A Very Belated Race Report

My return to racing was, thankfully, uneventful. The most stressful part of the Brooklyn Half Marathon was getting to the start. Thanks to NYRR disorganization, I walked 45 minutes until arriving at registration. Then they didn't have my number. Then it was back another half mile to the start, barely in time. The day was pretty warm, even at 8am, mostly because the sun was strong. That made me even more cautious, since I don't have a good track record with the heat and I drank a couple glasses of wine the night before.

I'd forgotten my HRM, so I decided to go purely on feel. My guess was around the 7:30 mark would be pretty good. That's quite a bit slower than I've run before, but I'm only running twice a week now and frankly still getting over the Achilles injury. Thanks to the number snafu, I farther back that I should have been. This was a mixed blessing. It kept me from going out too fast, but I gave up time the first couple miles.

Mile 1: 8:07
Mile 2: 7:44
Mile 3: 7:32

The Brooklyn Half began in Prospect Park, which we'd circle twice for about seven miles. The first three miles brought us around to the top of the park. I was weaving through people the first couple miles but soon settled into a nice pace. It didn't feel too stressful.

Mile 4: 7:22
Mile 5: 7:42
Mile 6: 7:30

One of those miles is not like the other. Again, the NYRR came up small. At mile 5, I was on my second loop. I came around to the second water station to find no water. Now I'm not in the back of the pack or anything. The volunteers were doing what they could, but the race had 12,000 runners. I ended up grabbing a cup and scooping out my own water.

Mile 7: 7:33
Mile 8: 7:15
Mile 9: 7:24

These are the miles of a half I consider the middle miles. They're typically where I try to be strongest. This was doubly so because the course exited the hills of Prospect Park for a straight shot down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island. I felt pretty good and tempted to pick up the pace. But I held back because I could tell I wasn't as well-trained as I'd like. It wasn't a fitness thing, just a running thing. My body wasn't used to exerting that much running effort. Cardio-wise, I was fine.

Mile 10: 7:28
Mile 11: 7:31
Mile 12: 7:25
Mile 13.1: 8:14

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with how I finished the race. I started feeling tired at the end but never had any real problems. My effort was moderate enough to have a brief conversation with another runner on the boardwalk as we looked for the finish line.

Final result: 1:38:53, 7:32 pace. Leaving out the first two miles and the cup fiasco, my miles were all at 7:33 or below. That strikes me as about right. One thing I noticed that pleased me is I was a little stronger on the hills in Prospect Park thanks to a little extra upper body strength from swimming. Still, I doubt I can run fast again while training equally, if not more, in cycling and swimming. I'm just happy I can still run a decent half marathon.

Back in the Arena

I wrote on my other blog about the need for people to get "in the arena," to take chances and risk failure. I've decided it's time I do that with running, even though I've been concentrating on other sports lately with the triathlon training. It's time to race again. I'm doing the Brooklyn Half Marathon on Saturday. I have no idea how it will go. I've been running just twice a week for months. That's not all that much, clearly, although my fitness level is alright thanks to all the biking and swimming I've done. We'll see how that nets out along the route from Prospect Park to Coney Island. The last time I ran a race, I did a 1:24 in the Seaside Half Marathon. That's definitely not happening on Saturday. I'll run by feel, conservatively, hoping instead for a 1:40 or so. It'll be nice to feel the pre-race nerves again and the relief of finishing.

Bicycle Dreams

Now that I'm cycling I can appreciate more how hard it is. Going 40 miles is more than enough for me. What about 3,000 miles in 10 days? There's a new film out, Bicycle Dreams, following cyclists trying to do just that during the Race Across America. From the trailer, it looks like there are plenty of encounters with the Pigdog along the way. The movie site has some great descriptions of the participants, who it must be said all seem a little nuts.

Why to run

I loved, loved, loved this op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about running. It perfectly captured what runners know and non-runners often don't get. I'm particularly partial to the part that details the odd pride runners take in the semi-masochistic side of the activity. My own armchair analysis of why this excites us is because it confirms we're truly alive and can face anything.

At the Olympic trials in Charlotte, N.C., in 1996, marathoner Bob Kempainen vomited a bright green stream of Gatorade on national television, then calmly accelerated (running a 4:44 mile) and sprinted to victory. World record-holder Grete Waitz did her business on the side of the road, then pulled up her shorts and went on to win the 1984 New York City Marathon. Every runner has a tale about a port-a-potty just missed, a coffee that wouldn't stay down, a blister that burst and filled a sock with blood. We tell the stories with pride, metaphors for our own indomitability.

Confession: I searched Google to find a clip of Kempainen. It made it into a Nike commercial.

Trail Running

I love living in a big city. There's so much energy, so much to do, so many kinds of people. I even love the running here, although it's a specific type of urban running. My (running) dream is to run trails. Why? Watch.

UltraRunning from Matt Hart on Vimeo.

Working Out the Kinks

Recovering from injuries is essential for running. The fact is it is a traumatic activity. Injuries are inevitable, it seems more so as I get older. I'm now determined to get healthier, no matter what I need to do. That led me to Chinatown on Friday for my second ever foot massage. Those guys really get into on the feet and below the knee. And guess what? It helped. The foot massage and a few outings with The Stick have improved things. Next up: a sports massage on Thursday. I found the woman through the NYRR Web site. In a series of email messages, she assured me massage and active-isolated stretching can help with my lower leg muscle tightness. I'm eager to see what she does Thursday -- and how much it hurts.

The upside of this recent injury is my swimming has improved. I'm at the point where 2,500 yards isn't so bad. More important, I feel like I'm swimming pretty efficiently. I'd like to get back on the bike and running in the park. That will happen. For now, I'm taking consolation knowing I'm improving in at least on discipline and becoming stronger.

Injuries

I realized over the weekend that it's been a year since I ran a marathon. This will turn out to be my longest time between marathons since I started running them in 2000. In that time, I've run thousands of miles and been asked, countless times, "How do you not get hurt?" Maybe it was just luck. Maybe that's run out. Ever since the summer, when I made my semi-psychotic push to run under three hours, I haven't been right. It started with the Achilles, which is something that I haven't healed altogether. Then some plantar fasciitis appeared on my right foot, followed finally by a strained calf or tendinitis on the same side. As an Italian friend once said to me at a terrible party, "This is very much the suck."

It's left me wondering how to get better. I've always been a firm believer that all injuries can be diagnosed back to a root cause that can be corrected. Many running injuries arise from the nature of the sport: it's a repetitive, high-impact activity. But lately, I've been training for a triathlon, only running twice a week and doing two other workouts in both swimming and biking. That's what makes this latest injury so frustrating. What all my latest injuries have in common is muscle tightness in my lower legs. This is, I believe, the curse of genes. I'm incredibly inflexible, always have been. For a few years now, I've relied on active-isolated stretching to make me slightly more flexible. That's been alright, although I can sometimes be indifferent to it. That's probably catching up with me now. The good thing is my injuries seem treatable. I don't have knee problems that can spell doom. For the next few days at least, I'm sticking to swimming, hoping to stay in some semblance of shape and heal.

swam 2,000 yards in 50 minutes

Getting Passed

There's nothing more humbling than getting passed. All of us have to deal with it, some more than others. As I got faster at running, it happened less frequently. Ninety-five percent of the time I do the passing. This has been nice for my ego. But it's a mirage, of course. There's always someone much faster than me in the park, only he didn't start at the right place to pass me. It's dumb luck.

Races are useful reminders of this. My worst running experience was at the Boston Marathon in 2003. That seems strange to say considering I had one marathon where I collapsed 100 yards from the finish and was hospitalized. The reason Boston sucked was I went in cocky. I'd just shaved 25 minutes off my marathon time to run a 3:02 in Chicago. Heading to Boston, I figured I'd run a 2:55. That didn't happen. I went out way too fast on a warm day and realized at mile 10 that the next 16 miles would suck. The thing that made it so bad was getting passed. Not a few people, but dozens, maybe hundreds of people went by me while I proceeded to run the second have of the race a half hour slower than the first. There wasn't much I could do about it. Still, I never felt worse after a race. I think I felt sorry for myself because of the passing.

I've been thinking more about getting passed now that I'm swimming and biking. On Friday night, I went to the YMCA to do laps. I swam for years as a kid. I honestly think the only thing that got me through practices at Whitemarsh was the awful feeling of the person behind me touching my toes. In the grown-up world, few people are that aggressive, although it does happen in NYC. At this point, I'm a mediocre swimmer. On a typical day, there are more people slower than me than faster. That leaves quite a few people faster than me. Swimming is so technical that the faster swimmers can surprise me. On a completely surface level, I feel like I'm more fit. But they have much, much more skill and experience, so I'm passed by men and women, the skinny and lithe and the not so much. It reminds me how I must improve my technique, not so much to keep from getting passed but to spend less energy. The hardest part of going from distance running to swimming is the urge to gut it out. That will kill a triathlon because you'll leave it all in the water and gain very little.

The same is true on the bike. I'm just now riding outside, keeping myself to loops in Central Park. My goal right now is just getting comfortable riding and putting in time in the saddle. Like the pool, I'm a middle of the pack cyclist. I'm not riding a Cervelo or anything, and I'm not used to going fast. It frankly scares me to go too fast down hills. I pass many more people than pass me, but still cyclists of all shapes, sizes and ages motor by me. My attitude is c'est la vie, excpet for one circumstance: on a big hill. Here, I've tried to replicate my running attitude, which is attack the hill. I love passing people on hills. It might be a toughness thing. This tact in cycling has met with mixed success. I get too excited early on in the hill, I think, rather than finding a gear that will let me consistently power up the incline. A few times today, I found myself in the humbling position of looking for a lower gear when there wasn't one on the Great Hill in Central Park. Once a guy in jeans on a mountain bike went by me. Ouch.

I accept these things in stride to a degree. Modest success in running doesn't automatically translation to new activities. I'm improving, which is really the only important thing. Getting passed is a useful reminder of how much more work needs to be done. It still bugs me, though.

Toughness

"I don't run to see who's faster, I run to see who's tougher." -- Steve Prefontaine

Like many runners, I went through a period where I was mildly obsessed with Steve Prefontaine. He was fierce, brave and, above all, tough. Looking at videos of his races, you see he just had more guts and at some point was prepared to suffer more. Most of us aren't out there doing that. We're just trying to keep in shape after sitting in an Aeron all day. Yet when I run, or nowadays swim and bike, I always think endurance stuff come back to toughness. It's not quite the same as persistence. Persistence is keeping at it, through thick and thin. But it's toughness that makes you feel OK with going beyond what's comfortable. At some point of a race, more is asked. My advice to marathoners like Lam before a race is always the same: Be tough.

Not Boring

The non-runner people often say running is boring. I don't understand this. Part of me thinks they're not interesting people because being alone with your thoughts for a long period of time is pretty fascinating. But it's also a great way to get out and about and see cool stuff. This is particularly true in urban settings. I went on a long run today that took me from 100th Street on the Upper West Side down to Battery Park. There were so many people out and so many things to see and hear. (Another reason not to wear an iPod.) The best was down in Battery Park, where I ran by a couple out for walk. This is the only snippet I picked up from their conversation.

Guy to well-endowed girlfriend: "They're big if they jiggle. They jiggle."

15 miles, 2:01:09

Persistence

These are tough times. People are losing their jobs and dealing with serious personal financial problems. It's not fun. It's also not going away overnight. I don't mean that in a pessimistic way. An important lesson running teaches is realism. You can't wish away the hard stuff. The way to deal with the inevitable pain of training hard and running long distances is to accept it as real, yet at the same time recognize it won't kill you and can be overcome. It is, in short, about persistence. This is a theme Obama keeps returning too, smartly I think. He had this to say today:

I'm under no illusions that a better day will come about quickly or easily. It's going to be hard. But as I said the other night at my press conference, I'm a big believer in the idea of persistence -- the idea that when the American people put their mind to something and keep at it, without giving up, without turning back, no obstacle can stand in our way, and no dream is beyond our reach.

That's it. Lots of people want to know the secret to running well, or accomplishing a certain goal, whether it's a 10k race, a marathon or even a triathlon. I think it's quite simple: persistence. Keep at it, day in and day out, be consistent and realistic but always hopeful.

Running + Simplicity

I got home from work tonight a little before 8pm. It was cold for late March, I'd worked a pretty long day and I'd already worked out the past six days. Still, I went out for a run. Thanks to my injury and the tri training, I haven't run much. In some ways it's been a nice break. Learning new activities is interesting, as is seeing if my fitness translates. My running has suffered. That's OK. I'm still not healed. I expected little from tonight's run. It started bad. The wind was really strong and stung my legs and face. I felt a little tired. But then, when I hit the dirt trails in Riverside for the first time in months, I fell back into it. For whatever reason, I got one of those runs that feels wonderful, clicking off the miles while the mind wanders. It had been a long time since I'd lost myself in a run, but it reminded me what's great about running.

I miss that core simplicity to running. I got home, put on shorts, a shirt and shoes, got my keys and watch and went. I like that. Yes, it's possible to get caught up in the different training regimens, VO2 max levels, lactate threshhold intervals and the rest of it, but at it's core, running is simple. You get out of it, whether that's a PR, losing weight or decreasing stress, what you put in. I firmly believe that.

With the triathlon, I'm facing something a little different. Just getting a bike is a chore. I've learned about carbon forks, shimano, tiagra, brick workouts, etc. The training book I bought looks a lot like a physics textbook. Scheduling workouts to an ironclad schedule seems pretty necessary. I need to plan ahead workouts with what I pack for work. That part of it can be a drag. The tri is many things, simple is not one of them.

Then there's the tri type and the running type. When I see the tri guys work out in Central Park, I see Type A people. Cyclists during a hard workout just look aggressive. They travel in packs and can even yell at people. You don't get that with distance running. It attracts the introspective types that relish the crucible of the lonely long run. I'm looking forward to the rest of training, but I'm pretty certain I don't want to trade being a runner for being a triathlete.