Moving On Up

A few hours after the Ed Murphey Mile in Memphis, Tennessee I shifted balance on the wall I was perched on outside a bar filled to capacity. My track season had just ended. As I craned my neck to see inside through big glass windows, huge versions of Floyd Mayweather and Connor McGregor danced, projected onto the bar wall during round eight of their much anticipated fight. Out there in the Memphis night there was barely room to get an unobstructed view of a TV inside.

Earlier in the evening, eight of us took up our own stage on a high school track on the outskirts of Memphis.  Standing on the makeshift mile start line, thousands of fans clamored at our periphery in the outside lanes and the infield. We felt something like Mayweather and McGregor must have felt in the ring. All athletes do. Knowing that was pain was about to come. Feeling the proximity of human bodies, leaning in, anticipation palpable in eyes.

Just eight men and seven women comprised the mile/1500m fields in Memphis, including pacers. Crowded, physical races are part of running, but this very small field was refreshing after a spring and summer of jockeying for position in US, Irish, and Belgian track races. Minutes before our race, the women put on a great 1500 meter show, and the crowd was still buzzing. The entire track was lined with people. 

Their roar abruptly crescendoed at the start as if torn from the starter's gun, its wave rippling around the oval, preceding and following us as we covered four laps for the mile. I never remember much detail from a race, but I do recall hearing "USA! USA! USA!" on each run of the backstretch. The pace was good and fast early as we passed 800m in one minute and fifty six seconds. 

Pacer Jesse Garn (a great guy) takes us through three laps in the inaugural Ed Murphey Mile in Memphis, TN.

You never truly settle in a mile. It's too short a race, and even the smallest gap to the guy or girl ahead can lose you the race. You enter into a state of strained relaxation at the intersection of conscious thought and subconscious action. The world collapses down into a few blurry objects seen through a pinhole, the wind in your ears, and the notion of how much you have left in your legs versus how far it is to the finish.

With six hundred meters to go I was in second place behind Craig Engels, one of those young guns right out of college. He had just cut his magic mullet off a few weeks earlier, so I thought maybe my old man strength could prevail over him. We were cutting the fastest pace I'd personally been on for a mile or 1500 in the past several seasons, so the letters P and R started floating around in my head on the second bend of the third lap.

But seconds later, coming around into the bell lap, Craig, in the lead, slowed down considerably. It was then that I made the mistake of not maintaining our roll and going around him. Instead, Eric Avila shot out of third past us into the lead. By then there were 400 meters left, I was in third place, and the kick was on.

It is here that we come to the point of, or at least part of the thrust behind, this blog you are reading.

Sticking to a strategy that isn't paying off, but still has a chance to, can be scary. In most endeavors, (except for like, trying to hit a piñata blindfolded)  you'll never find success unless you pursue a given strategy for a long, long, (long) time, wringing it of its potential. We have a word for that: committing. Running is one of those endeavors (you should still commit to the piñata because there's candy in it.)

After finding success in them, I've been committed to running shorter distance races (1500m, mile, 5,000m) since college, and I've been consistent. But pretty much just that: consistent. Running up to and just barely kissing personal bests each year, racking up many 5k performances in the thirteen-thirties and miles with one or two seconds of four minutes. Good performances, but not ones in line with my desire to continue improving.

So imagine my mingled dismay and disbelief when, after that last lap in Memphis, after cushioning ourselves by a full four seconds below four minute mile and P.R. pace through halfway, and seeing the door open to the lead heading into the bell, I finished fourth and the clock read 4:00.3 next to my name in the end. We’d slowed down too much on the third lap and it cost us. Btw, I had ran 4:00.7 three weeks earlier in Raleigh. I told you I was consistent.

(I'm not asking for your phalanges to ply the world's smallest fiddle for me here. Everyone's running career is a big series of experiments, and results are results, especially when they're less than "stellar". [Let me also say that disappointment very quickly gave way to joy at being part of such a great event in Memphis. The top three got under four, so it was a historic race. Having barely finished, I turned around and jogged down the line of spectators for a round of high fives.  My legs experienced a second round of numbing lactic buildup even at ten minute pace {how the hell do people do victory laps or post-race dances <Ezekiel Kemboi> looking so good?!}, but my spirit was quickly repaired. That's the beauty of events that get the fans close, physically, to the athletes. Like Memphis, Sir Walter Miler in Raleigh, the Long Island Mile, and others have been popping up. Like boxing. {In fact I started writing so much on the topic of making running more popular through format and presentation that I had to fork it over to a  separate, forthcoming blog. Stay tuned.}])

Getting fans close to athletes is the future of this sport. Sir Walter Miler in Raleigh, NC.

Memphis ended as somewhat of a paraphrase of my entire season: healthy, running pretty fast, but performing time and time again on the same plane. Our strength coach at Texas once told us that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That’s not really what it says in the dictionary, but I’ve been feeling a bit insane in that sense lately. 

So it’s finally time to try a new strategy. I’m selling my car and moving to Saskatchewan!

Just kidding. I’m not going anywhere. Luckily running offers more than one surface to gallop upon, and plenty of distances to gallop over.  It's time for me to move up in distance. 

No, not to the marathon. Yet. I’m not ready to relinquish all my fast twitch muscle fibers. Just half of them. I’ll be running the Houston Half Marathon in January. Race weekend in Houston will likely have a healing and inspiring effect on the city after Hurricane Harvey, and I’m excited to run and be part of the race. The remainder of 2018 will include more racing on the roads than on the track, although I’ll run a track 10,000m or two in the spring, and will probably hate myself afterwards.

Training will change, too. I’ve never trained like a true miler, but in parallel with the shorter distances I’ve targeted in the past few years, things like volume (mileage over time) and intensity of workouts have always been closer to a shorter, faster, trackier motif while at Princeton, Texas, and Zap Fitness. That’s going to change.

Basically my running pedigree boils down to a battle between my mom and dad’s sides of the family. Dad, with his shorter, stockier stature lends speed and power (and my big butt) to the equation. But then mom comes in and lets me run really far, with her thin, tall dad and willowy ancestors. I’ve been giving them both a chance up until now by focusing on the classic speed/distance combo that is the 5,000m event.  So sorry, dad. Time to give mom and the longer, strength oriented side some more love with things like triple digit mile weeks, longer threshold workouts and tempo runs, and farther long runs.

Squad. Andrew, Aaron, Brandon, and I line up for the Morton Games 5,000m in Dublin this summer.

Absolutely the most important thing for a runner (or anyone, with any passion) is to be excited about running and to keep having fun doing it. When you’ve reached a stale point or a bit of a plateau/mesa type thing, it’s time to make a change. Running in a few new events and getting a novel race calendar is exciting. Even more so is the renewed prospect of finding my true strength and reigniting my belief that I can make a world championship or olympic team. With new goals and a plan to reach them, it feels as if I’ve retired from one job and taken up a new one, where the water cooler is twice as far away, I work late on weekends, and have a brand new stapler.

I took a two week active break after the Memphis Ed Murphey Mile, and am now in the second week of building up mileage. My first race back actually makes this whole blog look like a lie, since it’s a 5k - the USATF Championship / Dash to the Finish Line race in New York City. Last time I ran that race, in 2013, I first met and shared a hotel room with the late runner David Torrence, who tragically died last month at way too young an age. It being one of my first races on the pro circuit, DT made an impression on me. He was eager to hand down seasoned wisdom on training and traveling and racing to a young pro just getting started (though he kept the room way too cold). I was always very impressed with his racing savvy and ability to run everything from the 800m to the 5,000m and beyond at a super high level, and his ability to pump up crowds and make people love him. He will be missed.

After New York it’s a few more road races in November and the Club Cross Country Championships in December. The fall/winter cycle builds to the Houston half marathon in January, after which we’ll start looking at that 25 lap track race and road races around the country.

For those of you who’ve somehow managed to read all the way to here, I reward you with an update on the Zap Fitness vegetable garden. This year has seen by far our most abundant harvest. The tomatoes did decently, though many get caterpillarized if you don’t pick them soon enough. Our real windfall was in jalapeños. They are the spiciest, tastiest ‘peños I’ve ever indulged in. Going in and coming out. And we have more basil than we know what to do with. Make a lot of pesto I guess.

That's it for now. Thanks for reading.

Upcoming race schedule:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
November 4	US 5k Road Champs/Abbott Dash to the Finish	New York, NY	Road 5k
November 11	VCU Health 8k	Richmond, VA	Road 8K
November 23	Manchester Road Race	Manchester, CT	Road 4.748 miles
December 9	Club Cross Country Championships	Lexington, KY	Cross country 10k
January 14	Aramco Houston Half Marathon	Houston, TX	Half Marathon

Fenestration

Afraid to swing my legs off the bed and put my feet on the floor, I stared at the blankness of my bedroom walls.  When I was younger, this would have been because I was afraid some raptor clawed monster with long, snatching arms waited beneath the bed, ready to drag me to its lair in the basement.  Or if at home in Milwaukee during the winter, because the hardwood floor of my bedroom tended to match the outside's midwest temperatures, ready to freeze bare feet.  Now I stared at the paintings on my bedroom walls.  Checked my heart rate.  The morning light made reflections in the altitude tent plastic, little faces that distorted and chuckled in the breeze coming from the window.

I was delaying the beginning of the day because I felt a sharp ache in my upper outside ankle.  I didn't want to put weight on it and confirm my worst fears: another bone injury.  I was being dramatic.  A year ago Id’ve chalked this kind of pain up to just another demon sorely haunting my flesh, tendons, and bones.  One of the countless reliably exorcised during the first cracking, tendon popping shuffle to the bathroom, or if stubborn, during the first few running steps of the day. 

As it turns out, I got up, went to practice, ran, and have kept on running since.  The ankle thingy was just that: a thing.  But my hesitancy shows one thing: getting hurt last September has certainly made me keenly aware of my vincibility.  I think that’s a word.

Having neglected to write for so long I feel obliged to rewind (still a word I think) to September twentieth.  I had just posted a blog piece that mentioned how taking a longer break from running had left me refreshed and healthy.  I was about to be proven (mostly) wrong.  The very next morning, on a hard hill workout with (ya done messed up) Aaron at Bass Lake, hubris struck swiftly and sans mercy.  Somewhere in my pelvis, some of the strongest ligaments in the body pulled hard enough on my sacrum, a bone between the pelvic wings, to fracture it.  I knew immediately during the workout that something was wrong.  Donald Trump was way too close in the polls.  And my back really hurt.  Luckily I only ran about an extra mile on the injury, hoping it was just freak pain, before I stopped.

Several days later, an MRI confirmed what we were already almost certain of: a sacral stress fracture.  Pete’s recovery protocol called for a full eight weeks totally away from running. Unlike other types of fractures, virtually every cross training modality, including biking, elliptical, swimming, pool running, walking, and even helping to construct a scale replica of the Great Pyramids of Giza by hand end up irritating a sacrum fracture.  Exercise was out.  I was now wanted by the Sacral Police around the Zap Fitness campus.  Five-stars-on-GTA wanted.  If I was caught so much as dancing I’d receive a stern reprimand from team mates. Eight weeks of electrifying ossification it was.

Wanted by the sacral police in Boston

As it turns out, running problems aren’t much different from living in Egypt under Pharaoh and the Ten Plagues.  Pee transforming into blood.  Lyme disease.  Shards of glass impaling the foot.  Food poisoning from diseased livestock.  Disintegrating bones.  I’ve seen friends and team mates with it all over the years.

Stress fractures are about as common as Starbucks locations will be on the moon in 2050. Most athletes on the professional circuit have suffered at least one bone fracture or reaction in their career.  Many ridiculously accomplished athletes seem to exist in a perpetual state of duct taped-ness, cross training from one window slit of health to the next, yet still pulling off amazing performances in times of relative health despite their apparent fragility.  

Having been healthy for so long, part of me felt I had it coming; that every lucky streak comes to an end.  This notion made being hurt a little easier to swallow.  I was finally about to experience the other side of competitive runner life coin for the first time: video games.  I mean…  being debilitatingly injured.  Actually I just watched team mates play video games. I’m more of an observer.  Seriously though: a runner should always do everything in her or his power to avoid getting hurt, but when she does, he should remember that being hurt is part of the process.  Injury is a cost of doing business.

And I’m finally a member of the Bones Brigade.  I know their secrets.

Rule number one: You don’t talk about the… 

You believe you’re going to come back stronger than before.  Not in an abstract, cliche way, either.  You believe you’re going to have your best season ever, right after being in the worst shape of your life, or at least since your middle school skateboarding years.  As in, you’re going to win stuff you’ve never won before and run personal bests you’ve never run before. Which is the definition of a personal best.  This helps get you through the days when the altitude tent faces start to look like that clown from It, or worse, James Franco.

I didn’t delight in not engaging in the activity I enjoy the most for two months.  I had too much time to think.  I started writing a novel about a coach that mentors athletes for years, only to sadistically murder them and stuff their corpses in a collapsed mineshaft.  I envisioned a toaster that prints the weather forecast, motivational phrases, and market futures on your toast.  (already been done)  I did quite a bit of sifting through thoughts, most of which fall under the “holy shit I’m getting old where did the time go and what am I doing with my life” theme.

I’m proud to report I came out on the other side.  No.  I didn’t quite experience the sunlit burst of mach-nine-jet-fighter-flying-out-of-a-masisve-kerosene-explosion type inspiration that some people claim they get after overcoming injury.  I know success won’t be automatic. It’ll have to be worked for over time.  It’s a long trail back to peak lifetime fitness.  That’s the realist in me.  What I am feeling, now healthy, with three workouts under my belt and running mid-seventies miles per week, on the way up, is a sense of reset and swift progress away from the bottom.  

I returned to running Thanksgiving week with a blissful nine minute jaunt on the alter-gravity treadmill at 70 percent body weight.  We did several weeks worth of short alter-G runs alternating with swim days.  By mid December most runs were on land with all 9.81 meters per second squared of sweet gravity pulling my aching limbs that forgot how to run down towards the center of the Earth.

The first hard workout back was here in Tallahassee.  Brandon and Matt dragged my mouth breathing self around four times two kilometer repetitions on grass soccer fields.  The 800 meter loop that Pete measured and marked out would have made lovers of quicksand and many sided polygons proud.  I didn’t care how much energy the angel food cake-like ground soaked up from our strides.  I was just glad to be back rolling after so much lying around doing crosswords.

Matt, Brandon, and I running a hill cycle workout in Tallahassee earlier this month.

Admittedly, there were moments during time off and the early phase of starting again when I was mildly depressed.  Doubtful that I’d be able to climb back to competitive fitness.  I didn’t feel like a runner, which, despite trying to stay diversified in my interests, is a huge part of my identity.  While not running in September, October, and November, the next most exciting aspects of life began creeping into my thoughts.  What am I going to do after professional running?  I want to engineer and invent.  My dream is to be an entrepreneur. With nothing else to do, I began doing research, sketching ideas, calling people.  Which is great, except for one thing: I’m not done committing myself fully to running yet.  Post-running life was making a house call while running was away.  The desire to do something frankly stressed me out, because I was, and still am, around Zap, a running environment (except for the occasional drag race and pistol duel).  

In the end I learned from this injury something I already knew, but had to be reminded of: to just relax and live the life I’m living currently.  That’s easier to write now, when I’m grabbing fitness left, right, port, and starboard and beginning to see the light.  When you’re going through a tough time, believe that your wayward anchor, when it’s given back to you, will serve its purpose and make you happy again.  I forgot for a time how great working towards hefty goals, finishing a hard workout, and sharing a swift run with friends makes me feel.  Natural.  Purposeful. 

Maybe I just came to the exact same conclusion that many before me already have.  But everyone has to wade through the same experiences, bound by shallows and miseries at times.  Would life be any fun if you were born with the wisdom of humanity come before you?  Probably not.  I always preferred the Do It Yourself (w/ your contemporaries) section.

One day I was staring out of my window at a tree high up on the ridge opposite our house.  It towered above all the rest against the sky.  The wind had gradually bent its limbs until they permanently embraced the trunk’s leeward side.  I was trying to determine from my window whether the tree was an evergreen or a deciduous tree, but at that distance I couldn’t be sure.  I resolved to take a steep hike up to find out.  But then I got hurt and couldn’t walk.

Six weeks later in November when the valley was awash in fiery yellows and reds, I looked out the window and my tree stood out, clearly ever green, high on the ridge.  Sometimes you just have to wait.

Team field trip to St. Mark's Wildlife Refuge and alligator alley.  Matt was so scared he kept his eyes closed the whole time.

Zap Fitness is in hard training at Tallahassee training camp until mid February.  Then we’ll retreat back into the mountains and enjoy Chef Michael (co-author of a forthcoming Zap Fitness cookbook + workout book!) food once again.

Having started training so late following the injury, my agenda for 2017 is a long track and road racing season extending all the way into October.  The first time I put the uniform on will be to pace 5,000m and mile heats at the Iowa State Classic indoor meet in a few weeks. My first real race will be the Gate River Run / US 15k Championship in March.  That one will be successful if I avoid a post-race thermometer up the butt like two years ago.  TMI?

Thanks for reading all the way to the end, gentle reader.  To reward you, I leave you with this: flamingoes are pink because they eat shrimp.

Here's my tentative race schedule:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
February 11	Iowa State Classic	Ames, IA	Indoor track pacing duties
March 11	Gate River Run	Jacksonville, FL	Road 15k
March 24	Raleigh Relays	Raleigh, NC	Track 1500, 5000 pace
April 15	Boston Athletic Assoc. 5k	Boston, MA	Road 5k
May 3	Payton Jordan Invite	Palo Alto, CA	Track 5k

Warming Up the Turkey

Before dawn, the sky black at the edges, stars number enough to reveal individual leaves' outlines in trees.  As the star quilted sky sweeps into view from above the house’s eaves, a meteor tears across the southern sky, extinguished and then reignited briefly, insane speed and energy dissipated mutely.  Orion hunts, slowly arcing from horizon to horizon.  The time before the beginning of a day.

Several hundred cubic fathoms of beer, immeasurable megawatt-hours worth of sun exposure, inundation in two each of ocean and great lake, multiple minor non-running related injuries involving jellyfish, rope swings, sidewalks, waterfalls, and physical feats a by definition athletically one-dimensional distance runner generally just shouldn’t be attempting, and 14 additional pounds of baggage later, I'm back to running after a cathartic six week break. I needed it. I sort of limped through the outdoor track season on a crutch of ibuprofen, running on a hip with internal workings that just, well, couldn't even. 

Motivating my recent demotivation were two people: the great Kenyan marathoner Paul Tergat, who purportedly took several years off every fall and gained innumerable kilograms, returning to running just rarin to rip heads off. His running career lasted at an international level well into his thirties.  And Pete, our coach at Zap Fitness, who told me I needed to finally let my usually pretty not-injury-prone physique actually rest for more ten days for once, for crying out loud. He had good reason.

Lucky enough to never have suffered from anything worse than achilles tendinitis (knocks on skull), I've never taken a break from training of more than twelve days since high school. Many runners would kill a fly for that kind of durability, but those long term injuries replenish your physical and mental energy stores.   Beside allowing the soft tissue in my hip to heal, pure off time would let the head scratching inducing symptoms of long-term overtraining subside.  I imagine fatigue from one season rolling over to the next season across relatively short ten to fourteen day breaks and compounding a runner to death later on.   Simulating a major injury and taking several weeks off could be the change in training I needed having spent several seasons on a plateau running similar track and road performances.  So Pete applied a jackhammer to my shins.

Just kidding. But for 42 days I wasn't a runner, or even an active human except for some hiking and canoeing.  And Pokemon Go.  Sue me.  Going cold turkey is hard, but I reminded myself that even though my lifestyle closely matched that of Jaba the Hut, minus the weird frog things he heats, the runner within was being given a breather for the work and competition to come.  Whenever thoughts of training started leaking in, I'd reach for another beer.  At two weeks the strangeness of not running faded as hormones stabilized, the metabolism slowed down, and my body got used to not being stressed each morning and afternoon with a run.  At a month I was the one shouting run Forest run.  But in the third trimester of my training holiday, with the Olympics on full blast and inspired by the hugely successful US distance and middle distance olympic teams, I was ready to return to running like I never have been before.  

Week one was rough.  “left, right, left, right, port, starboard” I told my legs, ambulating at greater than three m.p.h. for the first time since early July.  It made me respect the fitness I’ve retained continually for over a decade.  In fits and starts my legs have come around since the break ended.  As uncomfortable as the first few runs were, being “out of shape” provides a good point of reference.  It’s kind of fun to feel the tangible gains made almost daily when you’re starting from a lower point: sure, you have a long way to go, but runners are happiest when we’re climbing.*

Last month’s Cameron Bean Memorial 5k and Magnum Mile in Chattanooga, Tennessee provided a timely mental and spiritual boost for the return to being a runner.  Normally we wouldn’t race or work out so soon after returning to training, but I couldn’t miss Cam’s run.  It’s been almost a year since our Zap teammate Cameron died, and getting to run that morning with Zap team mates past and present, Zap campers, and over 650 people who knew Cameron and to hear how he inspired them in life completely reassured me I’m doing the right thing by working to achieve the kind of goals Cameron set and lived by.  Despite it being so early in training, I ran the evening’s very well put on Magnum Mile event balls to the wall because Cam would have done the same.  I was pretty happy with a 4:25 road mile off no training, although my legs were not pleased the next day.

Aaron, Brandon, and I running a 7-6-5-4-3 fartlek
on Bass Lake in Blowing Rock last week

Team at Zap Fitness has been another big source of energy and inspiration for me in the early stages of this new buildup.  Running after college is a hard road/trail/track, and the team has changed a lot since I started running for Zap over three years ago.  I have a good relationship with everyone who’s run here and moved on, and I draw on the young energy we now have on the roster.  Like Count Trackcula.  Johnny Crain, Matt McClintock, Brandon Doughty, and Aaron Nelson all moved into our facility and campus on Blackberry Road late this summer, and their excitement for training at this level and competing on the professional circuit spreads to the seasoned members of the team, keeping things fresh and in perspective.  When you live, run, eat, cut the grass, and sleep together†, good interaction within the group begets good living and effective training.  

This was a natural transition year between being an early post collegiate runner and being a better experienced and hungrier athlete not afraid to set lofty goals.  The best running is ahead.  For now I’m training until November, when I’ll run two road races, including (my favorite) the Manchester Road Race on Thanksgiving morning.  In December we’ll begin our cross country campaign with Zap as we run for the team title at the USATF Club Cross Country Championships in Tallahassee.  In January we’ll compete in several cross country meets across Scotland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in preparation for February’s US Cross Country Championships held in Bend, Oregon.  With lots of cross country on the schedule, I’ll enter the outdoor track season strong and prepared to race into the end of the summer.

So we move into one of my favorite times of the year: when the smell of leaves and decay on the dry breeze and chilly mornings bring on olfactory nostalgia and mean hard, long training runs on dirt and grass and other rustic surfaces‡, and when those first anxious memories of competitive running formed for a high school freshman who didn’t know where this after school activity would take him.  You fall§ in love with the tired, sore feeling in your legs that pervades your days.  The feeling of accomplishment as you train for those short and rare moments when your goals are at their most vulnerable, ripe for breaking.  The trail to those days is long and full of switchbacks, manticores, man, a lot of core, and as I’ve said, many Coors.  Our objective is to run faster times, qualify for bigger meets, and win championships, but you can’t forget who climbs the trail with you, and even those who conspire to beat you to the top, because they have a funny way of becoming your friends too.  Without them, there’s no one to share the glory of running with.

Thanks for reading.  Here's my upcoming race schedule:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
November 12	HCA 8k	Richmond, VA	Road 8k
November 24	Manchester Road Race	Manchester, CT	Road 4.748 miles
December 10	USATF Club Cross Country Championships	Tallahassee, FL	Cross Country 10k
January 7	Great Edinburgh XCountry ‖	Edinburgh, Scotland	Cross Country 8k
February 4	USATF Cross Country Championships	Bend, OR	Cross Country 12k

- - - - - - -
Digressions

* The derivative of my fitness with respect to time is positive and large, and right now I might even venture to say that its second derivative is positive, meaning my fitness is increasing at an increasing rate.  All of this provides good momentum against the inevitable cooling off the second derivative into negative territory and the slowing of my fitness increase to zero hopefully exactly when I want it to, say next summer at an important competition, again ideally at an absolute value of fitness greater than I’ve ever reached before.
† In extended stay hotels and European dorm rooms
‡ How to say 'soft surfaces' with class

§ Pun premeditated
‖ Qualification required