"It takes time to tell the Lord about her two sons in battle."

My Grandmother wrote a weekly column for the local newspaper in the small town in Minnesota where she lived.  During the early forties, everybody's young sons were overseas fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese empire, and both of Grandmother Gretch's two boys were so engaged, both Marines.  Each of them saw heavy, desperate action, and she occasionally recorded her thoughts or her fears for their safety in her otherwise light-hearted column.

Her oldest son, my uncle Harry, a teenager when he enlisted, was an officer commanding the anti-aircraft batteries aboard a heavy cruiser with Halsey's Fifth Fleet.  He earned the Bronze Star for meritorious service during a day of hellish combat of ships versus planes as he and a sister ship accompanied a gravely wounded aircraft carrier limping out of range of land-based aircraft at about three knots after a fast-carrier task force strike upon Tokyo the preceding day.  The rest of the fleet sailed out of harm's way during the night.

Her youngest son, my father, a teenager when he enlisted, was a radioman at two of the most ferocious land battles in the Pacific.  The brutality and bloodletting of the second one, Okinawa, is the reason why we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan to force it to surrender rather than face a projected million American casualties in an invasion of Japan.  He was 20 years old when the war ended, a wisp of a deadly fighting man who tipped the scales at 120 pounds.

Here's how Grandmother Gretch, a keen observer, described troubled people coming spontaneously into church on June 6, 1944 to pray for the safety of their loved ones, most of whom were barely out of their teens.  It starts off with her observation in the third person of an "older woman," who really was herself:

"Near us an older woman with a coat thrown over her house dress slipped to her knees and rested her head against the back of the next pew.  She knelt for a long time, oblivious of the hymn, and her body sagged a little.  It takes time to tell the Lord about her two sons in battle.

"Up ahead knelt a woman in a beautifully tailored suit and a hat that was perfection.  Her hands clapsed and unclasped, clapsed and unclasped through the whole service.  Her only son is in the thick of it.

"Two grave-faced fathers whose boys are in it, and dangerously, sat together and bowed their heads.  A couple whose only son has just left these shores sat anxious-faced, and when they rose to sing their hands touched when they held the hymn book together.

"A very young bride whose husband is in it came in with her face white and her eyes frightened.  Like a lost child she sat as close to her mother as she could.  On her feet were frivolous, high-heeled scarlet slippers that one felt she had worn to keep up her morale.  There is something very reassuring and gay about red slippers, even more so than a flowery new hat.  A girl in a shabby gray coat sat stiffly upright and kept ducking her head to wipe her eyes.  Both of her brothers are in Europe.

"Many people were there who had no sons in it, and they seemed anxious, compassionate.  It was as though they were humbly eager to do what they could by the comfort of their presence and their prayers.  A thing that shocked us was that we saw no young men between about 17 and 35.  How blessed a thing it will be to have them back."

By Gretchen Leicht Lamberton, excerpted from "D-Day",  appearing in Reflections and Recipes by the Casual Observer, Gretchen L. Lamberton, c1966 by the Leicht Press, Winona, Minnesota.

She wanted to break 4 hours, how?

A year ago my running buddy Leah had commanded me to run the last 6 miles of her 2015 Marine Corps Marathon ("MCM") with her, which I forgot about till she reminded me of her demand sometime earlier this fall.  I had forgotten about it because she really hadn't been training for a marathon, she only started to train seriously for it about eight weeks out.

She seemed to think she could go from a 4:51 marathon PR to a 3:59 marathon merely by wishing it.  But let me tell you something about Leah, she's incredible.

She's also fast, faster than me now, and steady too.  I taught her to crave hills on runs, and now she regularly smokes me on any uphill we find and take.

Of course I hate being showed up by a person I have been mentoring in running, but she is a determined, no-nonsense runner and she once told me, in the middle of last year's HM when she coldly went on ahead of me mid-race to finish four minutes ahead after we had supported each other for the entire first half, "I'm in it to win it."  I knew last month that she was thinking she could do a 3:59 marathon with inadequate training, and if she asked me to jump in and run with her to shepherd her home those last 6 miles at this year's MCM, well, I wasn't going to be the person who let her down and caused her to do a 4:01!

The 4.01K Race.

Prudential put on a 4.01K race at RFK yesterday morning, a 2 1/2 mile romp around the parking lots at the stadium in essence.  It was designed to highlight the looming (or occurring) retirement crisis in America where nobody has enough money to be able to actually stop working, except maybe the one percenters.

It was free, and you could create a team.  I created a team called January Ninth, which refers to the last day of the federal leave year this year.  I even activated my race wrist band on-line and printed off my bar code to bring with me to the race check-in.

But it was raining yesterday morning, and no work running buddies were going to come anyway.  So I didn't drive all the way across town to go to the race site.

But I did design a 4.01K race course in my head that left from my driveway and finished there.  Actually, since I was now the race director of this alternate run, I took note of the rain and reduced the course from a 4.01K to a 2.005K course, or a hairsbreadth over 1.2 miles.  Choosing to lay out the course as my standard neighborhood mile with two extra blocks thrown in, I lined up in the rain and off I went.

I ran pretty hard, since I was cold and getting wet, and I got into the run and was working it, just like in the old days of the last decade.  Soon my breathing became less ragged, I was focusing on turnover and I reached the halfway point of my little 2.005K course at the point where my mile run intersects briefly with the W&OD Trail.

Why not make it the real race distance of about 2.5 miles, I thought.  The MP 7 marker was down the trail about a quarter mile, and if I went past it to MP 7.5, turned around that and came back to here, that would add the extra 1.2 miles I needed to turn my 1 1/4 mile run into a 2.5 mile run.  Obviously my math was fuzzy, since in actuality I was adding about 1.5 miles instead of the necessary 1.2 miles, but it made sense to me at the time as I was redesigning the course on the fly.

It felt good to be going down the trail at speed.  I felt like I was doing 8-minute miles, or more probably about 8:10s.

Soon I was turning around MP 7.5 and then I was approaching the spot again where I had mentally reconfigured the race course to make it the appropriate distance.  My time running seemed to belie the pace I thought I was running at, because I was taking too long to be at this late spot in the race, so I picked it up a little more.  Down the last long straight block I could see the finish line stretching across my driveway and I sprinted the last 100 yards to bring the race home in 24:52.

Hmm.  A 9:59 pace, if the course was truly 4.01K.  I know I ran way faster than that so I decided the course was long, way long.

What a clown the race director was, I thought, to lay out such an obviously long course.  But I was pleased with my first-place showing.  And don't you know, in this virtual race, I was also DFL!

Or better yet, put it in a bottle for me.

My running buddy Leah had set her goal at a sub-4-hour marathon, which would be besting her PR by, oh, about 52 minutes.  All right then!

Twelve weeks before the event, the MCM, she wanted to do an 8-mile run at noontime on the Mall as she started to ramp up for it.  We couldn't finish the run and had to walk much of the seventh mile.  (Leah training for the MCM.)

This didn't bode to well for running a marathon in eleven weeks with plans to smash your PR by increasing your previous-best marathon pace by over 2 minutes per mile, but she did have some medical issues which were cleared up through the power of Western medical magic although she lost another couple of weeks of training while her RX took effect.  I want a bottle of those pills.

We still ran at work, our normal six miles, and she reported her weekend long runs to me, sometimes doing them with her husband who is faster than her.  Still, I was concerned about her ability to even finish the race without crashing and burning as her weekend long runs as the race approached went something like this towards the end--14 miles; 16 miles; 18 miles; 20 miles; 14 miles; 10 miles; race weekend.  (Leah at her pre-race dinner party at her house, an event for runners only and which doubled as her law school reunion.)

 

   

Please chart that training course for me.

When my running buddy at work Leah killed her half marathon a year ago with a 1:50, a PR of over 25 minutes, she immediately started thinking 3:59 for the 2015 Marine Corps Marathon.  After all, there was plenty of time to train, over a year.

Never mind that her marathon PR was 4:51, she now had a substantial base and a plan.  She asked me to coach her, which was very flattering since she had just beaten me by almost four minutes in the half.

I thought she could do it, with the proper training.  Ah, there's the rub!

We ran the year round, but there were certainly no 15-milers, or even any 10-milers in there, and her base reverted to the 6-mile base we both normally have which is the maximum distance we can run at noontime and get back to work without being too delayed.  She hyper-flexed her knee in a hockey collision over the winter, an injury that bothers her to this day, and she couldn't run for many weeks, but she didn't ask me for any running advice and I saw no training plan emerge as spring turned to summer, and suddenly her 26.2 mile race was a mere 12 weeks away.

The Blood Draw Deferred.

You might know that runners are obsessive. Perhaps you know that I donated 100 whole units of blood over thirty years and then, once I hit the century mark, I started in on donating blood products. Lately, every time I become available to donate, I drive out to the INOVA donation center and give.

Two weeks ago my next blood donation was due, but my running buddy Leah, who was trying to break four hours in the marathon, had asked me to run the last 7 miles of the Marine Corps Marathon with her the very next week. I wanted to donate blood on schedule, and I thought I could maintain the 9:09 pace necessary to break four hours, but I didn't want to let her down by hitting the wall because of depleted red blood cells. For a week after a donation I can often feel fatigue or a lack of energy during the difficult part of a run, whether doing a fast pace, during the fifth mile or on a long hill.

Leah's marathon PR was 4:51 so nobody thought she could throw down a 3:59, except for her. As for myself, I thought it was possible but unlikely, although I thought for sure she could achieve a huge PR. Last year she ran a 1:50 half-marathon with less-than-optimal training, lowering her PR at that distance by over 25 minutes.

I would do anything for Leah because she is my friend and one of the wisest people I know, and I seek out her counsel when I have an intractable problem. She has been making tremendous strides the last two years as a runner and has surpassed wherever I am, although we still run together. Soon I'll tell you how she did, with minimal training, but suffice to say that I'm glad I didn't donate as soon I could have, or falter in the steady, unchanging pace when I jumped in to accompany her for the last seven miles.

She Broke Two Hours.

My running buddy Leah, a co-worker and friend, runs at noon with me two or three times a week.  We both came back to running from long layoffs due to injuries in 2011 and have worked diligently since then to get back into shape and maintain it.

I was always faster than her, by a lot.  Before my layoff, where I put on a lot of weight, Leah and I wouldn't run together except on certain occasions like, say, an evening Holiday Season Festive Lights run from work.

That was, Back Then.  Now she's faster than me and makes me work to be able to even hang with her on our noontime runs.

I saw this coming while we were training for the Navy-Air Force Half Marathon in mid-September last year and suddenly I was seeing nothing but the back of her on hills and I couldn't catch up, and on the flats too unless I made a conscientious effort to get even with her and stay there.  She posted a 1:50:59 at that race, a huge PR of over 20 minutes, and I came in at 1:54:53, my second slowest half marathon.