Week in Review - 7-13 August 2011, and Semi-Shabbat Run Recap

It's that compelling list of numbers you've all been waiting for:

Sunday: 5 miles (35 minutes) on the east side, starting at 0630, then another 10 miles (70 minutes) after church on the west side

Monday: 15 miles (105 minutes) out to the Fed Hill Monday Night Run and back. Some of this was at upwards of low-to-mid 6-minute mile pace

Tuesday: 4 miles of treadmill hills (35 minutes, 1532 feet of gain), then drive to the Gilman Track for 2 miles of warmup, 5x300m @ 58 seconds (100m walk rest), 400m jog, 1x1100 (supposed to be 1500, but wasn't going well, so I stopped with a lap to go), 4 miles of barefoot running around the track, 2 more miles of warmdown (entire workout: about 60 minutes), then one more mile before bed for good measure (10 minutes)

Wednesday: Slow, lazy 2 miles (20 minutes)

Thursday: 4 miles of treadmill hills (35 minutes, 1615 feet of gain), then 15 miles around the Canton/Fells/Inner Harbor/Fed Hill area (105 minutes)

Friday: 8 miles (60 minutes) in the general vicinity of the Hopkins Homewood campus - feeling "whatever" about this, so I cut it short.

Saturday: 17 miles (120 minutes) out to Essex and back via Eastern Avenue, with detours of arbitrary interest thrown in here and there. Followed up with a very late night 9 miles (65 minutes) in a light rain around Canton/Fells/Inner Harbor.

Total Time: 720 minutes
Total Distance: 100 miles

In my last "real" week before Beast of Burden, I made it to 100 miles, although not without some figurative kicking and screaming. The last 9 miles were technically completed early Sunday morning, but since I was running from a little after 5 a.m. to a little after 6 a.m., and I didn't start logging miles for this week until 0630 on Sunday, this was technically within the 1-week window, and since 100-mile weeks are nothing if not a technicality, I'm counting it. (I ended up running another 4 miles later on Sunday, which will count towards this coming week.)

Of course, all of that obscures the real story, which is the 127-mile 7-day period from the previous Wednesday to the Tuesday described above. This was not at all on purpose, and it was only when I seemed to be tanking on Tuesday that I took a minute to count the miles, and realized that my volume was way over the top. This is the biggest 7-day period I've ever run that didn't include a race longer than 50K. The ragged last few days of this week are a testament to the aftermath of that, but I guess that's what happens when the dividing line between calendar weeks in no way constitutes a line of symmetry for your training.

Now, not that every run isn't an adventure in its own right, but seeing as to how, for the last couple of weeks, I've had a race on Saturday to carry on about ad nauseam on here, I needed to do something just for fun this week, not just for the sake of the blog (not hardly, really), but also (and mostly) to keep things fresh. I batted around a bunch of ideas, but when Saturday came around, the thing that made the most sense was a sort of running shabbat (thanks, Tel Aviv, for this great idea). Or, I would do whatever I wanted to do all day, run whenever I wanted, whatever I wanted, feel comfortable, and stop when I felt like I had enough.

So, in that spirit, I sat around for most of Saturday, eating cereal and watching King of the Hill and a documentary on the JFK assassination on Netflix. I listed to vicious thunderstorms pound on my skylights all afternoon. Finally, at around 7:30 p.m. (oddly enough, nearing sundown), I decided that it was time, and I headed off down Eastern Avenue, towards Essex.

The direction and destination of travel are relevant here, because they hearken back to the fall of 2008, just after I had met my former girlfriend and fiancee. Earlier this week, we broke up, and in some ways, it's been like a return to that fall (albeit a month early). There was a lot of beauty in that fall, and there was a lot of beauty in this running route, which I discovered that fall, and which I re-lived this weekend. For those of you who insist that beauty while running can be found only on a trail, I submit the following, taken on the bridge to Essex on Eastern Avenue:



Admittedly, man-made mayhem (such as this car crash that I saw on the way back) is a constant environmental hazard:



But man also makes some pretty cool stuff, like this fountain (be patient, and watch the whole thing, or skip to about 20 seconds in if you can't . . .):



So in the end, beauty is where you find it, but in order to find things, you have to look for them. You don't have to do much looking on the trail to find what typically passes for beauty. But in the city, you have to be open and adventurous and aware, because, for the most part, beauty doesn't just come up and smack you in the face (unless you consider being mugged a beautiful thing).

And sometimes, if you're looking hard enough, you find some really amazing stuff, like this mix CD I found on the run, containing, among its 18 unique tracks, "The Seed" (The Roots/Cody Chesnutt), "Sell Out" (Reel Big Fish), and "Otherside" (Red Hot Chili Peppers), twice:



Upon a few more runs through, I am now at least momentarily infatuated with Rise Against. :P

All things considered, it was a good run (both the literal one described above, and the relationship), and it's always sad when these things are relegated to memories. But then again, memories serve a purpose, too, and sometimes, that's where things need to be. Time to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and embrace whatever may come. :)

Week in Review: 31 July - 6 August, and Dahlgren Heritage Rail Trail 50K Race Report

Okay, the numbers:

31 July - 13 miles (95 minutes), in the evening, Patterson Park/Canton/Fells/Fed Hill. (Was only planning on doing 10 miles, but felt oddly fine, so I went a little longer . . .)

1 August - 4 miles (30 minutes), at APG (lazy lazy)

2 August - 1 mile (10 minutes), at APG (super lazy)

3 August - Treadmill hill workout - 1698 feet of climb in 4 miles (35 minutes), plus 1 mile total warmup/warmdown (10 minutes), followed up a few hours later with 15 miles (105 minutes) around Baltimore City, in circles that seemed endless, except for the parts where I sped up to chase down other runners (ad hoc speedwork?).

4 August - 5 miles easy (35 minutes) from SURVICE Engineering, Belcamp on my lunch break, 15 more easy miles in the evening around Baltimore City (105 minutes)

5 August - 10 miles (70 minutes) around White Marsh Mall, plus, I found a really awesome power line cut:



6 August - 32 (?) miles (50K plus a little), Dahlgren Heritage Rail Trail 50K, 4 hours, 10 minutes, some-odd seconds (250 minutes), 6th place overall.

Total Time: 735 minutes
Total Distance: 100 miles

Okay, now the race report:

"Fresh" off of last week's 6-hour run adventure in Astoria Park, I found, after a few low-mileage days this week rid me of the delayed-onset soreness in my quads, that the wanderlust had me again. So I hit up the trusty ultrarunning.com website for suggestions for the weekend, and lo and behold, the system works: Dahlgren Heritage Rail Trail 50K. Although there was some indication that the terrain was iffy, at least it would be flat (on account of being a rail trail), and perhaps a chance to re-PR this year at 50K (my previous best being the 4:19 that I ran at Seneca Greenway in early March). Maybe even (dare I say it) a chance to pull out a win - although 50K isn't my strongest ultra-distance, the fact that the course was relatively flat, and the course record, at a shade over 3:50, relatively "soft," meant that barring some superhuman competition coming out of nowhere, I would be in the mix for one of the top spots. The promise of a barbecue after the race was enticing, too. :) Anyway, all good enough for me to get up at 3 in the morning and make the 2-ish hour drive down to Dahlgren and the Caledonia Nature Zone, or whatever they call it. (If nothing else, the early-awake thing was good for randomly running into a lost cat outside my house, which rubbed up against my leg and emitted the most well-enunciated "meow" that I've ever heard a cat make. Delightful. :) )

I was first in line for race-day sign-up, and was pleasantly surprised to see how organized their operation was. After a briefing at 6 a.m. that warned us of the "bullet impact zone" on the western out-and-back, we all milled about uncomfortably for about 15 minutes until it was time to line up and wait for the gun.

The gun went off, and I went out slightly in the lead. My legs were feeling surprisingly okay, considering that I had run 50 miles in the past three days, a substantial portion of which was not particularly slow, so I hung on where I was across the field, out to the road, and down the steep hill to the rail trail. I bombed down the short single-track stretch so fast that even though I had clearly turned in the direction of the arrow, I put so much distance on the pack so quickly that I wasn't hearing footsteps, and was temporarily concerned that somehow I was running the wrong way. A quick turn of the head confirmed that there were a few other runners hard-charging after me, so I thought it best to turn around, keep sipping my Gatorade and downing my Endurolytes, and concentrating on running strong on the sloppy terrain.

It is at this point that I should mention that, on paper, this is a PR course, because it is so flat. In practice, this is no NCR Trail - it's ragged, littered with gravel, rocks, downed branches, all on a sandy bed. Nice cushioning, but not exactly built for speed. It takes a fair amount of concentration to achieve road-like speeds on a surface like this, which, except for maybe a mile total (intermittent throughout the race), never lets up. So, in all fairness, this really is a trail race (unlike races on the NCR . . .)

I reached the eastern turn-around in the lead, with runners gunning hard just behind me, but I managed to maintain through the next aid station, at around 7 miles. When I stopped to fill my bottle, one guy passed me, then another, and another . . . For whatever reason, I was hitting a rough patch, and struggling to keep my pace. I put my head down and soldiered forward, and, to my surprise, I pushed through, and by the time we were about three miles into the western turn-around, I was back up with the leaders, and feeling somewhat better. We made the climb up the single-track re-routing around the gun club (which seemed pointless at the time, but was a nice break for the muscles that were handling the brunt of the work for the majority of the race), and down the gravel road back onto the trail, and continued towards the western turn-around point.

It was somewhere about 3 miles from the western turn-around that thing started to fall apart. The fatigue from the past three days of heavy volume, the humid heat (80-ish degrees, 75% humidity), and the ragged terrain turned my stride from smooth to struggle. Four people passed me. Now in fifth place, I did what I did the last time that this happened: I soldiered ahead, albeit at a slower pace, and concentrated on nutrition/hydration. At about a mile from the turnaround, I stopped losing ground at an alarming rate, but I came into the turnaround feeling wrecked, and concerned about the 11 or 12 miles that I still had to run to complete the race. I took about a minute at the aid station to eat half of a banana, drink some Coke, and generally collect myself before I started walking from the aid station back down the trail. After about 5 minutes of walking, I decided that this was no way to end the ordeal quickly, so I began to run again. After a while, I slowed to a walk for another couple of minutes, and that was when Karsten Brown caught me. Sixth place now, but determined not to throw in the towel, I kept pushing forward, with the occasional walk break, but I limited myself to a minute or two, except for the climb around the gun club, which was now alive with the sound of shooting. Bullet impact area, indeed - fortunately, no impact on me.

This continued for a while, until the end of the race. Okay, that sounds stupid, but seriously, in the last five miles, my legs were tired - not so tired that I couldn't run, but tired enough that I felt like I didn't have the extra gear that I needed to mount a chase. I still managed a finishing "sprint" for show, crossing the line in just over 4 hours and 10 minutes, with Paul Jacobs less than a minute behind me, although I had no idea at the time (had I known, perhaps I would have tried to make the latter portion of the race less lazy). For my efforts, I got a glass imprinted with the race logo, for alcoholic beverages (probably), and the option to swap out my green t-shirt for a purple 2011 t-shirt (which I exercised). Oh right, and there was a barbecue, but it was hard to enjoy, because with all of the Gatorade, Coke, bananas, and Endurolytes, combined with the humidity, killed my appetite. So I mostly sat there with Chris Avedissian, a friend who had come out to the race, talking about nothing in particular and greeting the other finishers as they stumbled in to Shelter A. After far too many hours of that (when I left, the clock was at 7:30; the race time limit was 8 hours), I packed up what little there was to pack up, and went home.

Overall, I'm pleased with my effort. Since the "soft" in the course record turned out to be more in the trail surface itself than the time, I didn't feel too bad about my finish (hey, it was a PR), although I did feel a little bad when it turned out that the winner was "only" about 15 minutes ahead of me, and third place was just a few seconds under 4 hours. Considering that the last 3 miles took me about half an hour for no good reason (other than being tired and adopting a "training run" mentality at that point), that was 6 minutes lost right there. At any rate, for last-minute, un-tapered effort, it was another good call, another good training run, another fun adventure, and . . . another pile of swag: :)

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 . . .

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.

Winning and Losing

(I will explain the above image later, unless in the interim, somebody explains to me how to force this thing to put an image in the middle of a post. While you're at it, feel free to explain how putting a carriage return in the "Edit Html" window, without any change to the markup, creates a space between paragraphs, while doing the same thing in the "Compose" window does not.)

Welcome to another in a sporadic series of blog posts that don't consist entirely of times and distances run, or race reports. With these posts, I will try to stay out of the realm of the vast majority of content on the internet today, which seems to be divided between thinly veiled cries for attention, and expressions of cravings for various food and drink.

That said, with Charlie Sheen in the news so much lately, and with so much time for me to think about things when I'm running (particularly when I'm spontaneously running around Baltimore City at 3 a.m. on a decidedly dead real Mardi Gras, unlike the fake Mardi Gras this past Saturday night, which included some of the drunkenest mayhem the city has ever seen), every now and then, I find myself ruminating on something besides what the homeless man that I just passed was mumbling in my direction. In this case, I'm thinking about winning, and its less-popular, but often more fun counterpart, losing.

What is winning, really? In a lot of races, you can finish first, thereby "winning," but run a weak time. How valid is this sort of victory? Conversely, in lots of races, you can finish far back in the pack, but shatter a personal record. Is this "losing"?

After some thought, probably while running across the top of Federal Hill and staring vacantly at downtown, I decided that "winning" is when (because this really is time-dependent) a person, putting forth a directed best effort, achieves a goal that is both desirable to the person, as well as people within that person's circle of relevance. "Losing," on the other hand, is when a person, for any number of reasons, fails to put forth a directed best effort, and in so doing, compromises progress towards a goal that is desirable to that person, as well as people within that person's circle of relevance.

You're probably waiting for something to make that more concrete. So was I, and then I happened upon the mangled metal that you saw at the beginning of this post. And I thought, "who is winning?"

It might seem obvious that the owner of the offending vehicle (I'm guessing the ridiculous SUV with the ridiculous Virginia Tech sticker on the back, although how this accident could have occurred is still a mystery to me) is "losing." Who really wants his car (even if it is a Toyota 4Runner) all smashed up? But perhaps the owner of the car loves to smash cars (or perhaps drink or do drugs, if such things were involved in the accident). Perhaps those around the owner of the car share his interests. In that case, this is a massive win for the driver, because that is some of the better car accident debris that I've seen, especially considering that the accident probably happened at a relatively low speed on city surface streets.

Turning the camera around, was I "winning"? In my quest to maximize my running potential, this random late-night 15-mile run, on a sick stomach and only a few hours of sleep, is textbook ultrarunning conditions, and cranking out low-7-minute-miles under these conditions is a huge confidence boost, even if the fitness benefit is debatable. To people who care about that (me included), that's winning. But at the same time, there are many people out there who would question why I might endanger life and limb and endure such conditions, when at that hour, a more "normal" person would be at home sleeping, or engaging in some other, more desirable activity. The idea that either I have no alternative, or, more to the point, I would choose this alternative, casts this as "losing."

In the end, "winning" and "losing" are relative, transient states, each a function of variation in our individual goals, efforts, and circles of people that matter to us. Are you winning? Are you losing? Only you can truly decide that.

(Also, CAR CRASH.)