Week in Review: 19-25 February 2012, and Club Challenge 10-Mile Race Report

Day by day:

19 February: 11 miles in the morning (85 minutes), in the vicinity of Loch Raven with Luke and Seth; 11 miles in the evening (80 minutes), in scary West Baltimore neighborhoods

20 February: 1 mile (10 minutes)

21 February: total 10 miles (70 minutes): ~2 mile warmup, 5x800m, 90 sec rest between reps (2:57, 2:56, 2:55, 2:56, 3+awful), 2x(3x400m), 60 sec rest between reps (83, 81, 79; 81, 79, 80), ~2 mile warmdown

22 February: 7 miles mid-day at APG with Eric (50 minutes), 7 miles in Mount Vernon in the evening after Ash Wednesday service, because God told me to (50 minutes)

23 February: 15 miles (105 minutes), mid-day, straight-through, straight-up

24 February: 11 miles (80 minutes), on a gray Friday morning

25 February: 1 mile (10 minutes), "resting up" for Club Challenge

Total time: 540 minutes
Total distance: 74 miles

A "lazy" week by recent standards, but maybe necessarily so, considering that I wanted to have something in my legs for Club Challenge. Did it work? Well, I knew you were going to ask . . .

I hate Club Challenge.

The Club Challenge 10-Mile Run is the big "running team event" in Maryland, and every year, Falls Road Running (the club I run with) fields a competitive team here, and the competition from the front of the pack to the back is as fierce as it comes in any road race.

And I like all of that, but that's where the fun stops.

The race is always the last Sunday in February, when probably nobody's in top shape for anything, on top of which, Sunday morning, which is the last morning that anybody wants to get out of bed early to do anything. It's always a little uncomfortably cold at the start, and at least half the time, it's raining/sleeting/snowing lightly. Sometimes, the wind blows relentlessly in your face (okay, at least once during every race it will do this).

And speaking of every time, there are brutal hills that don't start showing up until a little after Mile 3, after you've had the most likely unwitting good fortune to be running mostly downhill, throwing off your sense of pace and making your slowdown on the uphills seem even more demoralizing. The mile markers are completely wrong (no doubt, the host team's strategy, although for future, they need to change up which ones are wrong, and by how much, because we're starting to catch on); running with a watch is futile. It's better to just viciously, aggressively race against whoever happens to be in your vicinity, until you cross the finish line or throw up/crap yourself/pass out trying (and yes, the former two did actually happen in this year's edition of the race, although thankfully, not to me).

So besides a new pair of gardening gloves with the 10-Mile Club Challenge logo printed on them, what do you get for your trouble? Frustrated, sick, full of regret? Does any of that sound awesome?

Of course, keep in mind that the flip side of this is that you manage to triumph over all of this adversity, and run an awesome race there. And then you feel like a big shot, which might be some of the draw.

So with all of that in mind, predictably, I thought about not showing up for this race. But a combination of guilt and a vague desire to test myself (as if I needed any more of that lately) brought me to the starting line, stubbornly wearing my classic red Falls Road Racing Team jersey, because it matched my shoes better than the new black-and-neon-green numbers. (Please note that one other runner on our team did this, so I was not the only such jerk.)

The start was the typical mumbling cluster, where you could barely hear the commands, but then gradually, everybody lurched forward, and apparently, the race had started. I went out feeling relatively fast and comfortable; apparently, lighter mileage this past week had done something for me after all. Based on the chatter of the GPS-watch-obsessed around me, I surmised that I was running just under 6-minute-mile pace. It was probably bad that I realized this, because based on past experience, when I hear that number, I assume that it won't last.

When I saw Melissa on the side of the course, somewhere in the first three miles, cheering "Go Dave!" and then, about ten seconds later "Go Chrissy!" (Olympic-Marathon-Trials 1:14-high half-marathon qualifier Chrissy), I realized that that was the wrong order in which to be hearing that, and that got inside my head a little more. In the next couple of minutes, Chrissy passed me. Then, for a while, nothing I remember happened until Meg D passed me (and politely cheered me on as she did).

Then the hills started coming, and things started turning around, to some extent. While I wasn't going faster on the hills, I wasn't slowing down much, either - apparently, last Sunday's hilly trail run at Loch Raven with Luke and Seth had helped, because I felt like I was either closing in on or passing people on the hills, more on good form than on abject strength. This helped me at least feel as though I wasn't going to totally tank, as I usually do in this race at this point.

I reached Mile 5 (the marker, anyway - who knows how incorrect it was), to see one of our runners walking slowly off to the side of the course, apparently having a bad day. It turned out that what I thought he said when I asked if he was okay - "I had a cramp" - was actually "I had to crap." I wish I had known that at the time, because it would have made the rest of the race more bearable. At any rate, Meg D's neon yellow jersey and matching headband weren't running away from me as quickly as I expected, so I gamely soldiered on through the seemingly endless hills of Howard County suburbia, against the intermittent protesting of my somewhat high-mileage-battered quads.

Somewhere in here, another runner in an orange shirt and gray shorts (so I have no idea what team he was running for) passed me, and asked "didn't you pace at the Richmond Marathon?" I said yes, and he said "I recognized you from the back," (creepy), and then "You had a rough finish there, didn't you?" to which I replied simply "yeah, it happens sometimes," and then, he took off, end of conversation. Nice demoralization tactics, jerk.

But I wasn't slowing as much as I typically do at this point in the race, and, compared to the runners around me, I seemed to be maintaining a lot more strength. Fortunately, thanks to a pack of about four or five runners from different teams that, from mile 7 to 8, were, quite literally, bearing down on me (as in, relentless footsteps, inches behind me), I had sufficient motivation to keep pushing. A little after this, one of the Falls Road girls passed me, breathing like she was flirting with a heart attack, and I decided that enough was enough of that, so I stepped on the gas and really passed her hard, and somewhere in that surge, I passed Ryan and Remus (bad and whatever days, respectively), and, before I had a lot of time to think about anything, I was nearing the finish line, and some random lady was calling out times at some random distance from the finish line, and I heard "1:01:47" and vaguely suspected that my vague 1:02:30 goal was out of reach, but that wasn't going to stop me from making one final push. (Plus, even though I was supposed to let her pass me, I wasn't about to let heart attack girl beat me after I put that much effort into my surge, and besides, the Falls Road women were probably going to win handily, anyway, and one point would likely be irrelevant.)


Nearing the finish, hating every second.

1:03:57, just in time to see Joel, aka "Barf," living up to his nickname and puking his guts out in the grass to the side of the finish line. It was an impressive show - usually, people puke once, and feel a lot better, but I saw him puke twice in succession, nothing but bile, and he claims to have puked twice more after that on his way to the gym.

Also, speaking of purging, orange-shirt jerk, who finished less than a minute ahead of me, saw me at the finish, and amended his statement to "I appreciate that you were out there pacing not a lot of people do that sorry if what I said during the race came off sort of mean." Apology accepted, or whatever.

For my part, I wasn't feeling too terrible, which I suppose makes sense, because I ran this race at what is roughly marathon pace for me these days. I took a pair of gardening gloves, ate a couple of banana chunks, a really gross Star Wars lightsaber Berry Go-Gurt, and a styrofoam cup of suspiciously warm water, and then went out for a warm-down before the awards ceremony, where Falls Road swept everything (Men's Individual - "C-Rad," 52-high, Women's Individual - "Christy," 1:01-high, Men's Team, Women's Team), which is kind of neat, although as slow as I ran, I can't claim too much credit for this victory (except maybe providing some motivation for our faster girls).

Which brings me to a point that I thought about making earlier, but now seems like the time to bring it up, which is that officially, the 10-mile is my WORST distance. Taking my time from the race, 1:03:57, my new 10-mile PR, and putting it into one of those fancy "race time prediction calculators," my PRs at shorter distances are all slightly faster than this time projects (10-15 seconds faster at each distance, depending on what calculator you use), and my PRs at longer distances are all more significantly faster than this time projects (about a minute for a half-marathon, which is a bad indicator, anyway, since I've only run one half competitively, and a whopping ten minutes for the marathon).

So with that in mind, this performance fits right in with everything else in my life lately. While it's unsatisfying on its own, in the grand scheme of things, it could be a lot worse, and there's so much other stuff that's so much better than it (most notably, the all-day bar-hopping embarassing-Facebook-moment-producing after-party, and not having to run this race again for another year), that it's not really worth dwelling on.

In that sense, it becomes, to temporarily abuse a word, a "challenge." But not the kind of obsessive, life-consuming challenge that makes you horribly disappointed when things fail to go your way; instead, the kind that sits in the back of your mind, resurfacing just often enough to both motivate and inspire you to do just a little better. And with as much of the former sort as I've seen lately, this is exactly the kind of "challenge" that I needed.

So, for that, thanks to everybody who in some way made this experience possible, because, as I reflect on this now, as much as I still really hate Club Challenge, I can't wait to take another crack at it next year.

Happy Thanksgiving: Gobble Cobble 7K Race Report

Welcome to a special mid-week update, courtesy of my foolish decision to run the Gobble Cobble 7K this morning in Fells Point. Because I've never actually run a "turkey trot" on Thanksgiving Day, now seemed like the best time to start. That, and the race was only a couple of miles from my house, so it made for an easy warmup/warmdown en route.

I almost didn't go out to the race, and I got partway down the block in front of my house, feeling terrible, and thought about not running it. But since it was cold outside, and I had gone through the trouble to put clothes and shoes on, it seemed stupid to turn back. So I ran the rest of the way out to the race, stood in line at the MAC to register, and then walked down to the start line.

As I stood near the front, I looked around to see that apparently, nobody that could clearly beat me was standing there. I briefly contemplated that this would be a chance to win a race, NBP-style, but before I had too much time to think about that, Jim was mumbling some stuff into the bullhorn that we could barely hear, and then we were off.

For about the first half-mile, I was within 10 meters of the leader, and not feeling so bad, and it seemed as though I might actually be able to do this. Then things turned south very quickly. As we hit the cobbles, I suddenly had this overwhelming "dead" feeling in my legs, and, as Meg D would later tell me, a look on my face that was something to the effect of "what on earth am I doing here?" It wasn't long before people started passing me, and as okay as I felt in the lungs, I had nothing in my legs.

We passed the Polish war memorial and headed out to the Inner Harbor promenade, and I gradually started to make a comeback. That, or people in front of me were fading. At least this was something I knew how to do - hang tough when a race goes bad. I started picking up ground on the pack of four or five runners in front of me, and eventually passed them all. Then it was just hang on for dear life to the finish, down the chute to the right that came up all too quickly, which meant I hadn't really had time to kick in the finishing sprint.

This ordeal took a little over 25 minutes, which, considering how I felt, suggests that the course was probably a little bit short. Who knows what my exact place or time was, but I do know that I accomplished one thing, which was to find out what I had today. Not to wax overly poetic about a silly little Thanksgiving morning run, where nearly every winner left before the awards were handed out, but with all of the long races that I do, sometimes I wonder how fast I might be at a shorter distance. Today, I found out. And I also suspect that, on a better day, I could go substantially faster, and, with some more specific training behind me, I could go even faster than that. I'd like to do that.

But for now, I'm going to be thankful for everywhere I've been, everything I've done, and all the good people in my life over this past year.

That, and this sweet youth extra-large t-shirt from the race:



(EDIT: Reportedly, the race was 3.8 miles long, which, at about 25 minutes, means that I was running about 2:52 marathon pace, which is probably about as fast as I can run for any distance longer than 100 meters now. So, from that perspective, maybe I should feel a little less disappointed.)

Week in Review: 12-18 June 2011, and Anatomy of a 100-Mile Week a 100-Mile Week

Deep breath; here goes . . .

Sunday: 6 miles (45 minutes) Canton/Fells, early p.m., then 11 miles (75 minutes) fast-ish around Harbor East

Monday: 6 miles (45 minutes) at APG, hot car ride home, 11 more miles (80 minutes) out to the Fed Hill Run and back (but not with the Fed Hill run, since my timing was so far off . . .)

Tuesday: 5 miles at APG; 4 of those on the treadmill (hill program - 1438 feet of vertical in 35 minutes, plus another 10 minutes warmup/warmdown); hot car ride home, then 10 more around Patterson Park and such (70 minutes)

Wednesday: 1 very slow mile that wasn't very fun (10 minutes)

Thursday: 7 miles at APG; 20 minutes warmup/warmdown, plus another 35 minutes on the treadmill (hill program - 1459 feet of vertical), hot car ride, then 10 more from the Falls Road Running Store with fast people (65 minutes) after Baltimore 10-Miler packet pickup

Friday: 15 miles in the morning, around the Inner Harbor, up Fed Hill, and all that business (105 minutes)

Saturday: 6 miles to the start of the Baltimore 10-Miler, along Monument Street (45 minutes), Baltimore 10-Miler in 1:09:40 (pacing the 1:10 group with Keith McBride), then 6 miles home, carrying my silly Fila vest down Madison Avenue (45 minutes)

Total Time: 755 minutes

Total Distance: 102 miles

Normally, this is the part of the blog entry where I write my race report, but (without any disrespect to the Baltimore 10-Miler), the race wasn't a particularly epic experience (which is not to say that it wasn't fun, only that it wasn't a struggle to the finish that would make for a compelling read). But in short, the last two miles are difficult, but not a surprise, since you run them (downhill) on the way out, there were cold, wet towels and watermelon at the finish, two beer tickets for every runner (many of which were being diverted to a few runners trying to collect as many beer tickets as possible), and a band that opened their set with that Ramones song "Blitzkrieg Bop" and didn't bother to censor the lyrics. (Nobody seemed to be paying enough attention to care.) I had a lot of miles on my legs coming in, so I was a little worried about the uphill finish, and that, combined with most of the mile markers in the first half of the race being wrong, led to a first half that was slightly faster than pace, but it all worked out in the end. And, Fila "running vest."

Because that was a crummy race summary, I'm going to leave you with something a little more substantial: the anatomy of a 100-mile week. I may not speak for everybody else when I say this, but in a typical 100-mile week, accumulating mileage at a steady rate throughout the week (as opposed to running very little on some days, and "binging" on other days, particularly with long races), the thought process ends up being something like this:

Day 1 - 15 miles total - Wow, that was a solid day.

Day 2 - 30 miles total - Another great day; almost a third of the way there!

Day 3 - 45 miles total - Um . . . 3 days and I'm not even halfway there?

Day 4 - 60 miles total - Another day, and barely over halfway . . . this is distressing.

Day 5 - 75 miles total - Seriously, when does progress happen? 5 days, and 3/4ths of the way there?

Day 6 - 90 miles total - Okay, wow, that snuck up on me; now I'm almost at 100. And I only have to run 10 miles tomorrow!

Day 7 - 100 (or 105, or something) miles total - I did it! I feel great! And now . . . do it again next week?!?!?!?! Then again, on second thought, it doesn't sound quite so bad now . . .

Given the mind game involved in reaching 100 miles in a week, you may be wondering how anybody can deal with it, week after week. As it turns out (and as I type this, I already have 25 miles in for this coming week, in one day), it gets easier and easier the more frequently you do it. After a while, your body gets used to being in motion that often, and the mileage becomes strangely comforting. Once you find yourself running in the moment, and not thinking about your weekly total, you can fully submit to the task; you accept that, at any given moment of any day, you might be on your feet and running - through sunrise, sunset, rain, wind, sleet, snow, jeers, catcalls, noise, silence . . . and in this submission, there is a profound peace. (For me, anyway.)

And along those lines, given than running a lot of volume is a strategy for success, optimizing the payoff for the volume becomes a concern. After all, in order to run fast, you need to run fast. ;)

This is where an insight from an unlikely source has been guiding my training lately. A couple of weeks ago, when I was called for jury duty, in the excessive wait time, I was reading a book called "On Studying Singing" by Sergius Kagen (a faculty member at Julliard). The author makes a number of interesting points that seem strangely applicable to running, but one in particular stood out to me. Kagen claims (in slightly different words) that there is a certain element of futility in teaching somebody to sing better, because the actual skill cannot be taught directly. Instead, teachers must come up with metaphors and visualization tricks as guides to help students improve technique. These teaching methods act on the conscious mind, but this is only to steer the unconscious mind (which does all of the actual work) in the right direction.

In a way, running a lot of miles has this effect. Physiologically, yes, it strengthens the body, but subconsciously, it strengthens the mental faculties that enable a person to run quickly and efficiently. As usual, these variables are confounded, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that both aspects of running are equally important, and developing them in tandem has a synergistic effect on performance, yet most people focus only on the physical aspect of the sport. Most likely, most people have a fair amount of untapped potential as a result of this myopic view.

Or, you know, I could just be making up a bunch of stuff to fill up space. But it seems to be working for me . . .

20-26 February: Week in Review, and Club Challenge 10-Mile Report

Okay, dates, times, distances:

20 February: 10 miles (74 minutes), Canton/Fells/etc.
21 February: 4 miles (29 minutes), Canton/Fells/etc.
22 February: 6 miles (42 minutes), including a "tempo" Patterson Park loop
23 February: 3 miles (25 minutes), APG
24 February: 8 miles (56 minutes), Canton/Fells/etc.
25 February: 2.5 miles, Campus Hills speed loop, 3.5 miles, treadmill hill program (51 minutes total)
26 February: 6 miles in the morning (40 minutes), 5 miles in the afternoon (35 minutes), all Canton/Fells

Total Time: 352 minutes
Total Distance: 48 miles

Definitely a decrease in mileage from the past couple of weeks, but considering that I didn't have a 30-ish mile run thrown in there, still decent volume, and overall, an appropriate draw-down, considering that the runs on the 24th through the 26th felt awful.

And speaking of which, Club Challenge . . .

The Club Challenge 10-Mile Race, hosted by the Howard County Striders, is a race that I've made a point of doing for the past few years, since it's the major Falls Road Running team race of the year. That's the fun part. Everything else about the race - the brutally hilly course, the end-of-February-when-nobody-is-totally-in-shape-yet, the distance (which is too long to be run outright "fast," but too short to just rely on endurance) - is, well, challenging. Every year, I wind up questioning my sanity around Mile 4 of this race, and every year I wind up finishing anyway, and totally forgetting how bad I felt the next day. That said, this post will not fully convey how bad it felt, since I've already partially forgotten that, but rest assured, it was worse than however this sounds.

Since this is a "relatively" short race, a relatively short summary is in order: I started out at just over 6 minutes for the first mile, hit the second mile in around 12:20, the third mile in around 19:20, and after that, the hills started coming and really did me in. The first couple were okay, but after that, I have never felt such blinding, excruciating pain in my quads when climbing a hill. The pain gradually disappeared on the flats and downhills, but of course, after a few miles on that course, there is never enough of either to regain any sort of rhythm. I ended up finishing in 1:06:37, which is 12 seconds faster than what I ran last year, but 1:48 slower than my fastest time at that race (although I think that may have been run the year that the course was 0.15 miles short).

So, in a way, not really much different from last year, which leaves me wondering how to feel about my performance. It was a strange race, because the limiting factor was not my aerobic fitness, but the fact that past the third mile, my quads felt like they might explode at any second. Other than my quads, I felt fairly strong, so it may just be that insufficient recovery from my weight room sessions was the culprit. By comparison, last year, I had done a 20-mile run the day before the race, and was incubating some kind of cold, hence my mediocre performance. That said, last year, I think that I performed closer to my theoretical capacity at that point. Even if I had been less sick and tired on race day last year, I don't think I could have gone that much faster. This year, had I not come in on a "bad" day, I think I would have had a faster time in me.

All water under the bridge at this point, but it does point to increased volume and sharper, more aggressive speedwork as the way to build from here (surprise, surprise). The diet and core exercises and all that seem to be working at the moment, so no need to mess with any of them. Hopefully, a better test of where I am will come this Saturday, at the Seneca Greenway Trail 50K.