Somehow I got my ass out of bed at 6:30 AM without having made prior plans with a horde of other runners as motivation. Then I got passed by a chick on my shakeout jog.
Getting up early led to me being exceedingly tired at work all day. But then I realized - it doesn't matter how tired I am at work because it actually requires zero cognitive functioning. If Art asks me a question, I can just say, "I dunno," and after I do that five or six times he stops asking. Then I can just type emails and read mindlessly in zombie mode. Not that this is an especially good thing, but it's possible, anyway.
I forgot my watch in the evening, and based my time off the clock on the wall of the gym (which was closed at 6pm - since when is December 30 a holiday?). I didn't even check how long I'd been going until a bit past 70 minutes, so I wound up getting in a good solid evening run, feeling great.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008 (20 am, 70 pm)
Weekly Summary: 12/22/08 - 12/28/08 (355 minutes, no workouts)
I missed two days that I planned on running, which was disappointing. But other than that things went well. I got in four runs longer than 70 minutes, with a 100 minute long run. I'll be returning to California tomorrow morning, where hopefully I can nail my schedule down more effectively.
The plan for next week is to increase minutage by doing more total runs, and to get in a long tempo.
Sunday, December 28, 2008 (75 minutes)
Cruised my neighborhood for the last time this winter. I ran at night, as I have a several other times this week. I prefer to run during the day, but I'm terrible at adjusting my schedule so that I'm sleeping at the right times. I stayed up all through the night more times that I stayed up all through the day this break.
Saturday, December 27, 2008 (100 minutes)
Surprisingly, I didn't break or rip anything by running this long on the roads. I was feeling sufficiently tired near the end to think it was a good solid long run. I'll be glad to get back on the grass in a couple of days.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008 (30 minutes)
My parents gave me a pair of Nike Free's for my birthday (Dec. 3, and therefore close enough that it's not worth shipping something across the US when I'll be home soon anyway), which I wore running for the first time today. About three miles out, some sort of tendon-like thing on the bottom of my left foot had a few twangs of pain, so I decided not to wear the Free's for real runs for a while, and came back. I hadn't run over 70 minutes for three consecutive days in a while, so an off day isn't go to hurt anything right now.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 (75 minutes)
Stalked around the streets near my house. I realized now wouldn't be a good time to start running twice a day, since the ground is frozen, and short of some fairly extreme measures my viable option right now is to run all my milage on the roads. I felt fine, though.
Monday, December 22, 2008 (75 minutes)
Kangway may have been slightly startled when I arrested him in his doorway, grasped his shoulders, and screamed, "I can't stop farting!" His advice was to open a window, but I couldn't make the connection with how this would prevent my unwanted gas.
I left for the Gold Line station around 1:10am this morning, not having slept. There should have been two more trains that night, according to the schedule I found online. I spent three quarters an hour standing alone under the halogen lights, feeling the heat radiating from my newly-shaven head and trying to focus on the book hovering in front of my face. I turned the pages less-and-less nimbly as my unprotected fingers solidified. Finally I adopted a nervous pacing, all the time seeing no one but the fantom, unmoving person at the far end of the platform, which turned out, upon inspection, to be a coincidental juxtaposition of a pole and a head-high flesh-colored call box. That is, no one except the guy who started peeing in the bushes by CVS ten meters away when I had paced a bit too far and disappeared temporarily from his field of view. All this time I farted.
The Metro abandoned, I called a cab, and continued my pacing on the sidewalk outside our complex, trying to tease out the precise relationship between my flatulence rate and the vigor of my stride in the fifteen minutes past the set rendezvous time it took the cab to arrive.
Sitting in the airport before the security checkpoint opened, significantly poorer from the cab ride and increasingly exhausted from staying up all night, I resolved not to eat anything for the entire day of traveling, since if there's only a set amount of material in there for my intestines to work with, eventually they'll just have to give up when there's nothing left to gasify.
The plane itself was the worst, since, with farting, you're basically fine as long as you can keep moving (as Ian, I think it was, once pointed out to me). Ironic that I could move around the least while going the fastest.
By the time I arrived home in Baltimore, not having eaten in 15 hours, the farting attack that had lasted at least a day was puffing out its last gasps. Running on fumes.
Fine, but it wasn't running time. It was dinner time - the first time in a year the whole family had assembled. And in my honor, the entree was sauerbraten - my boyhood favorite. After not eating for fifteen hours, my mom is laying before my a pile of the thick, juicy, week-long marinated beef, with a taste and smell (I could smell!) so powerful it threatened to tip from flavor to pure pungency. The side dish, traditional for us, was dumplings fried in butter, along with sourdough bread, salad, peas, and wine. Dessert of cheesecake, ice cream, cookies. This was where I found myself an hour before I intended to run.
"I remember the way you used to be able to eat when you were a teenager," said my mom, when I somehow refused seconds on the huge gobs of beef and dumplings.
But I made it through. The food actually seemed to quell the gastric uprising inside me, and I went out for a solid 75 minutes through that biting, still layer of air between the crunching ground and the intermittent, flickering streetlights. It was pretty nice. Out here you can see the stars.
Sunday, December 21, 2008 (90 minutes)
Long on the south field. I started running from the house, and finished my 90 on the south field so I could go lift afterwards. This left me stuck at the gym, so I had to run an extra mile and a half to get home, which adds up to a pretty good amount of foot travel today. This will be my last barefoot running for a week or so, since the ground in Baltimore is likely frozen, or near it.
My plan for next week is to run doubles, without worrying about speed. I'll throw in some striders when so inclined, but mostly I want to get my body and mind back into believing that they're going to be taking this thing seriously again.
Saturday, November 22, 2008 (brown mountain)
Ian, Dennis, Morgan and I hit up Brown Mountain while KB and Megumi did ...something. I felt decent, and kept a steady effort and cadence up to the saddle. From there, the rest of the run does not really take much leg effort, but is simply a matter of not stopping for a while. Then you're done. For a mountain run, my knees and various connective tissues felt surprisingly good.
I was glad to be running shod today, so as not to aggravate whatever the deal was with my foot yesterday. Lifted briefly in the afternoon.
As of tonight, in the past week I've introduced both Kamalah and J.R. to Rosarito's as soon as they mentioned Puebla. Unfortunately, I think the magnificent value of a three-pound burrito simply wasn't as obvious to them as it was to me. Unless Rosarito's is closed, though, I can no longer in good conscious eat there while 50% more food of the same type is available for 20% less cost right around the corner.
Friday, November 21, 2008 (40 minutes)
I had a pain in the bottom of my right foot that wasn't very bad. I decided to keep it that way.
Wed/Thu (DNR)
I could have managed a run, had I been truly motivated. But I was traveling, and it was hard, so I didn't.
Tuesday, November 18, 2007 (50 minutes)
I got up at 6:10 AM and ran with Scott and Goose through the arroyo. I thought I was doing an incredible job of getting up early and going at it, but Ian and a few of the Oxy guys were already down there running tempo at the same time.
Monday, November 17, 2008 (80 minutes)
Nice semi-long run on the North Field. Felt calm and smooth the whole time, and threw in five striders at the end.
Weekly Summary: 11/10/08 - 11/16/08 (about 330 minutes, cruise intervals)
I was getting into the swing of training again this week. The smoke on Sunday was horrendous by the afternoon, so canceling the marathon was probably the right choice.
The cruise intervals with Ian were a good workout. Next week I want to run up the total running a bit and hit at least one more good workout, and a longer run of 80 minutes in there.
Saturday, November 17, 2008 (50 minutes)
I had a bit of pain in my right hip and left knee, so I stopped short of 70 minutes today, although I was feeling good.
Friday, November 14, 2008 (70 minutes)
It was hot enough to be not only uncomfortable, but also mildly disturbing, just that the temperature was so high in November somewhere above the Tropic of WhicheverOneIsToTheNorth. I was, of course, rewarded with a nice little bath of foaming armpit sweat, and was pretty tired despite an easy pace. I was glad I don't have a big race tomorrow.
Thursday, November 13, 2008 (cruise intervals)
6x2 laps at Lacy, with Ian. Averaged about 5:35 per segment, with a minute rest. I was totally happy and satisfied with this. I didn't feel like I was going very fast, but I felt like I was running pretty controlled. It was faster for longer than I've done recently, and certainly indicated that I'm heading in the right direction.
The team was also down there at the same time, giving me an increasingly-rare opportunity to hang out with them for a bit. Afterwards I tutored for a while, then returned to the gym for some lifting and core.
Nov 11 - 12
Tues: 60 minutes in the morning, feeling a bit tired, but I hadn't eaten breakfast
Wed: 45 minutes again in the morning. got started late and had to go to work before i would have liked
Monday, November 10, 2008 (70 minutes)
Some good things happened today. Yesterday evening some muscles along the middle of my back suddenly seized up painfully while I was running, stopping me about half an hour into the run. This morning, those muscles were still stiff and sore enough that I skipped the morning run I had planned with Gustavo and Ian. That's not the good part. The good part is that as I went about my daily activities, they gradually loosened up until I ran 70 minutes without incident this evening.
The next good thing is that I ran 70 minutes, which I hadn't done in several weeks. Also, I felt great doing it.
It was cool, not cold. The ground was damp enough to be soft, but not wet enough to suck the heat from my feet. On one particular north field lap, which I distinctly remember against the backdrop of many others I ran this evening, I leaned gently through the corner where the light from the north entrance to the parking structure briefly illuminates a sandy patch of ground. As the light slipped behind me, the textures under my feet morphed to the soft dirt of the stretch. I ran up close against the fence, watching the solitary patches light from the fields and courts that punctuated the darkness with artificial regularity. The contrast to the dark field isolated me, and welcomed me. The cool hung still and quiet, unprotesting against my thoughtless progress. I was running again.
10/27 or so to now
I've been back running daily now, although I fell off updating. I did some tempo with Gustavo and Ian last Saturday. Goose and I clock 29:09 for the course. It's not fast, but the fact that I got through it was at least an encouraging improvement over two weeks ago. My easy/distance runs have been feeling pretty good as well, and I sometimes find that I'm unconsciously dropping the pace down quite a bit near the end.
The only problem I'm facing right now is a bit of achilles trouble, which is probably because during my training hiatus I also took an eccentric-calf-lowering hiatus.
I got in 50 minutes on Sunday, 60 yesterday, and 65 today. All felt fine. Towards the end of my run Kangway even came out to join me for a couple of miles!
Weekly Summary: 10/20/08 - 10/26/08
I didn't run much. Actually, I think I ran just two or three times. I'm hoping that this will be enough rest that when I start back into training, my legs will feel refreshed. I'll know soon enough.
Weekly Summary: 10/13/08 - 10/19/08
I felt consistently awful all week. I'm not sure why. My diet/sleep haven't been optimal, but also not significantly worse than normal. I'm biking to work each day, but nothing extreme. I just feel lousy and dead in my legs on a consistent basis, without the other normal indications of overtraining, and without actually doing any overtraining. So I'm just going to try to keep it easy, get my rest, eat healthily, and wait it out a couple more weeks before going over-analyzing anything.
Saturday, October 11, 2008 (5xarroyo tempo)
It smelled like Fall today. Finally cool, and a bit breezy. Cold enough to make bed really comfortable. Not yet cold enough to see your breath.
I met the team in the arroyo for a tempo. I hopped in the first lap 400m in, so didn't time it. I ran three laps with Dennis partway and Travis the rest of the way, then hit two more laps on my own.
Of the last four laps which I timed, I ran
9:17, 8:55, 9:30, 8:45
I slowed down to the 9:30 because I wanted the last lap to be fast. My two other workouts this week ended with me just trying to hang on, and so I wanted the boost of having at least one workout where I finish fast but in control - the way you should feel when you're fit. It worked out fine, since I averaged about 9:07 over those four laps. Which isn't flying fast, but it's not bad.
In the afternoon Will, Kangway and I (and Matt, some) hiked Mt. Lowe up to the remains of an old fancy hotel up there, and then came back down for some well-deserved egg pizza.
Friday, October 10, 2008 (60 minutes, weights)
Decided to keep it easy after two consecutive workout days. When I came into the training room just before running, Garrett was still there (I get back to Tech 5:30 - 5:45), and didn't see me come in the back way. So I thought I would play that game where you grab someone from behind and say "guess who". But it didn't work, because it turns out Garrett sees out of his eyes, not his nipples.
Then I jogged for an hour and did some weights. I'm pretty bad at pullups, and it's not only a few short weeks until Halloween.
Thursday, October 9, 2008 (4x2000 with Oxy)
Ian's been inviting me to come to workouts with Oxy for almost a year now. Every time, I wind up finding some stupid reason not to show - that I'm busy, or sick, or injured, or don't feel like getting owned by a freshman, or something. I was about to skip out again today because it would be two workout days in a row, but I'm trying to get over the attitude of constantly finding reasons to avoid doing some hard work.
It turned out not to be a vicious workout today, which is good. We did 4x2000 on the grass near the Rose Bowl. I ran with the first group of guys, but fell back on the last one with dead legs. I was impressed how disciplined the team was. Some of those guys are in great shape, and hearing stories of how fast their hard workouts are, it was clear to me they could have been busting out very fast repeats if they wanted to. But instead they ran steadily at the pace Rob prescribed for them - content just to do their tempo work at a reasonable pace today and run hard when it came time for a hard workout.
So I met a few of the guys and got in a fine workout (despite trailing off at the end).
Wednesday, October 8, 2008 (2000, 1000, 500 x 2)
First, Ryan brings word that DeMar and Reed both ran 1:11 for a half marathon! Awesome running from those guys.
I didn't run yesterday, which made me feel particularly like a jackass since I specifically turned Ian down on a morning run so I could workout in the afternoon. Then I just learned math instead. Dammit.
Today I got to the track around 6PM for 2000, 1000, 500 x2.
My goal was to mix up the paces, and hit several different gears that I haven't been hitting recently. I was running "with time, but not for time", in that I was timing myself, but not trying to hit a prespecified pace.
I also took long rests so I could keep the pace at least reasonable. I did about
2000 6:36 (79)
1000 3:08 (75)
500
2000 6:30 (78)
1000
500
Some of them I didn't time. I felt unfit. I didn't recover as well during my breaks as I did last track season. I didn't run as fast, either, but that's fine.
I simply need more consistency and workouts. But getting out there today and finally putting in some good work is a step in the right direction.
Monday, October 6, 2008 (95 minutes)
Very solid long run in the heat. With about ten minutes left, the blonde Romero came pounding past in lane one, so I jumped in for about 2200m of tempo with him right at the end of the run. His summary was, "I've got all this fluid in my stomach, so I don't feel like running hard. But I'm gonna."
Quick conversation with Dennis:
Me: How are your classes?
De: Okay.
Me: Mine are better than sex!
De: Wait, really?
Me: Yeah. I just don't like sex that much.
Ha! Double kidding!! I LOVE SEX!!!
My classes are pretty good too, though.
Weekly Summary: 9/29/08 - 10/5/08
I was just trying to get my groove back after some injury and sickness. I now seem to be perfectly healthy, so it's time for some real training.
Plan for next week:
Mon: long, core
Tu: mixed-speed faster stuff, on the track. maybe some weights
Wed: easy
Thu: longish, core
Fri: easy
Sat: tempo
Sun: NFTC, weights
Friday, October 3 - Sunday, October 5, 2008
Fri: 60 minutes at night on the south field
Sat: 90 minutes on the south field at night. Felt good to at least get a real solid run in after a week or two of nothing significant
Sun: 45 minutes chilling with Ian on the North Field.
Thursday, October 2, 2008 (15 minutes tempo)
Went to Lacy with the men's team for a 15 minute tempo. Even though I consciously regulated my pace to a reasonable level, I wound up tired and strained by the end. I felt like I was running as fast as I should for a 45-minute or even 1-hour steady state, but was breathing too hard feeling too tired.
Bottom line is I'm not as fit as I ought to be, and the reason is I haven't been hitting consistent workouts.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 (60 minutes)
Ran late on the North Field, meaning Val again asked me if I'm doing another 10,000. I told him I never understood that stuff about orders of magnitude. Then I did fifty billion laps.
Weekly Summary: 9/22/08 9/28/08 (sick)
Sick most of the week. Nothing much to say. I ran about 100 minutes towards the end of the week.
Monday, September 29, 2008 (55 minutes)
I was about to get pretty upset. I was stung by a bee on the bottom of my right big toe just a few minutes shy of my one hour goal. This after a mild hamstring injury that I'm not sure is 100%, a bad race, and illness. It seems common that these things clump together.
Normally I swell up with a big red welt when I'm stung, but it's been eight hours and still looks fine. Good thing when I got stung I immediately stopped and yanked the stinger out in a graceless flurry of monoleg locomotion and pathetic yelpings of pain. Score another one for the vertebrates.
Here is a comic I stole from the internet. SCREW YOU, INSECTS!
Sunday, September 28, 2008 (NFTC)
Membership in the North Field Track Club (which is training for cross country and meeting on the South Field) has dwindled to just me and Dennis, but it was a good week nonetheless. 40 minutes of running, then some lifting and a Rosarito's burrito.
Saturday, September 27, 2008 (~35 minutes)
Spectated at Riverside. I'm not feeling nearly fit enough to race at the moment. But watching the race and seeing a large fraction of the SCIAC run pretty well (Dennis ran 28:05 and was the 31st SCIAC finisher, with Whittier and Redlands absent) had me feeling a bit impatient to at least get on to some real training. Instead I just let Kangway take pictures with my camera and threw a bunch of rocks at the mysterious metal things. Amazingly, Scott and Katherine didn't chastise me about this dubiously-safe activity.
Friday, September 26, 2008 (30 minutes)
The general pattern has been feeling worst in the morning, getting better as the day goes along, and then regressing slightly towards evening. Around 5:30 I was sitting in the library, realizing that my cough frequency had fallen unusually low, and my congestion was down to just one nostril, so I went for a short run on the infield. Later I did 8 minutes on each leg on the balance pad, which is almost back to old form.
Westmont XC 2008 (28:05, 15th)
Splits about 5:12, 5:33, 5:45, 6:00, 5:35.
I can't believe I actually ran a 6:00 mile inside a five mile race. I'm pretty sure that when healthy I can run 20 six minute miles in a row.
I went out too hard, not wholly realizing it. In fact my pace that first mile was faster than the average pace of the race winner, who I knew was well out of my league after watching him race at Irvine. I wanted to stay close to Luis (who is clearly in excellent shape and took second), and sacrificed smart pacing to that goal.
I didn't realize during mile two how much I was slowing down. Once I saw the time, I knew that the leaders were long gone, and basically I hit the off switch and cruised in. I did not care at all when people passed me.
I need to run some hard workouts. I want to know that I have the ability to push myself. In order to know it, I have to do it. And in order to do it, I have to practice it.
So once I'm healthy, well, and have returned to full training, it will be time for some actual, faster-than-race pace hard work once in a while. The sort of thing I shy away from far too much.
Discovering New Ground II
The new ground I've covered recently has been to experience, for the first time in my life, waking up to the inability to open my eyes, since my own body nocturnally caked them shut with dried mucus. Honestly, I'm a little excited about going to sleep just now, because I want to see whether it will happen again tonight.
So haven't been running this week due to the illness that makes my ears throb in pain, my throat sore, and ocular boogers ooze liberally across my face. However, I've gotten to the point where I'm not especially concerned about throwing off my running schedule. Since it's clear I won't race at Riverside on Saturday, I don't have anything pressing to work towards.
When I do have a race coming up shortly, everything feels rushed. I worry that there's not enough time to get in a good workout, that I need to rest for it, that a certain injury will not heal and will be re-injured, that I haven't prepared well enough recently.
When I don't have a race, I simply understand that if I haven't prepared well, it'll just take me longer to get into peak shape. No problem. I'll wait another month.
The good part of a clear and immediate goal in front of me is that I work harder towards it. The bad part is that I pander to it. So the thing to do is to extract those good elements - a dedication to training rather than running, which sometimes slips away over the summers, and a sense of directed purpose. But to leave behind the fruitless worries and angsts.
Discovering New Ground
Megumi's comment on my post from a couple of days ago has been in the back of my mind all day. There, she wrote that when running well
every step down a trail i've never been before, every minute longer than i've ever run, every loop run faster than i've gone before, is like this cool new thing that is fulfilling in some way that's totally independent of everything else... i found out new things about the world and about myself, and it just so happened that becoming faster was a side effect of that.
But, persistent health and injury problems have kept her from training consistently. And although she's now resumed regular, organized, goal-driven training, her performance and general fitness, critically including the feel of running, are not approaching her previous levels. She describes the effect as:
now it's kind of like i'm in this no-man's land. since the year off, everything i've been doing training wise kinda feels unsatisfying. it's almost always slower, shorter and more tiring to boot. i so very much want to discover new ground again... but there are days when that seems ridiculous since my body won't even cover the old ground anymore... and then i feel discouraged and discontent.
There's a strong element of arbitrariness and inexplicability in running. My experiences with injury are the opposite. My best race ever was probably my 15:28 5000 at conferences my senior year. I dropped my PR 18 seconds in that race. The eight weeks immediately before that were six weeks of being injured, a 16:04 5000 at multi-duals (I don't remember why I went from not running at all to racing, but I did), then two weeks of regular short runs never exceeding one hour, three track workouts thrown in, and then 15:28.
I was similarly injured for most of senior cross country season before running two PR's at the end. Overall, I think I've had at least six layoffs of at least a month, and maybe two or three layoffs of three or more months. Each time I've returned to top shape in about half the time I spent being injured.
Ian seems to be the same way. He hasn't gotten back to 15:07 shape since 2001, but he's been back to 15:45 shape regularly, despite highly-yoyoing training levels (we occasionally bonded by aqua-jogging together while simultaneously injured).
Kamalah seems to return to high fitness very quickly; Gustavo does not.
Then, some people are more injury prone. I've had a full gamut of injuries, but recovered every time. Ian's had a full gamut and still struggles with them. Matt seems hardly to get injured at all. An old running friend of mine, Stuart Calderwood, was up to something like 22 years of running every single day, last time I checked.
Some people are naturally fast. Some train regularly without really improving.
Who knows? So much of deciding to be a runner is just this ridiculous crapshoot. We have a lot of control over our performances, but are also largely at the mercy of forces that are either random, or presently far beyond our understanding.
It appears to me that if so much of what allows you to run fast is a meaningless dice toss, then it doesn't make sense to judge your success at running based solely on performance. This last sentence carries an even-more-deeply ingrained but dubious premise: that running is an activity in which we should judge our success at all.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 (medium long, plyos)
AM: 90 minutes, dodging the grass-mowing guy
PM: Susan's plyos, lifting
I'm glad I didn't attempt a full-length long run this week, since I felt depleted to the point of weak legs and odd something-about-my-entire-body-is-not-quite-right sensations by a simple 90-minute run. I guess I had about a 13-hour gap between my last meal (salmon cooked by Kangway) and the beginning of this run, so I was simply on low fuel reserves. Still it was a little unsettling to be so wiped from a fairly-easy run. I took a two hour nap in the afternoon despite sleeping 8 or 8.5 hours the night before.
Lots of people think they'll have a "bouncing baby boy", but Susan's will be the bounciest. I tried hard to keep focused for her plyo session, despite anything she might tell you about my smart-aleck remarks. I'm clumsy at these. I focused more on "doing it right" than "doing it well", i.e. bound smoothly, not far.
It's hard for me to say whether or not I think these exercises have value as a distance runner. Certainly they are secondary or tertiary training. But as to whether they're helpful, it's impossible to say because I don't do them enough. We do plyos three or four times in the cross country season, and then that's it for the entire year.
Their stated intent is, I believe, to help the efficiency of your stride. There are other forms of plyos that should help your peak power output or speed of movement, but that's another story. There's no doubt in my mind that practicing the plyos would make me better at doing them. But as far as I can tell my stride is pretty good - not a thing of beauty, but it seems to get the job done, and people occasionally comment to tell me that I look like I'm putting out less effort than other runners at the same pace.
After eight years (I'm now a quarter way through my eighth year of running), I don't think my form will change drastically, although it's possible it could, especially at faster paces which I run less frequently. On the other hand, changes in efficiency could also result from physiological changes that don't necessarily manifest in the stride.
The plyos do make me tired - that much is clear. So they're an investment. I'll try to keep up with them through the winter and see whether it's a worthy investment or not.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 (3xarroyo tempo)
I came to practice the way I used to go to the buffet at Sizzler as a kid - unsure what would be waiting there but pretty much willing to go along with it regardless. Scott had the guys running more hill repeats over the roads, which was among the short list of workout I was not willing to do. Instead, I drove the van down to the arroyo (the hill repeats were on San Rafael), and did 3xarroyo tempo, intending a fairly-relaxed 9:00 pace.
My splits were:
9:18, 8:32, 8:31 = 26:20 total
This wasn't what I expected or planned for, but I'm satisfied with it nonetheless. On the first lap, my perception was that from my cadence and stride, I was going faster than I wanted, not slower. I felt a good rhythm, but was just counting the tempo wrong. I would have expected 8:40 rather than 9:20. But when I looked at my watch, it did make sense that my time was slow. I was much too comfortable for an 8:40 lap. Apparently my lungs know my pace better than my brain does. I had figured my legs were simply feeling very fresh due to several easy/off days recently. But they were feeling normal, and my brain had just adjusted itself to get used to slow-osity
After the first lap, I decided I could crank the pace down a lot. Which I did. I felt strong and controlled over the next two laps, which is a bit surprising considering that I thought I was going fast on the first one. I wasn't strained, though. My heart rate was only about 180 at the end. It frequently gets to 190 on tempo runs.
I returned to the planned rendezvous with the team at 8:00. They were half an hour late, so I got some unplanned meditation in as well.
In the afternoon I jogged down to Lacy with the guys and bullshitted for about twenty minutes before jogging back, too fast. Then we did a preposterous ab workout, that lasted almost half an hour. By the end of it, I don't think anyone was really getting much out of it. We were just thrashing around on the grass like flipped over turtles, but without quite so much striation on our belly sides. I think this sort of preposterous over-volume workout a symptom of the warped mentality, "if one cookie for dessert is good, then ten cookies is MAGNIFICENT!!"
But no, one cookie is plenty. Except sometimes you should take two, unless you want to be really really good. Then you can take three, but it's risky. Also, if you work up to it gradually over the course of years of training, you can take six or seven. That would be magnificent.
Monday, September 15 2008 (easy)
60 minutes on the North Field.
I was thinking a bit about training today, leafing through a book or two, and I was reminded of the following story a wise man once told me. Not that's it's super-relevant. But it's a good story. Also, Kangway's mysterious illness probably primed my memory.
There was a man who for many months had ailed from an unknown disease. He had seen many doctors, none of whom could heal him. Then he began visiting traditional healers and trying new-age therapies, but nothing worked. At last he heard of a specialist who might be able to treat him.When the specialist met the sick man, he sat him down on his examination bench, talked to him for a few minutes, and immediately diagnosed his illness. The doctor explained the man's illness to him, told him how to treat it, and wrote his instructions down on a piece of paper.
Although other doctors and healers had claimed they understood his illness before, the man was sure that this time he had finally found someone who knew the true solution. So he grabbed the doctor's instructions tightly and returned joyfully to his home. He built a small shrine to the doctor in front of his house. He decorated it with flowers, and placed an offering of fruit on its small altar. He walked around the shrine 100 times, bowed low to the ground three times, took out the doctor's orders from his pocket and began chanting, "One pill in the morning, one pill in the afternoon, one pill in the evening. One pill in the morning, one pill in the afternoon, one pill in the evening..."
Weekly Summary: (9/8/08 - 9/14/08 385 minutes, long run, mountain run, sub-tempo)
M: long
Tu: mountains
W: easy
Th: sub-tempo
F: off (hamstring)
Sa: off (hamstring)
Su: easy
This was a down week, since by Thursday I decided I should just take a couple of days completely off and make sure to take care of my hamstring. I trying to cut down on running-induced delirium, such as the delirious need to get in 12 runs every week.
Despite not working out much, I'm happy with this week of running. I got in an easy run with Matt on Sunday in the middle of helping him move out of town. Hopefully he'll still be back in Pasadena once in a while, but even so I was glad to have an easy "last run" before seeing him off.
I also got in a workout with Kangway for probably the first time ever on Thursday, and a great mountain run with Ian on Tuesday. The long run was good as well - 105 minutes. I'd like to push this up to 120 minutes and be comfortable running that duration at 6:30 pace or so before Huntington Beach. 13.1 is a long way to be running fast - I don't want my endurance to let me down in the last two or three miles when my fitness is strong enough to run 5:20's.
Next week, I'm planning on racing at Westmont. I'll do gentle workouts on Tuesday and Thursday, just keeping pace with whoever is up front in Caltech's workouts, and then let it rip (not literally, I hope) on Saturday. At this point it felt totally normal on my easy run today, but I didn't press it at all.
Approximate Schedule:
M: easy
Tu: AM: light workout PM: jogging, lifting
W: AM: easy PM: jogging, core
Th: AM: light workout PM: jog, core
F: AM: easy PM: course jog
Sa: race
Su: NFTC
I'm pretty flexible about all that if someone was dying to get in a run with me...
Thursday, September 11, 2008 (sub-tempo)
AM: 5x5on, 2off with Kangway in Lacy. Actually, I ran pretty much stride for stride with Kangway all day. Pace was a bit slower than tempo, but was just about as much as I thought my hamstring could take. It was good to work out Kangway, because as far as I can tell it's the first time we've done a workout together.
PM: 30 minutes easy on the south field, then some good lifting
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 (easy day)
AM: 20 minutes easy on the south field
PM: 30 minutes easy on the south field
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 (mountains)
AM: 85 minutes with Ian up Brown Mountain. I felt pretty good, even though my knees and hamstrings were both worrying me a bit beforehand.
PM: Spent the afternoon job hunting, then furiously working on my preparation for an interview with Brian Greene. Didn't get around to running.
Monday, September 8, 2008 (long run)
AM: 105 minutes on the South Field.
I paid careful attention to the hamstring, and it felt fine. Only near the very end where I started to get below 6:00 pace did I feel that any faster might be troublesome. So I simply didn't go faster.
I felt pretty strong on this, even at the end of the run with 1:40 of running already behind me. Waking up briefly at 4am and eating a Clif Bar might have helped, along with the enormous pasta-and-bread feast with Kangway late last night.
PM: About 20 minutes of easy running, warming up with the team before plyos. I skipped the plyos in favor of a solid core workout.
Sunday, September 7, 2008 (NFTC)
30 minutes of jogging, then a pretty good upper-body lifting session that left me sore by the next morning. The hamstring I pulled slightly on Friday seems to be doing better, although I'm still avoiding striders and fast running for the next few days.
Weekly Summary: 9/1/08 - 9/7/08 (525 minutes, steady state, long run)
This was a decent second week of the cross season. Both of my best runs were with Ian - a long run including Brown Mountain on Monday, then a steady state on Friday. My steady state run was excellent - controlled, steady work at just about the right pace. 5 arroyo tempo loops averaging 8:51. I felt stronger on my long run than I previously had.
I would have liked to get some faster running in this week. That's essentially what I'm missing - VO2 max type fitness. So I want to at least sprinkle in some faster fartleks here and there, rather than just running tempo all the time.
I tweaked my hamstring slightly on the steady state, so I'll have to be careful about this. I've also been running with the team less and less because I can feel what the roads and sidewalks are doing to my legs and I don't like it. I wish I could run with them more, because I like all the new prefrosh, (and the older guys as well), but I'd also like to have a season where I have no injury problems.
Plan for next week is contingent on how my hamstring feels, but will probably be like this:
Mon: AM long; PM easy, core
Tues: AM medium-long; PM easy, lift
Wed: AM easy; PM easy, core
Thu: AM fartlek or tempo (with team if they stay off the roads); PM easy, lift
Fri: AM easy, strides; PM easy or off
Sat: AM steady state 6xarroyo in 54:00; PM off
The goal is to keep working on the endurance and threshold stuff like I have been, but if the hamstring allows to get a little bit of work in at paces below 5:20.
Just Watching
I like to tell myself stories about other parts of myself, but they aren't normally true. One story is that I'm not especially motivated by competition. The idea here isn't that I avoid competition. It's that I have some sort of higher goal of personal excellence, and that I view competition solely as a vehicle towards that goal. But it's a lie. I want to win things, too.
I watched the race today, and when I saw that they were going out at 5:20 pace, I thought there was a good chance I could have mixed it up with the leaders. When Oxy's new frosh won in 26:45, I began to wish I had found a way to enter that race - not for the sake of racing, but for the accolades that would come after doing well.
On the other hand, over the course of the last 15 hours my reptile brain has been slowly sinking back from the fore. Now, my thoughts are different. I think that if I had run today's race, and even won it, I would not feel very satisfied with that. I know that my summer preparation was sloppy and lazy, regardless of whether it was sufficient keep me in shape to win the slow race today. The point of running is that it's a personal quest. The great part is that you're in control of your own actions. You have choices. Part of running is making the choices about what the best preparation is. Another part is making the choice about whether or not you'll execute that preparation with a whole-hearted approach.
I've only been putting in that full effort these last two weeks, and maybe not even then as evidenced by my sporadic updating of the log and a couple of missed runs.
I would say that my goal for the immediate future lies deeper than particular race performances, and instead lies in a display of improved self-control, improved dedication, improved self-understanding, improved love of the sport. But a wise man once told me this:
You cannot set out to fall in love. If you go out making an effort to fall in love with someone, you'll eventually find a romantic relationship, but it will likely be forced. It will be with someone else who set out with that same goal, and both of you will be deluding yourselves into thinking you're in love.
On the other hand, if you set about your daily activities by fully engaging yourself and living in the way you think is best, you'll inevitably come to share that with like-minded people. Soon, you may wind up falling in love with one of them. But that can't be the goal - only the consequence.
Similarly, my goal shouldn't be to achieve breakthroughs as a runner. It shouldn't be to run much better or much faster or much smarter than before. That's too big a picture - too global. Instead, the goal is just to do, each day, what I think is best to race my next race as well as I can.
I'm not sure whether this will sound profound or ridiculous in the morning, but I had five beers before I realized Matt had simply fallen asleep while sitting up next to me watching a movie, and I don't really have much better to do than drunkblogging at the moment.
Lost Days on the Log
There's no internet at the apartment yet, and consequently it's been a while since I updated anything. As best I can remember, here's what I've been up to:
Sunday August 31
NFTC - 30 minutes easy, some light lifting.
Monday September 1
Brown mountain with Ian. Pretty awesome medium-long run, including what turned out to be a pretty respectable ascent on the fire road, and my first-ever trip down the El Prieto trail back. The uphill climb seemed shorter than it used to. It's been a while since I ran it, though.
Tuesday September 2
AM: hard to remember. probably 30 minutes easy.
PM: ran at Lacy. I was going to do fartlek, but my legs tired, so I just did 40 minutes steady there, place Lacy long way and four Pattons all out.
Wednesday September 3
AM: I'm pretty sure I just ran on the south field, but I don't remember how long. One hour seems about right.
PM: Jogging with the team, about 25 minutes, then lifting. Katherine destroyed me in a game of h-o-r-s-e afterwards, but I did get one letter on her with a shot from behind the backboard, meaning I won on awesomeness.
Thursday September 4
AM: 20 minutes. It might actually have just been 10 minutes, since I wasn't timing it and Chief and Dennis said they ran on the south field as well, but didn't see me there. Basically I wanted to get it done and go back to sleep. Which I did.
PM: 80 minutes. I felt bad about running so short in the morning, and so went pretty long in the afternoon. It was hot and I was horribly dehydrated by the end of it.
Friday September 5
AM: 5xarroyo tempo with Ian. A very good workout; certainly better than last week's. I ran pretty steadily, with splits around
9:06, 8:44, 8:49, 8:49, 8:46 (44:14 total)
I felt pretty calm and controlled on this, and it was just one lap shy of what was probably my most impressive arroyo tempo, from March of this year, shortly before my three 5000's.
Saturday, August 30 (long run)
100 minutes over Patrician, with some extra on the South Field. Went ahead for a bit on the hills at first to get some workout in, then doubled back to catch the guys in back. Tossed in six striders as well. I felt reasonably strong despite the long week and workout yesterday. Nonetheless, striders were inevitably somewhat forced after 95 minutes of running.
Friday, August 29 (tempo am, 30 pm)
Time to go now
Time to train
Fitness you just
Cannot feign
Old arroyo
tempo loop
Sun is rising
give a whoop
First one: cruised it
felt just fine
Next one: faster
all aligned
Third one: still there
going strong
Fourth one: problems
something's wrong
I have to poop
what to do
Never look back
but run on through
run on through, man
run on through
I think my splits for 4xarroyo tempo were 8:56, 17:42 (8:46), 26:34 (8:52), 35:50 (9:16). As alluded to above, I was feeling pretty good until I had bowel problems on the last one, but I decided just to keep running and try not to explode in the middle of the trail. I made it, but as you can see was forced to slow considerably.
My impression from this run is that no particular component of my fitness is especially lacking. My aerobic and muscular fitness seem in line with each other. Both are really pretty good. But everything is down a notch or two from my peak fitness. It'll take me some time, but I'll progress steadily to new levels if I just keep training intelligently and do my various injury-preventing routines. I need some endurance-building long runs, some strength-building hills, and some speed-building fartleks and intervals. I've got to toss it all in there, and keep on practicing these threshold runs with an eye towards a couple good cross races in preparation for the half marathons.
In the afternoon I jogged it out with the team and did a very difficult ab routine, guided by Katherine. There was a lot of rest in there between exercises, which ideally one would try to avoid. But my abs were in poor enough shape that they needed it. Lifted a little bit with Dennis afterwards, but I was too tired from moving stuff to the new apartment and not eating a proper lunch to go at it very hard.
Thursday, August 28 (70 am, 20 pm)
Full arroyo with the team in the morning. I could feel all the pounding the sidewalk did to my legs, so I have to be careful about that. Also stopped to take an enormous dump in the arroyo, which allowed me to join back up with Kangway for most of the run.
Afternoon just jogged a bit on the infield while some high schoolers were playing football on our beautiful field. Some brief core stuff afterwards, then Scott bought me a new pair of DS trainers.
Wednesday, August 28 (30am, 55pm)
Easy morning jog with Ian and Dennis, then Huntington with the team in the afternoon. I went to the track at the end of the Huntington and did 1600 at goal half marathon pace - 5:17 (maybe one second too fast). It felt very nice and relaxed, but not 13.1 miles relaxed. My work is cut out for me.
Plan
My competitive plans are for two cross races (Westmont 9/13 and Riverside 9/27) and two half marathons (Rose Bowl Half and Huntington Beach, AKA Surf City).
I want to train with the team as much as possible, although I also recognize that I have to take tutoring work where I can get it, so some afternoons I might be forced to skip out. I don't see myself in a coaching capacity. A coach has to be confident in himself and his methods. I don't even have methods to be confident in. What I can do is offer myself as a mentor. I've done lots of both good and bad things as a Caltech student athlete. Younger athletes can benefit from my experience; older athletes from my camaraderie or example. At the very least, I can drive one of the vans. Having Ian and Ryan, and even McGrail around was a huge boon for me, especially over freshman and sophomore years. Those guys were awesome training partners and guides, and I wouldn't have developed the way I did without them. Now I'm in their role.
Personally, my strongest competitive motivation is still in track, but I want to take my fall and winter seriously. I plan to prepare for them more intelligently and more diligently than before. My goals are consistent, competent, injury-free (or minimized, at least), aerobic-focused training. I want to build from where I am now (not great shape, but not awful) into PR shape by Riverside, and then into new territory by mid-winter.
I'd like to run a couple of cross races as motivation to get good workouts in. That way I should begin advancing my fitness right away. I won't expect fantastic performances because I only have two weeks to Westmont and one month to Riverside. Nonetheless, it'll be good to get into the training-to-race and then the racing-to-compete mentality. My old cross country PR is 26:45, which I should be able to better on the Riverside course a month from now.
The Rose Bowl Half won't be a fast course, but it has a lot of things going for it. It's right here, so logistics are easy and I'll be familiar with the course. It has some trails in it and goes up around JPL. It probably won't be a very competitive field because there is no prize money, only some smaller awards. That's fine for the "tune-up" first of two halfs (would you spell it that way, or "halves", or "half's"?). The race is ten days after my 24th birthday and it's on my Dad's birthday, December 13.
Huntington Beach will be a good goal to shoot for over the next two months - it's February 1. I haven't run there, but Feldman runs it sometimes and says it's a great course. Much faster than the Rose Bowl, so I can gun for a good time there - right now I'm tentatively setting 1:10 (5:20 pace) as a goal, although I'll re-evaluate that when I have more data on how things are panning out a couple months.
As for what I'll do, I'm going to keep it simple and keep it loose. I need some long runs, some threshold, and some faster stuff. I'll do whatever the team is doing, except maybe going longer on tempo days. I've already done a 95 minutes long run. I'll keep pushing that out bit by bit as long as I don't feel truly awful doing so. And I'm going to resume counting weekly minutes, while using my meditation-built mental restraint to refrain from adding junk minutes just so that figure soars higher. A good training week would have a long, 6-15 mile tempo/steady state, a long run, and a shorter workout such as fartlek, intervals, or 3-6 mile tempo. If I'm feeling good, another medium-long run or another workout, or some light, fast reps (4 300's at mile pace for example) would be good to throw in as a bonus. If not, easy running can fill it out.
I want to be doing at least a little core work five days a week, and lifting two. I'll keep with the double days over preseason, and reevaluate that when the demands on my time change with the beginning of the school year.
I did a max set of 10 pullups the other night. That needs some fixing. And my abs coach and I have our work cut out for us. Fortunately, we'll be living together so I can get constant advice.
Tuesday, August 26 (55 minutes easy)
Recovery jog in the evening, around the illicit South Field. I thought someone might come and try to throw me off. If they do in the future, I have a trump card. According to the official Caltech Athletics website, I am the assistant coach of the men's cross country team. Now I can just tell them I'm officially conducting a special inspection of the facilities in preparation for the athletes.
Monday, August 25 (95 minutes)
Very nice long run with Ian, Gustavo, and Kangway down in the arroyo, from the bottom of California to a little ways down the waterfall trail and back. I still didn't feel well. My legs were sore and I'm not in top shape, but it was very nice to go out and put in all those miles with some good guys. Getting up early and doing that shit is actually a really nice feeling. The top sections of my calves were excessively sore all day, though.
Sunday, August 24 (65 minutes easy)
North Field running with Kangway. My first run in a while, and honestly I felt terrible. My digestive system was simply not adapted to doing anything other than being empty and taking lots of naps, especially after I blacked out due to low blood pressure immediately after standing up. That's what I get for messing with my body for two weeks straight.
Hot Events
I noticed today that the lovely Ms. Flanagan is now the 12th fastest female 10,000m runner ever, and 3rd fastest white chick (also ahead of her are three Asians and six Africans). But I also noticed that there were a lot of top performances this year at the women's 10,000. So I decided to look at the flat running events and see how many of the top 100 performances all time have come in the last three years for each event.
Men
100m 37
200m 33
400m 27
800m 5
1500 2
5000 25
10000 36
half 48
full 35
Women
100 6
200 10
400 9
800 13
1500 12
5000 33
10000 26
half 23
full 25
New Adventures
If you fall off the bike and don't get back on, the asphalt wins. And you know how much I hate asphalt.
My plan was to bike out of Stanford and go on a new solo adventure. Unfortunately, I caught a cold my last day of camp. (I haven't run the last few days for this reason.) Going on an adventure that involves six hours of exercise a day, which I'm not truly fit for, while sick, seemed like a bad idea. So I'm now in the 24-hour library in Stanford, wondering where I'll sleep tonight. A new camp has moved into the house I was occupying, and there aren't exactly any campgrounds around here.
Biking is out, but most of the adventure I had planned remains intact. I'm headed to North Fork, CA (near Fresno) for a 10-day retreat at the California Vipassana Center to learn to meditate. At the moment I'm mostly trying to not get any preconceived notions of what this thing will be like or what I'll get from it. I learned about this place from an EPGY counselor I met two years ago. He meditated two hours a day using the techniques he learned from a Vipassana center. We spent several long, lazy dinners talking about it, and over the course of a few weeks got me interested in trying meditation out.
The center runs by donation only, so I know they're not just out there to scam me. Further, they don't have any obvious religious ties, and they're not making any totally outlandish claims about what their training does. I have ten days to kill, so I'll see what this is like.
The program is pretty extreme. In approximate order of extreme-ness, I have to follow these elements of a code of conduct:
- "noble silence" as in, no talking. except to ask questions of the teachers or communicate some physical need to the staff. but no communication whatsoever with the other participants
- no reading or writing. not even a journal to record your thoughts. certainly not a novel or a textbook
- no exercise, except walking around the grounds
- no communication with the outside world. no cell phones, laptops, newspapers, etc
- wake up at 4am, then spend 10 hours meditating (or trying to) throughout the day on a strict schedule
- no sexual activity (masturbation is apparently a sexual activity, at least according to meditation guys)
- no leaving early or ducking out
- no contact with women
- give the course a full effort
- no praying, meditating by other techniques, nothing that would interfere or overlap or complement the training
- no wearing shorts, or anything with a logo or writing on it, or anything ostentatious
- no eating meat, or anything other than the food they provide
- no drinking, no telling lies, no stealing, no killing stuff (I don't do lots of these things normally, anyway. except telling lies. i do that whenever i have students around. it's fun.)
- no music (I don't use music much on a daily basis)
- no cameras/tape recorders
After that, Kangway and I are looking for a place in Pasadena. I'll be looking for some tutoring work, getting back into racing shape, and starting what had better be my last school year.
Friday, August 8 (65 minutes)
I keep forgetting/putting off updates, but here's at least one for today.
I went to Wilbur in the afternoon. Soon random chance graced me with the opportunity to observe a phenomenon which theory predicts must occur, but empirically happens quite rarely. The buses crossed. There are two free bus shuttle routes around campus drive - one clockwise and one counterclockwise. Mostly I ignore the buses because the bicycle is a much better transportation option. But I do see them from time to time.
Because they're going the same route in opposite directions, they have to cross twice per loop. But if the drivers go the same average speeds, they'll keep crossing at about the same spots.
Apparently, either the drivers have different personalities, or the directions are intrinsically different, or people demand different numbers of stops, or there's a large random component in how long a trip takes, because I finally saw the buses cross today, but then didn't see them cross there again in an hour of running.
When I realized the buses were going to cross, I got really excited. I closed one eye to eliminate my depth perception. Now the buses were headed straight towards each other! Crash inevitable! Bus parts everywhere! Fire and explosions! Then I could run in and start dragging out bodies. When I thought I had saved everyone, there would be one hysterical woman still standing there, pointing and screaming "my baby! my baby!", and I would rush in, save the child, and run back out of the bus carcass just as the fuel tank exploded into a giant ball of flames.
Alas, despite my lack of depth perception the buses passed harmlessly past each other, and I finished the run without incident.
Sunday August 3 (80 minutes)
Public bathrooms have a little corner built in just past the door, so that even if the door is wide open you can't see people peeing from the hallway. But it has a little added psychological effect, too. When you turn that little corner, it feels like there's no going back. You're in a whole new world, baby. A world of bodily functions and no eye contact.
Anyway I did 80 minutes on my favorite field today, although it was unusually sloppy down in one of the corners. I suspect I was running through liquified attack dog poo, but it was too dark to check, and besides, the fact that I just don't know is slightly exciting.
Thursday, July 31 (80 minutes mountain)
I was planning on running a mile at the Los Gatos All-Comers meet, but my achilles was bothering me a bit on the warmup. This is probably due to a combination of:
- hill repeats on Tuesday
- over-vigorous achilles rehab exercises on Wednesday
- not doing achilles exercises for a while before then
- several consecutive days of barefoot running for the first time in a while
- general lameness
I ran some big mountain/hill thing, then came down the other side to this mostly-dry damlake, which I tried to circumnavigate. I failed when the trail petered out three quarters around, so I went back around the damlake, back up the mountain/hill, and then up this other bigger mountainhill that was definitely a mountain but the top of it was called "Hilltop Vista". There I met this dude named Alex who run high school cross in the area and showed me the way back to the school and started doing striders while I watched and ate an orange.
Wednesday, July 30 (75 minutes)
I can understand when I can't use my favorite athletic field because people are doing sports on it. After all, that's what it's there for. But today I couldn't use it because people were training attack dogs on it. Seriously. There were several people standing around in the corner of the field with their large and disciplined-looking dogs on leashes next to them. They were watching one man with his large and unleashed dog standing out in the middle of the field. He was wearing some sort of bite-proof casing on his forearm, and holding one end of a stick. His dog was biting the other end and they were wrestling over it and growling at each other. Then the man started screaming commands at the dog. In German.
So I found another field far away and did a nice distance run with six long striders thrown in.
Wednesday July 23 (25 am, weights, 45 pm)
Worked my way around to the gym in the morning to lift, stretching it out into a nice 10:30 AM run. Then ran again at 2AM after a counselors-only screening of The Aristocrats.
Saturday July 19 (70 minutes)
cruised on Wilbur for my longest run since the bike crash. felt good, smooth. wore a shirt since some of my campers were playing soccer, and technically speaking i'm not supposed to seduce them with my stunningly-nondescript physique.
A few more days
I took one day off in there. Yesterday I started doing doubles, and in the afternoon I ran with one of my students, Christian. He told me he had run 10:57 for 2 miles, so I was a little surprised he was comfortable with the pace, until I learned he had only run 2 miles once, but was a 4:36 miler. So I have a running partner now. I'm planning on doing the morning runs all very easy on the grass field across the street, which is fantastically convenient. I'll probably be exceedingly tired the first couple of weeks of this, so I'm going to keep the pace easy and not attempt any workouts at first.
2 more - streak up to five
60 minutes each of the last two days. Yesterday in shoes because my calves were a bit sore, today barefoot on Wilbur.
As I predicted, I was sore pretty much all over after lifting last weekend. I'm almost recovered now though and ready to get back into this whole fitness thing. It also looks like three or four of my new students are cross country runners, so I may have people to run with at least on easy days.
3 days in a row
After hitting three consecutive days with exercise for the first time in a while, I feel like I'm finally back in the mentality of a runner. I did an hour each of Thursday and Friday. Today I lifted for the first time in a month, then ran a very easy 45 minutes. I'm feeling pretty good, although a bit sore in my calves. I expect I'll be sore from lifting tomorrow, although I didn't go especially hard. Mostly I'm just glad to be back at it. And screw the bandages on my arm. I'm a runner and I'm going to run, sweat be damned.
Health Problems Continue
My infected arm was supposed to be better by now, but it wasn't. When I took a shower last night I noticed there was a large red patch of organic stuff, apparently created by my (slightly confused about what it should be doing) body pushing its way up out of the wound.
So I went back to the health center and saw a different doctor (the first one wasn't in). She rubbed a new kind of gunk on it and told me to come back on Thursday. But in the meantime, I'm not supposed to remove the bandage, which also isn't supposed to get wet.
It's so hot out I'm sweating just sitting here inside. Given that when I run in the heat, little beads of sweat literally fly off the ends of my fingers as I go, if I went running right now I'd mess that bandage up and have to put band-aids on it until Thursday. Then I'd get berated by the doctor when I came in again.
So I'm still not running.
Saturday July 5 (one hour)
Did my first test run on the new Wilbur field, built on top of a subterranean parking structure. It's very smooth and even, and softer than the fields at Caltech. It's also right across the street from where I live. Look like I'll be there a lot.
Thursday July 3 (40 minutes)
A wound on my left forearm, leftover from the bike accident, became infected. I'm on antibiotics for a while, and showering is difficult due to the wrap covering that area. To add to my health problems, while awkwardshowering the other day, I managed to contort myself sufficiently to pull a muscle in my back.
Nonetheless, it was my day off today, and I finally got myself together enough to go for an easy run on my standard out-and-back to El Camino and Palm Drive. I haven't run more than twice in the past few weeks - once on a semi-adventure run with Katherine and Ian and once at night before I was beset by a bee sting/reopened throbbing hand wound.
After the run, I feel out of shape, but that seems to be the worst of it. The back muscle I had pulled started to get sore towards the end of the run, but didn't seize up or ache afterwards. Except for my forearm, the wounds from the bike crash are no longer a major issue. The worst spots were on my hands, but now even those have fairly-healthy looking patches of skin over them. They wouldn't hold up to gripping weights, I think, but daily life is not a problem.
The course of antibiotics finishes next Monday or Tuesday. After that I should be almost back to a normal person again.
Bike Trip
The first thing that came back was that large, indeterminate chunk of time had passed. The next was that I was on a couch in Lower Crotch, and the third was that there was a pleasantly-oval-shaped pile of my own vomit on the carpet beneath me.
My departure time for the trip was scheduled to be three hours ago, and I was hung over. I made an attempt to wipe up the vomit with a paper towel. Then I messed around with my crap, drank a bunch of water, and made another attempt at cleaning the vomit, this time with a wet paper towel.
I still had to mail myself some things, which I did and finally got started around noon an a 400-mile trek towards Stanford. My first step was to bike through LA. On surface streets.
After an hour of potholes I was on a crowded noisy street in some industrial park with a long line of tractor trailers belching at me from a few feet away. I was attempting to huddle under the shade the the single tree in the area, but failing, as I changed a flat. I couldn't pump up the new tube. I had bought a pump specifically for this trip, but never used or tested it. Pumped up the old tube. It held pressure so I put it back on the bike. No, it was really flat. I switched in the new tube. Couldn't pump it up. Took out the new tube and pumped it sitting there on the sidewalk. Finally, in a momentary lull in the rumblings of the engines around me, I heard the hiss of death. My brand new tube had a hole in it. I patched both, and put in my third tube.
I thought Los Angeles would never end. It was brutally hot. There were stoplights everywhere. I was getting saddle sore, and worse my lower back was aching horribly. There was too much traffic and no usable shoulder. But at last, quite suddenly, I looked up from the road and saw the sea.
There was a bike path that wound along the beach. It was a ridiculous mode of transportation considering how it wound back and forth incessantly with turns to sharp to navigate at any reasonable speed, but I was so glad to be out of the traffic that I happily rode along until it ended. From there I picked up the PCH, which was another disaster, since it was being resurfaced and was simply a long, gutted stretch of bumps for the next two miles.
In the early evening the road smoothed out beneath me. I looked out and realized all I had to do from now on was to keep the ocean on my left. I was saddle sore despite the bike shorts Ian and Kangway cajoled me into buying. My hands were tired, and my lower back was campaigning ever-more vigorously for a long, motionless rest break, preferably in zero-G. The wind had never ceased blowing into my face. But I felt that wind in the cooling air, and thought suddenly how glad I was to be out here. Doing something new and alone, and taking myself fantastic distances under just the power of my own body. Independent, unworried except by the most trivial matters of corporeal existence.
I road through Malibu until around 7, when I saw a tiny strip of grass by a sidewalk. It was about two feet wide, but I am even less wide than that. I lay down on it, groaning as the load finally came off my lower back, and ate handful after handful of the last loaf of bread I had baked for myself. I swallowed horizontally while the clouds floated up above.
Half an hour later I was back on the bike, still saddle sore and aching in my lower back, but mostly able to deal with it. I climbed a few big hills and wound up by the Leo Cabrillo campsite just as darkness set it. There was a shower and all, I didn't pay a penny (since I kind of hid my stuff back behind a tree in a vacant camp spot), and got a long night's rest.
I got my next flat an hour into the second day. Further, my pump was now definitely broken, since I somehow lost the piece that seals the pump to the tube. Fortunately, there were lots of bikers around, and a good Samaritan stopped to pump me up. He rode off, and I realized the patched tube was still flat. The process was repeated with the other patched tube and another good Samaritan, which left me walking until someone else actually gave me a tube, which went flat immediately when he rode away. I popped the tire off to check for anything that could cause this, but found nothing. So I walked.
I walked about four hours before someone pulled up alongside. It turns out he was a professional bike something (since it was on his business card), though I lost his name. He personally replaced my tube, demonstrated that I was getting flats because I was pinching the tube while using tire irons to pop the tire back on the wheel, and then drove me to the nearest bike shop to buy new tubes, a pump, and some other stuff.
I finally got on my way again in the early afternoon, and after ten minutes I was back on the trail with the ocean to my left. I made Santa Barbara around 5pm. At this point, I was following surface streets because route 1 had merged with route 110, a limited-access freeway where bicycles were clearly not invited.
Fortunately, there were these little signs posted around Santa Barbara that said "Pacific Coast Bike Route" and pointed which way to go. Unfortunately, they weren't actually directions. They were a trap laid to lure unsuspecting bicyclists into an exploration of half of the city's dead ends and circular drives.
I'm still not sure how I actually got out of that city four hours later, but I found a road that followed the side of the highway and took it until it dead ended at a fence 16 miles short of where highway 1 becomes ridable again.
It was about 10 already, so I locked the bike to a fence post, took out my bag, drank a can of tomato sauce, and went to sleep in the field. A couple hours later there was suddenly a bright flashlight being shone in my face and a man in uniform behind it.
"Is that your bike over there?"
"uh, what? no, my bikes over that way..."
"What, out in the field?"
"wait, where am I? Oh, yeah, that's my bike over there."
"Where I said the first time?"
"Yeah. That's right. Is it okay for me to stay in this field?"
"Hmm, well I guess so. But just so you know, we found a body in this field the other day."
"I see."
"Okay, well, just be careful. Also, there's been lots of reports of bear around this area."
"Right."
"That's all then. Have a nice trip."
"Thanks."
I went back to sleep for a few hours, but at 3am I woke up and realized that the traffic on the highway was down to one or two cars a minute, and that since I was trapped with no other visible route to where I wanted to be, now would probably be the best time to get through the twenty miles or so between where I was and the split I wanted to obtain.
I carefully lifted my stuff item by item over the barbed wire fence, hoisted my bike over, climbed over myself, and reassembled everything on the other side. I got started down the road, and realized it wasn't bad at all. There was a wide shoulder, I had a blinky, and there was very little traffic. However, my free dynamo flashlight wasn't much of a headlamp, since it was in the process of dying and would only illuminate the road ahead of me for thirty seconds or a minute at a time before I needed to recrank it. Still, without incident I rolled into a rest area two miles from where the highways split, got out my sleeping bag, and took a few more hours of sleep before beginning day three.
My hopes were high as I packed up the next morning. I was sure I would finally have a day without excessive flats, getting lost, etc, since it seemed from the map there was nothing but good long stretches of highway out in front of me. I thought I would knock off a huge chunk of mileage.
There was good highway. It happened to be going over mountains. I climbed through the mountains for 20 miles into Lompoc, took a rest, and got started again on the way to San Luis Obispo. Coming down another mountain, I suddenly felt the bike swerving beneath me. It wobbled back and forth underneath me five or six times, wobbling a little further each time. I tried to think whether I should hit the brakes or not, but soon I was on the shoulder rolling with the bike chasing behind me.
I had fallen before, but this time I was going 25 or 30 miles an hour, down a hill. When I realized I was going over, I saw how fast the ground was coming towards me and when I hit it I rolled down the shoulder, not sure when I would stop, and thought it was possible this could kill me.
But I did stop quickly. I had fallen off the side of the bike, and it lay just a bit behind me. I never lost consciousness, and could move to get myself off the road. I started trying to flag down cars. The first two drove right past. I didn't understand how you could just drive past someone bleeding by the side of the road far from anywhere. But within a minute a man had stopped and was wrapping a shirt around my bleeding arm and calling 911.
An EMT stopped just after that and started speaking in an authoritative voice, which was nice. There was some pain, but nothing unbearable. I was bleeding pretty well from some deep cuts on my forearm, and was scraped up all over, but wasn't in terrible shape. I crashed right by Vandenburg Air Force base, and within fifteen minutes there were five or six individuals, a fire truck crew, and an ambulance all crowded around me.
They wrapped some gauze around the obvious things, asked me a bunch of questions, and strapped me to a big plastic board. I rode to the hospital and spent a few hours getting cleaned up, wrapped up, and briefly x-rayed. It was too late in the evening to get a bus, so I spent the night in a motel and took the greyhound up to Stanford the next morning to stay and recuperate with JR for the remaining days before camp started.
I'm still not totally healed. Once at Stanford, I took some long afternoon walks and got fairly badly sunburned so that I'm still peeling. The scrapes on my hands were especially difficult to heal because the new skin and scabs would form while I slept with my hand bunched up, and when I opened it up in the morning the skin would rip apart again. I was finally able to run one day last week, but then next afternoon got stung by a bee. The bee sting was on my leg, which swelled up for three days. After that, I was recruited for the "counselor's relay" in the camp olympics, fell down while sprinting, and reopened the scabs that were finally healing on my right hand. Also, I think the deeper wounds in my forearm may be infected, so I could have a lot more fun with this before it's over.
Tuesday/Wednesday (no running)
No running. I've decided to split my more personal/flight of fancy blogging off separately.
Arcsecond
I also won't be updating for the next week or week and a half due to lack of internet. I've on my way to bike from Pasadena to Palo Alto to start my summer job at Stanford. I think my basic plan is to follow Route 1 as far as Santa Cruz, then cut up towards Palo Alto on Route 17. This is based off of staring dumbly at a road map I bought an hour ago.
Monday June 10 (easy)
Garfield the long way with Matt. First time I've gotten to run with him in some obscenely-long interval. I feel like I've just been living in some bubble for the last three weeks, and now that I'm out I'm leaving.
Also the first time I've run on the roads in a long time, but it didn't seem to cause any problems.
Sunday June 9 (NFTC)
I definitely did something bad to my knee. I had no problem going 40 minutes with Kangway and Dennis at the NFTC meeting today, but I could feel a little stiffness, weakness, or soreness all in and around my knee. I get very worried about extending it fully - this seems to be what bothers it most. I'm thinking it could be a hamstring tendon, but I have no real idea. I don't think it's bad yet, so I better play it safe and go easy on it for now.
Saturday June 8 (easy)
Went to the South Field at night and jogged an untimed run. I felt so wonderful that in the middle I broke out into a few spontaneous striders that turned into full-bore sprinting through tall grass and thin artificial light. Afterwards, I stretched out excessively before returning home.
This seems to have been unwise. My right knee was hurting walking around later that night, in the fleshy area in the back of the knee. It felt slightly painful but mostly weakened.
Friday June 6 (easy)
I turned in the exams. Now I just need to wait for word from the Registrar that all is in order, and I'm good.
Did an indeterminate-length run on the North Field with Kangway, plus a little lifting. I just felt good to get some sort of physical activity in, even if we both spent the entire time complaining to each other about how out of shape we are.
Also, this a photo of Shalane Flanagan and Kim Smith after they broke their respective national 10,000m records at Stanford earlier this year:
First
"Introduction to Sexual Intercourse for Scientists and Engineers"
there, I'm the first one to immortalize it on the internet
Total nerd-out
I was supposed to be doing quantum in the library, but I accidentally picked up a book on mathematical physics and read it for an hour. Then a couple days later I was daydreaming about how I would lecture on vectors to my summer camp kids, and I suddenly got extremely nervous about something. As in, I had a total crisis of faith about the rigor of our mathematical description of the physical universe, which led me to start this post on the physics forums. I really hope someone answers so I can sleep in peace again.
As for the rest of life, well, it's going.
Update Chunk / Mostly Ranting
Here's something I wrote about KELROF for the Tech
Also my photos
and Mike's Photos
KELROF was amazing. Everything fell into place perfectly. I couldn't have imagined a better series of performances from our guys, or a cooler bunch of people to suffer with.
Now that it's over, I'm having a hard time training seriously. School is just kicking my butt. I've gotten out there and run easy a few times, but I don't have the mental energy to divide between hard, consistent studying and trying to focus on three straight weeks of sharpening/peaking. The stress of trying to graduate just doesn't go well with peak athletic performance. So I'm not worrying about it. I'm putting Jim Bush on ice. I'm a slow-heat kind of guy at that meet, anyway. I still want to run, but there are priorities.
On the one hand, I know that really all I need to do is just turn in anything. I really doubt the profs will make me stay another year. But relying on that pity-pass phenomenon is too fitting an end to my entire Caltech education. When I look back at it, I actually have learned an awful lot of physics. When I'm presented with a problem in the real world, I have some idea how to understand it to order of magnitude right off the bat, and know the general idea behind how I would start researching it if I wanted to do a good job. It's the morass of details and technicalities that fill up the problem sets that I'm pissed off about. The problem is the profs need some way to differentiate the students, so they choose problems not for their instructive value or the physical insight they grant, and not for their innate interest or applicability to physical research, but for their technical difficulty. If you know everything forwards and backwards, you shoot through those details to the heart of the problem. If you know everything forwards only and not backwards, you can wade through. Finally, if you know everything in outline but don't really know it forwards, you can say a thing or two about the problem but can't really solve it. Right now, I know the E&M stuff forwards but not backwards, and the QM stuff in vague outline. Still, vague outline is a significant improvement.
It seems there's three or four physics majors (out of twenty) in each class who can actually handle Caltech. They come in two types - brilliant (future eminent physicists) and extremely hard-working (future competent physicists). The rest are sort of getting dragged along for the ride, giving answers that satisfy the professors and TA's, picking up a bit of stuff here and there, but mostly it's a process of being tethered behind a fast-moving vehicle and just fighting the keep your legs underneath you as it pulls you along.
I frequently find myself distracted from the "advanced undergraduate" studies, and going back on a whim to examine the basic stuff (i.e. what if we define the natural logarithm by *this* property instead of *that* one, now how do you show the two are equivalent?, or, how do we justify this theorem we always use on the commutativity of partial derivatives?, or, is it just coincidence that the cross product can be written as a determinant, and how does this generalize to higher dimensions?, or, how can I derive the vector derivatives in curvilinear coordinates based solely on their physical interpretations?, etc). I know all that stuff forwards, and over the past year I've been learning bit by bit of it backwards as well. This is an enjoyable process for me. When you understand something in a superficial way, it becomes a bit of knowledge stored on a shelf somewhere in your brain, hopefully in a prominent-enough location that you can pull it down when someone asks you to. But when you understand something in four or five different ways, you get the entire picture. It comes down off the shelf and gets incorporated into you. It fits in neatly with all the rest of your knowledge. You can wield it like a tool that's become an extension of your body. But instead of violin bow extending your hand and arm, it's Fourier series extending your understanding of physical resonance, or vector calculus extending your understanding of 3-dimensional geometry. I'm not allowed to do that though. There isn't enough leeway, isn't enough time, to go through and master that steps bit by bit so that the more advanced material, when you come to it, grows up naturally as an extension of what you already know, or as a necessary and logical outgrowth in a new direction. Instead, it's frequently a strange, unconnected, and confusing formalism floating out there and demanding to be used on the next set.
I think that the professors, who have been using their mathematical tools as aids to their physical intuition for decades, tend to forget that we're not yet as competent. We can't follow their lucid explanations and clever formulations in real time during lecture, even though we can, with considerable effort, answer their questions correctly on the problem sets. It's like a college orchestra, though it may sound technically proficient, still can't interpret the subtlety in cues from Herbert von Karajan.
So what I want to do is to finish the degree, understanding the best I'm able, and then to explore things on my own terms, and at my own pace. My pace is, unfortunately, not genius pace. But not-genius pace is just fine for someone who delights in the little bits of understanding they chance upon, treasures them one by one, and over time builds an ever-more coherent, ever-more elegant model of reality.
Friday May 9 (60 minutes)
Jogging in prep for KELROF tomorrow, then pre-race dinner at Ian's. It was weird because I was supposed to be "in charge" and "know things". Dammit. I hate when that happens. I need to pass this off to someone else for next year.
Thursday May 8 (speed)
5x500, run as 400 at goal 1500 pace straight into 100m kick at 93% effort, approximately.
20 minute warm-up, then 3x200 cruising to work my way up to speed. Then I started the workout.
I hit 63 for the first 400 on all five repeats, although on numbers 2 and 3 it was a slightly-faster 63 than on numbers 1, 4, 5. The kicks varied a bit. Number one was felt quite strong, although as soon as I started it my legs burned. I was going every 4:00 (300m jog/walk recovery), so recovery time was about double sprinting time. Number two was still a good, quick kick. Three and four were noticeably faster than the 400 that preceded them, but maybe a bit slower than the first two kicks since I was hurting. Number five I made myself kick all-out because I have to learn to do that eventually, and it worked out fine. I didn't feel like I was going super-fast, but I held whatever speed I did work up throughout the entire straightaway.
Afterwards I was pretty toasted. I would have done 4x200, but I felt like I wouldn't be able to run them faster than the pace I had done for the workout, so I just jog/walked three laps of cool down. I did a little core afterwards, but couldn't muster up much effort for it.
I'm happy with the workout. 63 is pretty quick for me, and I was still able to kick off it, completing a total of 2500m worth of work.
Before my 4:03 time trial I did 6x300 in 46 average. This seems superior.
Wednesday May 7 (long)
90 minutes on the south field around the Los Feliz Flyers. Morgan joined me for a bit. I'm getting pumped about KELROF. We've put together a very good group of guys to make a run for it. 5:28 average may or may not be within our power, but at least we'll have a lot of solidarity as we suffer together.
We've got shirts, although they won't arrive until after the event. We have food and athletic trainers and the facilities will be open, so I guess that about covers it. I have three teams entered now, although it'd be nice if a fourth is out there somewhere and simply hasn't made its presence known just yet. I have food and funding based on 60 people, so it'll be a little embarrassing if my yield is only half that.
I felt fine on the run. Six strides near the end. Core plus a little lifting afterwards.
Monday May 5, Tuesday May 6 (midterms)
Didn't run much. Twenty minutes on Monday morning, but that was about it. Got through the quantum midterm, though.
Sunday May 4, 2008 (1500m 4:05.84, 800m 2:02)
Splits something like 66/2:11/3:16/4:05.84
1500 felt very strange. I wasn't at all used to running in a pack. It didn't feel horribly fast. It did feel surprisingly short. I couldn't understand why everybody around me was breathing so hard, or why they seemed so eager to go to this exact spot on the track right now. I stepped on people's heel several times as I moved up a bit, then got stuck. I realized it's very difficult to move when you want. You have to either be content to sit right where you are, or be prepared to spend a lot of energy moving around, at least when the pack is as tight as it was today.
With 500 to go I realized that I ought to get moving because the leader was starting to get a gap on the pack, and I felt good enough to chase. I had to slow down to get clear, then move all the way to lane three, then sprint down the homestretch to get to the front. By the time I did that, I came up on the leader's shoulder with a lot of momentum going, so I just decided to make a move and see what happened. The announcer called my name as I did, and I felt great for about 150 of the last lap. I thought as I started it that I might run close to 60 seconds. But with 200 to go I started hurting badly, and had to focus to keep from falling apart. A few guys inevitably came past again, and I finished in fifth. The winner seemed happy to have had me make the move and keep things interesting, though, and I'll see him again at Jim Bush.
Considering that I hadn't run 1500 in two years, that I have done only a bit of training for it, that I raced the night before and was tired and sore before the race, and that I still hit an official 1500 PR and came close to my ideal-conditions time trial time, I'd say the race was a success. I think that with another month of training and fresh legs I have good chances for a sub-4:00 performance at Oxy.
Matt ran 3:57.01 in the heat ahead of me despite non-optimal splits, so he's in position to go for a qualifier at Oxy next week.
About two and a half hours later I jumped in the NFTC 800m Carnival. Kangway led and I came through in 60. With 300 to go I moved and tried to keep the pace up. I felt myself slowing down, but maybe with someone right there next to me I could have knocked off another second. 2:02. Ian ran a shockingly-fast 2:04, despite very little training for it. Kangway came in around 2:10 and Chief 2:15 or so. A good time trial, for being basically exhausted before it started. Close to my PR of 2:01.84 from summer '06.
Kangway then redeemed himself with a NFTC record of 24.9 in the 200, and egg pizza was enjoyed by all.
Saturday May 3, 2008 (5000m 15:21.11)
PR. Pretty good race. Chris Raub was there on the infield yelling for me. Splits about 4:56, 4:52, 4:56, 36 = 15:21.11
Moves me up to number three on the Caltech all-time list, past Pete Cross (15:21.2).
Probably the worst thing I did was Thursday of this week, after not being able to run due to poison oak, I went a little stir-crazy and did some leg press. I didn't put on a whole lot of weight compared to what I've done in the past (290 compared to 400 lbs), but I probably did more reps, and also wasn't used to it. My legs were sore heading into the race. I don't know what possessed me to make me engage in such frivolty, but what's done is done. At least I had a race that didn't involve a horrible last mile.
It panned out much like the other races I've done this year. I started out all the way in back and moved up past people. I was even passing people as late as the last 800m of this race. I still had no significant kick. This time, though, that was partially due to my having a very strong urge to have a bowel movement right when the bell rang (I had 700 to go, and did not get lapped).
I didn't meet my goal of running faster than the CMS guys at Ben Brown, but I averaged faster than them over the year, anyway. Also, I improved my time just in time and just enough to stay ahead of Arianna Lambie, who ran 15:22 at Stanford on Sunday.
This puts a close on my 5000m season. Earlier in the year I thought I could go under 15:00, but I just didn't put the pieces together to do that. My training was inconsistent and a bit unfocused. My diet and lifestyle haven't been ideal. I'm probably five to eight pounds too heavy, thirty or forty hours behind on sleep over the last month, and three or four good workouts short of where I should have been. But, I guess I learned some things this season as well.
Back at the beginning of it, I essentially felt entitled to the times I expected to run later. It seemed inevitable. But nothing happens just because you think you deserve it. It only happens if you take responsibility to make it. I've chosen to train essentially on my own because I like that independence and wanted that freedom and responsibility. But I have yet to demonstrate that I'm truly competent in training myself. Over the next month I'll be moving on to 1500 training with the goal of breaking 4:00. I want to improve consistently over this month and set the pattern for a career of excellent training and racing.
Friday May 2 (60 minutes)
Pre-race jogging on the north field. Last night my bicycle seat broke. I was just at Matt and Katherine's at the time, so I left the bike there and walked home, it being too dark to accomplish much else. I went back at lunch today and realized that it didn't just come apart (it had been loose for a while). The bolt that holds the seat on had snapped in half. This is not a little joke bolt, either. Probably a good 8mm thick, and it just ripped in two underneath me. I didn't think I had been putting on that much weight taking two or three days off.
Anyway, I ended up doing a lot of walking today, and since I ran eight hours or so after lunch, I was feeling pretty depleted by run time.
For tomorrow I think I can go after one more PR at 5000 this year. My original goal of 15:00 doesn't seem like the smart thing to shoot for, but I know that I can put together a race better than the last two, so I just want to get out there and do it.