Garmin strapped on, I present:

Garmin says the race started at 737 feet above sea level and finished at 465. It also reports we climbed 103 feet and dropped 353 feet. That all doesn't quite add up, nets of -272 vs. -250. But close enough. Say it's a 250-foot drop: that works out to an elevation loss of 7.6 meters per kilometer. As a point of comparison, marathon courses with a drop greater than 3.25 m/km don't count for U.S. Olympic Trials qualification purposes.

Relatively Difficult

2010-09-12T19:36:00.000-07:00

You don't want to get in the habit of contemplating the what-if/either-or questions and scenarios given life on the message boards at Letsrun.com. I mean, really. "If becoming gay would make you 10 percent faster, would you have an affair with a man, and if you did, should this be considered using performance enhancing drugs? And how would they test for it, LOL." But the other day the real live question was this: "For an average fit and healthy male in their 20's with no great deal of talent which would be a more impressive achievement, to go Sub 5 for a mile on the track or to go sub 3 hours for a marathon?" Ignore the sins against grammar, punctuation and syntax, and the age restriction—Who gives a shit about 20-somethings?—and this is pretty intriguing.

I've been busting my ass for almost a year now trying to stuff 26.2 miles into a 2:59:59 sack. So far, 3:04:05 is the best I can do, but I think I know what it will take to get the rest of the way. I think I will get there. But cracking cinco minutos in the mile? You don't need to be a running expert to understand we're talking about widely disparate achievements here, requiring dramatically different sorts of fitness, each of which could be arrived at only through a training regimen appropriate to the task.

I pondered this puzzler as I ran today. There was plenty of space in my mind for pondering as there was no plan or goal for the run. (There hadn't even been a plan to run. I was driven off the couch by the 49ers' wretchedness in Seattle and lured outside by the sunshine and mid-70s.) There I was, running. Got to think about something.

Five minute mile. What would it take to do a five minute mile? How far am I from a five minute mile? I don't even know. Maybe I should run a mile and see?

Two slow, joint-and-muscle loosening miles later I was at the track at Grant Park. Four times around plus 10 yards, that would be a mile. Off I went! On the first curve it occurred to me that this would be a painful little exploration. And that the roast beef sandwich I had eaten an hour earlier was perhaps insufficiently far along in the digestive process to stay down. So I ran a fairly hard 402 meters, which is a quarter mile. Then I jogged a quarter mile to gather my wits. Then came another hard one. Then an easy one…. I did four hard ones separated by easy ones. The hard ones clocked in at 1:18, 1:18, 1:18 and 1:15, adding up to 5:09.

I interpret that to mean I am further from cracking a five minute mile than I am from dipping under three hours in the marathon. That last hard quarter, the 1:15—that's what I'd need to run four times, with no rest interval. That might be impossible! So, obviously, I'm now reading up on training for the mile and will shortly be launching into a program. Told you it's a bad idea to contemplate questions posted on the Letsrun.com message boards.

Seasoning

2010-08-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

Forty-eight on the backyard thermometer this morning, our first 40 in a couple of months. I see a near-90 in the forecast for next week, but the diminishing daylight and the falling angle of the sun mean there won’t be any more heat waves. Let's call summer over—for what is summer if it isn’t the possibility that it’ll be so damn hot for so long that you begin to fantasize about the rainy season? That never even happened this year. The closest we came was last week, when we endured four consecutive days around 95. Included in that stretch was the fun, well-organized and extravagantly appointed Friday evening Catnip 5K. Ninety-one at race time! I figure the heat cost me 10 or 15 seconds. Also, I forgot my street-racing shoes and had to run in the worn-out trail shoes I happened to be wearing, which probably cost me 10 additional seconds. Hmm. If I can think of a few more excuses I might actually arrive at a respectable time. But you know—and this I told myself and Niko afterward—they can't all be PRs. It wasn't that long ago when I was striving to bust through 20 minutes, so a 19:39 on a hot night in the wrong shoes, OK, fine. (Plus, that course is not very fast. A few tiny but severe climbs, lots of sharp turns in the late going...).

Meanwhile, I ran a 10:13 in the Mouse Miler that followed the 5K, out kicked at the line by one Niko Danko, who according to the Garmin data blasted the final tenth in 40 seconds on his way to a 10:11 finish. I'll get that rascal next time.

By the numbers:
19:39
6:19/mile
20/292 overall
19/113 men
6/33 men 40-49

Ultralicious

2010-08-09T12:33:00.000-07:00

Damn you, Crackhead! Your recent exploits have rekindled my urge to go long. Not that trying to get faster at shorter distances—from 5K to marathon—has lost its charm. Still into that. But it's now pretty clear that I will need to get a 100-miler out of my system at some point. And since I've vowed to train to swim Gibraltar with my friend Steve, it seems like another Ironman (at least) could be part of the picture....

On Top of Old Tabor

2010-07-29T17:41:00.000-07:00

See that big white peak? That's not Mount Tabor.
Tabor is the bump in front.

Finally, about 10 minutes after the race was scheduled to start last night, the race director showed up at what the gathered crowd suspected but was not sure was the start line. A bearded slightly chunky guy he was looking frazzled, overheated. No surprise. He had several hundred runners doing three different distances virtually simultaneously at various spots on Portland’s favorite volcano, Mount Tabor. Then there were the dogs. It was the Mount Tabor Doggie Challenge, so there were dogs everywhere. And kids for the kids race. And bicyclists who typically own Tabor on Wednesday, when it’s closed to cars: they were weaving through and around us with more than a few gripes.

He tugged at his white, soggy-with-sweat T-shirt to give himself some air. He apologized for the delay, muttered vague regret about having switched the race to a Wednesday, gave us a few course notes and pointed out there would be beer, Burgerville and a band at the finish. “I think we can still have a lot of fun,” he said.

Huh, I thought. Can we? I actually hadn’t been too bent out of shape that the race organization was wobbly, mostly because it was apparent from the very start this race was more about good wacky fun than keen competition. Plus, I did not have high expectations for myself. I had arrived home three hours earlier after a five-hour drive from Ashland, then had one of those face-wrinkling afternoon naps that can happen, where you crash hard and awake groggy and with a pillow pattern indented on your cheek and part of your nose. It was 5:40 p.m. when I came to. The race was set for 6:30 p.m.

Still, despite not being in PR-seeking mode, and having arrived and locked up the Bontrager around 6:15, the disarray did put my inner uptight asshole on notice. I was poised to get ornery if things didn’t turn around quickly. Then came that suggestion that "we can still have fun.” Tabor, one of my favorite places to find myself in running shoes. A fine, sunny and warm summer evening. Beer. Burgers. A vast collection of shockingly well-behaved dogs of every size and shape. What the hell. He could be right.

He counted us down from 10 and then whistled into his megaphone to get the show on the road. I had warned the tiny speck of a girl, maybe 10 or 11 years old, next to me at the front of the pack that giant fast people might come plowing through so maybe she wanted to move back off the line? “No.” she said. “I don’t want people in my way. I'm very serious. I’ve run 22:35.” Well OK little plucky one! Nevertheless, as we took off a gangly high-school-age guy tried to leap between me and the wee tyke. There was not sufficient space. The gangly guy left me alone but shoved the little kid to the side. I was briefly horrified, but she took it in stride. Onward.

We had started about 50 meters shy of the Tabor peak, and headed up to the top. There’s a short circle there and after completing it we wound our way down to the northeast base of the park. A couple of guys were pulling well away and then came a small cluster that included me. Behind us the crowd of nearly 200 must have stretched way, way back; a check of the results afterward showed that two-thirds of the finishers did the race at slower than 10:00/mile.

It was a sweet downhill, but then we had to head back up and around the hill, not all the way to the top, but pretty close. That was horrible, pushing and pushing to the brink of hurling, but barely moving anyway. What was the point?

Oh, yeah: fun.

We got one more downhill after that, just long enough to give us stupid confidence that the final 100 yards up to the finish line wouldn’t kill us. I hit the line in 18:56 and lived to tell about it.

Some Widmer ale and a little Mediterranean-inspired burger from Burgerville’s Nomad hit the spot. Under the tall trees an outstanding mercifully fiddleless bluegrass group played. I watched people and their dogs, dogs and their people. An hour after it all began I was on my way, feeling two-beers-good headed back down the hill home on the bike. But just before I left I saw the RD guy. He was getting in a truck, about to move some race gear it appeared. He had changed out of his white T-shirt into a red one. He looked a little less crazed but still not out of the woods. I said, “Great evening. Tons of fun. It was beautiful.” He smiled and said, “Thanks.”

RESULTS

Running at Nike

2010-07-26T16:28:00.000-07:00

Just looking around it was obvious this was not the usual bell curve-shaped 5K field. The bump at the Bowerman Athletic Club 5K last night was on the "fast” end of the graph—befitting the race location, none other than Nike Inc. world headquarters, a vast, Edenic suburban business park 15 miles west of my home. A world away.

I flew the helicopter over and snapped this shot of

Nike HQ before setting the bird down on Ronaldo Field.

I was especially impressed by how masterfully they had hidden the acres and acres of parking. Lots cover the campus but are mostly in concentric circles separated by high hedges and tall trees. So you never look out upon an endless sea of cars. It's just you and a few other drivers; thank goodness everyone else is taking public transportation and saving the world from choking itself to death!

I arrived early and had time to find wood-chip trails, water features, statues of Nike-sponsored greats, sloping lawns, covered walkways, playing fields and my favorite, a track with trees in the infield. The Tiger Woods Building was the epicenter of race festivities so we were allowed entry. I guess you either stand by your man or not, and Nike has, but in July 2010 this shrine to Tiger struck me as equal parts comical and tragic. On a wall in the airy lobby there’s an ode in melodramatic Nike marketing speak to Tiger's talent at whacking the little ball into the slightly larger hole, complete with some suggestion about how he's brought peoples together. I’ll say.

The day was warm, peaking around 90 in the Portland metro area and remaining well into the 80s as the 7 p.m. race time grew near. I heard more than a little fretting about the heat, and just now read a message-board contributor’s assertion that PRs were virtually unattainable in such conditions. A perfectly reasonable view, but my mindset was different. I was pleased not to have to run early in the morning on my slow-to-lubricate joints. I took heart that the temperature was falling, that the sun’s angle was growing less fierce, that a little breeze was coming up. Perfect conditions, I told myself.

As it turned out, it did feel pretty damn hot. We did a big loop nearly twice before peeling off to the finish in the plaza behind the Tiger building. There was a stretch directly into the sun and the second time around I suddenly noticed my mouth was Death Valley in July dry. This wasn’t my first instance of dismay. A half mile in I was suffering enough to wonder what ugliness the race’s later stages might bring me. I thought about a Joe Dudman lament from a few weeks ago, posted on the TRL message board, in which he suggested that running shorter/faster required a different and perhaps more profound commitment than running longer/slower: “I can't seem to push myself to that level of extreme physical crisis that's needed to run up to my standards as often anymore. It's like I don't have anything left to prove, so why go through the pain.” Crisis is the right word, getting at the desperate, mind-exploding nature of the pain, so different from the grinding, contemplative hurt of the marathon.

So I slowed down. I pushed, but I slowed down. A 5:53 opening mile became a 6:10 second mile. It felt like the wheels were coming off on Mile 3, but it wasn’t much worse, a 6:14, which I suppose means I was working, giving it my all. Then the final tenth, 33 seconds more, adding up to 18:50 on the certified course, a hefty improvement on my previous 5K best of 19:19.

That's me on the right, losing out on 77th place by breaking

stride to stop my watch while racer 201 hammers it home.

Yeah, well, my chip time was three seconds faster, dude.

It was such agony. It was so unpleasant. It was a half-minute PR? Wow. I was aided, I know, by the high quality of the field. Amazingly, in a race with only 498 finishers, there were always runners to chase or runners to sidle up to or tuck in behind or fight to stay ahead of. Great credit to the Bowerman AC and Nike for providing the lure, the venue, the experience.

Of course I’m not satisfied. Nature of the beast. Already setting new goals, beginning with running the distance at a sub-6:00/mile pace. That translates to 18:38. I think it’s doable. I think sub-18 might be doable. I’m fighting against aging, anyone beyond 40 is, but there’s upside potential in the fact that my training the last few years has been focused on marathons. More time on the track could make a big difference. And what fun, those swimming-in-lactate, lung-busting workouts. What fun, indeed.

By the Numbers:
18:50
6:04/mile
78/498 overall
72/275 men
2/30 men 45-59

The Summer Season

2010-07-24T23:11:00.000-07:00

The Flat at Sauvie Island—or Sauvie's Island, as a persistent minority of locals call it, among them most recently a little-girl "Nature Photography" campmate of Niko's up at Audubon, describing her shot of a green frog on a gray board, snapped on that island—that marathon on the Fourth of July was my fourth hard 26.2 in less than 10 months. Ask me to describe the physical toll and I throw my hands in the air and roll my eyes; no marathons, lots of marathons, there's always something, always been something, always will be something. Worse or better now after the four? I don't know. Achilles is A-OK, calves are fine but hips ache. A moving target, a woe of the moment. Seek it out, deal with it, train on.

Upstairs, however, it's a different story. Mentally, I'm a little checked out. My training style has always been more intuitive, more ad hoc than the next guy's: yes. But my spurs-of-the-moment and flights-of-fancy come in a context of careful study of what's necessary to advance in the sport. Building base, long runs, tempo runs, recovery runs, miles, speed—these things I have grasped and over the long haul they all get their due.

Now? Now it's just put on the shoes and the shorts and go. Summer has something to do with this. Literally it's shoes and shorts (OK, Badger sunscreen, a light cap and sunglasses, too) and out the door. And out the door I go, for a few miles easy to warm up, then maybe I find a pitch perfect for 110-meter sprints, and bounding, and dancing back and forth over and along the sideline. One day post-Sauvie I ran for 80 minutes I think it was, but mostly I'm in the neighborhood of 40-60. Just moving and grooving, watching, watching being watched, chatting passersby, jayrunning, skipping, tripping. Really, out there, it is a little like being high. It's an exploration that would be called aimless if it weren't so precisely aimed at being exactly fun.

With this, I go after the Bowerman AC 5K at Nike HQ Sunday night, and the Mount Tabor Doggie 8K on Wednesday night. These short ones are not necessarily painful. Rather, they are as painful as one wants them to be, and I have a feeling after all the fun and games of recent weeks I'm keen to kick (my own) ass.

Race Report: Foot Traffic Flat

2010-07-08T12:16:00.000-07:00

To the cyclist I accosted at Mile 6 of the Foot Traffic Flat Full Marathon this past Sunday, I offer my apologies—and my gratitude. That Gu was most appreciated.

This was on the first out-and-back spur off the Flat Half loop, a long, wayward, north-south spur. Two-thousand ran the shorter race, 400 embraced the perverse charms of 26.2, and there we were in the lonely early-morning nether reaches of Sauvie Island. Through the odd shady grove, the many open spaces along Multnomah Channel, past farmlands and marshes where insects buzzed and birds sang.

I should have been blissfully alone in my mind at this point, avoiding pondering Terri Moulton Horman's recent visit to the island. There were a dozen or two runners in front of me, only a few in view, no footsteps heard. Cruising at three-hour pace, as planned. The check-engine light off: troublesome hips mellow, PF issue nonexistent, often-tight calves loose and beautiful (if I do say so myself).

Then came a little organizational snafu. Four miles or so in, Aid Station No. 2 would, according to the course map and website, offer the carbohydrate drink Heed and Hammer Gel as well:

Although I prefer to run unencumbered, many races don't provide what I want when I want it, so often I tote my own calories. At Berlin I set out with not one but two gels in hand, 65 grams of carryon. Sign me up for Himalayan sherpa duty. But if the good people of the Foot Traffic Flat Full Marathon would have a petit sac of sugar waiting for me, on cue at Mile 4—then again at Mile 17 on the out-and-back return—then I say let's lighten the load.

Aid Station No. 2. Card-table legs barely locked in place. A couple of people scurrying to set out and fill water cups for the trickle of marathoners, girding, no doubt, for the deluge soon to follow, the horde of halfies, fast deft ones who grab well, first-timers who don't, walkers, talkers, balkers.

“Gel? Heed?” I shout on approach. “Not yet,” the reply.

All right. Another aid station two miles onward. No gel promised there, but Heed, yes, a few healthy gulps a measure of the calories needed early in a marathon.

Aid Station 2B, around Mile 6: water, period.

“No Heed?” “Sorry.” An expletive. Regret. An over-the-shoulder apology.

There are no carbs on this course! The voice inside my head screeching—the one that barely puts up with marathons under the best of conditions.

BONK, BONK, BONK like an alarm sounding shouts the voice, footage of me dry-heaving at Wildflower ’05 splayed paralyzed in a cold stream in the Flint Hills of Kansas at Death Ride ’97 rolling now for this audience of one scared-shitless dude his race falling apart.

There are attempts to remain calm, good faith efforts, rational entreaties. A little traction comes with the reminder that, aha! I do much of my training “low,” as they say—without sustenance. Yes, my ridiculous familiarity with running on fumes could save me from complete disintegration here and that is a good thing, but of course the point of this exercise is not survive-it-end-of-story. Because if making my way from the beginning of the course to the end was the only goal I wouldn’t be running so damn hard. No, I'm about the three-hour barrier.

(Barrier? Really? The three-hour wall so high and intimidating Gov. Jan Brewer would look at it and say, “That'll keep 'em out”? Or just another number made powerful by its mere roundness? You may cite personal experience in formulating your answer.)

And who should appear in my moment of need, a cyclist, two cyclists, a young woman and a guy, their voices evident first behind me, the guy saying, "This part of the ride is so peaceful," the woman murmuring her assent. Together they roll on, the guy now even with me, he has a small pack on his back. Apparently thick with provisions, surely there must be, there, in the pack, a gel, a zipper pull and a reach of the hand and a little feeling about. All it would take.

Not slowing down, I explain my predicament to this guy on a bike and although he does not look pleased to do so—quite appropriately, I submit—he rides up ahead, pulls to the side, removes the pack and retrieves a gel, a Gu, specifically, fruity flavor I will discover, and hands it to me. "Thanks, I love you," as I run away.

I assumed he and the woman would pass me and I was ready to tell him if he ever needed someone to co-sign for a home mortgage or donate a major organ, track me down, I'm good for it. But I never saw them again.

Then everything was normal. It was just another marathon then.

I ran on. That check-engine light illuminated around the midway point. The hips: tightening. I slowed. Maybe I tried not to—a matter of some internal debate, you understand—but in any case I slowed. The three-hour pace—6:52 per mile—leaked away the way it always does, by drips. Mile 12: 7:00. Then 7:07, 7:04, 7:06, 7:07.… I hit seven-flat three or four more times but never got below that.

So what else is there to say? Just a few things, briefly. Around 18 miles there was a second spur for the Full runners. This was a surprise in many ways, not least because its very existence is not noted on the course map pictured above. Then again, it is on this map, which organizers also provided a link to. In any case, when pointed off the loop—"Full runners to the right, Half runners go straight"—I seethed. A somewhat hilly unannounced spur, another rhythm-destroying 180-degree turnaround, the cruelty.

Ten minutes later, about to rejoin the loop, I'm still sour. Looking to get out of my head, I say to a guy I had drawn even with, "How you doing?" He's younger and I don't know why but I assume he has more in the tank than me. I want a compatriot. I'll give extra. He'll give extra. We'll lift each other. Hope flickers! But in his training he had only run once a week, one weekly long run, because of the kids, you know? He's not looking for miracles, just plugging along, losing faith in a PR (old one 3:05). At the next aid station I go first to grab Heed and that's it, I'm a few feet in front, then 20, then I don't look back, I feel him falling away.

Between 21 and 24 brief electrical impulses attack my calves alternately every minute or so, nearly knocking me off my stride. Not cramps. Just powerful, quick rockets of pain. I ought to be worried but something needs to be at stake to worry, right? Nothing is at stake. I'm not scaling any three-hour barrier today. I'm just running, running, running, faster than I've ever run this distance before:

Napa, March 2007: 3:24:46
Boston, May 2008: 3:18:52
Berlin, Sept. 2009: 3:09:54
CIM, Dec. 2009: 3:06:16
Eugene, May 2010: 3:05:07
Flat, July 2010: 3:04:05

Is that the most ridiculous progression you've ever seen? I'm aghast, amused and proud.

Anyway, couldn’t have done it without the bicyclist and his Gu. Couldn't have done it without caring. Still with the caring.

Splits on the Fourth

2010-07-04T14:40:00.000-07:00

Flat Half on Sauvie Island this morning...

1- 6:36
2- 6:42
3- 6:51
4- 6:51
5- 6:49
6- 6:50
7- 6:48
8- 6:53
9- 6:54
10- 6:57
11- 6:58
12- 7:00
13- 7:07
14- 7:04
15- 7:06
16- 7:07
17- 7:03
18- 7:11
19- 7:06
20- 7:00
21- 7:00
22- 7:12
23- 7:23
24- 7:32
25- 7:23
26- 7:03
0.2- 1:29
3:04:06

Data: Up (and Down) the Lazy River

2010-05-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

A little 10K down near the Willamette, described well by Joe Dudman in the Oregonian the other day.

41:44
6:44/mile pace
15/249 overall
15/126 men
2/29 men 45-49

Garmin.
Full results.

On Plans, Spontaneity and Joy

2010-05-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

Just back from a walk to the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, with a detour to the bank, making it a three-mile round trip. I think my legs are ready to go again after two days restricted to biking due to excessively shredded quads. Maybe something easy this afternoon? Then long tomorrow, although Monday is looking like a better bet for decent weather. Definitely by Monday afternoon I want to have completed the first of three planned 18+ mile runs before the Flat on the Fourth.

By the way: I have no regrets about derailing my training by running 2,800 steps on Mount Tabor on Wednesday. I knew there would be a price to pay, but the price was fair for what I got. There are people who thrive on following a carefully laid out training plan but I’m not one of those people. My approach is to understand the kind of runs I need to do to get me to my goal; to make sure that over the course of the cycle my training has the right mix of those runs; to build smartly; to overvalue rest ... and to have fun. I never want to lose touch with the joy, and spontaneous running is a key pathway to the joy. That stupid stair run last Wednesday was one I had to do.

Mind you, I wasn't planning to run at all that day. After four straight days of road work, I planned to rest. But I was hit with the urge when I ducked out the front door to pluck the Oregonian off the porch. There was a breeze blowing from the east, weirdly warm, crackling with energy and premonition. A mostly blue sky was dotted with clouds that piled up, then disengaged, then danced away. I came back inside and checked the radar: the predicted wave of rain, hail and 40+ mph gusts looked to be about an hour away. I rushed to put my shorts and shoes on without any of my usual dallying and was pulled out the door, onto the road — the atmospheric maelstrom had me all hopped up and I practically glided down NE Hoyt Street and turned right toward Mount Tabor, in the heart of Portland’s east side.

The Storm

The thought that flashed in my mind was to run the mile to the hill, do my trusted 2.3-mile trail loop around the extinct 650-foot volcano three times, then run the mile back. That’d be about nine miles. Perfect: most of my run would be in the warm, pulsating pre-storm air, then the unfolding system seen on the radar would chase me home for cover.

But when I got to Mount Tabor I didn’t head up the dirt trail. I started up the stairs, as far as I can recall without having made a conscious decision to do so. I rarely run stairs— hilly trails are a better running workout, providing a broader range of benefits — yet something about the day compelled me to just go, so stairs it was.

When I got to the top — it’s about 150 feet vertical from the bottom of the staircase— I wondered how many steps it was and decided to run them again and count. I’d counted the steps on this staircase before, on walks with the Lad, but the total had a habit of floating away from us. A day later I’d say, “Niko, how many steps was it up those stairs on Mount Tabor?” He’d reply, “Huh?” because he’d be buried in a Terry Pratchett novel. I’d repeat the question and he’d scrunch his face, peer up at the ceiling, then look over at me and offer: “Two hundred or something like that?” And there we’d be. Unknowing.

On Wednesday the number bore into my mind. It became part of my cerebral architecture. I very well might be muttering it incoherently on my deathbed, Rosebud-like, leaving survivors to speculate as to the meaning. The freeway that goes down San Francisco Peninsula? His best bowling score? No, 280, that’s the number of steps on the staircase on Tabor, the staircase he ran up ten times one morning in May.

The Stairs

I counted on the second climb and the third one, too, to confirm the total. On the fourth climb I began to hit the lap button at the top and the bottom. The first timed climb came in at 2 minutes and 45 seconds, so that became the Minimum Required Time to Count. If I didn't hit 2:45, the climb didn't count toward my goal of 10 times. (Where did that goal come from? It popped into my head.)

I’ve been using the term “staircase” but I should note there are several very short portions along the way that aren’t steep enough for stairs, and a couple of road crossings. The irony is that these short portions are, psychologically, the most difficult. The stairs compel you to take another step; it's all you can do and you get into a groove and up you go, tiring constantly but pushing through it. When the stairs disappear, the powerful inclination is to take a breather. I soon realized that my fastest climbs — dipping toward 2:30 — came when I hammered the non-stair portions.

It was never difficult to gear up and take off on another climb, even for No. 10. The quarter-mile downhill (I mostly went downhill on grass and trail) was enough to induce runner’s amnesia. You know, where you forget how wretched you felt just a minute ago. But of course, each successive climb the muscle-strangling lactic acid would wrap its hands around my quads earlier and earlier. The final climb was done almost entirely in extremis.

It also was done in rain. Well, not rain. A few sprinkles. Tiny, scattered sprinkles on the way up, slightly larger ones on the way down. Then, just a block down the hill from the bottom of the stairs, beginning the mile home, the blue skies were entirely gone, the wind was swirling crazily and the sprinkles had morphed into fat raindrops. I passed a coffee cart and a woman waiting for her drink looked up and said, with panic, “I thought I had more time. It isn’t here already, is it?” It was. “‘Fraid so,” I said with an empathetic smile, motoring by, feeling her pain — she probably had designs on walking that cup of coffee up to the top of Tabor. But me, I was loving the rain. The morning sun had dried things and now that distinctive aroma of rain on warm blacktop was rising from the streets. Turning toward home, a powerful gust stopped me for a moment, then pea-sized hail began to pelt down. I arrived at my house and stood under cover on the front porch, wet, wrecked, watching, a big smile on my face.

Restarting the Engine

2010-05-11T22:26:00.000-07:00

It's time to run.

This ranks as my best marathon recovery. Since the Eugene Marathon there's been no running whatsoever for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and today makes it nine straight days. I told myself I'd go two weeks without lacing them up, but that was just a ploy to ensure I lasted at least one week. Mission accomplished, then some. And not only did I not run, I didn't do anything remotely strenuous. Every day I walked a bit—anywhere from a mile to four miles—and on all except one of the days I burned 200 to 400 calories spinning at low-resistance on the bike. I decided upon this intense effort at avoiding intensity based on my Berlin and CIM recoveries. Or, better put, non-recoveries. Berlin left me relatively unscathed and there were cross-country races and 10Ks fast approaching so I figured what the hell, go, man, go. And go I did, with fair results, but a vague, background sense of fatigue developed and carried through to CIM in early December. After that race, I felt like I'd been mugged by a fierce gang of very small people. Shins, calves, Achilles, plantar fascia … pretty much everything below the knee was achy. Come to think of it, I had an achy knee, too. Again, however, races lured me back out there too soon. Six weeks after CIM I ran the Cascade Half. A week later I ran the Vancouver Lake Half. Yeah, two hard half marathons within two months after my second marathon in three months—no wonder the Eugene training block was equal parts piling up miles and soothing pains and strains. A deep taper is what saved me, I think, and I felt surprisingly fresh on race day. It went pretty well. Except for the stupid blister thing I talked about earlier, it was dang fun. I was reminded that I love marathons.

So 10 days later, tomorrow, Wednesday, May 12, 2010, I'll run. Something short, mostly slow but maybe a few little burst here or there, all on the grass, under the promised sun. It'll be a new beginning. I love these new beginnings. I'm setting out to run another marathon, to make a go at three hours again, on the 4th of July. You heard me right. Less than two months from now! Look, I’m not getting any younger. I'm running New York in the fall for fun—no way I'd get three there—so when am I supposed to crank it up for a fast one? Next year? Get out. It's now or never. Not only am I creeping toward the half-century mark, which is hardly PR territory, I just don't have it in me to do a full 16-, 20- or 24-week program to get ready for a marathon. And actually, I think those programs, at this point, end up beating me up a bit more than is good for me. So the quick turnaround might, by objective analysis, be the best strategy. I've given myself a nice rest. There's a great base of fitness that can be summoned and, one hopes, nudged forward even more. I like running in warmer weather and even Portland at 6:30 a.m. on July 4th is bound to be warm by marathon-running standards. Flat course? Flat except for two hills, each a climb of about 50 feet. Yeah, it's flat.

Last thing to say is that I learned something at Eugene, or in the aftermath of Eugene, I guess. As I thought about my race, I realized that I hadn't pushed through the fatigue and distress. Not that I crumbled. I stayed steady. But I didn't fight. I didn't fight for sub-three. I conceded and began to think that 3:02 wouldn't be bad, or even 3:04, or anything at all under my previous best of 3:06:16. And I think that was partly because I didn't believe I could run sub-three. Without the belief that the effort might be rewarded why would I endure the pain? I said I was going to go for it, but I really wasn't ready to. I think I am now.

Eugene Marathon and Beyond

2010-05-03T09:36:00.000-07:00

Bib Number: 537
Age: 47
Gender: M
Location: Portland, OR
Overall Place: 131/2333
Division Place: 16/170
Gender Place: 113/1252
Time: 3:05:07
Pace: 7:04

1- 6:49.2
2- 6:42.6
3- 6:53.6
4- 6:41.0
5- 6:58.8
6- 6:49.7
7- 6:46.8
8- 7:01.4
9- 7:02.9
10- 6:55.6
11- 6:57.4
12- 7:00.8
13- 6:53.6
14- 7:02.3
15- 7:00.5
16- 6:55.3
17- 6:57.1
18- 7:06.8
19- 7.15.5
20- 7:05.6
21- 7:09.1
22- 7:16.9
23- 7:24.4
24- 7:32.0
25- 7:32.9
26- 7:23.2
0.2*- 1:53

First half: 1:30:15
Second half: 1:34:52

Aching hips, tight, painful knees, sore heel and those two god-damned blisters, one on each foot right behind the big toes—those are the things that make me want to throw in the towel on chasing Spiridon. I drew just a shade over a minute closer to the Greek at yesterday's Eugene Marathon. Not much progress. A 3:05:07 is a PR for me and hell-yeah I'm proud of it. And the race in many ways was, as races tend to be, a total gas: a great adventure, a grand opera, an epic novel in my own mind. Yet I'm pissed off, too, because if I'd been thoughtful in my sock selection I would have worn a pair I know don't give me blisters. I've run wet 50-milers and avoided blisters. I'm not a blistering guy. Today, however, blisters cost me because I didn't make sure to wear the right socks. How lame is that? These are quarter-sized, ballooning blisters. Big mothers. They began to bother me around mile 10, became downright painful around mile 15, and over the last three or four miles prevented me from running freely. It sucked, because while I didn't have enough to break three hours—let me repeat, I was not going to break three hours yesterday—I did have more to give. I would have been a minute or two faster, which isn't meaningful as far as the Eugene result goes: the race was there, on the course, from start to finish, no addenda, explanations or excuses. But that stupidly lost time matters as I ponder whether to make a go at three hours again. There's a part of me—the aching part—that wants to think I've reached my limit, pushed it as far as I can go. I see these folk who were born in Reagan's second term—when college was already in my rear-view mirror—scampering by and think: I'm too old for this, too old and beat up. But. But, but, but. I know I had 3:03 fitness yesterday. Again, that doesn't mean I get to pretend I ran a 3:03. It is enough, however, to tempt me into thinking I can get under three hours, which, by the way, I'm counting as catching Spiridon, even though it really isn't. Sorry, Spiro. We're all kicking the Greeks these days.

*They obviously added some distance onto that post-Mile-26 marker stretch to make the course certified. I ran that part hard, probably close to 6:00/mile pace, so 0.2 miles would have taken me 1:20-1:30.

Eugene Marathon Result: 3:05:07

2010-05-02T22:55:00.001-07:00

More tomorrow.

Eugene Marathon Weather

2010-04-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

I read that "some kook" has a blog dedicated to tracking the weather forecasts for Eugene on May 2 (aka, Race Day). No way! But it's true. Check it out here.

Lassoing the Yassos

2010-04-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

Ideally this final pre-Eugene bout of unmitigated masochism known as Yasso 800s would have happened earlier in the week, giving me a tad more recovery time. But I think I'll be OK. Ninety minutes later I feel fine.

Not that they didn't hurt like the dickens. You know how it is. Midway through the fourth in the planned set of 10 and you're coming up with rationalizations for trimming the workout to eight reps, or maybe six. Hell, five might do. You ponder, you mull, you flirt with the idea. That's OK. It's a nice distraction. Like imagining cheating on your spouse, it's the kind of very private contemplation you engage in to get you through some painful times, but you'd never actually do it. You're just not that kind of person. You do the whole workout.

Below are my Yasso times for August 2009, before Berlin, where I ran 3:09:52; for February this year; and for today, with the difference between the pre-Berlin splits and today's splits noted.

Aug 09 / Feb 10 / April 10
3:00 / 2:58 / 2:51 -9
2:50 / 2:59 / 2:47 -3
2:56 / 2:53 / 2:47 -9
2:57 / 2:53 / 2:48 -9
2:56 / 2:52 / 2:50 -6
2:57 / 2:54 / 2:49 -8
2:55 / 2:52 / 2:53 -2
2:55 / 2:54 / 2:53 -2
2:56 / 2:54 / 2:53 -3
2:57 / 2:53 / 2:51 -6

So my average split before Berlin was 2:56 and my average split today was 2:50. That's good, but ... well, I'm just going to leave it at that for now.

Bonus Content: Thoughtful Perspectives on Yassos:
Why they're meaningful vs. why they're not.

Tapering

2010-04-14T21:22:00.000-07:00

You can't rest too much. That's my general theory on the taper, though it does come with a caveat. Or, at least, an assumption: that you've been training your ass off for months. And I more or less have, capped last week with my biggest seven-day mileage ever, a lovely 80. There were two 18-milers, a 12, two 10s, a seven and a five. Damn. That's almost real-runner territory. The last run of the week, one of those 18s, was the best. Basically it was broken into three parts, and I went progressively faster, from 8:10 to 7:40 to 7:10 per mile. This was on the mucky, spongy Glendoveer path, which is nice and soft and joint-saving but sucks at least 15 or 20 seconds out of every mile. So those were solid paces for a longish run and better yet, I felt good. This thing tweaked momentarily and that thing served brief notice. But there's always going to be this thing or that thing, at least for me. With increased mileage I've been walking the scary-thin injury line the last month, but I appear not to have fallen into utter disrepair (that close cousin of utter despair).

I'm going very lightly this week. That's in my taper theory, too: the third-to-last week before the marathon is the single best week to get deep rest. Don't wait until it's too late! Deep rest now, then ratchet things up a bit in the second-to-last week in order not to lose fitness, then some short, up-tempo stuff in the days before the race to keep rust from accumulating…. Hey, it's worked for me. I won't tell you I'm a great marathoner, but I will tell you I've always met or exceeded expectations.

Cut Short

2010-04-07T18:31:00.000-07:00

That was ugly. At 16 miles I started to feel cruddy and by 18 was certain I was just a few steps from going off the cliff down into Bonk Canyon. So I stopped running. I walked the two miles home from there. No 20. Instead, 18 miles, the first eight @ 7:45 and the last 10 at 7:30. The only other thing to say is I'm an idiot; once again I did not respect the necessity of fueling a long run. At eight miles I had most of a gel (call it 75 calories) and half a serving of Accelerade (50 calories). Yeah, that's going to do it on a (planned) 20-miler, 125 calories and 6 oz. of water! The thing is, my stomach tolerates eating and drinking well on a run. There's no reason not to feed the fire. It's just laziness and bad planning. It's just stupid.

All that said: the last two miles were no walk of shame. My legs appreciated the opportunity to unwind. My whole body relaxed. My mind, too, eventually. I went around and around about the failure that the run was; about the training I've done for Eugene and how it compared with other races; about the aches and pains; about the unlucky truth that three hours don't last just a little bit longer; and about the gray Oregon sky, that fucking gray Oregon sky. For a moment I had myself believing that if it were blue, everything would have been OK. The plan, the pain, the passage of time. The sky. TS Eliot said, "April is the cruelest month" (as Art Spander readers well know), no doubt as he was training for a May marathon. But in the end he wrote, "Shanti shanti shanti."

20

2010-03-31T20:07:00.001-07:00

That was no puny run: my first 20 in two months. Not that 20 is the ultimate bestower of marathon fitness, the great guarantor of success. Hard not to think that, though. It’s a round number, and we do love our round numbers. And it’s into the 20s, luring you to believe that, having run it, you have passed through the turnstile into that far off ballpark where 26.2 miles hangs out. A mere 10K shy of the full distance! Practically the same thing. Ha.

This was kind of an ugly 20. One month before Berlin I ran 20 in 2:28. Today’s 20 took 2:40. The last three or four miles my hips, ankles and feet were aching and worse, my legs were leaden. Things might have been better if I’d hydrated or eaten worth a damn; one 100-calorie gel with about 6 oz. of water at the eight-mile mark, then 75 calories worth of Accelerade around 16: stupid, stupid, stupid. In my defense, it was cool, in the high 40s, and in such perfect running weather it’s easy to forget the body is still burning through water and energy.

This run was out at Glendoveer, 10 loops of the two-mile, wood-chip trail around the golf course. After two or three inches of rain the past several days it was often squishy and occasionally a muddy mess. Given that, my 8:00/mile pace doesn’t seem so pathetic and in terms of effort might rank right with the 7:25/mile pace I ran in the pre-Berlin 20. Whatever. I’m not feeling greatly motivated to study this run. I did it. I reminded my body how to burn fat on a long run and maybe stimulated the production of capillaries and mitochondria and all that good stuff. Well, maybe not all in one day, but I’ve got another 20 (maybe 22) scheduled for 10 days from now, all on a pretty good base.

And about that base: I’ve been doing a better job of logging my runs this go-round, writing notes and observations in a notebook but also entering the data into an online running log. Since I started training in earnest around January 10, and not counting this week-in-progress, I’ve had six weeks of running 40-50 miles; one week of 50-60; two weeks of 60-70; one week of 70-80; and one week when I ran just once, a 10-miler, as I tried to figure out what was going on with my ankle. Take out that injury week and I’m averaging 51 miles per week, far and away my biggest total in a marathon build.

Falling Short

2010-03-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

How do I expect to beat Spiridon with such puny runs? Good question.

Race Report: Shamrock 15K

2010-03-14T17:58:00.000-07:00

Finishing time gives you a result, and I do worship at the altar of result. But as grandiose and overwrought as it might sound, for me the spiritual heart of running — the mysterious, timeless allure of the sport — is the challenge it offers to the idea of supreme effort.

Running asks the questions: Did I give it my all? What is my all?

This was top of mind for me while running today’s Shamrock 15K, especially during the nearly four-mile climb on the first half of the course. This is a brutal climb not because it is exceptionally steep, but because it’s not; at around 2 percent, you can't just concede and shuffle on up. No, on this gentle but steady grade you’re compelled to decide how fiercely you will go, how much pain you will trade for gain. It was here that I told myself, “Run this race harder than you’ve run any race before.”

I told myself this and tried to comply with the order. I have to confess, however, that I wasn’t entirely certain what it meant. An all-out uphill sprint two or three miles into a 9.3-mile race? That would be just stupid. I’d be fried, unable to finish strong, probably unable to finish at all. Some concession to good sense would be required. Yet being careful, making sure to leave something in the tank, well, the risk there is that the effort wouldn’t be the absolute one I was looking for.

So how do you know if you’re giving it your best effort? I suppose it comes down to starting the race with a realistic understanding of what you’re capable of doing. From varied and thoughtful training you can make rigorous, honest assessments about your fitness.

I’m usually pretty good at that, but with this race I almost got waylaid by a magical round number.

One hour.

Actually, 59:59, which is what one Red Lizard had taped on his back this morning. He had it as his race goal and so did another runner I know. In the week leading up to the race, I had begun to think maybe I could make a go at it.

Well, not really. But sort of. Kind of. Maybe. No, not really.

That’s the kind of mental gymnastics I was doing as I pondered my race strategy. When I finally did step to the line this morning, I wisely dismissed the idea of an hour being in play— but I held onto something. Something valuable. Contemplating the goal did, I think, shift my sense of what might be possible. I found myself expecting — not hoping — to be within a minute or so of that magic mark. True, that would be a substantial improvement over my PR at the distance, but that 1:04:48 was way back in 2007, and, yeah, I'm two and a half years older now, but I'm also fitter. Plus, I ran 31:53 last week at the Red Lizard 5-Miler, a 6:23/mile pace. Shouldn’t I be able to run near 6:30 miles for a 15K?

It was a chilly morning, with temps in the mid-30s at racetime. The air was calm. I noticed just a slight north wind occasionally rustling the line of blossom-filled cherry trees along the waterfront. I wore two layers of short-sleeved technical shirt, Nike Dri-Fit shorts, cotton gloves and no hat. My feet were entrusted to the battered Asics Hyper Speed 2s I’d been doing all my road racing in the past several months. I looked at them on the line and thought, “This is it, your last race; go out with a bang!” I'm sure they were inspired.

They call it Shamrock Run Portland but it’s actually several staggered runs, beginning with the 1K Leprechaun Lap, then the 5K Shamrock Race, the 15K Shamrock Challenge and finally the 8K Shamrock Run. Oh, and squeezed in there somewhere is the Shamrock Stride, a 3.5-mile “fitness walk.”

Race organizers serviced and herded some 21,000 participants in all, and did a good job at it. And they especially deserve credit for getting runners to self-seed according to their expected mile pace. I waited for the starting horn with the six- to seven-minute group, while a smaller bunch stood ahead of us, directly behind a placard reading 5-6 Minutes. It was all extraordinarily orderly for a big race.

The first mile of the course is flat, taking you north along the waterfront for a few blocks. It then dives east into the downtown area before turning south down Broadway. I felt fine with the pace but my heels and Achilles were a bit tight.

Once on Broadway the climbing begins. I looked at my Garmin from time to time, but somehow wasn’t really processing the data; I was running on feel. I kept thinking that I wanted the effort to be not just hard, but a bit beyond hard; I wanted to make sure it was as much as I could give without destroying myself.

Oh — mind if I go a little Euro on you here? I want to switch from using miles to using kilometers in talking about the race, because that’s the easiest way for me to understand my progress. After all, it was a 15K. Plus, even though I wasn’t shooting for it I was using an hour as a reference point, and that translates nicely to an even 4:00/kilometer pace. Think of it as three consecutive 20-minute 5Ks. Or a 40-minute 10K followed by a 20-minute 5K. Metric math, it’s a gas!

(And just a little bit more about the data I’m presenting: Garmin takes its own measurement of the course, of course, and by its accounting this 15 kilometer race was 15.24 kilometers. That “extra” quarter of a kilometer took me 51 seconds. So what I’ve done, to match my data with the certified course, is disperse those seconds equally among the Garmin’s 15 one-kilometer splits. Probably not a precise match with reality, but darn close.)

So the first two kilometers came in 4:04 and 4:03, just a little off the one-hour pace. Then gravity hopped on my back. Not knowing what numerical pace I should go, I again proceeded on feel. I’ve been running tons of hills lately — 30 miles of up-and-downness on Mount Tabor this past week, for instance — and felt comfortable and confident. From time to time my breathing would become labored and I’d notice tightness develop in the quads, but I’d just relax and remind myself how strong I was. It seemed to work out OK, and I climbed with splits of 4:22, 4:22, 4:12, 4:17 and 4:22 on kilometers 3-7.

At this point the course relented just a bit; there was additional elevation gain, but flats and declines were thrown into the mix. My eighth K was a 4:04 and ninth was a 4:10. This put us right around the turn from Terwilliger onto Barbur and it was about then that a guy pulled up alongside me and said, “Nothing but downhill now.” I figured that was the case, but wasn’t 100 percent certain. I wanted to know if this guy meant what he said literally — you don’t want to dispense with the possibility of more climbs and end up wrong. Major bummer. “Really?” I said, turning and looking right at the him. “Absolutely,” he said seriously. “You are done climbing.”

Usually, my approach to downhills — especially when preceded by a climb — is to take advantage of the opportunity to recover. Today, I told myself, that would not be good enough. Push. Push. Push. My body felt great; the tightness in the heel and the Achilles had dissipated, and my left hip — all my problems are on my left side — hadn’t uttered a peep all day. So downhill I went, going 3:57 for the next kilometer, putting me at 41:53 through 10K.

Even going downhill I knew I couldn’t run 18:06 on the final 5K and shock the world (you know, the Inside Pete’s Head world) by shattering the hour barrier. But I thought I could get under 20 minutes, landing me in the 1:01s for a finishing time. Push. Push. Push.

Things got a little crowded when the 8K runners joined our 15K route to the finish on Naito Parkway. I had to dance around some people and, to my surprise, found the experience more joyful than irksome. I think going downhill and nearing the finish were factors in that generous attitude. Kilometers 11-14 were 3:57, 3:52, 3:52 and 3:48.

We were on flat ground now, heading to the finish. I passed a girl and chased a guy. I went hard the whole way. As I crossed the timing mat I hit Stop on my Garmin and saw 1:01:03. And that was my official time, according to the not-quite-official results posted on the race site.

On the short MAX ride home I spent some time chatting triathlon with a fellow who wanted to but didn't do the race. An Ironman Canada veteran, he was on his way to the airport, heading to Brazil on business, and had seen my Ironman Coeur d'Alene bag. I tried not to babble too much about my race, but it was hard. They're always rewarding, these races. Always. Shamrock, though, it rated extra high and I was in the throes of a nice post-race buzz. The effort mysteries weren't solved for me on the streets of Portland today; I think it's in their nature never to be. But I feel like I got closer to some truth.

1K: 4:04
2K: 4:03
3K: 4:22
4K: 4:22
5K: 4:12 21:03
6K: 4:17
7K: 4:22
8K: 4:04
9K: 4:10
10K: 3:57 41:53 (2nd 5K: 20:50)
11K: 3:57
12K: 3:52
13K: 3:52
14K: 3:48
15K: 3:41 1:01:03 (3rd 5K: 19:10)

106/3,639 overall
95/1,733 men
8/203 m45-49

Race Report: Red Lizard 5-Miler

2010-03-07T13:55:00.000-08:00

Good to have the five-miler the day after a 10K, and not the other way around. This occurred to me around three and a half miles into the annual Team Red Lizard nickel run today in bucolic Lake Oswego, just after I'd put the race's signature feature—a block-long (a long block, mind you) wall-like climb away from the Willamette—in my rear-view mirror. There was some hurt going on then, but I comforted myself with this a clever mash-up of lies, logic and rationalization: If this were a 10K, you'd barely be past halfway done with the race. There'd be three more miles to go! As it is, just a little more than a mile and you're practically there. This is so short! I love five milers!

I guess it worked. I ran Mile 5 in 6:11, and with the (1) 6:07, (2) 6:38, (3) 6:26 and (4) 6:31 miles that came before it finished in 31:53. That's a solid 2:27 improvement on last year, which indicates that I really sucked last year and this year, less suckage. By the way, last year's race report delivers excruciating detail on the unique and very interesting course, which was unchanged this year. The difference this year was in the day: last year was cold and rain began to fall toward the finish; this year the running conditions were excellent, with race-time temps in the high 40s and the sun mostly winning its battle against an encroaching weather system.

Also excellent: The Lad, who ran the 1K, smartly staying under control on the big downhill then passing a bunch of kids on the subsequent climb and the closing straight.

Race Report: Champoeg 10K

2010-03-06T16:43:00.000-08:00

It was a March 6 better than any of us deserved, chilly at first – there was a thin, watery layer of ice on the car windows at 7:30 a.m. – but under skies marked here and there by only the wispiest of clouds the day turned certifiably springish. Springlike. It blossomed with abundant springosity. Fairly boinged, it did. A shorts-and-shirt, no-gloves, no-hat sort of day for the run.

We – Lad and I – whipped up pumpkin muffins the night before so we could throw them down for breakfast and make a fast getaway, and that scheme went off without a hitch. We were at Champeog State Park, 30 miles south of Portland hard on the Willamette, by 8:25 for the 10K start at 9.

Should I have been running the concurrent 30K as a training run for Eugene? Yes, if I had the self-discipline not to blow it out for 18.6 miles on the mostly paved course, leaving me fried for a week. Trust me, I don't. I know me. I made the best choice for my Eugene program. (Plus, doing so left me 2-for-2 with the ORRC 10K Series, and I aim to run in as many of those races as I can.)

They counted us down and off we went, me too fast, and to back up that claim I present this evidence: Joe Dudman remained in sight for more than a mile. Moreover, afterward Joe said he went out too fast. Without the (forgotten) Garmin I relied on the mile markers for my splits. The first came in at 6:03 and I still wasn't feeling too bad. Mile 2 was a 6:28 with some headwinds and turns. Mile 3, on the meandering, undulating bike bath, was a 6:36. The small fraction of the mile to the turnaround that followed featured an ugly little climb, slowing me to 6:50 for Mile 4. Around then, a slightly older fellow passed me and not in the usual chipping-away-at-it way you'd expect that late in the race. He burst past me. I remember thinking, "Whoa, that dude is on his way to a serious negative split." But when he'd stretched the gap to10 or 15 feet, well, the gap stopped stretching. I don't know what his state was, but I was feeling great. The slow miles in the middle had revived me.

I chased the older dude over Mile 5, a 6:27. Then early in Mile 6 – 6:15! – I passed him. He tucked in behind me and I suggested to him that we go after the two guys ahead of us. We did, or I did – he stayed close but I opened up some distance – and with a final 0.2 miles in 1:10 I was done. 39:49. Off my PR by a half-minute, but my second 10K under 40 minutes. I was pleased. (Race results are here.)

I got a blue ribbon for finishing first in my age group, but that was a little hollow: Dudman beat me by nearly four minutes, giving him claim to fastest Master. Since he got that award, I got mine. OK. I'll take it.

Afterward, we drove over the hill through Newberg and out to my sister's in Scholls where many pancakes were consumed.

Return of the Yassos

2010-02-24T23:24:00.000-08:00

One month before the Berlin Marathon I did a full set of Yasso 800s. For Eugene, my plan was to do the Yassos on at least two occasions. Today, with just over nine weeks until the race, it was time to get one in the books.

There was some chintzy Portland-style rain most of the morning and into the early afternoon, while I worked. Around 3:30 I was ready to head out. It was raining, but I noticed on the radar that we were just a half-hour or so from lightening skies. So I waited a bit and then jogged the two miles over to the Grant Park track. I was surprised to find a gaggle of high schoolers doing repeats, and decided to jog around the outside lanes while they finished up. That gave me two more miles, adding up to an extravagant four-mile warm-up.

By then, there was a bit of sun, low on the horizon, sneaking around the clouds and through the trees onto the track. The air was perfect, a cool 50 and calm, just a soft breath of a breeze from the south.

So here's the data, comparing my pre-Berlin workout with today's:

Aug 09 / Feb 10
3:00 / 2:58 -2
2:50 / 2:59 +9
2:56 / 2:53 -3
2:57 / 2:53 -4
2:56 / 2:52 -4
2:57 / 2:54 -3
2:55 / 2:52 -3
2:55 / 2:54 -1
2:56 / 2:54 -2
2:57 / 2:53 -4

That workout last August was a killer, especially the sixth through tenth reps. Today's workout, while far from easy, felt considerably less challenging. Part of it was that I was a bit cautious; I'm sure I could have gone a couple of seconds faster all the way through without dying. Yet I was still consistently faster today than last summer. That's a confidence booster. The data—and this is just an educated guess—tells me my marathon fitness is around 3:03. That's cool. I've got five or six weeks of hard work to get faster.

INJURY REPORT: Earlier posts talked about a wonky ankle/heel/Achilles. This Tuesday I hit Glendoveer for 15, going eight easy, four hard (tempo) and three easy. Felt pretty darn strong and better yet, as the run went on—and particularly during the hard four miles—there was zero pain. Zero! Then yesterday I did 30 miles on the bike trainer and again felt good. Heading out for today's track workout, I was a bit worried about running on harder surfaces (particularly to and from the track). Mostly it turned out fine. The injury tightened up a bit around the ninth rep. I iced it afterward and am going to be sure to do some Trigger Point massage before hitting the sack in a few minutes. Interestingly, these last two workouts have helped me to better define the injury: it's definitely not the Achilles. It's more the heel. The tightness is centered in the heel. The worse it gets, the more it spreads toward the outside the ankle and up the Achilles, but the problem is in the heel. This is good to know—helps guide my massage a little more precisely.

Spiridon Didn't Do This

2010-02-20T21:36:00.000-08:00

The bike trainer isn't so bad for an hour, hour and a half. It's especially not so bad outside in the sunshine instead of downstairs in the basement gloom.*

But I'd rather be running.

I've backed off on the running the past 10 days. Since Feb. 11, I've run just twice, the 10-miler in San Luis Obispo and then a 10-miler on the soft chip trail of Glendoveer this past Wednesday. I almost convinced myself, after the Glendoveer run, that I could barge through this injury, if you want to call it that, without reducing my mileage. I'm still almost convinced. Almost.

What ails me is a little mysterious. In many ways it's the same thing I experienced in the fall and early winter of 2008: pain on the outside of my left ankle, just in back of the knobby ankle bone and spreading down into the heel and up into the Achilles tendon. Back then, two different doctors offered vague non-diagnoses, agreeing only that my Achilles appeared healthy. Since then, I've learned about trigger points and it's abundantly clear to me I have some issues in my left calf. When I work the trigger point in there the ankle/heel/Achilles loosens up beautifully.

So I've been doing a lot of trigger-point work and the run at Glendoveer was, like, 80 percent trouble free. I ran it pretty hard at points, too, with several miles at or under 7:00/mile on a very soft, slow track. That's what had me almost convinced. But the evening after the run the tightness and slight aggravation when getting up after sitting down was still evident. It made me afraid, and I haven't run since.

With 10 weeks to go until Eugene, I figure now is the time to be cautious. I figure—well, I hope—that a few days of extra rest here will allow me to put in some serious training weeks in March, crunch-time for a May 2 marathon.

The bike trainer is my salvation when I can't, or won't, run. I can work up a sweat, work the legs. Sure it's an entirely different sort of exercise and not even close to being an adequate replacement for running. You don't become a better runner by riding a bike trainer. However, you might not become too much of a worse runner by riding a bike trainer.

Next week I'm getting back to running, to see where I stand. A stretch of hard/easy/hard/easy all on soft surfaces. (In fact, I may not do another Eugene training mile on concrete or asphalt. It was a 16-miler on that shit that caused this flare-up.)

*On a sunny, 58-degree afternoon, why not go for an actual bike ride? Welcome to the life of the single dad. Plus, in an hour on the bike I can give myself a much better workout than an hour on the streets. I did some killer short intervals and a period of hard steady spinning. It was great.

Sunday Run

2010-02-16T21:56:00.000-08:00

There's been a possibly profound development in this bid to dismantle Spiridon's legacy, but I'm not talking about it, apparently because I harbor the hope that it will blow away, like a cigarette-pack wrapper on the wind (got hit with one of those while walking the other day). So I'll just say that I ran about 10 miles Sunday in San Luis Obispo, which felt at once foreign and familiar. What was I doing there? It was a quick trip down to California for a family function. Flew to San Jose, then piloted Dad's Lexus, mis padres in tow, down U.S. 101, through the southern end of the Santa Clara Valley, then the Salinas Valley and onward past Paso over Cuesta Grade and into San Luis Obispo. A gazillion relatives of mine went to Poly, including three siblings. And my eldest brother, who damn well knows how to smoke a turkey, and his family live in nearby Templeton, but it'd been maybe a quarter century since I'd spent any time right there in SLO town proper.

So I took off on my run without much idea of where I was going. It was 8 a.m. on Sunday and the burg was still pretty quiet. The sun was bright and the wind was howling from the northwest, but it wasn't cold. It was gorgeous. The Development That Shall Not Be Named faded from my mind. I went up Monterey Street. I wound my way to the other side of 101 to a preserve. Two people—I was going to say "homeless people" but who knows?—slept right on the path entering the parking lot. The path became a trail and quickly turned up the hill. You can't miss this hill as you drive south through SLO; there's a big M on it, for Madonna. (No, not for the singer; for this.)

The trail was steep and like the trails I mountain-biked in Riverside wayback when, it was ravaged by the cycles of months and months of dry interrupted by big rain: cracks and crevices galore. The ground was hard, though wet and muddy in low spots. The grasses covering the hillsides were green but thin and low. It wouldn't take very many weeks of sunshine to turn them brown. The Brown State. Not as inspiring as Golden State. I powered my way up the grade, passing dogs and their walkers. There was a split in the trail, left heading up to the hill—perhaps another 1,000 feet in elevation gain?—and right skirting fairly level around the base. I so wanted to go higher and almost did but then gave due respect to what horror the downhill might inflict on my ankle/Achilles problem. Oh, shit, I gave it away.

Anyway, I hit nearby Lake Laguna for a mile or two and then headed back to the motel. When I said San Luis felt foreign and familiar I was talking about the sunshine, the light, the texture of the earth, the generosity of the breeze. When I said it felt foreign and familiar I meant that it wasn't Portland at all but was California.

The REAL Top 10 Boston Qualifiers (FWIW)

2010-02-03T13:47:00.000-08:00

Cool Running, part of the Active.com network, tweeted several days ago to a list billed as the “10 Best Boston Qualifiers.” Many retweets followed.

Now, neither the tweet nor the page itself claimed that this was fresh data, but people have been reseasonably interpreting it as covering the recently completed 2009 marathoning year. This caught my attention because I remembered seeing a tweet to this same list several months ago. Hmm. Active.com does say their info came from Running USA, but after clicking around that site for a good long while, I couldn’t find the Boston qualifying statistics.

Then I visited Marathon Guide, a low-key site that I’ve always found to be a great resource. And it came through again. They present Boston qualifying data by year. And their data for the most recently completed year, 2009, differs from what Active.com has on their site. In fact, what’s on Active.com — and what people have been tweeting about the last few days — appears to be based on 2008 data. So courtesy Marathon Guide, below is the latest data on the 10 U.S. races with the highest percentage of Boston qualifying times. The list is similar to Active.com's, but four races fell out of the top 10 in 2009 — Grand Rapids, Snickers, Tucson and Newport. They were replaced on the list by Pocono Mountain Run for the Red, Jacksonville, Green Mountain and St. George.

Marathon Guide
Boston Marathon Qualifying Races — Most Likely To Qualify — 2009

Boston — 43.2%
Mohawk Hudson River (Albany, NY) — 34.9%
Bay State (Lowell, MA) — 33.5%
Pocono Mountain Run for the Red (PA) — 30%
Steamtown (Scranton, PA) — 28.1%
Wineglass (Corning, NY) — 27%
California International (Sacramento, CA) — 26.7%
Jacksonville (FL) — 24.9%
Green Mountain (South Hero, VT)— 24.4%
St. George (St. George, UT) — 23.3%

Of course, as Marathon Guide points out, it could be a mistake to interpret a higher percentage of qualifiers as evidence that a marathon is easier than one with a lower percentage of qualifiers. For one thing, the huge marathons — with the exception of Boston, for which one must qualify, natch — draw fields with a lot of newer and slower runners. This weighs down their qualifying percentage. Other than Boston, no marathon with more than 10,000 finishers was on the Top 10 list. Chicago is widely considered to be a pretty fast course, yet just 12.7% of the people who finished it in 2009 met their Boston qualifying standard.

Gettin' Me Some

2010-01-31T17:10:00.000-08:00

Oh, yeah, I’m talking today about that thing we all need, we all gotta have, we humans, we animals, we living creatures. That thing that whether we acknowledge it or not, motivates our every action. That thing that, when we do get it, completely overtakes us, makes everything else in the world fall away. It’s a desperate and primal act, that thing, full of panting and gasping and for the more vocal among us cries that blur the line between agony and ecstasy.

I’m talking of course about track work.

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that the target paces for my Eugene-program track work are challenging. Farfetched, more like it. I’m using the FIRST program regimen, which is more aggressive than McMillan generally, and the paces are based on my marathon goal of breaking three hours. That said, because I’m doing many more weekly miles than FIRST recommends, I'm hitting the track every other week instead of every week. (Seriously, deadly VO2 sessions every week for 16 weeks leading up to a marathon? I guess if you’re actually doing the program and only running three times a week that could make sense.)

On the agenda today:
1200 @ 4:10
1000 @ 3:25
800 @ 2:43
600 @ 2:01
400 @ 1:19
All separated by a 200 meter rest interval.

Before leaving the house I figured out that the 400-meter pace for the reps descended from 1:23 to 1:22 to 1:21 to 1:20 and then finally that last 400 itself in 1:19. So while the distances got progressively shorter, the pace break was not very substantial. Bastards!

I warmed up by jogging the two and a quarter miles from home to the Grant Park track. Nice day to be out: mostly cloudy but dry, temp in the mid 40s.

1200: I started and noted how nice it felt to run fast on the smooth, slightly soft track surface in my Asics Speedstars. I’d run for seven straight days before today, totaling 70 miles, pretty heavy mileage for me, but felt surprisingly fresh. For a lap. You know how that goes? First lap in 1:24 and all was well. Then the lactic acid began to build and lap two became harder work, another 1:24. Lap three I don’t even remember. I was swirling in pain, vowing to keep going as hard as I could despite having nothing left to give. Amazingly, the last lap wasn't dramatically slower, a 1:26, giving me 4:14 for the rep, four seconds off the goal.

1000: This was the worst of the five reps. Just a minute after the 1200, it took a mere half-lap to get to the bad place. I didn’t split each lap. The final toll was 3:32, seven whopping seconds off the goal. Brutal.

800: While jogging—very, very slowly—the 200 meter rest interval, I tried to buoy my spirits. Hey, just two laps! So much shorter than that first 1200! This is going to be easy! Well, no. It wasn’t. That said, mindful by now that I wasn’t likely to hit the goal time I took this one out a little slower, hoping for a more even pace. And, indeed, I didn’t begin to feel like barfing until I’d run about 500 meters. Only 300 meters of head-to-toe misery, that’s not so bad. 2:51, eight seconds off the goal time.

600: Right, you’ve got the picture by now. Pain, agony, slower than goal time—but only by three seconds, at 2:04.

400: Something I’ve noticed about track work is that I don’t care how much the last rep hurts. In fact, getting to The Last One is not very different from being done entirely. The way this works, I think, is that the real dread isn’t a tough rep—it’s a tough rep with the knowledge that there is more to come. Once that “more to come” feature is dispensed with, once I’m on The Last One, what the hell, bring it on. For kicks I took a 200-meter split on this one and found I was at 38. I felt like I was barely moving during the final 200. My legs were cooked well done. And yet that second 200 was actually run in 39 seconds, for a 1:17, two seconds faster than the goal time. That’s right, I ran the rep too fast.

After a walk once around the track I jogged the two and a quarter miles back home, feeling spent, satisfied and relaxed. Curiously, however, I was not interested in smoking a cigaret.

Testing the Converters

2010-01-31T08:41:00.001-08:00

What sort of time might you expect to run a marathon based on your performance at shorter distances? It's a common question, for first-timers especially. There are plenty of conversion calculators on the Web; my favorite is this one. But recently I've heard about some simple equations, one that you can crunch in your head and two that you can do easily with a pencil and paper. Let's try 'em out.

There's the one that says your marathon time will be twice your half-marathon time plus 10 minutes. For me, that's 1:28:51 x 2 = 2:57:42. Then add 10 and you get 3:07:42. That's less than 90 seconds more than my actual marathon PR. Not bad.

Hal Higdon's formula is your 10K time multiplied by 4.66. So we've got 39:13 x 4.66 = 3:02:45. A little quick there, about three and a half minutes too fast, but still not bad.

Last one says simply add 20 seconds per mile for each doubling of your distance. My best half-marathon pace is 6:47 (actually, 6:46.7). Add 20 to that to get 7:06.7 x 26.2 = 3:06:35. Wow—that's almost spot-on, a mere 19 seconds slower than my PR.

Of course, the old caveat that goes with any conversion to a marathon time still applies: If you haven't been doing the kind of long runs that are key to adapting your body to run 26.2 — as opposed to run 18, shuffle four, walk four more and then crawl the final 0.2 — these are all meaningless.

The Blog Rundown

2010-01-30T10:35:00.000-08:00

Less and less I'm interested in the running blogs that have become extensions of fitness-gear marketing departments. Not that the reviews aren't honest or helpful. I just find that the more time I spend reading about cool new stuff, the further removed I become from the true rewards running offers me.

I'm also losing my appetite for reading about someone's latest diet experiment in which this category or that other category of food is off limits because an author, armed with a study or two—likely to be contradicted in a few years, because that's what always happens with nutritional "science"—has with evangelical fervor made a compelling case to do so. Grains evil? Coffee toxic? Green tea the cure for all your ills? Yawn. Michael Pollan is right: If you're going to avoid anything, avoid the fads. Embrace what you know is good for you. You do know.

I'm trending in the same direction when it comes to reading about training regimens. Mostly I confine myself to Science of Sport-type discussions that try to tease what's real from what's myth.

Instead of gear, diet and how-to-train blogs, I now find myself reading the sites that exhibit and explore a deep connection to running. For example: Anton Krupicka's Riding the Wind. He writes infrequently but compellingly. As here:

Heading down Greenman (the upper section down to Saddle Rock is excellent for descending right now with an almost perfect amount of snowpack) I encountered no knee pain but was treated to a most excellent night-time view of the city as the clouds lifted virtually right before my eyes. This was the view I'd been waiting for all day and it sparked a stretch of that kind of running that only comes along every once in a while. Every footstep is perfectly placed without trying, the growing darkness adds a sense of increased effortlessness and speed, and the steep drops and rocks and roots all provide giddy moments of acrobatic proficiency instead of the more typical tired and awkward navigation. I'd forgotten how much fun it can be to run trails at dusk.

Not Quite

2010-01-29T08:14:00.000-08:00

Danny Dreyer:
The information from Lieberman’s study isn’t new information, but it is fabulous to finally have some scientific backup for our claims that a midfoot strike and minimal shoes can help you reduce or avoid many common running injuries.

Lieberman:
Is There Anything Wrong With Heel Striking in Running Shoes? Not necessarily! Many people like to run this way and do so without injury. But some runners get repetitive stress injuries each year (estimates vary from 30-75%) and one hypothesis is that heel striking contributes to some of these injuries. We emphasize though, that no study has shown that heel striking contributes more to injury than forefoot striking.

Simplifying It

2010-01-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

Greg McMillan: "My belief is that for our runners to be successful in the marathon, they need to be able to run between 120 and 150 miles a week. That’s what almost all of the great runners have done. We need to get them to that point and we need to be smart in how we get them there. Once they can do that, then we can step back and we can look at how can we push the pace faster, how can we get marathon-specific training going. And that’s what we’ve done with Brett (Gotcher, who ran 2:10:36 in his debut marathon at Houston earlier this month). We took two and a half years to build him where he can get into that zone and he’s just in it. We only had five weeks before the marathon above 120 with one week above 140 so he’s certainly getting in good volume, but I’d love to see us get in six or eight weeks above 130 and average 135 or so."

Sure, there's incalculable difference between elites and 47-year-old weekend warriors. Understood. But adjusting for that, the principle stands: The way to become faster is to run more miles. (And, of course, the key to running more miles is figuring out a way to do so without incurring injury.)

Makes My Head Spin

2010-01-27T19:44:00.000-08:00

When he ran 2:54:48 at Toronto in 2004, Ed Whitlock was 73 years old.

It Doesn't Add Up

2010-01-25T23:27:00.000-08:00

Does a 1:28:51 half-marathon followed a week later by a 1:28:52 half-marathon equal a 2:57:43 marathon? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Losing the Half-Marathon PR Touch

2010-01-24T21:17:00.000-08:00

What can I say? Last week I ran 1:28:51 at the Cascade Half. Today I ran 1:28:52 at Vancouver Lake. If I keep slowing down 1 second per 13.1 miles per week, well, hell, eventually they'll have to shut the course down on me.

Strange race. I was dreading the rain/cold/wind combo plate being served up an hour before the start, but then by race time, at 10 a.m., the rain was for the most part eighty-sixed. Once we got going I never felt uncomfortable.

We were running on roads and bike paths on the flatlands that separate Vancouver Lake from the Columbia River. If you look at a map of the United States and see where, not far from the Pacific, the line between Oregon and Washington makes a sharp turn north, that's where we were, on the Washington side.

Sidenote: Yesterday Niko and I were just across the Columbia at Kelley Point Park, the northern tip of Portland and the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia rivers. I was going to say, "where two great rivers come together," but I don't think the Willamette quite qualifies as great. Pretty good, certainly. A major drainage. Much-bridged, and prettily, too, here in PDX. Visiting Kelley Point we learned that Lewis & Clark missed the Willamette, both coming (to the Pacific) and going (back up the Columbia). Bozos.

I liked seeing lots of familiar faces at the race today. Many Red Lizards, and Steven Livermore, kicking butt as usual. I liked, too, the flatness of the course and the many long straight or slightly bending stretches but I wasn't crazy about having to do three 180-degree turnarounds. For an old guy like me you don't want to have to crank it down for the turn then crank it back up out of the turn. It hurts.

The second turnaround, coming at six miles, was especially obnoxious because it sent us into the wind for a couple of miles. That's when I ran my worst mile split, a 6:57. I got a little better after that, and even mustered enough late-race oomph to do mile 13 in 6:37. But too many six-fifty-somethings in the second half cost me my shot at a PR.

Afterward I realized this, my sixth half-marathon, was the first time I didn't PR the distance. I had always gotten faster. Well, I don't suppose going balls-out last Sunday was really the best way to prepare for the race. Nor was running 15 miles on Wednesday, eight on Thursday and seven on Friday.

It probably wouldn't have hurt my Eugene training to back off a bit this week. Certainly I would have had fresher legs today if I had. But psychologically it was important for me to keep the focus on the marathon. I think it's OK to run tons of shorter races leading up to a marathon. Races keep running fun. But I can't get sucked into adjusting my marathon training in order to excel at the shorter races. I've got a job to do at Eugene.

Official results:
1:28:52
3/34 M45-49
35/200 Men
38/407 Overall

What I Thought About During Today's Run

2010-01-22T22:26:00.000-08:00

When I wasn't assessing my condition on today's easy, comfortable seven-miler in the drizzle, I was pondering Jim Cramer. Did Stewart already do something on this? It's too good.

Cramer, last Friday:
"I think investors who are nervous about the dictatorship of the Pelosi proletariat will feel at ease, and we could have a gigantic rally off a Coakley loss and a Brown win (Tuesday night). It will be a signal that a more pro-business, less pro-labor government could be in front of us."

Dow close Tuesday: 10,725
Dow close after Day 1 of the Brown Era: 10,610 (-115)
Dow close after Day 2 of the Brown Era: 10,321 (-289)
Dow close after Day 3 of the Brown Era: 10,172 (-149)

The Brown rally so far? -553 points on the Dow (-5.2%).

Slowstar

2010-01-21T21:17:00.000-08:00

Beautiful afternoon here in Portland. Little rain down there in Cali? Ah, well. You need it. Here, periods of actual sunshine (as opposed to the virtual kind we usually settle for in the winter). Temps well into the 50s. Light breezes. I ran seven miles, that's all. The glorious weather brushed up against me in all the right places and whispered stuff-I-can't-repeat in my ear, but I did not succumb. I set out to run seven, easy (aka, slow), and seven easy I did run. Left runner's knee was a little achy to start but loosened up. Everything else felt great, which surprised me because I was running on the street. Yesterday on the grass my hips were hurting. Today on the street, A-OK. The mysteries. I do wear shoes with more cushion on the road. My current road shoe is halfway between a racing shoe and what most people use as a training shoe: the Asics Gel Speedstar 3. That's it pictured above. Subdued color scheme, no? On the grass I wear a New Balance trail racing shoe that is practically like going barefoot. After that, the Speedstars feel plush, even on the road. I raced in them at Cascade last Sunday and will again at Vancouver this weekend.

I'm getting fired up for Vancouver. The weather forecast is slowly improving. Right now they're saying 40s and only a 50 percent chance of rain. All week they've been too bullish on the rain. Yesterday we had an 80 percent chance of rain and .01 inches fell in Portland. Today the POP was 40 percent and, well, you heard what I said up top: some sun. Anyway, I don't even care that much what the weather gods dish out. I'm not exactly tapering and zeroing in on this race, but I am giving myself a little bit of a chance with nothing but easy running this week: 15 yesterday, seven today, maybe eight tomorrow. Then a full day of rest Saturday. All leading up to my favorite race format: a flat half, with tons of fast people to chase.

UPDATE: Ha, now it's down to 30 percent chance of rain for Sunday.
UPDATE II (Fri., 7:15 a.m): "Sunday: Rain likely, mainly after 10am. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 48. East wind around 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%."

Miles and Piles

2010-01-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

In Berlin, when I visited last September, it was evident that many people did not pick up after their dogs. It wasn't just that you saw the stuff on sidewalks and streets and in parks. This was something the sight-impaired would have winced at. I thought it was a pretty sorry state of affairs, and was even more alarmed when told the situation had improved in recent years.

Here in Portland, dog owners are often seen pulling out there plastic bag after Bartholomew rises from his squat. Unattended, untended poop, while hardly unheard of, is disparate. You walk four or five miles and some days you see none, some days you see one pile, some days maybe two. Maybe. It's not a problem. But today, today at Normandale Park, I stepped in TWO PILES.

True, I ran the .68-mile perimeter 21 times. I took many steps. But I ran a consistent route. In fact, late in the run you could see my path marked in the grass. So if my consistent, narrow path resulted in stepping in TWO PILES, well how many piles lurk in Normandale? I shudder to imagine.

Pretty decent run, nevertheless. Fifteen miles in 2:05, an 8:30 pace. Very slow. Yo, I raced a half-marathon on Sunday and am doing another one this Sunday. I don't think I need to do anything intense right now. Actually, it was a 9:00 pace on the first seven miles and around 8:00 on the last eight. Hip was aching by the end. Both hips. And I smelled.

Harrowing Descent into Slackerdom

2010-01-19T20:43:00.000-08:00

No post yesterday (and no run). No run today, making it two days in a row. A harrowing descent into slackerdom! This is not how the Eugene plan is supposed to go!

So what’s going on? Yesterday was a planned day off after going hard at the Cascade Half. No problem there. Today there’s no good explanation. Plenty of reasons, however. I had a hell of a time falling asleep last night and felt all out of sorts this morning. Then I was scurrying around madly to get breakfast for the Lad, and his lunch bagged up, and him to school, and then immediately on up to the Clark County courthouse for my first newspaper reporting gig since before the World Wide Web even existed. Then I rushed home to write up the story. By then I had completely given up on the possibility of running today. I wrote the story and sent it to my editor and was surprised to find that I actually did have a chance to run—a sliver of time before I'd have to go pick up aforementioned Lad from school. But I was hungry and cold and just wanted to have a light lunch, put on a sweater and relax. So I did just that.

I'm not worried. In fact, I think this gift day off was precisely the right thing to do. Remember: The first thing you need to do in your training is survive it.

I'll run 15 slow-to-moderate tomorrow, do my track workout on Friday, spin on the trainer on Saturday, then go hard at the Vancouver Lake Half Marathon on Sunday. In the 15th-to-last week before Eugene, it'll be just fine.

Race Report: Cascade Half Marathon

2010-01-17T20:35:00.000-08:00

I didn't exactly leap out of bed this morning ready and eager to run the Cascade Half Marathon. The forecast was for rain and wind. Plus, I wasn't really prepared to run my best race. With my focus on the Eugene Marathon in 15 weeks (yeah, I'm counting!), I hadn't tapered or even adjusted my training to get ready for this one. I was feeling a little down about that. My vanity gets the better of me when it comes to racing: I always want to be in a position to get a PR, and knew that today that was not likely to be in the cards.

But I needed to run 13-15 miles and I really liked the Cascade Half when I did it a couple of years ago, and, truth be told, I just love to race. So I was out the door in the quiet dark of Sunday morning 7 a.m. for the 63-mile drive south from Portland.

And I'm sure glad I did it.

Turner is in the middle of the Willamette Valley, in the sticks about 10 miles southeast of Salem. The race has a great small-town feel, with number pickup and day-of-race reg taking place in a small, wood-paneled school gymnasium, where white-haired ladies smile, ask you your name, find the number that corresponds to it, write it down on a piece of paper and hand that to a white-haired fellow who retrieves a bag with your race bib and shirt (nice one, too). Watching that, my attitude improved.

And the weather wasn't bad at all. The roads were wet but hardly any rain was falling and the temperature was a comfortable 50 degrees. I wore a single layer—a long-sleeved technical shirt—and no hat, and felt great.

We got going right around 9 a.m. and I resisted the urge to chase the speedy dudes too intently in the opening miles, but still went out a little fast (6:27 and 6:36 splits). My half-marathon PR coming into the race was 1:28:53 but all I was really thinking about was sneaking under the 1:30 mark, a 6:52 pace. Those first few miles put some seconds in the bank, sure, but they also put a little hurt on me. I really felt this when the course turned into the wind for much of the next four miles, and I struggled with splits of 6:52, 6:55, 7:04 and 7:09.

Mostly I was running alone here, but after the turnaround—which I hit in 44:43—I at least had someone to chase: a tall guy in a blue shirt who was about 10 yards in front of me. His pace was just a little faster than what I had been running, so it was really helpful for me to try to maintain contact with him. This helped, too: The wind was now at our backs. I luvz me a tailwind, and miles 7-10 came in at 6:49, 6:53, 6:42 and 6:45. I was feeling pretty good, too, like I could run around 6:40 pace the rest of the way.

I passed Blue-Shirt Guy in the 11th mile, which I ran in 6:37. Not surprisingly, without him pulling me along, I immediately slipped to a 6:46 for mile 12. Luckily, a different dude eased passed me on the final mile and I gave chase. I knew if I ran fairly strongly over the 1.1 miles to the finish I might squeak out a PR. Down the final stretch I felt a little churlish racing past a group of three women who appeared to be wrapping up a fun 10K, but we all get to run our own race, right? It was hard to tell exactly where the finish line was, but I pressed stop on my Garmin at 1:28:49 (6:47/mile). I guess I was a little quick on the trigger, because the official results had me at 1:28:51*.

That's a PR, sure, but by two seconds. That strikes me as a little ridiculous, a two-second half-marathon PR. What's the point? But I'm happy about it for several reasons: It's still a PR; it reduces the embarrassingly high number of California-race PRs on my list (bad form for an Oregonian to be revealed as so California-oriented); it tells me that if I did point to and taper for a half marathon I might be able to run something in the 1:27s, which is the sort of fitness I definitely need if I want to make a serious go at three hours for the marathon; and, lastly, it was accomplished with a strong second half, a negative split of 44:43/44:09.

Some soup and excellent bread in the school cafeteria afterward got me in good shape for the drive home. It was raining steadily now, which was OK with me. My work was done.

Official result:
1:28:51
35/482 overall
3/24 M45-49

*Organizers apparently revised the times and I became a second faster than I had posted earlier. So it's a PR by two seconds, not one.

Race Outlook

2010-01-16T17:45:00.000-08:00

Do I race too much? This is something I've been researching and thinking about the past few days, but I've still not arrived at any firm conclusion. And tomorrow: a race. The forecast is ugly, with temps in the low-40s, rain and strong winds from the south (the second half of the race features a lot of southbound running). But I did this race two years ago and for reasons unknown, feel drawn back to it. It's a flat course, and I like flat courses, but given the predicted conditions I doubt it will be all that fast. Oh, well. A full report tomorrow, but be forewarned: could be grisly.

Better Late (Than Early)

2010-01-15T20:25:00.000-08:00

Someday—Note: if I start a post with the word "someday" you are safe to assume I am talking about something that will never happen—I'm going to organize a late-spring marathon that starts around 5 p.m. Here in Portland on, say, June 1, sunset is around 9 and there's plenty of light lingering for 30-60 minutes after, so nobody would be left out in the dark.

I hatched this fantasy while running early this morning. Actually, it wasn't that early—I hit the trail around 7:30 a.m.—but I'd rolled out of bed a scant 45 earlier. Typically, I run midday or later. This provides a nice break or decompression from work (OK, "work") and gives my muscles and joints a chance to loosen up. But while working on my first cup of coffee this morning I could see on the National Weather Service radar that a big gob of rain was headed toward Portland. It was going to rain all afternoon. I'd already run twice in the rain this week and just wasn't up for the another squishy experience, especially since the forecast for Sunday's Cascade Half calls for rain. So I jumped into my running shoes and out the door, wiping the sleep from my eyes.

The prescribed workout called for 2 miles easy, 2 miles of tempo run @ 6:14 and 2 miles easy. I did the two miles of easy and thought I was warmed up, but I couldn’t hit those 6:14s, instead doing 6:35 and 6:39. (I followed this up with six miles of easy running, giving me 10 total miles for the day.)

Part of the problem might have been that I was running on a wood-chip trail with some ups and downs. Mostly, though, I just didn't feel like my engine was capable of revving up the way it usually does. And that, apparently, makes physiological sense. From the New York Times:

[A] small group of researchers has studied the question of exercise performance and time of day, even doing studies of heart rates. And not only are performances better in the late afternoon and early evening, but, contrary to what exercise physiologists would predict, heart rates are also higher for the same effort.

I knew it! And yet the latest any marathon I've ever run has started was 10:30 a.m., at Boston. Berlin, in September, started at 10, and because I was staying right in the city I was able to sleep until 6. That wasn't too bad. CIM, last month, started at the ridiculous hour of 7 a.m. I woke up at 4:10 that morning, giving me shy of three hours before the race began. That was brutal, especially since it was around 30 degrees out.

Wouldn't it make sense to start a race later in the afternoon? From that same Times article:

[I]t might make sense for endurance events, like marathons, to start in the afternoon instead of the morning, when they almost always are held. Maybe they could be held later in the year, to avoid afternoon heat. [Chronobiology expert] Dr. Michael A. Smolensky agreed. "Most marathons start early under the guise that it's cooler then," he said. "That needs to be looked at."

I'll say.

Rest

2010-01-14T23:54:00.000-08:00

I came so close to going for a 10-mile run. I felt the itch to pile up miles. I'd only run 20 miles in three days. Was I going to start my training for Eugene with a lame total for the week of, I don't know, 40 miles? But I came to my senses. No need to ramp it up so fast. Better put: Stupid to ramp it up too fast. Plus, tomorrow there's a pretty tough workout in store: 4 miles easy, 2 miles of fast tempo (6:14/mile) and 4 miles easy. In the rain. Then Sunday, I've got the Cascade Half. In the rain, if the forecast is to be believed.

Yeah, it was a good day to rest.

1600 Reps?

2010-01-13T20:58:00.000-08:00

Damn. I knew 3x1600 @ 5:41 was going to be hard, but I didn't think it would be impossible.

I went 5:42, 5:52 and 5:58—notice a trend? Plus, I did a very slow 400-meter jog between the 1600s instead of the called-for one-minute rest interval.

This workout comes from the FIRST program and is based on a 5K PR of 18:30. No, I haven't run a 5K in 18:30, but I'm pretty sure that if I went out on a flat course this weekend and tried to, I could. I'm sure of that—so why did I fail so miserably at this strange VO2 workout?

Well, let me start by explaining why I call it strange.

FIRST is about the only program that calls for 1600-meter repeats. Matt Fitzgerald talks about "specific endurance intervals," which he defines as 200 meters to 1K. Daniels says that unless you can run 1600 meters in five minutes you should be doing 1200 meters for your long track reps. Pfitzinger's longest VO2 reps are 1200. And even at that, all of these guys are expecting you to use 5K race pace—around 5:57. McMillan is right there: Punching in an 18:30 5K on the calculator yields 5:55.2 to 6:08.3 for 1600 reps in speed workouts.

I guess FIRST, because it's based on doing just three runs a week (plus two cross-training workouts), pushes the intensity to the nth degree. But of course, I'm modifying FIRST to include leisurely and long recovery runs at least twice a week because I just don't have confidence that I can shave 6:17 off my marathon time running 30-35 miles per week. So maybe it's not vital that I nail these weirdly lengthy track reps that nobody else in the running world asks you to do? Hmm. Well, I'll do this workout again, 11 weeks from now—five weeks before the marathon—and when I do I'll have today's pitiful results to look back on for comparison.

Getting Better

2010-01-12T17:38:00.000-08:00

Quite suddenly last night I noticed that my ailing throat was feeling much better. About a half-hour earlier I had eaten five cloves of raw garlic, crushed in olive oil, with some bread. Maybe that’s what did it. Who knows? The improving trend line held today. Still, I remained cautious on my run. A cold is like an economic downturn: you want to make sure the recovery has solidly taken hold before announcing good times have returned. Few things worse than a double-dip recession or a cold that comes back. So while I ran farther and harder today it was still just seven miles at an 8:00 pace, again over at Normandale on the grass.

This was a run I enjoyed—and it seems important to highlight that fact. I intend to post every day over the next 15 weeks and five days of training for Eugene and I’ll be talking often about workout strategies, injury avoidance, indicators of fitness and, more than anything, the challenge that breaking three hours in the marathon represents for me. The joy that running brings me will probably get short shrift but don’t ever think it’s not the driving force in my training. Today, after sitting in front of a computer screen for several hours trying to glue words together in a way that makes sense, to get out and run was like coming up for air. I felt like I could soar. It helped, I suppose, that my legs felt fresh—no calf issues, and that lingering shin pain from Sacramento was gone as well. And the conditions were pretty sweet, too. The temperature was probably about 45 and it was drizzling off and on, but the wind was calm and occasionally the sun semi-busted through the clouds, providing a break from the gray. In my life before Oregon I would have called it a crappy day but as Dorothy* famously said, “I've a feeling we're not in California anymore.”

OK, so yesterday I mentioned three key workouts for this week. Had I been healthy I would have done one of them by now, but with the cold fast receding I have a plan for how to fit them in: Tomorrow, I hit the track; Friday, it’s the tempo run; and the 13-miler will be on Sunday—probably in the form of the Cascade Half.

*Or maybe it was little Mary Decker. Some girl in pigtails.

Eugene Prep Begins (Sort Of)

2010-01-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

My left nostril was clogged and there was a scratchiness where the nose and throat intersect. It was 4 a.m. and I needed a glass of water. Thus began Day 1 of my 16 weeks of focused training for the Eugene Marathon.

This is my first brush with ill health this winter. What timing! I went for a run anyway, but a short one. Here's why (as reported in Runner’s World a few years ago):

David Nieman, Ph.D., who heads the Human Performance Laboratory at Appalachian State University, and has run 58 marathons and ultras, uses the "neck rule." Symptoms below the neck (chest cold, bronchial infection, body ache) require time off, while symptoms above the neck (runny nose, stuffiness, sneezing) don't pose a risk to runners continuing workouts.   This view is supported by research done at Ball State University by Tom Weidner, Ph.D., director of athletic training research. In one study, Weidner took two groups of 30 runners each and inoculated them with the common cold. One group ran 30 to 40 minutes every day for a week. The other group was sedentary. According to Weidner, "the two groups didn't differ in the length or severity of their colds." In another study, he found that running with a cold didn't compromise performance. He concluded that running with a head cold—as long as you don't push beyond accustomed workouts—is beneficial in maintaining fitness and psychological well-being.

It wasn’t a bad run, actually. I kept it as low-key as possible: five miles at a slow-as-can-go 9:15 pace on the grass at nearby Normandale Park. I read somewhere once that if you go out to run when feeling a little sick, after 10 minutes—if you haven't dropped dead already—you should take an accounting of your condition. If you feel better, keep running. If you feel worse, stop and go home. I felt better, so I kept going. I flirted with the idea of going for six, seven, maybe even eight miles, but quickly dismissed the foolish notion.

Now, a few hours later, the cold is progressing just as colds do: the nose/throat area that was scratchy this morning is red and irritated and I’ve got a little bit of pressure in the sinuses. No fever, no headache, pretty good energy, huge appetite (that never fails), but, man, that irritation in the nose/throat sucks.

Impossible to say right now what this means as far as my training plan goes. I’ve got three key Eugene Prep runs on the agenda this week: a 13-mile long run @ 7:22 pace; a 2-mile tempo run @ 6:14; and a track workout consisting of 3x1600 @ 5:41 w/ 1-minute rest intervals. That track workout is intense enough and the long run long and fast enough that I wouldn’t want to do either unless I’m confident the cold is beaten. I’m incredibly eager to get this program rolling, but at this point the risk/benefit analysis suggests being careful. And I shall be.

Resolution 5K (XC)

2010-01-09T23:04:00.000-08:00

I got chicked about two thirds of the way through. Joe Dudman and his toes were way out front. There was one other guy ahead of me but he was fading fast and I knew I'd get him. Second place, I thought; what a weak field (no disrespect intended). Still, hey, second place. Then I got chicked by a woman in black tights, which could describe just about every female runner out there on a chilly January morning, but this was the young one who could really motor. I got third place on the soggy, occasionally muddy, sometimes uneven turf out at Clackamas Community College. My splits were 6:20, 6:40 and 6:30, and then 33 seconds for that last, dangling 5K tenth, for a 20:03. As always, I was left afterward to ask: Did it hurt as much as it should have? I never know but am always skeptical. The problem, I think, is that the memory of running pain doesn't last. Not with me. It's immediately displaced. I'm staggering toward the finish line my mind a blazing blur as signals of ache, tightness and distress assault it from every corner. The world is about to end. Fine, let it! I finish. Two seconds later I'm saying to the tag-grabber something utterly rational like: "Damn, I wish I'd gotten that 20:00." But, of course, this is as it must be. This is why I train, what I condition my body and mind to do. To move, move, move past the moment—which hurts—and take the next step. There are a billion miracles of biokinetics happening instantaneously. The machine is under enormous stress. It knows one thing for certain: Stop, and everything stabilizes. Stop, and the chances of survival are enhanced. And my training tells me to move, move, move past it.

Official results
Garmin data

The Racing Year Begins

2010-01-03T12:55:00.000-08:00

Well, that was a heck of a 5K I ran this morning. Unfortunately, the race was a 10K (rimshot, please).

It was the Oregon Road Runners Club's season opener, with options: a 20.10K to salute the new year, or a 10K. Nine times out of 10 I'd choose the longer distance, but those two hard marathons late last year—in late-September and early-December—left my legs pretty wiped out. In the four weeks since CIM I'd run just five times, including this past Monday (6 miles, slow), Wednesday (8 miles @ 7:30) and Friday (8.5, slow). I felt better each run—and on the days after, too, thanks to lots of massage each night on my calves and Achilles tendons. When I got up this morning I was excited and eager to race again.

The race was out in Forest Grove, about 20 miles west of downtown Portland. This being Oregon, you couldn't have asked for a more perfect January morning for a race: gray skies, temps in the low 40s and the air still, dead calm, not a whisper of a breeze.

At the starting line I said hi to Red Lizard compatriot Joe Dudman along with Steven Livermore, whose excellent blog I've been reading for several years. Great to meet Steven finally! Joe was running the 10K but is fast so I knew I wouldn't see much of him during the race; Steven is fast, too, but was running the 20, so I didn't figure to see him on the course, either.

With a "runners set … go!" we were off. I went out fast. I had a feeling it was too fast, but wasn't exactly sure. The fact that Joe and the leaders weren't pulling away too much too quickly should have tipped me off. I checked my Garmin a half mile in and though I can't remember what the numbers were, I recall thinking I was headed for an opening mile around 6:10—fast but not stupid-fast. But that was wrong. I hit the first mile at 5:54. My thought when I saw that: Oh, bleep.

The course went through the small town of Forest Grove for a mile or two, then out into the countryside, staying flat. I passed the halfway mark in 19:09, 10 seconds better than my 5K PR. I was already hurting a bit, then around 3.5 miles we got a climb of about 50 feet in elevation over a few tenths of a mile. Ugh. I recovered on the downside of the hill, but then at 4.25 we had another one, this one a little longer and steeper. We got to go down after cresting the hill, but cruelly the course turned around at the bottom. So up the backside of the hill we went.

Most of the way here I was chasing a guy in a yellow shirt and shoes that had day-glo green on their soles. I saw a lot of those soles, but they began to pull away as we headed down a long, steady, slight decline that comprised most of the sixth mile. This was where that stupid-fast first mile really came back to haunt me. With my marathon fitness, I should have been able to cruise this stretch, but the lactic acid buildup put a literal crimp in that plan. Then came one more hill, the biggest one yet, a good 100+ foot rise in the quarter mile leading up to the Mile 6 marker. I just tried to relax, lean forward and keep my feet moving. Took me about two minutes to cover that climb, a dreadful pace around 8:00/mile.

Finally, back to the school where we'd started. I crossed the line in 40:23 by my accounting, and gave congratulations to the dude who finished in front of me after powering past me up that last hill.

So my 5K/5K splits were 19:09 and 21:14. Disastrous at first blush, but perhaps not quite so bad given that the first half of the course was flat (actually, on the Garmin, a net decline), while the second half featured those four climbs. Tough stuff but a good and fair test. Nice course, nice race, and the blueberry pancakes served up by the Hagg Lake Harriers afterward were an outstanding bonus. All in all, a really fun morning. I'm looking forward to the rest of the ORRC 10K Series. There are eight race in all and I should be able to do each one except Hagg Lake, which unfortunately is the day before the Eugene Marathon.

OFFICAL RESULTS: 40:23, 3/10 M45-49, 14/98 men, 15/211 overall.
My mile splits, adjusted slightly from the Garmin data to reflect the course markers: 5:54, 6:11, 6:23, 6:42, 6:56, 6:45 and 1:32 for the final 0.2.

Marathon on the Rise

2010-01-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

According to Marathon Guide:

There were approximately 463,000 marathon finishes in the USA in 2009—an increase of approximately 9.2% over 2008. That's the largest year-to-year growth in finisher numbers since the 9.8% year-to-year growth seen in the abnormal years of 2001/2002 when travel and finisher numbers were down in 2001 after 9/11, leading to the unrealistic growth percentage in 2002. As has been the trend, women continued to make up a higher percentage of the total finishers, reaching a record 40.7% of finishers in 2009. We'll have our full report available in early January.

My Decade of Going Long

2010-01-01T17:14:00.000-08:00

There's a picture hanging in my parents' house of my siblings and me, with our cousins, taken soon after we moved to California from Minnesota. This was 1967, just before I entered kindergarten. The cousins and their parents, they'd moved out from Manitoba a year or two earlier, skipping the Minnesota interregnum.

We're all lined up in the sunshine beside the Plymouth station wagon that carried us west. (Or maybe it's Uncle Denny's wagon? Everyone was driving a wagon back then.) In the picture, I'm a chubby little guy. Tan round face below my shaved-short blond hair, paunch obvious under a T-shirt. As I grew up I became less soft in the middle but remained on the stocky side, with huge thighs and hindquarters. These came from my mother's side, from the Cheslock gene pool; one imagines such attributes being quite the asset through the centuries on the western Eurasian steppes.

Despite this less-than-svelte physique, I was a fast runner as a kid. I'm talking about sprinting, of course. In grade school you don't hit a long run every weekend, or ever, although you might ride your bike for hours to a reservoir over the hills, or walk several miles roundtrip to the bowling alley. But if you grow up on a block teeming with sports-crazed boys, where every day includes several hours playing pickup games, you find out how your speed stacks up. Billy Smith and Rick Martig were pretty fast but I think I was faster. In fact, I believe I was the fastest kid around until Marc Bernard moved to San Jose from Minnesota. He didn't live in our neighborhood but was in my fifth-grade class and I became friends with him because he was a huge Vikings fan like me. He and his dad had a super-cool model train set in their garage, too.

Running then was about gaining yards carrying the football, getting open deep, stealing second base or beating out a bunt—that kind of thing; there was never a consideration of participating in an organized race. I guess it just wasn't something that suburban California boys did in the late '60s and early '70s, before the running boom that swept the nation. Although, come to think of it, my dad was jogging then—that's what we called it, jogging, it was never running. He'd hit the local dirt track for four or five miles a few times a week, trying to keep his weight down. And my brother Phil, two grades ahead of me, ran a little track in junior high, placing in the Santa Clara County meet at the 660. A coach lured him into some longer distances, too, and he even did the Bay to Breakers one year. This was probably 1973, just before the race exploded into the huge carnival it would become. I vaguely recall him coming in the top 500 among a couple thousand runners.

But I'm getting sidetracked.

This is supposed to be about the fact that by nature I'm a sprinter, not a distance runner. I'm a fast-twitch guy. Nobody has dug into my muscle tissue, but the history bears it out. Nevertheless, here I find myself, at age 47, embarked on a quest to run a marathon under three hours. There's nothing fast-twitch about that. Yet it's that very contradiction that is at the heart of my motivation. On the list of the decade's Top 5 Profound Things that Happened in My Life—below Fatherhood and Abandonment but above Relocation and Professional Upheaval—was Becoming an Endurance Freak.

Not that hints of such a predilection weren't evident before the new millennium dawned. There was a ton of mountain biking in the '80s and '90s, including epic adventures such as that 70-mile race in the Flint Hills of Kansas. But getting out every day, not really for the health benefits, not to socialize, but getting out every day and gradually going farther, pushing the limits, going harder—that unfolded over the past 10 years and became an essential part of me. I was constantly baffled when friends would express their awe that I was able to stick with my "fitness stuff" for so long; but it was never a chore. Never. It always gave me more than I gave it. It made me happy.

Now, I'm actually hoping to dial it back. I'm hoping to become comfortable with an hour a day because I think—I think—there are other things I want to spend more time on. And I'm pretty sure that an hour a day gives me a better chance of continuing to do this stuff into my elder years than pounding the hell out of my body the way I do now. Maybe what I'll do is become the sprinter I was meant to be. But the three-hour marathon, it's just sitting out there, waiting to cap off the decade. Isn't the decade over? Not according to the pedants who argue that decades end at the conclusion of the "zero" year. So there's some flexibility there. For me, my decade, my decade of going long, ends with a dedicated, smart, intense effort to break three hours in the marathon. May 2? That's the plan. (And more on the plan in the days ahead.)

The Days Are Getting Longer

2009-12-28T09:07:00.000-08:00

Thirty-two more seconds of daylight today than yesterday. Tomorrow, another 37 seconds, and on Wednesday we get 42 more. Baby steps, but I like the trend.

CIM 2009

2009-12-19T17:42:00.000-08:00

I didn’t mind the cold. It didn’t feel as biting as in 2005 and the prerace wait in the predawn chill went by quickly. The temperature was about the same as four years ago, just below freezing, but I was better prepared this time. I had my layer of throwaways, the key piece the Northwest Nazarene University hoodie, cotton, yes, but a ridiculously thick slab of the stuff. I was comfortable, and away from the buses and the start line there were porta-potties galore without lines, just walk right up, step right in. A rare and wonderful thing before a big race. And as for the bag drop, I must have hit it at just the right time because while I encountered a hectic scene, I did not find it to be the chaotic, race-derailing experience it apparently was for some runner-bloggers.

Maybe you've heard about the wind. That's been a focus of many of the CIM reports I've seen. The wind got me down for a little while on the southbound stretches. At one of the mile markers, in the mid-teens, I became so frustrated running into the cold wind that I asked the guy (not) calling out splits how long would it be before the road would turn and we’d be out of the wind. He thought I was asking for directions and told me to just follow the people in front of me! Definitely a failure to communicate there. I wanted to but did not stop, turn around, and explain the point of my inquiry. I ran on.

I guess if there’s got to be a theme to this race that’s a good one: I ran on. Things unfolded pretty much as I anticipated. Or planned? Maybe there’s no difference. I don’t think there was in this race. I wanted to run the first half in 90 minutes to see what it felt like to run the second half of a marathon after running a first half in 90 minutes. This, I figured, would give me valuable insight into what it might take to complete a marathon under three hours. And bang, that’s the way it unfolded. I hit 13.1 miles at 1:29:56, a fraction under the magic 6:52 pace. I'd kept the three-hour pacer guy in view until then, but the wind got to me not long after the halfway point. The blustery miles 15 through 19 went 7:07, 7:13, 7:07, 7:18 and 7:19. After that we were mostly not fighting the wind; it was coming from the south or southeast and we were running west or southwest. But my legs had grown tired. I had eaten gels around 5 and 13 (and then took another at 20). And there had been a piece of a banana along the way somewhere, as well as water—sips—grabbed on the fly at most of the aid stations. I think I was reasonably fueled. I just couldn’t go faster. Mile 20 was a 7:09, 21 a 7:10. At that point I was thinking a 3:05 might be possible, but 22-26 went like this: 7:25, 7:30, 7:31, 7:38 and 7:34, and even 3:05 slipped away.

As I suggested, this wasn’t surprising. With a half-marathon PR of 1:28:53 coming into CIM and no big workout breakthroughs, I couldn’t very well expect to run back-to-back 1:30s, adding up to a three-hour marathon. One of the things I've learned in running intently the past few years is that magic, craziness, doesn't often happen. Recent races and honest contemplation of your training will tell the story.

My second half of the race came in at 1:36:20, considerably slower than the first. No problem; I didn't come completely apart. I ran with composure throughout in what were hardly superb conditions (the consensus view was that the race was a 7 or 8 on a 1-10 toughness scale; I'd call it a 6, maybe 6.5). There was also the fact that I was running less than three months after going hard at Berlin. There was a sense, throughout my training leading up to CIM and on race day, that I had never quite completely recovered from that race.

So I suppose you could say the conditions cost me a minute or two, and lingering fatigue from Berlin maybe grabbed another minute. Or maybe not. Either way, I'm a few minutes shy of three hours. Of course those are the hardest minutes, those bare handful that stand in the way of the big goal, the goal of an athletic lifetime.

The plan is to do some resting, cycling on the trainer and easy running over the next few weeks then, in mid-January, embark on a 16-week program culminating with the Eugene Marathon on May 2, 2010. I'll tell the story here.

Data:

Time: 3:06:16
Overall: 372 out of 5848
45-49M Age group: 25 out of 543
On my Garmin.
My CIM time in 2005: 3:35:32

Don't Look Back, Spiro; He Might Be Gaining on You

2009-12-07T19:29:00.000-08:00

OK, got a long way to go. But I drew three minutes and 38 seconds closer to the legendary Greek with a 3:06:16 at the California International Marathon in Sacramento yesterday. The full story soon.

Garmin data

Some Quick Pre-CIM Thoughts

2009-12-04T20:10:00.000-08:00

Why am I so uptight about this marathon? I think it’s because I’m not feeling the energy bubbling in me the way I did before Berlin in September. There have been a lot of races this year—maybe too many. The aforementioned Berlin was only two and a half months ago and since then I’ve run five cross-country races, a half-marathon PR, a 10K PR and there was another one or two other races in there somewhere. I brought a ton of enthusiasm into all those races; every one of them was great fun. I’m feeling right now a little tapped out.

Maybe it’s just typical pre-marathon nerves. Maybe it’s the fact that this is a marathon and marathons, even if you’ve done the distance or greater many times, are always challenging. Maybe—no, I know this is definitely a part of it—I’m weary of getting PRs. Wait, what I mean is, I’m wearing of needing a PR in order to have a successful race. And I’m rather afraid that this time a PR could be really, really difficult.

I’m fortunate, in a way, in that I came to running late, in my 40s. With increased and better training it only took avoiding injury to accumulate PRs. But the low-hanging fruit has been picked. I knew going into Berlin that even if I didn’t have a great race I could better my PR of 3:18:52. I was obviously much better prepared than when I ran that time 17 months before. Now, it’s different. I believe that sometime in the next year I’ll run a marathon faster than 3:09:54, my time at Berlin, but it’ll take a very strong race to do that on Sunday. It will hurt. It’s not going to happen automatically. I’m not any fitter. Probably, I’m a little more tired. That doesn’t bode well, does it?

And yet. And yet come Race Morning, well, things happen. All those crazy, scared-shitless-happy people gathered in the freezing semi-dark out in Folsom, wondering what the 26.2 have in store for them (and what they have in store for the 26.2). It’s a pretty special place to be. It can fire a guy up.

CIM Weather?

2009-11-30T12:51:00.000-08:00

There's only one place to go if you want to know.
http://cimweatheroutlook.blogspot.com/

Silicon Valley Turkey Trot 10K

2009-11-28T23:58:00.000-08:00

Probably 10 million guys have run 10 kilometers in less than 40 minutes. Who knows? Maybe it's 20 million if you count the barefooted tribesmen who chased down udus and gerenuks in millennia of yore. My point being this is not considered exceptional beyond the bounds of my own ego. Alas, this blog represents the (indecent) public exposure of said ego. Those given to easy blushing are invited to click away.

You can find a 10K result for me on the Internet from 1999. The time: 46:21. I was a hard-core mountain biker then. I didn't run much, but I was very fit and also was 36 years old. On Thanksgiving Day this year I was five days shy of 47. I've been running a lot lately. If there were close observers—and on this count, at least, I suppose I'll be thankful there are not—they might say it's practically all I do. And so I found myself lining up with 11,000 other people in a bright sun—at its low angle managing to warm the morning chill—for the Applied Materials Silicon Valley Turkey Trot in San Jose. Mostly the multitudes were there to run the 5K. Actually, mostly they were there to make a preemptive strike against Thanksgiving-gorging guilt. Some 3,000 were doing the 10K.

One could argue I should not have been among them. The California International Marathon was just 10 days off. A 10K might fit into the taper as a tempo run, I suppose. Or maybe (though not likely) a VO2 workout, depending on how one approaches it. But my approach, inevitably, wouldn't fit either category of workout. I'd be racing it. I never for a second imagined anything else. Most coaches would have advised against it, but I did a hard 10K two weeks before Berlin and that worked out OK. More importantly, I was in San Jose, there was an attractive race there, so.... It's like 2+2=4.

Great sleep the night before, easy 15-minute drive downtown from my parents', where everyone was still asleep when I left at 6:45. Parking 200 yards from the start/finish. No lines at the porta-potties. This was looking good. When it came time to race, feeling bold and no longer a sucker, I positioned myself near the front. So often I've spent the first several hundred yards of races fighting past much slower runners. Finally I was going to avoid that. To the fore! There were some skinny dudes around me who were clearly ready to run 15s or 16s in the 5K, along with a few scattered tubbies who either didn't hear or didn't care about the frequent admonishments from the race announcer (bless him) to seed yourself according to your ability, but mostly I seemed to be among my people.

And we were off.

Well it wasn't really that exciting, this little 10 kilometer circle around San Jose's downtown, starting and ending in front of the HP Pavilion, aka The Shark Tank. Noteworthy, I suppose, is that as I hit the Mile 1 sign my Garmin showed 6:06, which is actually faster than what I ran my first mile in when I got my 5K PR. Unsustainable but not ludicrous, I thought. Maybe time in the bank? Time in the bank doesn't work. You'll die later. But maybe not. Who knows?

No more mile splits from there. My Garmin was marking laps at kilometers, and I looked down as each beep sounded to see which side of four minutes I had landed on. Here's how it all went:

3:43
3:47
3:54
3:56
4:01
4:02
4:01
4:02
3:56
3:51

There was a little drama just past the halfway point, when I was working really hard to relax—if that makes sense—and slow down while maintaining my speed (if that makes sense). We were on a wide boulevard and the runners were scattered about, no clusters at all, and some fellow masters runner couldn't find his way past me without brushing me and then getting right in front of me, forcing me to move to my left. I said something like, "Dude, it's a wide street." He didn't say anything or even look back, but when I passed him with a half mile to go he said, "Good job," and when he passed me with a tenth of a mile to go I said, "Strong."

I was pretty strong down the stretch, too. Relatively speaking, of course. I made that clear at the beginning of this entry, right? That running 10K under 40 minutes isn't a big deal? I ran 39:13, 1:04 better than my previous best at the distance, 7:08 faster than in 1999. From here I suspect any further improvements will be measured in much smaller increments, if they happen at all, but I'm sure I'll keep trying.

Finish: 39:13
Pace: 6:19
Overall: 43/3,238
Men: 42/1,679
M45-49: 6/197

Through the Rough Patch

2009-11-21T20:47:00.000-08:00

I hit a rough patch about three weeks before Berlin. "The run was f'd up," I wrote in my log regarding a 14-miler that was supposed to be 15. "Little energy. Cut it short." That was 19 days before the race. Two days later I ran 10 and wrote, "Still not good. Very heavy legs. Tired. Very tired. Tough run. Slept afterward, conking out."

I began to come out of this slump within a few days—with short runs, nothing long, just stuff that was fun and reawakened the pep in my step—and the rest of my taper was fine. I never felt super-energized, but the aches and pains receded and I knew my muscles were getting the deep rest they had missed for several months, and on race day I was ready.

Am I seeing a repeat in the run-up to CIM? Last Monday, 20 days before the race, I did 18 and wanted at least part of the run to be near marathon pace. That happened, but it was hard. I really had to work for it. Now maybe this was because I was running on wet and squishy wood-chip trail that, while it didn't have any real climbs, was loaded with ripples and turns. Very different than running on the roads, where you can practically flick on the cruise control and conserve physical and mental fuel. I ran eight miles on each of the next two days, recovery runs, and I still felt sluggish. On Thursday, I finally got around to getting the Computrainer set up, for the first time since before IMCDA in June, and had tons of fun spinning against the silver digital guy for 90 minutes.

After that break from running, I was a new man yesterday, warming up with a couple of miles at well over 8:00/mile, then taking it down gradually and finishing under 6:50/mile on a 10-miler. That last mile was pure fun; I could have continued at that pace for three or four more miles, easily.

My thought going into the weekend was to take it easy on Saturday and then do something pretty long—say, 12-14 miles—on Sunday. That, coming two weeks before CIM, would be my last run over 10 miles. Today I was just going to muddle through 6-8 miles, but then saw that the Clark County Running Club would be holding its Turkey Trot 5K at the reasonable hour of 10 a.m. and at the even more reasonable cost of $2. Plus there was the lure of the turkey raffle—frozen birds going out to 20 lucky runners. I wanted some of that action.

Cold (low 40s), wet, breezy morning—late November in the Northwest. This was a small race, entirely day-of registration, out at Marine Park, along the Columbia. Neither of the two bathrooms at park was open. There was a sign on one of them that blamed the closure on budget cuts. Clark County—kind of like the more famous Clark County in Nevada— boomed with construction during most of the decade, then went bust in a big, ugly way. Its unemployment rate of 13.7 percent is the highest in the state of Washington. Pity, no stimulus money for cleaning bathrooms.

Desperate to take care of some serious business, I grabbed a handful of tissues and headed for the wooded gully on the edge of the park. Enough said about that.

The run was an out-and-back on a concrete pathway, wider than your normal bike path by a few feet. There were maybe 150 runners, a dozen or so who appeared capable of cracking 20 minutes. Finally I was confident enough to station myself up front at the start. Without slower runners to wend my way past, I ran 5:59 for the first mile and although that was at least 10 seconds faster than my usual 5K first mile, it didn't feel completely stupid. I had no idea where this circuitous path was taking us, but during the second mile we emerged right along the Columbia, providing a nice view and some intermittent strong headwinds. The pavement was wet with plenty of leaves littered about, but it wasn't raining. I was wearing just shorts and a short-sleeve technical shirt, while most others were in tights and jackets or long-sleeved shirts, but the cold felt good, invigorating. The turnaround was a tight 180, which of course requires virtually a complete stop, not exactly what you're looking to do in the middle of a 5K. That might have been the hardest part of the race for me, gearing back up after the turnaround slowdown.

I chased a young kid for a lot of the second half of the race, caught him and just tried to stay strong from there. Running marathons, I think, helps makes 5Ks easier from a mental perspective. It hurts, but so what? You only need to endure for nine or five or whatever small number of minutes more. I endured, not heroically, but reasonably, running the second mile in 6:16 and the third one in 6:08 and crossing the line in 18:23, according to my Garmin 305.

Now 18:23, for me, is freaking fast. My best 5K coming in was a 19:19. But there's a hitch in running this time up the PR pole: the course might have been short. I'm going to check in with the race director and see how certain they are of the distance before I count it as official. That said, even if the course was a tenth short, adding 25-30 seconds to my time, I still would have busted my old PR by a goodly margin. Officially, my time was 18:26. And despite the fact it was advertised as a 5K, the race was measured and run as 3 miles—precisely the distance my Garmin had it at.

Afterword they hauled out the turkeys. I didn't get one. Eh, if I had to make a choice, I'd rather have ~~a PR and~~ the exciting sense that with two weeks to go until CIM, my legs are in fine fettle.

One more race before CIM: The Silicon Valley Turkey Trot 10K on Thanksgiving. Hell, yeah, I'll be going for it!

It's that Time of the Year

2009-11-11T19:14:00.000-08:00

We've had measurable precipitation (aka, rain) seven days in a row. And the forecast?

So there's a lot of running in the rain going on, although if you're lucky you can find a gap in the gray and pounce. I did yesterday. Here's a picture I took of the sky just before embarking on my run:

For more on that run—far from epic, but beautiful nonetheless—check out the little photo album I posted publicly on Facebook.

Racing the Storm

2009-11-07T21:29:00.000-08:00

On our marks.

The Red Lizard cross-country series ended last weekend, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a race to be found today. The USATF put on the first of two Saturdays of racing out at Sandy High School. I didn't exactly set myself up well for today's 5K (next week it'll be 8K). Yesterday's planned 10-miler morphed into an 18.5-mile, pavement-and-asphalt slugfest that took me downtown, a half-dozen times around the Hawthorne-Steele bridges loop, then back home. This was the pre-CIM long run I was planning on doing tomorrow, but when it occurred to me, as I embarked on the run, that CIM is only four weeks away, I got a notion to do two long runs, Friday and Sunday. So tomorrow will be another big day, assuming a wheel hasn't fallen off.

The men's race came last, at noon, after the juniors and women, so I had time for a morning walk to the farmers' market. Rain was in the forecast, but fortunately it was holding off. Unfortunately, I arrived at the market at 8:30, and although many of the vendors were there and set up, the pasture-grazed meat guy told me if he sold me anything before 9 he'd be bounced from the venue by the organizers. Could I hang on for 30 minutes? Right. I walked home empty-handed, wondering what kind of bogus farmers' market doesn't get going until 9. Nine, that's lunchtime on the farms my parents grew up on.

Once home, I jumped online to check the radar. The Doppler showed an impressive yellow and red wave onto the coast, headed right for the Portland area. When would it hit Sandy, 20 miles east of the city: before, during or after the race? Hard to tell. Not that I cared that much. Running in howling wind at 50 degrees with torrential rain wouldn't be my first choice, but 5K of it I could survive.

Still no rain by the time I arrived in Sandy, around 11:30, though skies were heavy and that wind was ripping. The women were finishing up their race. There were, like, three guys there then, but nine were at the line when the starter called us to our marks. We went first across a big grass field, then into the woods, where we wound around every which way until I had no idea what direction I was going. I just tried to stay upright while making the dozens of turns on the squishy track under the canopy, and to keep an eye on the guy 10 or 15 yards in front of me. I knew there were two guys behind me and after a while I couldn't hear them anymore. I was surprised that my legs felt reasonably spry. If I'd rested instead of running long yesterday I might have had enough juice to nab the guy in front of me, maybe even the guy in front of him, but just running decently on the dirt and grass was good enough for me. It was good stuff.

We finished on the Sandy High track just as the skies began to spit. The hardy USATF-Oregon people were already beginning to pack up after several hours out there. A look to the west showed a wall of rain moving toward us. This wasn't your typical Portland dripper; it had Midwestern ferocity written all over it. I hurried to the car, not even bothering to change. By the time I got on U.S. 26 for the drive through Sandy and Gresham, the skies had opened and the rain was whipped sideways by the wind. A huge bolt of lightning cracked just to the north. It was a little harrowing. Water began to pool at some intersections and in low spots along the right side of the road. It was good to make it home safely, have a nice hot shower, and then get some beans and rice going on the stove.

My Garmin data.

Photo courtesy Red Lizard BrianH.

On Pace

2009-11-05T17:03:00.000-08:00

“Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.” — Emerson

“To climb steep hills requires slow pace at first.” — Shakespeare

“When the race gets hard to run, it means you just can't take the pace.” — Bob Marley

"i have no idea what my #marathon pace is--or should be? how do you figure it out?" — Woman on Twitter

I’m so predictable. I didn’t used to be. But the more I run, the better those online calculators—you know, the ones where you plug in a 10K or half-marathon time and it spits out a marathon prediction—the better they are at pegging my pace. This is a good thing, since how fast to go in a 26.2 mile race can be terrifyingly difficult to determine. The dire scenarios if you get it wrong are obvious: go out too fast and you risk blowing up and staggering to the finish; go out too slow and you finish strong but with the soul-devouring sense that you failed to leave it all on the course. The former possibility is universally applicable. The latter assumes that racing to your potential is important to you, which may not always be the case. The woman who does the New York Times’ Well blog was pleased as punch after training for months and then turning in a six-hour, 58-minute marathon. That’s 16 minutes per mile, a brisk walk for most people. Then again, it was her first marathon, and the standard-issue advice for newbies is not to concern yourself with pace, have fun, get through it, worry about how long it takes in your next race. Clearly Ms. 6:58 took that advice to heart.

In my first marathon, the Bizz Johnson, I desperately wanted to run under four hours. This was in 2004. I was 41 and had been doing triathlons for a while, but moreover still saw myself as the athlete I was as a kid, with unlimited, unknowable potential, and a fierce need to be well above average. You could say I’ve always been a bit of a fasthole, even if the person I most frequently looked down upon for being slow was me. In any case, then as now, simply finishing the race could not be the goal.

The Bizz hardly unfolded as planned. In my training, I had done a 15-mile run around two hours — eight minutes per mile. Mindful that 15 miles isn’t 26.2, it made sense to me to go a little slower than that in the marathon, so I decided to aim for an 8:30 pace, then see if I could hang on to the finish. On race day, a frightfully cold October morning at 5,000 feet elevation, on a course that rose gradually for the first 12 miles (a fact I, weirdly, hadn’t taken into consideration in my “planning”), I found myself running nine-minute miles. It was all I could manage. I hit the halfway mark at just under 1:57. Having never run farther than 17 miles, I was scared shitless that I’d slow down even more as the race wore on and then I’d have to live forever with having run a marathon in more than four hours. Could I just never talk about it and pretend it hadn’t happened? No, too many people knew I was doing the race. The results would be posted online. Fucking Internet.

A few things happened on my way to plus-four-marathon infamy, however: the course elevation declined by a steady 80 feet per mile over the last 14 miles; the sun shone bright and the temperature climbed from the mid-20s into the 40s, perfect for running; and I kept running. All this added up to a negative split and a finishing time of 3:49.

It was an unorthodox first-marathon success story, attributable as much to the nature of the course as anything else. It wasn’t great reserves of energy that allowed me to go faster late in the race. It was gravity. I was like a ball rolling down the hill. If the course had been flat, I’m sure I would have faded badly—which is what happened in all my subsequent marathons. Until Berlin, earlier this fall.

Going into Berlin, I knew, based on my workouts, that my fitness had improved since I’d run 3:18:54 in Boston in 2008. I had done a 20-miler in 2:28, a 7:24/mile pace, 12 seconds faster than at Boston. So immediately I was thinking of shooting for a 7:30/mile or faster at Berlin, for a total time under 3:17. Also, I had done more long running than ever in my Berlin training, which gave me confidence that my fitness late in the race—in that scary 20- to 26-mile zone—would likely be better.

You’d think that would have been enough to settle on a pace, but it wasn’t. I didn’t want to mess things up. I wanted to run the perfect race. I read my books and scoured the Internet for more insight. I ran Yasso 800s, which served to inspire and confuse me. Ripping off those 10 halves in under three minutes apiece suggested my goal of bettering my PR was well within reach, but left me confused as to how bold I should be on race day. Could I really run a marathon in close to three hours? I wasn’t buying that, and indeed most analysis of the Yasso formula says it tends to yield and an overly optimistic forecast.

The online predictors were less optimistic about my chances, but they still held out the prospect of a substantial PR reduction. I had done a half-marathon in 1:30:19 in April. Using an age-grading formula, that translated to a 3:07:54 marathon. An estimated-VO2 max formula said 3:08:12. Riegel (Runner’s World) was at 3:08:17. And Cameron 3:11:23.

All these formulas came with a caveat: “the assumption that you've done appropriate training for the distance,” as one of them put it. That makes sense. If you’ve never run more than 13.1 miles, a half-marathon time probably won’t say much about your capabilities at 26.2. I wasn’t sure if I’d met the criteria for “appropriate training,” but I knew that in the lead-up to Berlin I’d done more running, more focused running and more long runs than ever before. Based on that, I began to warm to the idea that I could make a go at 3:10. I had based my FIRST training on 3:10, but the idea there was simply to push myself. I didn’t know if I’d actually get to the point where I could confidently start a race aiming for that time.

Sometimes in the days before the race I would think about what had happened at Boston, how my 1:35:27 first half had devolved into a 1:43:25 second half, and I’d wonder if I really did have what it takes to maintain a 3:10 pace — 7:15/mile — for the duration. I’d think: Maybe I should aim for 3:15 (7:26/mile)? That would be safer. That would be prudent. But on race morning, at the starting line, with Ravel’s Bolero thumping over the PA system as welcome messages in a dozen or more languages were delivered to the 40,000 runners massed on the Strasse des 17 Juni, I felt absolutely calm. I had shifted my thinking to kilometers, since that’s how the course would be marked, and I was sure that 4:30/kilometer, 7:15/mile, was the way to go. I didn't know for sure if I would succeed. That's something you never know before a race. Hell, you race to find out. But I was sure that my pacing approach was solid, come what may.

My worst 5K split was only 49 seconds slower than my best. As I wrote in my race report, I began to fade a bit around 35 kilometers, but just a bit. Mostly I stayed steady from start to finish. This was a challenging pace, but a pace I could handle. It was a joyous, exhilarating run. I set out to run 3:10. I ran 3:09:54. I nailed the pace sweet spot. And my ability to do so was a function of my training. It all comes down to the training. If you are well-trained for the marathon — and by well-trained I don’t mean that you’ve followed an 18-week run-a-marathon program, but that you’ve been at it for years, built a base, raced a variety of distances and put in the long runs and the deep thought and, if this doesn't sound too weird, the love for the sport — that’s when you’ll become predictable. Wonderfully predictable.

Farewell, TRL XC '09!

2009-10-31T21:13:00.000-07:00

Off we go: I started at the back and moved up. A little.

The variety of terrain at Klock was really cool.

Footing was treacherous. Spikes might have been a good idea.

Klock Blueberry Farm kicked my rear today. A couple inches of rain during the week and more during the race turned much of the course spongy and mucky. No standing water, but lots of slick, gooey mud on the steep pitches and divot-strewn grass on the flats. I can't believe how spent I was by the last loop. It was far more taxing than my half-marathon PR last Sunday. I had run shy of two and a half miles and for a flicker of a moment considered walking it in. Meanwhile, the fast dudes were, like, eight minutes in front of me. I don't know how they negotiated the downhills as quickly as they must have. Of course, I'm a wus on downhills, and was passed several times. That's how it went for me: give up ground on the descents, gain a little back on the climbs. Anyway, it was a blast, the last of the four-race Team Red Lizard XC Series. Heaps of thanks to Jacob Buckmaster and everyone else who made it happen. I'm looking forward to next year. Special thanks as well, this day, to Beverly Klock (I think I have the name right) for being so sweet to Niko, inviting him into her house to pick out a book to bring home!

My Garmin.
Official Results.
Joe Dudman's race report.

The DKSVM: A Quick Review

2009-10-29T21:45:00.000-07:00

I don't want to criticize the Dean Karnazes Silicon Valley Marathon, because it was a fun run and, geez, I PR'd. The course — I did the half, the out part of an out-and-back — was an interesting mix of urban (downtown), neighborhood (Willow Glen) and semi-natural (the paved Los Gatos Creek Trail). It was also 13.1 miles, just like it was supposed to be, and the weather was beautiful, clear and crisp as the race got under way at sunrise, and sunny for the post-race goings-on. And those goings-on weren't bad, with a free fish taco, a nice change of pace.

What the hell more do I really need than all that?

Still, there were a few issues with the race that others might find helpful to know about as they ponder which events deserve their hard-earned entry fee. Some things that didn't bother me too much but might be a concern to you:

1) Weak Web site with "coming soon" pages (for course elevation, for instance) that never came and confusing or non-existent instructions on race logistics.
2) Almost non-existent crowd support. The marathoners probably had it better as they neared the finish line downtown, but for the halfies it was a pretty lonely affair.
3) I enjoyed the several miles on the paved path but from time to time was almost frustrated having to deal with non-racers out for their Sunday more run, walk, ride or blade. Hey, I'm glad they were out there gettin' it done, but in a race it's nice not to have to zig and zag to avoid baby strollers.
4) The volunteers were enthusiastic and polite, but they didn't always have answers to questions and didn't appear to have strong leadership guiding them. At the finish they ran out of water (which was handed out in paper cups). And none of the volunteers knew where bathrooms were or where we were supposed to pick up the bus to get back to the start. And when we did figure out where to get the bus, we had to stand in line for well over a half-hour.
5) As mentioned, back downtown at the marathon finish, they had some Mexican food, fish or chicken tacos, rice, beans, good stuff. But again there was no water to be found. In fact, to get anything to drink we had to reach inside the ropes to where the marathoners were finishing and grab a Gatorade.
6) The on-course sport drink was Ultima, which is OK for a 5K but for a half marathon or marathon? The drink has no carbs. You need carbs to do a marathon, and could certainly benefit from some in a half marathon.
7) There was no effort made to seed the runners at the start. So I'm starting out intending to run 6:35 miles having to dodge people who are running 9-minute miles. Not a big deal, but kind of irritating and, moreover, quite avoidable.
8) There were no results posted until the next day, and the results included no split times. This is another thing that's not a huge deal but you'd think the SILICON VALLEY MARATHON would be as technologically with-it as other marathons, many of which now offer 5K splits, real-time tracking and results immediately upon completion. The DKSVM had none of this.

To wrap things up I'd say that overall, the race had a kind of sleepy, relaxed feel. Which makes sense. It's a bit of a forgotten race in Northern California in October, following fast on the heels of the Rock 'n' Roll San Jose 1/2, a typically flashy Competitor Group Inc. franchised event with big-name pros - Meb Keflezighi among them this year - and a field nudging five-figures, as well as the Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco, which is actually much more a half-marathon (12,730 finishers) than a marathon (4,351), but is any case large. So there's a virtual guarantee, coming amid that glittery clutter, that the DKSVM is going to be small (around 2,000 racers total). And perhaps the organizers know that, and it leads them to be too unambitious in their staging of the event.

In sum: A good race that I quite enjoyed, but one that could be better.

Sacto Here I Come

2009-10-28T16:22:00.001-07:00

I'm registered.
The plane tickets are purchased.
The car is reserved.
The room is secured.
I'm running CIM.

A Half-Marathon PR

2009-10-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

Ran the half at the Dan Karzanes Silicon Valley Marathon yesterday in San Jose. My Garmin showed a 1:28:57, but officially I clocked a 1:29:00. Hey, that's still a PR by well over a minute, so I'll take it!

Time: 1:28:53*
Overall finish: 28/927
M45-49 finish: 3/71

*I originally thought I'd run 1:28:57, the time on my Garmin. Then I saw 1:29:00 on the results, so I thought that was my official time. Now, looking again, I see that 1:29:00 was my gun time; my chip time was 1:28:53.

Sponge-Worthy

2009-10-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday’s post about the inevitability of running shoes being remade each year, whether they need to be or not, overlooked an obvious consequence of this dastardly marketing strategy: the disappearance of a favorite shoe. In a bitterly ironic turn of events, I came face-to-face with this issue just a few hours after making the post.

I had done my run on the grass at Normandale Park. This, with some variation, is one of a handful of my regular runs: a half-mile on pavement over to the park, then several miles running its perimeter of primarily grass and a bit of dirt. Usually I throw in a dozen or so 100-yard sprints on the football field, along with some dexterity drills (running along a line, switching from side to side every few steps, that kind of thing). It’s a bumpy, twisty-turny sort of running, great for building foot and lower-leg strength and flexibility. I run Normandale wearing my New Balance 790s, which to my thinking are the perfect off-road shoes: flat, low, light and incredibly flexible. Cushioning? Fuggedaboutit. You couldn’t feel more rocks if you ran barefoot.

So after yesterday’s run I was cleaning the mud off my 790s when it occurred to me that they were beginning to wear down and although they probably had a solid month of life in them, it might be wise to get a new pair lined up. I jumped online to Zappos, but they had none in stock. Weird. Then I tried Holabird; they had just a few super-small sizes. WTF? A little more Googling landed me on a blog entry from April this year announcing, to my horror, that New Balance was abandoning the 790 and that a replacement model, the 100, would be released in October.

Bastards! Here they had a loyal customer, a guy willing to buy several pairs of their shoes every year, and they were leaving me out in the cold. Why? Because that’s what shoe companies do.

As promised, the 100s are now available. But I didn’t want the 100s. Or maybe I did. Unsure, I read a few reviews and a lot of comments, many from similarly jilted 790s lovers. Several people said the 100s weren’t as flexible as the 790s, were narrower in the toe and featured a hard top of the heel that was liable to dig into your ankle/Achilles. Other said the 100s were great, with many of the same wonderful attributes of the 790s but with more apparent durability.

While I mulled over the 100s, I did find some 790s available in my size. They were the brown ones, not the all-black models that I loved so much, but at least they were 790s. What to do? I felt like Elaine in the drug store, faced with the prospect of her favorite birth-control aid disappearing from the market.

ELAINE (with little hope): Yeah, do you have any Today sponges? I know they're off the market, but...
PHARMACIST: Actually, we have a case left.
ELAINE (excited): A case! A case of sponges? I mean, uh...a case. Huh. Uh...how many come in a case?
PHARMACIST: Sixty.
ELAINE: Sixty?! Uh...well, I'll take three.
PHARMACIST: Three.
ELAINE: Make it ten.
PHARMACIST: Ten?
ELAINE: Twenty sponges should be plenty.
PHARMACIST: Did you say twenty?
ELAINE: Yeah, twenty-five sponges is just fine.
PHARMACIST: Right. So, you're set with twenty-five.
ELAINE: Yeah. Just give me the whole case and I'll be on my way.

I bought three pairs of 790s.

This Year's Model

2009-10-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

That famous bike snob says, “Cycling simply doesn't need new product lines every year.” Duh! If Snob thinks cycling is unique in this regard, he’s never gone through a running phase. Every year my hard-road training shoe, the Asics Gel Cumulus, gets a new number stuck at the end of its name. I started on this shoe when it was hardly even a kindergartner, at 4. (Actually, it was IV then; they made the switch from Roman to Arabic numerals with X, aka 10.) Now it’s 11, a certified tween, all into V Factory (or w/e).

Remarkably, the company doesn’t claim there’s anything new about the Gel Cumulus 11. Last year they boasted of improving the Gel Cumulus 10 by adding something called Impact Guidance System (I.G.S.®), which the Iranians promptly ripped off and are using in their nuke program, thanks a lot, Asics. This year, nada. Did the Marketing Department take a big whack in a cost-cutting move? Or were they just unable to conjure another registered feature? The list already included — in addition to I.G.S.® — SpEVA®, “Twist” GEL® Cushioning and the Space Trusstic System®. Remember, too: Plenty of stuff had been quietly abandoned over the years. My Gel Cumulus IVs, which Zappos tells me were purchased on December 28, 2002, came with GEL® Cushioning (no “Twist” then), in addition to the late but not lamented DuraSponger® forefoot and AHAR® heel plug.

Actually, now that I think about it, the lack of advancements to the Gel Cumulus 11 has an obvious explanation: It’s a a nod to the minimal-shoe trend. When the Gel Cumulus 12 rolls around, I suspect you’ll see Asics boast that it’s discarded at least one of the shoe's trademarked features. And by the time we get to Gel Cumulus 15, it’ll be an utterly featureless shoe, perfect for the multitude of born-again forefoot strikers.

Perspective

2009-10-21T08:32:00.000-07:00

BMJ. 2007 Dec 22;335(7633):1275-7.
Competing risks of mortality with marathons: retrospective analysis.

Redelmeier DA, Greenwald JA.
Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Ontario, Canada M4N 3M5. dar@ices.on.ca
OBJECTIVE: To determine from a societal perspective the risk of sudden cardiac death associated with running in an organised marathon compared with the risk of dying from a motor vehicle crash that might otherwise have taken place if the roads had not been closed. DESIGN: Population based retrospective analysis with linked ecological comparisons of sudden death. SETTING: Marathons with at least 1000 participants that had two decades of history and were on public roads in the United States, 1975-2004. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Sudden death attributed to cardiac causes or to motor vehicle trauma. RESULTS: The marathons provided results for 3,292,268 runners on 750 separate days encompassing about 14 million hours of exercise. There were 26 sudden cardiac deaths observed, equivalent to a rate of 0.8 per 100,000 participants (95% confidence interval 0.5 to 1.1). Because of road closure, an estimated 46 motor vehicle fatalities were prevented, equivalent to a relative risk reduction of 35% (95% confidence interval 17% to 49%). The net reduction in sudden death during marathons amounted to a ratio of about 1.8 crash deaths saved for each case of sudden cardiac death observed (95% confidence interval: 0.7 to 3.8). The net reduction in total deaths could not be explained by re-routing traffic to other regions or days and was consistent across different parts of the country, decades of the century, seasons of the year, days of the week, degree of competition, and course difficulty. CONCLUSION: Organised marathons are not associated with an increase in sudden deaths from a societal perspective, contrary to anecdotal impressions fostered by news media.

Mount Tabor XC

2009-10-17T10:27:00.001-07:00

Garmin data.
Official results.

Impatient

2009-10-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

So where am I in this epic quest to topple Spiridon and twist a dagger into the heart of Greek pride? (If I, an aging American writer-not-being-published—from the soft West Coast, no less—can best the time of that ancient land's lone marathon gold-medal winner, surely Greece will be forced to disavow its history of achievement. At least the part involving Spiridon. Maybe they can keep the really big stuff ... like the invention of columns and sororities.)

Well, it's kind of a weird place, where I am. I know what I want to do—run better than Spiridon's 2:58:50, which, I hasten to add, was accomplished on a short course, said by historians to be around 40 kilometers, not the modern 42.2. (Then again, Spiridon didn't have the aid of Powerbar Gel Carbohydrate Electrolyte Blend, so we'll not quibble.)

The question is, when? When do I slay Spiridon? The wise—perhaps not insane would be a better way to put it—approach would be to give myself several more weeks to recover from Berlin, then begin a long, careful build toward a marathon in the spring. Eugene. That's May 2, with a finish on the track at Hayward Field. Damn. Hayward Field! That's almost as cool as the white-marbled Panathinaiko, where, I hardly need point out, Spiridon took the crown in '96.

The only problem is I don't know if I can wait that long. I'm already contemplating running CIM—that's California International Marathon, in Sacramento, on December 6—which has earned the reputation as fast. I ran that race in 2005. A really hot girl that I knew then talked up the race, that's why I did it. She was deep in a relationship, actually ended up marrying the guy, but still, if a hot girl is talking up a race then of course I'm running it. That's how stupid I am.

This was my third marathon, I think, and I went into it with a three-forty-something PR. As usual I did no real marathon training. I did do a lot of half-ironman triathlon training—that was the thing I was into then—so I was fit, but being "fit" and being ready to run a fast marathon, ha! Not the same thing. It was a frigid freaking morning, clear and calm but right around freezing. The buses dumped us out at the start, in the darkness, at, like, 6 a.m., with a 7 a.m. start. I shivered for an hour. Then the gun sounded and off I went with the 3:30 pace group, which I knew was a reach but what the hell? Give it a go.

As you might expect, I fell apart in the last four or five miles and finished in 3:35 and change. It was a great race, but I feel a bit like I owe CIM another go, a better one. I know the course now; know how to deal with running downhill. I think I could pull off a good race there. But can I run faster than 2:58:50? I would say the chances are very slim. Very slim. Like, 2 percent. No, make it 5 percent. No, make it 0.4 percent; I just remembered that I've never even run under 1:30 for a half marathon. Beating 1:30 in the half twice, back-to-back, in six weeks seems highly unlikely. To put it kindly.

Still, I'd learn something by running stupidly and unsustainably toward Joan Didion's and Herb Caen's hometown, which is really how I view Sacramento. (Didion nor Herb, I'm sure, never got near a marathon, in Sacramento or anywhere else. When it came to fitness, Herb often mocked but also marveled. An item: "A moment's heartfelt silence: Walt 'Iron Man' Stack finally wore out. The great marathon runner who did 17 miles daily plus a swim in the bay as a matter of course died at 87 last Wed. at Sheffield Convalescent Home here. He was never the same after his beloved wife died four years ago ... Walt was a founding member of the Dolphin Club, where, one day in '88, Peter Rudolfi asked him, 'How do you keep your teeth from chattering out there in that icy water?' Walt: 'I leave 'em in the locker' ... ")

So, running CIM, I'd get a better idea of what I'm up against. And that could come in handy on May 2. Hmm.

Spirit of Spiridon Lives in Centenarian Shot-Put Champ

2009-10-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

Sure that shot looks kinda like a BB. But C'mon, Ruth Frith, of Brisbane, Australia, is 100. She was just 13 years from being born when Spiridon reigned! And she also throws the hammer and javelin. From the news video: "She believes other pensioners should follow her example."

Daring Dathan

2009-10-11T19:08:00.000-07:00

I didn't plan on watching the World Half-Marathon Championships this morning. The online broadcast began at 1 a.m., for crying out loud, and I'm not that hardcore. Then again, maybe I am. I'd fallen asleep around 11:15 p.m., and noise from the street outside my bedroom window woke me up at 1:45 a.m. Next thing you know, I'm on UniversalSports.com watching the action from Birmingham, England. Let me tell you, it was worth it, thanks to Dathan Ritzenhein. Of course Zersenay Tadese was the best runner; he won the title for the fourth time. But to see an American, and one who lives and trains in the Portland area, no less, fearlessly take on Tadese and all the great Africans was brilliant stuff. Dick Patrick of USA Today wrote a pretty good story on the race, which you can watch at your leisure on Universal.

X-C Action!

2009-10-10T13:46:00.001-07:00

Garmin data.
Official results.

A Veggie BQ

2009-10-05T07:18:00.000-07:00

Huge congratulations to Matt, the No Meat Athlete. He not only got his Boston qualifier yesterday, but did it in style. Being a young fella, he needed a 3:10, which for Boston actually means 3:10:59. But No Meat obviously didn't want anything to do with those extra seconds. He aimed for 3:10, and he got it: 3:09:59. Classy!

Matt's quest was a great benefit to me during my training for Berlin. He was following the same FIRST program I was and his experiences and insights, always well-told on his blog, provided me much to think about when it came to my own running. Plus, I picked up several excellent recipes! Great job, Matt.

Berlin: An Elaboration

2009-10-03T22:52:00.000-07:00

The weird thing was, I was neither nervous nor anxious in the days and hours leading up to the Berlin Marathon. I slept poorly the night before the race, but not because I was worried about whether I’d do well, or about the conditions I might face. It was excitement that kept my mind churning until 2 a.m. Finally, I’d run ready and rested. Finally, I'd discover what I was capable of doing.

There was also the fact of what this marathon wasn’t: an Ironman triathlon. I can’t emphasize enough how daunting the details of Ironman are for me. This past June at my second go-round at Coeur d’Alene, experience and checklists together couldn’t keep me from spiraling into exhaustion as I pondered clothing, equipment, nutrition and hydration possibilities, fretted about forgetting things and wondered how weather might derail me. Logistics are not my strong suit and maybe Ironman doesn’t actually punish every miscue, but its complexity and length make it less forgiving than marathon.

Sweet, simple marathon: a run from here to there.

Plus, there was my buddy Steve, running his first marathon on brave but short training. Sure I provided him insight and reassurance, but let’s be honest: When fear and uncertainty, that blood-sucking duo, entered the room they knew they had an easier mark than me. And there was this about Steve: As a longtime Berlin resident, he bestowed upon me advantages not common at a faraway marathon. I had a comfortable apartment to stay in instead of a hotel room, and keen local knowledge at the ready. I told him what time I thought we ought to arrive at the race site and he knew the train to get on and when.

* * *

I often wonder how much detail to include in these race reports. Do readers really want to know about the bowel movements? And indeed, I believe I just heard somebody mutter, “Dude, don’t go there.” Fair enough, but this is a real concern if you plan on running hard and don’t wish to spend time seeking refuge on the course. You want to make sure your business is completed. And the way things went for me on race morning in Berlin says a lot about the kind of day it would turn out to be.

A typical scenario for me is two visits to the toilet before leaving home, then a couple more to the porta-potties at the race site. These appointments might not always be productive, but they always feel—literally—necessary. Race morning in Berlin? There was one visit before leaving the apartment. That was it. Never even thought about needing to squat after that. As for the less grave but still potentially troublesome matter of finding a place to pee, that too was a non-issue. In Berlin, the procedure was: amble up to a bank of bushes or into a grove of trees in the sprawling greenery that is the Tiergarten, where the race began and finished, and let loose.

The race was set for 9 a.m. Around 8:30, I jogged a little and did a few striders, hit the bushes one last time, then lined up in the Group D block, for runners whose previous marathon times made a 3:00-3:15 effort within the realm of possibility. The starting line was a few hundred yards in front of me and the vast crowd behind me—more than 40,000 people were registered for the race—stretched down the Strasse des 17 Juni, toward the Branderburg Gate, for what could have been a kilometer. (Yes, a kilometer; for this marathon, in the heart of Europe, I adopted a metric mindset.) Somewhere back there was Steve, with a lot on the line—for himself, and for me.

* * *

The pretense of this blog was a head-to-head matchup with the great Haile Gebrselassie. At Berlin, I asked, could I beat my previous best marathon time by more than Geb could beat his? Geb’s best was the world record of 2:03:59, set in 2008 at Berlin; my best was 3:18:52, set at Boston in 2008. You could say my time presented me a tad more downside potential than Geb’s did him. If Geb could take even a minute off his world mark it would be an amazing achievement. Me, a minute would maybe put me in the front of the front of the middle of pack, instead of the middle of the front of the middle of the pack.

Really, though, my goal wasn’t even to run a minute, or three minutes or eight minutes faster. There wasn’t a number. Believe me, this claim sounds more ridiculous to me than it does to you, because there’s always been a number, or set of numbers. But as strange as my calm was before the race, equally odd was how slippery a numerical goal was proving to be. I wanted to beat my Boston time but that didn’t seem like enough. I thought I might wiggle below 3:10, but that would be a huge drop—hell, I’d gone from 3:49 in my first marathon to 3:41, then to 3:35, then to 3:24 before that Boston effort, then to 3:18. Meanwhile, I was not getting younger. At nearly 47 years old could I reasonably ask myself to run considerably faster than I did at 45?

A couple of factors said yes. First, there was the “10-year rule.” This is often attributed to Joe Henderson, but Henderson himself credits fellow runner and writer Joan Ullyot with saying, “No matter what your age when you start racing, you can expect about 10 years of improvement. That's how long it takes to learn the game.” (Ullyot got her own marathon PR at age 48, in her 12th year running the distance.) The other thing was, I actually trained to run this marathon. My earlier marathons had all come as by-products of triathlon training. True, that training was weighted toward running because running was what I liked and was good at, and I am not immune to the human tendency to favor that which I like and am good at. Still, that translated to just 30 miles of running a week, on average, with no thought given to tempo runs and long runs and track work, and how a good mix all of these types of training could push me toward my potential.

So this time around, in the two solid months of training post-Coeur d'Alene, I ran more miles than ever, hitting a three-week plateau of 60 per week. More importantly, my training was built around the FIRST program's aggressive pacing on three weekly core runs: tempo, track and long. As Berlin approached, I knew I was in the best running shape of my life. I'd done three 20-mile runs, the last at under 7:30 per mile. I rocked the Yasso 800s under 3:00. I was sure that with a good taper I could have gone out and smashed my PR by at least a couple of minutes.

My half-marathon PR, that is.

Lingering, still, was a sense that what had happened in most of my marathons could happen in Berlin: a dramatic fall-off in pace over the final few miles.

* * *

With 40,000 runners, you'd think the first few miles would be an obstacle course filled with skipping, swerving, jostling and leaping to get past slower runners and let faster ones by. Not so at Berlin. We had both sides of the Strasse des 17 Juni, plus the center median. Plenty of room as we headed toward the Siegassaule, the Victory Column. I was to the starting line just a little over two minutes after the gun sounded and hit the 1K sign 4:36 after crossing the starting line. It was then that I firmed up my squishy goal pace. I would aim for 4:30 kilometers. That would translate to a three-hour, 10-minute finishing time—but that really wasn't what I was thinking. Rather, my thought was that 4:30/kilometer was the right spot between manageable and ambitious, between going too easy and falling short of my potential and going too hard and blowing up. Between, you could say, fear and ambition.

I ran. I ran comfortably and with great pleasure. Berlin unfolded around me, a bit blurry in hindsight, but glorious, unique, historic, grand. I know there were gaps here and there, but it felt as though deep crowds lined the streets the entire way. The sound, it was like being on the coast at Mendocino, with voices punctuating the undulating roar, voices often shouting "Danmark," for I was among a clutch of Danes wearing their colors. At two spots, first down in Shoneberg, passing through the platz where Kennedy declared his allegiance to Berlin nearly a half-century ago, and later, damn, I can't remember where, before we got to the Kurfurstendamm, I know that, I remember hearing church bells folding into the crowd noise, and it all made me tingle and feel inspired and strong.

I had my Garmin 305 set to record a lap every kilometer. It got ahead of the course early on—to be expected, since the course was measured to be 42.195 kilometers at its absolute possible shortest route, and even my best efforts at running good tangents would take me away from that minimal path. So my kilometer splits came a few meters before each sign, at first, then several dozen meters, then a hundred meters … the gap gradually growing. But it didn't matter. I was getting a good read on my pace, and it was remaining consistently at or below 4:30/kilometer. I sped up to work my way around a group of runners, and slowed a little when I hit the aid stations—and, in a big change from my normal practice, I did hit nearly all of them.

In all my marathons before Berlin, I operated, I think, under the assumption that I needn't worry about fuel or hydration; after all, a marathon was so much shorter than a half-iron triathlon (let alone an Ironman). A few sips and nibbles here and there, I had always figured, would be enough to get me through. More careful study, however—of expert opinion and my own experience—inspired me to make a change at Berlin. I became convinced that, as with the rest of humanity, I had the glycogen stores to get me through 20 or so miles, but not 26.2; and that significant dehydration could and would slow me. Whether it was by 1 percent or 3 percent, I didn't want it to happen. So I would eat and I would drink. With the forecast for warm, sunny conditions—60F to start, and well into the 70s by noon—the task would be doubly important, and more difficult, but I was 100 percent behind the plan.

So nearing 5K—my first opportunity for water—I tore open one of the two gels I was carrying and began sucking it down. It was the usual chaos approaching the aid station but I did my best to check my blind spot and drift to the right side—barely slowing down, but avoiding cutting anyone off—to get a cup of water. A lot of it splashed away as I grabbed it from the table, but I pounded the two or three ounces that remained. That was another part of my fueling/hydration scheme: gulping instead of sipping. One of the worst things that can happen in a race is to be thirsty and to be drinking but to have liquid sloshing around in your stomach. Gulping, studies show, enhances absorption. It took me another kilometer or two to finish off the gel, by which time I was at the next aid station, which offered a Euro version of Gatorade called Basica. I grabbed a cup—and gulped.

I ran. It was never a problem maintaining the 4:30 pace over the first half of the course. If anything, I had to fight the urge to speed up. There was a 4:19 kilometer in there in the early going, and several under 4:30, particularly from 10k to 15k, which I ran at a 4:24 pace. I briefly, very briefly, flirted with the idea of rethinking my goal pace to 4:25, but sanity prevailed. I told myself that if I was really in such great shape, if I was really meant to run faster, well, I'd get my chance to prove it in the final 10k. For now, steady she goes.

I hit the half-marathon mark in 1:34:24—that's 4:28.5 per kilometer, just slightly faster than what I was aiming for. I was continuing to hit nearly every aid station, and had eaten my second gel after the 15k mark. Just before or after the half mark, I can't remember, I saw a Team Red Lizard singlet up ahead. I'm a member, though up until recently I hadn't acted like one. I surged ahead to chat with the guy, who I knew had run Boston in 3:13 and was hoping for something better in Berlin. I also knew, however, that he'd arrived from the West Coast on Friday, just two days before the race, which seemed ludicrous to me. I had arrived on Monday, and it took a good three days for the nine-time-zone dislocation to be neutralized. I don't know if it was jet leg that did him in or something else, but my Red Lizard compatriot didn't look or sound good, and after a brief chat I left him behind.

* * *

Here's what I thought about after the halfway point (when I thought about anything): If I run the final X number of kilometers at a five-minute pace, I'll still beat my PR—and every kilometer under five minutes means more time under my PR. This was wily thinking, a deft combination of optimism and pessimism: optimism in that it allowed for slowing but not blowing up (I just didn't think that was going to happen); pessimism in that it was mostly about avoiding disaster, instead of reaching beyond my grasp.

I kept up with the 4:30s through about 30k. Around there, the running, for the first time, began to feel like work. I wasn't suffering, but my legs began to gain some weight; it took more concentration, more effort to keep things humming along. And, in fact, I began to slow. Below are my splits for each 5k segment of the race, plus the final 2.2k (they couldn't make the marathon a nice, even 40k?). I'm quite proud of the consistency of the splits, but you can see that they do begin to fall off a bit:

5k: 22:36 (4:31/k)
10k: 22:37 (4:32/k)
15k: 22:03 (4:24/k)
20k: 22:18 (4:28/k)
25k: 22:32 (4:30/k)
30k: 22:45 (4:33/k)
35k: 22:48 (4:43/k)
40k: 22:52 (4:34/k)
End: 9:21 (4:15/k)

But I didn't panic. This was still good. Remember, ever kilometer under five minutes was now taking me even further under my PR. So I stayed cool, worked a little harder, and got closer to the end.

* * *

Late in the race, I never did any hard math on getting sub-3:10. I don't even remember when it occurred to me that I might have a shot. In fact, it may not have. I recall thinking it took a long time to get from 37k to 39k; I'd become confused somehow and thought the 37k sign was going to be 38k. When it wasn't, I felt like I was being asked to do an extra kilometer. I sagged ever so slightly, the only time all day. Finally, though, we made the turn off the Leipziger Strasse—there was the 40k aid station!—and were heading north, soon to meet Unter den Linden for the climatic straight through the Brandenburger Tor.

Forty kilometers. Shit, I said to myself: this thing is nearly over. There's no falling apart to fear now; there's no time to fall apart, not enough distance to go. There's no reason not to go hard. That's really what the final 2.2k was about. I wasn't chasing 3:10. No, I went hard because I'd trained my ass off for this race, thought about it endlessly, been knocked for a glorious, giddy loop by its grandeur and utter coolness, and now I had fuel in the tank and nothing to lose.

There was a patch of cobblestone along that final stretch that I didn't like, but I got through it. For a good while down along the way it was hard to tell where the damn finish line was, what with the Morgenpost banner and the Gate and then it was beyond there somewhere, somewhere. So I just kept going, running the final 2.2 at a 4:15/k pace, which is 6:50/mile, which is faster than half-marathon race pace for me and may not impress you or Geb but makes me feel really, really good. I didn't know that's what it would take to get 3:10, but it did, and I did it.

My time of 3:09:54 placed me 1,992nd out of 35,031 finishers, and 316st out of 4,992 finishers in the men 45-49 age group.

* * *

What's next? Well, being 40+ and sneaking in under 3:10 gets me into New York, and now that I've got check marks next to Boston and Berlin, I'm thinking I'd like to do the five marathon majors (London and Chicago are the other two). There'll be more races along the way, mostly running, probably some shorter-distance triathlons, too. But there will also be a lot of swim training, a hell of a lot of swim training. You see, my buddy Steve, well, the deal was that if he ran the marathon under five hours, I'd join him in attempting to swim the Strait of Gibraltar. Kooky, eh?

Berlin Is Done

2009-09-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

What a city, what a race. There's much to say about the Berlin Marathon, but no time (or energy!) to do it justice now. I'll just note that on a very warm day I nailed my nutrition and hydration, got in a good groove and the kilometers seemed to sail by, well, not effortlessly, but in good order.

3:09:54

That's a PR by 8 minutes and 58 seconds.

And check this out: I ran nearly even splits on the front and back half of the race!

1st half: 1:34:24
2nd half: 1:35:30

More in a couple of days. Now, a Budweiser awaits (the real one, imported from Czech Republic).

My results are here.

Marathon Eve

2009-09-19T05:36:00.000-07:00

We walked around the neighborhood a bit, picking up some bread and cheese and a few other items at the Saturday Friedrichshain market, and hit a little T-shirt and tchotchkes joints to load up for folks back home. Now just hanging out and waiting. Let's get this race going! That's my attitude. It's going to be sunny and on the warm side, but with a 9 a.m. start I should be done before the temperature nudges too far into the 70s. Still don't know what the drink is they'll be offering at the aid stations. I'm going to carry two gels, even though I hate carrying anything in a race. I need to make sure I get some calories in me during the race. Here's one thing I'm incredibly excited about: running the streets of Berlin. It's an amazing city and the marathon will take me through, like, a dozen neighborhoods. We'll start near where Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down that wall, travel down Karl-Marx-Allee and pass the spot where Kennedy declared himself a Berliner, or a jelly donut, or something. Anyway, I'll run it hard and it will, I'm sure, be an experience I'll never forget.

I Like This

2009-09-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

Open the graphic in another window and you'll see that the Berlin Marathon richly deserves its reputation as flat. The one sustained climb is from the 12.2 mile mark to 16.9 miles—and that's from 121 feet elevation to 171 feet, an elevation gain of 50 feet over 4.7 miles. There may be heartbreak in Berlin, but it won't be a hill.

Just a Picture

2009-09-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

Crossing the Broadway Bridge at Run Portland Run, Sept. 6, 2009

10K Fun

2009-09-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

There was no good training reason to be getting up stupid-early this morning for a 10K. With Berlin two weeks away shouldn’t I be, I don’t know, not racing? But racing is what makes all this fun, so there I was, asking myself, “Already?” when the radio came on at 5:15, Liane Hansen talking to union guy Richard Trumka.

Run Portland Run was set for 7; I needed to be on Max at 6:09 for the ride downtown; thus, my out-the-door goal was 6. Coffee, some white rice I'd cooked the night before (sweetened with a little maple syrup), a couple of visits to the bathroom, a last check through my stuff and off I went, into the dark, into the rain and wind.

* * *

The skies were only spitting as I waited for the train but by the time I got off, a block from the race start/finish, it was a steady shower. First year for this race so the crowd was not huge, maybe 500 people divided among half marathon, 10k and 5k. (Turned out there were 456 finishers: 240 HM, 123 10K and 93 5K.) Most everyone was huddled under tents. I huddled, too, then when the rain let up a little decided I'd better warm up. It was about 25 ‘til 7. I took off my extra clothes and checked them and donned the trash bag that I had punched holes in the night before and brought along just in case.

I ran up closed-off Naito Parkway along the Willamette River. Under the Morrison Bridge on-ramp there was a good 25 yards under cover, perfect for some back-and-forth surges and other undefined loosening activities. Most excellent. Decently warmed up I made my way back to the start/finish area about 6:50, not sure exactly when the 10K would launch. It was really raining now. While I was making the second of what would be four, I think, visits to the toilet in the 45 minutes before the race they said the half marathon would go at 7 and the 10K 10 minutes later. So by 7 I was back under the tents with the 10K and 5K runners while the half marathon people gathered at the start, on the street. It pretty much stopped raining then, which was a good thing for the half marathoners, as the start was delayed 10 minutes "so the volunteers could get into place." I warmed up a little more, the half marathon people took off, we 10K types congregated, it was showering again, and then we were off.

Of course there were slow people who had placed themselves at the very front. Why, my fine running compatriots, why? I quickly made my way past those folks as two guys went way out front, followed several yards back by a group of three or four people, then a lone woman, then me. Nothing was hurting, legs felt fresh. The only thing bothering me was that my socks were soaked and I was running squishy. It made me feel awkward, almost slow, but I grew accustomed to it. Oh, I was wearing my Asics racing shoes. They provide a lot less cushion than the Gel-Cumulus but feel light and fast. I'll probably wear them for Berlin.

* * *

It was just some good comfortable hard running over the first flat, straight mile. When I'd looked at my Garmin about a half-mile into the race it said I was running a pace around 6:11, and I hit the Mile 1 sign at 6:13. My Garmin and the official signs were precisely aligned, too (at that point and at every mile marker, it turned out). We then made a small loop back around to begin heading onto the Broadway Bridge to cross the Willamette. A little climb into the strong, spitting wind. I realized then that most of the first mile, northbound, was run with a big southerly breeze at our backs and I started to worry about the wind we'd face on the return portion of this out-and-back. Of course, it's a strange sort of thing to worry about something like that in a race. It pops into your head and really doesn't stay for long, but it makes an impression; you sort of feel like it's ready to come back into full consciousness at any moment.

Onward over the bridge. I'd passed a bunch of laggard half marathoners and the 10K chick who had been in front of me, a shapely, somewhat short girl in black tights with a very compact, consistent stride. She then passed me as we hit the most substantial incline on the bridge and I was going to say something to her, something small and not too clever but not stupid about the bridge, or the wind, or the rain, but she was doing the iPod thing so I didn't. I passed her once more on the decline and that was that, never saw her again.

The Mile 2 marker seemed to come quickly, but it was a 6:46 split (putting me at 12:59 overall). A litle slow but the bridge climb and some other ups and downs ... that's OK, still good, I thought. I just kept cruising, feeling like I maybe could have been pushing just a little more but thinking—there it was, coming back to mind—about the return-direction wind and how I'd want to make sure I was strong for that. But it turned out I ran a solid third mile, 6:35 (19:33 overall), and just after rounding the turnaround I looked at my Garmin and saw 20:19. Well, I won't break 40 minutes, I thought, but maybe if I stay strong I can beat 41.

One thing that was really weird at this point was that I was running alone. There were some slow folks and walkers still coming from the other direction, but the two really fast 10K runners were way out in front, out of sight, and the other small group (two or three) of 10K runners in front of me was barely in view. I took a brief moment to consider the scenery as I passed the Mile 4 marker (6:36; 26:09 overall): industrial, lots of on-ramps and off-ramps to the nearby I-5 and 405 and the gigantic Fremont Bridge and smaller Broadway.

* * *

The Broadway was the one we came over and the one we'd go back over. It was a gentler climb up this eastern side and a steeper decline back down onto the west side of the river, which I tried to take advantage of with some longer and faster striding.

Not soon after coming off the bridge came the Mile 5 marker: 6:35 (32:43 overall), which seemed to be my midrace sweetspot, with miles 3, 4 and 5 in 6:35, 6:36 and 6:35.

OK, only 1.2 to go. I told myself: Push a bit. I wish there had been someone to chase, or someone bearing down on me. Still, I was able to crank up the effort a little. I didn't take it to the absolute red line, but brought it close, I think. It felt good. The effort was stressing the whole system, that whole crazy mysterious human machine, but everything was holding together.

We were going mostly into the wind, which gusted at times and made the barely spritzing rain seem more intense, but there was a stretch between some buildings during the sixth mile where the wind got turned around. Ah, yes, I said: I remember going into the wind on this short stretch as we headed out. But that didn't last long and the course emerged back onto Naito Parkway along the river fully exposed to the southerly gale. Pushing, I hit Mile 6 with a 6:18 split and a total time of 39:01. I was wishing the course wasn't so accurately marked and that the finish might come in one-tenth rather than two and I'd slip in under 40 minutes. No such luck. I gave it almost everything I had in that final straight. Almost, I say, since to give it all would mean, I don't know, that I'd be dead right now, or hospitalized, or at least resting comfortably on the couch with a little piece of tape covering the spot where the post-race IV had piped magic stuff into my veins.

There were timing mats in front of the start/finish archway itself, and behind it. I stopped my clock at that archway, looked down at the time, felt a nice wave of satisfaction, then, quite spent just then, walked carefully to the three volunteers sitting and clipping timing chips off finished racers. By the time I walked another 20 or 30 yards to the staging area to pick up my clothes bag I felt pretty well recovered. That surprised me, how quickly I stopped breathing hard. I grabbed a half of a bagel and a cup of water and strolled the block to the Max station. The train arrived a few minutes later and once on, I changed out of my wet shirt into a dry one, then relaxed and reviewed my splits on the Garmin during the 15 minute ride to the NE 60th Ave Station.

* * *

My official time was 40:17, a second faster than what I had myself at on the Garmin, which measured the course to be 6.22 miles. That’s a PR by 44 seconds, a nice drop of seven seconds per mile. What I liked even better—and I didn’t realize this until just now—was that I actually ran the second half of the race (19:59) faster than the first (20:18 I'm calling it, since I looked down at the time just after the turnaround). And to think: My first sub-20 5K was in August 2008—and now I ran the second half of a 10K under 20. That tells me my fitness is very much improved.

So whether it helped or hurt for Berlin—and given that I feel great right now, I can't see how it hurt—I had a blast running a good 10K course pretty damn hard. Even in the rain. I'd really like to point to one of these 10Ks, make it a focus race, train specifically for it physically and get in a mindset to try to kill it. If I did that, I have no doubt I'd get under 40 minutes.

Want data?
Official results.
My Garmin.

Oaktown Runs

2009-09-04T11:34:00.000-07:00

Oakland will put on a marathon next spring, which is very cool. A quick look at the rudimentary map revealed this week suggests it will be a course with some challenges, which got me thinking about the marketing considerations that go into drawing up a city marathon route. Obviously, organizers want to show off their community's best assets and the hills are certainly a large and beautiful part of Oakland. So it makes perfect sense that the course feature some significant ups and downs. At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that this will make the race less attractive to those runners (and there are many) in search of "flat and fast" for PR/PB and BQ purposes. The California International Marathon in Sacramento each December, for instance, has always leaned heavily on its runner-friendly elevation profile in promoting itself. And though I can't say definitively that it was a consideration when the Portland course was drawn up, I notice that my home-town race is pretty darn flat, despite the city's bumpy topography.

(And speaking of marketing, it would sure be nice if the Oakland Marathon made its map clickable to enlarge and put it on MapMyRun, GoogleEarth, etc. I mean, how hard could that be?)

UPDATE: Working with that lousy map, I drew the Oakland course on MapMyRun. It isn't perfect, as the fact that I was at 25.8 miles when I got to the apparent finish line attests. But it's very, very close, and captures the elevation profile damn well. Here's that profile (click to enlarge):

As you can see, that's a hefty bit of climbing in the first eight miles, from about 50 feet elevation at the start to some 600 feet around Mile 8. Especially noteworthy is the half-mile or so stretch just after Mile 5, where you climb maybe a couple hundred feet. Then comes the quad busting descent from Miles 9-13. Oh, yeah: Gonna be some fried quads on the second half of this marathon. All that said, the course looks like a blast. I bet I do it!

Lost: One Runner's Mojo

2009-09-03T22:08:00.001-07:00

After Tuesday's awful 14, I walked a bit and then jogged very slowly for three miles on Wednesday. Today I headed out with very modest ambitions, intending to do 10 miles in 90 minutes or thereabouts. It turned out to be 10 in 1:25, and it was pretty bad. Leaden legs, no energy ... and I was totaled afterward. Showered, fell asleep, woke with a start, barely in time to go get The Lad from his OMSI class. Lydiard warns about too much intensity, especially without a massive base. Should have read Lydiard a long time ago. Shoulda.

Strange thing, though: As afternoon turned to evening, the fog in my head began to burn off. I noticed, heading down to the basement to fetch some laundry, that my legs didn't feel quite so whipped. Mojo returning? We'll see. Tomorrow another very light effort, a slow jog. Saturday, a walk to the farmers' market. Sunday, a 10K.

Geb Tweets

2009-09-02T10:50:00.000-07:00

Obviously his recent embrace of Twitter is in response to this blog and the rising profile of his hated rival.

Embrace the Taper

2009-09-01T22:19:00.000-07:00

A guy on Slowtwitch referenced the workout function on his Garmin 305 the other day. This got stuck somewhere in my brain and today, just before I took off on what was intended to be my last long hard run before Berlin, it resurfaced. In four years of owning a GPS I never had tried the workout function—why not test it out on a key run less than three weeks before the race you've been pointing to for months? Surely nothing bad could come of that. (Obviously I was channeling Homer Simpson.)

I entered "15 miles" for the distance and "7:30" for the pace. And off I went.

With no warm-up at all.

Having entered this workout into the Garmin, I had no choice—one does not defy the Garmin—but to adhere to it. Right from the start. So from my first step—did I mention there was no warm-up?—I was revving up to that 7:30 pace. Now, 7:30 pace is not super-crazy-stupid fast in my book. Hell, I just ran a one-hour time trail at 6:41 a few days ago.

But if there's one thing I've learned while training for Berlin—and isn't this ironic—it's the value of warming up. Why, just yesterday while snacking after my bike ride I was patting myself on the back for being such a good warmer-upper. "Kudos to you, Pete, for your most excellent training-run preparations!" I said, cracking open a pistachio and popping it into my mouth (this is foreshadowing; yes, indeed, more on those pistachios later!).

Today, no preparations! Why? Don't know. Off I went.

I hit it hard, going from cold to one mile in 7:22. Didn't feel great but figured I'd settle in. Next mile: Another 7:22. Felt tight. Felt like I was working way too hard.

Well, shit, I'm not going to detail the whole grisly, grim, gruesome (what is it about these words starting with gr?) death march. It was a bad run. I didn't warm up, went out way too fast (especially given that I hadn't warmed up) and every step of the way the run felt like it was unraveling, becoming less and less tenable, unsustainable. Not only did I fall off the prescribed pace—forgive me, Garmin—I didn't even do the full 15.

After zigging and looping and zagging around the wider neighborhood—going up and down a lot of small, brutal hills, apparently in some fit of masochism—I was near my house for the final two miles. And they became a final one mile. I hit 14, a block from home, and said enough. Enough of this.

Fourteen miles at 7:36. I asked myself, walking that last block home: "Could this happen at Berlin? Could I completely suck?" It could; you could. It's always possible. Usually, though, the Race Day effort is good. There's a warm-up.

Later, too, this occurred to me: A hard 20-miler 10 days ago. Yasso 800s under three minutes a couple days after that. And the aforementioned one-hour TT on top of that. A little heavy on the intensity of late? I'd say so. My new mantra: Embrace the taper.

And lastly, as promised, a word on pistachios: The 1 lb. bag at Trader's Joes, the "50% Less Salt" one? Don't eat the whole thing in 24 hours. Just don't.

There's Always Next Year

2009-08-30T22:31:00.000-07:00

It won't make a bit of difference for Berlin, but I'm absorbing the Arthur Lydiard principles these days, courtesy Keith Livingstone's Healthy Intelligent Training. What I'm learning makes me want to rewind the clock to late-June 2008 when I decided to re-up for Ironman Coeur d'Alene. If only I'd spent the year leading up to IMCDA '09 building a huge aerobic running foundation instead of dicking around in swimming pools and in that blasted, neck-pain inducing aero position! Oh, well. The year after Berlin, I guess I can run my ass off then, Lydiard style, and get ready for … something.

Meanwhile, in the week just ended—the fourth-to-last week before the race—I took it really easy, except for that one-hour flight of fancy on Wednesday. This is my custom. Instead of a steady three-week taper, I like to do an easy fourth-to-last week to let the training sink in, then have a somewhat bigger week in order not to lose my edge, then taper full-on the final two weeks before the race.

Monday… 7.1 flat terrain, easy
Tuesday… 1 hour bike trainer
Wednesday… 12.3 (1-hour TT, 8.97 miles)
Thursday… 8.3 flat terrain, easy
Friday… 7.6 hills, easy
Saturday… 1 hour bike trainer
Sunday… 7 easy w/ hard last mile (5:50)
Total: 42.2 miles
Last four weeks: 208.3 miles

In Recovery

2009-08-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

The name “recovery run” is misleading. It implies the run aids in repairing physical damage. As the kids say, I call bullshit on that. Recovery runs don’t clear lactic acid, nor do they help mend muscle tissue. Massage will do that. Maybe a swim. Maybe. But if you’re beat up from an intense run, more running is not the ticket to recovery.

A recovery run will, however, enhance fitness, according to Matt Fitzgerald. And in a very clever way:

[R]esearch has shown that when athletes begin a workout with energy-depleted muscle fibers and lingering muscle damage from previous training, the brain alters the muscle recruitment patterns used to produce movement. Essentially, the brain tries to avoid using the worn-out muscle fibers and instead involves fresher muscle fibers that are less worn out precisely because they are less preferred under normal conditions.

When your brain is forced out of its normal muscle recruitment patterns in this manner, it finds neuromuscular "shortcuts" that enable you to run more efficiently (using less energy at any given speed) in the future. [This] "pre-fatigued" running is sort of like a flash flood that forces you to alter your normal morning commute route. The detour seems a setback at first, but in searching for an alternative way to reach the office, you might find a faster way—or at least a way that's faster under conditions that negatively affect your normal route.

With FIRST there are no recovery runs, and I missed them—not for the physiological benefits (though when I did begin to add them back into the program I could tell they were making me fitter). No, what I missed about recovery runs was what they are not: not driven, not focused, not fast.

Yes, I love driven and focused and fast—but not all the time! Every five or six runs, I want to stumble out the door, study the cloud formations, talk to the neighbor’s cat, pull a weed from our stupid lawn and then slowly take off, doing nothing more mindful than picking my feet up and putting them down at a rate faster than a walk.

Today I wore the Garmin on my recovery run but didn’t look at it until I got home. Turned out an hour and 10 minutes had passed and I’d traveled 8.3 miles. What’s that, just a little under 8:30 pace? Whatever. Meanwhile, during this run I came up with a great idea for some new writing to do, didn’t curse at any drivers, by smiling induced a passing pedestrian to respond to my “hello” and marveled that the shorts worn by the young soccer players on the pitch in the middle of the Grant track are even bigger and baggier than ever. I thought to myself while doing a couple of laps: wear them on a backpacking trip and you don’t have to carry a tent.

But I digress (which is what happens on a recovery run).

* *

What I was recovering from: A tempo run. I think. Reading No Meat the other day I remembered that I had never done the longest of the prescribed FIRST tempo runs, a 10-miler at 7:15/mile. Since I was due for a tempo run, I thought I’d do that. But then I started thinking and wondered how a run at 7:15 is a tempo run for me.

Stay with me here: The definition pretty much everyone gives for a tempo run is "at or just a little faster than lactate threshold pace." OK. And lactate threshold pace is defined as that pace you can steadily maintain for one hour. That's generally said to be somewhere between your 10K and half-marathon race pace—or, better yet, around your 15K race pace (a distance rarely done, though I have in fact raced it). My 15K pace—from a race in October 2007, I'm surely faster now—was 6:58. So 7:15? I see why FIRST tells me to do a five-mile tempo run at 6:49. That's in the LT-pace ballpark. But just because the run is longer why would you do it slower? You’d still want to do it near LT, right? Or are they making it slower so you don’t kill yourself for your next workout?

Anyway, after pondering all this I got it in my head to run pretty much as hard as I could (sustainably) for an hour. Seemed to me that met the very definition of a tempo run.

I went out to the bike path along the Columbia River. It was a beautiful morning, heading into the 80s after a chilly, 51-degree dawn; beginning to feel just a little bit like fall here. Warmed up with a mile of jogging and two or three short sprints mixed. Then I was off.

Lord, I went out way too fast! My first half mile was in 3:02. Dialed it down slightly, but I think the damage was done. Splits:

1 - 6:11
2 - 6:29
3 - 6:34
4 - 6:48
5 - 6:49
6 - 6:54
7 - 6:57
8 - 6:49
9 - 6:25 (actual distance 0.97 miles; 6:37/mile pace)
Total: 8.97 miles in 1:00:00; average pace: 6:41

I didn't realize I was that close to nine miles in the hour. If I had, I'd have pushed and gotten it, though, I gotta say, I was already working hard.

It was nice to see that I could pull myself together over the last nearly two miles and turn the pace trend away from 7:00/mile.

One thing that would be very interesting would be to try this workout aiming to nail every mile at, say, 6:35. Could I maintain that for an hour? I bet I could—which would verify the efficacy of steady-pace running.

Anyway, it was fun. Hard. Which I why I did a recovery run the next day.

Sunday at the Track

2009-08-23T22:31:00.000-07:00

Yasso 800s. My splits:

2:59.6
2:49.5
2:56.2
2:57.1
2:56.4
2:56.5
2:55.7
2:54.9
2:56.4
2:56.8
[3-minute 400-meter jog interval between each 800)

What's it all mean?

Third 20 in the Berlin Lead-Up

2009-08-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

I was on the road at 8:30 a.m., with temps in the mid-60s and a thick marine layer overhead. (It's a different sort of marine layer than you get in Northern California, chunky instead of smooth; splotchy, not so monochrome. Also, it's not so regular. Growing up in San Jose and living later in Berkeley, San Francisco and Napa, from spring until fall there would be never-ending stretches of "low clouds and fog along the coast, extending inland nights and mornings," as the forecasters put it. Here in Portland, you get the stuff for a day or two, or maybe four or five, but then it's gone for a month or six weeks or maybe the entire season. It happens, but it's not like back home, where sometimes anything other than the morning gray coming in and then burning off begins to feel unnatural, as though the Bay has forgotten to breathe.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, my run. So no sun to start and it never came out (still hasn't, quite, and it's nearly 3 in the afternoon). Lovely running weather. The plan called for a pace of 7:30/mile. I wanted to do that for the first 15 miles, then try to push it a little harder on the final five. And it worked out just like that, with the last five miles coming in around 36:15, or 7:15/mile. Total was 20 in 2:28:20 (7:25/mile).

Congratulations to me are in order because I vowed to do a better job with hydration and nutrition during this run and I did. On my front porch I left a 24 oz. cycling bottle of ice-cold Perpetuem; a 12-ounce bottle of ice water; and a Mojo Dipped bar. I stopped by the house at six, 12 and 18 miles. Before the run was over I had consumed probably around 24 oz. of fluid and 350 calories. OK, I can do better—maybe 36 oz. and 500 calories. But for me, not bad. And maybe even that minimal sustenance helped keep me strong late in the run?

Onward to some key learnings: The tempo runs have clearly improved my lactate threshold. I was aerobic the whole way, pretty much just cruising. Even at the harder pace over the last five miles I was still in a comfortable zone. Also, the calves are much, much better. A little tight here and there—the left one (huh?) at a few points, the perennially troubled right at a few other points, never both at once—but all very minor, not even a distraction. Massage and stretching rule! (And compression socks after workouts might not hurt, either.) Oh, and the Achilles that was bothering me through much of my Ironman training and even afterward? A thing of the past.

The only tough aspect to the run—beyond the fact that running 20 hard is always demanding—was the general feeling of my body being beat up. My hips and back were aching and it felt as though my leg muscles were working extra hard to compensate for those stresses. This might be a product of running more on hard surfaces lately. Even wearing the Gel-Cumulus, my well-traveled, much-abused, 168-pound and 46.7-year-old self takes a pounding on the streets. Of course, what one hopes is that with the taper—beginning a little over a week from today—a lot of that bone, joint and muscles weariness will fade away and on race day I will toe the line fresh and frisky.

The big question to begin thinking hard about: What pace, what pace, what pace for the race? Next post.

Four Days Running

2009-08-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

Sorry, FIRST. I know I'm only supposed to do three runs a week, but as I explained yesterday, I'm hungry to run more frequently and my body is feeling good, so why not? Today: 15.01 in 1:54:55.

With the temperature headed well above 90F today in Portland, I was out the door around 8 a.m., when it was still < 70. Even at that I wanted to avoid the sun, so jogged 1.5 miles over to Laurelhurst Park. At .83 miles, the loop there is a little repetitive for longer runs, but in the morning the big-tree canopy allows for an almost completely shaded run. That's what I wanted. I clicked off lap after lap in 6:21 (7:50/mile) until I got to 13 miles. Then I cranked up the effort, covering the final two miles of the run in 13:30. That's a Pfitzinger thing, working toward (or, in my case, getting under) marathon pace for the last few miles of your long run. I felt strong, though of course there was some hurt involved, especially since I'd drunk and eaten nothing for the entire run. Two hours is about as long as I can go without replacing some of the lost fluid and energy.

Pre-run weight: 169 lbs.
Post-run weight: 162.4 lbs.

I ate and drank a lot immediately after getting home and felt well-recovered within 90 minutes.

The really good news? Very little calf trouble on this run. The extensive massage and stretching I'm doing is proving to be very beneficial. Woo-hoo!

Adaptations

2009-08-17T17:02:00.000-07:00

“The biggest mistake is to stick to a formula, or a schedule,” says the running coach Brad Hudson. These have been comforting words over the past few weeks. It’s a little scary not to follow the FIRST dictates day by day. There’s a sense that by letting go, anything might happen—including the whole enterprise falling apart. But things have hung together well, I think, even as I go my own way more and more. Mostly I’ve remained confident that I understand (1) how FIRST is trying to make me faster and (2) that my own input can only improve the formula.

Take this past Thursday: I had missed the two previous tempo runs because of races, and was trying to decide between getting back into the program with the 10-miler at 7:15 from the previous week, or the subsequent five-miler at 6:49. The long run felt a little slow and the short one too much like the races I'd just done, so I kind of split the difference, doing seven miles at 7:00/mile. My race log notes: “Marine Drive w/ Niko riding alongside. Nice cloudy day. Wore Gel-Cumulus. Hard run. Still recovering from Sunday’s tough 20. But a solid workout. Five would have been too short, 10 too long.”

Saturday called for a track workout: 1000m @ 3:37, 2000m @ 7:36 and 1000m at 3:37, with 400m rest intervals. As always, I warmed up by jogging the 2.2 miles to the track. My right calf was really tight and this worried me. But while you’d think hard running would exacerbate an injury—I would think that—it hasn’t worked out that way. Again, the track workout loosened up the calf, and I did the first 1000 in 3:31, the 2000 in 7:28 and the final 1000 in 3:37. These track workouts are always challenging, but I seem to be able to swallow a thick dose of short-term pain easier than a thin dose spread out over three-plus hours.

So that was two hard workouts in three days but the weird thing was, I didn’t feel like resting on Sunday, or doing an hour on the trainer. I felt like running easy. As it happened, Southeast Portland was host to the last of the summer’s Sunday Parkways, in which a circuit running through several parks is closed off to traffic, allowing bikers, runners and all manner of people movers and people moving to own the streets. Niko and I chugged along at a comfy 9:00/mile pace, covering 8.5 miles and rather enjoying the Portland-style parade. I felt refreshed and invigorated afterward—the very definition of a recovery run. And the run made me hungry to run more. So I did, today. I went for 10 miles, mostly at 7:50/mile, but in the middle of the run, for three miles I alternated moderately hard 400s (6:45/mile pace) with easier 400s (8:00). This was a total freelance effort, no planning beforehand, just winging it and going with the flow. It was good.

What’s next? My gut tells me that the half-dozen tempo runs and half-dozen track workouts I’ve done with FIRST have largely done their job. I’m not saying I’m going to abandon those runs entirely. I understand their value, and I’ll turn to them again, if less often than the schedule tells me to. But my highest priority in the next two weeks is to get in two great long, hard runs, per FIRST. To do that, I’ll need to protect myself from damaging workouts and have great recoveries. Weirdly, I think that means frequent mid-distance, mid-effort runs.

Recent Goings-On

2009-08-10T20:00:00.000-07:00

Chugging along on the training, but throwing in some fun stuff along the way...

Last Wednesday, did a 10K on the track as part of the Oregon Road Runners Club "Dual Duel" meet: 41:03, just two seconds off my PR.
5K at the Crawfish Crawl in Tualatin on Saturday: A new PR of 19:19.4! Miles were 6:08, 6:17, 6:21 and then :33 for the final tenth or so. Second in the M45-49 age group out of 25, 27/413 overall.
Great 20-mile workout yesterday. Despite some challenging conditions (nearly 80 with high humidity), I covered 20.07 miles in 2:29, a 7:27 pace. Beginning to think it's actually possible to run Berlin in 7:20/mile or faster. (Of course, just because it's possible doesn't mean it will happen. Still got to do it on Race Day.)
Right calf fine for the shorter stuff, but begins to tighten up around 12 miles. Trigger Point Performance massage seems to help a ton, so I'll keep doing that and hope that my three-week taper leaves it in good shape for the race.

Getting to Where I Want to Go

2009-07-29T22:49:00.000-07:00

A race on Sunday, ungodly heat in Portland all week and now a calf strain—it's all got me off the FIRST track, but I'm not worried. It’s a plan written on paper by a bunch of guys who never met me and who don’t know how I feel when I climb out of bed in the morning. FIRST is my map, but I take a few detours—that's detours, not shortcuts—along the way.

* * *

The race was Wharf to Wharf, a 6-mile run from Santa Cruz to Capitola. I would never have thought to do this race—it’s 750 miles from home—but my Berliner friend Steve was on a trip to California and his family makes something of a tradition out of running the race, so I flew down to San Jose, ate Vietnamese while enduring karaoke with Steve in downtown San Jose, got in an easy 6-miler on the Coyote Creek Trail in south San Jose, and spent a couple nights at the ol' boyhood home with my parents. And then on Sunday, the race.

Santa Cruz is small and Capitola smaller, so 15,000 registered participants and maybe half that many bandits and folks just wandering around the course made for a crowded, tumultuous run. I lined up halfway between the 6 and 7-minute pace signs, which proved to be irrelevant; the runners seemed to have randomly seeded themselves and it wasn’t until after the two-mile mark that I began to move mostly unencumbered. Even at that there were the occasional slow-moving, wayward and zigzagging obstacles to negotiate, including what we came to term “walker walls,” anywhere from three to a half dozen or more people (almost always women) walking shoulder to shoulder, merrily and mindlessly blocking a good part of the road. Every race has its clueless contingent, but Wharf to Wharf excels in this category. Never seen anything like it in Oregon. Then again, up here people are generally pretty knowledgeable and aware (OK, a little obnoxious, too) when it comes to running.

No chip in this race, and I forgot the Garmin at home. Didn’t even mark my splits on my Timex. Data: sparse. But I do know I was through the first two crowded miles in around 15 minutes; made a clear mental note of being precisely at 28 when I hit the the four-mile mark; and my time was 40:35 from line to line. So we can agree I ran a 6:46 pace overall, with the final four miles at 6:24 and the final two at 6:18. I was pleased with all that, so pleased that I surprised Steve by being smiley afterward when I had every right to be miffed, as he was, at the unwillingness of so many race participants to seed themselves properly and remain aware of how their pace and path might impact others.

* * *

Arrived back in Portland around 10 p.m. Sunday to a locked-down 85-degrees-inside house and a forecast of extreme heat for the next several days. Did some light cycling Monday to loosen up a little race soreness. As I pondered rejoining FIRST yesterday, I knew I didn’t want to do track work, having just run very hard in Santa Cruz. I figured that instead I'd take on the week’s long run, a 20-miler at 7:45 pace.

That’s a tough run any day and at any temperature, but by the time I dropped Niko off at OMSI camp and got home and ready to run, it was after 10 a.m. and toasty. As in 85 degrees and climbing rapidly, with unusually high humidity lending an oppressive quality to the air. I’m stupid but not that stupid. I ditched the 20 and decided to run 14 at 8:30/mile pace followed by 10 today. My thought was that 14+10 might not be the quality workout that FIRST had in store for me, but it was enough volume to keep me from falling behind.

The 14er was brutal. I sweat nearly a gallon, literally, with my weight dropping around seven pounds in the hour and 58 minutes I was out there. Weird and telling how 14 @ 8:25—that’s what it ended up being—could be so much more challenging than the 18 @ 7:40 that I did the week before.

It took me all day to recover from the run. I ate the appropriate foods directly afterward, carefully rehydrated and took a long, cold shower. I even rested for 45 minutes, dozing a bit. But still there were points in the day when, alternately, great fatigue, hunger or thirst—or some combination thereof—would roll over me.

So there was a little trepidation coming into today's run, made worse by the fact that I got going later. The temperature was well into the 90s and closing in on 100 when I hit the road. See, I told you I was stupid.

After four miles on the grass at Normandale I felt a sharp pain squarely in the middle of right calf. Actually, to be honest, I had felt the slightest of twinges there late in the Wharf to Wharf race, though on yesterday's 14-mile run there was no pain at all. I thought it might loosen up if I just kept running, but it only got worse, so I cut short the run at 6 miles. Still, on PPH (pints per hour), today turned out to be even more of a sweatfest than yesterday; my weight dropped 4 lbs. during the 45-minute run.

* * *

Around the Web you can find a few semi-authoritative-sounding articles connecting dehydration and calf strains, but none of them comes with citations, so who knows if there's a link there? Right now, late in the evening after some icing and Trigger Point massage, it feels the way a cramp does several hours after it calms down: kind of sore. When I put pressure against the ball of my foot and try to point the toes forward there's no real pain the calf, a good sign. And I can walk and even go up and down stairs without any trouble. Nonetheless, I will approach this injury carefully. With seven and a half weeks to go before Geb and I tangle, there's time to rest and recuperate and still get in several good weeks of training before the taper begins. So if that's what I have to do, I will. It'll suck, for sure—I really want to get back to my track, tempo and long runs! But as I said earlier, if I need to make a little detour—particularly to avoid a fiery crash—well, I'm OK with that.

@ 7:45/mi

2009-07-22T22:46:00.000-07:00

The aches I'm feeling now when I get up off the couch (a man's got to eat and use the facilities from time to time) tell me I did a long run this afternoon. They still take a toll, especially when run hard; that much hasn't changed. But along the way during today's 18-miler I noticed that the run was not nearly the mental challenge that such runs used to be for me. In the old days, way back before FIRST, even after I'd done a couple of 50-mile races, an 18-miler would include several points where I'd wonder when this damn run was going to end, or would drift off into thoughts about life, work or love, or would wonder if I was indeed going to finish the thing.

Today was done in a flash. I was absorbed the entire time in running my pace: 7:45. (I didn't nail every mile, as you can see below, but on a twisting and turning 2-mile dirt trail with a fair number of walkers and joggers and some short hills and drops here and there to negotiate, did come pretty close.) The thing I'm not sure about is this: Was I able to remain single-mindedly focused on my pace because my fitness is such that running 18 miles at 7:45 in the middle of a busy training week just isn't the nearly overwhelming challenge it once was? Or did my focus on pace help me ignore the challenge of the run? Eh, it's probably some combination of the two; isn't that usually the way it works? In any case, there was little drama on this run. I felt strong and intent. I wish I had worn my heart-rate monitor because I bet, but don't know for sure, that I never went over 150 bpm (82 percent of max). I never felt like I was breathing hard. Only once, briefly late on the 15th mile, when I grew a little tired of the patellofemoral pain that had kicked in around Mile 10, did I feel some muscle weariness, the quads yacking back at me as I pushed up a little incline. Didn't last long at all, though. The trail flattened and I motored along, vowing to nail Miles 16, 17 and 18 not only under the pace goal, but progressively faster. And I did.

1: 7:44
2: 7:30
3: 7:46
4: 7:43
5: 7:48
6: 7:32
7: 7:49
8: 7:33
9: 7:39
10: 7:40
11: 7:37
12: 7:33
13: 7:46
14: 7:40
15: 7:52
16: 7:39
17: 7:37
18: 7:25
Total: 2:18:01 (7:40/mile)

A few final notes: The long run usually comes on Friday but on Sunday I'm doing Wharf to Wharf, a 6-mile race in Santa Cruz, so I thought I'd knock off the LR today, and then do an easy, oh, 6 or 8 on Friday, and then go for it on Sunday. I had been thinking I'd treat the race as a tempo run but Pfitzinger wisely says that's unrealistic; if you're going to do a tempo run, just go out and do a tempo run. If you're going to race, race hard. And that's not a tempo run.... It was overcast and cool in the morning today but I didn't get out until almost noon, so by then the sun was shining. Thank goodness it wasn't too hot and much of the loop offers shade protection. Temps were in the low 70s, maybe 75 by the end. I had a tall cycling water bottle filled with Hammer gel mixed with water and ice that I sipped after running 6, 10 and 14 miles. I drank about a third of the water bottle. I don't even know how much those hold; 20 ounces? So I had about 8 ounces of water during the run and in that small amount was probably 100 calories worth of gel. Should have had more. Pounded the rest within 10 minutes of finishing, while also downing a Larabar.

Speed Thrills

2009-07-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

Niko came with me to the track today, riding his bike. After taking some pictures for a while, he decided he wanted to do a lap alongside me as I worked my way through 2 x (6 x 400) in 1:24 w/ 1:30 rest intervals and a 2:30 rest between sets. I was in lane one, Niko in lane two, on his bike. Around the first curve, he said, “Hey, you’re going 11 miles an hour,” a note of surprise clearly detectable in his voice. Heading into the homestretch he passed me shouting, “Going against the wind is tougher on a bike than when you’re running.” That was his way of saying he was having to work pretty hard to finish ahead of me.

I still had a few more 400s to do and Niko went along for the ride on these as well. On the last one, I cranked up the pace. Halfway through, Niko shouted, “Over 12 miles per hour!” I finished that 400 in 1:15. The workout done, we hung out in the shade having a drink of Nuun and splitting a Larabar. “I can’t believe how fast you were going,” Niko said. “And that was running, not on a bike! I didn’t even know you could run that fast.”

Sure it’s cool, as a 46-year-old dad, to impress your 9-year-old son with your ability to run “fast.” But what made me feel even better was that I had inspired in Niko a wonder at what we humans are capable of doing, at our physical potential—and the interesting thing about that was that it took speed to do it. Triathlons, marathons, ultras—Niko has always been great about listening to me yammer on about that stuff, but I could always tell he wasn’t feeling much of a connection. Dad ran 50 miles up and down Mount Hood one afternoon? Oh, uh-huh, pretty neat. That Dad could run fast, however, time and time again around the track, wow, that was cool. I think it’s cool, too. There are layers and layers of mystery that a long run or triathlon peels away, but there’s nothing as exciting as the primal act of going fast. That’s what I love about FIRST, I think: how it’s all about how fast you’re going. Obviously this is true on the track and on tempo Wednesday, but even on the long runs, which so many of us automatically think must be slow—it’s so driven into runners’ minds—you have to make an effort to push the pace, sometimes a lot, sometimes just a bit, but always there’s the push.

It’s great to feel this excitement about FIRST now, because a week into the program I wasn’t so sure. I honestly thought it might be too hard on my body. Yeah, I know, that doesn’t make sense. FIRST is sold as a way to do the marathon without beating yourself up. It's not just "Run Faster," it's "Run Less Run Faster." Uh-huh; run less but also run so hard your eyes fall out. I feel for the newbie who, meandering the aisles of his local Barnes & Noble—that very effort his most strenuous exercise since he struggled through a 5K six weeks earlier—sees on the back cover of the book that FIRST is a program that "makes running more accessible and limits overtraining and burnout." That might be true if you’re extremely conservative in assessing your fitness before taking on the program. Maybe then, the paces you are required to maintain in your weekly track repeats and tempos and long runs won't be punishing. My guess, however, is that most people do what I did—err on the side of excessive ambition, seduced by the idea of a PR or at least a time that won't embarrass them when they post it on Facebook. The cruel irony is that it’s the less experienced runner who is especially vulnerable to the pain FIRST dishes out. Me? The first week was a shock, but my foundation of several years of tons of running (and other stuff) clearly helped me hold it together, physically and just as importantly psychologically. And now I’m totally digging it. My legs have felt fresh for the last four run workouts, and the rides—I’m on the bike three days a week for at least 75 minutes, spinning fast and occasionally also spinning hard—feel great, like I truly am filling in the gaps that a three-day-a-week run program leaves.

Today's 400 splits:

1...1:19
2...1:21
3...1:20
4...1:21
5...1:21
6...1:22
Avg...1:20.67

1...1:24
2...1:22
3...1:22
4...1:22
5...1:23
6...1:15
Avg...1:21.25

Week 10—Long

2009-07-17T17:05:00.000-07:00

[13 @ 7:30]

Week 10—Tempo

2009-07-15T18:48:00.000-07:00

[1 easy, 6 mi @ 7:04, 1 easy]

Week 10—Track Repeats

2009-07-13T16:07:00.000-07:00

[6 x 800 in 2:25, w/ 1:30 RI]

Long Run, Trimmed

2009-07-10T17:01:00.000-07:00

I'll have more to say about long runs, the theories behind 'em and their role in the marathon-training scheme. But right now I'll just post the workout and a few words, because I need to eat and I need to rest; I feel very wiped out.

So I jumped into this 16-week training plan more than a month in, at Week 11 counting down toward the Berlin Marathon on September 20. I was relying on my fitness base from Ironman to carry me, but this first week of training soon revealed that to be overly ambitious, or hopeful. I discovered that Ironman fitness and fast marathon fitness, even fitness-in-progress, are two very different things, and that my body was not fully recovered from the 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of cycling and 26 miles, 385 yards of running that I did on June 21 (not too mention all the work that got me ready for that effort).

When I woke up this morning I knew I couldn't do what the plan told me to do: 20 miles at 8 minutes per mile. Well, I could, but it would have been foolish. The track repeats on Monday, the tempo run on Wednesday—this was all high-intensity stuff, new to me, and it left me feeling mildly sore and majorly worn out. I made the decision to trim the run to 16 miles. (Yes, I need to do long runs, but did you know there are three more 20-milers scheduled in the next seven weeks?)

All that said, I think I would have been able to do a solid 20 fairly comfortably today if I had gotten my ass out the door earlier in the day. By midrun it was quite warm, well into the 80s, and on the humid side as well. Most days I do a 16-miler without stopping to drink or eat, but today I found myself desperately thirsty after two loops (four miles) on the dirt at Glendoveer. So most of the slower miles on the chart above—9, 13, 15—included 20- to 30-second pauses to drink some Gatorade. Otherwise, after starting a little too fast, I did a decent job sticking near the 8-minute/mile pace I was shooting for. In the end, it was 16.2 miles at 7:58/mile, and it was done.