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.

Yesterday I got into an uncomfortable discussion with a co-worker and a stranger at lunch about the economy. The situation is clearly not cheery with the housing market downturn and junk mortgages cindering but it’s also hard to identify “we are in a recession” because the measures of recession really aren’t popularly agreed upon. Two quarters of economic downturn, and all, but if you look at BEA’s numbers we haven’t had a single quarter of downturn and there is a wide sense among the laity that we know better whether a recession is in effect and that because of the way economic indicators are assessed (like the exclusion of people who are not looking for work from the unemployment rate), the formal definition of a recession misses the reality of our economic well-being. So conversations like this frequently wind up feeling somewhat like bitch-sessions and anecdotal stories making a case one way or another.

So I’m talking with my coworker when someone at our shared table asked whether we’d heard about the landfill status and how landfill rates (meaning, he said, trash) had reduced to 95% of their regular levels. He seemed quite convinced this was an (unmeasured) strong indicator of recession. So I said, “hold on - that sounds like an interesting indicator but Seattle also introduced an initiative within past year about forcing people to recycle more and couldn’t that account for this change?” “No - of course not - not 5%” I was reprimanded by both people. So I left it with my insistence that I didn’t know how much recycling rates would influence the landfill rates but I was positive this would have an impact (and my coworker offered that trash volume isn’t a very precise measure of economic volume).

Next comes my mail yesterday. Just a couple hours after having this conversation I opened my mail and found a Seattle Public Utilities’ newsletter stating that over the last 5 years recycling rates have increased from 38% to 47% - meaning (it appears) that 9% of what we used to throw in the trash goes to recycling. I don’t know when the trends were greatest with that change and this doesn’t talk specifically to last year, but that’s a 15% reduction in trash that would go to a landfill, which would definitely affect the indicator we were discussing.

The summary is that this is exactly why I don’t like getting into political discussions with strangers and frequently why I don’t like having the conversations any more at all. You get people together who have (frequently incomplete) information and agendas and you get past the baseline of “here’s some information and the conclusions from my agenda that follow” and it’s just too hard to have a remotely meaningful conversation after that because you need more good information about the specific topic at hand to have a worthwhile conversation. Disclaimer: I can certainly be guilty of this, too.

Has Lost started again yet??

I have a bunch of recaps I need to get to work on…

• My trip to Salt Lake City with Scott from a week and a half ago, wherein the slopes were rocked.
• The weekend of races, wherein my track race was so-so but the Hart Foundation reunification saw me and the Anvil both setting new personal bests.
• The transformation of flexcar into zipcar, wherein my rates go up.

Monday I start real work again, so I guess I’m glad I’m keeping busy enough that I’m not finding time to blog, but as usual I’m not totally sure where all my time’s going. But I know in about an hour it’s going to be sucked up by 6×800’s with 1 minute recovery. But it’s on the grass! Just like old times!

Since my friend Paul started working for them, I’ve gone to the U District Food Bank’s annual fund raising dinner, which has a silent and live auction. By the way, if you’re in Seattle and reading this and not already at my table, you should totally go! It’s in a week, it’s a ton of fun, and for a good cause. Anyway, a year ago they auctioned off a pub crawl and last night I finally cashed it in. It was fun, but we didn’t get back till after 1 and the auction item should have included someone coming to turn off my alarm so that I would skip this morning’s long run.

Two short updates since yesterday:

First - all my pictures from Mt. Adams are online in flickr. My favorites are an amazing cloud shadow we saw on the way up, the panorama view between the false summit and summit (specifically in full size), the view of our campsite from the ridge heading up, and a hungry chipmunk.

Second - being tired yesterday has yielded to being very, very sore. Today is a day to listen to Crooked Fingers. I feel broken.

USGS Summit marker, originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

On Saturday and Sunday I went with Tanya, Adam, Julie and Shawn to climb Mt. Adams, the second highest mountain in Washington. The trip to the mountain on Saturday was eventful. We decided not to bother getting an early start because our directions said it should only take about 4 hours to get to the trailhead. Ha. It probably took us 8 hours. We stopped for a leisurely lunch in Eatonville at a strange restaurant that had 21 flavors of soft-serve ice cream and sold toe rings from their bathroom. Then one of the forest roads to get to the trailhead (a section of NF-23 just before NF-90) was completely washed out. This was after driving on the roughest road I have ever seen - a dirt road with huge rocks in the way and with most of it only one car wide and so overgrown that bushes were rubbing on both sides of the poor Shawn’s car. So we struggled to find an alternate way to get to the trailhead (since, from where we were our best maps only showed a bunch of dead ends). We finally got to the trailhead maybe some time around 6 and started toward the Lunch Counter where we wanted to camp. The Lunch Counter is at about 9000′, which is supposed to put us in a good position to get to the summit the next day with a pretty leisurely climb of about 3000′ but it got dark way too early and we had to camp just a little above 7000′. Not that we didn’t fumble around in the dark with our headlamps trying to find cairns or trails or anything to get us a little further along.

Then yesterday we rose bright and early (and covered in suffocating ash, which blew right into all of our tents) and climbed the “non-technical” route to the summit. The climb was tough but fun and the views and way down were incredible. Maybe most incredible is that Shawn made it down at all since he started having some terrible IT pain in his left leg on the way down. After stopping to take down our tents we got to the parking lot and on the road at about 8 or 9 and didn’t get back to Seattle till about 3AM. Mad props to Adam and Shawn for getting us back. I was exhausted and not trying to be totally selfish about the trip back but I was thinking about what was ahead of me Monday morning…

Which was the Super Jock ‘n’ Jill half-marathon today at 9AM. I don’t know exactly what my time was and won’t know how I did against my three goals until times come online, but I think I probably made two of the three, which were:

1. Finish better than 1:40
2. Finish in the top 100 overall
3. Finish better than 1:30

My time was somewhere between 1:31 and 1:32 which is shy of 1:30, but about a 7 minute mile pace and I’m happy with that. And I’m very, very tired.

The past couple days have been busy with a mix of interesting and just busy.

I felt great heading out to Saturday’s long run and asked Chuck what I should do.  He suggested 13 miles so that’s what I did.  Finally. I haven’t done a straightforward easy pace 13 miler on a Saturday in over a month and that time it was the longest run I’d ever done in my life.  And it felt hard a month ago. But Saturday it really didn’t feel like enough. We did the Shilshole route and back up Stone Way and I had to cruise up Stone Way to feel like I was getting my work in for the day. So I asked Chuck if I could run again Sunday, which is kind of dumb. I think I’m starting to finally get that the answer to “Hey, I’m feeling pretty good and want to work more, is that OK with you?” is always “Yes.”  So Sunday I went around the lake and did a 20 minute tempo run. And that’s totally, totally different now than it was a month ago, which was the last time I had a tempo run in my schedule and when I had way different expectations of my abilities. I’d done the Firecracker at about 6:50 minute miles so I was doing tempo runs at 7:10 minute miles. Now I don’t know what my 5K time should be but I know it’s way faster than I did the Firecracker so I aimed for 6:30 minute miles in the tempo and wound up doing it at 6:24. And THAT felt good.

Tegan and Sara came with me on the run - The Con is awesome.

I spent the rest of the weekend priming, painting, and hanging doors on the new shed on the back of our house.  It’s coming along nicely and almost done!  I just need to decide - blueish like the house, or yellow? My samples should be dry by the afternoon. Sunday was cookout and frisbee golf in the H-district.

Yesterday I started work again!  Very exciting and fun. The environment seems great and I’ve had a totally good vibe about all the guys each time I’ve been in. However I came home and found Io not adjusting to being left home that well. He left a monumental turd next to the computer and, I later discovered, wet the floor at the bottom of the stairs.  Thanks, buddy! But more importantly, I’ll say again that the Bissell SpotBot should come standard with every puppy.

This morning I took Io on a jog for the first time in well over a month, since I upped the mileage.  A short run in the park in the morning isn’t too much to add on to my schedule and it’s just right for him so I figured I’d go for it even though I’ve got track work later tonight. It was awesome. I really miss running with him and he totally loves it, too.

The rest of the morning I’ve spent consolidating my google accounts.  This is just a bunch of stupidness but basically I had my “home” account as a google account, but then I started using google domain hosting for psoul.com and re-created the “home” account there. This resulted in google knowing about two home’s at psoul.com, which confused it. It seems like it *should* be easy to say “take all the mojo from the old account and consolidate it into the new one” but it’s not. So I had to modify the old account so it looked distinct from the new account. Then from the old account change all of its sharing settings (calendar, documents, etc.) so that nothing was shared with “home” and then re-share with “home”.  Now I think it’s all basically moved over and I’m close to being able to retire the old account.

During this time, the new Weakerthans album and some Feist have accompanied me. I’m totally on a Canadian kick.

Good times!

If you’re like me, when you read this weather alert:

   THE HEAT WAVE WILL CONTINUE TODAY WITH WARMER CONDITIONS EXPECTED
   COMPARED TO YESTERDAY. AFTERNOON HIGH TEMPERATURES WILL REACH
   INTO THE MID 90S TO NEAR 100 DEGREES. THIS IS 20 TO 25 DEGREES
   ABOVE NORMAL. THE COMBINATION OF HIGHER TEMPERATURES AND HIGHER
   RELATIVE HUMIDITY WILL CREATE VERY UNCOMFORTABLE AND DANGEROUS
   CONDITIONS ACROSS THE AREA.

You think “time to go heat up some coffee and think about the afternoon run.”

Tuesday night at about 11:55 the Firecracker 5K took off from Mercer Arena in Seattle Center. It was a fun race that starts on July 3 and finishes on July 4 (but is late!) and overall I was very pleased with the race.

I put together a mini-persistence of vision (POV) kit from ladyada and programmed it to say “USA!” with a small firecracker logo that I would tie to my shoe for the run. This seemed like a great idea, but it fell apart literally and figuratively. Figuratively, I thought I should tie it to my left shoe since the course involved a bunch of right turns and I thought people would be more likely to see it on my left foot. But I failed to consider that from a watcher’s perspective, my left foot moves right to left, meaning the image created by the POV kit would be mirrored. Oh well, at least the firecracker would still work, right? Not so. I really should have anticipated this but probably 200′ into the race I felt like the straps on the battery pack were loosening and by 500-1000′ into the race the battery pack was totally loose. This was awful because I was trying to set a competitive pace in the race and was near the front so tons of runners were behind me as I stumbled and tried to rip the battery pack off so I could run. I did manage to rip it off (and have been able to solder it all back together and it still works) but I had an awkward half mile or so while I tried putting the battery pack and batteries in my pocket, then decided to carry them, and finally got comfortable.

And my technical woes didn’t end there! At about the 2 mile mark I wanted to check my pace and in trying to turn the light on my watch on I managed to pop one of the pins out of the strap. Ugh!

In spite of this I finished in just over 21 minutes at 6:50 miles, which accomplished my goal of sub-7 minute miles. My previous best recorded 5k pace was over a minute slower. So yay!

Tanya and I scootered down, which was eventful, and met John on the field and also ran into Gunter and Mike before the race. I think everybody had a great time and Gunter took 5th in the clydesdale division - way to go, Super G! Tanya’s time was on par with the Furry 5K, which was good considering that while this wasn’t an impossible course it was quite a bit more challenging.