Badwater Business

Now that the proverbial dust has settled from the initial "you got into Badwater!" excitement, it's down to business.  So, a few things:

1. Charity: This year, I'll be running to raise funds for G-PACT, at my little sister's request.  She's been dealing with gastroparesis for some time now, and it is, at the risk of sounding glib, no picnic (especially since picnics and other food-centric events become complicated when gastroparesis is involved).  The website is here: http://www.g-pact.org/ . . . and the Facebook page is here: http://www.facebook.com/#!/GPACT.  Check it out, and if you feel so motivated, make a donation, and let me know (or don't, although I would like to keep track if possible).  If you do let me know, same deal as last year; I'll write whatever you want on clothing that I wear during the race.  I'm thinking this year maybe arm sleeves or my hat, so that it's more visible in the photos. (Probably not as face or body paint, as that probably won't last 135 miles.)

2. Crew: I do like company when I run, and, in truth, it's difficult to cross a desert in July by yourself.  So I need a few support crew members to help me out.  Yes, I could just ask my entire crew from last year to come back, and I'm sure that they all would, and they would all be just as awesome as they were before.  But Badwater is too much awesome not to share, so I'd like to open it up to the general public and see what happens.  So send me an email, post on my Facebook wall, call me, text me, whatever creative way you want to contact me, and let me know why you'd like to crew for me at Badwater this year.  I'll leave the lines open until, oh, say, March 17th, and then make a decision based on what I've heard at that point.  Please keep in mind that this decision will likely be totally subjective and somewhat random, so no hurt feeings, okay?

3. Training: Oh, right, that thing. Last week, I ran 15 miles total on Sunday (including that awful, awful 10 miles at Club Challenge), 13 miles on Monday in two runs (5 at lunch, 8 in the evening), 8 miles on Tuesday in two runs (5.5 at lunch, 2.5 on a terrible, terrible windy cold rainy evening), took Wednesday and Thursday off, ran 4.5 miles on Friday, and 5.5 miles on Saturday.  46 miles total.

And that doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't, in terms of quantity, but, as it turned out, the run-on-sentence-before-last ended up being of much higher quality than its grammatical construction.

After Club Challenge catastrophe, and what was a struggle to make it to 13 miles the following day, Tuesday took a turn for the even-worse.  The night was cold, windy, and rainy like (in technical terms) WOAH.  My goal was 2 warm-up miles, 2x200 FAST, on full rest (~600m), and 2 warm-down miles.  The 2 warm-up miles on the track were at around 8:20/mile pace, with the wind blowing impossibly hard starting halfway on the second turn and all the way down the home straightaway.  The first 200 felt like it had to be fast, until I looked at my watch, and it said 37.  Dismayed, and dreading another 600m around the oval, I ran back and forth on the home straightaway until my 600m was up (at least the wind was predictable that way), and lined up for my second 200m.  In spite of the wind assist, and my resolve to run faster than before, this time, my watch said 38.  And that was enough.  I jogged off the track, cold and defeated, and went home.

Two days off later, I went for a half-hour run around Patterson Park.  Granted, the weather was a lot nicer, but my expectations were still fairly low.  To my pleasant surprise, I completed the entire 2-mile loop of the park in exactly 14 minutes, not feeling as though I had pushed hard or was in any particular distress, then proceeded to run Butcher's Hill on the Baltimore Street side of the park, bottom to top, in 3:13, again, in no particular distress.  To put that in perspective, the hill is 30-40 meters shy of half a mile, and rises a little over 90 feet.  I finished the half-hour feeling as though I could put in two or three more half-hours like that.

I felt similarly good on Saturday, so, fingers crossed, this trend will continue.  I'm going to continue to be cautiously optimistic, the way I was in early 2011, when I came back from a stress fracture in December to run 2:49:33 at the Boston Marathon in April.  I'm sure that there will be ups and downs between now and July, and there will be plenty more foul weather to tough out.  But I do feel as though I've turned a corner, hopefully for real this time, and I'm excited about my training in the weeks and months ahead.

So if there is a mini-moral here (and I feel as though this has to end with something of the sort), it's that the focus for now needs process and the effort, and not the final goal.  135 miles is a long way, and it's still a long way off.  So far, focusing on the process, and making gradual gains, seems to be working.  Expect to see more of this, and maybe some cat or Baltimore-street-vagrant stories, which are inevitably part of the process, next week . . .