Autumn Leaves: Among Real Runners

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

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

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.