Line of the Week

"Poets run on rocks barefoot when shoes are available for a dime. They stand on cliffs but not too close to the fatal edge."

—Jim Harrison

Why I Should Take Up Cross Country Skiing in place of Winter Running

Coldest Run in a Long Time

When I layered up (four layers of technical wicking fabric up top, tights and wind pants for the legs, two layers of knit gloves, and a stocking cap) and headed out in to the 5:20 darkness, the thermometer read 13 degrees, but there was a pretty brisk wind, and I feel confident putting the wind chill in the single digits. The first mile was fairly bitter, and I wasn’t sure how long I would stay out in it, but after that I acclimated, and felt comfortable the rest of the way. Also, my course went into the wind the first half of the run (a trick I learned from Merle Harris back in the day in Boone, Iowa, when winter running meant heavy cotton sweats and thermal underwear). It’s a good strategy; you don’t want to work up a sweat and then run into a winter wind. The cold and dark can be intimidating at first, but once you’re underway it really doesn’t feel much different from running any other time of the year. Plus, one of my favorite sensations in the world is coming inside after playing out in the cold.

3:46!

Knots & Butterflies: The Countdown

This blog picked up steam for me back in the spring when I registered for the Twin Cities Marathon. I had a purpose and a focus as I wrote about my early, often discouraging efforts to get into shape. Then, early in the summer, I left the topic behind. The truth is after a series of frustrating runs, I was on the brink of giving up, and I wrote a lengthy, depressing piece on my ambivalence called “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” which I removed from the site shortly after I posted it. Somehow—in part by getting most of my runs in before the heat of the day—I managed to get around that bend that seemed so impossible then; training became rote and didn’t seem to raise any issues that required a written account; and now post time is only five days away.

My other friends who are running Sunday seem to be going through the same thing I am right now. That is to say, we are a bundle of nerves. One of them sent me an email on Sunday saying she had just driven the course. That single sentence caused my stomach to flip and flop for a few minutes. Then yesterday, another friend wanted to know where to go to watch the race, so I popped open my laptop to show her the course, and as the map came on the screen, my stomach headed straight south. Even writing this, which I’m hoping will help exorcise some of these nerves, is causing my stomach to flutter around a bit.

Here’s why we’re all a bit antsy. There’s nothing any of us can do now to prepare ourselves, really. The training is done—and, in most cases, we have undertrained a touch. A friend calls training for a marathon a second job because of the time it entails. Each of us follows a training schedule, but it’s pretty darn difficult to do everything the way it is charted out. Life gets in the way, and you make compromises. I’m taking comfort in Haile Gebrselassie’s comments after his new world record for the marathon that he had to miss an entire week of training shortly before that race. Clearly, the rest of his training was more than sufficient. I am harboring similar hopes for myself. I had a pretty successful 20-miler a few weeks back, and if my taper has been more of a sharp drop off than I would like, perhaps the previous months of training have been enough to make up for that.

The other thing that is difficult right now is the unknown and that which you have no control over. For the last couple weeks, I have been washing my hands constantly, hoping against hope not to contract the common cold at exactly the wrong time. A concern of mine long before I signed up for the race was the weather. The only previous marathon I’ve run, Grandma’s in 2006, was marked (or should I say marred?) by high temperatures and humidity: it was grueling. And the last two Twin Cities Marathons I have attended have been brutally hot. Both times, I kept saying to myself how glad I was to be watching rather than running. At this point, the forecast for Sunday is for mild temperatures, though I have heard talk of a possible headwind. With roughly 10,000 runners though, a person should be able to do a fair amount of drafting.

Then last night, while I was sleeping, my left calf cramped up, and it’s still tender and knotted today. I wrestled with calf problems all through my training for my previous marathon, and they tightened up at the three-mile mark in that one. I was pleased I could tough it out over 23 miles, but it also made the experience less than entirely enjoyable—especially combined with the heat and humidity. Later that summer, I made a mid-life stride change, and I have hardly had a twinge since then—until last night. I don’t think it is going to be a problem, but I’ll admit it has me a little freaked out.

Hats Off . . .

. . . to Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia on the occasion of his new marathon world record of 2:03:59 set in Berlin on Sunday. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a pace of 4:43 per mile, which absolutely blows my mind. If any of you have ever spent time in your youth trying to break five minutes for the mile, or say 2:20 for the 800, you know what a feat this is. He ran 26 consecutive miles, each faster than I could run a single mile in my prime. On Sunday, I will attempt my second marathon. I am a solid middle-of-the-pack runner, the epitome of average. Odds are very good that I will finish in the middle 20% of the field, which is to say, in part, thousands of people will still finish behind me. If I manage to double Gebrselassie’s time, I will be celebrating like there’s no Monday.

Mark Your Calendars!

I know many people would be severely disappointed if they accidentally missed one of the Olympic marathons, so I'm offering the following reminder as a public service announcement: the women's race is Saturday, August 16 and the men run the following Saturday, August 23.

I'm not convinced Deena Kastor can repeat her bronze medal performance from 2004, but I do look for Ryan Hall to be in the hunt for a medal in what should be a very tight race on the men's side. Don't be surprised if the top five or six runners finish within a minute of each other.

More Track and Field Predictions

Tonight is the men's 5000 meter finals. I'm picking Bernard Lagat to win and Matt Tegenkamp to place second. Third place seems wide open to me. I'm tempted to pick the baby-faced Galen Rupp for third, but I'll be cheering for local boy Matt Gabrielson to surprise a bunch of people and pull off a spot on the team.

Handicapping the 10k

We were going to go to the track tonight to watch the ponies run, but a storm blew in, so we decided to settle for Mexican seafood instead. The ceviche tostadas were the hands-down winners on that front, but that's not really the matter at hand.

Today is the first day of the Olympic track and field trials in Eugene, Oregon, and I want to make my picks public in advance of tonight's race. Most of the events today are preliminary heats, but the women's 10,000 meter final goes off at 9:20 pacific time. There's a field of 24 runners. Here's my exacta for tonight's race, the three Olympic qualifiers in the predicted order of their finish:

1. Shalane Flanagan
2. Kara Goucher
3. Katie McGregor

"The Wind Doesn't Blow. It Sucks!"

I saw the adage above on a fellow cyclist’s t-shirt the summer I was 14 while biking across Iowa (take heart middle school teachers—some things that enter the adolescent brain appear to lodge there permanently). 28 years later, I have had cause to recall it any number of times while training for this marathon. It occurred to me today when I turned the third corner of my rectangular route, expecting relief after running into the wind for the first two legs, only to find myself fighting a headwind again. The homestretch also featured a headwind. How does it do that?

Earlier this spring I almost wrote another entry with this title, and I was going to claim that nothing was as likely to stop me as a stiff headwind. Especially if it’s on a particularly long stretch, and even more so if that long stretch is uphill. In fact, I’m not sure that’s true. I may have been as disheartened at times over the years by hills as I have been by headwinds, though I think I have had more successes on hills than I have heading into the wind.

Well, as I predicted last week, the last few days have been slogs, but yesterday and today I put long uphills in the second half of my runs. Today, I put in the very hill I’m going to have to face at around 20 miles in the marathon. I plan on running it so many times before the race that I will know every landmark along the way. Even though today’s run wasn’t easy, I’m already feeling like that hill is a little more manageable.

I made it over the eight-mile mark today, only a day or two after my training schedule called for it, but I certainly didn’t find any endorphins there. I’ll have to look for them again another day.

Finally!

This week marks the beginning of the eighteen-week marathon training program, and I got off to a great start by missing the first two days of it. Nonetheless, today I had the first really good run since I started this blog. Went over forty-five minutes, picking up the pace as I went along. According to the bipolar runner’s guide, this successful run will be followed by some ugly ones in the coming days, but today I finally felt like a runner rather than a poseur.

Training Log: Slogging

For the third consecutive weekend I got in a run of over five miles, but none of them have been easy. I have yet to get in the groove on any of these outings. My ankles still feel tight and weak (each in its own way), and every mile has offered numerous tempting opportunities to give up. I’m just one week away from the beginning of my 18-week training program, and I’m glad I’ve got those runs in, but I would feel better about starting the official training schedule if I felt a little more at ease during at least some of my workouts.

Bipolar Runner’s Disorder

I mentioned recently how easily I can go from Walter Mitty heights of imagined glory to the equally convincing depths of unworthiness during a single run. Well, the same thing happens (perhaps not surprisingly) from day to day as well.

Last week I had a couple of very successful runs. On Thursday I finally broke the 30-minute barrier for the first time in 2008 with a four-mile run, then on Saturday I went six, my longest run since November 2007. I felt like I had broken out of my rut, and was on my way to being in good enough shape to really start my marathon training program.

Of course, the two runs after that were sluggish and disappointing. I barely made thirty minutes one day, and opted for twenty the other. The bad runs were followed by two days off, when I either didn’t have time to run, or didn’t make time. One of them I woke up early enough to sneak in a workout, but I couldn’t convince myself to get out of bed. Two bad runs followed by two days off had me questioning whether I had any right to be attempting a marathon. I certainly didn’t feel like a real runner.

Yesterday, after the two days off, I went out slowly and had a relatively decent run. I was weary by the end, but I picked up my pace over the course of the run rather than flagging in the later stretches, and perhaps even more importantly, the ankle joints that have been extremely tight all winter and into the spring are loosening up, so I felt like I was running instead of just shuffling.

Good News!

The route I've been running that I estimated at around three miles is actually 3.5. That means I've been going a touch farther and a touch faster than I had been giving myself credit for. A nice boost on an off-day—added a couple miles to my weekly milage with a few clicks of the mouse.

Training Log: Bits & Pieces

Three runs in the last five days, which means five workouts in seven days. That’s right about on target. Off-days are important, but they always make me nervous. I’m afraid that things are going to come up immediately afterward, and all of a sudden I’m going to have three or four off-days in a row, and lose conditioning.

I haven’t gone over thirty minutes yet, and two days I only got in twenty minutes, one because of scheduling constraints, the other because I just didn’t have it in me. It’s amazing where the mind can go even during a short run. Within a mile or two, I can feel good enough to think I could set a time goal, and tear up the marathon course (at least by my personal mediocre middle-age standards), and before I know it, I’m feeling like the idea of even completing a marathon will be an impossible stretch, a set up for failure and embarrassment. Both mindsets are completely believable to me—within minutes of each other!

The best run of the last three was yesterday in a downpour, which was the best once since . . . the previous one in a downpour, which got me thinking about weather. Minnesota’s two marquee marathons, Grandma’s and Twin Cities, used to practically guarantee cool weather (ideal for 26.2 miles); however, in recent years, they have resembled long-distance saunas. When I ran Grandma’s in 2006 (my first and only marathon to this point), the humidity at the start was frighteningly close to triple digits, and by the time I hit Duluth, the sun was baking the streets of the town, with no shade anywhere. When I watched the 2006 & 2007 Twin Cities Marathons (both sunny, hot, and humid) I was happy to be on the sidelines cheering and had no desire whatsoever to participate. Part of the reason I decided to register this year was because it’s been such a cool, gray spring that I managed to convince myself that October 5, 2008 might actually be a traditional, cool autumn day. I’ll be crossing my fingers for the next five months on that issue.

Training Log: Day Two

Gray, rainy, and windy all day, 40 degrees at 5:15 according to the State Farm agent’s about a mile into my run.

The trees are on the verge of leafing out, something they may be regretting tonight if we get snow as predicted. I got thirty minutes in the hard way this evening. It’s hardly inviting weather for a workout, but once I got the kinks worked out, it was my best run since . . . well, since the last time I ran in weather like this. At least until the last half-mile home stretch which was directly into the wind and rain.

Afterwards, apropos of nothing except perhaps his dad’s seemingly foolish run in the blustery weather, R. asked if I was ever going to run another marathon. When I told him I had just signed up for the Twin Cities, his face lit up, as did his younger brother’s, and they raised their palms to me for high fives. An unforeseen bonus! Great to have their enthusiastic support!

Training Log: Day One

A few weeks ago I started toying with the idea of signing up for the Twin Cities Marathon. I had all but decided not to enter when I learned that two friends had registered, so due to peer pressure and the idea of camaraderie and the other ideas (fitness, accomplishment, it's not going to be any easier to attempt such a thing a year or two down the road, etc.) that had me considering the marathon in the first place, I decided to go ahead with it. Buyer's remorse settled in pretty quickly, but 48 hours later I got my first training run in, so things are underway.

Made it 30 minutes without stopping today (with the exception of two brief red lights). Five months to add four hours of endurance. I think my weekly basketball game is wreaking havoc with my ankles. Only one more month of that. If I can make it through that without getting injured, I want to think the ankle joint tightness will ease up.