Eighteen Saturdays: Canton Marathon 2012, Week Thirteen

In terms of total weekly miles, the running schedule has entered the taper phase, and for the first time in more than a month, I’m running regularly with my brother Adam again.

Last week’s schedule called for five-milers on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Adam and I did the Tuesday and Thursday runs pretty casually, and even while talking, we kept things well below 9 minutes per mile. I ran Wednesday’s loop in the evening by myself – I don’t remember why – and it was a really good pace run: I’m pretty sure it marked the first time I’ve ever run a 40-minute time on a five-mile course.

Saturday morning, Adam and I left for our 19-mile run just after 8:30 a.m. My third-longest run ever – behind only the 2009 Towpath Marathon and the 20-miler I did to train for it.

I didn’t fully carbo-load the night before, since I had driven to Columbus for a fantastic dinner, but I’d had a bowl of pasta when I got home at 11 p.m., so I wasn’t totally unprepared.

The first five miles went very smoothly – we were managing right around 8-and-a-half-minutes per mile when I took my first gel-and-one-minute-walk break. We happened to be near our brother Nick’s house, so he came out and joined us for a couple minutes as we passed.

Miles five through ten weren’t bad overall, although mile nine was much more uphill than we’d anticipated. Still, we were keeping pretty close to that 8:30-per-mile pace when I did my second gel-and-walk minute.

Miles eleven and twelve were decent, and I was feeling OK.

And then we hit the climb which kicked off the thirteenth mile, and that thing ate up all my reserves. I came down the other side just absolutely beat, and knowing I not only still had something like two miles until my next break, but four more after that. I had hit the “just-try-to-keep-moving” wall. Hard.

I wound up doing my gel-and-water break about a mile early, and even after that, it was all I could do just to stick to my plan and not stop jogging.

I closed my eyes a lot. I looked at the white line at the edge of the road a lot. I tried to look to the horizons and the treelines off to the left and right – anything to put my gaze anyplace except on the road ahead, which just. Kept. Going.

Mile Nineteen.

It kicked off with another climb of not quite a quarter-mile. At its base, I finished the last of my water.

Over the top, then, and with about 3/4 of a mile to go, I started to feel like I was going to puke. I was thisclose to pulling up short and walking when Adam slowed up and jogged back to me. “Mile nineteen,” he said, “Don’t stop now. Just focus on the breathing.”

I gave an angry grunt, gritted my teeth, and threw myself into the long strides again and drawing the deep in-through-the-nose, out-through-the-mouth kinds of breaths I turn to in moments of desperation to keep myself from throwing up.

My head cleared, my stomach settled, and the last half-mile eventually passed.

We finished in 2:58:09 – less than two minutes more than it had taken me to do 18 miles a couple weeks ago. The pace works out to about 9:21, and though that’s about a half-minute faster per mile than I ran my 18-miler, I still find myself wondering how the heck I’m going to come anywhere near the 9:01 pace I achieved in the Towpath Marathon.

Five weeks until race day.

Absolutely worth the drive.

I took a half-day off work Friday, May 11, so I could drive to Columbus for dinner.

I had toyed around with the idea for a day or two, and was still waffling about it Thursday night, and then Jenn pointed out that if I went, and it was awkward and no fun, I’d forget about it soon enough, but if I didn’t go at all, I would undoubtedly wish I had.

Big surprise: My wife was totally right.

I’ve been a fan of Jay Lake‘s writing for a few years now, and while we exchanged a few emails around the time I was reading The Specific Gravity of Grief, I had never met him at a convention or spoken with him. And though I have thought it would be kind of cool to visit Portland for “JayCon, ” his annual open-invite birthday party, that hasn’t been a viable option of late. So when he announced on his blog that he’d be in Columbus for a brief business trip and would be at the Northstar Cafe at Easton for an open dinner, I figured, Why Not?

Hey, look, here’s me, having just  eaten dinner with Jay Lake:

I’m really glad Jenn encouraged me to go: Two other guests, Kris and Scott, were also there, and the four of us spent about two hours just hanging out and sharing stories and talking about science fiction and writers and movies and even a little sports. (Jay shared a great perspective on appreciating a sporting event from a storytelling point of view: I know he credited someone else with pointing it out to him, but the gist of it was that unlike stories told through books, television or movies, the ending of a game remains undetermined and unknown until it actually unfolds, and the resulting tension and drama can hold great power.)

Good food too: I had a tasty turkey sandwich and a surprisingly unique rice salad, and then we all shared a gigantic, gooey, eyeball-vibratingly good chocolate-chocolate-chip cookie.

Everyone was easygoing and fun to be around, and I felt really comfortable from the moment I sat down.

The sun was just setting when I headed back north on the interstate, incredibly glad that I’d made the drive.

A fistful of pennies

OhmygoshOhmygosh, I cannot believe this still exists:

Photo: Allen County Museum

Honestly, it doesn’t match up to my memory, but then again, I’m pretty sure I was only three (maybe four) years old when mom took me to the local TV station in Lima, Ohio so I could climb into the Birthday Chair and stick my hand in the Penny Jar. I had seen other kids do this on TV – it was a locally-hosted kids’ show – and the fact that I was going to be ON TELEVISION just blew my preschool mind.

Of course, I didn’t actually get to see myself on TV, but I think I remember Dad telling me he had watched, and I tried to imagine what it had looked like on that black and white TV in our living room.

I remember only snapshots of the experience: Only the faintest memory of host Easter Straker, and over the years, the chair had morphed in my memory into something like one of those red and gold Santa thrones. I have a vague recollection of finding it odd that the studio was kind of a plain room with just this one corner decorated for the show. But I do remember reaching into that penny jar, and being disappointed that my fist couldn’t scoop up a jingling mini-pile of coins, Scrooge McDuck fashion.

My post about Giant John brought the memories to the surface again and inspired me to do a quick Google search for something like: Lima + Ohio  + TV + show  + birthday + chair, and I was just amazed when it returned that page from the Allen County Museum.

Better than a fistful of pennies.

Eighteen Saturdays: Canton Marathon 2012, Week Twelve

After the missed steps and self-doubt of Week Eleven, I went into Week Twelve wondering how much damage I had done to my goal of running the full Canton Marathon at an 8:23 pace. Still, I knew focusing too intensely on that would likely only discourage me further, so I really made an effort to focus on the things I like about running on a schedule: the mental distraction and unlocking; the physical motion and the world around me; the effort and the breathing and just being out there.

My weekday runs took place after work, and it was unseasonably warm this week. Tuesday’s five-miler wasn’t bad, since I wasn’t pushing it, but on Wednesday, I was supposed to run another 8-miler at race pace, and even though I waited until 7 p.m., it was still above the 70-degree mark when I set out. The Garmin didn’t work at all, so I just checked the time when I left the house and figured I’d try to recall the pacing and feeling of the unexpectedly great eight-mile pace run (8:09 average!) I’d done in Week Ten.

This week, though, that ease of effort was nowhere to be found, and though I suspect that I managed to keep a decent pace through the first three, maybe four miles, by the second half of the run, the heat had taken its toll and I was just wiped out. I wound up with an 8:48 average, which was not really the way I wanted to peak for my pace runs. (From here on out, the pace runs get shorter.)

While a late night at work kept me from Thursday’s five-miler, I decided to try to make up for it by really going after Saturday morning’s 13.35 mile course.

I couldn’t have asked for a better morning: When I left the house at 7:45 a.m., it was right around 60 degrees and completely overcast, with a bit of a breeze. The cloud cover was low enough to be called hazy, but high enough not to be called fog. Just perfect for a long run.

I had memorized the points every 4.5 miles for my water-and-gel one-minute walking breaks – since, again, no Garmin. No way to know what my pace was at any given moment, of course, but I was feeling good after the first mile. A southbound wind pushed against me for the next couple miles, but when I reached the northernmost point of my run, I realized my energy level and lungs and legs were all in a decent zone, and I kept telling myself, “Run faster now, while you feel like you can,” and I deliberately picked up the pace until I hit my first break.

The middle 4.5 miles were probably even a little bit better, since they took me south and west, and the wind wasn’t a factor, and after my second walk-water-gel break, I put on a little eastbound burst in preparation for the three-miles-mostly-northbound stretch home.

I finished up somewhere around 1:56 for the entire course, which works out to about 8:40 per mile. I cut roughly three minutes from the last time I ran this loop on April 14, and I felt really good at the finish.

Giant John

I’m pretty sure this is the first book I remember reading, or having read to me.

And yes, this is my actual copy, which I’m pretty sure I’ve had my entire life.

It goes back so far in memory that I have no specific recollections to connect to it – what it triggers in my brain are vague but encompassing sensations of times and places and the feeling of a particular era.

It’s the early 1970s, Lima, Ohio. My parents rent a house on North Main street, and we have a black-and-white Zenith TV in our front room, and a convertible VW bug in the driveway. The soundtrack of the time includes “Band on the Run” and “Billy Don’t Be A Hero.”

Though I’m sure both Mom and Dad read this book to me countless times, I still hear it in my grandma Joan’s voice. She has a slight Midwestern accent, and her librarian’s cadence and careful enunciation is mixed with a storytelling grandparent’s sweetness and tone of wonder that ends every sentence with the unasked question, “What do you think is going to happen next?”

I’ve written a lot about growing up in the 1980s, but over the past couple years, I’ve realized how much I absorbed from the early-to-mid 1970s, and how bits and pieces from those times are lodged in the back corners of my mind. I’ve been meaning to mine that territory a bit more, and Giant John has been there the whole time.

Eighteen Saturdays: Canton Marathon 2012, Weeks Ten and Eleven

The past two weeks have been rollercoastery in many ways that had nothing at all to do with my marathon training, but which absorbed so much of my mental and emotional energy that it took a toll on my running.

Week Ten (April 15 – 21) started off with an untimed four-miler on Tuesday – I didn’t bother with the Garmin, since it’s been unpredictable – and it felt really good just to be out there running without even the ability to glance at my time or pace or distance.

The next evening, I was scheduled for an eight-mile pace run, which I wasn’t looking forward to, given my Week Nine struggle with a seven-mile pacer,  But I carbed things up with a pile of noodles at lunch and found myself facing a gorgeous evening for a run when I got home after work. Warm enough for shorts, cool enough to wear long sleeves and not worry about overheating. I let myself get out to a quick start (7:43 first mile), and realized I still felt pretty good, so I figured I’d keep pushing while I had the energy. Two miles in, I was pleasantly surprised to see my overall pace still just under the 8-minute mark, so again, I’m thinking the better I can keep these early miles, the more of a cushion that gives me down the stretch. At three miles, I was at just over 24 minutes, and now I’m starting to kind of wonder what the hell’s going on that I’m feeling so, well, good. After four miles, I’m at an 8:06 overall pace, and I slow for my planned 60-second walk – even so, when I start up again, I’ve only added three seconds to my overall pace. Over the second half of the run, I watch my pace climb steadily, but I’m still feeling remarkably good, and my accumulated pace never goes above 8:13 per mile. In fact, when I hit the seven-and-a-half-mile mark, I decide to power things up and see if I can get my overall pace back into the eight-minutes-and-single-digits range – and I do: Eight miles, 8:09.

I’m floored. And I’m ecstatic. And it just feels so damn good that on Thursday’s four-miler, I don’t care when I discover that my calves had seemingly taken out a strength advance to pull off that eight-mile time the night before, so I’m just out jogging and enjoying the road.

What happens Friday and Saturday is this: Real life. The weather turns cold and rainy. We drive across the state to spend Saturday at Kelsey’s regional gymnastics meet – which is awesome because she places three times, including a third-place podium spot – but it means I miss my scheduled 17-miler. We get home fairly late, go to bed, and I am wholly unmotivated Sunday morning, which is still cold and rainy, and I never get out to run that day either.

This marks the first time I have ever completely missed a scheduled run while training, and paired with some other real-life stresses going on, it fuels a couple days of motivational crisis: Do I even want to do this marathon? Is my heart really still in it? I’m still not sure about either when Week Eleven begins, but Tuesday night, I make myself go out for my scheduled five-miler, and although I think this gets me back in the saddle, there are more scheduling conflicts and demotivational moments on Wednesday and Thursday, so I miss TWO MORE RUNS.

And now, I think, I am really up against it. Saturday, April 28, I am supposed to run 18 miles. Since my fantastic eight-mile pace run, I have missed three of four scheduled sessions and only put in five of my scheduled 35 miles. Time to see how much damage I’ve done, and whether I have time to recover.

The 18-miler and I, we have a history. Back in 2009, my first 18-mile run set a bar for Worst Run Ever that surpassed even the full marathon I ran a few weeks later. Many times since then, I have pushed myself through low points by thinking, “Wow. I feel like crap. But I don’t feel as bad as I did during that 18-miler in ’09, so I’ve got that going for me.”

Friday night the 27th, I carbed up at dinner and went to bed on the early side, knowing if I was going to do this, it would have to be early, since we were facing afternoon rain, and we had things to do in the afternoon. As with the last time, I was also facing a solo run, since my brother would be heading out pre-dawn due to a mid-morning track meet.

So: Up at six a.m. Some cereal, some toast, and a PowerBar. A single cup of coffee. I load up my running belt with gels and water. It’s overcast and in the mid-30s, and the high is only in the mid-40s, but it’s not raining, so it’s actually good running weather: I can get by with a sweatshirt, hat and gloves and not worry about sun or heat.

And out I go, at about 6:55.

And back I go, at about 6:57, because I forgot to bring my inhaler.

And out I go, 19 seconds after 7 a.m.

I’m utterly unconcerned with time – although I do expect to come in at under three hours, which I barely, barely managed to do on my Worst Run Ever. I just need to see if I can do this, and stick to my plan of 60-second walks for water and gel every 4.5 miles. That’s how I’m looking at this – four 4.5 mile runs. Just in case the Garmin decides to conk out, I look at my route map and memorize the spots at 4.5, 9, and 13.5 miles.

I am slow from the start, but I don’t care. I’m not pushing my lungs, and all I want to do is keep my legs moving. The first quarter of the route goes by smoothly, and just past 4.5, I eat a gel and drink some water and walk for just under a minute. Then I focus on the next 4.5.

These miles pass more slowly, since there are longer turn-free stretches of road and more hills, but at about 9.5 miles, I have another gel, wash it down while walking for a minute, and then tell myself that I’m more than halfway done.

I’m in mile 10 when the Garmin shuts down. Oh, well. I know where my next water-and-gel-and-walking marker is.

It’s about this point where my knees start getting that numb sort of ache, which sounds weird, maybe, but there it is. It’s getting harder to lift my legs and stride out the downhills, and harder still to push them uphill.

I turn the Garmin on just to see what time it is, and I make a note of exactly where I am at my two-hour mark. (Turns out I was 12.5 miles in and averaging 9:36.) Although I have run distances of 13.1, 14, and 15 miles this year, my legs are starting to feel like jelly, and I blame those missed runs and missed miles.

Past 13 miles, I eat my last gel and drink while I walk, and it’s soul-crushing how quickly this minute goes by, even though I know I’m three-quarters of the way done. The next mile is much more hilly than I remember, and it really wears on me. In 2009, this stretch actually almost drove me to tears. The next three miles feel like a dozen. By the time I get to the big climb that marks the beginning of mile 18, it is all I can do to just keep jogging. My lungs are fine, but the knees and calves and ankles are just screaming at me to freaking stop, and maybe more painful than that, I’m getting close to the three-hour mark.

I reach my driveway at 2:56:48. Not nearly as much of an improvement over the Worst Run Ever as I was hoping for, but considering the lost miles and my strategic walking minutes, I’m OK with it.

It’s eight-and-a-half hours in the past, now, and my knees feel shredded, but thinking ahead, I realize that even so, I’ve run 26.2 miles once before, and this run convinced me I can do it again.

N00bs

Eighteen Saturdays: Canton Marathon 2012, Week Nine

So the Garmin Forerunner has been acting funny from time to time, blanking out and throwing my time and distance calculations off. Oddly unpredictable about it, too. I thought maybe I was bumping the power switch somehow, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Anyway, last week marked the halfway point of the training schedule, which is hard to believe, since it’s gone by pretty quickly. There are long runs and high-mileage weeks coming up though, and I don’t expect the second half to go as smoothly.

Tuesday and Thursday’s four-milers were routine.

Wednesday’s seven-miler called for me to try to achieve race pace (8:23), which I’d managed to do in Week Seven (8:18). This time around, I worked in my recently-adopted one-minute walk strategy. Just before the four-mile mark, I slowed up and drank a bit of water before kicking back into my run. My overall pace was still slower than I wanted, but I felt like I had more energy through miles five and six than I had two weeks earlier. (My final times would prove this to be true: These laps were both 10 to 15 seconds faster than the Week Seven run.)

Still, going into the last mile – in fact, going into the last half mile – my overall pace was 8:27, and I was all ready to settle for it and tell myself that I was only a few seconds off pace … and then I decided “Screw it – I’m going to try and knock that down.” I ran really damn hard that last half mile and watched my average drop to 8:26 … 8:25 … It hit 8:24 when I turned onto our street for the final almost-quarter mile, and at about the 6.95-mile mark, I got it down to 8:23.

I know that the sprinting finish to lower the average pace is hardly ideal, but hey, I’ll take it.

Saturday I did a half-marathon route of 13.3 miles, running solo and walking for one minute to eat a gel at the 4.5- and 9-mile marks. The Garmin went wonky early in the run and threw off my accumulated distance by about a half-mile, but it still gave me a decent idea of the pace I was managing, which turned out to be right around nine minutes per mile.

By the numbers:

• Tuesday,  April 10 Schedule: 4 miles. Actual: 4 miles. Time: 35:26. Pace: 8:51/mi.
  
• Wednesday, April 11 – Schedule: 7 miles. Actual: 7 miles. Time: 58:43. Pace: 8:23/mi.
  
• Thursday,  April 12 – Schedule: 4 miles. Actual: 4 miles. Time: Unknown. Pace: Unknown.
• Saturday, April 14 – Schedule: 13.1 miles (half marathon). Actual: 13.31 miles. Time: 1:59:00. Pace: 9:00/mi.

Uniform of Youth

I was 15 when I bought my first concert tickets, shelling out my hard-earned summer job money for lawn seats to see Mr. Mister at Blossom Music Center on July 23, 1986. It was the second stop on their Welcome to the Real World tour. (Oh, shut up, and Don’t. You. Judge. I played the hell out of that cassette and don’t regret it for a second.) Opening act: The Bangles.

I bought one ticket for me, one ticket for my then-girlfriend, and one ticket for her dad – who brought a lawn chair and sat himself at the top of the Blossom hill – since we needed someone to drive us to the show.

My parents had taken me to a Beach Boys concert before then, but the Mr. Mister show was the first time I paid my own money to see one of my generation’s current pop bands. I remember how it changed the way I their songs sounded in my head after that, because my mind would overlay the regular recordings with the much louder, slightly different concert version of the music, with the crowd noise and everything mixed in.

This weekend, my daughter – age 15 – bought her first concert ticket. She and a friend will be heading to Columbus next summer for an arena show – and yes, Kels had to buy a ticket for her mom, who has the driver’s license. (Of course, unlike my girlfriend’s dad back in 1986, I know Jenn’s excited about going. And hey, I’m not judging.)

Four blue eggs

They’re back:

Three years ago, I documented the growth of three baby robins in a nest above our front porch light. There were actually two clutches that summer, and we had another family in 2010, but not in 2011.

This year’s nest popped up overnight and includes a bit of green Christmas ribbon.