Criminal nuisance

We were woken up last night at one am by a knock and the doorbell. I tried to ignore it, but a second doorbell a minute later convinced me I had better go see who it was. On the way to the door, I saw flashing police lights. A cop was at the door.

“Are those your garbage bins down there?” he asked.

“Yes…?”

“Two of them?”

“Three.”

“Three?”

“Er… two big carts and a little glass debris bin.”

“Well, one of the carts might be salvageable but the other two are destroyed,” the cop said.

Hmmm? We walked down the driveway to the curb, where I had, earlier that evening, put out the garbage, yard debris, and glass for this morning’s collection. What a mess. The little glass bin was torn apart and most of the glass in it was shattered all over the place. The garbage was tipped over and strewn about a bit. And the yard debris bin, that had been full of wet leaves? I didn’t get a look at it then, because it had been pushed — presumably stuck under a car or truck — around the corner of the road and left in a ditch. Its wheels were still laying there, though.

I said I was surprised the noise that all must have made didn’t wake us up. He said a drunk neighbor had called it in, saying he heard something hit, back up, and hit again. It all looked deliberate. Someone must have had a total junker or a stolen car. I started trying to pick up the garbage bin and the cop told me he still wanted pictures. He said he’d drag what was left of the yard debris bin back over to my house.

The cop took my name, gave me a case number, and told me to call my garbage company. This morning, when I called them, they weren’t at all interested in the details… they just said they’d send out new bins next week, pretty much no questions asked. I cleaned up the garbage and a lot of the glass this morning before work.

Halloween

Halloween was fun this year. Bride-and-groom zombies. I didn’t do a great job on my makeup, but the hair, teeth, and outfit made up for it. This wasn’t my real wedding outfit, just some cheap stuff we got at Goodwill. I think the shirt, pants, and jacket were all six or seven dollars each. The bow tie was a three- or four-dollar novelty item from the party store.

My original plan for messing up the suit was to lay it on the ground and whale away on it with this replica medieval flail I have — a heavy ball with sharp points, connected by a chain to a handle. I was hoping it would create a lot of puncture marks, kind of like a shotgun blast effect. The clothes proved surprisingly flail-resistant, though. It got them dirty, but the holes were few and small. Plan B, hacking away with a kitchen knife, worked a lot better. I also got out the blowtorch — you can see one burn mark on the front of the shirt. Then I dripped on this blood gel stuff. You had to heat it up for it to flow, then it solidified (some) as it cooled. It worked OK, but probably wasn’t worth the trouble vs. red paint or something.

The teeth were effective. They were pretty cheap at the party store, and they came with this epoxy stuff that hardened into a springy rubber compound. I thought it was just a dental glue or something when I bought it, but it was much better. You mashed the two epoxy components together, stuck the result into the bite tray in the teeth, bit down into the hardening rubber and waited the five minutes for it to cure. Once it did, you could take the teeth in and out whenever you wanted, and they fit well since they were molded around your own teeth.

Frustrating

Monday and Wednesday I ran the same 5.8 mile route, at about the same speed. The route, our on-street winter loop, has more hills than the paths we take in summer. Still, I felt fine after Monday’s run and went into Wednesday’s brimming with confidence. Wouldn’t you know it? My knee hurt after the run, a low-level tightness that lingered through most of Thursday. Bleah. Looks like I won’t be increasing my mileage this week.

 

Yay! And yay!

Good news #1: I ran six miles on the Jackson Junior High track yesterday, at a nearly steady 7:11/mile pace, with… no knee pain!

Good news #2: In my virtual cross-country run, I have made it 3572.6 miles and have just entered the last state on the route, which is coincidentally also my home state, Oregon! I crossed the Snake river about five miles ago and I’m currently headed north along it on the Oregon side:

Where I am on my virtual run: far, far Eastern Oregon. I live in the little western portion of Oregon that has things like trees and grass, not this part.

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Update

A 3.8 mile run around my neighborhood on Tuesday went pretty well, with my sciatica giving me more trouble than my knee did, which is fine, since I have a lot of experience with my sciatica and know it will get better, whereas this knee thing is anybody’s guess. The fact that this was just one day after a five mile run gives me room to hope for the best. I’m somewhere past hoping for a speedy recovery, but I’m still angling for a steady one. (Phase three of grief: bargaining.)  Steady enough to start hitting the trails in the next few weeks, ideally. The Hagg Lake mud run is only four months away! I’ve done the 50K two years running and I have no plans not to make it three. The Wildwood trail is calling to me for training, and I’d like to be able to answer.

A running convalescence

On Saturday, I went out for what I hoped would be an eight to ten mile run. The weather forecast called for rain, but it was sunny and mild when I got started, heading north from the Sellwood Bridge along the Willamette. The first few miles, my knee felt fine but I found myself struggling to breathe. It was just one of those days where I felt out of shape.

As I neared downtown after three miles or so, the storm clouds rolled in. I crossed the Hawthorne bridge as the downpour began. The rain would last for the rest of the run. Around the same time, I started feeling the tightness in my knee. I decided to throw in walk breaks to try to keep it from getting too bad. So: it’s pouring down rain, I’m four miles from my car, and I’m walking. I’ve had more fun.

I did eventually make it back, for an 8.3 mile total “run”, one with quite a few walk breaks in the second half. I shouldn’t have tried to go farther than six miles, I think now. Still, my knee felt OK that day and the next. I did get a Sciatica attack in the other leg starting Sunday. I’ve had these things since 1995 or so, long before I ever started running or doing any other form of exercise, and I’ve found that running through it can actually help. So, Monday night, even though I couldn’t walk without a swaying limp, I went out to the group run. The first mile was pretty agonizing, but after that it got better. I went for five miles and only felt my knee complaining for the last half mile or so.

Knee

I ran five miles Wednesday evening, with some knee tightness most of the way. I’ve been happy with the knee’s recovery since then. I feel it sometimes, especially when I’ve been sitting at my desk too long, and double-especially when I cross my good leg over my bad knee, something I’ve been trying my best to avoid. For the most part, though, I feel like my knee is slowly but surely healing up. Except of course for those moments when I feel like it’s never going to get better. Injuries are always like this for me.

I’ve been doing leg-strengthening  exercises to try to firm up all the muscle groups supporting the knee. This sort of thing never helps with recovery or prevention, it’s just the sort of totemistic thing that runners do when they are hurt. It passes the time and lets you pretend to yourself that you are doing something useful. So I’m always lifting my leg or doing squats or walking on tiptoes or balancing on one foot or writing the alphabet with my toes. I’m the life of the party.

Have you ever noticed that running blogs post a lot less when things aren’t going as well?

It’s clear my knee rehabilitation is going to be at least a medium-term project, if not a long one. Monday night I again ran only two miles before deciding I was experiencing too much tightness and discomfort. I’ll try again tonight, and again be ready to stop early.

Recovery

I ran today for the first time in a week. That’s a very long gap of time for me; first, I was incredibly sore from the marathon, then, I came down with a cold. I can’t say I was surprised to get the cold — it seems like a pretty common pattern for me to come down with something once the “big event” is over. Anyway, if I’m going to get a cold, the week after a marathon is just about the ideal time to get one, training-wise.

So, a two mile run today, straight up and down Taylor’s Ferry Road. I could feel there was still a little healing left to go in my quads. And my knee got a tiny bit sore. Well, what do I expect?

Waddle On, Friends

“Waddle on, friends” is how John “the Penguin” Bingham always ends his Runner’s World column. He’s the poster child for slower, new-to-running middle aged folks, hence the waddling. I don’t think I waddled through the marathon two days ago, but I’ve certainly been waddling since. My legs are only marginally better than yesterday. At least my blister has deflated some.

Kelly has a piece today in her Run Oregon blog on OregonLive.com, with stories from a few marathoners. I’m one of them.

Glazer told me he almost got stuck by the train, the way he actually put it was “sprinting like an idiot in front of the Amtrak train at mile six.” Other friends near his pace recall seeing Glazer zoom by them to get ahead of the train, muttering expletives with every step. (I know the feeling.)

Read the whole story for more.

One day later and I am very sore

I’m unbelievably sore today. My calves are tight and painful too, along with my thighs, even though I didn’t notice anything wrong my calves yesterday. I think my overall condition is as bad as it was after marathon #1. I guess that makes sense… you’re going to suffer more after those marathons in which you suffer enough during the race to have to slow down by the end. Another great reason to try for negative splits.

Race Report: 2009 Portland Marathon

Official results: 3:28:55 (7:59/mile). 747/8091 finishers, 647/3825 men, 127/635 men aged 35-39.

Holy sacred guacamole, am I happy to have finished the Portland Marathon this year. And I hit my goal time too! Just finishing, with this runner’s knee of mine, is a huge thrill. That said, this ended up as kind of an ugly marathon. As early as mile 10, I was thinking I might just jog back to my car and call it a day. But unlike my experience during the 14-mile training run — the one that was supposed to be 22 miles — the pain didn’t keep escalating. It got to some point and just stayed there. So I just kept running. Why did my knee do better? I’ll never know. At least three variables were different.

This picture has educational value.

1. More time to heal. This is most likely the biggest factor, and may well be the whole story.
2. Back to the old shoes. I had a few miles left of my old, pre-injury pair, an older model, and I wore them instead of the new ones.
3. KT Kinesiology Tape. How embarrassing! Remember all that black tape on Beach Volleyballer Kerri Walsh’s shoulder in the Olympics? There was a free sample of the same stuff in the marathon’s goodie bag. It included a little pamphlet that showed you how to apply the tape for every athletic-type injury known to mankind. You can tell how desperate I must have felt to have gone along with this quackery, but there you are.  When the pictures come in, you will see me with a kind of black “U” cradling my left knee. It is kind of a fun, stretchy tape, but I’m no believer.

It was plenty cold and damp in downtown Portland at 6 am, but I had scored a sweet disposable jacket from Goodwill the day before, a $6.99 powder-blue fleece number. Yeah, it was a lady’s, wrongly sorted into the men’s section (along with about half of the other jackets), but I’m secure enough to sport a lady’s blue fleece, at least as long as it’s dark out. Not much interesting happened waiting for the start, though I was concerned for the length of time some people spent in the portable restrooms. If someone were to pass out, or, God forbid, die, in one of those, it would barely slow down the line at all.

I had no “bathroom” problems all day and the weather was absolutely perfect for a marathon: mostly cloudy, dry, no wind, around 50-60 degrees. My nutrition went well; I downed four Clif Shots before mile 8 then had gummi bears from the aid stations after that. So I have nothing much to blame any problems on, other than my lack of training in the last few weeks before the taper.

I ran smoothly and cautiously for the first few miles, being careful to avoid doing anything stupid and taking care to run a nice straight line. I found myself in front of the 3:30 pacer, and not all that far back from the 3:20. The first six miles were all 7:40 or under, except for the uphill one. You can see all my splits and a bunch of other data on my RunningAhead log entry for the race.

Coming up to mile six I heard a certain “ding ding ding ding” and looking ahead, there it was: the crossing gate coming down for an Amtrak train. I apologize to those around me for my repeating series of expletives at this point. It looked pretty bad for making it across the tracks before the train did, and with the crossing gate down, I knew it would be stupid to try to do so. But that train was crawling pretty slowly by that point, and anyway who says I’m not stupid? A switch to the left side of the road and one really dumb 25-meter sprint later, and I was across. My two friends from my running group made it too. I feel absolutely terrible for the people who got stuck.

Is this a joke?

Should a huge big-city marathon have this happen? I really have a hard time saying “yes” to that. I’m sure the organizers believe it to be out of their hands. But if the train right-of way truly is immutable (I have no idea), well, that’s just one more great reason why the Portland Marathon should push as hard as they possibly can to find a new route. You know, one that also actually shows off the city for all these thousands of out-of-towners. And if the city of Portland isn’t willing to play ball with that idea and close off some major space on the East side of town, then they are idiots too. But tentatively at least, I’m willing to put the “idiots” mantle solely on the marathon committee. You know what the back of the finishers medal has this year? Portraits of long-time committee members! I nearly lost it when I saw that. Of all the smarmy, self-congratulatory moves imaginable, that takes the cake. “Here, you finished, congratulations, here’s your medal with our pictures on it.” Unbelievable.

Back to the run. My knee started feeling stiff somewhere after mile eight, and, as I said, by mile 10 or so I was really starting to think I might pack it in. Everything else felt terrific. I kept going, and stuck with the 7:40s. My emotions were see-sawing between “I’m going to have to stop” and “I’m going to run a 3:20 and qualify for Boston.” The truth, as they say, is somewhere in the middle.

I believe it was around mile 15 that I noticed my thighs (or, as we athletes say, quads) starting to hurt. It was just a small hurt at first, but this was far too early for it: my muscles usually hold out nicely to at least 18, maybe longer. I’m pretty sure this is the price I paid for missing my last long run, and excessively tapering down my mileage after that. I suspected it wasn’t a problem that was going to go away. It did take my mind off my knee some.

Some general fatigue was also setting in, of course. Getting up and over the St. Johns Bridge still wasn’t too bad. As always, it was beautiful up there. I was happy to have made it at least far enough for the crossing. I was also starting to think about various scenarios that might see me walking the rest of the way in, and whether I would endure it. I was carrying my cell phone (tucked into the palm of my stretchy gloves, inside a tiny zip-lock bag) so that I could call Sweetie for a lift if I needed to stop. But finishing would be nice. If nothing else, it would get me a shirt. With about nine miles to go after the bridge, I knew I needed to run at least a few more before I could seriously contemplate a long walk to the finish.

Running was getting harder. It was my thighs. I’ve hardly ever really cramped while running, but this was kind of like one long, milder, mobile cramp. And it hurt. My calves felt OK. All systems were go except for the knee and thighs. My lungs and heart seemed better than I could ever recall at this stage of a marathon. But I had slowed down to get over the bridge, and my thighs wouldn’t let me pick it back up to my earlier pace. I did a couple of 7:50s and then started seeing the miles come in over 8:00. I held it to the low 8:00s until the downhill on Greeley (which I took achingly slow), then saw my splits slow down to 8:30 and beyond. And my thighs hurt tremendously. With just three or four miles left, walking started to get pretty tempting. But I’ve run in pain before. The thighs weren’t an injury, just sore muscles. I could beat that. I kept jogging.

The 3:20 Boston qualifying time was out. Could I still set a personal record, beat 3:38? Yes, trivially, if I kept jogging at any pace whatsoever. Could I still meet my 3:30 goal? Yes, as long as my pace didn’t fall too much further off the cliff. OK then. Carry on. Endure the intense soreness. Don’t worry about all the people streaming past you. At least you’re not that guy writhing in pain on the ground. The last miles were just an endless grind. OK, they always are. But you feel better about them when you’ve not slowed down, too. Here, miles 24, 25, and 26 were 8:43, 8:27, and 8:47.

Quite emotional and with tears of several varieties very nearly in my eyes, I made it past the finish line. As is my predilection in these affairs, I then stopped running. I was quite surprised to find that when I just stood there, my thighs did not hurt. I know that sounds stupid, but I must say it is quite unlike every other long race experience I can recall. Usually, the moment I stop running is the moment I really feel just how sore my legs are. This time, standing still or sitting down was pretty much pain-free, although walking still hurt some. I can recall twenty minutes of exquisite agony after this year’s Hagg Lake 50K, and similar trials at all my previous marathons. Standing or sitting in the minutes that immediately follow is always painful. Not this time. I can offer no coherent explanation for the discrepancy. I can say that I am very glad I never stopped running during the race: starting again might have proved unthinkable.

One more rant. The Scientologists have a big tent in the finisher’s zone. It looks like an exercise-massage tent. Is it? According to the Scientology web site, this is one of their “good works in the community”: “Church volunteers also support amateur athletic events by caring for participants who may be physically exhausted or in physical pain, such as providing assists when asked, such as the help provided to runners at the Marathons and other long-distance races held in Portland, Oregon; Boston, Massachusetts; Los Angeles, California, and Clearwater, Florida.” Assist has a special Scientology meaning. Check out the Wikipedia article Assist (Scientology) for more information about this pseudo-scientific pile of quackery. Hey, marathon organizers? “Thanks, but no thanks” is what you say to a bunch of money-hungry nutcases who want to put up a big tent where they can give “nerve assists” by “stroking a person along the spine, around the torso, and down the limbs.”

Even though standing still felt OK, the walk through the marathon’s endless “finisher’s area” and back to the car was not easy. In addition to some leg pain and generally feeling cold and tired, I found that my pinkie toe on my right foot was giving me some trouble. I hadn’t noticed any issue with it while running. Once I got home I discovered that the entire toe had pretty much turned to blister. Should you be interested in such things, here is a picture. It looked considerably worse in person.

Other that that, I’m recovering well. The thighs are rapidly feeling better, the knee isn’t as crippled as I probably deserve it to be, I didn’t get run over by a train, and Sweetie — in addition to her usual great post-rest ministrations — treated me to a hamburger and two Manhattans at the Slow Bar. Life is good.

Oh, and I signed up for the May 2010 Eugene Marathon a few days ago. 3:20:00 here we come.

Portland Marathon 2009: brief update

Knee kinda-mostly-sorta held up. 3:28:55, with a big slowdown in the last few miles. Happy! Very tired.

Bowpicker Fish and Chips in Astoria, Oregon has the goods

Bowpicker, Astoria, OR. Located across from the Columbia River Maritime Museum, in the converted gillnet boat. Corner of 17th & Duane St. Astoria, OR 97103.

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This is a food cart in the form of a boat. The boat is on land, but it’s still a real boat. There’s a little set of stairs going up to a walkway alongside, to bring you up to the cockpit-slash-kitchen level to place your order. We got there on a rare sunny day in Astoria and joined the short and enthusiastic line. From memory, their menu consisted of:

Large order of fish and chips (five pieces), $9
Small order of fish and chips (three pieces), $7
Side order of fries, $?

Aside from some grab-it-yourself sodas in a picnic cooler, that’s it. Not even a choice of fish. Albacore tuna is what you get. This is a place that knows what they make well. Could they offer salmon, cod, clam chowder? Sure, but then we’d all come away saying “the salmon was okay, but man that tuna was great!” I know this sounds crazy, but I love not having a choice. I love a place that’s confident enough that the one thing they make is good enough for everyone. There was a high-end Italian place in Portland, called Genoa, and it always annoyed me that their five-course (high) fixed-price dinner gave you a choice of two mains. Not a problem here.

Tuna is a somewhat unusual choice for fish and chips (I’m a cod fan myself, usually), but it works here. The star of the show, though, is their batter. I don’t know what’s in their recipe, but it is spectacular, leaning  toward a tempura-like delicacy without the softness or smoothly bland texture that most tempura has. Crispy and wonderful right out of the frying oil, it showed no signs of getting soggy during the time it took for me to eat my five pieces. I usually like malt vinegar on my fish and chips but that wasn’t the right way to go. The one piece I sprinkled with vinegar didn’t have the same amazing light crunch, and the flavors were big enough to not need the extra vinegar pizzazz. The fries were serviceable but nothing special. They were from-frozen steak fries, judging from the containers we could spot in the kitchen.

The Unknown

The Portland Marathon is three days away! Everybody ready?

Everybody keeps asking me “how’s your knee?” And I always have to say “I don’t know.” Then they look at me funny. How can you not know how your knee is? And I go on and explain that my knee feels fine for six miles worth of running, but I have no idea how it will be after 10, or 15, or 26.2. Because that’s how this injury is manifesting itself: no pain for x miles, then a slowly building discomfort, until after y miles, it’s clear I need to stop. Now, I can cross my fingers and hope that x > 26.2, but there’s no experiment I can do to find out… other than the running itself.

Catching Up (and a big announcement)

Oh! Hello. It’s been a while. Catching up…

Tuesday Sweetie and I got all dressed up, rounded up the parents, and headed down to the county courthouse to get married. Which went pretty well. This signaled the start of what would prove to be at least four days of serious overeating and drinking. Our honeymoon was on the coast, and we had a great time.

The Saturday before that, I ran in the Rockin’ Relay, a fun little four-person relay where we each ran three 2.18 mile legs. In theory, anyway. In reality, their course was closer to 2.08 miles, except for the very first of our twelve legs, which was even shorter. So we ran about 25 miles altogether. No matter, it was still tons of fun. I ran all three of my legs at something very close to a 6:38 pace. The picture is from leg two or three. My knee, which had been depressingly painful on the preceding Thursday, came through it in decent shape too.

Between the vacationing and — especially — the desire to let my knee heal as best it can, I haven’t get a lot of running in since the wedding. Just a few miles on the beach Wednesday and a few more Friday. Friday’s run didn’t go that well — I was off the beach on a sidewalk when I didn’t see a curb going down to the street. I fell, hard. Scrapes on both knees, a pretty bad gouge on my left middle finger, some little chunks taken out of both palms, and a seriously overextended right hand. The right index and middle fingers are still a bit tender, but I’m OK.

So, I’ve got just six days until the Portland Marathon, a still-questionable knee, healing wounds, and slovenly eating habits during my taper. I’ve decided to revise my goals down a bit. I’m back to my “original” Portland Marathon 2009 goal: 3:30:00, or an eight-minute-per-mile pace. Boston Qualifying can wait until the next one. It’s also entirely possible my knee will force me out early, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Every Run

Here’s a fun graph showing the length of every one of my runs since I started in February 2007.

That big stripe down the bottom are my six-mile Monday and Wednesday runs from the Beaverton store of the Portland Running Company. The eight over 25, in order, are the Portland Marathon, two training runs in Forest Park, Hagg Lake, the Eugene Marathon, The Pier Park 6-hour, Hagg Lake again, and the Eugene Marathon again. You can clearly see the four months when I was nursing my plantar fasciitis with no runs over 10 miles.

It’s interesting at least

My planned 22-miler last night turned into a 14-miler as my knee started hurting more and more. I first felt it around mile seven, and the soreness kept increasing, leveling off a little around mile ten but getting to the point of “I’d better stop” by the end. It was a nice evening, sprinkling and cool, and other than the knee I felt great.

So, it looks like the Portland Marathon is going to be something of an experiment for me this time around. There’s not going to be another chance for a long run before the race itself. Then again, I have done four 20+ long runs since late July. Unfortunately my last one was August 22, six full weeks before the race. My half marathon two weeks after that should stand in for a long run to some degree, I imagine.

Running, I have heard, is an experiment of one. This should be an interesting chance to learn something new. Until the marathon, my priorities are to balance the healing of my knee (which is probably back at square one after last night) with the maintaining of conditioning. And to stay positive.

Update

I ran 2.6 miles on the track Thursday night before I felt something funny in my knee. Friday morning, I ran six miles and it felt OK, with only a mild gradually increasing soreness. Saturday we were at the coast and I ran 5.5 miles on the beach with no problems. I think my knee’s OK now.

Leaving only the question of when the heck I am going to do my last long run before the October 4th Portland marathon. The plan was originally to do it this last weekend. When I realized that wasn’t going to happen, the new plan was to do it next Saturday. When I remembered I’m committed to three or four two mile legs of the Rock’n Relay on Saturday, the new new plan was to run it this Wednesday, after work. That will be a new trick for me… I’ll do nothing but work and run all day, basically. The good news is that a two and a half week taper might be just right for me.

Arg

Waiting for my knee to get better has been frustrating. It doesn’t hurt to walk on it, but sometimes I’ll straighten the leg out a certain way or bend it a certain direction, and it’s still not right. I’ve felt it at both the bottom and top of the kneecap, laterally centered. I was going to try a little running last night but decided against it in the end. I may try tonight, depending on how it feels throughout the day.

Overdid it?

My plan for this week was to run a lot of miles, all of them slow. This is planned as my peak mileage week before the Oct 4th marathon, with my last long run coming on Friday. So even though I had raced a half marathon the day before, I did three slow miles before my usual six-mile Monday-night group run. And even though I did the group run slowly, too (an 8:49 average pace), something still happened. In the last half mile or so, my left knee started hurting, getting quite painful by the end.

Or maybe it wasn’t that I ran too much, maybe it was that I got new shoes. I switched to the Mizuno Wave Alchemy model last time I purchased running shoes, about three months ago. Much to my tearing-my-hair-out chagrin, since then the running store has stopped selling the model I bought, the Alchemy 8, and now only has the newer Alchemy 9. I hate the shoe companies. Hate them hate them hate them.

In any case, whether it’s from too much running or new shoes or too much running on the new shoes, my knee still isn’t feeling right. The pain feels like a sore or bruised kneecap, generally over the middle bottom of the kneecap but not very specifically localized. I feel it walking around some. It improved overnight and I suspect it will heal up quickly. Fingers crossed.

Race Report: 2009 Run Portland Run Half Marathon

Hoo boy, was it raining cats and dogs this morning. Actually it seemed like it wouldn’t be too bad, driving downtown, at twenty after six, when it was mostly just drizzling. But shortly after I got to the race start area, it started to pour. Everybody huddled under the tents. Maybe running in that downpour wouldn’t be so bad, but standing around waiting to start with it coming down like that would be awful.

With 15 minutes left, it started to slack off. I took off to warm up a bit and stash my jacket in my car, parked just a couple blocks away. During my warm-up, it started pouring again. Sigh. I made it back to the starting area. Now it was getting light and the rain was turning into drizzle once more. One of my running-group friends, J, was doing the half marathon too, along with his sister-in law, in from out of town. It was her second half marathon. She asked me how many I had done. She could see me counting on fingers and toes, I guess, and changed the question to how many I’d done this year. Four? Too bad they don’t get easier.

With 30 seconds to go until the scheduled start time, a rumor started to go around that they were going to be nine minutes late. You want my opinion, that’s a pretty specific amount of time to be late by. Why not a nice round ten? Observations like this are why nobody wants my opinion, by the way. Anyway, the nine minutes gave the drizzle plenty of time to pick up into a light rain by the time we started. It would alternate between drizzle and rain for the rest of the run, with one torrential downpour thrown in for good measure.

The route was an out-and back up over the Broadway Bridge then north on Interstate, Greely and Willamette to the University of Portland. The hills of note were the climb onto and over the bridge and then the long steep hill up Greely.

I took off pretty fast the first mile. If I was going to have a shot at my PR, I needed to average under seven minute miles, and I knew I’d be quite a bit slower uphill. Mile one was a 6:55; J had come off the line a bit slower than me and I wouldn’t spot him again until the turnaround at mile 6.5.

I held it together well up and over the Broadway Bridge. This was a pretty small race and we were well spread out already. The next mile was mostly flat and I returned to a seven-minute pace.

Then came the hill. In some ways, it wasn’t as bad as I feared. It felt nothing like that monster in the Helvetia Half, for instance. That one had me almost ready to throw up by the time I crested it. This one, I did my best to take it easy. I think I should have taken it a little easier than I did. I made it through that mile in 7:28, but I was still paying for it during the next mile, where, working really hard, I managed only 7:07.

Now we were up on the exposed bluff overlooking Swan Island and the North Portland industrial area. The wind became a factor in here. It was a strong wind. A couple times I nearly lost my hat. Running into, or even across, this wind was definitely more work than it would have been on a calm day.

What can one do? Plug ahead. Try to run the best lines. (People are amazingly bad at this. Curb huggers, cure thyselves!) Count steps and breath. At the turnaround, I saw that J was just a little bit behind me. A hundred feet? I said something about him being right there and he said something I can’t remember but with an inflection that made it sound like he wasn’t sure he was going to catch me. Or maybe he wasn’t sure he was going to survive another six and a half miles. I know I wasn’t.

The return trip on the bluff is a not-visible-to-the-naked eye gentle incline that gets the better of you as you wonder why you’re slowing down for no apparent reason. The last mile of it is the worst; I gasped through a 7:09 there. Then comes the tricky part. The run down Greely. Take it too slow, and you’re not grabbing back any of the time you lost on the way up. Too fast and you’re thrashing your legs and missing out on a valuable chance for some recovery. I pounded down at a 6:45 pace or so, which doesn’t sound too bad. The torrential, soaking, stinging, driving rainstorm hit as I was nearing the bottom of the hill. Just carrying that extra water weight around in my shirt had to hurt. And the wind! Oy. So reaching the flat, and then the uphill as Greely hits Interstate, was not so much fun, no. The mile after the hill sucked. At one point early into it I looked down at my Garmin and saw I was averaging about an 8:00 pace thus far into it. “Yikes,” I thought, “that’s slower than my marathon goal pace and here I am in a wee little half marathon, jogging that kind of speed?”  I picked it up after that but still covered the 11th mile in all of 7:22. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to PR at that point.

Have I ever mentioned that in the two and a half years I’ve been running, every race I’ve entered has been a PR? It’s a stupid stat, but it’s mine. It was mine.

J passed by me right near mile marker 11, as we were heading up onto the Broadway Bridge. It would have been nice to rally and overtake him, but I didn’t have another gear in me. I kept him in sight through the last two miles, but he was steadily pulling away. J got a PR, finishing about 35 seconds ahead of me. My time, unofficially, was 1:32:38, a 7:05/mile pace. That’s less than a minute off my half marathon PR from two months ago on a much easier course in nicer weather. I think I did good today.

Elevations: The elevation chart doesn’t have the bridge elevations at miles 1.5 and 11.5 right — the elevation data that the chart is generated from thinks we were running at river level instead of on the bridge.

Mile splits: 6:55, 7:08, 7:00, 7:28, 7:07, 7:00, 7:01, 7:01, 7:09, 6:51, 7:22, 7:08, 7:00

Official Results: 1:32:37. 23rd/240 finishers, 19th/120 men, 2/22 in my age group.

Brief update

After eight miles on Monday, seven on Wednesday and seven on Thursday, my foot is still feeling OK. That’s good news. I’ve had a tiny bit of right-side shin pain while warming up this week, but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about either. It could be as simple as being due for a new pair of shoes. I figure I’ll wear the current pair for Sunday’s half marathon then buy a new pair Monday.

RunningAHEAD

Every so often, I think about keeping a better running log. My only logging so far has been for my virtual cross-country run, on a funky U.S. Government-run web site. It’s not a great site by any means, but the cross-country pictures are addicting. Other than that, though, the site does little for me but log distances. No times, no course information, no graphs, no exporting, no GPS integration, etc etc etc. When I did want to see a map of my route from my Garmin GPS, I’d use Garmin’s MotionBased site (or their newer Garmin Connect), but I didn’t upload religiously enough to treat those as a training log, even if those sites worked well enough to be usable day-in, day-out, which they don’t. (Garmin seems to hire good engineers for their hardware and pretty awful ones for their web sites.)

So, now and then I go looking around for decent running log software, preferably something web-based. A few days ago I started trying out RunningAHEAD. It’s a pretty full-featured logging tool, but does a pretty good job about letting you only enter the stuff you care about. And it can upload stuff directly from your Garmin Forerunner and turn them into log entries, each complete with a map and heart-rate data. Its map display, running on top of Google maps, is better than MotionBased ever was. And the developer is still actively working on it.

You can see my RunningAHEAD training log here.

11.5; update on foot

My foot didn’t hurt when I walked on it this morning. I think I felt a little burning pain one time, but it was so transient that I’m not sure I’m remembering right. Then I ran 11.5 miles on a loop that included the entire extant Fanno Creek trail system, at a constant 8:30/mile pace. It felt a little harder than I think an 8:30 pace should have. Shorter runs done at a deliberately slow pace often seem that way, though. Anyway, my foot didn’t hurt during the run, nor after. So, good news there!

The Left Foot Strikes Back

I woke up this morning (after a hill workout last night) with a left foot that hurt a bit. It’s an occasional mild burning pain, in the arch near the heel, present when walking. It hasn’t started the classic way for me, but other than that it feels just like — say it with me everyone! — plantar fasciitis.

I haven’t had even a whiff of PF for most of a year, so this is a little disappointing.  Last time, it was mostly in my right foot. Still, I’m optimistic it will go away as fast as it came. For the immediate future, this is just another signal that I’m to take it very easy and run very short on Saturday: perhaps just 10 or 12 miles.

Feeling a little draggy

I ran 7.5 miles Monday, the last four of them pretty hard (getting down a little under seven minute miles for the last one) and I’ve been feeling a bit tired and heavy-legged since. Wednesday was another 7.5 miles, at a slow 8:15-8:30/mile pace, and I just kind of dragged along.

It might be that my body is starting to ask for a bit of a break from the workout load I’ve been giving it the last few weeks. Forty miles a week might be nothing to other marathoners in my running club, but it’s a lot for me right now.  And the number of 20+ long runs I’ve done in the last few months is unprecedented. On the other hand, I might just be having some off days.

Either way, my long run this week is planned as just a 16 miler, so I’m in something of a recovery week. If I continue to feel run-down, I might shorten it up a bit more. I’d like to be in good shape for the half marathon the following weekend.

22.5; Portland Marathon Course Preview

This morning the training clinic ran their marathon course preview, a fun run that’s more or less over the last 20 miles of the marathon course. It’s been a few years since I ran it, so it was a good refresher course on what to expect. I actually ran 22.5 miles, since I parked more than a mile away from our start point (Nike Town on 6th and Salmon) and ran to the start and back from the car. Why’d I do that? For one thing, I wanted the extra mileage. For another, I was too cheap to pay for parking… and all the free parking is about a mile away from Nike Town.

The clinic had an enormous turnout today and so formed more pace groups than they usually have… from 2:50:00 marathoners on up by ten minute intervals. I ran with the 3:20:00 group. As always, the actual pace we do these training runs at was about 20% slower than race pace, meaning we were plodding along at around 9:30 per mile. Easy going.

The uphill portions of the St John's Bridge and approach. Click for interactive map.

Here’s a look at the big hill that comes during the 17th mile of the actual marathon, getting up and over the St. Johns Bridge. I recalled it as being kind of short and steep, but in reality it’s neither. It’s a moderate grade, but surprisingly long. From the start of the approach road to the crown of the bridge is a full 0.8 miles!  The bridge portion is considerable less steep than the approach road. Also, be prepared for a short but very steep downhill very shortly after you get off the bridge, followed by a few blocks of uphill.

Of course, I now know that it’s the miles after the bridge that get you. This time I’ll be more ready than I was in 2007. One hopes.

Another trip to the Nike campus

It was 97 degrees outside and time for another round of the free 3K cross-country series on the Nike campus last night. The format was a goofy team relay. Everybody in your team of four runs the first two laps, keeping together. Then the slowest person drops off and the remaining three run lap three. One more person drops off, and the fastest two run one more lap.

I formed a team with two very fast runners (17-minute 5Kers) and one fellow with similar speed to myself. I’ve seen him run in the heat before, though, and I thought he was a bit better at it than I was, so I ever-so-graciously volunteered to be the first to drop off. Yep, selfless, that’s me!

By the time we were nearing the end of the second lap, though, he wanted to drop too. I struggled to get enough breath to inform him that I was dying, and I’d still be the one dropping. I made it through my 1.5K in 6:15; it took me twenty or thirty minutes of coughing and a tight chest to really regain my breath after that. All in all, just pure torture, really.

Anyway, our #3 guy made it through one more lap and then our two fast guys took off. We ended up finishing third, behind a couple of high school cross country teams. Good enough for some prize tee-shirts. I take none of the credit.

Before and after the race, I did a loop around the wood chip trail they have around the perimeter of the campus. It’s two miles long, with footbridges over the main entrance roads.  It was the first time I’ve ran on that trail and I was surprised how nice it was, with a real variety of scenery along the way.

Tune-up half marathon

I’ve been looking for a race to enter the weekend of Sept. 5 and 6.  That’s four weeks before the marathon, and one week before my longest pre-marathon training run. (Probably 22-24 miles. I’ll run 16 the week after, starting my taper.) Ideally this race would be a half marathon on streets. It would serve as a tune up, a last check on whether my pace goals are realistic, and (hopefully) a confidence-builder.

I hadn’t had much luck finding a local race that fit the bill, though. The ORRC Wildwood Trail Trial sounds like a fun race and I’d like to do it some time, but as a 10K on trail, it didn’t entirely fit my needs. There were a few 5Ks and 10Ks out in the Gorge or way down south, but I wan’t going to travel for this.

Patience is a virtue. What should appear on the race schedules but the Run Portland Run half marathon, on the 6th. It’s a brand new race by a pretty new race outfit from California, and most of the stuff on their web site was written by someone who seems to talk only in “business-school buzzword gibberish,” but those red flags aside, it fits the bill perfectly. Not only is it a half marathon on the perfect day, but it also has an awesome route for people doing the Portland marathon. It’s an out-and back over the last six and a half miles of the marathon route, traversing it backwards (and uphill) first, then returning back to downtown. I’m signed up.

20 on a hangover

This training cycle has been going  unusually well. I haven’t been sick in ages and I haven’t had any injuries. My weekly mileage has topped 40 and if I stay on schedule, I’ll have five 20-milers (or longer) under my belt going into Portland on October 4th. I’ve been mixing in speed workouts and lots of hills.

Even my best efforts to sabotage Saturday’s 20-miler failed. I took Friday off from work to do some events for the Meetin “Celebration” — kind of a national Meetin convention — taking place this weekend in Portland. Basically I started drinking around noon and didn’t stop until 10pm. One could look at it as a determined experiment in deliberate dehydration before a long run. Even with that, the run still went OK.

The Training Clinic was only doing 16 this week, so I peeled off near the end and did five miles by myself. The first four of those went pretty well, but then, at mile 19, I found myself back at my car. That’s always hard, making it to the car and having to keep on going. I took that last mile as a pretty slow cool down and rewarded myself with a cupcake from Saint Cupcake when I was done.

Idaho

Tuesday night I ran 6.9 miles around my neighborhood (in some much-needed rain) and made it to mile 3,293 of my virtual cross-country trip. I’ve been tracking the trip mileage since I first started running in February of 2007. It’s pretty close to a lifetime total for me, since I probably hadn’t run more than five or ten miles combined before then.

Tuesday’s mileage put me across the Montana-Idaho border near Lolo Hot Springs.  Just Idaho and Oregon left to cross! Then what?

Only sixteen

Saturday, I did my long run alone for the first time in quite a while. My plan was to run 16 miles at 8:00 to 8:15 per mile, starting at the Sellwood bridge and doing the Sellwood-Steel loop but extending it with a run up Front and through the NW up to the Leif Erickson trailhead. That makes for a mostly flat run with about a mile of uphill and a mile down. Sixteen miles is a break from all the 18s and 20s this past month, but at the same time this was going to be a much faster pace than all my other long runs.

I had some thoughts of keeping the first mile slow to warm up, but it still came in under 8:15. After that, most of the run was near a 7:50 pace. Faster than I had planned, but still a little short of my planned marathon pace. No doubt if I had a coach, he would be yelling at me for running at such a pointless, in-between pace. And I’d tell him to stop pestering me with his crazy theories about pacing.

Getting up the big hill was a workout and a half; I paused for some water and a candy bar at the top. (And to catch my breath.) I sprinted down hard, then resumed the 7:50s for the last six or seven miles. The running average pace for the 16 miles was a 7:55, if I remember correctly. I had to jog another 0.8 miles — nice and slow — to get back to my car.

Top ten!

There’s this company with headquarters in the Portland Area; maybe you’ve heard of them. I believe they call themselves “Nike”. I guess they make athletic apparel and equipment, or something. Anyway, they have this enormous fancy-pants campus out in Beaverton. I’ve driven past it, but never stepped foot inside before. I don’t even own any Nike apparel. If I showed up there without any swooshes on, they’d just sic the bouncers on me, right?

Yesterday, though, they were putting on a free 3K cross country race in the middle of the campus and a bunch of my running pals were going, so I braved it. Walking around the grounds is a little spooky. Everything is so ostentatious. Almost everything, from parking spaces to pillars, has the name of one  famous Nike-sponsored athlete or another stuck to it.  It’s all huge and weirdly un-Portland-ish.

*My* office doesn't have little footbridges...

I parked and found my way to the double soccer field (“Ronaldo Field”) tucked away in the center of campus. The race format was a 3K predict-a-time: before the race, everybody has to enter what time they expect to run. Whoever comes closest to their prediction wins. No watches allowed.  Obviously that means you don’t need to be a fast runner to win. It also means you don’t have to run hard to win, although the common wisdom holds that it’s best to do so. If you push yourself to near the limits of your speed (and you’ve raced enough to know what those limits are), that makes for a natural “clock”. You lose that if you pick a time that leaves you at a leisurely pace.

Besides, it’s a race! You have to test yourself a little!

I picked a time that meant I would be racing it, but hopefully not all-out: 12:20. (A 6:37/mile pace.) That would actually be a really conservative goal time for me if it were under 60 degrees and the race were on pavement, but it was about 80 and it looked like the course was all grass, both of which I thought would slow me down.

As it turned out, it was a mixture of grass, trail, and a little cement. We did four laps of the course. A lot of school children had shown up for this race, and almost the whole time I was running behind someone who looked about 12. I felt good for the first half of a lap or so, and after that it became hard work. I could have pushed it harder, I’m sure, but I was still awful glad when it was over and I could collapse and catch my breath.

I was pretty psyched when I found out I’d run a 12:10! Ten seconds off seemed pretty good to me. One of our regular Monday night runners trumped me though: she was off by just two seconds! She tied for first place; I got ninth.

My prize? My first piece of Nike apparel.

Workin' the prize hat

Training in the heat

Ten days. That’s how many days in a row of 90 degrees or hotter (often much hotter) temperatures Portland has just been through. Not that good for a runner, or at least for a runner like me, one who melts easily. After a mile out there, my body is at max temperature and my heart is doing all it can to try to cool me down. After four miles, I feel like I do at the end of a marathon. Not everybody seems to be hit by the heat like me; just lucky, I guess.

So It’s been unpleasant, but I’ve still been putting the training in. Wednesday I ran in the morning again. That just doesn’t work very well for me. Thursday it was in the 90s instead of the 100s, so I went back to an evening run. I tried to run The Hill near my house a couple times, but I couldn’t make it up that sucker in the heat, so I used it as an opportunity to work on my power walk.

Saturday morning I did another 20-miler with the marathon clinic. This time it was the Tualatin route. They had a 3:15 group and a 3:30 group, but no 3:20, so I ran with the 3:15s. As always, they kept a slow pace for the long run… 9:15 to 9:30 per mile. It was getting kind of toasty out there by the time we finished, but keeping to that slower pace and drinking a lot, I finished without a problem. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve ever run 20 milers or more on back-to-back weekends. I had a little stiff pain behind my left knee the next day, but it was gone by Monday.

Monday I ran after work again. I (probably foolishly) decided to try to go out pretty fast, to get a little speedwork in before the heat caught up with me. I made it to our water stop at 1.6 miles at a seven-minute pace, then slowed way down. The last three miles were not pretty.

The good news? It’s not supposed to break 90 today.

First twenty of the training cycle

Saturday morning I ran an uneventful 20-miler near Vancouver Lake with the Portland Marathon Clinic’s group run. It was hot and the scenery was mostly blackberries and corn, but there were lots of nice people to talk to and plenty of aid stations. It was probably the easiest 20-miler I can recall. I had a little ankle soreness afterward, but it went away the next day. With 10 weeks left before the Portland Marathon and a lot more long runs of 20 miles or more on the schedule, I should be in solid shape, endurance-wise.

This morning I ran six miles before work. This is very unusual for me, but it’s going to be near 100 degrees tonight and something needed to be done. Trying to push myself to keep the speed up while I’m alone and sleepy was a challenge.

Too hot

I ran the usual six miles last night in what I think was the hottest weather yet this year: low to mid 90s, no wind at all, and a bit humid. It was a serious struggle. My legs started out pretty dead feeling. I guess it was delayed soreness and stiffness from Saturday’s 19. After a few miles, my legs warmed up but the heat was just murderous. I found myself trying to sprint through the sunny bits of the trail and linger in the shaded portions. I found myself cursing the fact that such heat training has little practical training effect.

(The big exception being if you are going to be racing in the heat. Heat training will acclimatize you to the heat to some degree and let you run faster in hot weather. However, it is sub-optimal for training for running in moderate temperatures.)

The only good news was that the pace I was running was actually faster than the pace I felt like I was running. The run finished up with a 7:50/mile average pace.

19

I was glad that the Portland Marathon Clinic’s free group run this Saturday was on a nice flat route. At 19 miles long, this run was going to create a high-mileage week for me. Last week’s run had been a fairly hilly Forest Park trail run, and Thursday’s workout had been on steep hills as well.

The run was an out and back from 12th and Couch in the Pearl district, down to the river and across the Steel Bridge, then south on the Esplanade and the Springwater. I switched to the 3:20 pace group this time, but they still went pretty slowly; a 9:20 average pace. It was a surprisingly comfortable run. It was hot, even early in the day, but I kept hydrated and didn’t wilt at all.

Oh boy! A graph! About running!

Race paces, adjusted to "equivalent" 5K pace. Click image to see full size.

This graph shows the progress of my race pace over time. The y-axis shows the pace at which the McMillan Running Calculator says I could have run a 5K, given the actual race distance and time. (Obviously, for the 5K races, no adjustment is needed.) All of my road races are shown; two 50K trail races and a six-hour-race are not. (The running calculator doesn’t handle 50Ks, and comparing road to trail isn’t fair anyway.)

The results as a whole are surprisingly linear looking. I’ve been gaining somewhere around 45 seconds a mile per year for the last two and a half years.  The rate of improvement slowed after May 2008 (plantar fasciitis limited my training) and I seemed to slow even further during my mostly-on-trail training over the winter after that, but my spring and summer roadwork appears to have put me back on the same approximate slope.

Racing uphill in the heat, wheeeee fun

The heat was awful yesterday — low 90s — and the traffic getting to the start was horrendous, but I fought both problems and ran the Goose again yesterday. This time the first two miles were done as a race. My performance was less than impressive. At one point in the middle everything gave out and I was walking for a bit. The two miles (mostly sharply uphill) took me twenty minutes and change. I have a profound respect for the winner’s 14-minute results. I look a lot better than I felt here at the end:

After waiting for everyone to finish the race portion, we continued over to Pittock Mansion where we had CAKE! All runs should have cake in the middle.