Week in Review: 4-10 March, and Spectating

The running that I did:

4 March: 10-ish miles pre- and during the B&A "Trail" Marathon with Meg H, then 8-ish more miles afterwards, for some reason (130 minutes).

5 March: 15 miles to, during, and from the Fed Hill Monday Night (Race) Run, with some stupid-fast stuff somewhere in the middle (105 minutes).

6 March: 8 miles at lunch (60 minutes), track "workout" - 15 min warmup, 5x(800m, 2 min rest, 400m, 90 sec rest), 15 minute warmdown. Intervals in (2:51, 76), (3:00+, 80-ish), (3:00+, 80-ish), (3:00+, 80-ish), (3:00+, 80-ish) . . . yeah, oops, I had only one good set in me.

7 March: 10 miles at lunch (70 minutes), 10 more miles later, in part with the Wednesday Night O'Donnell Square Run group (70 minutes).

8 March: 4-ish miles with Luke after work (27 minutes), 23-ish miles with Meg H on the dark scary hilly Catonsville loop, ending just before midnight (190 minutes).

9 March: 10 sort of lazy miles (70 minutes) in the afternoon.

10 March: 10-ish miles with Luke at Loch Raven (70 minutes).

Total Time: 852 minutes
Total distance: 116 miles

The running that I watched:

While this week was not my biggest-ever week in terms of mileage, it was my biggest-ever week in terms of watching people run. I had the pleasure of watching both the B&A "Trail" (i.e. asphalt path to Marley Station Mall) Marathon last Sunday, and the Shamrock 5K in downtown Baltimore yesterday. Typically, I am a pretty bad running spectator, because I'm almost always game for anything running-related, no matter how stupid or out of my comfort zone. But in both cases, I was too late to the registration party to get in on either, so I was relegated to the sidelines.

In both cases, though, I'm glad that I had the opportunity to be on the sidelines. Running is generally a very self-focused, self-directed activity. With all of the racing that I've been doing lately, it was a nice mental break to shift that focus, and support other runners for a change. There's also a lot to be said for what you can learn from watching others run, from the stoic, steady strides in the middle-mile wasteland of a marathon, to the all-out finishing kicks in a 5K. Lots of great efforts to be filed away in the memory banks for instruction and inspiration in my upcoming races . . . and some of them captured on my cell-phone camera, which turned out to be a lot of fun, and something that I want to do more of in the future (maybe with a better camera, although there is a certain charm to trying to take a good picture with a less-than-good camera).

And all of that "outward focus," if you will, is, in a more general sense, something that I needed, considering the sort of emotional turmoil that's driven me a bit more inward than is really healthy in the long-term over the past few weeks. Between the warm, sunny Sunday afternoons, the neon-yellow Falls Road Racing jerseys, and the return of Daylight Savings Time, I've been fortunate to find plenty of light to combat the recent darkness in my life. So congratulations and thank you to everybody who I was able to watch racing the past two Sundays. The future is very bright indeed.


Shamrock 5K - my best crummy cell phone picture (Becky Parks flying down Pratt Street)

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.

Week in Review: 16-22 October 2011 - Boredom

It's been a while since it's been boring like this:

16 October: 10 miles (80 minutes) at Loch Raven, on the trails
17 October: 1 mile (10 minutes) at Patterson Park
18 October: 2 miles (20 minutes) at APG
19 October: 5 miles (35 minutes) in the rain in Holly Woods off of Route 7, for whatever reason
20 October: 9 miles at APG (65 minutes), followed by a late-night 6 miles (45 minutes) in and around Patterson Park
21 October: 7+ miles (~70 minutes) through the Inner Harbor and back
22 October: 15-ish miles (~150 minutes) on the NCR Trail

Total Time: 475 minutes
Total Distance: 55 miles

So there, one goal accomplished: documentation of my daily mileage, which, for the past month, has been helter-skelter (the documentation more than the mileage), because I've been spending a lot more time and effort on "races" (or, in most cases, more accurately, "epic runs") to get it together enough to put this in my entries. I'd guesstimate minimally about 60 miles per week in previous weeks (based on race distances alone, it's unlikely that it would be much less), so this was a bit of a "slow" week for me, in the grand scheme of things.

So here comes the part where I say something deep, or wise, or whatever, as parting words to my 20s, since I turn 30 this coming Saturday (October 29th), in a big way, with back-to-back 50Ks (i.e. back-to-back races of 30-ish miles, as I've come to a point in my life where I'm more than happy to associate an "ish" with my age, lest I be confined or defined by a specific number). Halloweeny 50K (a "fatass" event, for which I will be wearing a surprise silly costume, pictures of which will no doubt end up on here) on Saturday, followed by Fire on the Mountain 50K on Sunday (a "serious" race, maybe - as serious as a race can be when one of the finishing requirements is to throw a branch on a fire).

And so, setting parentheses aside, and temporarily eschewing the complex sentence-splicing techniques that I'm admittedly too fond of, time to be clear and direct: Running has been good to me. I started running at age 13, and since then, I've never gone more than a month without putting on shorts and running shoes and hitting the trails or the streets for at least an easy mile or two. Since then, I've seen and done more crazy running-related things than I'd ever have the time or patience to type out in this blog, and had many a good time with friends along the way. It hasn't always been easy. It hasn't always been pretty. Sometimes, especially at the time, it hasn't been all that fun. But however it was, it's been a huge part of my life.

All of that relative pomp and circumstance aside, though, the thing that fascinates me the most about running is this: All I did, at least once each day for the majority of days over the past 17 years, was put on shorts and running shoes, and hit the streets or the trails for at least an easy mile or two. Put that way, it seems trivial, even inconsequential, especially at the time. But I've seen and done so much that's anything but trivial or inconsequential as a result that, over time, I've changed my view of the "trivial" and "inconsequential." Because this isn't about a journey of a thousand miles starting with a single step; this is about not even knowing that a single step will lead to a thousand-mile journey in the first place.

Or, less proverbially, life's most brilliant moments are apparently built on the mundane, the trivial, the inconsequential. There is always some sort of beauty hidden behind the boredom, waiting to be revealed by the perceptive and the patient.

I'd rather not skew further abstract than that, as I'd rather not come off overly poetic or pretentious about any of this. All I know is that 17 years later, I'm running hundreds of miles in remote wilderness, getting my picture in magazines, wearing silly belt buckles and climbing trash heaps in foreign lands, and none of that was part of a grand plan of mine. It all just happened, because I just happened to stick with something and endure a whole bunch of "whatever," with eyes wide open, to get to a whole bunch of "wow." And as long as my body will have it, I'll continue to endure and embrace the seemingly mundane, because it seems that good things really do come to those who are able to wait.

Also, having to do your business in the woods really gives you a new appreciation for toilets and modern plumbing. Truth.

Week in Review: 1-7 May, and Frederick Half-Marathon and 5K Report

On paper, this is probably going to sound like a pretty dull week, but I'll do my best to shine it up. (Also, for the sake of dramatic effect, if there is any to achieve, I'm going to relegate my KDM recap to the land of lost posts, to re-surface at some random time in the future. There's nothing wrong with it; just seems like too much stuff to post now, at sort of an awkward time.)

Anyway . . .

1 May - 9 miles (60 minutes) through a park and the backside of some random neighborhoods surrounding the park-and-ride off of I-70, exit 28 (our meeting place for the drive out to KDM), in light rain.

2 May - 2 miles (15 minutes) around Patterson Park, barefoot.

3 May - 10 miles, as a result of the following medley: 2 miles (16 minutes) warmup on Gilman Trail, 36 minutes including "interval on, half off," starting at 6 minutes, and working down to 1 minute, in 1 minute intervals, 2 miles warmdown (16 minutes), 1 mile barefoot (8 minutes). 76 minutes total. "On" intervals at 5:45-5:50 mile pace.

4 May - 2 miles around Patterson Park, not barefoot (15 minutes).

5 May - 5 miles (35 minutes) on and around Pot Spring Road, or, an impromptu hill workout.

6 May - 15 miles (105 minutes) at Gunpowder State Park, Essex version, that featured a long section along a power line cut, various suburban streets, a whole lot of mud, and rotting fish heads on the trail. Followed up with 2 miles of run/hike with Sara at Loch Raven (30 minutes).

7 May - Pace Frederick Half-Marathon in 1:40, with about a mile of warmup and a mile of warmdown on either end. Rest for a couple of hours, then a mile of warmup, the Frederick 5K in a disappointing 19:45, a mile of warmdown, then another 4 miles just because. Back in Baltimore, about 5 miles of run/hike with Sara at Loch Raven. Total 29 miles, and about 240 minutes.

Total Time: 576 minutes
Total Distance: 74 miles

Definitely high marks for variety, although not for mileage. Then again, going back and running the numbers from 28 April to 4 May, I ran 90 miles in that 7-day stretch, so, although not the magical 100-mile mark, more in the ballpark than this actual week would suggest. Given that I'm this close to MMT, and most of the hay is in the barn, this peak-and-rest trend is probably for the best (not to mention the variety in times/distances/terrain).

Now, Frederick, in as few words as I can manage:

I've run at least one race at the Frederick Running Festival since the 2007 edition, and I've always found the experience to be at least slightly uncomfortable. In 2007, it was the first year I had done the National, Boston, and Frederick marathons in the same spring, and I really didn't have the base to sustain it, so Frederick didn't go so well. 2008 went somewhat better, but Frederick was still my slowest of the three. 2009 was a 3:50 pace effort, which would have felt easy, except for the rain. 2010 was a crash-and-burn pace effort at 3:20, due to heat and cramping (but at least I finished, in spite of calf cramps so crippling that I nearly tripped and fell several times in the last mile).

This year, there was no marathon, so instead, I paced 1:40 for the half-marathon with Brian Benda, and then decided at some point in the past couple of months that running the 5K at noon would be a good idea. As it turned out, this was partially true.

The half was, as Frederick tends to be, pretty uneventful. We went out a little bit fast, slowed down on the hills in the middle and the end, and came in right on time. The weird thing about pacing 1:40 is that, unlike 3:20, not that many people want to run 1:40, because it's not really a qualifier for anything. The women's auto-qualify for New York is 1:37, which is a little too fast to stay with the 1:40 group for very long if you want to hit that mark, but otherwise, 1:40 is sort of an arbitrary time to run. A lot of people came and went, and in the end, we weren't really pushing anybody to the finish. I know that we helped people reach their goals, but it didn't feel like it as much this time.

When the half was over, I found relief for my upset stomach (which had made running the half a bit unpleasant, in addition to the fact that that pace for a half marathon is just a bit uncomfortable for me at this point - not slow enough to be completely easy, but not fast enough to feel fluid), then trudged back to the car, which was parked uncomfortably far away, in uncomfortably tall grass, to change clothes for the 5K. I napped for about half an hour in the car, because it was uncomfortably just a little bit chilly outside, and it was a little bit less uncomfortably chilly in the car. I woke up about 45 minutes before the race, and embarked upon the uncomfortable trudge back to the half-marathon finish/5K start.

I'm not really sure how to explain the 5K. In my warmup, I felt okay, maybe even fast. And my workout on Tuesday was faster than I had expected for that set of intervals (sub-6-minute-mile-pace). Maybe it was the crowded start, or the sandy loop around the track at the beginning of the race, or the hills and headwind on the way back, or maybe it's just not possible to bust out a fast 5K as the 32nd, 33rd, and 34th miles in a 24-hour period (although probably not the latter if you're trained for it). In any case, my 19:45 finish was evidence that my training has been too slow overall for me to run a fast 5K (and I think this is the salient point here). While this is a slow time, another way to look at it is that at 6:23/mile pace, it's in the ballpark of my current marathon pace, and, aside from general sluggishness, it didn't feel harder than a marathon effort. Developing a stride and a comfort level over the 5K distance is definitely something I want to work on in the next few weeks, so that hopefully the Bel Air Town Run will go a bit better.

And now that all of that (uncomfortable) water is under the bridge, it's onward to the MMT 100 this coming weekend. Stay tuned for that recap, which is bound to be more epic and inspiring than this one.

Week in Review: 27 March - 2 April

This will be (for once) a relatively short update, as this was sort of a "down" week, in the sense that I didn't run a major race that I could subsequently carry on about for thousands of words. Instead, the (relatively) terse summary of my training:

27 March: 11 miles (77 minutes); the traditional post-race recovery run around Canton/Fells/Inner Harbor.

28 March: 13 miles (91 minutes); attempted to catch the end of the Fed Hill run, but nobody was running back my way, so I detoured uphill through Mt. Vernon and back down dark scary Monument Street.

29 March: 6 miles (42 minutes) as a TNT "warmup" at APG. Another 9 miles (65 minutes) at TNT, including a set of 3x(4x(400 m fast, 200 m jog rest), 400 m jog rest), with 400s in 82, 83, 83, 84, 84, 84, 84, 84, 84, 82, 81, 76 (oops). Based on the last one, maybe should have been running the whole workout less conservatively.

30 March: 10 miles (72 minutes) at APG, including some stupid-silly off-trail steep-grade-in-the-woods running in honor of the upcoming Barkley Marathons, followed up by another 8 miles (58 minutes) with the Wednesday night Canton run crew.

31 March: 8 miles (55 minutes) on a run around Harford Community College that started like garbage but ended up fast.

1 April: More garbage? Split run, 7 miles (50 minutes) in the rainy, ambivalent morning gray in Fells, then 10 more miles (70 minutes) on a similar route in the evening, when it was slightly warmer and brighter. A few intermittent fast sections in there.

2 April: Long(ish) 120 minutes (conservatively, 16 miles) at Loch Raven, on trails. This was uncharacteristically beautiful and fun, in spite of the gray, spitting rain.

Total time: 700 minutes (exactly)
Total distance: 98 (inexactly)

I was not keeping very close track of my mileage during the week, but I felt like I was running a lot of miles. And now that I've actually bothered to add it up, apparently I was, coming very close to that magical 100-mile week mark.

So maybe some meditations on the 100-mile week are in order. On the one hand, when I stop to think about it (which I try not to do), it seems like an awful lot of running. On the other hand, when it comes time to actually do my run, once I get over the fear that this might be the run where I crash, it feels entirely natural to be in motion for an hour, or an hour and a half, or however long my run is supposed to be. And especially since this past Wednesday, running has felt very, very pleasant, normal, and even a little euphoric towards the end of each session. Maybe that's the magic of the 100-mile week - it's the threshold at which one more mile becomes more pleasure than pain. Or maybe it's just me.

Another thing about a 100-mile week is that it gives you a lot of time by yourself, with your thoughts (so hopefully they're not stupid and boring). I could also use this space to carry on about the thoughts I've had while running this past week, but it's getting late, and there's more running that needs to happen tomorrow, so, for now, I'll keep them to myself. But if one of them keeps on catching my fancy, I may just drop some science on that in a day or two. Until then, I'll keep on riding this wave and continue to hope that it never crashes.