Even when I run it slow, the half marathon still hurts

Today I ran the Mercer Island Half Marathon. I ran it in 1:52, with a bathroom break in there, and to be honest, I'm pretty happy with that time, which is way slower than my course pr of 1:45. My watch clocked the distance a little long and had me running 8:26 miles. The official time had me at 8:37. Might have been the piss stop. Who knows?

I came into the race with very low expectations. I have been fighting off some kind of cold picked up during the last couple of weeks on the road, my training had completely nosedived the last part of Feb and all of March, and I had done very little speedwork. I had been traveling a lot, and work has been through the roof lately. Getting up and running at 5am after being up till 11 working was getting difficult to the point where it wasn't happening.

The one thing  I did have going for me was that I had put in some good base work in late December, all of January and early February. Lots of miles on the road, most of them firmly in the 'base pace' category, but I did get some hill sprints and even some Yasso 800s in. Plus a lot of time up skate skiing. In late Feb the travel kicked up again, and training dropped off. Before I knew it, the race was the next day, and I was barely walking up the stairs without getting winded -- whatever virus du-jour that was on the airplane with me had come home to roost.

So it was with a completely open mind and detached head that I showed up the morning of the race. I jogged the 1 mile to the start, which was great to loosen up the legs. When a race starts a mile from your house, you've got little excuse to avoid it -- I was cracking jokes with the course marshals on the way in ("what do you mean the race hasn't started yet? I thought I was just having a great day!")

On the starting line I was overwhelmed by a feeling of irrational exuberance. Just f*ing happy to be there and be alive. No idea why. But, prior to a big endurance event (and this counts as one for me), feeling irrationally exuberant is just the right place to be. For a brief, fleeting moment, I felt 20 years younger and stronger.

Lopa always wonders out loud why I run these events. She does these kind of things with friends, so she can have someone to talk to. Well, I don't like talking, especially when I'm out of shape :) Truth is I do feed off of the other people at the events -- just being around people running makes it so much easier, especially since I train alone --  between travel and work and family, training is something I do when I have time, not when it's convenient for anyone else. When I'm at a race the paces that feel hard feel easy, and when it gets hard there is always someone ahead of me to focus on. My best races have felt very painful, but afterwards I can always look back and say 'hey, that was pretty damn fast!'

Of course there was going to be none of that today. I felt better than yesterday, but still not in PR shape. My speed is nonexistent, and my endurance was questionable. I had decided in a fit of conservative pacing to try to break 2 hours, sticking to 9 minute miles.

The gun went off and of course I wanted to stretch a little. Keeping an 8 minute mile pace was easy with everyone around, and I had to put the brakes on.

I usually suck at pacing. It's like I have a devil on one shoulder, poking me with his pitchfork, saying "Faster! Faster! This feels Awesome!" and an angel on the other shoulder saying "whoah there. Let's not get too excited, we're a mile into a 13 mile run". Yeah, I think the angel sounds pretty lame too.

Today was different, either I'm maturing mentally or physically -- which, btw, is not a good thing for someone in their 40s.  My newfound mental or physical maturity enabled me to hold back.  I didn't want to explode on the back half of the course, which I've done before when running with a slight cold. I kept the pace around 8:30, and really had to work on holding back.

At mile 6, I started to take the brakes off, slowly, just to see how I was feeling. Because I had been sick I had no idea if I would explode once I picked up the pace. Of course, miles 7-10 are where the rollers are, and those kick my ass whether I run them fast, slow, or backward.  It wasn't a 'here comes the BOOM' kind of moment, but on the other hand it wasn't a 'The Di-Lithium Crystals are crackin, Capn Kirk' moment either. I basically held it even at 8:30 or so during that phase, which is a slow grinding uphill with short downhill sections.

Mile 10-11 are a fast, sweeping downhill, and 11-12 has the toughest hill on the course. I finish on this hill with most of my training runs, and thought I was prepared for it. It still hurt, it was still really hard, and I had to dig into my bag of tricks to make it up the hill. I attached a mental rubber band to someone that had come by me and pulled myself up the hill that way.

Miles 12-13 were heavy fatigue miles. I knew the barn was close, but the legs were starting to feel it, my calf was twinging a bit and the burn was consistent. This race ends with  a nice steep uphill, and when I started up it, I felt like someone had turned up the gravity. And coated the road with molasses. I played my last mental trick ("I'm a bird! I can fly!") and got across the line.

My watch, which is normally pretty accurate, went a little long on the course. I'm pretty sure they are right and Garmin is wrong in this case, but Garmin has been very right in the past, so I'm wondering why my watch shows me running 13.3 miles instead of 13.1.

Summary:

• I guess this shows that you can get a good base, slack on training for a month and a half, and still have a reasonably good time. 
• However, my speed really needs work. Time to get that Mercer Island High School Track pass. 
• The course is tough. I wonder what I would clock on a flatter course? 
• I love this distance. It really stretches me without the killer 3 hour long runs that marathon training requires. I can have a life and run half marathons. 

Gotta be the wax

Today was a stellar day on skate skis. That doesn't happen for me very often, but this year I've actually gotten out more times than I can count on one hand, and I think the coordination is starting to come together.

I wasn't expecting a great day: I had just done a 12 mile long run that turned into a 'cave of pain' tempo run the day before, and was pretty cooked. But, in a fit of forethought,  I had taken my skis and rubbed them down with some One Ball Jay snowboard wax.

This turned out to be the killer move of all time. I was gliding extremely well, passing people who looked like they were sticking a bit. I also didn't get as hyperspasmodically tired. I was able to put long climbing sections together without stopping, and when I stopped, I felt rational, not on the edge of passing out.

Skate skiing works well for me because I waddle naturally from side to side. When you put that waddle on skinny skis and long poles, it works pretty well. I don't know how good I look -- I'm willing to bet not as good as I feel -- but I feel like, occasionally, in fits and spurts, that  I'm dancing up the slope. Especially today. Again, it's gotta be the wax.

At the same time I can feel a lactic acid bath going on in my legs and lungs. Only focusing on the movement actually gets me up the hill without stopping.

I realized on the 12 mile run that the pain cave is a romantic concept (romantic as in enduro geeks get all dreamy eyed about it), but the reality is, well, painful. The only way I can get up in there and stay there is to stay focused on the movements and not think about the futility of the effort. I'm not sure how other people get through tough efforts. For me, thinking about anything other than right now = slowing down.

Left foot and ankle feel odd. kind of twingy. I'm going to hopefully get my ass out of bed for a recovery run tomorrow, and I'll check it out then. Maybe it'll get pounded out? 

Yasso 800s suck

I mean that in the best way possible. I think I just found my interval training go-to workout. It's so damn simple that I just cant f*ck it up. Yasso 800s:

1. run 800 meters at your target marathon pace
2. jog for the same time you ran the 800
3. repeat

Now, I'm not training for a marathon. I'm training for a half. I found this half marathon pace calculator, but (a) it's depressing and (b) I start slow, pick it up in the middle, then tend to slow down as fatigue creeps in. 

The Mercer Island half marathon always, in the words of a friend, a kick in the nutsack. The first time I ran it, 15 years ago, I ran it in 1:45. At mile 10 I had some gastric issues that slowed me significantly. The following year, with significantly less training, but less gas and more pride, I ran the same time. We had kids, etc, and 5 years later  I ran a 1:50something, cramping the last mile. 

This year I want to show up on the start line, but without expectations. I certainly can't fake like I'm 29 anymore. But maybe I can run negative splits. 

Yasso 800's feel real. The effort starts to add up, it starts to take a toll after a while. They're nice on a hilly course because if you're running hills, you get a longer recovery. If you're running flats or downhills, you get a shorter recovery. I ran roughly 7:30 pace for my 800s, which is slooooow. But I've got ~ 1.5 months to go for this first half (thinking about running a couple this year), and if I can get these in on a regular basis, I should start to get some speed going. 

Tomorrow is a 12 miler, just getting out, running it slow at first, then picking it up. I did the yasso 800s, racked up 5.89 miles, and coupled with my 3 mile recovery run, my weekly total is a weakly total of almost 9 miles. I'll work on getting the miles back up next week, starting (hopefully) with a nice skate ski on Sunday! 

Training Cycles and Work

Doh. This always happens. I start training hard and forget to stop training hard. Then my body reminds me in increasingly unsubtle ways.

Periodization is hard because it means slowing down/doing less. For a chunk of time. The chunk of time that seems to work right now is 2 weeks on, 1 week off. By off I don't mean 'on the couch', I just mean that the runs stay easy and unstructured, and the mileage drops.

Coming back from my last off week has been hard. It coincided with a real motherf*cker of a week at work. Where I was going till 11pm, and not doing the fun stuff -- it was 11PM emails. I've got to change that. I've got fun stuff to do, but at 11PM I'm too fried to do it. Need to shift my schedule around so that my brain is good on the fun stuff.

What is the fun stuff these days? It's statistics, machine learning, making sure I touch Python enough to not need to google every other syntactical wrinkle. I swore (lividly) that I would never become a  manager again. That oath has been dropped -- the opportunity to scale an effort and succeed at that bigger scale was more tempting than the opportunity to go deep. But I've got to keep the things that got me to this point -- the love of making things -- around, otherwise I lose my way.

This is hard, with the amount of coordination this new group requires. But one key thing I've realized is that the work is never done. So chiseling out 'me time' to hack out ugly naive bayes algorithms in python with canned datasets beats the hell out of watching TV.

What's fun about management? Well, a lot of things, this time. I'm not a line manager anymore, I'm managing a very senior team of managers who get along and want to get things done. I get to set strategy and higher level tactics, and as a team we work out the concrete implementations. I get to do things in a way I would have wanted them done when I was an individual contributor working around severely flawed processes.

That stuff is all good, but without scratching the itch to make something, I will become a mid-level manager and stop there.

I had taken about 2 months away from coding at all, and decided to try an interview question one of our top guys used on a recent interview candidate. It's a simple question: given an integer, translate the integer to it's word representation. btw, simple != hard :) There are some interesting edge cases (the teens) and some harder variations (where do you put the word 'and'?), and an elegant solution is hard to come by. But I did (finally) grind out a nice way to do this using the mod and div operators.

The sad part is it took me a while. The good part is that I eventually cleared away the mental cobwebs. Hopefully I can keep them cleared out even as management duties accelerate.

Silent Running (in the dark fog, on the ice)

These days I start my runs in the dark. Its not easy to get excited about running in the dark, so I don't. I realized a while back that some things suck to start, but get better. Running is like that, especially in the morning, and especially when it's dark.

Lately it's been Dark, Foggy, and Icy. Before that, it was  Dark and Stormy. Both have their challenges. Dark and Stormy requires me to suspend my dislike of getting sprayed with cold water, because that's what happens the moment I step outside. The truth is that running Dark and Stormy is like getting into cold water in a wetsuit. It sucks for about 3 minutes. Then you feel good. Unlike a wetsuit, peeing on yourself doesn't make it feel better. But 3 minutes is doable even without the peeing option.

Dark, Foggy, and Icy is an altogether different challenge. No, I'm not getting spritzed by the Pacific NW's best January drizzle, but I am having constant, multiple conversations with myself about the quality of my footing. Yesterday, In a fit of profound wisdom, I realized that there can truly be no good answer to the question "Am I about to plant my foot on  moss,  ice, or icy moss?"

Dark, Foggy, and Icy muffles sounds. I feel like I'm underwater.  I can't hear my feet land, I can barely hear myself breathe. And that's saying something. I'm a registered loud breather, I can remember back in my mediocre bike racing days when one of the better riders remarked that I reminded him of an old train, going backwards.  I feel like a deep sea diver. Not a casual tropical vacation snorkeler, because that implies that I can actually see stuff, and that the water is warm. I feel like I'm diving at the bottom of the Puget Sound.  I can only see my feet, my immediate next step, and a tight cone of light that blinds me more than it  illuminates. And my nose, which, ethnically speaking, has a profound curvature that intersects the light cone and throws a proud shadow.

In that kind of environment, there are a couple of things that make the miles go by:

(1) I give myself all kinds of credit just for being out there. Hey, it's 6AM, and a normal person would still be in bed.
(2) I let the small details of the experience seep in. Yesterday, in the fog, my new headlamp was throwing out a tight cone of light, with very sharp edges.  I felt like a (slowly) moving geometry lesson.
(3) I focus on form. The ice doesn't lend itself to moving super fast, but the more I turn my legs over, the less likely I am to slip. So far, anyway. Running upright is another thing I pay attention to.

In any case, my 'hard day' with  pace and distance goals  was shelved for a totally hallucinatory running experience. Which, in the end, was critical in making sure the sucky part (starting) ended quickly.

Tomorrow I'm doing another 12 miler, just to confirm the first one wasn't a fluke.  Its the longest I've run in a couple of years and I want the legs to build into that distance and be comfortable.  No real pace goals, but if I'm feeling chippy I'll pick up the last 4 miles. It'll be a good birthday treat.

To LiveStrong or not to LiveStrong? That is the question

Torn over my LiveStrong wristband. I'm probably the last person in the world wearing it. I know everyone in South Park had theirs surgically removed :) 

To me the band has nothing to do with Lance, it has everything to do with remembering my father and friends I've lost to cancer, and honoring them by living fully, getting out and doing the rides, getting into the mountains, going on long runs, spending time with my family, watching killer sunsets -- the stuff they'll never get to do again. 

I always feel better when I see someone wearing the LiveStrong band because I assume they've been affected in the same way. We're the ones that have lost someone we loved to a complete motherfucker of a disease.

But now when I look at my wrist I think of an unrepentant asshole who gladly ruined other peoples livelihood and reputations to protect his gravy train, whose only motivation to confess is to get some kind of reduction in punishment and/or return to competition. I've been trying to maintain some notion of separation between Lance and Livestrong, but the two are blurring. 

Still, I'm on the fence. Cancer sucks.  In the last year of my fathers life, when I watched the toughest man I knew waste away, going on long rides and runs was the only thing that kept me sane. Drinking didnt work. Working didn't work. Talking about it to my wife and friends didnt work. Getting outside, putting my head down, and going until I dropped was the only thing that took the pain away.  And when I was gapping on a really long run or bonking on a ride miles from home, I would stare at that yellow piece of rubber, summon my dad's strength and courage, and rise above the moment. 

Yep, it's a dirty trick, and I still do it. But its the one that works, it gets me over the crest of the hill, to the downhill side with the tailwind. Every single time. 

I probably don't have to wear a yellow rubber band to remember my dad and honor his memory by pushing myself through the hard times. But it's an incredibly powerful way to keep him with me. 

This would be so much easier if Lance had just been a hypercompetitive, egomaniacal asshole. If he hadn't gone and done something so good, something that has helped so many people, including me. This is not a cut and dry kind of situation. Boolean logic does not apply. As far as LiveStrong is concerned, it's all shades of grey.  

Same Shit, Different Day? Maybe...

Wrapping up the first week of January, and once again wondering what...happened? It seems like I update this blog quarterly, hopefully that will change. Why? Because I think I'm going to have a lot more granular updates and 'deep thoughts'. How? Well, my fingers need to touch the keyboard more frequently. I think my updates will be shorter, more media filled, and less about quantity (training miles), more about quality (what's going on).

What is going on right now? Well, I've gotten my long runs up to 10 miles over the XMas break. That's 10 miles at 5000 feet, in low double digit temperatures (~20 degrees). Granted, all of this running was done along the Rio Grande river basin, so there was no altitude gain, but it still felt like an evil monkey was squeezing my chest the whole time, and every run started out as a 10:30 'shuffle'. I managed to put in a 34 mile week while I was at home, which is my longest week in a long time.

That's the good news. The bad news is after that week we were travelling and skiing, certainly not doing running. I was skiing for the first time in 20+ years (fun!), but doing it with the kids (not super hard).  And I ate and drank my way through the holiday. I've now got a spare tire. Sure, it's a racing tire, but it's a spare tire nonetheless.

More bad news: I've got some kind of nerve pinch in my shoulder that makes it hard to sleep, let alone turn my head. Agggh. Getting old.

This leads me to my conclusion: Nutrition and Stretching are as if not more important than the training miles. I'm coming up on 44, and the same mileage that would have dropped weight off of me like melting water off of an ice cube 15 years ago is....not doing that. Also, I'm running those miles a bit slower than I did 15 years ago. Because if I go faster right now...injuries happen.

So, what to do? It turns out I may have a corporate health benefit that I can apply towards being healthy. If that is the case, I'm going to apply it towards nutrition. I was doing pullups last Friday, and my shirt rode up to expose that tire and love handles. I always make fun of my wife for being motivated to exercise by vanity, but I have to say that shot of my gut was sobering, I'm hoping that image (seared to my eyelids) can be used to resist eating gut enhancing foods that are incredibly yummy going down.