Week in Review: 5 February - 11 February, and Mid-Maryland 50K Race Report

Cold, hard numbers:

5 February: 2.5 miles (17.5 minutes) to Our Daily Bread for a service project, during which I saw a guy punch another guy square in the jaw, causing him to drop like a rag doll. Then, 2.5 miles (17.5 minutes) back home, wearing "nice clothes" (jeans, button-down shirt, and a Ben Sherman jacket) on Monument Street, narrowly avoiding getting jumped by four high-school-sophomore age boys (race redacted) - clearly a case when you're "asking for it" by dressing a certain way. Finally, 10 miles in normal running clothes in normal places (70 minutes) - what Super Bowl?

6 February: 10-ish-mile lunch run with Luke (70 minutes)

7 February: 10-ish-mile lunch run with Luke (70 minutes), then my return to Tuesday Night Track - 2+ mile warmup, fast "minutes" (1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1), with 1 minute running "rest" between - intervals at high-5-minute-mile pace, "rest" at low-7-minute-mile pace, 2+ mile warmdown, for about 10 miles (70 minutes) total

8 February: 10-ish-mile lunch run with Luke (70 minutes), then 10 more miles in the evening (70 minutes) with the Wednesday night Canton run crew.

9 February: 5 miles at the end of the workday (35 minutes), waking me up for a night with Me Talk Pretty, Hawthorne Heights, The Young Electric, and some other bands at the Legendary Dobbs in Philadelphia (a pretty legendary night . . .)

10 February: Doubled, on a theory - 6 miles (40 minutes) at around noon, then another 6 miles (40 minutes) at around 7 p.m.

11 February: Mid-Maryland 50K in 4:29, follwed up with 7 miles (49 minutes) in light snow and whipping wind around the Inner Harbor

Total Time: 888 minutes
Total Distance: 120 miles

Warm, gently massaged memories:

I didn't want to run the Mid-Maryland 50K.

But this year, I set a goal to run a race of at least 50 miles in length every month. Unfortunately, when it comes to ultrarunning, February is the cruelest month (except for the Rocky Raccon 100, but it would have been 2 weeks after the Beast of Burden 100, and the race director didn't seem keen on late entries, although with the number of people that asked me about it, I'm regretting now that I didn't at least try, but anyway . . .), and so it seems unlikely that I'll be able to meet that goal this month. But I can maybe at least run an ultra every month this year, and 50K is pretty much the legal minimum for an ultra. Plus, this race was close (shortest drive ever to an ultra for me - just under half an hour) and cheap ($50, registering online 3 days before the race). And, theoretically, the course, 5 10K trail loops, was flat and fast, so maybe a chance for a PR.

So whatever, I entered.

The night before was total routine - less than 10 minutes to lay out cold weather running outfit A, and post-race warm-jeans-and-button-down-flannel ensemble B, and put together my bottles and pills. (Perhaps it's a little disturbing how dialed-in all of this is now.) I went to bed early, got plenty of sleep, left the house on time, arrived an hour before the race, and had plenty of time to do everything I needed to do, including take this picture:



Which is how it looked before the race, and why I was, even more than when I woke up and forced myself out of the relative warmth of my bed, dreading this race. All that snow, and still coming down - over the course of 4 or 5 hours, that would make clothing wet, heavy, and useless at best (burdensome at worst). But again, whatever, I was here, and so were Serge Arbona, Christian David Creutzer, Henry Peck, and Mike McGonagle, ultrarunning buddies. Time to run a race.

The race director gave us about two minutes of instruction, joking that he marked the entire snow-covered course with a white line yesterday (as it turned out, he really wasn't joking, which meant the course markings were nearly impossible to see - good thing there were a lot of signs). Then, with little fanfare, except for all of us shouting the word "Uno!" in a nod to the pizza sponsor, not the card game, we were off.



(Oops, wrong race. The other side of the sign was supposed to be directing vehicular traffic to the start of the race. Apparently, the race director thought nobody would be foolish enough to drive the wrong way to the start. *raises hand*)

The race director kindly ran the first loop with us, to blaze the path and help prevent people from getting lost. So I stuck with him and a small pack of front-runners for our loop around the fields before we entered the woods. But within the first couple of minutes, I could tell that something was horribly wrong. My quads felt like they were bleeding out, badly, for the first time in a run since the Fire on the Mountain 50K debacle (see this: . . . I am just now realizing the funny coincidence that was my relentlessly burning quads). Maybe it was that I wasn't warmed up, maybe that I haven't been on trails much in the past month, maybe something silly to do with uneven surfaces and muscle activation and whatever, but the point is, it was awful. I was struggling to picture the rest of the race continuing at this level of pain.

So I started falling back, and, predictably, within the first half of the first loop, Arbona, Creutzer, and McMonagle passed me, in that order. When Mike passed me, he asked how I was doing, and since I don't pull punches with that sort of thing, I didn't hesitate to tell him that I felt awful and this was going to be a long day. He was kind and reasonably encouraging as he passed me.

But really, it was going to be a long day at the rate that I was going. The second loop came, and this was the worst. All of the parts of the course that were muddy the first time were even muddier, and some parts that were only sort of muddy had gotten worse, all from a bunch of people trampling through the mostly narrow single-track for some reason. (By the last loop, conservatively, 70 percent of the course would be slippery-to-ankle-deep mud - not exactly a fast surface.) The second loop was the worst, since I knew we were still in half-marathon/training run territory, and there was no chance of anybody falling off pace at this point, so I would continue to struggle along.

Fortunately, the course was scenic, and offered a good amount of variety - it was seemingly in short, distinctive, mentally-manageable sections that made each loop feel a lot shorter than it actually was. Also, I could console myself with thoughts of A FRIEND who was also running a 50K today, under far hillier conditions, and solidarity with MY FRIEND'S pain was some consolation, since other feelings that I had kicking around at that point for various reasons were anything but.

Eventually, I reached the end of the second lap, and I saw Mike coming out, which was surprising, considering how poorly I thought I was doing. Maybe I had a chance to catch some people after all. Mike asked again how I was, and I shouted "TERRIBLE," and, just like that, whatever demon was afflicting my quads had been exorcised, and suddenly, I felt "normal" again.

I felt my pace quicken on the third lap, and the amount of grunting increase (it seemed to help release the pain, so I really wasn't worried about who was hearing me at that point). But darned if the race hadn't somehow gotten faster - the first woman was not far behind me, and at this point, I was resigned to defining success as not letting the first woman pass me and not letting the overall winner lap me. So I pushed harder, and, at one point, fell with first woman not far behind me, and I've never gotten up and mumbled "I'm fine" to the nearest runner (who asked if I was okay) more quickly. Mud and roots came and went - the third lap.

I started my fourth lap optimistically, especially since one runner who was ahead of me was dawdling at the start/finish aid station (the lone aid station in the race). But somehow, he, like everybody else that day, was super-fast, and caught up to me and passed me within the first mile after the aid station. So much for that. I kept pushing, and feeling a little more human (albeit sore from slipping and sliding so much on the mud), but other than lapping lots of other runners, I wasn't passing anybody. I couldn't even see anybody close enough to pass. The lap ended, and I ended up right where I was.

Fifth and final lap - surely somebody will slow here. Nope, everybody is super-fast all the time. I had finished the fourth lap in about 55 minutes, and was hoping to go a little faster on the last lap, especially since I had finally shed my soaking wet outer layer (which, it turned out, probably weighed upwards of 5 pounds, and probably had not been helping my cause earlier in the race). But in spite of my pushing, and my lighter load, I still came through in just about 55 minutes for my last lap, and I still didn't pass anybody who was ahead of me. I came through the finish line, 7th overall, 4 hours, 29 minutes, and some-odd seconds, ripped off my teal Baltimore Marathon Under Armour recycled-fabric long-sleeve shirt (still best shirt ever) in discomfort and frustration, my brief shirtlessness causing small-scale stare-age and swoon-age by the females in the vicinity of the finish line (yeah, I just said that), before putting on the very dry, somewhat warm, long-sleeved finisher's shirt.

Mike apparently finished 7 minutes ahead of me, from the look of his watch, and we chatted a bit, during which time his lady friend Jackie (1) asked about Rocky Raccoon (okay, seriously, as soon as they open registration for that race next year, I'm signing up . . . and hoping the word really does end before then . . . kidding :P), and (2) informed me, after a significant amount of mental math, that 3:20 marathon pace was probably good enough to run sub-4-hours in a 50K (her goal, and mine, and everybody's, apparently - but this is the mystery of the 50K dance, one perpetrated in part by the fact that most "50K" races are probably closer to 35 miles than 31 miles - I'm curious to see a GPS on this one). Both completely valid topics. :)

I congratulated the people that finished ahead of me and had stuck around (Arbona and Creutzer, and that guy that I almost passed but eventually didn't), and congratulated Henry Peck when he finished about ten minutes after I did. Then I put on my warm clothes, ate pizza from Uno's, drank Dr. Pepper, and listened to 50 Cent on the radio ("In Da Club"), for some reason. And, after hanging around the finish line for a little while, I left, at 113 miles on the week - 7 more to go (on 2/11 - a great day for numbers).


(As visual evidence, a sample of the mud - if there hadn't been a few dryer gravel sections, this would have looked a lot worse.)

Back home, after shaking out my muddy clothes in the park across the street from my house, while the late 20-something neighbor guy carried flowers into his house for his girl (different lives, indeed), I sat on my front steps, lacing my house key into my black-on-black Asics 2150s, as the wind callously whipped tiny snowflakes in my face, just like this time last week. I pressed "play" on my iPod shuffle, to be shot down by a female voice that said "LOW BATTERY." This would be a run alone with my thoughts, apparently, to piece together this post to the sound of the earphone cable pounding against my chest, like a heartbeat in my ear. I cruised through the streets, totally comfortable, showing no sign of the 30+ miles that I had already put on my legs today. And as I came home, just like last week, the snow had stopped, although the wind had not totally abated, and the sky in front of my house was crazy, in the way that only the sky in front of my house can get crazy:



So if music had been playing, I'd go with Sunny Day Real Estate's "In Circles." It was not the same day as last Saturday (over twice as many running miles, and not nearly as many mall miles), but in a lot of ways, especially emotionally, it felt like it.

And, to go one further, it wasn't the same race as the Holiday Lake 50K this weekend last year (see this: . . . ), but, again, emotionally, it felt like it (although intellectually, it is nice to know that I'm in shape enough to turn out a race like I did today, even on a "bad" day). Maybe this weekend is just a bad weekend for an ultra, although the Mid-Maryland 50K is a top-notch race, on a beautiful, varied, challenging course, incredibly hitch-free for its first time, and poses stout competition to the race that Horton himself claims is his least favorite to put on. In any event, in all cases, it was a little high, a little low, a little bit of everything.

But in the end, whatever, a lot of it is just running, and the stuff that isn't is easily (if sometimes temporarily) obscured by running, even (and sometimes especially) by a bad day of running.

And as much of a mixed bag as these experiences are, they're uniquely so, and I'm thankful for everybody, "good" or "bad," who help to make them. And that's the best I've got right now. :)

2011 North Coast 24-Hour "National Championships" Race Report

Okay, I ran some miles this week, but that can definitely wait, because right now, this race report is way, way more interesting and important.

Before I start, though, I'd like to make a few things clear. Although what I write here may (no, probably will) be construed as insulting to the city of Cleveland and its residents, I am in no way blaming the city for my disappointing performance. Rather, dry/irritated sinuses (as it eventually turned out; fortunately, not a cold or infection) made it difficult for me to run without generating tons of mucous, which found its way into my lungs and sent me into uncontrollable coughing fits of increasing frequency as the race progressed. If anything, this was a result of pacing on the dry, dusty Wasatch course last week (as I type this, my lips are still sort of chapped from that). Fortunately, by this time tomorrow, I'll be in humid, 85-degree weather in Israel, and that should go a long way towards clearing this up. Ultimately, it's my responsibility to take care of myself, and I did a poor job with this (although I did a remarkably good job with everything else, which perhaps made this worse by comparison), and I suffered as a result. (But make no mistake - I laughed harder and longer at this race than I did at any other race that I've ever run, which is why I will be first in line when registration for this opens next year.)

With the bottom line out of the way, begin humorous rant:

If you're one of the three people who hasn't seen these videos, or if you'd like a refresher, here:



and, here:



So you know what they say about a lot of truth being said in jest . . .

Well, Mark Rodriguez, Jackie Ong, and I saddled up this past Friday for another road trip, all having seen the videos, but of course thinking that this was no doubt exaggeration. The trip was totally uneventful until about here:


Don't worry if you miss this one - there's one about every 50 feet along I-71, which proves that Cleveland has no idea exactly where their corporate limits are.

After a totally safe, homogenized lunch experience at the Olive Garden, we headed to our rooms at the Days Inn on Lake, just outside of Edgewater, the "host hotel" of this "national championship" event. We should have been a little bit more prepared when everything along 130th and 117th looked exactly like the stuff in the parody "tourism" videos, but apparently, we're slow learners. For the moment, I'll let this picture speak for itself:


Why aren't there bars on this window? (Maybe the front desk has them on request.)

The "non-smoking" room smelled like a seedy bar (i.e. cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, more the former than the latter), there were bits of pizza and fried chicken all over the chairs and carpet, the sheets were stained . . .


Zero points to the first person who can guess what caused this stain, because if you know, you are no doubt familiar and/or complicit with horrible, horrible things . . .

But fortunately, we're good sports, so we couldn't stop laughing. One of the hotel employees overheard us, and when we told him that the room smelled like somebody had been smoking in there as recently as ten minutes ago, he responded "yeah, everybody does that." Okay, Cleveland, stop and think about that for a second - is that not your property, that you charge people money to stay in? Don't you have any concept of pride, or ownership, or pride in ownership? You can't just ENFORCE YOUR NON-SMOKING RULES? Okay, maybe to their credit, somebody did come in with a spray to try to clean things up . . .


Other hotel employee: "Isn't that the spray that they use when they evacuate buildings?"
Spraying employee: "Yeah, and it works great!"

Not long after (now that the window was open), we heard yelling outside the window, and saw a bunch of cop cars. Most of the shouting was unintelligible, but the clearly audible "this is bullshit!" would become our rallying cry for the weekend. We made the best of the situation by blasting gangster rap and gunshot sound effects from YouTube out the window, in an attempt to appear "hard."

The "official" pre-race dinner of the "national championships" was at a place called "Players on Madison," which I won't dignify with a link here. Go ahead and Google it if you like, but all I will say is that any place that calls itself "Players" and doesn't have gambling or strippers involved is clearly mis-named. We opted for the Pizza Hut instead, which was right next to this lovely establishment:


Racism, alive and well in Clevelandtown.

Then it was back to our hotel room, which still smelled terrible, and was now really cold on account of having the window open, to sleep on our dirty sheets and pray that we didn't wind up with bedbugs.

Oh, right, a race happened eventually. We went to the breakfast lounge, where there were no spoons for the cereal, and where somebody comically asked "is that real orange juice," as if he could expect to drink anything in this city that wasn't tainted with antifreeze. Then off to the race, where, in an attempt to play upon patriotism to band everybody together in spite of the poor conditions, we listened to somebody sing the National Anthem, then had about two minutes of pre-race meeting before the blasted event began.

There was a veritable "who's who" of ultrarunning at this event: Zach Gingerich, Jamie Donaldson, Phil McCarthy, Byron Lane, Connie Gardner, Anna Piskorska, Serge Arbona, Nick Coury, just to name a few. Suckers, all of them; all of us, really. At this point, there's not much to write about running around in a circle about a million times, except that the leaders went out way, way, WAY too fast (50 miles in the first six hours is ridiculous, sorry, guys), and there was a brief period where there were some overweight nuns flying kites in the park (god, how I wish I had my camera for that, but they were gone by the next lap).

EDIT: PICTURE OF KITE FLYING NUNS:


For my part, I went out pretty conservatively, and everybody commented on how good I looked, and I kept saying (the best I could, considering that I could barely talk through these sinus problems) that as long as this stayed out of my lungs, I would be fine.

And it did, somewhat, for about 8 hours and a little over 50 miles, and then things just became unbearable. I tried to sit down and change shoes and eat food and all that, but the fact was, mucous was draining into my lungs, and I was coughing hard, and my chest hurt, and without knowing for sure that it wasn't something more serious, I was hesitant to push through this, even though I felt pretty much okay otherwise. Besides, they had gotten about ten Hammer Gels for this first-class "national championship" event, and by three hours in, the only gels left were the ones loaded with caffiene, so I had no steady nutrition source at this point, making forward progress even more risky.

So I slept for about six hours, got back up, and decided to run a few more laps at 1 in the morning (what better time to run?) and passed a number of people who had been out there the whole time (who, with their fast start, were now predictably trudging along), but the mucous was heading back into my lungs, and that was it for me. I hit just over 60 miles, went back to the tent that Laurie Colon had so generously set up for us, and hung out with Mark Rodriguez (stopped due to blistering at about the same mileage) for a little while before we went back to his heated car to sleep some more.

We got up around 7, and I took the most brutally cold shower ever in the restrooms (I had to, because I was not getting on a plane that dirty), cursing all the way, accusing Cleveland of being a giant concentration camp as I shivered uncontrollably under the cold mist, which did almost nothing to rinse the soap off. We went to the timing table to officially check out, to take our medals, and to have one last photo op:


Race official: "Just ignore the part on the sign that says '2010'"

Then off to the airport, to eat a burrito at "Currito" (which was actually pretty good, or maybe I was just hungry), and to write this report.

Okay, in all seriousness, a few parting comments:

The biggest problem with Cleveland is not that it is this bad, but that people in Cleveland seem to think that it's OKAY for things to be this bad. From the smoking in the non-smoking hotel room, to the randomly-stocked aid station at the race, everybody had the attitude as if this was fine, and it was okay to inconvenience people this way. Look, guys, seriously - if you want people to take this seriously as a NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP event, you have to raise the bar a little. It's not a big deal if this is just some random stupid race, but you've made lofty claims and failed to deliver.

The exchange between Mark and I on the course: "we are all witnesses" (reference the Lebron James poster), to which the reply is "this is bullshit" is an epic classic, and was totally worth the price of admission.

I have never laughed so long or so hard at a race in my life. I'm going to be first in line to sign up for this ordeal next year. :)