Ayer Fire Department Thanksgiving Day 5K Race Report

Perhaps I’m crazy for getting up early on Thanksgiving morning to run a 5K four years in a row.  On the other hand, the people who think I’m crazy probably see no problem in getting up early the day after Thanksgiving to fight the crowds at the mall to save a few bucks on some electronic gizmo.  Me? I’ll just wait till next summer and get the next generation gizmo at a lower price.  Or more likely, I’ll keep my rotary dial cell phone another year.  It’s working rather well thank you very much, but I digress.

This year I decided to add an extra challenge to the race by taking NyQuil the night before.  Let me assure you that NyQuil is neither a performance nor a mood enhancing substance.  I was groggy, running felt especially laborious.  My legs were still sore from an overly eager practice run two days prior.  Expectations were that setting a new personal best would be difficult.

On the upside, I had a plan: Run fast.  As in, don’t try to pace myself and save something for a strong finish, but just go out fast from the beginning and see if I could sustain it.  That plan lasted about a mile and a half, before reality slowed me down and my legs turned to lead.

Then came the hill.  In the last mile there’s an uphill section which I will forever remember as the place where the fat guy in the turkey costume passed me.  This year I used that as motivation and somehow found the energy to sprint past about a dozen people up the hill.

After that I felt like toast (whole wheat!), but at least it was downhill to the finish line.  Somebody passed me during their final sprint to the finish, and I sped up and kept pace.  We both passed a couple other runners, then he started to tire out and slow down just short of the finish.  Engage warp speed!  Where the energy came from I do not know but I passed him in the last hundred feet and set another personal best for a 5K.

So it was that a good start and a very strong finish offset a lackluster showing from mile 1.5 to about 2.5.  Fun stat of the race:  My average heart rate was 175, which if you believe in the 220-age formula means that I averaged 99% of my maximum, with a peak of about 110%.  I never did like that formula.

This makes 3 years in a row I’ve run a minute faster than the previous year.  When I reach my 60s I’ll be doing the 5K in 10 minutes.  Past performance does not guarantee future gains, and other similar disclaimers apply.

In retrospect (as in, after the NyQuil wore off), it was another great morning with all my fishy friends.  I’m thankful to be able to keep doing this, and especially happy that this year I didn’t get passed by some overweight guy in a turkey costume.

Octoberfest 5k Race Report

I forgot to bring my towel.  If you’re a fan of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, you’ll understand why this is cause for great concern.  Luckily for me the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal was a no-show for the race.  At the very least, rain was predicted today, so I expected to finish the race soaked, dripping, and in need of a good drying off.

But I got there early and was the first car in the parking area, or so I thought.  The parking attendant quickly set me straight and pointed out that everybody else had been parking on the other side of the field, closer to the actual location of the festivities.  I am definitely firing on all cylinders today.

This was a small local race.  Small is a little less than 200 runners.  Local as in about 10 miles away.  I could have run from home to the starting line, ran the entire race, then run back home and still not have covered marathon distance.

The course itself is flat by New England standards, with only gentle rolling hills.  No climbs higher than about 50 feet would be my guess.  And the roads are completely closed off for the race.

On to the race itself.  Since I had quite a trail run yesterday and my legs were still recovering from that, I elected to start slowly from near the back of the pack and see how many people I could pass during the race.  And we’re waiting for the sound of musket fire to start the race.  20 seconds.  10 seconds.  And… he’s reloading the musket.  20 seconds, 10 seconds, and that musket sounds quite a bit like an air horn.  We’re off, wet powder be damned.

I take it easy for the first half mile.  People around me are panting somewhat heavily, and I’m calmly breathing through my nose.  The legs begin to loosen up, and I start ramping up my speed.  Mile 1 is complete in 9:30.  I start passing people.  I’m now taking full breaths at a comfortable rate.  I blow past the water stop and Mile 2 is completed in 8:40.  This feels like about as fast as I can go and still finish the race without slowing down.

But the course goes downhill and other runners begin to pick up the pace.  I do my best to match them and pull away again.  Somewhere around here I pass a group of girls from the Groton Dunstable track team.  I must be in better shape than I thought, I just passed a track team!  But I’m breathing heavy, trying not to gasp for air, and the legs are starting to get an unfamiliar burning sensation.  I’m pushing deeper into my limits than I’m accustomed too.

As the finish line draws into sight, I hear a loud pounding of footsteps chasing me down from behind.  Now, it’s not the Bugblatter Beast, but the Groton Dunstable track team passing me by.  My ego forces me to try to keep pace.  I realize how this looks.  A 40-something guy chasing around some high school girls with his tongue hanging out.

And my finish time is approximately 27:20, unofficially based on my watch.  That’s just a few seconds slower than my best 5K time.  So on the one hand I basically matched my best time without giving it my best effort.  On the other hand, I’m sure I could have found 20 seconds in that first mile and finished under 27 minutes.  I’m already eager to run another 5K this fall.

In the end, the rain held off for the race and it was a pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning and have the opportunity to hang out with a few friends from the running club.

LSD beats OCD

Today I had the opportunity to do a semi-regular long, slow distance run. Running long is a double whammy. You have to set aside several hours for the run itself, plus several additional hours of lying on the couch afterwards if you’re pushing your limits on distance as I did today.

The advice on these runs is to start slow and finish fast. But, no matter how slow I start, I usually get slower and slower as the run goes on. Today I was determined to go out so slow that I’d have something left to really push with in the final hour.

Enter my Garmin watch. It can display heart rate, pace, time, distance, lap time, and a number of other things. It can also do “workouts”. For example, if you want to run intervals, it will time the intervals for you and beep at the end of each time period.

There are two fundamental problems with this watch. First, while it can display a lot of information, it can only display a few numbers on the screen at a time. So you end up having to page through the screens to get all the information. I have the same problem with my Ford Escape. In that, you have to hit the “info” button to cycle between the trip odometer, MPG readout, miles to empty, etc.

In both cases, I get too fascinated with the numbers and OCD makes me end up cycling through them, which takes my focus away from other things such as watching out for oncoming trucks (conveniently, that applies to both running and driving).

The second problem with the Garmin is that it can do a lot of wonderful things, but it never does them quite the way I expect. Case in point: Today I was trying to start out slow, slower than I can actually “run”. Anytime I need to run an average pace slower than about 11 minutes, I use the run/walk method promoted by Jeff Galloway. So in the middle of my run today, I decided to use the interval timer of the watch to let me know when to run and when to walk.

Now, when you do a “workout” with this watch, and the workout completes, the timer stops. However, if you simply hit the start button again, you continue timing from where the workout ended. So, it would make sense that if the timer were already running, and you started a workout, it would just add on to whatever time had already been counted by the watch, right? Nope. It resets the time and distance to 0 when you start a workout. Oops, I’ve now divided my long run into a series of smaller runs that need to be all added up to get the total time and distance.

So here I am, running along and thinking about how to use an Excel spreadsheet to do the totals for me. But you know what? After a few miles, you cease to care about such things. All that really matters for future reference is that I ran approximately X miles in T time. It’s probably even slightly OCD to be keeping a log of my runs, but a certain amount is called for so you can track progress and figure out what works and what doesn’t. But at some point, you just need to get out and run, and not worry about all these numbers.

Now, I will spend the rest of the evening trying not to figure out how many kilobytes of data per mile my watch generates.

Oh, and about the run itself. I did manage to hold my pace down to 12 minute miles or slower for the first 9 miles. Then I stopped at home to use the bathroom and refill my bottle, and then back out for some of the hardest sub-11 minute miles I’ve ever run. In years past, I never pushed myself this hard on a training run. However, that was before I ran a marathon and found out just how far you can push yourself and how much pain you can actually feel. Today was nothing compared to mile 24.

Attack of the Zombie Trees

My idea of cross training is to walk through the woods with a chainsaw and cut out the dead or undesirable trees. It’s part of owning a tree farm (more on that in a future post) and a great way to be outside in the fresh air and get relatively low intensity exercise for the entire body.

The problem is, dead trees tend to be found where the forest is overcrowded, and the weak trees lose out in the survival of the fittest. In short, sometimes there’s not a lot of room for them to fall over. They become zombies. They resent my attempts to get them to lay down. They throw branches down on me. Once in a great while, they respond to my attempts to physically push them over by snapping in two, so that the top half can fall back at me and smite me mightily on the head.

I can tell you from experience that a small branch falling from 30 feet up hurts like hell when it hits you directly on the head. So as dorky as I sometimes feel wearing my bright orange hard hat for dinky jobs, it’s a good habit to be in. I can also tell you from experience that a 15 foot section of zombie fir tree falling from 30 feet up packs quite a wallop, but it didn’t hurt a bit.

So between dealing with zombie trees and a trail run that included getting lost in a field of ferns and prickers (while wearing shorts, of course), it was very nice to have a boring session running on the treadmill in air conditioned comfort.

Literally Running an Errand

As much as I don’t like bringing a car in for service, I hate doing my own exhaust work even more. But since the truck has an exhaust leak, the question becomes how to drop it off for service, get in a morning run, and still make it to work in time for a group meeting.

The answer, of course, is to drop it off and then run back home, hop in another car, and go to work. And so it was that I got up at 6:30 and fueled up with a bagel and almond butter. There are two things to be aware of with almond butter. First is that if you let it sit in the cupboard for several months before you open it, it will separate into oil and cement. Secondly, it has a magnetic attraction to freshly cleaned white table cloths. But I’m getting off track.

Getting into my running clothes was a bit of a challenge today, on account of if my head was attached, I’d be searching the house for it. After circling the house twice looking for the socks I was going to wear, my loving wife asked why there were socks on the dining room table. “Oops, sorry” is a more politically correct response than “they’re hiding the almond butter smudge”. But at least now I’m ready to run.

Next up, make a protein shake for after the run and lay my clothes out on the bed. I’ll have about 15 minutes to drink, shower, and change from the end of the run until I need to leave for work.

Okay, get the truck keys, clean out the interior (you do not want your mechanic to find “Culture Club” in your cassette deck), driver’s license, and EYEGLASSES! Uh-oh, I don’t usually run with my glasses on, and legally speaking, I need them for driving. A quick search through “that drawer” and I find a pair from 20 years ago. Pop off the clip-on flip-up blue blockers, wash the lenses, and I’ve got a pair that I can wear while driving and leave in the truck. Wow, my eyes were different 20 years ago. It’s like I’m looking at everything in a fun house mirror. But I’m legal to drive now, so off we go.

Drop off the truck, wait for the Garmin to find a few satellites, and we’re running. Slowly. Did I mention this is the seventh day in a row that I’ve run? But the weather is absolutely beautiful, and I run by some of the best scenery in Pepperell. Scenery is a good excuse to walk for a few moments and take it all in.

Have I mentioned that I’m the secretary of the local running club? And that I’ve run the Boston Marathon? Combine the two, and what happens is that whenever I take a walk break from my run, somebody who knows me is sure to drive by and make a comment. So having received my daily “motivation”, I continue on running.

And I make it home a bit earlier than expected. This is a problem. I’m not in a hurry, and soak in the shower for a few. Guess what? I’m not early anymore. By the time I made it to work, I was the last one into the meeting, but still made it before they had the Skype connection to the Budapest office up and running. I’ll let the reader decides if that counts as late or on time.

Countdown to Boston

I’ve spent a fair amount of time today trying to write down my thoughts about tomorrow’s Boston Marathon. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s simply bigger than I am capable of comprehending.

On the one hand, it’s “just a marathon”. I show up at the starting line, wait in the impossibly long line to use the porta-john, run at a pace I think I can sustain, grab water along the way as needed, and collect my finisher’s medal at the finish line. Just like any other race.

But, this is an event on par with the Super Bowl or the Indy 500. The best runners in the world will also be running. It’s the oldest and most prestigious marathon in the US. There will be 500,000 spectators lining the streets and cheering the runners on.

What makes this race different than most others is that people who don’t run know about it, and people who do run put it on their bucket list of races to enter. People can relate to me saying “I’m running Boston” in a way they simply can’t when I say “I’m running Stu’s 30K”. In short, people get excited that I’m in the Boston Marathon.

Simply put, tomorrow is shaping up to be a life-changing day. Today I should be able to run a marathon. Tomorrow, God willing, I will have run a marathon, and arguably the most significant marathon in the world.

But for my purposes in actually running the race, it will have to be “just a marathon” until I reach the finish line. This means sticking to my usual race routine, and more importantly not getting carried away and running too fast at the beginning. Because really, like any other race the way to get from the starting line to the finish line is to simply focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

Having said that, I’ll probably be up at 3am obsessing over what to wear. And hey, I’M IN THE BOSTON MARATHON, HOW COOL IS THAT!?!?!?

Observations from an easy treadmill workout

47 days to the marathon! My biggest training accomplishment today was remembering to throw my water bottle into my gym bag so I’m not constantly hopping off the treadmill to fill up the thimble sized cups that are available at the water cooler. Not that I really needed the water today with my short and slow walk, but building the habit of having water handy means I don’t need to think about it in the future.

Another variation I tried today was to work out on an empty stomach before lunch. Somehow I seem to have this fear of starving to death during a run, and try to avoid running on a completely empty stomach. But since an easy day was planned, it made sense to force the body to work off of what was in long term storage. This worked out really well, as I had more energy after the workout than before it started. Of course, that might also be the result of having a meeting just before the workout.

On the downside, the fitness room was packed during the lunch hour, and the TV had the noontime news on. This is not life affirming. I couldn’t hear the stories over the noise of the equipment, which made me more aware that the images on the screen were quite vivid. There’s somebody getting punched in the face. Here’s the security video of an armed robbery. And finally, a car running down a bunch of bicyclists (I found a print version of the story here). These are traumatic events you might witness firsthand a few times in your entire lifetime, so by my count I had a lifetime of trauma condensed into a 30 minute capsule. All while I was trying to have a positive workout.

So the plan tomorrow is to do another easy workout in the morning before breakfast. Hopefully I’ll have my water bottle and there won’t be any news on.