I'm not there yet...

I ran four times last week as I try to come back from injury, short runs that totaled slightly over ten miles. Although all the runs were slow and rendered me shockingly out of breath, it was a start.

I kicked off the week on Sunday with my familiar mile-run around my neighborhood in 8:52. I don't think I could have gone any faster than that.

I ran twice during the week at work with co-workers, each time running to the Washington Monument from near Union Station and back again at a twelve-minute pace. During one of those runs, tourists hurrying to be on time for their scheduled entrance into the monument jogged by us and outdistanced us as we dawdled along.

My best run was two and a half miles around my home town on Friday, a slow, meandering journey up the hill to the school and around some of the cul-de-sacs I used to traverse on my early-morning runs back when I ran five times a week. On Saturday I got a workout of a different sort when I took a pickup truck load of furniture from Not Born to Run's old place in Maryland to her cool new digs directly across the street from the National Cathedral.

Blog Land Hookup

I've been sort of remiss in keeping this blog updated recently. Busy at work, you know. Also busy lamenting losing 40% of my net worth in the last six months of the Decider's and the Torturer's (aka the Great Bird Hunter) reign. Trying to map out retirement at age 82 rather than 67.

Last month I attended a blogland hookup in DC at the District Chophouse on Seventh Street (NW) that was pure blogger. The occasion was Danielle from Iowa came to town to run the National Half-Marathon, and eight of us had pre-race dinner together. The pictures just came back (I still use film which bugs people I know mightily).

(Danielle, Adam, Rebecca, Joe, Audrey, NBTR, DC Rainmaker and DC Spinster.)

A blogland hookup

I had a nice hookup for lunch with Not Born To Run on Saturday at Teaism in the District. Since she does tris now, she really should be known as Not Born to Run, Bike or Swim (or maybe Not Born to Whatever). She had a real nice post recently about losing her Mom, and it was good to catch up with her for an hour.

I was late. I couldn't find parking nearby so I finally parked over near my work across the street from Georgetown Law and ran from there to Judiciary Square, where I jumped aboard a DC Smartbike and bicycled the rest of the way to the restaurant at E and 8th Streets. Jeanne's observation as I rode up was that all I needed was to add swimming and I'd be a tri-athlete too.

It's funny the difference between men and women. I spent the hour bemoaning the fact that I hadn't brought my cable lock so we had to sit by the window where I could watch my bike, parked outside. NBTR instead was worried that I didn't have a helmet. (Helmet? What helmet?)

I grew up biking all over the hills of Staten Island on my trusty red Schwinn without a helmet. I delivered the Herald Tribune every morning and went to the corner candy store for an Almond Joy bar every afternoon on my bike without mishap. Gears? What gears? (Ain't this a thing of beauty? My Schwinn didn't have any front brakes, though. )

Even the Smartbike has three gears. While we ate, I saw another Smartbike user ride by my forlorn red and white bicycle parked on the curb, sans lock. I felt like rushing outside and waving to him. Sort of like back in the early 60s when VW owners always beeped at each other when they drove by one another. But he had on a helmet so I didn't point him out to Jeanne. Show-off!

After sixty minutes of delightful conversation during which we solved many of the problems of blogland but none of the difficulties of the real world, I bicycled back to Judiciary Square to return my bike to its rack and then went in to work for a few hours to do some administrative work on the half-marathon program I direct for my club. Jeanne is hard at work training for her next race, the Blue & Gray Half-Marathon in Fredericksburg. She is fresh from a 10K PR in a race last week. She looks great.

What I forgot to tell Jeanne is that I have the same birthday as her Mom had, April 15th, Income Tax Day. It's unforgettable.

Do you suppose I really need a helmet?

Ugly ugly!

The endless headphone debate rages on. The RRCA came out with a No-Headphones icon to be posted at races. And a good-looking icon it is, too. It sort of looks like someone who has just come from a halloween party at the mansion on the hill in Psycho.

The headphones-in-running discussion never had any good come out of it. I used to have an opinion on it til I was misquoted on the subject and now I keep my own counsel about it.

In a post-race dinner-gathering of friends once, I spoke about how I thought it was ridiculous to wear headphones because it detracted from the experience of running-being outside and seeing and hearing things that you wouldn't ordinarily encounter. But since I believe in individual choice, I also said that headphone bans were ridiculous.

One of my good friends at that dinner is a reporter. In an article she published internationally that night about the subject, she quoted me anonomously as saying that wearing headphones was assinine.

If you ever see a comment of yours in print, always claim you were misquoted, no matter what. It gives you wiggle-room. But in fact I was misquoted. I never said that.

What I really said was that wearing headphones was asinine.

I wonder what shade of lipstick that garish icon is wearing?

A Busy Day of Running

Lots of running stuff happening. Yesterday was the start of the Reebok Marathon and Half Marathon Training Program for the Wirefly National Marathon on March 29, 2008, which is a must-do marathon. Reebok's training program is "powered by" my running club, and I am directing the half-marathon portion of it, operating out of the Gotta Run running store in Arlington. Four coaches took seven runners out on a 10K run in about an hour in South Arlington yesterday. You can sign up for the training program on the race website. I am very excited about this, as all of the program coaches will receive the opportunity to get coaching certification out of it.

(Left: Almost there! Approaching the bridge over Leesburg Pike WB on the W&OD. Right over the hump of the bridge is MP 7. 200 feet further and you'll be passing by my house.) This morning I ran 15 miles on the W&OD in 2:08:32 (8:38) in cold and rainy conditions. Along the way I did my eight on date eight (actually the date was the ninth) in 1:07:27 (8:26) and I completed my virtual Blue and Gray Half-Marathon run, actually held in Fredericksburg, in 1:51:51 (8:32). Jeanne and Susie and David, Susie's husband, actually ran the race in Fredericksburg. Susie achieved her excellent time of last year, David broke two hours (congratulations to him!) and Not Born To Run PRed! I'll let her tell you all about it when she posts about it, at this very moment she is limping back to DC in a car without a muffler. She called me from the road and asked if I could hear her muffler, or lack of it, over her cellphone. Naw, I said, I could hear it before you called.

NBTR reports that she called Bex after the B&GHM and Bex answered on her cellphone and reported she was at that moment at MP 11 in the Honolulu Marathon, slogging through a heavy rain on her 26 mile "training run."

Five things you need to know, five people you need to meet

I’m going to do a meme, whatever that is. I think it’s just a blogging version of - Tag You’re It.

I tried this once before without much success. Jeanne (Not Born To Run) cooperated, so I might as well tag her again. She has to post once a day for a month anyway because of Nablopomo, whatever that is. So she’ll undoubtedly thank me. Go read her blog. She’s brilliantly funny. (Aww, anyone who reads this knows that already.)

I got the idea from reading Irene in San Diego (Magazine Smiles). She likes Led Zeppelin and I’m going through a Man With Sticks phase right now (again). It looked like it would be fun. Besides, my parents got married in San Diego, in 1944. My Dad was a young Marine about to ship out for Peleliu and Okinawa, and my Mom was a defense plant plant worker. They met at a USO dance. She was hiding in the coat room when he was getting his jacket to leave. She was lonely and shy, having grown up in Yuma, Colorado, a small farming community on the plains. My Dad, OTOH, was cosmopolitan having grown up in Winona, Minnesota, a large town on the Mississippi River. She was 20, he was barely 19. They were together til death did them part 42 years later when he died of lung cancer. I was there when his life departed. He became addicted to nicotine from smoking the three cigarettes supplied in each K-Ration during the war. He came back from the war and taught her to smoke. She died of emphysema. Those were different days. Nobody stays married now and the kids suffer. (There. You just got a lot of free information. At work, I always tell new attorneys, never give out information for free.)

Here are the Rules:
• Link to your tagger, and post these rules on your blog.
• Share 5 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
• Tag 5 people at the end of your post by their names and links to their blogs.
• Let them know they are TAGGED by leaving a comment on their blog.

1. I was born in Connecticut. (I lived there all of six weeks.)

2. There were six kids in my family.

3. We weren’t Catholic.

4. I have three sons, all over 18.

5. I had never run a distance of more than seven miles at any one time when I did my first marathon, the Inaugural Baltimore Marathon in 5:05:20. (I told myself the whole last hour while I was walking it in that if I only could beat five hours, I’d never do another marathon. I missed my goal so I had to do fourteen more (and counting)).

Here are four more persons besides NBTR who are going to be mad at me.
cewtwo - why, how, what, where I run...
Dorine - she do run run
nylisa - Lisa's Running Journal
sunshine - best day of the year

More Track Work

Yeah, I been running again. What, are you surprised? Shocked, maybe? After my first Track W.O. since the winter (last post), I fielded a call on Friday night from the mid-group volunteer coach in the TMG (Ten-Mile Group Program) that I direct for my club. She was sick.

Good (I mean, bad for her, sorry to hear it). Now I could really get a workout in, just like in the old days when I was a coach and would run the line from slowest to fastest of my group and back again and get a real workout in. That sort of "training" led directly to a 1:14 Ten-Miler PR last year and indirectly to a 3:50 marathon PR this year.

I plotted out a 7-miler for Saturday morning on the soft dirt C&O Canal Towpath in MD, from bridge to bridge, Key Bridge to Chain Bridge (and over Chain Bridge to VA for a moment and back to burn up half a mile). The appointed time came and off we went. I ran the line. It felt great. NBTR shepherded the novice group along the same route minus the dash over the bridge and I finished up running with her the last mile. She's running great, BTW. I figured I ran eight miles in 82 minutes.

That afternoon I hiked the Billy Goat Trail off the C&O and watched the death-defying rock climbers practice their skills on huge boulders. They think runners are crazy for running themselves into exhaustion; we think they're crazy for clinging to tiny crevices in sheer rock faces forty feet up. My hands aren't strong enough to do what they do, or maybe my heart isn't big enough. I admire them.

Sunday I made it over to Rock Creek Park where I jogged four miles in about fifty minutes through trails in its wooded ravines with a friend who is just starting up with running. I stopped to smell the roses along the way several times as we moseyed along. I am truly delighted whenever anyone takes up running.

Wednesday brought forth the real test of my injured left foot, the monthly noontime Tidal Basin 3K race my club puts on. This was the 403rd consecutive running. It's not older than me but it's a venerable running for sure. My foot held up to the fast pounding.

I improved by 26 seconds over the July race when I was bothered by my hip (it's always something, eh?). 13:10 (7:04), 36th male out of 52. Two women passed me in the last half mile and I had no answer to either of them. I was too busy keeping ahead of the 58 year-old man chasing me and trying unsuccessfully to catch the 70 year-old man I was chasing. Shoot, I swear that when that guy beat me last month, he was only 69.

But I like to break 13 minutes for a 3K so I felt alright about the race. I'm getting close again. Did I feel good enough to call it a day? Uh, no, Wednesday night was track night.

So at 7 pm I was lining up on the track to start four 1000 meter runs at "cruise or tempo pace." That is, according to the track workout director, your 10K race pace. I figured lately that was 7:37s so I wanted to do 4:44s for each thousand meters.

Results: 4:27, 4:26, 4:38, 4:30, and my, ahem, cooldown thousand meters, 4:24. That would be a 22:25 5K if you could claim them in a race and forget about the recovery jogging (and walking) between the sets. I have done four 5Ks as fast or faster than this, twice in 2001 (when I PRed at the Spirit of Gettysburg in 21:58) and twice last year. Either I was then in unconscious shape during those two periods or else I was dogging it a few days ago. But at least I'm back to the track again. That's truly how you get faster.

Odds & Sods: Today I fielded a call at my home number from someone asking for Dr. Edmund Lang. When I first acquired my landline number in 2001 shortly after being served with divorce papers, I used to get a lot of calls from persons seeking a doctor's office here in Virginia. I still get automatic fax blasts every single weekday at 8:45 am. Anyway, this was the first one this year. I chatted briefly with the woman from Columbia, SC, who had undergone surgery on her back in 1986 after a car accident, performed by Dr. Lang out of his Seven-Corners Medical Office. It changed her life by enabling her to walk again. She was sorting and came across his number. If I'd'a been him, she woulda put me on her Christmas card list. He was a sought-after physician then. He was old back then, she confided to me. Being 55 myself, I take statements like this with a grain of salt, but I did wish him good health, or good spirit, whatever the case may be, to her upon hearing her tale. So here's to Dr. Lang, wherever he may be, for making a difference in this life.

I want to thank Bex for her generous support of my determination to run Chicago in two months for a charity, A Running Start. Bex just won a 5K race in Las Vegas. She also just purchased a house in Lake Tahoe. All in a week's work for my friend Bex, apparently. Thanks Bex. (Bex on a run in Lake Tahoe. Look at that Cheshire Cat grin. Do you suppose the East Coast phase of her life is ovah!?)