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.

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.

N00bs

Heck, Yeah!

My extended family has played “Oh, Hell” at big holiday gatherings since I was little. A boxed version of the game – which came with plastic holders that I used for card-house construction – was kept in a cabinet in my grandma’s living room.

Sometime over the past year, my brother Adam proposed the creation of an annual holiday Oh Heck (which is what my grandma – who has always downplayed her skill at the game while regularly racking up victories – has called it for years) tournament and trophy.

We held the inaugural competition this Thanksgiving at my mom’s house. Format: A two-round contest, the first open to all entrants, the second consisting of the championship round between the five top scorers of the first round. Each year’s champion will receive an automatic bye into the next year’s championship round.

Trophies: To the winner, a small glass bowl with “Booth” engraved on it, and about which nobody in the family knows anything. To the competitor who, in either round, completes the most consecutive successful bids, a weird little brown glass vase with an orange string around it that Adam bought at the flea market for just this very purpose.

Our family is always good-naturedly competitive about Oh Heck, and my utterly terrible track record is legendary.

Which is why nobody was more surprised than I was yesterday when the dust settled after the Thanksgiving Day nine-person competition:

Mind you: Nobody in the family can recall me winning a game of Oh, Heck.

EVER.

Winning the first playoff round was by itself a shock.

Never winning another game is fine by me: My Sharpie-inscribed name occupies the first spot on the  Grandma Joan Booth Schoenberger Oh Heck Trophy Cup of Awesomeness (I just named it that. Just now. Try and change it.). This win’s for her, and as such, the trophy will spend the next year or so in the esteemed company of my favorite Shazam glass.

Doctor Who Sixth Series: GeekDad Review and Giveaway

Over at GeekDad I reviewed the DVD set of the amazing Sixth Series of Doctor Who, from “The Impossible Astronaut” to “The Wedding of River Song” and a ton of extras to boot.

And if that alone isn’t enough to encourage you to click over and read it, how about this: GeekDad has three sets of the series to give away to lucky readers – so seriously, if you’re a Doctor Who fan, or you know someone who’s a Doctor Who fan, and you want a chance to maybe get a very cool present for someone (or yourself!), click through and register for the drawing: You have until 11:59 p.m. EST, Monday Nov. 28, but you’re online now, so why wait?

12 Items Or Less

I spent the afternoon hanging out with my daughter – running errands, hitting a couple bookstores, and then picking up a few groceries at Giant Eagle.

We didn’t buy many groceries, so we headed to a self-checkout lane, and since Kels prefers to scan the items, I stepped toward the bagging end of the lane, only to see that a helpful employee had already stepped up and begun bagging our stuff for us. “Thanks,” I said with a nod, and then I turned back to hand groceries to my daughter for scanning.

So we finish up, pay for our purchase, and then step down to the end of the lane to grab the bags. Having finished his work, the bagger has stepped away.

“Hey,” I say to Kels,”Where’s our gallon of water?” There’s a gallon of milk in front of me, and two plastic bags of groceries.

I look to my left, back at the grocery cart we’d been using: empty.

I look back at the grocery conveyor belt: empty.

I check the receipt: the water’s there, so it was obviously rung up. And yet there’s nothing here in front of me but the milk and these two bags, which, it dawns on me, look like precious few groceries considering the total on the bill, and as the confusion starts to really take hold -

- I turn around and look into a cart behind me - which, of course, holds a gallon of water and four bags of groceries, right where the bagger had set them as they were filled. The whole thing lasted maybe 20 or 30 seconds.

Kels and I shake our heads and grin and laugh at ourselves (okay, mostly at me) and this is when I notice the bagger, standing not six feet away, pleasantly overlooking the row of checkout lanes to see where he might be needed next. He catches my eye, and I say, with genuine good humor, “You were enjoying that, weren’t you?”

He shrugs and smiles, and nods briefly. “A little bit.”

“Well-played, sir.”

The Shadow of the Past, part 2: The Lord of the Rings Paperback Flashbacks

I’m happy to finally complete a trilogy of posts born a month ago out of an afternoon spent hanging out at a local comic show with Adam, at which I bought a Starlog magazine featuring a cover piece on The Star Wars Holiday Special, and this Ralph Bakshi interview about his Lord of the Rings movie.

I also couldn’t resist this paperback boxed set of The Lord of the Rings:

Adam remembered these editions with their colorful triptych of covers as the ones his family had owned when he was growing up -

Click the photo to see a bigger version.

- but I’d never seen them before and loved them instantly, both in color (although I can’t stand the dead-center placement of the Houghton Mifflin logo on The Fellowship of the Ring) and as the black-and-white wraparound art to the slipcase.

I still have the boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which my Uncle Rob gave me when I was in first grade:

There are are three different kinds of tape holding these together. Two of the covers (which, as I had completely forgotten until working on this post,  featured the paintings of J.R.R. Tolkien himself) are missing, replaced by sturdy black posterboard. The pages (and while a very few of the introductory pages and maps are missing, all the actual story pages are still here) are worn soft like a child’s blanket at the corners and edges.

The slipcase to these books was covered in shiny gold paper and decorated on the sides and top with symbols associated with LOTR figures and civilizations:

Click the photo to see the entire set of scans and pictures.

And I loved these books.

Not just the stories within, but these actual objects: I loved having this relatively massive set of books that looked so different from anything else on my bookshelves when I first got it. I loved feeling like reading these books was, by nature of the number of pages and the small type and the lack of pictures, something of an epic quest in itself.

(Digression: When I was a fourth-grader, as part of a reading awareness week, our entire class at Lake Elementary School participated in a vote to rename our school for one week in honor of a favorite author. No one seconded my nomination of Tolkien, and it was really no surprise when we wound up as students of Judy Blume Elementary after the balloting.)

When I got the books out to scan them for this entry, I found two things I had forgotten. First, a bookmark which I kept in this set of paperbacks, and second, this artwork inside the slipcase:

Though I got through The Hobbit pretty easily, it was a couple years before I really buckled down and got through The Lord of the Rings, and I vividly remember finally reading that last page, sitting in the den of our house – the room which had been my youngest brother’s room as an infant, and which had once been decorated with blue shag carpet and wallpapered with cartoon caricatures of old fighter planes and pilots.

Finishing The Return of the King marked the first time I remember completing a book into which I had been so thoroughly drawn that I felt off-kilter for awhile, like I had to re-adjust to the world around me, akin to the feeling you get returning home after a long trip. I still get that feeling from time to time, and when I do, it also takes me back to that afternoon in the den of the house where I grew up.

Goodbye, Lucky.

This has always been one of my favorite pictures of our cat Lucky, who passed away last night:

Even today, less than 24 hours after she left us, it’s impossible for me to look at this photo and not smile and imagine – as I always do – hearing her say in some sort of voice that’s half Brando and half LOLcat, “Some day – and that day may never come – I’ll call upon you to do a service for me…”

Just a few things about Lucky:

She was the first pet Jenn and I had as a couple. We got her in 1995, when she was about a year old, adopting her from one of Jenn’s co-workers who was moving to a pet-free home. Her name comes from having survived being hit by a car, as a result of which her right front leg sometimes seemed slightly out-of-whack when she stood a certain way.

For that first year, she woke us almost daily with a series of repeated meows, beginning around 5:30 a.m. She stayed a talkative kitty right up until the day she died. (We think she suffered a stroke yesterday, in the late morning or early afternoon – and, in fact, her sudden lack of “speech” was the strongest sign she gave us that she was ready to let go after several weeks of failing health.)

She was the Feline Jedi Master of the Ultimate Slow Stalk, creeping up on dinner plates and unattended water glasses with the almost undetectable slowness and subtlety of a tree’s shadow on the ground as the sun marks an afternoon. She could make traversing the length of the couch and sneaking between you and your book an act to rival the most patient ninja.

In her younger years, whether you were sleeping or faking sleep (which we often did just to encourage this ridiculously cute behavior), Lucky would sneak ever so slowly up to your face and stare at you, then tentatively lift a paw, w-a-i-i-i-i-t, and eventually reach forward to gently pat your nose or eyelid to encourage some petting.

She balanced a sense of grace and agility with her determination up to the last few weeks of her life, making the leap from the kitchen table to the countertop almost soundlessly. Try to block the way with appliances or water jugs, and she’d manage to light on the remaining three inches of open space.

Amazing post-meal kitchen sink plate-cleaner, especially if Italian food, chicken, or scrambled eggs had been on the menu.

Enjoyed working the team con: For most of her life, Lucky’s partner in crime was Charles Wallace. The last year and a half, she found a more than willing accomplice in Pepper, with whom she shared her tricks to getting into the double-spoon-barred cupboard holding the riches of the kitchen garbage.

Lucky was with us for 16 years – that’s two apartments, three houses, a Florida-to-Ohio move, somewhere near a dozen jobs, and our daughter’s journey from newborn to teenager.

And if you met her, she liked you. More than once, a first-time visitor to our house suddenly found this little gray lady staring up at them, and then, without ceremony, in their lap.

I’m going to go have lunch now, and afterward, I know I’m going to miss the gentle clinking from the kitchen that means Lucky has hopped up to the sink just to make sure my plate is properly cleaned.

Tatooine and the western terminus

Knowing I was facing a relatively short drive of between six and seven hours yesterday, I had a nice breakfast with my kind friends and hosts near Phoenix and didn’t start logging highway time until just after 9 a.m.

Just before reaching Yuma via Interstate 8, I passed a cluster of what looked like distant fires – I don’t know if they were brushfires or controlled burns or something else entirely, but for a minute or so, the dark smoke at the core of one of them was caught in a swirl that took on that creepy life-of-its-own serpentine movement like the Wizard of Oz tornado.

Naturally, as soon as I’d roughed out my journey’s map and saw that it would take me through Yuma, I decided that if it was at all possible, I’d visit the area where the Sarlacc pit scenes were filmed for Return of the Jedi. I was thrilled to find that the place – a recreational area for off-road enthusiasts in particular – had its own dedicated exit right off the highway just inside the California border, so it became a must-see stop.

Before I got there, I stopped in Yuma to make a sandwich. And knowing that the Star Wars saga has sometimes drawn names and words from real-world inspirations, I couldn’t help but have my lunch here:

(Yes, I know that “fortuna” is a word that exists in several languages and had a long history well before it became Jabba the Hutt’s majordomo’s surname. Still.)

After about 15 more minutes of freeway driving, I got off at the Grays Well Road exit and parked myself on Tatooine.

There are, of course, fences and power lines and restrooms dotting the base of the dunes, and the highway’s right there, and parking lots and maintenance equipment, but even with all those real-world intrusions, it’s ridiculously easy to look at this stretch of sand and sky and feel like you’re on that made-up planet and imagine a Krayt dragon skeleton just over the horizon, or a jawa sandcrawler cresting the next dune.

Wait? Did I really bring an old Star Wars toy all the way across the country for a five-minute stop? Why yes. YES. I. DID. And I love the way this picture turned out, first try. (And yes, I am well aware that the dewback is a Star Wars toy and didn’t make a Jedi desert appearance. I chose it anyway.)

The trip finished up with a surprisingly fun drive 4000-plus feet up into the mountains -

and then down into the greater San Diego area, where i pulled into my friends’ driveway midafternoon, some 2,500 miles after leaving my own.

Five Things I Did Today

Today I -

did some thinking. And I

took a huge pile of recyclables to the township bins. Then I

mowed the lawn. After which I enjoyed a refreshing beverage and a

rest with Lucky, who was having little paw-twitch dreams. Then I

straightened up my finally-finished office.

It’s been a good day.