Boston 2014

I set the goal of qualifying for and entering the Boston Marathon on the 4^th of October in 2003. I was crying, I was bleeding, I was shivering, I was disoriented and I had a freshly minted 4:57:39 marathon PR. To anyone who has run a marathon, I do not need to explain why I was crying: the emotional investment into finishing a marathon is enormous, especially for a new runner. Not everyone cries at the end of their first marathon but I would wager that 9 of 10 runners feel something overwhelming at the finish line of their first marathon.

Why I was bleeding is a bit more difficult to explain. Despite what one might expect, I was not bleeding from my nipples. I was not that first time marathoner. I was bleeding from my right shin. About three weeks before the race I had been hit by a shard of glass from a Molotov cocktail that someone had tossed off of the roof of my fraternity house. It happens. You get your stitches and go on with life. Unfortunately, my doctor had recommended I not run for at least 4 weeks so that the gash could heel up. The glass had punched through to the bone so all I had was the skin tied together by the stitches with nothing behind. I was no smarter back then than I am now. I took the next couple weeks off from running (which wasn’t really that difficult because I hadn’t really been training for this marathon) but then ran the race. About 8 miles into the race I twisted my ankle missing the edge of the road’s shoulder while moving out of the way of a car. When I found my way to my feet I noticed that the gash had torn open again.

I figured that if I turned around and went back to the start that I would have gone 16 miles with nothing to show for it. If I kept on going then it was only an extra 10 miles and I would have finished my first marathon (and incidentally, my first run longer than 15 miles). I was still running when I got to the half marathon mark but by then runners were already streaming by me like…like…well, like runners who know what the hell they’re doing running past a 20 year old kid with a bum leg who thought that running a 6 minute mile for the first mile of his first race which happened to be a marathon would be a good idea.

It was a cool but not cold day for October in New Hampshire but I wasn’t generating the heat that I needed. I had skipped breakfast and was soaked in sweat from the start of the race when I had burned myself out. The sweat had rapidly cooled and between the hunger, the dehydration and the exhaustion I could not stop from shivering. I began to forget a time before the marathon. I began to forget that there was anyone else running this race. It was just me, trudging along somewhere between a limp and a jog, slowly inching toward a finish line that I no longer believed existed.

I didn’t own a watch or an mp3 player so I had no concept of time but as eternity gave way to more endless road I somewhat suddenly came upon downtown Bristol, New Hampshire. This told me that the end was near but it never seemed to come any closer. I cannot describe the eternity of agony that I endured between the Mile 26 marker and the finish line. Surely there had never been a longer 0.22 mile long piece of road.

Looking back at the standings I see that there was someone only 4 seconds ahead of me at the finish and someone just 26 seconds behind but I have no recollection of either of them. I don’t have any memory of crossing the finish line. I recall the endlessness of the tarmac and I recall standing in the field near the finish line, wrapped in my parent’s blue car blanket with my finisher medal around my neck. There is no time in between those two times but in that gap the tears had welled up and I could not speak.

Thirty people finished that race slower than me so the course was still open but there wasn’t that much going on around the finish line more than two hours after the winners had come through so we got back into the car. I still could not speak, the best I could manage was to nod or shake my head, and I was still shivering but I had a slice of pizza and I had a new goal: qualify for and run Boston before I age out of the Men’s Open division.

On that day there was no real indication that I would ever run the 3:10:59 that I needed to qualify for Boston but I had 15 years before I turned 35 and the qualifying time would get slightly longer. A year later I went back to Bristol to run the New Hampshire Marathon and surprised myself with a big PR of 3:51:01. Of all of my marathons, this is the only one that I have no specific memories from. It just sort of happened. I recall joking with my college friends after that if I kept cutting 1:06:38 off of my marathon PR every year I would qualify for Boston in one year, break the world record the year after and quite soon break the speed of light.

Your improvement is never linear. It may be for a very small time (in fact it always is if you only look at 2 races) but it doesn’t stay that way for long. The next year I went back to Bristol for my third race and clocked 4:12:00. In 2006 I returned to the New Hampshire Marathon for my final crack at this running thing. I had finished three marathons already, I didn’t have anything to prove to anyone else, I just wanted to go out with a sub 4 marathon and call it a running career. I finished in 3:33:00, 19 seconds later the Women’s winner crossed the finish line.

“Damn, I’m actually pretty fast,” I thought to myself. I got a flyer in the mail for the Feaster 5 and decided that since I was so fast at the marathon I should go try to win this little 5 miler. I had just run a 3:33:00 marathon, how hard could a 5 mile race be?

I ran 37:03. It was faster than I thought people could run a 5 miler. It was faster than 7:30/mile pace for god’s sake! If you’re reading this blog then you know as well as I do now that this is not that fast. I was beaten by 301 runners and very nearly threw up on the course. I was over a mile and a half from the finish line when the race was won. It didn’t matter. I had run faster than 8 min/mile for a distance race and had placed in the top 20%. I wanted more. Again, I wanted Boston.

The 2006 Feaster 5 gave me my first race photo!

I ran my 6^th, 7^th and 8^th races in 2007 but didn’t take a crack at the marathon due to injuries from soccer. My next year was pretty crazy (I ran 49 races that year to bring my lifetime total to 57). Five years to the day after my first marathon I was out at the Sports Page bar in Beverly. I was a bit drunk and someone mentioned that a friend was running the Maine Marathon the next day. I thought it was a great idea so at 4:30am my alarm went off and I drove to Portland for race day registration.

I was lucky that they had race day registration. Despite the hangover I crossed the finish line in 3:24:05. I was really starting to think that Boston was a possibility soon. I only needed to shave 13:06 off of my time to qualify and I had already cut over an hour and a half from my first race.

After that race, the marathon changed for me. I now expected to qualify for Boston and wanted to do so in sub 3 fashion. A month later I ran 4:45:16. Then I had a DNS at Hyannis 2009, a DNF at Rotterdam 2009, a DNS at Outer Banks 2009, DNS at New York City 2010, DNS at Cape Cod 2011, a 3:48:32 at Napoli 2012 and a 3:40:31 at Cape Cod 2012. In that same time span the qualification time for Boston had tightened to 3:05:00. My confidence of qualifying in the Men’s Open division was at an all-time low.

Well, it eventually happened last spring. I got a qualifier with a BQ-2:13 and the cut-off to get into Boston for 2014 turned out to be BQ-1:38. I got my email saying that I was in during a process characterization meeting. I read the email after the meeting and texted Sarah: “In”.

I did not yet know how to sum up my feelings about getting into Boston so all I sent were those two characters. Days later, I still don’t think that I can sum up my feelings any better than: “In”.

It has been a long road for me to get into Boston. I have run 6026.10 miles (that I know of, I started keeping a log in December 2009) and completed 180 races and have 2 DNFs and 6 DNSs. (One could argue that there were many more than 6 races that I have not started, but I define a DNS as a race I paid to enter and then for whatever reason did not run).

Almost everyone who runs has a deeply personal connection of some sort to the Boston Marathon and this year more so than any other year. I do not “deserve” to have one of the 36,000 numbers that will be handed out for this race. I did not get in because I ran a qualifier; I got in not because of what my time was at the Maine Coast Marathon but because of what other people’s marathon times were relative to a somewhat arbitrary standard based on their gender and age.

When I was young, the first two Super Bowls that I remember watching pitted first the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Dallas Cowboys and then the Green Bay Packers against the New England Patriots. These games were events unto themselves; they were greater than just football games. There were fireworks, there were rock concerts, and they were really something. The next year I watched the Denver Broncos beat the Green Bay Packers. Looking back on those three games now; the best football game was the third. The Packers and the Broncos fought it out right down to the last second of the game but at the time I found myself disappointed with that Super Bowl even before it started.

I stole this photo from somewhere on the internet. I do not have express written consent from ABC and the NFL

When the Packers played the Broncos it was an outdoor game in southern California. The sun was shining, the flags were waving in the wind and I realized for the first time that the Super Bowl was just a football game. When the superfluous pageantry was stripped away from the game it was still a 100 yard long by 50 yard wide bit of turf and the clock still ran for 60 minutes just like in the regular season. At that moment I felt like something was stolen from me. I felt like this thing, this event, the “magic” of the Super Bowl was gone forever and I would always see it just as another football game.

Now I understand that it wasn’t something that was stolen from me. It was something that was given.

Perhaps I would have called it a moment of clarity if I was a drunk, but being a high school freshman at that time I was neither drunk nor aware of the phrase “moment of clarity”.

The Boston Marathon is no different.

There are qualifying standards to get into Boston just as there are playoffs to get into the Super Bowl but when you strip aside the media attention, the advertising dollars, the awards, the internet discussions, the medals and crowd along the side of the course what you are left with is 26.22 miles of pavement just like every other marathon.

I have heard some people say that the marathon is just another long run. I have heard other people say that the marathon is just a celebration of your hard work. Yet others have been heard claiming that the Boston Marathon is a victory lap for your qualifying race. The marathon is none of these and yet all of them.

What the marathon IS depends far less on the race course, the race director or even the history or pedigree of the race. What the marathon IS depends solely on the runner.

For me the marathon is agony and ecstasy. It is fear, aggression, rage and calm contemplation. It is every human emotion that exists in life condensed into one infinitesimally small blip in my life. It is a race. The swag doesn’t matter. The media coverage doesn’t matter. The crowd vanishes from my view no matter how close they stand or how loud they cheer. It is only me and 26.22 miles of my old friend: public road. It is a race and that next singlet in front of me is either getting closer of farther away. All that matters is closing the gap on that singlet and moving on to the next one.

Since I have been accepted into Boston, I will have to filter out all of the meaningless noise that comes with the Boston Marathon so that I can focus on training and racing. Had I not been accepted into Boston, the only difference is that I would be racing against a different field.

So I will not celebrate my acceptance into Boston. I will not celebrate finishing Boston and if I PR at Boston I may not celebrate that PR. Boston, like every other race, is just another step in preparing for the next race to come after.

Whether you are training for Boston or some other race; best of luck training injury free!

Why I think "that guy" got it all wrong:

Okay, so by now everyone has read the article about how the “color run” is killing competitive running or is at the very least indicative of a general lack of competitiveness among younger runners. I am clearly oversimplifying the article. This is a bit of a challenge as I felt that the original article was oversimplified to start with.

Here is the link: Some guy grubling about kids these days...

The article starts our bemoaning that the author placed at about 15% in the Men’s 50-59 age group and that his AG outperformed the field such that he finished 11% deep into the field. The knee jerk reaction is to say that he has made the incredible discovery that men run faster on average than women. The more concerning issue is that from this limited data he draws the broad conclusion that the competitiveness of younger runners is gone.

“They're just not very fast. "There's not as many super-competitive athletes today as when the baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s," said Ryan Lamppa, spokesman for Running USA, an industry-funded research group.”

I have heard this before but I still don’t believe it.

I think that a 4 minute mile is a good measure of being a "super-competitive" runner.

What is that I see? The top runners in America aren’t getting slower? More people are breaking the 4 minute mile than ever? What about the lack of competitiveness in younger runners?

The 4 minute mile is a measure of the most competitive runners. Maybe the author of the aforementioned article might argue that he was not referring to elite runners but rather to the runners at an average weekend race. Perhaps the elite runners are supposed to be excluded when discussing “super-competitive athletes”?

What we do see over the past 20 years is a serious explosion of interest in racing. In 2012 there were 15.5 million race finishers, 44% of finishers were male. In 1990 there were about 4.75 million race finishers, 75% of which were male.

If we assume that the distribution in terms of racing speed across the entire American population is roughly normal it would look something like this:

What we should expect is that most of the people who fall into the >2 standard deviations faster than average were already racing 20 years ago. What we see now is that these people have not stopped racing. American records are getting faster; more people are breaking the 4 minute mile and there are still epic battles at the USATF New England championship races around here. What has happened is that more of us from the rest of the distribution have started racing and there are now >3x more race finishers than there were in 1990!

The shift from 75% male to 56% female has also helped to change the average finish time at every distance. It is not a controversial statement that men are on average faster than women.

So what does all of this mean? To me, this means that runners are as competitive now as they have ever been if not more. Some of us take the starting line knowing that we are not that fast yet and don’t care. We race the people around us and lay everything on the line to beat everyone we can. We race for PRs and we race to push ourselves. The average finishing time at any given race is slower but now the probability of the average person taking on the challenge of a race is much higher.

If you don’t see the competition at the local level then you’re not looking in the right place. Visit the New Bedford Half Marathon or the Lone Gull 10km. Look at the USATF New England Grand Prix site and come run one of these races. If these are not competitive enough for you there are Club Nationals both at XC and Track to try out.

“Of course, there are countless super-elite young athletes. And only because the young have no need to prove they're not old was I able to outrace so many of them last month. Still, apathetic competition offers little comfort to some aging athletes.”

I'm not a super-elite athlete, but sometimes I will pick a shorter race like a 10k or Half Marathon to run at MP to practice the pace and practice taking liquids at race speed. My 6:30 pace might let you beat me and you will think that I am apathetic but it is not my job to comfort “aging athletes”. It is my goal to run my target races as fast as I possibly can.

In take away; while the author is worried about a lack of competitiveness from the new runners who take on the challenge of a race even though they are slower than an experienced senior runner, I will not be worrying about how many people are behind me. I will be worrying about how many people are in front of me and what I can do in my training to get faster than them. But then I’m 30 years old and us kids just aren’t that competitive anymore.

Back to a bit of running...

Talk about a long slump! It’s the 22^nd of August today and since I last posted on the 27^th of June (57 days ago) I have run just 160 miles. I raced only once in that span (on the last day of my 20s) and clocked a 17:53 for the 5k, nearly a full minute off of my PR. While my running life hasn’t been remotely interesting over this period I have done some stuff in my non-running life (what? I have one of those?) Here’s what’s happened since I last posted.

1)      Sarah and I bought a house.
2)      I turned 30.
3)      Sarah and I went on vacation to Ireland and Northern Ireland.

First: the house. It is small but we’re right by Oak Grove in Malden so Sarah can walk to the train to get in for work (this cuts ~30 minutes off of her commute each way). We’re also up on a hill so every run I do (though there have not been many yet) ends with an uphill sprint. From our front door it is only a 3 minute jog to get into the Fells (or Oakdale Park?). Even if it is Oakdale Park instead of the Fells, I can pick up the Cross Fells Trail (blue blazes) and get just about anywhere in the Fells I want.

Sarah gave me a BBQ!

We have a TV but so far have only connected Netflix. The lack of new programing has helped us to be productive with setting up the house. We will either get cable at some point or I’ll actually start getting more things done once the house is sorted…who knows which way this will go.

Second: turning 30. Shit. Now I have to race against Bash and Bui…no more AG awards for me for a while. It was nice running in my 20s where you can get a medal at almost any local race just by showing up and running <6 min/mile (you can still do this in your 30s for half marathons, full marathons and so forth but not 5ks).

I was 20 years old when I ran my first race (10/4/03 New Hampshire Marathon 4:57:39). Yes, my first race was a marathon and no, I had yet to log 1000 miles in my life when I ran it. I set the goal of qualifying for Boston before I turned 30. At the time I needed to run 3:10:59 to get in. My first “brush” with qualification came in 2008. I ran 1:33:34 for the first half of the Maine Marathon before falling apart over the last 6 miles and walking it in for 3:24:05. I had no business running 1:33:34 over the first half because I had run a Half Marathon PR one week earlier at the Wicked Half Marathon. That PR was 1:35:46.

At my next 2 marathons (2012 Napoli, Italy 3:48:32 and 2012 Cape Cod 3:40:31), I ran the first half progressively faster (1:31:41 at Napoli, 1:29:33 at Cape Cod) without getting any closer to actually qualifying. A week after Cape Cod, I ran the first half of Manchester City in 1:37:00 to see if a slower first half would produce a faster finish. It did. I came home with 3:17:30 which was a PR but not a whole lot closer to qualifying than my 3:24:05 had been because the standard had been tightened to <3:05:00.

After Sarah and I got back from Machu Picchu I started training with Mike Toomey and took another stab at the marathon. At the Maine Coast Marathon I went through the half in about 1:25, faded and finished in 3:02:47. I got the qualifier before turning 30 (yay) but when Boston rolls around I will need to run a much smarter race.

The joy of qualifying and the disappointment of dropping from 3^rd place at the half all the way back to 8^th place at the finish were hard for me to process together. I could make excuses about how my mixed emotions played into my lack of running over the past ~2 months but in reality it was mostly that I was (a) busy buying a house, cramming work in to be ready to leave for Ireland and then on a 2 week vacation all over the island and (b) lazy. It was mostly the lazy thing.

While my mileage hasn’t gone up I have check off some more Massachusetts cities and some more countries in my goal of running in all 351 Massachusetts cities, all 50 US states and all 197 UN recognized countries. I am now at 62 MA cities, 13 US states and 12 Countries.

Third: Ireland. It was awesome. We saw ruins. I drank many stouts and a bunch of whisky. I ate a LOT of stew, brown bread, pie and chips and a lot of carrot cake. I really need to work on getting my base back in place for my next racing goal.

 

 

MY NEXT RACING GOAL!!!

I haven’t really had one of these in a while but now I finally do!

I am going to race the mile over the winter.

I have my eye on 5 meets. The plan will be to run the 800m at the first two meets as a tune up and then race the mile at the last three. Dates have not been released for the meets yet but here is my tentative schedule based on when the races were last year:

12/14/13: BU Mini Meet #1 - 800m
12/21/13: BU Mini Meet #2 - 800m
12/28/13: BU Mini Meet #3 - Mile
1/19/14: GBTC Invitational – Mile

12/28/13: BU Valentine Meet – Mile

I’m meeting with Mike Toomey early next month to put together a training plan and a set of goals for these meets but for now I’d like to cut 1 second off of each quarter for my first 800m race. That makes my goal 2:14 for the 800 at Mini Meet #1. I’m also planning on changing from a Monday – Sunday running week to a Saturday – Friday running week with 6 days of running and my rest day on Sunday.

I will plan on starting up weekly training updates again with the hope of putting out an update every Saturday. I hope this thing keeps me honest to my training so I can actually get some speed going this winter.

And finally, I can’t keep hiding from the start line just because my fitness is gone. Racing is a skill and I need practice so I’m off to run the first USATF NE XC GP race of the year this Saturday. Cheers and happy running!

Trying to avoid as much of a let down as this might become:

Despite missing my goals of (a) winning and (b) breaking 3:00:00, my Boston Qualification at the Maine Coast Marathon was an enormous emotional event for me. I would say that countless miles and hours of training went into this race, except for the fact that the actual count is 981.31 miles in 119:46:00 over the training cycle that started on 12/4/12 and ended on 5/11/13 (does not count the race itself).

As with my PR at the Madison Mini Marathon in 2009 (dropped my Half Marathon PR from 1:35:46 to 1:23:21), the effort and the instant sense of accomplishment has led to a huge drop in motivation and training.

On my way to cutting ~12 minutes off of my 1/2 Marathon PR

In 2009 I basically stopped running after the Madison Mini and took 17 days off before starting again with an appearance at the Danvers 5k. After shaking the rust off at Danvers, I went to Lynn the next evening to race the Central Square 5k. I ran an 18:08 (which at the time was only 37 seconds slower than my PR) and thought everything was OK because I finished in third place behind Doug Chick and Mike Toomey who had an interesting photo-finish…

Who's going to win???

I took a day off and ran an 18:01 at the Rowley Poker Run 5k. Feeling good about myself that I hadn’t lost much I took the next 27 days off.

 On 10/27/09 I decided to head to Melrose for the Allan Morrison 5k to get back into running. With nearly a month off I had most certainly lost a step. I finished in third place, but it took me 18:52.

What place you finish in has less to do with how you run and more to do with who shows up.

I completed my loss of fitness over the next week and clocked a 20:25 at the Witch City 5k for the third slowest I’ve ever run a 5k. After sliding out of shape over that two month stretch, that 20:25 finally made me realize I needed to start training again. November was a bit hit-or-miss and finally in December, I started the new training spreadsheet which has evolved into the 24 tab 500KB behemoth that I now use to track everything running related.

One would think that after going through this kind of experience once before (and then taking another 2.5 years to get back into good enough shape to break my 5k PR from 2009) I would be better equipped to avoid this kind of let-down after the Maine Coast Marathon. I wasn’t. Fortunately, I logged a Personal Worst less than a month after Maine Coast and that’s got me moving again.

May really wasn’t that bad. I ran 172.76 miles in 20:49:16 but didn’t have any solid workouts in that mileage after the marathon. The bottom really fell out when I went to Las Vegas with Abe, Bryan, Bryan and Jeff.

I'm not a huge fan of Las Vegas the city, but riding ATVs out in the sand was a lot of fun.

I don’t do well in the heat to start with. My lowest mileage months are always June through September. Las Vegas is hot. The temperature may have dipped into the double-digits while we were there, but if it did no one told me. The mercury hit 113°F on the Saturday.

I could have woken up extra early to run before the sun came up or I could have paid $30.00 per run to go to the Planet Hollywood gym but I didn’t. I ran 4 miles on the strip over the entire trip; bringing my lifetime mileage in Nevada to a whopping 9.09 miles (or 0.1611% of my total miles…yay for my overly complex training log)!

I came home from Vegas and was sleepy so I took 5 days off. By the half-way point in the month I had run 5 times for a grand total of 30.11 miles. I ran my “things are okay” race on 6/20. It was the JP Morgan Corporate Challenge; a 3.5 mile road race that features a field of 12000 runners all in one giant starting corral. I led the way for my company with a 20:02 (beating my Personal Best for the event by 27 seconds) and finished in 62^nd place. I focused too much on the PR and the placement and not enough on the fact that my 5:43.4 min/mile pace was almost 17 seconds per mile off my 5k PR even though the course is only 0.4 miles longer…

Team Axcelis cut ~4 minutes off of our team time from last year!

Two days later I got my rude awakening about how much fitness I’ve lost. I was at the Tufts track in Somerville to run the 21^st leg of the Club Challenge Marathon Relay for the Greater Lowell Road Runners. The event is one of my favorite racing events: 26 runners each run a mile on the track as Boston area running clubs compete to see what club can finish a marathon the fastest. Many thanks to the Somerville Road Runners for hosting this awesome event!

 

SRR won the event...again. GLRR's coming for it again next year so you guys better not slow down!

I was a part of one of the Greater Lowell Road Runners’ teams and thanks to some truly impressive performances by the rest of the team we were able to capture third place in 2:22:41. I thought that with my fitness from March (I think that I peaked a little early for Maine Coast) I could have run a 4:48. I adjusted my expectations to a 4:56 (0.5 seconds slower per 100m) and set out on pace for the first 200m of the race. I didn’t have the fitness that I needed. I was just on pace at 400m and already feeling like it was going to slip away. I went through the 800 in 2:32 which was only 3-5 seconds faster than I was doing my 10x 800m repeats over the winter. At 1200m my split was 3:50. I’ve run plenty of <70 quarters, but not this time. I ran as hard as I could for the final quarter but it took me 76 and I finished with a 5:06.

A mile on the track with Melissa? What is this, a race or a Toomey Clinic?

That 5:06 (while only 3 seconds off of my fastest mile, excluding the Millennium Mile which is heavily down-hill) was the slowest mile I’ve raced and only 10 seconds faster than the miles I was ending my 5x Mile workouts with over the winter. (Also, strictly speaking, this was a 1600m race rather than a Mile. If you extrapolated out we’re probably talking 5:07-5:08 for the full mile).

That was enough motivation for me. I’m looking for redemption at the Derby Street Mile in Salem, MA. The race is Friday 8/16/13. I started with 16x 200m this past Monday at an average pace of 4:48 min/mile to get the legs used to the speed again and I’ll slowly be ramping my track and hills work back up over the next couple of weeks. This goal race does mean that I will need to stay on top of my training while Sarah and I are on vacation in Ireland at the end of July and beginning of August but I’d hoped to do that anyway.

Finally, regarding the Boston Marathon in 2014, I have come to terms with the fact that while I have a qualifier I might not get in. It is what it is and I don’t think that I have time to rush another race in between now and registration. Instead of focusing on the marathon in the fall I am going to have an XC season and then transition onto the track for the winter. If my time holds up and I get into Boston I will get after it starting in the New Year. If I don’t get in then my training schedule won’t be significantly different but I’ll choose between the L.A. Marathon and the Eugene Marathon.

In the short term, the next one up is the FORR 5k on 7/18/13. I turn 30 a few hours after the race so I'll bring cupcakes. Come race, eat drink and be merry!

http://www.forr5k.org/

 

Happy running!

It's a post

I'm in a bit of a rest mode right now post Maine Coast and focusing more on work, buying a house and planning vacations in Las Vegas and Ireland and Northern Ireland than I am on running. While I don't have anything to update; here's a link to a good write-up by Mike about his BQ- at Vermont City:
On 6 weeks of marathon training...

The Maine Coast Marathon

It took me a lot longer to sit down and write this thing than it should have. Part of that was that I was really disappointed with my lack of discipline at the 3 mile mark. The other part of it was that after the race, Sarah and I put an offer in on a house in Malden, more on that later (maybe).

My training for the Maine Coast Marathon was a bumpy ride from my marathon PR (3:17:30) at the Manchester City Marathon in November through the absolute high of shattering my expectations at the Jones 10 Miler (1:00:30 for a PR by 6:09 over my PR set in 2012) to the lows of a calf strain, Achilles Tendonitis, my big toe splitting open on a long run and bruising the top of my left foot by running 19 miles in a pair of trainers that I had tied MUCH too tight.

My track work all winter was the corner stone of smashing my PRs at the 15k, the 10 Mile and the Half Marathon but tendon issues started hampering my top end speed in the last week of February and stayed with me through the end of March. In April I started transitioning away from the track to focus more on hitting my long runs, hill workouts and tempo runs. Some poor decisions with my footwear cut into my hill work.

My Marathon Pace runs on the treadmill were smooth and easy but Planet Fitness has the mills shut down after an hour so I could only get up to about 9.5 miles in and then had to call it a day. I was never able to transition that work to a really solid outdoor Marathon Pace run. I got up to about 12.5 miles at a 6:34 doing laps of Fresh Pond a few weeks before the race but never got a workout that pushed into the hard half of the marathon.

Of course the big news in April was the attack at the Boston Marathon. I resolved that I would be there next year. I ran the Good Times 5k the day after Boston and clocked 17:58 which was good for a weeknight fun run but was the slowest I’ve run at the 5k in about a year and left me wondering where my speed had gone.

By the time May rolled around, my 1:20:50 at the New Bedford Half Marathon was a distant memory. I had logged a lot of easy miles (234 miles in April) and had some good long runs but I just didn’t know what kind of speed I might have on race day.

Then it happened.

The Maine Coast Marathon published the list of entrants and their projected finish times.

The list was sortable by projected finish time so of course I that’s what I did. The fastest projected finish time was 2:50 for a kid named Steven McCarthy who had a marathon PR of ~2:51. Now I do recognize that 2:51 is much faster than 3:17. There were a bunch of us projecting 2:55. I was hoping that someone would sign up who could run <2:40 so that I won’t have the temptation of chasing down the leader.

I thought that my hopes had been realized the day before the race when I saw D5k legend Junyong Pak (he had too many racing accomplishments to list here, but has a <2:33 Boston Marathon PR and Bui’s first snowshoe race: http://fearthechicken.blogspot.com/2013/03/snow-shoe-is-good-shoe.html)

I figured that Pak would take off and win the thing while we mere mortals could focus on just running our time trials to get into Boston 2014. That wasn’t the case. Pak was there to cheer on Yvette Tetreault who rocked out to a >1 hour PR.

To a disciplined runner this would not have mattered. The smart runner would not have cared what the winner was doing. The smart runner would run the race that he or she had trained for. I had started training for a 2:55 and then I changed gears to chase after 2:50 until the Achilles tendonitis convinced me to back off and try for 2:55-3:00.

I chatted with Chris Hancock for a bit, gave Sarah a kiss goodbye and lined up one row back from the front to make sure I went out easy and didn’t get caught up racing.

None of that mattered. I had a bib on my chest and it was a race.

I was “good” for the first mile. I was running with two kids from the Colby track team who were also thinking 2:55-3:00. We were running easily enough that we were able to chat as we let the leader develop a lead of about 50 meters on us in the first 5 minutes. Two other guys joined us and we turned into a bonafide chase pack. We went through mile 2 in around 13:00 but all confirmed with each other that the marker was short. None of us were wearing a GPS watch but we knew that we weren’t running 6:30s, we were right on target at 6:40.

We slowed over the next mile just in case and went through the third mile in 19:22. Steven had almost disappeared over the horizon on us by this point but we could still see the flashing lights of the pace car. I was leading the chase pack at this point and decided that this mile marker was short too. Over the next half mile or so I heard the rest of the chase pack fall off so I decided to drop the hammer and try to catch Steven. I started closing the gap and was able to surprise Sarah by coming up to the corner at ~4 miles in second place hammering away at a pace in the low 6:20s to upper 6:10s.

I eventually closed the gap back down to about 25-50 meters but I could feel my empty stomach screaming about the effort. I forced down some Lifesavers and backed off the gas. By mile 8 I had company again. Timothy Mallard of the Gate City Striders had caught me and we ran together for a while. By mile 10 he had dropped me to go after Steven and I was again running all alone but was now in third place.

I went by the marker at mile 13 in about 1:24:22 and knew that I wasn’t going to be able to finish strongly. I felt like I was going to hit the wall and crash unless I back my pace off significantly. With the BQ as my number one goal at this race I didn’t hesitate to slow down. It only took another two miles for David Murphy and John Williams to catch and pass me.

By mile 16 I had fallen back to about 6^th place when I ran past where Erica Zornig was watching the race. She hopped in and paced me through the next half mile. I had been almost ready to start walking at that point but she got me past that and I was on my way towards the last 10k.

I was on my way, but not as quickly as I would have liked. I gave back a lot of time between miles 17 and 20 and fell back to 10^th place by mile 22. I figured that the past 9 miles of rest were enough and Sarah was driving along the course and cheering me on so I gritted my teeth and worked my way back up to 8^th place and across the finish line in 3:02:47.

 

A short while later Chris came in at 3:04:37 for 10^th place and an Age Group win. Almost as soon as I was done congratulating Chris, Sarah and I went off in search of some showers. For the record: the showers at the Maine Coast Marathon have really nice water pressure.

So all in all: I got a new PR by 14:44 and I got the BQ by 2:14 but missed my goals of (a) running <3:00, (b) running <2:55, (c) running <2:50 and (d) winning the Maine Coast Marathon. I’ll still happy with the result if not how I got there. I’ll take it as a learning experience and try to run a more even split next time to get the <3:00. Ending on a positive note: going sub-3 sounds a hell of a lot easier now that I’m sitting on a 3:02:47 PR rather than a 3:17:30.

Now it’s time to pick out the next one. I’m looking at the Drake Well Marathon, the Quebec City Marathon and the Lehigh Valley Marathon as potential races at the end of this summer. My shake out runs have been quite comfortable this week, including a 5.39 run at 6:59 pace the day after the marathon so maybe I can sneak a race in at the end of June or early July if Sarah and I are not too busy with potential house things.

I enjoyed a nice cold Harpoon Summer when Sarah and I got home from the race; I probably won’t be posting regularly until after Sarah and I get back from Ireland in August so until then enjoy the summer and have some beers because I’ll be back to posting useless lists of daily runs to annoy any of you who bother reading this thing.

 

Cheers!

Week of 4/15/13 – 4/21/13.

I had a lot of anger this week. I never managed to be genuinely afraid but I more than made up for that lack of emotion with fury. I channeled that rage into my training and had my highest mileage week since early 2010 and ran a <18 Tuesday night 5k and my longest ever training run. I will not discuss Monday’s events here. The news will tell you what was going on around here and you don’t need me to rehash all of that. Here is my training:

• Monday: 5.06 miles in 36:06.
• Tuesday: 6.41 miles in 43:27 including the Good Times 5k in 17:59. This was Rose Maguire’s Great Mill Girl Chase 5k which means that the women got a 2:30 head start on the men. This meant that once we caught up with the women we had to weave through traffic on the trail which slowed us down a bit but it was a fun run anyway.
• Wednesday: 12.41 miles in 1:28:53. I was unsure whether I should go to the d5k or the Wakefield lake 5k so instead I ran in Cambridge. There were tons of runners out showing that there was no fear among us runners in Boston.
• Thursday: 5.06 miles in 39:11 at lunch and 9.44 miles in 1:08:59 after work. I ran the No Rest for the Wicked in honor of those from Boston.
• Friday: 5.06 miles in 37:31 at lunch.
• Saturday: 10.00 miles in 1:12:39. This was supposed to be tempo, but I was out late raising toasts on Friday night so I just did an easy run off of about three hours of sleep.
• Sunday: 24.53 miles in 3:03:11. I woke up, put on my running gear and went out without breakfast or water for a long “depletion” run. I thought that by running on empty that I would be running 22 miles in 3:00:00 but thought I was running easier than that so I kept going until 1:35:00 before turning around. I was surprised that despite the distance and intentional hunger and dehydration this run felt so easy. I’m starting to feel the confidence that I had when I ran 1:00:30 at Jones.

I still have work to do, but I am starting to get excited to get after it at the Maine Coast Marathon.

14 weeks down; 3 weeks to go. It's crunch time!

Run For Boston.

Boston

I don't have words for today but I could not leave a trivial story about my training on top when there was such a horrific terrorist attack in Boston. I have no eloquent statements and I don't know how to edit my thoughts. So simply this:

This was not an attack on the Boston Marathon. This was not an attack on runners. This was an attack on humanity. Hold your loved ones close. If you are a praying person then pray. Donate blood. Keep running and spit in the eye of whoever was behind this.

Tomorrow is Boston!!!

Got some workouts in but missed some of the miles I had planned on running. The missed miles put me in a bad mood so I ended up spending most of the week just replying to trolls on RunningAhead with snarkey posts. Less than a month to go until the race so hopefully I'll be a little less sarcastic after that.

4/08/13 – 4/14/13

• Monday: took the day off to recover from the tendon issues that popped up late in my long run on Sunday.
• Tuesday: 2.16 miles warming up in 15:53. 2x 200m strides in 0:36 and 0:38. 5x 1000m in 3:18, 3:25, 3:24, 3:28, 3:29 with 2:30 rest. Target was 3:26-3:30. I wanted 6-8x 1000m but I was having toe issues with my DS Racers and tendon issues with my Cadence so I cut it short. Ended with 2.16 miles in 16:11. This was my first time running on the track at Danehy Park where my soccer career ended with an injury in 2007.
• Wednesday: The tendon thing still hadn't gone away so it was another day of rest.
• Thursday: 7.00 miles of Hills in 55:33. I wanted 10.00 miles on the Park Street hill, but in the morning I gave up eating mammals and started drinking an extra 3 liters of water while at work. The good news was that I felt much better by the end of the day than usual. The bad news is that I needed to cut the run short to pee.
• Friday: 5.06 miles in 39:52 at lunch time. I did not say it was okay to be cold and rainy out but it was anyway. I forgot to bring gloves so I ended up cold and soaked with numb hands but I was going over to the Depot for Eric's 30th birthday dinner after work so I needed to get through it.
• Saturday: 3.06 miles in 20:07. I picked Sarah up at Logan after her red-eye from San Francisco. Then we were out house/condo shopping. We looked at a super awkawardly laid out condo in East Boston so we aren't putting any offers. After that it was over to WholeFoods to get stuff to make gnochi sorentino with garlic pan seared chicken and talapia. I started the sauce when we got home and then darted out for a quick MP run before the Curriers came over for dinner.
• Sunday: 17.95 miles in 2:16:00. Mike scheduled 16 but it was so nice out that I ended up going a bit far. I felt strong on this run so at least I ended the week on a good note.

Tomorrow is the Boston Marathon so here's some numbers that you should be keeping an eye on:
From GLRR:

8795 Biancheri, Andrew
23248 Biancheri, Kimberly
9362 Bourne, Trish
16507 Bourque, Susan
25285 Brouillette, Ray
1031 Bui, Jason
22406 Cain, Ken
22905 Calvin, Luciana
22455 Chandonnet, Andy
23553 Coney, Aims
8855 Crane, Brian
22468 Desmarais, Ronald
5511 Faria, Fil
22419 Farrow, Chuck
7605 Flores, Carlos
10735 Floss, Peter
14222 Ford, Virginia
22948 Goodin, Ken
8142 Graham, Scott
10800 Hadley, Paul
6469 Hancock, Chris
21465 Haskell, Richard
11645 Hersey, Howard
1119 Hrynowski, EJ
15971 Jacks, Sheila
20532 Kanaracus, Steve
11643 Kasabian-Larson, Sarah
24279 Kiriakakos, Kelley
22930 Lokere, Kris
13516 Maslowski, Ally
11684 McInerny, Lori
23982 McKenney-Finn, Mary Beth
13968 Molloy, Amy
554 Morasse, Joe
7519 Mottram, Eric
25579 Murphy, Mike
20515 Ottaviano, Gerard
523 Patronick, Justin
9197 Peters, Tom
24365 Phillips, Ray
21093 Pierce, Jack
3659 Ring, Jonathan
9085 Roberts, Erin
6937 Schroth, Katie

1979 Sullivan, James
18763 Thibeault, Jocelyn
5946 Trotter, Jill
22563 Turcott, Richard
8051 Wallis, Lindsey
4101 Zaganjori, Bash

From Wicked:
F10 Flanagan, Shalane
21742 Carraro, Jason
6167 Chaves, Suzanne
21741 Hewson, Shari
5039 Paulin, Mike
23694 Tabbut, Rich
Probably missing some others but I couldn't find a list from Wicked

I'll probably be out on my lunch-time run when most of you finish but I'll be watching the results from my desk if I have time. All the best to all of you. As usual, I will not say "good luck" about Boston. It isn't about luck, it's about the hard work you've been putting in for the past months and years.

Cheers!

13 weeks down and just 4 weeks remaining until Maine Coast!!!

May your training miles be ever hilly and may all your races have free beer!

Starting to move again

My last week of training wasn’t sexy but I started doing workouts again and got in some decent mileage.

4/01/13 – 4/07/13

• Monday: rest. I ended March with a 16.44 mile run which was my second longest run YTD so a rest day was in order.
• Tuesday: 7.00 miles in 47:09. I did miles on the treadmill to start getting back into speed work. Easy mile in 7:30, mile rep in 5:45, easy mile in 7:30, mile rep in 5:45, easy mile in 7:30, mile rep in 5:39, easy mile in 7:30. This was much slower than I was doing on the track a month and a half ago but for my first speed work in almost a month I’ll take it.
• Wednesday: 9.55 miles in 1:11:00. I ran the Danvers 15k with a little add-on. I didn’t time the run right so I had too much time to cool off before the d5k started so I skipped the race and went home.
• Thursday: rest.
• Friday: 10.06 miles of Hills in 1:18:31. Ran repeats on Park Street. This was my first hill workout in a while so I was OK with it being a little on the slow side.
• Saturday: 10.00 miles in 1:13:22. First 2.50 miles were the easy run over to Porter Square where I tested out the Brooks Pure Flow2 trainers for 5.00 miles at MP (actually closer to 6:40 than 6:30, but close enough to MP for now) then ran easy for the 2.50 miles home.
• Sunday: 19.19 miles in 2:32:41. This is the farthest I have ever run without taking liquids or eating anything. It was also the farthest out west of I-95 that I’ve run on the bike path…I lost the path somewhere in Beford and turned around over by the high school. Anyone know if there is any more bike path out past the Bedford Depot? My big toe on my right foot split open ~15 miles into this one so my form was a bit off for the last 4 miles which dropped my pace quite a bit but I put a Band-Aid on so I think it is OK now. After I got home, Sarah and I went for a hike in the Fells with Sarah and Harold; I think this helped shake out any lingering soreness from the long run.

Looking over the calendar, I think that I will only have two more legitimate long runs before I have to start cutting my mileage back for Maine Coast…I’ve got to make those two runs count!

 

I'll need to actually post my weekly update on time next week so I can focus on the Boston Marathon on Monday (which I'm not running)!

12 weeks down and just 5 weeks remaining until race day!!!

May your training miles be ever hilly and may all your races have free beer!

Well, this hasn't been going the way I wanted since the end of January...

The last I posted was right after the New Bedford Half Marathon. I was beat up from that race but feeling optimistic based on the 1:20:50 result. Since then two weeks have past and March has come to an end. Only a month and a half now remains before I put my toe on the line for the Maine Coast Marathon and all I can think about is how far below my targets my training has fallen since January.

I’ll start with the quick review of my training since my last post:

3/18/13 – 3/24/13

• Monday: 3.06 miles in 22:55. Easy recovery run around Spy Pond in Arlington.
• Tuesday: rest.
• Wednesday: rest.
• Thursday: rest.
• Friday: 7.52 miles in 59:00. I ran down the bike path and around Fresh Pond. My right Achilles and my left calf were still in agony for the entire run. After the run, I noticed that the sole of my Adios had completely worn off the outside of my strike area. I guessed that this meant that I was torqueing my ankle with each landing so I decided to retire the Adios and get some new trainers to keep going in.
• Saturday: 10.00 miles in 1:17:51. I ran to City Sports in Porter Square in my old NB880s (2.5 miles) and bought new Brooks Cadence (1^st generation because they were on sale for $59 and change) and did the 5 mile run club route then ran home in the Cadence. They felt a little better than my end-of-life Adios but the damage had been done by racing New Bedford in dead shoes so my Achilles still wasn’t elated with the idea of running.
• Sunday: rest due to Achilles pain.

3/25/13 – 3/31/13

• Monday: 10.17 miles in 1:19:01. I ran this one on Mass Ave, the bike path and Fresh Pond. I still wasn’t feeling 100% but I could tell that my legs were healing up now that they were in new shoes.
• Tuesday: 10.17 miles in 1:18:07. This was the exact same route as Monday but a little bit stronger.
• Wednesday: 10.17 miles in 1:16:04…in keeping with the trend for the week.
• Thursday: rest. Sarah and I went out to the Painted Burro in Somerville; it was pretty good but nothing to write a post about.
• Friday: rest. I thought about doing the hill workout that had been scheduled for Thursday but was le tired so I took a nap.
• Saturday: 10.00 miles in 1:11:28. Started with an easy 2.5 miles to Porter Square where I hooked up with the City Sports Run Club for a Marathon Pace 5 miler (I ended up running the 5 in more like 6:40 than 6:30 but it was my first real MP run off the treadmill and first workout since New Bedford, so I’ll take it). After the 5 with the Run Club I ran easy for the last 2.5 home. It was super nice out so in the afternoon, Sarah and I walked from Arlington Center through Harvard Square, along the Charles and over to Copley Square with a stop for beers in Cambridge, coffee and shopping on Newbury Street and Sushi on Boylston Street. It was a really nice first day that felt like spring!
• Sunday: 16.44 miles in 2:08:15. I ranged all over on this one. I started heading north on route 3 until I ran out of sidewalk in Woburn and did a loop through the Wholefoods parking lot before coming back south on route 3 until Wildwood Street which I followed to Church Street in Winchester. Church took me to Main Street through Winchester Center. I was completely lost and went north on Main Street until I saw a sign for 38 South towards Somerville. I took 38 South past the Oak Grove Cemetery to the Mystic Valley Parkway in Medford which I followed through Somerville and a bit of Cambridge to get back to Mass Ave. I took Mass Ave back to my apartment but only had about 1:46:00 on my watch when I got home so I decided to add on the 3.06 mile loop around Spy Pond which added Belmont to my list of cities that I passes through on this run.

March as a whole was a difficult month to characterize so I invented some math to compare it to other months. My gut feeling was that it was a particularly bad month of training due to all of the time I had to take off because of the Achilles problems. I ran 194.78 miles in 24:10:22 this month which is definitely up in distance since February (146.72 miles) but my pace was down from 7:10 min per mile to 7:27 min per mile.

I decided that there are three things that are important to any runner’s training: volume, intensity and frequency. I defined volume as the average distance per run (monthly mileage divided by the number of runs during the month). I defied intensity as the equivalent age graded percentage of the average run distance and time (monthly mileage divided by number of runs during the month, monthly time divided by number of runs during the month, age during the month all put into a age graded calculator to get a decimal from 0.00-1.00). I defined frequency as the percentage of days during the month that a run was completed (total number of runs divided by total number of days; this is expressed as a decimal but can exceed 1.00 if you are running doubles etc).

These three variables (volume, intensity, and frequency) are combined by taking the geometric mean to get a raw training score. The geometric mean is used because it allows you to calculate a meaningful average for multiple factors on different scales. The raw score will typically fall between 0.00 (for a runner who does not complete any run in a given month) to 2.971 for a runner who runs a World Record marathon every day during the month. As the quality of workout clearly does not scale linearly between these two boundary conditions, I raise e to the power of the raw training score to get what I’m calling (for lack of a good name) the ζ-value (zeta). The ζ-value ranges from 1.00 for a runner who does not complete a run to 19.5 for the runner who runs a world record marathon every day.

I went back and calculated my historical ζ-values since I started logging my running in January of 2010 (I actually started in December 2009, but January 2010 was my first month with the entire month logged).

zeta-value Control Chart...I need to clean this thing up...

 

The SPC control chart of my running over this 39 month period shows that my training has been very poorly controlled. My month-to-month 1σ non-uniformity is ~22.6%. The good news is that 12 of my past 13 months have been above average. The one month in that set of 13 months that fell below the SPC chart centerline was November 2012 and I spent two weeks of that month in South America with Sarah on our honeymoon. Also in November, I ran a marathon on the 4^th and then basically took the rest of the month off.

According to my ζ-value, this past March was my 4^th best month of training. While I don’t feel like it was my fourth best month, it does help to explain how I ran a 2:31 PR at the Half Marathon on a swollen Achilles. Looking at my moving average, I think I should be on track for some more PRs:

6 Month Moving Average of zeta-value since January 2010.

 

So March wasn’t everything that I wanted it to be, but the math suggests that if I keep working in April and get my ζ-value for the month over 5.0 then I should be in good shape for the marathon.

I should note that the failure of the ζ-value as a quantification of training is that average distance is incorporated into the result twice: once directly in volume and once indirectly in intensity. Also distance can very on a much larger range than either frequency or intensity. Were a runner to run one mile at World Record pace every day for a month, the equivalent zeta value would be ~2.72. This suggests that my current training is better than the theoretical mile world record every day. I’m still working on a model that will better account for this, but for the time being I am okay with my ζ-value model as it stands as far as marathon training goes. Due to the demands of the marathon for high volume training, the type of training that I am doing right now is probably more effective at preparing for a marathon than running a single mile every day even at World Record pace.

I’m also thinking about how to merge total elevation gain into this model so that there is some sensitivity to hill workouts. The drawback is that almost all of my runs start and end at my front door so my net elevation change while running over the course of the year is essentially zero and because of this I do not track elevation in my log. Lacking data to manipulate, it is difficult to develop a model that uses elevation as a parameter. Confounding this, I would need to track total elevation gain and total elevation loss separately as well as grade because clearly running up a short, steep hill is different than running down a long gentle decline.

Aside from this weekly/monthly update I am due for a postmortem on my Adidas Adios and an introduction of my Brooks Cadence. We’ll see when I actually get a chance to write those up though.

Here's another picture of a graph that I'm inserting here so that I have a URL for it elsewhere. It is a natural log regression of my racing speed as a function of distance for my recent races.

 

Happy running!

11 weeks down and just 6 weeks remaining until race day!!!

 

May your training miles be ever hilly and may all your races have free beer!

It's been a while...

I haven't posted in a while because it's a bit depressing to keep posting: "yup, my right Achilles is still swollen and my left calf still has a big old knot in the middle of it and both hurt a bunch when I run."

I shut it all down on Sunday (3/10) and switched from doing workouts to get fitter to just doing a little easy running to try to work the nicks out and try to get healthy for the race. It worked a little. The Achilles wasn't as swollen on race day as it had been a week before but the calf wasn't much better. Anyhow, the legs didn't get any worse which I'll take as a positive after two weeks of accumulating injuries.

Here was my running:

3/11/13 - 3/17/13:

• Monday: 7.45 miles in 0:57:27 running easy on Mass Ave.
• Tuesday: 7.89 miles in 0:59:00 running at lunchtime at work.
• Wednesday: 10.17 miles in 1:14:58. Laps around Fresh Pond.
• Thursday: 8.52 miles in 1:06:26. Couple easy hill repeats on Park Street.
• Friday: rest.
• Saturday: 5.00 miles in 0:38:26. City Sports Run Club in Porter Square. First 4 were easy, last mile was easy with strides.
• Sunday: 1 mile warm up in 0:07:58. PR at the New Bedford Half Marathon in 1:20:50.

New Bedford Half Marathon race report:

What better beer to toast PRs all around with?

Sarah and I went down to Plymouth on Saturday to have dinner at Cafe Strega (http://www.cafestrega.com/). We had the rehearsal dinner for our wedding here six months ago and it was still as good as we remembered. Then we spent the night on the south shore.

On Sunday morning we kept tracking Julie's progress at the NY Half Marathon while drove the rest of the way down to New Bedford. We kept cheering her on to the finish of her first race! When we got to New Bedford we circled the YMCA a couple times before finding parking. I jogged over to the Y to get my number then back to the car to get myself sorted. That was all the warm up I got. Sarah and I walked back to the Y were I got in line for the restroom. I must have chosen the wrong line because at 10:53 I was still in line, gave up and jogged over to the start.

I found EJ, Mike and Cody in the starting queue and a moment later the race started. The first mile was too fast: 6:03. I realized that I was still with Mike and EJ at this point and thought I could follow them to a PR but by the end of the next mile I knew I needed to back it off a tick. I went though mile 3 in a little under 19 and decided that it was time to pick it back up. My Achilles and my calf were both muttering their complaints but the miles clicked by fairly easily until I went through the 10 mile mark in 1:00:39, just a few seconds behind my 10 mile PR from Jones a few weeks earlier.

That was when it started to hurt. Ten years of running and I still haven't figured out how to drink a cup of water while running. Apparently, 10 miles is about the upper limit that I can race without taking liquids because it just got harder and harder with each step until I finally turned until onto the final stretch. I didn't hear the footsteps approaching as a SRR runner passed me like I was standing still in that final straight. I thought that it was too late for me to react to get back ahead of him but his passing alerted me to the sound of another runner coming up so I dug in and sprinted it out staying just ahead of someone from CMS just barely catching up with the SRR guy at the line.

I came across the finish line and almost threw up. My left calf didn't want any weight on that leg and my right Achilles just wanted a bag of ice. Instead I congratulated the GLRR team that was already in: Sully, Cody, Andrew, Justin, EJ and Mike...all under 1:20:00.

Sully, EJ and Mike post-race. Stole this photo from the New Bedford Half Marathon  forum at runningahead...quite the race shorts.

Mark finished with a big time PR of 1:36:28 and a little while later Jeff came in with a PR of his own in 1:43:39. Sarah, Jeff, Mark and I went out for some lunch to celebrate the many great performances.

Here's a better NBHM race report: the hobbyjogger chronicles

Here are the NBHM race results: coolrunning

Here are the NBHM team results: like you couldn't have gotten here from the coolrunning link above

Here are Julie's results from NY: NYHM

This coming week is about continuing to get healthy and starting to build the distance for the marathon.

9 week down and 8 weeks left until the Maine Coast Marathon!

May your training miles be ever hilly and may all your races have free beer!