Where’s the peanut butter?!

So yesterday was the 2008 Seafair Marathon. I had hopes that it would be my second marathon and one I’d run with the 8 minute pacing group from my running club which wouldn’t be easy but should have been perfectly doable and provide me with some training I hoped would prepare me for some solid marathon this fall where I could hopefully qualify for Boston.

It didn’t happen.

I started having concerns on Tuesday or Wednesday the week before the race when forecasts indicated that it could reach the 80’s over the weekend. Then it looked like it would get to the 90’s. Then it did. So it was hot. This was probably the first and biggest problem for me and should probably be the key lesson I learn which is (at least for me) heat makes a tremendous difference in the effort and experience of a race.

Second, the course really is not easy. This year was a new course starting at Husky Stadium, going across the 520 floating bridge, and winding down through Bellevue and then up to Kirkland before coming back to finish in Bellevue. Judging from the elevation profile, the first half of the course really *should* have been the easy part. The second half starts with the biggest climb of the course (something like 300′ or about like climbing up Queen Anne hill but with a shallower gain) and after a long rolling descent, the final couple miles of the course demand about another 200′ of climbing before the finish.

I have no idea which factor was more influential but I found the combination brutal. After 10 miles at an 8 minute pace I found myself feeling pushed just to maintain the pace, and this is after a long run three weeks earlier where I did 20 miles at an average 8 minute pace where most of the run was conversational and felt fine or even good. Either way, the effort was considerably greater than I anticipated and I knew given how tired I felt, what the remainder of the course looked like (from the elevation map) and that the day would only get hotter, I had nothing but a brutal day of increasingly compromised goals ahead of me. It would almost definitely not help me build either the physical or mental foundation that would help me get to my fall goal and would probably be detrimental, and so I decided to call it a day and slowly walk/jogged back to the course and eventually back to the finish where I asked for a half finisher medal.

One other note on muscle preparedness. Last week (my last taper week leading up to the race) I noticed some occasional soreness in my right calf. It wasn’t constant and after I would get a few minutes into most of my runs it tended to feel OK again but after I stopped in Seafair this muscle actually started cramping. I don’t exactly know where the threshold here is, but in hindsight I was in a “this may seem OK, but it’s really not prepared to get through a marathon” range and may also be a lesson that if there are any problems in training leading up to a marathon and close to the marathon date, there’s probably a good chance that it will be a problem in the race.

So overall, it was a pretty tough call to make and it’s hard now not to be disappointed. After training for this for a long time, having set what felt like scaled back goals, and then feeling like you’ve fallen so short of even those goals, it’s really hard not to be pretty disappointed. On the other hand, I did experience and hopefully learn some lessons in preparation that should be more helpful next time around. My training all felt basically right on (whereas before Portland I didn’t start with and appropriate base), my nutrition felt basically right (whereas before Portland I experimented with a carb loading technique that may have been my key problem), I figured out something about my muscles (the sore calf), and I definitely got more insight into what heat and elevation can do to performance.

When the south central krumpers…

…meet the Chicago jukers…

…what’s going to happen?

There’s an interesting idea in the latest Runner’s World that they call finish strong points. If you’re running a race and care about the best results you can achieve then you clearly want to wind it up feeling like you don’t have any energy left. This probably won’t be achieved by everyone using the same tactic (go out strong and try to hold on, progressively work your way up to a fast finish, or something else) or for the same distance, but the article describes tabulating these points by starting to keep track at the 2/3 point of a race and then gaining a point for every person you pass and deducting a point for every person who passes you. Regardless of specific splits, this should help you understand whether you were more or less able to sustain whatever you were trying to do in the race than other people in the field.

I know at my last 5K I was hoping to finish at a sustained pace of faster than 6 minute miles. I hit the first in about 5:55, the second in 6:00 flat, and when I saw my watch in the third at about 6:14, I felt discouraged and started to not care as much about the remaining leg. So clearly, I slowed, but I don’t think I was getting passed by tons of people, so maybe I should have felt more satisfied on the whole. Or maybe if I’d paid closer attention I would have realized I was getting passed, and then I might think that the next time I’d be better off starting at or above a 6:00 pace. In future races where I’m trying to race hard, I’ll try to pay attention to this.

Also - this isn’t about the kick at the end of the race. I’ve learned over the past year that whether you outkick or are outkicked has a lot more to do with whether you (or someone else) put forth a consistently hard effort leading up to the finish and also your mental state about the finish and doesn’t provide enough information to really be meaningful toward analyzing the race. It is, however, the a great indicator of whether and how awesome you’ll feel about yourself after the finish!

In Seattle, probably like other major cities around the country, there is an option with electric bills to purchase renewable/green power. You do this by adding some dollar surplus on your bill which creates a buyer incentive for energy producers to produce green power. In principle this is definitely the kind of thing I’d advocate but there are a two things that I wind up scratching my head about…in no particular order:

1. The cost rates - consumers are offered three billing rates that add $3, $6, or $12 a month to electric bills to cover 25%, 50%, or 100% of your energy. Because their FAQ states that the average electric bill is $100 and mine is about $25, I figure that their definition of “100% coverage” really shouldn’t apply to me and I should sign up at the $3/month option which should cover 100% of the production of green power for my use. Or is there something I’m missing about this? Also, I’m not positive but I’ll bet that Jeff Raikes’ house in Laurelhurst uses a lot more energy than my address. I’m not positive but I’d hope that he has a gazillion computers running everything. Does he have a special option to add an equivalent surplus on his energy bill to fully advocate green power for his usage levels, or is the only option that people like me on the low end pay at the 100% rate to get full advocacy for green power from all of Seattle City Light’s customers?
2. What the program actually does - I don’t have the numbers handy but I think something like 80% of the energy produced in Washington comes from hydroelectric dams, mostly along the Columbia river. Since we aren’t building new dams, what does voting for green energy in this way really mean? I don’t know what the revenue from the program is, but it seems like an elective system to buy some green power might hint that they should invest in solar or wind power (since people like me are demonstrating that there is a market for green power), but the program described on my bill makes me feel like I am buying power directly from the dams (or wind or solar), which seems not correct. Also, I have the sense that hydroelectric energy production and my demand are both essentially fixed so I’m not totally sure what happens when I opt in to increasing my bill with green energy other than indicating to power producers that the market for green power exists.

Chicago, Twin Cities, Marine Corps…I better make up my mind before my only choice is an ad hoc Trishathon!

merge conflicts, originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

Is out! Don’t mind the merge conflicts. I’ve been running the beta for a while and have been much happier with a lot of it, but saddened by the lack of firebug and greasemonkey support (both of which may have been resolved by now).

There is a 1974 green Karmann Ghia coupe for sale in Seattle right now and I don’t have a car.

lions, originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

This is the best thing since the Panda cam.

As Adam has said before, screen rules. It can be used in conjunction with a bunch of other stuff but its main benefit (in my book) is solving the scenario of getting re-connected to a remote shell session. The multiplexing is, IMO, like a poor man’s emacs buffer/window management system, but when I lose an ssh connection because I take my laptop somewhere or whatever, being able to reconnect with screen -r - that brings me great joy.

Note: this will not be the start of a recurring series to some day feature vi or svn.

The next time I’m in the company of three cell phones, I must try this: