Once More Around the Tidal Basin

Today was the fourth year in a row I’ve run the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler. This was the first year that we didn’t lose an hour of sleep the night beforehand, which was nice. This was also the first one I didn’t have anyone to really run it with, which was a little sad. (Long story.)

The race itself went well, though. I was feeling the after-effects of the half marathon from eight days ago, so it’s always a little frustrating to know you’re not even close to your best, but I was still really happy with the end result: a 1:26:09, which is an 8:37min/mile average, and slices 6 1/2 minutes off of last year’s time.

My mile splits do a lovely bell curve for the race: 8:23, 8:24, 8:31, 8:31, 8:32, 8:51, 9:02, 8:44, 8:38, 8:28. Clearly miles 6-7 were the tough ones, although I was more than a bit pleased to pass the 10K mark at 53 even and note that if the race had been over there I’d have gotten a new PR for it as well. (It sounds silly but I always play the “What if this race had been X distance instead?” game in my head. The whole could’ve, would’ve, should’ve mentality.) Once again, no walk breaks aside from a 10 second stop during mile 7 to gulp down a cup of Gatorade.

The best thing was seeing a lot people before and after the race. Before the race started I’d run into Ali, Carla, Chris, and Del; Carla and I started together but separated after the first minute. (Sorry Carla!) On the course itself I caught glimpses of Carla, Dave, Julie, Mark, and Randy (gotta love out-and-back stretches of the course!), and I managed to even see Carla, JP, and Randy finish the course. Finally I was too cold to stay any longer and I fled for the metro and the promise of brunch with a couple of the guys at Freddie’s. Mmmmm, mimosas.

Anyway, it was a good time, but I’m glad that I don’t have yet another race next weekend. Oof! (Carla’s trying to talk me into a race on the 21st. We’ll see.)

Amazing Race

I admit it, I was nervous about running the National Half Marathon this year. After having such high expectations for Florence last year and then missing them, I was afraid that my gut-instinct finishing time was far off and that not only would I miss it (1:58 was the number I’d come up with) but that I’d no doubt end up doing worse than last year.

The morning was off to a slightly rough start; it was raining when I got to the stadium, and I was supposed to run the race with my friend Del but was never able to find him. Thankfully the rain stopped and was merely gray and misty for the rest of the day, which was fine by me. I ended up deciding to pace off of the (badly-marked) 4:00 marathon pace group. The half-marathon and full marathon share the same course for the first 10 miles so I figured they could at least give me someone to focus on for the majority of the course. After a slightly slow first mile (and someone else following the pacers talking about people with bad body odor and wanting to throw up—gee, thanks, that’s just what I want to hear right now) we began to pick up the pace… and then some.

Finally someone else asked, “Aren’t we going a little fast?” A 4:00 marathon is a 9:10min/mile, and we were well above that. The two women explained that we were indeed; what they were trying to do is “make up” the several minutes we were off the clock; that way anyone who followed them into the finish line, regardless of when they began, would get a sub-4:00 marathon. This actually worked well for me because I knew hills would be in the later part of the course and if I could “bank” some extra seconds that I could use later, that was fine by me.

Ironically, while I never saw Del, I seemed to run into lots of other people. I ran about four miles of the race with Rick Weber, and passed and said hello early on to Rick Carter, Julie Ann, Chris, Carla, and Randy. It was around mile 8.5 that we hit a water station and I ended up ahead of the pacers. A couple of times they were close behind me, but never actually passed me. I must admit I was a little surprised (especially since mile 9 was 5 seconds too slow), but if it meant I didn’t have to run with Ms. Body Odor then that was all right with me. Besides, the split was up ahead and I knew I’d be on my own at that point anyway. (Ironically I lost them at one and only time I ever walked; a 15-second moment to gulp down a cup of Gatorade that someone handed me without spilling it all over my shirt.) When I hit mile 11 amidst all of the hills I was delighted to see I was still on pace, and it was at that point I began to believe that I would actually get my goal time of a sub-2:00 half marathon.

0324070959.jpgI was definitely losing a bit of steam in the last 2.1 miles, but even then I only picked up an extra minute and thirty five seconds. I can more than deal with that. And then it was over, and I’d finally done it. 1:58:18. Wow. What a wonderful, glorious day. Races like this remind me why I run; it was hard in places, but the entire experience was nothing short of fantastic. I ran one of the best races of my “career” this morning, and I am so completely happy with it. (And this is the longest “no walk breaks” race I’ve ever run.) Yes, yes, yes.

Oh, and in addition to bagels and bananas? Beer. Apparently it was “foods that begin with ‘B’ day” and yes, I drank one. Despite being crappy Budweiser beer I must admit it tasted awfully good at that exact moment. So there.

Laughing at Myself, Florentine Style

Recently I decided that I was actually going to order some of the (overpriced) photos from the Florence Marathon. I figure, hey, I’m only running that race once so I should get something else to remember it. With that in mind, I would now like to present four of the funniest race photos I think I’ve ever had taken of me.


Quite possibly my favorite picture of the entire event. I look confused, or lost, or quite possibly both. Meanwhile there’s a lovely view of Piazza Signoria behind me, but I’m a little too busy (or rather, lost) to stop and gaze. At this pont I clearly just want it all to be over.

Continue reading Laughing at Myself, Florentine Style

How to get out of the last five minutes of spinning class.

It’s a little funny; just yesterday I was looking at my tally for miles run in January 2007 and thinking that 35 miles was for me a pretty puny total, and that February needed to up the total a bit. Well, steps have now been taken to make sure the February total is quite different than January’s.

I was at my spinning class tonight, we were almost at the end, and Theresa (our instructor) told everyone to try and pick up the pace a little more for the next 15 seconds. And I was pedaling and thought to myself that I could surely push it a little harder, really knock it out. It was right about then that I felt it. The return of the knot in my left calf muscle that originally plagued me back at the end of May 2006.

Oh, great.

It’s my own fault, really. I’d gotten a little slack about stretching my achilles tendons every day (which is what appears to have caused the problem in the first place) and had gotten to the point where I was only stretching them on days that I actually exercised. Not so smart, it seems. The end result is a nasty knot in the center of my back calf muscle, one that’s so incredibly tight that when it happens, everything is over. Period.

So I stopped pedaling instantly, and Theresa came over to see if I was ok. “Cramp?” she asked and I nodded. After a minute or two, I managed to get down off the bike, and hobble over to the big wooden platform that her bike sits on and sit down on it. Except now I was feeling dizzy (a new one). I tried putting my head down in my hands, but that wasn’t helping. And suddenly I had a major fear. I was suddenly feeling like I might throw up. Oh no.

The nearest trash can was about 50 feet away, and that’s when I did something very stupid and was clearly the dizziness talking—I tried to walk over to it. I was almost all the way over there when apparently I suddenly wove to one side and fell over, clocking my head on the corner of the wall as I did so.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

Yes, it hurts.A second later four or five people were clustered around me, putting a towel under my head, arguing if my arms should be over my head or not, trying to get me to eat something, and so on. And if there’s one thing I really hate when I’m feeling vulnerable, it’s seeing other people see me that way. (There’s something about that look of pity that just gets me.) An employee of the rec center came over with some gauze and ice, which is what it took for me to register that I was actually bleeding from where my head hit the wall. And of course, my calf still hurt like the dickens.

Finally all the commotion settled down, and I was feeling better enough that I could go home. Fortunately I don’t have a stick shift, and Roger followed me home to make sure I made it in one piece, as well as helping me getting my stuff out of the car. Meanwhile, all I could think is that now I’ll be “the guy who fell over” in that class for the rest of eternity. On the plus side, it might have scared off some of the new people and since the class actually filled up today that could only be a good thing, right?

Meanwhile, the plan is (in addition to getting back into daily stretching—a painful lesson to learn) to take several weeks off of running. At this point I’m not planning on doing so until after I get back from an upcoming trip (February 15-20), and even then it might be longer, we’ll see. This also means that I will probably have to scrub one or both of my spring races that I had planned, we’ll see. (As I told Roger, if I tell people now that it’s a possibility then there’s a greater chance that I will do the smart thing down the road. Mentioning something in public helps lock me into a plan of action.)

There must have been an easier way to get my Tuesday and Thursday nights (plus Saturday mornings) free for the next couple of weeks, though.

“You and I are here to stay.”

A week ago, I found out that the DC office of the National AIDS Marathon Training Program was closing. As people who have known me for a long time know, signing up for AIDS Marathon in 2001 literally changed my life. It got me exercising, I met a whole new group of friends, it helped me lose a lot of weight, it taught me just what I could accomplish if I put my mind to it. I believe in the program enough that I not only ran in it for six years in a row, but this past year I worked on Saturday mornings for the program to be one of the run site assistants.

Needless to say, AIDS Marathon going away in the DC area is not at all what I’d call a happy event, and there was a whole range of mad/upset/sad/unbelieving emotions that quickly ran through my head over the course of a couple of hours. (An abbreviated version of the grieving process, such as it was.)

What interestingly enough stopped the process for me, though, was a sudden thought that brought everything into a different sort of perspective. I’m not going to stop running, I told myself. A part of my life is going away, but at the same time it’s almost more of it merely changing into something else. And suddenly, like that, a whole new world of possibilities opened up in front of me once I realized that I wasn’t saying goodbye to everything in one fell swoop.

And it was right then that I saw that line from Six Feet Under that I mentioned a week ago. It was Lauren Ambrose who delivered the line (from the episode “Nobody Sleeps”) and part of it was just her body language and her tone of voice that sold it, but even stripped down to just print it still really hits home for some reason:

“I’m not even sure what happened, but I just had this glimpse of what might be possible, and for whatever reason the world just seemed really open and interesting, and not totally screwed up, and I don’t know, I don’t know, I just felt really happy.”

It’s taken me about a week to get fully back to that point, but I think I’m actually there. My iPod just pulled up Jennifer Kimball’s “The Revelations” and I’d forgotten how much I love this song. There’s this wonderful optimism bound up in it, this amazing forward-thinking.

Even through a wood you know by heart
It’s hard to go the same way twice.
Any bird, a stone can be a new path
Any love may turn to ice.

I’ve got all these opportunities in front of me right now. Things are going to be very different for running in 2007. And don’t get me wrong, leaving a great love of mine behind is distressing, and it’s sad to have to do so. But there are so many ideas I have, so many options, so many forks in the road waiting to be chosen. I can’t wait to make them.

There is no vision here but what is seen,
A stillness deeper than the night sky.
There’s time enough for both of us,
I am yours, and you are mine.

This is the way I’ve heard
It’s supposed to be, you and me.
A bridge over open sea
A single span, the infinite plan.
You and I are here to stay
You and I are here to stay.