Race Report: 2012 Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run, and 2012 Bel Air Town Run 5K

At long last, time out from lugging heavy bags through many airports (one of which was Cleveland Hopkins - can't seem to get away from that place) to write about round 2 of my Old Dominion/Bel Air Town Run double.  For those who missed the first round, refer to this: http://tokenrunningblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/week-in-review-29-may-4-june-and-old.html.

Why do it again?  Well, besides feeling as though I could better last year's performance, and the training benefits, this year was to be a "reunion" of sorts.  I ran my first Old Dominion 100 back in 2008, after Collin Anderson talked me into it, with Chris Avedissian crewing for us.  It was only my second 100-mile race, and the race where I met Dave Snipes.  To make a long story short, I endured brutal heat, got lost a few times, including in the last three miles, but managed to sneak in under 24 hours, totally spent.  (It was even more epic than that sentence suggested, but that's not the point here.)

Fast-forward four years, and Collin, who now lives in Utah, was coming out to run Old Dominion again, Chris was coming up from Georgia to crew, and of course, Snipes was going to be there.  Between that, and the tradition of the Bel Air Town Run (shooting for 17 consecutive finishes there), I was excited to continue a weekend of running tradition.

In the week leading up to this ridiculous double, though, my body was less excited.  I felt crummy just about every day, on every run, and I was glad that I was limiting myself to 5 or 6 miles a day, because my body wasn't having much more than that, anyway.  Wednesday midnight Collin pickup antics at BWI (with the cops aggressively forcing cars through that weren't actively picking people up), followed by an epically long last day at work on Thursday, with two late nights with my girlfriend thrown in there, and things leading up to the race weren't particularly restful.

Still, on Friday, Collin and I managed to leave Baltimore around noon, in plenty of time to stop by Whole Foods for his $7.00/gallon chocolate milk ($5.00 for the milk, plus a $2.00 bottle deposit), without any sort of scramble to get on the road, and the 2+ drive via Route 70 and Route 81 was mostly uneventful . . . except for the part where my "crew" sent me a text, around 3 pm, saying that he wasn't going to show up.  Considering that this race uses Succeed electrolyte drink, and my fueling strategy lately depends heavily on Gatorade, this was a potentially serious problem.  Fortunately, it was enough notice for me to stop at the Food Lion to pick up Gatorade and Zip-Lock bags to make drop bags, and to stop at Arby's for dinner.

With drop bags distributed, and the pre-race meeting underway, I was feeling a little better about things.  I calmly ate my Arby's roast beef and cheddar and curly fries with hummus that I had bought at Whole Foods while the race director went through the standard litany of cautions and informations (perhaps most amusing of which was NOT to call 911 at any point during the race, because three counties will show up and there will be a huge mess).  The meeting was over in less than an hour, which gave us plenty of time to organize our things for race day, set up sleeping space in the barn, and hang out with Meg and Charles, who were there to volunteer/crew.  The rain came, as predicted, but was over by 9 pm, leaving behind this rainbow:

Left to right, Collin (in the barn), Charles, Meg, and Lynne, demonstrating a 75% rate of marveling at the double-rainbow.

In other pre-race silliness, in a video that needs no further explanation, Collin was tending to other things:



It turned out that only four of us (Collin, Meg, Charles, and me) were sleeping in the barn - far less than usual, and since we were sort of our own quasi-cohesive group, we could make group decisions such as "turning all the lights off" and "not making lots of noise during the night" so that we could all get some sleep.  We all went to bed a little after 9 pm, and, besides a brief bathroom break at around 1 am, I slept soundly, arguably some of the best sleep that I had all week.

We didn't really need alarms, because shortly after 3 am, people started entering the barn and checking in.  Since everything had been piled neatly the night before, there was no "scramble to get my stuff together" fiasco, and I had plenty of time to put on clothes, A&D ointment (except on my nipples - oops), and eat potato chips before the start of the race.

After a brief prayer, as is custom at the race, we were off for our lap around the fairgrounds, with little fanfare.  Although I had weighed in sort of heavy (138 lbs), I was feeling relatively light and springy, considering that it was 4 am, and compared to how I had been feeling all last week.  I led the charge, with another two runners nearby, and this neck-and-neck race continued through town and up most of the climb on Woodstock Tower Road.  It might be sort of silly to run up this, but it is a "road-grade" climb, and I ran up it last year, so, whatever, I ran up it, and dropped one runner, but the other runner, Oliver Leblond, continued to chase me, and, from the sound of it, he was chasing hard.  We crested the climb and I started bombing down the other side, and he continued the chase.  I wasn't sure how long he could keep this up (I had never run with him before), but it was going to be an interesting race . . .

Especially since at this point, disaster almost struck.  At the bottom of the hill, we reached Boyer, where we were directed to "go up the road, make a left onto the trail, run the trail loop, and come back to the aid station."  My memories of the early parts of the race are fuzzy, so as we ran down the road, and it got to be a few more minutes without a marker than were comfortable, the thought occurred to us that we might have been going the wrong way.  But I spotted an orange flag, so we continued up the road, and eventually, we found a double-orange flag that signaled the trail turn-off.  We climbed the winding, technical trail, only to discover, in horror, three runners coming TOWARDS us . . . they had thought they were the leaders, because they were breaking cobwebs.  Oliver was confused, but I immediately realized that, since there were no arrows on the ground, we had mistakenly entered the loop where we were supposed to exit, and were now running the loop backwards.  Panic set in - would we have to re-run the loop?

In any case, it made sense to finish out the loop, since if we had to re-run it, we would have to go back to where we got off course (which was the entrance to the loop).  After lots of reassuring oncoming runners that they were going the right way, we made it back to Boyer, where Ray, the race director, was sitting on his truck, directing us left.  Oliver talked to him, and he let us continue, since we had run the same distance, and correctly followed the ambiguous directions (we were technically not wrong, since there were no arrows indicating the direction of the loop; there were, however, arrows throughout the rest of the course, painted on the ground).  I imagine that they will paint arrows on the ground on this part of the course next year.

At any rate, with that minor catastrophe resolved, we ran together to the first crew stop, where Chris was waiting for me.  My bottles were empty, and somehow, my drop bag hadn't made it there - minor catastrophe #2.  Fortunately, Chris Wilde, a runner from Baltimore who was crewing another runner, had a jug of blue Gatorade that he was willing to share, so I was able to leave the aid station with one bottle of Gatorade, and one bottle of gross Succeed drink (which I eventually dumped).  Half a banana and some Coke later, I was heading down the road.

For the next 13 or so miles of road, Oliver and I ran closely together.  Sometimes he would get ahead, and then I would catch up (at one point, he ran off the road, distracted by extraneous orange flags on somebody's property, which led him partway up a grassy hill), but he was starting to put distance on my by pretty much blowing through the aid stations, while I was taking a minute or so to drink a Coke and/or eat a few banana chunks.  I was feeling good on this fueling strategy, and reasoned that he couldn't possibly keep skipping the aid without crashing.  Plus, this was apparently his first 100-mile race (or so he said, in some sort of accent), and he was running with me because he was "crazy."

As I neared Four Points, at around 33 miles, Oliver had pulled out of sight, and now, entering one of the more difficult sections of the race, I had to decide how hard to push.  Ultimately, I decided that with about 2/3rds of the race left to run, it would probably be better to run a little conservatively, in the hopes that Oliver would blow up.  I ran so conservatively here, in fact, that the third-place runner, Mike Mason, briefly caught and passed me at around mile 44, on the gravel road back to Four Points.  Fortunately, I gambled that he was running too hard too early, and that the tougher stuff ahead (particularly the ATV trail) would get the best of him, and I won that round . . . eventually, coming downhill on the ATV trail, I passed him.  But on the return to Four Points, Carter (who had taped my bleeding nipples on the way out) commented that I had slowed down, and seemed concerned (although I wasn't too concerned), and nobody was talking about where the leader was, so I got the feeling that people were thinking that he was totally out of reach.

And so it went for the rest of the race.  I stuck with my Gatorade/Coke/bananas fueling strategy, and kept plugging along - the temperatures never got much about 75 degrees, and with the shade and the breeze, the conditions were very forgiving (which may have inadvertently made Oliver's race strategy a good one - going out too hard in the typical Old Dominion heat tends to be a recipe for disaster).  I felt pretty good the whole way, but I never had any indication of how far ahead Oliver was, and, in retrospect, maybe I should have asked.  Because by the time curiosity got the better of me (just past mile 90), it turned out that he was about 15 minutes ahead - apparently I had been shrinking his half-hour gap for a while.  I charged as hard as I could in the last 9 miles, but it was too little, too late - in town, with about a mile and a half to go, I saw the lead Jeep coming at me, and I knew that he had finished.  So I slowed down and pretty much walked the rest of the race, costing me about 15 minutes on my finishing time, but since I was solidly in second place, I wasn't terribly concerned (room for improvement next year, right?)

Chris and Henry were the only people waiting for me at the still-darkening finish line.  Chris took pictures of me (I'm sure my nipple-bleed looked great), and Henry recorded my time:

Old-school Old Dominion Results Sheet

17 hours, 46 minutes, 58 seconds later, I was finished, and shortly afterwards, I was on the road back to Baltimore.  The intermission between races at my girlfriend's apartment is worth mentioning:  I drove back in the clothes that I wore during the race, nipple-bleed on my shirt, number still pinned to my shorts.  She lives just up the street from a club in downtown Baltimore, so on a Saturday night, parking is scarce, and I was forced to park about three blocks away from her apartment. Just as I was parking, the police arrived and began clearing the club, due to some sort of physical altercation on the premises, so I was walking towards a parade of evacuated clubgoers in my gross running clothes.  You would think that the first thing somebody would have commented on was my nipple bleed, but it was actually the second - the first comment was from a guy who said "dang, you been running?"  I smiled and said, "yeah, a little bit."  But the height of this experience was when two police officers stopped me a block away from my destination and said "are your nipples bleeding, sir?"  I explained that I had been running and that it was no big deal, and once they were satisfied that I was not injured in the club brawl, they let me go.  (And things like this are why I do things like that.)

And . . . on to Act 2, the Bel Air Town Run.  Last year, I was pretty much crippled, and it took me over 25 minutes to finish the run, but the important thing was the finish.  This year, I finished Old Dominion nearly 2 hours faster, and felt better after the race, so I figured I could at least go slightly faster than last year.  I had a nice little "reunion" prior to the race with my family (all of whom came out to watch), and some friends from high school (Pete DeCapite and Patrick Early), which helped me feel a little less terrible about three more miles under these conditions.

The weather remained cooperative, though, and I optimistically lined up near the front of the pack, to discover that once the race started, my legs loosened up, and I was running reasonably fast (albeit not entirely comfortably).  I went through the first (downhill? short?) mile in 6:58, according to the clock on the course, and was not feeling as though I had totally spent myself, so I just went with it, kept passing the people in front of me, and, in what seemed like a comically short amount of time after 17+ hours of rugged trail running, I was at the finish line, 21 minutes and 47 seconds later:

Snuck through the crowd and snapped a picture of the results.

The "after-party" at the Town Run was better still - it seemed like everywhere I turned, somebody I knew was there hanging out, wanting to talk about running (including Brien Christesen, another friend from high school, with his wife and children). It was sort of surreal, since so many years have passed since high school, but being back there, where the Town Run has been every year, made things feel, in an odd way, like they hadn't changed at all.

And speaking of "not changing," we all waited patiently through the traditional long age-group awards, and then the more-to-the-point overall awards for the bike raffle, and, for the 17th consecutive year, I did not win the bike.  Oh well, better luck next year.  Then it was back to my parents' house for shower, food, and a ride to the airport, so I can spend two weeks at Fort Leavenworth learning about . . . um, something, I forget.  I hope there are good places to run here!

All in all, a satisfying weekend of upholding running traditions, making new memories, and, in some cases, squeezing Hi-C boxes into empty gallon jugs of water.  And I don't feel cripplingly bad . . . maybe I'll continue a tradition, and go running again today. :)

The Eagle Has Landed: Eagle 100-Mile Endurance Run Preview

For what will probably be my last major "adventure" of 2011, this Saturday (December 17th), starting at 5 a.m., I'll be running an all-new 100-mile race, mapped, organized, and directed by Dave Snipes, with a modest amount of input from me. This course takes parts of The Ring, the Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run, the Massanutten Mountain Trails 100-Mile Run, and some fun new surprises (some of which I am forbidden from posting pictures of here), and remixes them all at the very end of the year, far away from all of those races, to present what will hopefully be an exciting new challenge for runners and the foolhardy alike.

This will be a limited-entry pilot test of this course, and if it turns out awesome, who knows how high this eagle will fly next year. But for now, here are a few preview pictures from the course-marking expedition that I participated in a couple of weeks ago . . . Enjoy!


The first image in this blog entry because it's arguably the coolest, but in the race, it's the last thing you'll see . . .


Rocks coming down . . .


Rocks going up.


If you can't see the course markings, you probably shouldn't run this race.


Look familiar?

Fear and Laziness

While my memories of a race are usually freshest within 24 hours of the event (hence the updates like clockwork), my reflections on the experience are usually deepest a few days afterwards. And in some cases, they don't really sink in until years later. This is one of those . . .

When I was doing my "massive" two-week buildup for Rocky Raccoon in 2009 (which, after a weak attempt at a 30+ mile run, consisted of a 20-mile long run, and 800-meter intervals every other day), I was cooling down in Mount Vernon (Baltimore) after one of my silly 800-meter interval sessions when I saw, spray-painted on the side of a truck: "The only things preventing anybody from doing anything are fear and laziness.". At the time, this seemed insightful enough, especially given the undertrained effort I was about to put forth at Rocky Raccoon (which was still good enough for a sub-19-hour finish, and top 10 overall).

But after my Old Dominion 100-Mile/Bel Air Town Run double this past weekend, the words don't sit the same way in my mind. To do the double was weird, no doubt, but on a more basic level, it was scary. These were both important races to me, and I needed to run strong in both to be satisfied with my effort. Who knows what could have happened that could have derailed this effort?

At the same time, those thoughts are thoughts that are rooted in fear and laziness. Obviously fear, but indirectly laziness, too. Because really, fear and laziness aren't all that distant. We are often afraid of things because we're too lazy to prepare properly to face them. And we are often too "lazy" to prepare properly to face things because we are afraid of what putting out the proper effort might involve.

In a way, what I did this past weekend, and what ultrarunning is at its core, is only possible by conquering fear and laziness. To be successful as an ultrarunner, you have to build more than just muscles and capillaries and cardiac efficiency. You have to also build willpower, determination, self-sufficiency, and, above all, the vaguely romantic sense of awe and wonder at the thought of spending hours and hours running on rocky trails through the woods, and hot, shadeless roads, to find out how it feels, to find out what will happen, to find out if you could. Fear and laziness are the enemy.

In that spirit, I went running earlier tonight, to see if I could, and managed a little over four miles, at a little over 8-minute mile pace. And it was good. Fear and laziness? Not here - they're on a different sort of run.

Week in Review: 29 May-4 June, and Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run and Bel Air Town Run 5K Report

Same ol' drill; first the miles, then the race report:

29 May - 1 mile (10 minutes)
30 May - 10 miles (75 minutes), around the Harbor - hot.
31 May - 9 miles - 6 in the morning, another 3 in the afternoon, including a 15-minute treadmill hill session. (95 minutes)
1 June - 8 miles, from O'Donnell Square (60 minutes)
2 June - 1 mile (10 minutes)
3 June - 1 mile (10 minutes)
4 June - 100 miles, Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run, 19 hours, 14 minutes, 30 seconds

Total Time: 1415 minutes
Total Distance: 130 miles

Now, the race reports:

First, a little background. When I ran the Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run back in 2008, I was able to run both Old Dominion and the Bel Air Town Run 5K because, in a relatively rare turn of events, the first Saturday in June and the first Sunday in June were not on the same weekend. Collin Anderson, who had put me up to Old Dominion in the first place, had said at the time (before I had checked to see if there was a conflict) that I should just run both races, thereby keeping my Bel Air Town Run streak alive. The more I thought about this, the more I thought I'd want to try it some year. This, apparently, was the right year.

First up, the Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run. This was the first time that I'd run the same 100-mile race more than once. Despite knowing the course, I didn't know was how the race would turn out. As I mentioned in my last post, my training runs over the past couple of week have been shorter and more painful than I would like, which was either a sign that I needed some extended downtime, or that I had just hit a low point in my training cycle, and was on the road to recovery.

In any case, since I knew that the race would be stacked (70 entrants, up from about 40 in 2008, and the list being a bit of an ultrarunning who's who . . . of course, they don't post the entrants list online, so the best information that I had was through the grapevine: http://nealgorman.blogspot.com/2011/05/deep-field-at-old-dominion-100.html), my plan was to go out aggressively, but not totally kill myself, and hold on the best I could.

This plan worked very well for about the first 30 miles, as I was relatively comfortably leading the race. I was climbing well (I actually ran all the way up Woodstock Gap, without feeling over-exerted), attacking the downhills, and generally feeling strong. Then, nutrition caught up with me. Old Dominion is very old-school when it comes to aid stations, so most of the food, aside from bananas and oranges, was sugary-fatty (Snickers bars, cookies, etc.), and my poor digestive system couldn't handle that much fat, sitting there, most likely getting rancid. So I started slowing, from my relatively breakneck pace that put me through the first marathon in around 3:40 pace, and people started to catch me. First Neal Gorman and Eric Grossman (running together at the time), then a couple others, and before I knew it, I reached Four Points (around 32.5 miles) in fifth.

Over the long loop out from Four Points and back in, things got worse. It was starting to get hotter, and I had no desire to eat or drink, and my stomach was churning. I continued to press forward, but at a slower pace, jogging a lot less and walking a lot more. The end result was that I reached Four Points again, 15 miles later, probably looking okay on the outside, but barely hanging on on the inside.

Still, I remained patient, knowing that the dreaded exposed, rutted, ATV-ridden "ATV trail" was the next section of the course. I wasn't moving forward as well as I would have liked, but I kept moving forward, somehow in fourth place. It was somewhere along the ATV trail that Jeremy Pade passed me, relegating me to fifth place (spoiler: where I would remain for the rest of the race).

From then on, the rest of the race was less of a race than a war of attrition, which, in the end, most 100-mile runs turn out to be. I navigated the dreaded 11-mile Sherman's Gap/Veach Gap section in around 3 hours (starting a new tradition by shouting "911" from the top of Sherman's Gap), and kept a fairly steady (albeit slow) pace from there to the finish. My stomach never felt better enough, and my food never digested enough, for me to move much faster, which was a shame, because I still had legs left at the end, enough to run down Woodstock Gap into town (where a woman standing outside her house asked where I got my headlamp, because it was really bright, and then asked if she could have it for walking at night . . . bizarre.) As it turned out, Keith Knipling finished about 10 minutes behind me, which meant that he had been chasing me for the better part of the second half of the race, without my knowledge.

If all of the above sounds a little more mundane than usual, it was. Other than my stomach problems, I didn't have any problems with chafing, or blisters, or any of those other ultrarunning nuisances that can ruin a race. For me, Old Dominion was about continued forward progress, even as my pace slowed, and at this race, more than at any other, I successfully worked the "dogged persistence" angle. It helped to have a crew out there, because nobody wants to crew for somebody who's having a crummy race (and, on the flip side, people like to crew for somebody who's doing awesome), and it also helped that if I didn't finish the race in a timely fashion (i.e. before midnight, or sub-20-hours), it would be much more difficult to make the 3-hour drive back up to Bel Air for the Town Run in the morning.

The bottom line was that I finished in 19 hours, 14 minutes, and 30 seconds, which would have been good enough to win the race many years, but this year, was only good enough for fifth (the place that I can't seem to get above in ultras - I've also placed fifth twice at the Seneca Greenway 50K). I was pleased with my effort, but had my nutrition been a little better, up to two hours improvement in my finishing time seems plausible.

In any event, water under the bridge, because the Bel Air Town Run 5K (my 16th consecutive Bel Air Town Run) was at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, so I had about 8 hours after finishing my 100-mile run to get myself together for that. I can honestly say that I've never stood at the starting line of a race more afraid than I did at that run. I had no idea how my legs would respond. I walked around with my dad for about 15 minutes before the race to loosen up, and it was clear that I could walk, but this is the Bel Air Town RUN. As much as I wanted to keep my completion streak alive, I didn't want to have to resort to walking to do it, and I hadn't run a step since I finished Old Dominion, so there was no telling what would happen. My legs might just seize up, I might trip and fall and not finish the race.

For the first time ever, I started so far back that I couldn't hear the starting commands, so at a random gunshot, the pack lurched forward, and I began to desperately hope that I could keep up. So I took my first running steps, and - surprise! It hurt, but not as bad as I thought it would. Pretty soon, I was tucked in the crowd, running what would turn out to be about a 9-minute first mile. In fact, that first mile felt very cleansing. For the first time since things went south at Old Dominion, I was moving forward at a decent pace, without expending a lot of effort. It was, I imagine, the kind of pace I could have maintained at Old Dominion had my stomach not betrayed me.

Since the first mile felt okay, I started gradually picking up the pace, and came through the second mile in just over 17 minutes - an 8-minute mile. So I figured, why not? and ratcheted things up one more time, running the last mile at around 7-minute pace. It hurt, a little bit, but not much worse than it would have hurt had I been running on fresh legs at race pace. I crossed the line in 25:17 net (26:00 gun), which was a huge relief, since I was concerned that I would run over 30 minutes and be one of the last people staggering towards the finish. I stayed around for the post-race awards, and sadly, still did not win the bike, but nevertheless had the distinction of having bib number 999.

All in all, mission more than accomplished. While not optimal, I ran a strong race at Old Dominion, and I didn't run too badly at Bel Air. Provided that I recover quickly from this epic misadventure (which, at some point, will require having an appetite for some kind of nourishing food), this weekend's result indicates that I'm on track to do well at Badwater.

Week in Review: 22-28 May - Calm Before the Storm

For whatever reason, my recollection of the week that is the subject of this blog post is particularly fuzzy. Here's my best attempt at a re-construction:

22 May: 12 miles, in and around Patterson Park (100 minutes)
23 May: 8 miles, 3 of which were treadmill hill work (60 minutes)
24 May: 1 mile (10 minutes)
25 May: 6 miles, 3 of which were treadmill hill work (45 minutes)
26 May: 9 miles (70 minutes), in and around the Inner Harbor
27 May: 1 mile (10 minutes)
28 May: 20 miles, around the Inner Harbor, out to Homewood and back (155 minutes)

Total time: 450 minutes
Total distance: 56 miles

I sat on this post for a while, because I wasn't really sure what to think about this week of contradictions . . .

On the one hand, this was my lowest-volume week in quite a while. On the other hand, it included two of the highest-intensity treadmill workouts.

On the one hand, I had two nearly "off" days. On the other hand, I had my longest continuous road run (20 miles) since the Kentucky Derby Marathon at the end of April.

On the one hand, getting "up for the game" before and during every run seemed extremely difficult. On the other hand, afterwards, every run felt like no big deal.

On the one hand, nearly every mile seemed more painful and laborious than any of the miles I've run so far in 2011. On the other hand, the trend towards the end of the week was towards slightly less painful.

I think that my success so far this year is due at least in part to framing the effects of my training appropriately, and moving forward from that frame of reference. In less abstract words, I've been doing a better job this year figuring out exactly how spent I am from the training that I've done, and what level of training makes the most sense going forward. The context for this week is the most ambiguous yet, but here's my attempt to make sense of it:

MMT, as my first 100-mile race in a long time, was rougher on me than I thought. The physical and mental fatigue from the race were still lingering during this week, but I was recovering gradually nonetheless. The lower training volume was a natural consequence of the recovery process, but is not necessarily an indication that I'm "burned out" from the first half of the year, as evidenced by the fact that later in the week, I seemed to be running in less pain.

This weekend, the Old Dominion 100-Mile Run and the Bel Air Town Run 5K (a.k.a. my grand, ridiculous adventure) should be a much better indicator of whether or not that assessment is accurate. I won't make predictions here about how I think these will turn out, except to say that if I've assessed things correctly, the recovery process should be nearly complete by this weekend - just in time for another round. If not, well . . . it could be a long couple of days. But in either case, I'm excited about doing this classic-race double for the first time, and have no doubt that it will make for a far more memorable experience than this past training week.

Week in Review: 15-21 May, and MMT: The Aftermath

Alright, miles . . .

15 May 2011: 31.7 miles, as part of the MMT 100, 11 hours, 47 minutes (sounds even worse typing it now)
16 May 2011: 1 mile, slow, at APG, to Burger King (10 minutes)
17 May 2011: 2 miles, at APG - twice as much mileage as yesterday! (15 minutes)
18 May 2011: 5 miles, at APG again. Continuing with the double-mileage trend (plus a little extra) (35 minutes)
19 May 2011: 9 miles, at APG, half on the treadmill, doing hills (70 minutes)
20 May 2011: 13 miles, at APG, with another half-hour of treadmill hills (95 minutes)
21 May 2011: 13 miles, around Patterson Park, the Inner Harbor, and all that business. (90 minutes)

Total time: 1,022 minutes
Total miles: 74.7 (75, more or less)

Probably another deceptive week, since counting MMT on 14-15 May, I posted 130 miles in 7 days (although the fitness benefits of covering that distance in that much time are probably debatable). That said, the mileage that I put in over the past few days is more in line with the density required for a 100-mile week, so hopefully next week, the numbers will look a little better.

And now, speaking of MMT, if you haven't already accidentally discovered it:

http://www.ultrarunning.com/ultra/features/news/meltzer-pastalkova-win-at.shtml

. . . which marks the third time that I've had a picture of me racing show up in UltraRunning online/magazine (Mohican 2009 and Cascade Crest 2009 were the other two). Also, my picture showed up in the 2009 Boston Marathon race record book (the first time that I broke 3 hours at Boston).

That said, I didn't have the performance that I was hoping for at MMT, and I type this with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it appears as though my running is inspirational in some way. Not only do I have a track record of getting my pictures printed everywhere, even when I have a crappy race, but also, I have a way of being inspirational in spite of (or, at times, because of) my sub-par performances. After MMT, a woman came up to me and told me that she had seen me at one of the aid stations when I wasn't doing so well, and then, many hours later, when she was driving down the road at the end of the race and saw me running again, she started crying.

A few minutes later, as I trudged through camp, barefoot, shirtless, and carrying my water bottles, shoes, and shirt, the kids who were camping there for the weekend saw me and asked me if I ran 100 miles. I told them yes, and then they proceeded to ask me tons of questions - How long did it take you? (31 hours and 47 minutes.) Did you sleep at all? (No, and now I'm very tired, I said with a smile.) Did you see a bear? (No, and I was a little bit disappointed that I didn't!) You could tell that they were in awe that a "regular person" who didn't look much older than them had run so far.

In all fairness, I think that the above is a valuable byproduct of my running. A lot of runners compete and win, but competing and winning with style and grace seems rare, particularly in ultrarunning. This is a topic that I had hoped to discuss in a different blog entry, in greater depth, but to me, an important part of running is motivating others to run, and being motivated by them in return. Being out on the roads and in the streets, around other runners, and people in general, affords a greater opportunity for my running to inspire others. To me, spending a lot of time on trails, alone, or with only a select few people, is very self-serving, and part of the reason why I put in most of my training miles on the roads. Unless this is going to be something bigger than just me, I can't justify the time, effort, and pain involved in training and racing at this level (or, at least, the level to which I aspire).

But, on the other hand, at some point, inspirational though my efforts may be, the bottom line on my MMT performance was that the outcome was mediocre at best. Can I run much better than I did? There's no doubt in my mind that I could, on a different day, under different circumstances. But to really take things to the next level, I need to perform my best when it counts, and at MMT, I didn't.

Fortunately, to that end, there were a couple of positive consequences from my MMT experience. The first is that the fire in my training has returned, after flagging somewhat as a result of 4+ months of slow, steady mileage-building. Sometimes it takes a roadblock like this to re-ignite, because a long string of gradually-improving performances does more to make one complacent than anything else. I recovered quickly from my "bad" race, and put up some decent mileage later in the week.

The second is that the DNF demons of Grindstone and Oil Creek have been at least temporarily suppressed, which is no mean feat. This should give me at least a little bit more confidence in my next race, the Old Dominion 100.

The bottom line is that, for me, running is still joyful - it's hard not to sit in my office all day and not have the itch to go outside and run (especially the way things are in the office lately). If I can keep holding on to that, everything else should fall into place.