1. The Sunday before, the toenail on that toe I broke came off. (This would be the one on my left big toe.) I may have wiggled it off a little before it was ready, but I thought that would be better than having it fall off during the marathon. Little did I realize how wounded the nail bed was underneath! Either the original wound under there never healed up (after four months?) or my continued running kept re-injuring the area. I would have some bleeding during most training runs, but I was chalking that up to a loose toenail shifting around and cutting the skin or something. Instead it turned out to be a good-sized moist and inflamed horror of a wound under there. It didn’t hurt much, but would that be true for 26 miles?
2. The next evening after I laid down in bed I started to feel an all-too familiar feeling in my lower back: I was experiencing a kidney stone. It would be my third such incident in 11 years. Once I was sure what it was, I figured the marathon was not to be — I’d be on painkillers and in no shape for anything physical for several days. This time turned out different though. We headed for the emergency room as the pain was peaking. By the time we got there, it was already starting to subside. Three hours, one I.V. bag, and a CAT scan later, we had a confirmed diagnosis of a three millimeter stone almost out already and no pain or irritation whatsoever left. It didn’t bother me again.
3. I had some painful sciatica most of the week, leaving me hobbling around in pain and further psychologically demoralized.

For most of the week, then, I was telling people that I might or might not run it, depending on how I felt as race day approached. It wasn’t until Friday that I made up my mind to go. We headed down to Eugene on Saturday and stayed the night with my mom as usual. I had a pretty big pizza dinner, then slept well the night before.

What perfect weather we had! It wasn’t cold at the start and it never got too hot. The sun peeked out a little but it was mostly cloudy.

A friend of mine was running his first marathon and I had offered to pace him. He thought he could run about a 3:40. He didn’t want me pacing him until the bitter end if he started slowing down, but we agreed to run together as long as he was hitting his splits. This was a great plan until I was unable to locate him at the start line. It seems like Eugene is getting more crowded every year… There were a few rounds of fruitless phone- and texting-tag which led me to believe he was still in the bathroom lines as the race was starting, but I couldn’t be sure.

I spent the first two miles of the race kind of sweeping the area between the 3:45 and 3:35 pacers, looking for him. I didn’t have any luck, so when I passed our families on the sidelines around mile two, I stopped and asked if they had seen him. They had not. I waited with them for a while, looking for him to pass. Some seemed shocked by this — what happened to ultra-competitive Scott?  Eventually my friend’s parents spotted him and pointed him out to me. I quickly caught up to him and found that we were a little behind the 3:45 pacer. We slowly inched our way past.

It was fun running through South Eugene with my friend, pointing out the personal landmarks — my elementary school, the house I grew up in, etc. My “pacing” mostly consisted of telling him he was running a little too fast and holding him back, especially down the gentle hills. I think I did a pretty good job of it — we came through the half marathon at almost exactly 1:50. I told him banking time when you’re still feeling good almost never pays off, and that even splits are the best way to go. I still think it’s true.

Near mile 17 my friend’s breathing was getting labored and we were starting to slow down. I was still feeling pretty good. My toe wasn’t a problem. We talked about our plan once more and we parted ways. I sped up to a pace somewhere under eight minutes a mile. Up until then, we’d been doing around 8:24. Even at the faster speed, I was still having fun. Miles 17-20 were all pretty easy feeling. It didn’t hurt that I was passing so many people. I thought I would try to catch up to the 3:35 pace group.

After mile 21, my left thigh stiffened up a lot. I could feel the tight muscles pulling on my kneecap as well. At last my poor training volume was coming into play. I could feel the leg get better when I shortened my stride and slowed down a bit, and worse when I sped up. I had no real motivation to kill myself, so I tried to maintain a speed below the tightness threshold. That turned out to be just a few seconds slower than eight minute miles.

My other problem was that I really hadn’t tied my shoes tight enough, and my right foot (not the one with the nail-free toe) was sliding around too much. I was getting some pain from a couple of the nails. In the end, I think they were just digging into the toe a bit; they hurt a lot after the race but healed almost completely by the next day. It’s a tricky balance, tying the shoe — too loose around the ankle and this happens, too tight and your whole foot gets bruised.

I never did catch that 3:35 pacer.

I had a few sips of PBR from the unofficial beer aid station at mile 24 (briefly chastising them for the poor choice) and carried on toward the finish. As always, that last lonely mile on the inaccessible bike path before you get back to the streets was a test. This year I passed.

Heading into Hayward field for the finish was fun, as always. With twenty yards left, I looked over to my right and saw some guy trying to pass me! This could not stand. I ratcheted up my speed and left him behind. What a jerk. (Him, or me? You decide.) I finished in 3:36. My finishing photo is not too bad if you ignore the weird angle of my trailing foot.

Once done, I found myself relatively mobile — those right-side toenails were the biggest problem. I had a chocolate milk and a banana in the recovery area, then I found my people in the stands just as my friend was finishing. He did great! I was worried that he would really fade, but he pulled out a 3:45.

Our families had a combined victory lunch later at one of our usual spots, Marché in the Fifth Street Market. I had my hamburger and two excellent Bulleit Rye Manhattans. Because I am a dork, I wore my race shirt and finisher’s medal.

I’m quite happy with this race. I had a lot of fun, and feel re-motivated to keep training and run some fast marathons again soon.

Official results: 3:36:37 (8:16/mile avg pace). 570th/2346 finishers. 447th/1281 men, 78th/205 men 40-44.

I ran my first 20-miler in what seems like forever today. The route, above, worked out really well. Running over the St. John’s Bridge in far North Portland is fun (as anyone who’s run the Portland Marathon can tell you) but running on NW St Helens Rd/Highway 30 to get there or back is not (as anyone who’s run the Portland Marathon can also tell you). But you can detour around that by taking Forest Park’s Ridge Trail, which connects the south end of the bridge to milepost 8.5 of Leif Erickson Drive. If you finish the loop across the Broadway Bridge, it works out to almost exactly 20 miles, all on sidewalks or trails and with few busy road crossings.

The Ridge Trail is a steep little six-tenth of a mile. It’s pretty obvious where it falls in this elevation profile. (Ignore the dip between mile eight and nine; that’s where the software doesn’t know there’s a bridge and thinks I  ran across the water.)

I mostly walked going up the trail. It was in pretty good shape, especially considering all the rain we’ve had lately. The rain continued during my run and there were lots and lots of puddles everywhere. For a while I tried to go around them, and found myself irritated every time I drifted off and stepped in one. But after three or four miles I gave up on keeping my shoes dry and just waded through.

My feet were sore by the end of the run, but other than that, all good.

There’s no reason to ever do this, other than to say it’s been done. The bridge run is seven-tenths of a mile on a sidewalk with four lanes of very fast traffic shooting by right next to you. The river view from up there might get more interesting when they get further into the construction of the new Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail Bridge, but for now you find yourself looking at pretty humdrum section of the river with a few barges and cranes playing around it it.

The west-side approach to the bridge is pedestrian-unfriendly, involving scrambling across a crosswalk-free ramp. Neither side is particularly easy to navigate on foot — it’s not obvious just how to get up to the bridge from the more usual running paths down along the river. (I ran west-to-east, since I had a slightly better idea of where to get onto the bridge on the west side, and figured getting off the bridge would be easier to figure out than getting on.) I can’t give any good directions, but if you stare at that GPS-generated map up there closely enough, you might get the idea.

The seminal work on being a pedestrian on the Ross Island is, of course, cyclotram’s “How to walk the Ross Island Bridge and not die, if you’re lucky“.  It is an absolute must-read for anybody with any interest in the topic of how crappy it is to walk across the Ross Island Bridge. It is a true classic in the genre. (I refer here to the how-to-walk-across-various-Portland-bridges-without-dying genre, of which cyclotram is the primary and perhaps only contributor.) My small efforts (like this) perhaps don’t count, since I am in fact running, not walking, which arguably makes it easier not to die. Cyclotram’s posts also have a lot more pictures, maps, and history than mine. He makes the interesting note that the Ross Island Bridge has been crappy to walk across since the 1940s, which demonstrates some remarkable forward-thinking.

I decided to run across the Ross Island Bridge today because (a) I never had and (b) I thought it would be a good way to get an eight-mile run from our new place in NW Portland. This eight-miler capped an 18-mile week for me, and my toe feels entirely healed. I’m slow slow slow still but I’m getting back.

That’s a ceramic platter we have. It weighs nine pounds.  It fell off a chair onto the tip of my left big toe. I was wearing socks and standing on a hardwood floor. The platter hit edge-first. The good news — the platter is fine. The platter thanks you for your concern. My toe hurt like a mother. Here’s a blurry picture of what it looked like a few minutes later, after the searing pain had subsided.

I could wiggle my toe and touching it didn’t seem like it hurt that much — except for the nail — so I didn’t think it was broken. But soon it started to bleed out of the corner of the nail, and once it got going the blood wasn’t stopping. It didn’t hurt much, so we wrapped some paper towels around it and had dinner.

It was still bleeding an hour and a half later. It showed no sign of letting up and I was going through a lot of paper towels. We decided to go to the emergency room. I put on a flip-flop and we drove over. Here’s my toe in the hospital:

After an hour or so of waiting and triage, we saw a nice PA. The best thing about her was that she was also a marathon runner, so she was very sympathetic. Especially after her and my wife talked me into getting an x-ray, and it came back looking like this:

You don’t have to be much of a medical expert to see something wrong on that big toe. That should all be one bone, not five or six. Ouch. Shouldn’t that hurt more? Don’t ask me.

They pressure-bandaged the toe to slow the bleeding and sent me home in one of those open-toed post-surgical shoes. It oozed and bled for about four days; it was such a relief when I no longer needed any bandages. I limped pretty badly for a week and I still have to be very careful if I’m wearing shoes. I saw a podiatrist the week after it happened, but he didn’t give me anything different to do — no casts, splints or boots.

Obviously, I can’t run either. I don’t know exactly how long I’ll be out — I’m supposed to go by how it feels. Six to eight weeks is a good guess though. I’m two weeks and three days into it now.

I have a pretty good streak going: I have finished this race every single year it has been held. (This was its second year.) Here’s my report from last year. You will note that I have reused the same scenic picture. Ah, you’ve seen one giant waterfall with little ant-like people running behind it, you’ve seen them all.

Really, though, it’s a spectacular course. I know someone who runs a half marathon or two every single week, and he ran this one today for the first time, and you should see what nice things he’s saying about it on Facebook. Even if you aren’t a runner, if you live anywhere near here and haven’t been, you should take a trip to Silver Falls State Park and hike around a little — it’s a gem. If you live anywhere near here and are a runner, this is a must-do race. But hurry, because it fills up fast. This year they opened registration on August 1st and it filled up on the 3rd. New next year: they’re going to be doing a full marathon also! If it’s just two loops of the half-marathon course (as seems likely), I’ll probably take a pass on that, though.

I was in mostly decent shape coming into the race. No real aches or pains to speak of; not sick; plantar fasciitis very mild. My biggest problem was that I’d only been putting in 22-26 miles per week for the previous six weeks, to give the aforementioned PF a break. Still, I thought I had a good chance of beating my time here from last year, when I was sick and gimpy.

The course has a lot of uphills and downhills. Here is the elevation profile, as published on the race web page.

As you can see, the race sucks you into going out way too fast during those first four gentle miles. I’m not sure what my pace was but I’d guess it was 7:30 or faster through there. Everybody else seemed to be running fast too. Seriously, this race seemed to have attracted a lot of fast runners this year. The winner posted a time of an hour and eighteen minutes. Look at that elevation profile! Remember that most of it is on wet and/or rocky trails. That’s just insanely fast.

Mile four kind of sucked. I complained about this hill last year, writing “My lungs weren’t giving me enough air and my legs felt heavy.” Well, no duh, that’s actually a pretty steep climb there! I probably got up there faster this time around but it was certainly no easier.

Near mile six, we descended into the gorge via a route that wound behind the North Falls, then we got two miles of mostly-downhill trail, downstream alongside a creek. I was feeling OK and I ran this portion hard. Maybe seven-minute-miles; it’s hard to say since I wasn’t doing manual laps on my Garmin and its accuracy is rubbish in that kind of terrain.

Shortly after mile eight, we started heading upstream along another creek, and then we hit the two big waterfall climbs. The first involved an endless series of stairs; the second only some very steep trails. I knew better this year and just briskly walked these sections, rather than pretending I could run them and then petering out into into a gasping slow trudge.

After that, it was all pretty easy except for (a) the fact that this was my longest run in two months and (b) the sadistic hill they insert just before the finish. At least I was mentally prepared for the hill this time around. I finished in about 1:44:10, which would be a 7:58/mile average pace, and more than six minutes faster than last year. So, mission accomplished there.

Post-race, they had bread, chili, and a roaring fire in the picnic area shelter. They didn’t have finishers medals, if you care about that sort of thing. I don’t, and would much rather have a lower race entry fee. I think it might have been $25 this year? An unbeatable race bargain.

Update: Official Results. 1:44:11, 67th of 454 finishers.

The McKenzie River 50K is usually a pretty easy run, at least as far as thirty-one mile trail races go. Yes, there are a few miles of “technical” rocky trail where you have to pay attention to every footstep. And, yes, there is a bit of climb in the first few miles. But most of the last two-thirds is downhill and you cruise to the finish on miles of soft, gently downhill trail. Usually.

This year, the Shadow Creek forest fire changed all that, closing the upper portions of the route and forcing the organizers to stay away from the ranger station that normally serves as the finish area. The race organizers did a great job coming up with a workable plan at the last moment, and communicating the changes with the runners. The new route was basically an out-and-back, down the river and then back up. There was also a separate 2.5 mile out-and-back at the very start, along the waterfall trail just upstream of Carmen Reservoir.

With the changes, here is what the elevation profile of the course looked like. (Elevation is in feet.)

Hard-core trail runners are looking at this and chuckling a bit — a thousand feet of climb over the last fourteen miles: big deal. Compared to the normal course for this race, though, this was a big change in the “harder” direction. I’d wanted to break five hours but with the new course I knew that would be unlikely.

Now, did I mention that the race turned out to be on the hottest day of the year? And that the whole area was a little smoky from those forest fires? Not that I’m making excuses. At least the bees (or wasps, or whatever they are) along the course decided to ignore me again. A lot of people do get stung every year and 2011 didn’t seem like it was an exception. (So much for my theory that the smoke would calm down the bees :-)

I don’t mean to be negative though. This is a beautiful, gorgeous, incredible trail and it was great just to be out there running it. I love this race.

We had no problems getting to the 7:30 start from our motel room 25 miles away. It wasn’t hot yet — probably in the mid 50s — but it was the first time I can remember not actually getting cold at one of these early-morning race starts. Earlier, I had a cup of coffee in the motel room, and that helped gear up my digestive system to properly do what it was supposed to pre-race, if you get my meaning.

I went a bit faster off the starting line than I usually would, because I didn’t want to get caught too far back when we reached the tight single-track trail a few hundred meters farther along. Of course, this meant I was up with people who were probably in better shape than me, and the first uphill mile proved challenging. I felt like I was having trouble getting enough air, and no doubt I was — probably not because anything was wrong, just because I was running hard to keep my place in line.

Fitness-wise, I was a mixed bag coming into the race. My weekly mileage and long runs had been adequate but nothing spectacular. My taper was too long. I had tweaked my back doing nothing at all on Wednesday, and that still bothered me a bit. My left foot hurt.

After a bit more than a mile of uphills and steps along the spectacular waterfall section of the McKenzie headwaters, we crossed a little bridge to the north/east side of the river and headed back downhill through the first tricky steep section. I had no problem keeping up with the people around me here. I enjoyed all the downhills, including the rocky, volcanic boulder strewn “cheese grater” sections. I got through the race without any falls, and only twisted my ankle once, which is still one time to many, but is a lot better than I did last year.

Soon, we passed a little water-only aid station and could look down the hill through the trees to our left and see where we started. From here on out it was an out-and-back course, and every nice downhill plunge plagued me with thoughts of having to run back up it so many miles later.

Sweetie was going to see me at the aid stations again this year, and this time we decided that as long as she was “crewing” me, she should really crew me. With that in mind, we brought two handheld water bottles, so we could swap out. We also brought a cooler, which we filled with ice that morning at the motel, so that when we did swap out, I’d be getting ice water. Without even having discussed it, Sweetie started putting gels and pretzels into the handle pockets on the water bottles, which cut my aid station stopped time to literally zero seconds. The trickiest part of getting through the aid stations was waving off the official volunteers who wanted to take my bottle to refill it. They were doing exactly what they should — great volunteers.

After five or ten miles, I stopped noticing my aching back, which was good. My foot, though, stayed painful through the entire run. It never became a sharp pain, though, and after a while it stopped getting worse, so it wasn’t a major concern.

Predictably, I ran strongly for about 25 miles, then we hit the technical section below the famous Blue Pool, this time in the uphill direction. Soon, I was sucking wind. My legs felt OK but my heart rate was too high and I was breathing too hard. The heat probably was having some effect on me too, but it was hard to tell while running — I just felt bad.

The aid stations that had seemed so close together on the way down now seemed about three times further apart on the way up. They said it was five miles to the finish after the last one; it took forever. I started walking a lot. I wondered why I did this to myself. Eventually I made it.

Official results: 5:09:48 (Which is an average pace of 9:58/mile, if the course was an accurate 50K). 37th out of 151 finishers.