Archive for October, 2010
From one dude delivering a message (and then dropping dead), to the current moment, when more women than men run the race worldwide and there are clubs in which the members (myself included) claim to be Maniacs, the marathon has grown up.
Take a look at this concise history of the 26.2 race some of us have become committed to (obsessed with, overwhelmed by – you name it):
2,500 Years After Pheidippides
Second Wind’s video trailer is now complete. Have a look:
In desperate need of getting my miles in, but still struggling with pain in my foot from planter fasciitis, I decided to try “deep water running” this week. Imagine this:
You get up earlier than you like, and you quietly sneak out of the house in your swimming suit. Your dog thinks she is going to grandma’s house because you have a bag of clothes sitting by the front door, and so she climbs into her crate in preparation for the car ride and you have to explain to her that she isn’t going anywhere and that mommy will be back in a couple of hours. Then you drive to the pool. You’ve never been there, but you’ve recruited your friend (let’s say her name is Julie) to join you and show you the ropes.
In the locker room, you shove your bag of clothes into a cramped locker, and Julie leads you over to the diving/deep water pool and instructs you to place a flotation device around your waist and pull it tight. Then she grabs a pair of barbells made of foam and shoves them into your hands. “Come on,” she says, “just jump in and get it over with.” She does so. Just jumps in. You, never a big swimming pool fan, step carefully down the ladder and let one portion of your body adjust to the temperature of the water before lowering the next part in. The water isn’t cold, thank goodness, because the only thing worse than worrying about drowning is being cold while worrying about drowning.
Julie, always a little too cheerful for early mornings, prods you on: “Come on, you can do it.” You know you can, you just aren’t sure you want to. But finally you’re in, treading water, looking around at the other women who’ve shown up for the deep water running class. No one is under 70. That’s good, you think, hoping that in their mature states, these women won’t judge you for your ineptitude.
Then the instructor shows up. She’s a twenty-something blond woman with a stopwatch. She turns on some rousing ‘50s music and starts shouting orders. “Run at 70 percent!” she demands.
“What does that mean?” you ask.
“It means run as hard as you can and then cut back to 70 percent of that. You’ll do it for 30 seconds.”
You say, “But I’ve never done this before. How do I know what 70 percent of my capacity is?”
She shrugs. Meanwhile, Julie has closed her eyes tightly and puckered up her face. She’s pumping her arms and legs for all she’s worth, bobbing her head to the left and right as she “runs” at 70 percent. You look around at the other women. They are chatting amongst themselves. You overhear one conversation about how “those fellows on the Fox Network are the only commentators you can trust these days,” and you decide to close your eyes and pucker your face like Julie and really go after it.
Thirty seconds pass.
“Cross country skiing,” the instructor commands. Then she looks at you, having already figured out that you’re going to need extra remediation, and demonstrates the motion she wants. It’s a back and forth motion with arms and legs straightened, going in opposite directions. You try it, but it doesn’t feel natural, so you go back to running at 70 percent.
After 40 minutes of various “running” motions (high knees, knees wide, the “frog,” jumping jacks), the class moves on to crunches, arm-strengthening activities and stretching. Finally, the hour is over. You climb out of the pool exhausted, wrinkled around the toes and fingers, and not at all sure you’ve had a workout. But at least your foot isn’t bothering you as much as usual.
If you can imagine the above, you’ve got the gist of my morning last Thursday. After washing the chlorine out of my hair, I went to see Jason (physical therapist and really great runner). As he massaged, applied ultra sound to and iced the bottom of my foot, he commended me for giving the deep water thing a try, but fortunately never suggested I give up running on solid ground in exchange for “running at 70 percent” in the community pool.
Ah, fall is here again. I took a short run this morning through the crunchy leaves and lamented how, once again, I have missed the late summer trail running series that the Greater Bellingham Running Club (GBRC) sponsors. It seems that every year, just as the trail running series begins, I’m beginning some kind of commitment that happens on the same night. This year I’m taking classes on editing through the extended programs up at Western Washington University.
I’m enjoying my classes, but I’m sad to have missed out on running the trails with a group. Trail running is different than road running or track running in that it engages the brain differently – and the muscles. On the trails, you’ve got to watch where you’re going to avoid tripping over rocks, roots or even just variations in the turf. You’ve got to hop and dodge and bob. And then you have to hike up and pound down hills. It’s fun.
I learned to enjoy running on trails in Arizona. Every year, Bill and I visit his mom in Peoria, and nearly every day during our visits, we drive out to Thunderbird Park and take rambling runs on the trails through the desert. I love leaping over stones in the big gravel patches and avoiding Teddy Bear Cactus plants. Once I even enjoyed NOT stepping on a sleeping rattle snake. And while Arizona is where Bill introduced me to trail running, my favorite trail run ever was one we took this summer along the Baker Lake Trail. Soft and spongy, smelling of moss and evergreen trees, this trail curls along beside the lake with hardly any elevation gain. We ran for 12 miles (six miles in and six miles out), poking our way through the woods at a lazy, happy pace. It’s one of my favorite memories of this year.
What are your favorite trails to run? And what makes them so great? Share your knowledge so we can all have some fun before the weather turns the ground muddy?
Ah, the best laid plans come crashing down, like an airplane falling from the sky. No – like the “other shoe.” Or, better yet, like a waterfall, dumped down to earth sent by the gods of the Great Northwest.
Friday night, Bill and I attended a wedding about 20 minutes outside of Portland. The Bride and Groom had provided their guests with a canvas tent under which we could observe their nuptial recitations, but it was unnecessary. The sun was shining. Speckled light filtered onto the green grass meadow through healthy, well manicured evergreen trees. We enjoyed the celebration until about 9:00pm, at which point, Bill and I made our way out to our car and commented, “Oh, it’s sprinkling. So glad they got a nice night before this began.”
In the morning, when we awoke and saw that the soft sprinkle of the evening before had turned into an earnest downpour, Bill said, “Well, let it empty itself out. It can’t rain like this for two straight days.”
Bill has lived in the Northwest for 30 years but his optimism over the weather has never waned, no matter how many times it has been proven ill-placed. When he made his comment on Saturday morning, I just shook my head and kept my mouth shut. I had a feeling – a bad feeling. The thing is, I didn’t have this bad feeling before we left Bellingham, so I didn’t come prepared for the pouring rain. It’s stupid, I know. I’ve lived here for 43 years, myself, and I should know better.
Because I didn’t come ready for hard rain, we scrambled on Saturday at the expo to find me some raingear for the following day and ended up with a wrinkly, paper-like, disposable rain jacket made by a company called Sheddable Shell. And Bill reluctantly loaned me his baseball cap to keep the rain out of my eyes (reluctantly, because he needed it himself if he planned to stand in the rain and cheer me on).
Sunday morning, I “tweeted” (yes, I tweeted!) that it was still pouring and that it was going to be a long, wet day. Bill got me to downtown Portland by about 6:30 am, and I stood in the rain for a half hour waiting for the start of the race and then another fifteen minutes waiting for my corral to get to the starting line. I (and everyone else, I’m not taking it too personally) was soaked by the time I hit the start button on my Garmin.
The race was well organized and well supported – one of the best I’ve participated in – but it was just a hard day.
My plan was to repeatedly run five minutes and walk for 45 seconds – a Galloway-like routine that was supposed to give me breaks and, therefore, make my pace more steady and a little faster overall. I followed this plan for the first half of the race and tracked with the five-hour pacer that whole distance, but by the time Bill met me at mile 20 (his third station on the course), I’d given it up. Actually, I gave it up at about mile 14, when I felt myself slipping further behind the pacer every time I walked. I SO wanted to finish close to five hours, but it just wasn’t to be.
A little more than halfway through the race, the rain made me feel unhappy, everything began chaffing. I started to develop a blister on my left, very wet foot. And the plantar fasciitis started RAGING in my right foot. This was the first time in a long time that I felt like crying during a race. But I didn’t do it! Not me. I cranked up Harry Potter on my iPod and pushed. I literally ignored how miserable I was.
Now, it’s not my policy to ignore my pain. I’m quite fond of complaining and adjusting my pace to accommodate discomfort, but the pain in both my feet was at the level that if I had given it even the time of day, I would have had to quit. And I couldn’t endure that option.
I finished the race in 5:34. Not my slowest, but almost. As soon as I crossed the finish line, the damn sun came out.
Slowly, painfully, I made my way toward the family reunion area to meet Bill. Shortly after finding him, I stripped naked in the bathroom of a pizza place near the where Bill had parked the car and changed out of my drenched clothing into something dry. Then I limped back to the car and took my shoes off to survey the damage.
Once we were on the highway on our way home, Bill said to me, “Wow, we paid $150 for you to run in the rain for five hours and then limp back to the car.”
“We should shop around,” I said. “I bet we could get all that for less.”
Still, the war wounds and crazy-awful discomfort (though I’m sure I could get all of that for half the price I paid in Portland) are worth every penny. Once again, I see I can do more, endure more, push through more than I would have thought a few years ago. Three cheers for the RAIN that makes us strong!