Week in Review: 19-25 February 2012, and Club Challenge 10-Mile Race Report

Day by day:

19 February: 11 miles in the morning (85 minutes), in the vicinity of Loch Raven with Luke and Seth; 11 miles in the evening (80 minutes), in scary West Baltimore neighborhoods

20 February: 1 mile (10 minutes)

21 February: total 10 miles (70 minutes): ~2 mile warmup, 5x800m, 90 sec rest between reps (2:57, 2:56, 2:55, 2:56, 3+awful), 2x(3x400m), 60 sec rest between reps (83, 81, 79; 81, 79, 80), ~2 mile warmdown

22 February: 7 miles mid-day at APG with Eric (50 minutes), 7 miles in Mount Vernon in the evening after Ash Wednesday service, because God told me to (50 minutes)

23 February: 15 miles (105 minutes), mid-day, straight-through, straight-up

24 February: 11 miles (80 minutes), on a gray Friday morning

25 February: 1 mile (10 minutes), "resting up" for Club Challenge

Total time: 540 minutes
Total distance: 74 miles

A "lazy" week by recent standards, but maybe necessarily so, considering that I wanted to have something in my legs for Club Challenge. Did it work? Well, I knew you were going to ask . . .

I hate Club Challenge.

The Club Challenge 10-Mile Run is the big "running team event" in Maryland, and every year, Falls Road Running (the club I run with) fields a competitive team here, and the competition from the front of the pack to the back is as fierce as it comes in any road race.

And I like all of that, but that's where the fun stops.

The race is always the last Sunday in February, when probably nobody's in top shape for anything, on top of which, Sunday morning, which is the last morning that anybody wants to get out of bed early to do anything. It's always a little uncomfortably cold at the start, and at least half the time, it's raining/sleeting/snowing lightly. Sometimes, the wind blows relentlessly in your face (okay, at least once during every race it will do this).

And speaking of every time, there are brutal hills that don't start showing up until a little after Mile 3, after you've had the most likely unwitting good fortune to be running mostly downhill, throwing off your sense of pace and making your slowdown on the uphills seem even more demoralizing. The mile markers are completely wrong (no doubt, the host team's strategy, although for future, they need to change up which ones are wrong, and by how much, because we're starting to catch on); running with a watch is futile. It's better to just viciously, aggressively race against whoever happens to be in your vicinity, until you cross the finish line or throw up/crap yourself/pass out trying (and yes, the former two did actually happen in this year's edition of the race, although thankfully, not to me).

So besides a new pair of gardening gloves with the 10-Mile Club Challenge logo printed on them, what do you get for your trouble? Frustrated, sick, full of regret? Does any of that sound awesome?

Of course, keep in mind that the flip side of this is that you manage to triumph over all of this adversity, and run an awesome race there. And then you feel like a big shot, which might be some of the draw.

So with all of that in mind, predictably, I thought about not showing up for this race. But a combination of guilt and a vague desire to test myself (as if I needed any more of that lately) brought me to the starting line, stubbornly wearing my classic red Falls Road Racing Team jersey, because it matched my shoes better than the new black-and-neon-green numbers. (Please note that one other runner on our team did this, so I was not the only such jerk.)

The start was the typical mumbling cluster, where you could barely hear the commands, but then gradually, everybody lurched forward, and apparently, the race had started. I went out feeling relatively fast and comfortable; apparently, lighter mileage this past week had done something for me after all. Based on the chatter of the GPS-watch-obsessed around me, I surmised that I was running just under 6-minute-mile pace. It was probably bad that I realized this, because based on past experience, when I hear that number, I assume that it won't last.

When I saw Melissa on the side of the course, somewhere in the first three miles, cheering "Go Dave!" and then, about ten seconds later "Go Chrissy!" (Olympic-Marathon-Trials 1:14-high half-marathon qualifier Chrissy), I realized that that was the wrong order in which to be hearing that, and that got inside my head a little more. In the next couple of minutes, Chrissy passed me. Then, for a while, nothing I remember happened until Meg D passed me (and politely cheered me on as she did).

Then the hills started coming, and things started turning around, to some extent. While I wasn't going faster on the hills, I wasn't slowing down much, either - apparently, last Sunday's hilly trail run at Loch Raven with Luke and Seth had helped, because I felt like I was either closing in on or passing people on the hills, more on good form than on abject strength. This helped me at least feel as though I wasn't going to totally tank, as I usually do in this race at this point.

I reached Mile 5 (the marker, anyway - who knows how incorrect it was), to see one of our runners walking slowly off to the side of the course, apparently having a bad day. It turned out that what I thought he said when I asked if he was okay - "I had a cramp" - was actually "I had to crap." I wish I had known that at the time, because it would have made the rest of the race more bearable. At any rate, Meg D's neon yellow jersey and matching headband weren't running away from me as quickly as I expected, so I gamely soldiered on through the seemingly endless hills of Howard County suburbia, against the intermittent protesting of my somewhat high-mileage-battered quads.

Somewhere in here, another runner in an orange shirt and gray shorts (so I have no idea what team he was running for) passed me, and asked "didn't you pace at the Richmond Marathon?" I said yes, and he said "I recognized you from the back," (creepy), and then "You had a rough finish there, didn't you?" to which I replied simply "yeah, it happens sometimes," and then, he took off, end of conversation. Nice demoralization tactics, jerk.

But I wasn't slowing as much as I typically do at this point in the race, and, compared to the runners around me, I seemed to be maintaining a lot more strength. Fortunately, thanks to a pack of about four or five runners from different teams that, from mile 7 to 8, were, quite literally, bearing down on me (as in, relentless footsteps, inches behind me), I had sufficient motivation to keep pushing. A little after this, one of the Falls Road girls passed me, breathing like she was flirting with a heart attack, and I decided that enough was enough of that, so I stepped on the gas and really passed her hard, and somewhere in that surge, I passed Ryan and Remus (bad and whatever days, respectively), and, before I had a lot of time to think about anything, I was nearing the finish line, and some random lady was calling out times at some random distance from the finish line, and I heard "1:01:47" and vaguely suspected that my vague 1:02:30 goal was out of reach, but that wasn't going to stop me from making one final push. (Plus, even though I was supposed to let her pass me, I wasn't about to let heart attack girl beat me after I put that much effort into my surge, and besides, the Falls Road women were probably going to win handily, anyway, and one point would likely be irrelevant.)


Nearing the finish, hating every second.

1:03:57, just in time to see Joel, aka "Barf," living up to his nickname and puking his guts out in the grass to the side of the finish line. It was an impressive show - usually, people puke once, and feel a lot better, but I saw him puke twice in succession, nothing but bile, and he claims to have puked twice more after that on his way to the gym.

Also, speaking of purging, orange-shirt jerk, who finished less than a minute ahead of me, saw me at the finish, and amended his statement to "I appreciate that you were out there pacing not a lot of people do that sorry if what I said during the race came off sort of mean." Apology accepted, or whatever.

For my part, I wasn't feeling too terrible, which I suppose makes sense, because I ran this race at what is roughly marathon pace for me these days. I took a pair of gardening gloves, ate a couple of banana chunks, a really gross Star Wars lightsaber Berry Go-Gurt, and a styrofoam cup of suspiciously warm water, and then went out for a warm-down before the awards ceremony, where Falls Road swept everything (Men's Individual - "C-Rad," 52-high, Women's Individual - "Christy," 1:01-high, Men's Team, Women's Team), which is kind of neat, although as slow as I ran, I can't claim too much credit for this victory (except maybe providing some motivation for our faster girls).

Which brings me to a point that I thought about making earlier, but now seems like the time to bring it up, which is that officially, the 10-mile is my WORST distance. Taking my time from the race, 1:03:57, my new 10-mile PR, and putting it into one of those fancy "race time prediction calculators," my PRs at shorter distances are all slightly faster than this time projects (10-15 seconds faster at each distance, depending on what calculator you use), and my PRs at longer distances are all more significantly faster than this time projects (about a minute for a half-marathon, which is a bad indicator, anyway, since I've only run one half competitively, and a whopping ten minutes for the marathon).

So with that in mind, this performance fits right in with everything else in my life lately. While it's unsatisfying on its own, in the grand scheme of things, it could be a lot worse, and there's so much other stuff that's so much better than it (most notably, the all-day bar-hopping embarassing-Facebook-moment-producing after-party, and not having to run this race again for another year), that it's not really worth dwelling on.

In that sense, it becomes, to temporarily abuse a word, a "challenge." But not the kind of obsessive, life-consuming challenge that makes you horribly disappointed when things fail to go your way; instead, the kind that sits in the back of your mind, resurfacing just often enough to both motivate and inspire you to do just a little better. And with as much of the former sort as I've seen lately, this is exactly the kind of "challenge" that I needed.

So, for that, thanks to everybody who in some way made this experience possible, because, as I reflect on this now, as much as I still really hate Club Challenge, I can't wait to take another crack at it next year.

Week in Review: 23-29 October 2011, and Halloweeny 50K Race Report/Product Review

Getting back on track with the mileage thing:

23 October 2011: 20 miles (140 minutes), including an impromptu Diane Heiser-brand beatdown, as I joined her for pickups of ~4 minutes, 6 minutes, 4 minutes, and 2 minutes on the promenade. Almost hit by a car in the process, jeered by a group of guys in Fells when she dropped me on the 6, and saw a guy with a boa constrictor draped over his shoulder coming back on Monument Street. What a day . . .

24 October 2011: 15 miles (110 minutes), out, back, and along with the Fed Hill group, plus a little extra meander.

25 October 2011: 6 hard-fought miles (~40 minutes): 1 mile warmup, 2 miles warmdown, and about 3 miles of intervals on the track on "relay night." Mile (6:15-ish - bad), quarter, half, half, quarter, plus some jogging around. Last quarter in 68, which is the fastest quarter I've run in a long, LONG time (which is a feel-good, even though Diane ran a 64 and beat me in the last few meters . . . boo)

26 October 2011: 9 miles (65 minutes), easy with the group running from O'Donnell Square

27 October 2011: 7 miles, wandering in and around Patterson Park (50 minutes)

28 October 2011: 3 miles (25 minutes), test-running the Hokas in Patterson Park

29 October 2011: 30-ish winning birthday miles (probably more like 31), in about 5.5 hours (330 minutes) - see below.

Total Time: 760 minutes
Total Distance: 91 miles

Back to a solid mileage total. Good variety of speed, distance, and terrain this week, and getting beaten by the best on occasion, made this week productive and satisfying.

Now, the race report, and product reviews (man, this thing is going to be jam-packed - if you're just interested in the Hoka Mafate Trail Running Shoe and Nathan VITABand reviews, skip straight to the bottom now):

For my birthday weekend, my original plan was to run back-to-back 50Ks, in keeping with the tradition that I started last year of running a mile for each year (where last year's event was a wandering 29-mile loop around some of my favorite places in Baltimore City). This year, the Halloweeny 50K and the Fire on the Mountain 50K were scheduled as back-to-back races on my birthday weekend, so I had planned to run them back-to-back, in honor of 30 being a big year and a nice round number, for whatever that's worth. I was also planning to try to go under 5 hours for each of them, or under 10 hours total. But, as we shall see, the best laid plans of mice and men (especially mice, and even more especially, men dressed as women dressed as mice) . . .

In any case, at 5:05 a.m. on Saturday, Octoher 29th, my cell phone alarm rudely awoke me after a night of warm, sound, cat-free sleep in my own bed. I spent the last 10-ish minutes of still being 29 tending to my three cats and starting to put on my costume (which, for those still not in the know, was Karen Smith from the movie "Mean Girls" dressed as a mouse for Halloween, in keeping with the monologue in the movie about Halloween being an excuse for girls to dress like sluts without retribution, and that the "hardcore" ones dressed in lingerie and animal ears). My costume, which cost about $15 (total of $6 for women's size XS running skirt and size M running tank on deep clearance at Target, $5 for blonde wig, $3 for mouse ears, and $1 for a roll of pink ribbon to use as accents for the outfit), proved more complicated to put on than I had thought - apparently it's not easy being a girl. Somehow, I managed to take an hour and a half to get out of the house, in spite of laying things out the night before (maybe I should have stopped noticing things out of place and fixing them before I left).

The drive out to Gathland State Park for the race was a bit harrowing, as it was alternately snowing/sleeting, and people were choosing either to ignore this fact and drive 90 mph as if nothing were wrong, or panic and drive 40 mph as if there were already a foot of snow on the road. I arrived at the parking lot at about 5 minutes to 8 a.m., when the race was supposed to start, only to find that due to the snow, the start had been moved to the pavilion a little less than half a mile up the hill. I drove up the hill and checked in right around 8 a.m.; fortunately for me, due to the changed start location, the start time was pushed back 15 minutes to account for anybody who had gone to the original start location and been re-directed. After a pre-race briefing with more course directions than anybody could possibly remember all at once, we were off.

To back up for a second, because this was a "fatass" event, the event was not postponed to a later date due to weather. As a "fatass" (no entry fee, no t-shirt, no awards, no wimps), participants take their ability to navigate the course and their safety into their own hands, since the course is not marked, race-related medical help is not available, and the event is not sanctioned by the park. Given this background, although a little over 100 people signed up for the race, only 41 actually showed up, and, with the ever-worsening conditions (more about that later), only about 10 people actually finished the entire race.

I headed down the white-blazed Appalachian Trail (AT) section up to Weverton Cliff, behind Sean Andrish and another faster runner. The snow was coming down, the rocks were getting slippery, and it was a gradual uphill. I stopped to put on a jacket and re-tie my shoes, and Sean ran out of sight, so I held my pace once I got running again, was passed by a guy dressed as a nun and another guy not in costume, both of whom I passed by the end of the first AT section. I came into the first aid station looking like this:


Time to fly, indeed, turn sheet in hand.

Not super-fast up the mountain, but definitely rolling down the backside, where the snow had turned to light rain. The next section was "easier," following the AT down to the C&O Canal Towpath (of JFK 50 fame), but on the Towpath, the snow had turned to freezing rain, flooding the path and ensuring that I would not be even remotely dry for the remainder of the race. So a theoretically flat, fast 3-ish miles on the towpath became a slower, colder, wetter slog than I would have liked. Sean and his fast friend passed me on the towpath coming back from the aid station, about a quarter-mile from aid, which was a little bit of a blow to morale, as I had hoped to make up a little more distance here.

Due to the cold temperatures, and the tiny skirt I was wearing, leaving more leg bare than is optimal under these conditions, I didn't dawdle at the aid station, and headed back down the towpath as quickly as possible. The turnoff, on the second footbridge to the left, came sooner than I had passed Sean, which led me to believe that he had decided that enough of this was enough, and simply turned around and headed back to the start, bypassing most of the race (this later turned out to be true). This left me in first place, apparently 5-10 minutes ahead of the second-place runner, heading up what appeared to be a rough section of trail. The volunteer on the other side of the footbridge directing runners up the trail was reluctant to try to give me directions (which, in retrospect, would not have been a huge task - how difficult is "green trail, to a left on blue, to a left on red, turn around at overlook, red to green back to the towpath" to remember for an hour or two?), and, a bit frustrated with this, I began climbing the steep green trail/fire road, and worrying about how my increasingly frozen hands were going to pull out the turn sheet to keep me on track. The soaking-wet cloth gloves, which I had balled my hands into and tucked into my jacket sleeves, were doing very little to keep my hands warm, and only the fact that I had my hands balled up, recirculating body heat to the extent possible under those circumstances, was keeping me from frostbite. Any attempt to take the turn sheet out had to be completed within a couple of minutes, or else my crippled fingers may never work again.

As the snow came down harder, the green trail turned more narrow and winding, and it occurred to me that, based on prior review of the turn sheet, there was a potentially difficult turn-off on the green trail to the blue trail, and I may have gone too far and passed it. Struggling with frigid fingers, I pulled out the turn sheet, and, sure enough, the distance that I had gone seemed a bit too long, and so I turned around, brushed the snow off of an info sign along the way, and found that it was the Naval Battery location that the turn sheet mentioned was what you would see if you went too far.

Back on course, I headed further uphill, to encounter my first downed tree, due primarily to the freak snowfall on the trees, which were more leaf-covered than they typically would be when snow starts here. I then realized two things: 1.) Those shotgun-like sounds that I had heard earlier in the race were the sound of trees falling under the weight of the snow, and 2.) the tree which had freshly fallen in the path (only the slightest hint of snow on it) had fallen in the path while I was off-course, and, had I not missed the turn, I may well have been under this very large tree when it fell. As if all of this was not nerve-wracking enough, I was struggling to pull on my soaked cloth gloves and to tuck my hands into my sleeves after I exposed them in order to read the turn sheet. This slowed my progress up the hill, as I attempted, mostly with my teeth, to pull on the gloves to protect my fingers. As I progressed up the hill, a trail of footprints became apparent, and I began to wonder, since Sean had turned around, and was running with another person anyway, if the runner in second had passed me while I had spent about half a mile off-course. I decided that it was cold enough that I was just going to follow the footprints, even if they were on the wrong path, since whoever was out on foot probably didn't want to stay out in these conditions for a long time, no matter where they were going, and there would likely be help wherever they were.

All of this caused me to slow and be more cautious, and it was on the rocky downhill at the end of the blue trail to the red trail that the second-place runner passed me. He had been following my footprints, apparently, and had sped up for the same reasons that I was being more cautious. We decided to stick together, and he let me borrow an extra pair of socks and a Gore-Tex glove cover to keep my hands warm. The gentleman, Tom Kubicz, dressed in a much more weather-appropriate medieval costume, turned out to be a professor of Oceanography at Johns Hopkins Homewood campus (my undergrad alma mater), so we quickly had fodder for conversation as we descended to the overlook, then back onto the red trail, onto the green trail downhill (flying down this relatively tame trail section), and back down to the C&O Canal Towpath to the aid station where all of this mayhem had started. We also passed the gentleman whose footprints I had been following, who turned out to be a hiker with a dog (explaining the frequent animal tracks next to the footsteps), coincidentally on the same path that we were following.

I waited for Tom at the aid station, since he was taking longer than I would have, because the next section, through Harper's Ferry, was subject to complicated directions, and with minimal access to my turn sheet in the accelerating wintry mix, it seemed best to use the buddy system here. We went down the towpath, right over the canal bridge, slightly right up a set of stone stairs to a trail to more stone stairs to a graveyard to the right, through the graveyard and to the left, up a road and through a college gate to the left, back down onto the trail, down to the road and left again to loop back across a "no-bike" bridge to the right, onto a footpath which led us back to the towpath - phew! Got all that? In better weather, this would have been a lovely scenic tour of the town, and even in this weather, with more functional fingers, I could have gotten a few neat photos out of this, but at this point, I was too cold to fully appreciate any of it. We turned right on the towpath to head back to the first aid station, and the puddles had only gotten bigger and colder since we had left them last. In spite of our friendly banter, the towpath seemed interminable, although maybe it's not apparent from this picture of us heading back:


On the towpath - Lord and Lady of the Freak October Snowfall?

We reached the last aid station together, and at this point, a couple of new things were apparent: 1) Sniper and Chris, who had been patiently "crewing" for me this entire time ("crewing" which mostly consisted of making jokes about my costume and providing general moral support, so that I wouldn't think about how conditions were steadily getting worse), had firmly established my alter-ego's name as "Gerta," the steroid-pumping German, due to comments from Pam, a race volunteer, about how muscular my legs were, and 2) it was now officially too cold for that silly skirt. Tom and I left the aid station together, but Tom said that he was fading, and told me I could take off and run faster if I wanted, since I was cold, and motion was the best way for me to stay warm at this point - I wasn't insulated nearly as well as Tom was.

I scrambled ahead up the hill, up the tight switchbacks, with Tom not too far behind, competitive drive being what it is. Eventually, I lost sight of him, at about the same time that the course began to level out a bit (although it was still a gradual uphill), and also at about the same time that I realized that I probably wasn't eating enough, and was now playing a balancing game between level of exertion required to generate enough body heat to keep warm, versus energy to move forward. Or, some of the energy that I needed to move forward as fast as possible needed to be diverted to warming my body, but if I didn't keep moving foward, I wasn't going to get the benefit of the waste heat from forward progress. This was going to make the last 6 miles interesting. Although that doesn't sound like a lot of distance on paper, in practice, in drastic enough circumstances, anything can happen (see: 2011 Holiday Lake 50K, last two wobbly miles that took half an hour to complete). To add to the intrigue, the harder snowfall had now brought down so many trees that for a solid mile of the course, there was a downed tree in the path, without exaggeration about every fifteen feet. At the rate these were coming down, it was hard to believe that there would still be a forest when this was all said and done.

Nevertheless, I kept the faith and slogged through (briskly, as though Diane were chasing me, and ready to pass me at any second - ha!), passing a few more runners who had turned back early (including a very large guy - around 5'7" and 200 pounds - ambling towards the finish in a long-sleeved shirt and shorts, apparently unaffected by the cold . . . sometimes some extra body fat is convenient), and finally, a couple of hikers who confirmed that, in spite of the fact that I hadn't seen a white marker on the snow-covered trees in an uncomfortably long time, I was near the parking lot and the pavilion. I motored downhill, and sure enough, within a couple of minutes, it turned out that those car-like sounds that could have just been wind or airplanes were what I had wanted them to be, and I rolled into the pavilion, about five and a half hours after this whole ordeal began, first man, woman, and mouse to finish.


Finishing this silly thing, with a random dog. Also, note no exaggeration with respect to the snowfall.

Then the cold really set in, and I looked more like this:



Tom showed up about ten minutes later, second to finish, and we congratulated each other the best we could, given that we were both exhibiting signs of the early stages of hypothermia.

Overall, it was nice to begin my fourth decade with a win, but in particular, with a win under these conditions. It takes more than speed to finish first in a Fatass - it takes a lot of guts, self-sufficiency, and awareness of your environment to persist and make it to the finish in spite of minimal aid and no course markings. Furthermore, because Fire on the Mountain wasn't cancelled until a couple of hours after I had finished, I had been deliberately holding back a bit, under the assumption that I was going to have to run another 30-ish miles the next day under similar conditions, so I had been doing only what I needed to to get through the race in a timely fashion, win or otherwise. It was nice that that strategy turned out as well as it did, and saved my legs enough to allow me to run a 2-hour, 17-mile run the next day in the relatively warm, dry confines of Baltimore City, around M&T Bank Stadium during the Ravens game - my first stadium run this year during a game, and a huge come-from-behind win for the Ravens (down 24-6 when I passed the stadium at halftime, with folks in purple shamefully streaming out).

So that's the race, but you're probably also curious about the gear. If you are, here goes:

Hoka Mafate Trail Running Shoe Review:

In the above pictures, you probably noticed the giant, goofy shoes that I was wearing, and wondered "what on earth?" I was wearing the Hoka Mafate Trail Running Shoe for this race, the first time I had ever worn them, save for a three-mile shakeout the day before in Patterson Park just to make sure that there was nothing catastrophically wrong with them.

In the pantheon of increasingly wacky shoes these days, these are some of the wackiest, with their oversized sole and bright colors. The concept is that the thicker sole allows for more cushioning, and, in spite of the appearance, a near-barefoot 4mm heel-to-toe drop (most shoes come in at around 12mm), which, combined with a wide, slightly rockered outsole, allows for more natural running form, and saves your legs on potentially punishing downhills, while also allowing you to run faster than you otherwise would. All of this is supposed to justify a lofty $150 price tag. So, did it? (Note that I will answer this hypothetically, as I paid far less than $150 for these . . .)

Well, first off, the claims about flying downhill are warranted. The first picture in this post is pretty characteristic of how I was handling the downhills in this race. The cushioning, rockered sole, and positioning of the foot allow for a little extra "slop" in the heel-braking that inevitably occurs on the steepest downhills to keep you from face-planting. Once you're comfortable with the height off the ground, and convinced that the shoe is wide enough to provide a stable platform on which to land (because it is), you can really fly on the downhills, as the tag line suggests - they force you to engage your lower back and butt more, which helps save your quads.

That said, in my experience, they were a wash on the flat C&O Canal Towpath, and on the uphills. Some people have claimed that they are too "mushy" uphill, but I didn't notice a difference, although I am generally strong and adaptable when it comes to climbing, so I might not be the best judge of that. In this case, a flaw with the shoe, probably particular to my foot, came into play. Because the back of my heel is unusually flat, it tends to slip in shoes with a pronounced rounding in the back of the heel (which is probably ideal for people with more "normal" feet). The slippage for me in the Hokas was pretty bad, to the point that in spite of my lacing tricks, my heel was eventually slipping significantly on almost anything that wasn't a downhill. Over the course of a lot of miles, fighting the shoe this way was tiring.

As far as tread and grip on terrain, this race exercised the shoe over a lot of different surfaces - road, gravel, puddles, snow, ice, rocks. Although out of the box the shoes were a little slippery on flat, wet surfaces (I almost took a dive on the linoleum behind my front door when I was running back to the house after tossing out a bag of cat litter in the park before leaving for the race), once the race began, and the shoes were "christened," the grip improved, and, for not having an outsole specifically tuned to any one surface, these were some of the better-gripping shoes that I've ever worn (heel slippage aside, of course).

Also, these were the "waterproof" version of the shoe, and, like every waterproof shoe, that works only until your socks get wet. As deep as some of the puddles were, wet socks, and ultimately wet shoes, were inevitable. I will say, however, that after close to 6 hours in the shoes by the time I finally got them off at the finish (including 4 hours of being pretty soaked), I somehow had almost no signs of pruning or trenchfoot, so they must have at least kept the water to a minimum.

Overall, because of the poor heel fit, I definitely would not have paid full price for these. But, with a better upper fit (which, within a few minutes of putting them on, I'm sure you can determine whether or not the shoe works for you that way), these are awesome trail shoes, and definitely worth considering for long trail races. My legs didn't feel terribly beaten-up the next day (they were good enough for a relatively fast 17 road miles), which I can't totally attribute to the shoes, because, again, I was running just fast enough not to freeze, but I suspect that the shoes helped, if for no other reason than I didn't have a single bruised toenail or blister. (And, with respect to bruised toenails, being a little higher off the ground reduces the risk of stubbed toes, probably.) For me, these are an effective heel mod away from being a great trail shoe. And, for Hoka, this is another "podium" for your shoes, you know, if you care as much about those things as your website claims. ;)

Nathan VITABand Review

As people apparently read this silly blog now, sometimes companies send me free stuff to test out, and usually, I'm remiss in reviewing it. But it's a new year for me, and I'm turning over a new leaf, so here's my review of the Nathan VITABand, provided to me for free by Nathan:


Here's me wearing the VITABand, just before all of that stuff above happened.

The Nathan VITABand is a Livestrong-style bracelet with a unique identifying number on it that you can link to an online profile with your medical history and emergency contact information. In the event that you, say, foolishly venture out into the cold, snowy wilderness underdressed, run out of food and water, and freeze to death, somebody can at least identify your corpse. (And if you're still alive, they might even be able to call the number on the bracelet and get you appropriate help.) The bracelet can also hold chips with your info written on it, so that the person who finds you doesn't have to call the phone number on the bracelet to ID you, and a pre-paid debit card chip, which you can use at places that accept pre-paid, touchless payment methods. Fancy.

I had just received the bracelet a couple of days before the race, so I didn't have either of the chips for it yet (they come in the mail once you fill out your profile online), but I figured that since it matched my outfit (it was hot pink - not sure if it comes in different colors), it was at least a fashion statement, if not a precaution in the event of a catastrophe on a mountain. So I really can't vouch for it saving my life, but I can offer some initial impressions:

Good:

- Pink color looks cool, is highly visible, and supports breast cancer awareness ('tis the month . . .)
- Lightweight
- Easy-on, easy-off
- Fits securely
- Holds a lot of information in a neat little package

Bad:

- Time-consuming data entry online (but basically a one-time thing)
- Subscription service ($20 per year; not backbreaking, but still not free)
- Cats think that it is a small snake and try to chew on it (mine has teeth marks in it now, and is missing the placeholder "debit" chip . . . although that's better than missing a real chip)
- Pre-paid debit service is as useful as touchless debit is available and as much as you pre-pay (which I typically do not do)

But all things considered, this is a compact, sturdy ID system, probably the best on the market in that regard. The subscription fee might be cause to balk, but at the same time, it's not terribly expensive for a little peace of mind. I wish that the touchless payment was credit, as opposed to pre-paid debit (personally, I would me more likely to use it if it were credit), but they could probably modify that without having to modify the bracelet itself. If you can keep it away from curious cats, and the subscription model doesn't bother you, this is arguably the best bracelet of its type out there.

And with that, I've written more than my share of words for the week. Now, back to running . . . :)

Week in Review - 3-9 April, and Bull Run Run 50-Mile Race Report

Comin' atcha now with that blah blah blah:

3 April 2011: 8 quasi-slow Canton/Fells/Fed Hill miles (60 minutes) in the morning, and a faster reprise (9 miles, 60 minutes) in the evening.

4 April 2011: 1 stupid mile, in about 10 minutes, in bare feet around Patterson Park, carrying my dress shoes, with my keys and phone in my pockets, post-Sara's-recital, keeping the streak alive.

5 April 2011: About 9 miles (65 minutes) at TNT, including the following workout: 4x(600m hard, 200m jog rest, 400m hard, 200m jog rest, 200m hard, 200m jog rest). First run in Asics Pirahna SP 3s, 4.6-oz miracles which can be summed up with two words: SO FAST. Oh yeah, workout times: (2:02, 77, 37), (2:12, 81, 37), (2:08, 83, 44), (2:08, 81, 37). (Yes, note the trend of the first set being fast, then getting slower, then getting faster again - I really think I have a mental block about the track sometimes, but that's a topic for another post.)

6 April 2011: 16 miles (conservatively; 1 hour, 53 minutes), in part with the Wednesday night Canton Square crew, and in part on my own, running at dusk in dangerous places like East Monument Street, and being called a black boy's "n-word." Street cred, yo.

7 April 2011: Orioles magic, as they come back from 2-0, 4-2, and 5-4 to defeat the Detroit Tigers 9-5. Went there, saw it, bought a 40-dollar "on-field" official home team hat. Oh, and because my running streak needs to stay alive, 2 miles (15 minutes) around Patterson Park just before midnight, just beating the buzzer.

8 April 2011: Pre-furlough(-that-never-came) madness at work, combined with pre-Bull-Run-Run traffic that make a 2 hour drive take a little over 3 hours (thanks DC-area highways on a Friday at around 6), so this was another stupid mile (10 minutes), around the Hemlock Overlook camp.

9 April 2011: 54 miles; Bull Run Run 50-Mile in 7 hours, 28 minutes, 50 seconds, 10th overall, plus a mile and a half warmup (10 minutes) and a mile and a half warmdown (10 minutes), and later, a mile just because, well, you'll see in my totals . . .

Total Time: 812 minutes (not a very round number)
Total distance: 100 miles (a round number)

Before I get to the (probably epically too-long) race report, you'll notice that this was the week of stupid mileage. Lots of elsewhere-in-my-life activity happened that precluded some of the running that I had planned. On the other hand, I knew I had a 50-mile chunk coming in on Saturday, so ironically, even though this was officially my highest-mileage week in 2011, it was also, in some ways, my "easiest" week in 2011, relative to my recent activity. It was also a lot of fun, running stupid short distances at stupid times. Definitely not something to do as serious training runs all the time, but maybe something to incorporate now and then, because just running randomly for about 10 minutes is a different (and often surprisingly fun) way of doing business.

Okay, now for the race report:

I'm going to try to simplify and shorten as much as possible here, because in a way, Bull Run was a very simple race for me this year. Okay, fine, my goal for the race was a bit ambiguous and complicated:

1. Run at least as fast, or faster than last year (most likely meaning a time between 7 and 8 hours), but feel much stronger doing it.

2. Win prizes.

3. Have fun.

As such, coming into the race, with the help of the illustrious David Alan Snipes, I put together an all-male "team" to compete for the "fastest male team" prize (fleece blankets). The team was Matt Bugin (at Dave's recommendation), John Cassilly (Matt's running buddy), Jack Pilla (who won Vermont in 2009, in just over 16 hours, and who Sara, who was working the finish line aid station then, thought was me, because him and I look similar, although he is 52), and me. We were all looking to run in the 7-8 hour range, so I felt that our team would be pretty competitive, even with the "WUS" teams, which are typically stacked with the fastest runners, in the mix. This was all in keeping with goals 2 and 3 above (particularly the team's name, "Equipo de Deportes," or, in English, "Sports Team," the best I could come up with three hours before team registration closed).

The drive to the race was not fun, as it took nearly 3 hours, but fortunately, even though I showed up half an hour after dinner ended, I was still able to pick up my packet and eat leftovers in the lodge, while I caught the end of the pre-race briefing, and met with my teammates for the first time. None of us actually knew each other, other than online (except for Matt and John), so it was a little awkward and first, but being the non-psycho version of ultrarunners, we were all cool, and Jack's wife (who runs, but is still recovering from surgery, so was crewing for Jack during the race) was also cool, so I knew that everything would be cool. (Cool.) Jack and I retired to our respective cars early for sleep, and Matt and John slept in the cabins (although Matt got fed up with somebody's snoring in the middle of the night, and moved all of his stuff out to his car and slept there instead).

I woke up at 5:15, 15 minutes later than I do on a normal workday, after having gone to bed at 9:00, hours earlier than I do on a normal workday, so I felt a lot fresher than I usually do in the morning. After a disgusting breakfast of half a sesame-seed bagel with peanut butter, 3/4ths of a muffin, and some water, I ambled down to the starting line, and got up front with the rest of our team, which, although there was no requirement to do so, packed up to run together at the start.

It became quickly obvious that Jack was going to take off and do his own thing, but Matt, John, and I stuck together in a loose pack for about the first ten miles. This brought back cross-country memories, as we traded the lead, talked trash, pushed each other through the tougher spots, and turned on the intimidation factor as we passed other runners in a group. The trail got muddier and muddier closer to the turn-around, and both Matt and I were wearing MT101s (in black), which are awful on mud, while John was wearing some sort of heavy shoe with giant lugs, so he would pass us on the muddy sections, we would curse his lugs, and then scramble to make up the distance on the dry sections.

As the trail got dryer as we neared the 16-ish mile mark (the start/finish area, and beginning of the second out-and-back), Matt and I put some distance on John, and we chatted about running philosophy, work, life, the universe, everything. Matt and I are the same age, and although Matt hasn't been running ultras for as long as I have, I found we were very similar in a lot of ways, which was really reassuring, and a huge mental boost in a race like this. I probably should have mentioned, at the start, that goals 1 and 3 were potentially in conflict, in that running on the slow end of what I thought would be doable would be an "also-ran" performance, while running on the fast end would most likely be top-ten. So, in the interest of every race being a little scary (and therefore, on some level, a growth experience), the fact that I was running very comfortably with somebody who I could really relate to was mostly easing that fear. That said, Matt has a lot more experience on trails than I do, and he finished top-10 at Holiday Lake (my first-race-of-2011 learning experience/disaster), so there was still an element of intimidation factor, particularly at any point where he would temporarily take the lead, or zoom down a hill that I was approaching more cautiously.

Our comfortable pace continued towards the marathon mark (as it turns out, Matt's entered in the Boston Marathon this year - it will be his first one - do the similarities ever end?), and it was about this time in the race that we finally started to chase people down. In these races, typically the faster guys go out hard, slow down in the middle, and then find something left at the end. Matt and I had been going at a pretty steady pace all day, and while Matt was concerned that we would never see anybody, I reassured him that if we could hold steady, we'd gradually make up ground. Sure enough, we started picking off runners in front of us, including Keith Knipling as we climbed one of the short-but-vicious back-half hills. Matt decided that he wanted to pass authoritatively, so we bombed down the hill faster than I would have liked, but I was still hanging in, so, whatever.

Then, when we got to the "Do Loop," a 3-mile circuit through leaf-covered, short, steep, zig-zagging hills, Matt fell apart. I didn't realize that I had dropped him until about halfway in, when I noticed that I was no longer hearing footsteps behind me, and I thought his calf was the problem. As it turned out later, his nutrition was the issue - not enough calories (been there, oddly enough, at Holiday Lake this year). So now I was running alone, with only the crew teams on the lake and the aid station volunteers as human life, and I was vaguely worried. I pulled back on my attack on the jack-knife hills, worried that maybe I would also burn out. After all, thanks to my unintentional taper, there was no way of knowing how much I had left in the tank - maybe I just felt good because several days this past week, I ran only a mile or two, but I didn't have enough to go 50 miles at this pace on this kind of training/rest. I recalled that we hit the marathon mark in 3:43, which would be on pace for a 7:06 50-mile - the aggressive end of my time goal. Finally, as I approached the aid station at the end of the loop, I decided to take the advice of an aid station volunteer earlier in the race, who, seeing me staring at the table with a puzzled look as I pondered which cookies to eat this time, and whether I needed to eat something saltier than that, told me that I was "thinking too hard." Bottom line was that I was feeling good, and I needed to just keep running.

So I did, and then I started passing the hundreds of people who were still on their way out. I smiled at each one of them and told them "good job" as they passed, because it's the good-person thing to do, and because I was wearing my Natural Vitality t-shirt and hat, and wanted to make my Badwater sponsor proud. (Incidentally, the cotton/hemp fabric blend for the t-shirt? Really awesome cool-ish weather running wear; who would have thought?) As I neared the 40-mile mark, I sensed that this could be where the big crash might happen, so I kept smiling and looking as strong as people were telling me I was looking, because that way, if there was pain, I wouldn't feel it. One woman asked me what it was like to be young and fast, and then told me that "it looked good on me." Other than that, no particularly memorable comments, just lots of runners showing a lot of grit in being out there for that long.

I reached the aid station 10 miles from the finish, still not having passed any runners in front of me, but a man at the aid station told me that there was a runner not too far ahead, so this spurred me on for the next 5-mile stretch. Over that stretch, I passed him, and I also passed Aaron Schwartzbard, one of the WUS runners that Matt had mentioned that he wanted us to pass, so I felt a little disappointed that Matt wasn't there to share in this kill (although it was a bit anti-climactic, because Aaron was dying and actually very politely let me pass, as I was power-walking an uphill, before I even got right up on him). I reached the last aid station, about 5 miles from the finish, still feeling pretty good, but really wanting to use the bathroom.

Here were the final gambles. I knew there were port-a-pots ahead, near the soccer field, but I didn't know how much distance I had on people behind me, or whether or not somebody would try to make a move. I also wasn't sure how much food I needed to prevent a late-race crash, a la Holiday Lake, and it would be awful to have this effort end with a 20-minute final mile (or 40-minute final two miles) and blow my race. I decided that 3 Oreos was enough food for 5 miles, and that I would play the bathroom thing by ear. As it turned out, the 3rd Oreo was either at my limit, or one too many, because I spent the last 5 miles on the verge of vomiting. I also decided that the port-a-pot, although very tempting, was something that I could handle after the 3-ish miles left to finish, and uncomfortably passed on the opportunity. I felt okay about this, because I had completed the previous 5-mile stretch in about 40 minutes, so if I could hit 40-ish minutes on this, I would be flirting with sub-7:30, and it's nice to be under a number like that. As I neared the finish line (which I knew because I remembered that the bluebells get denser about a mile from the end), I was finally relieved that the "crash" that I had expected from previous 50-mile races, had not come, and was unlikely to come at this point. On the last steep climb to the end, I passed Jack, coming down the hill after his race, who told me "no walking!" on the hill. So I muscled up the longest, steepest hill in the race as fast as I could, and as it turned out, this was a good thing - I finished in 7:28:50, 10th place (in the top-ten visor, as no prize money is involved here), an uncomfortably narrow margin ahead of the next guy, who finished just two minutes behind (and just over 7:30).

As it turned out, Jack finished in 6:49:57, 4th place, setting a new over-50-years-old course record by a huge margin, and John came in not too long after I did, in 7:37:10, good for 14th place. Then the three of us stood around and worried about Matt, who John had passed, and said that he looked bad. To our very pleasant surprise, Matt came jogging in at 8:01:02, 24th overall - not bad for his first 50-mile race. So now the waiting game began, because the all-male WUS team's fourth was supposedly a 9.5-hour 50-miler, but their fastest runner, Matt Woods, set the course record in a blazing 6:08:14. Finally, enough time elapsed that it was mathematically impossible for them to win, and we all celebrated with hamburgers, hot dogs, cookies (ew, SO MANY COOKIES), and, best of all, sitting down.

The fact that we won the team competition was especially gratifying, since the WUS team was trying to stack the competition to win the male, female, and co-ed awards. As such, they couldn't put all of their fastest guys in the male team, or else their co-ed team might be too slow. In any case, some of the race organizers vaguely resented this type of prize-engineering, so a team of four people who only vaguely knew each other, and had a collective 1 prior finish, but came together to push each other to better races, and ultimately winning, was the feel-good story of the two minutes when they were actually thinking about it. So there.

But the real bottom line in all of this (besides the fact that blankets are an awesome team victory prize, because we were all very cold) is that I felt really great for the whole race, thereby accomplishing goal #1, arguably the most important of my goals. In a way, I feel bad about my performance, because it was, by some standards, "lazy," especially considering how many people laid it all out there today at this race, and at the American River 50. On the other hand, I am still walking normally, and feel as though I didn't just run 50 miles, which is really important for training through and running well in Boston. And all of that (which wound up being really long, sorry) can be summed up in two words that are becoming staples of this blog lately: Mission Accomplished.

Winning and Losing

(I will explain the above image later, unless in the interim, somebody explains to me how to force this thing to put an image in the middle of a post. While you're at it, feel free to explain how putting a carriage return in the "Edit Html" window, without any change to the markup, creates a space between paragraphs, while doing the same thing in the "Compose" window does not.)

Welcome to another in a sporadic series of blog posts that don't consist entirely of times and distances run, or race reports. With these posts, I will try to stay out of the realm of the vast majority of content on the internet today, which seems to be divided between thinly veiled cries for attention, and expressions of cravings for various food and drink.

That said, with Charlie Sheen in the news so much lately, and with so much time for me to think about things when I'm running (particularly when I'm spontaneously running around Baltimore City at 3 a.m. on a decidedly dead real Mardi Gras, unlike the fake Mardi Gras this past Saturday night, which included some of the drunkenest mayhem the city has ever seen), every now and then, I find myself ruminating on something besides what the homeless man that I just passed was mumbling in my direction. In this case, I'm thinking about winning, and its less-popular, but often more fun counterpart, losing.

What is winning, really? In a lot of races, you can finish first, thereby "winning," but run a weak time. How valid is this sort of victory? Conversely, in lots of races, you can finish far back in the pack, but shatter a personal record. Is this "losing"?

After some thought, probably while running across the top of Federal Hill and staring vacantly at downtown, I decided that "winning" is when (because this really is time-dependent) a person, putting forth a directed best effort, achieves a goal that is both desirable to the person, as well as people within that person's circle of relevance. "Losing," on the other hand, is when a person, for any number of reasons, fails to put forth a directed best effort, and in so doing, compromises progress towards a goal that is desirable to that person, as well as people within that person's circle of relevance.

You're probably waiting for something to make that more concrete. So was I, and then I happened upon the mangled metal that you saw at the beginning of this post. And I thought, "who is winning?"

It might seem obvious that the owner of the offending vehicle (I'm guessing the ridiculous SUV with the ridiculous Virginia Tech sticker on the back, although how this accident could have occurred is still a mystery to me) is "losing." Who really wants his car (even if it is a Toyota 4Runner) all smashed up? But perhaps the owner of the car loves to smash cars (or perhaps drink or do drugs, if such things were involved in the accident). Perhaps those around the owner of the car share his interests. In that case, this is a massive win for the driver, because that is some of the better car accident debris that I've seen, especially considering that the accident probably happened at a relatively low speed on city surface streets.

Turning the camera around, was I "winning"? In my quest to maximize my running potential, this random late-night 15-mile run, on a sick stomach and only a few hours of sleep, is textbook ultrarunning conditions, and cranking out low-7-minute-miles under these conditions is a huge confidence boost, even if the fitness benefit is debatable. To people who care about that (me included), that's winning. But at the same time, there are many people out there who would question why I might endanger life and limb and endure such conditions, when at that hour, a more "normal" person would be at home sleeping, or engaging in some other, more desirable activity. The idea that either I have no alternative, or, more to the point, I would choose this alternative, casts this as "losing."

In the end, "winning" and "losing" are relative, transient states, each a function of variation in our individual goals, efforts, and circles of people that matter to us. Are you winning? Are you losing? Only you can truly decide that.

(Also, CAR CRASH.)