9555 Blackberry

Sunday evening I went for a walk.  In the running world Zap Fitness coach Pete Rea's style falls on the eclectic side, and one of his slightly quirky training tidbits is prescribed Sunday evening walks following the morning long run for the week.  They're meant to knock loose some of the inflammation in our legs.

The Zap campus sits at the bottom of a valley in the Appalachian Mountains.  Blackberry Road dips down into our little hollow complete with a creek that rushes by and a mile section of dirt road that somehow never got paved.  Just up the hill from the long Zap driveway the construction site of a new house is already daily bustling with activity as a new athlete lodging rises from its foundation.  It replaces an old white house that just months ago was my home.  The white house held a lot of Zap history but needed to be torn down.

Darkness falls earlier now and as I come upon the equipment and mounds of dirt left by the contractors, I try to find remnants of our old house.  There isn't much.  But on the edge of the site where a chain link fence was bent into a tangled mess by the bulldozer are a set of busted-up wicker chairs.  And a dirt stained bed sheet.  It was Cameron.  He used to love getting people together around the fire in our backyard and projecting movies onto the sheet against the fence.  That stuff sat out in the weather all summer long since the last showing.  I'd look at it from my bedroom window and think, "I better bring those chairs in from the rain and get that sheet."

I imagine where the old house was, my room floating in the air and Cameron's below it, his cat Nala chasing birds around in the yard.  Cameron died two months ago after being hit by a car while running in his hometown of Chatoanooga, TN.  The magnitude of support from the local and running community is testament to how many people were influenced by his huge personality.  His dreams were not abruptly and totally ended that day.  They live on through us at Zap and everyone who takes on the challenges and strives to live the way Cameron did.  Cameron is cheering us on now, and I can feel a certain determination and electricity in the Zap team as we approach the Olympic year (Thanks in no small part to the occasional Drake and house music we play in his honor while lifting).

Cameron and I on the last night I saw him.  Wouldn't have wanted
it any other way.

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The Olympic Year focus has had a strong effect this fall and early winter.  We've tweaked autumn training compared to the past two years, and it's already had good physical and psychological effects. 

Friday is now #FastFriday.  On Fridays we typically run 50-55 minutes in Moses Cone National Park before putting racing flats on and doing two to three kilometers worth of fast, uphill running.  It's not a lot of volume, and I wouldn't label it a full workout, but economy on hills helps with proprioception and activation of prime mover muscles (ok, now I'm using language that only Pete Rea understands).  This is nothing new - almost every serious runner does hills - but we've never made it this much of a focus this early in the buildup into the new year before.

Lifting.  Core, stability, and plyometrics have been in my training plan since high school.  The focus has gradually shifted from traditional core "abs" in college towards stability in the hips and pelvis at Zap.  Now we've added real, actual lifting with real, actual bar and plates twice a week, doing weighted squats and weighted step ups onto a box.  We save the core and stability for four other days during the week and take a break from the weight room on Sunday.

Diet.  I've always had what the average American would call a healthy diet, but as a bigger runner, I have to pay a little more attention to what, how much, and when I eat.  "The flame burns hot" mentality does not cut it for me.  I eat often during the day and in small amounts, eating just enough to stave off hunger until the next small snack.  Carbs generally go in early and protein more in the PM.  I have a medium-sized snack 45 minutes to an hour before dinner to keep my eyes small.  Tuna is my best friend.  I'm not gluten free, but I tend to avoid it with some wiggle room.  (Like if I go to my girlfriend's parent's house and we're having lasagna, I eat it.)  Figuring out how to stay lean while training hard and not getting hurt sustainably has taken me years, and I'm continually testing new strategies and foods.  What I have found for sure is a strong motivation to stick to the plan this fall.

The Manchester Road Race is tomorrow morning.  It's my first race in over two months and the beginning of the road to the Olympic Trials in July.  The course is 4.748 miles long and has a large hill in the second mile that will test what we've been working on a little bit.  Can't wait to feel some burn and taste some bile.  I'll be running for Cameron.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.  I think Black Friday started already too.

Caesar's Head

I listen to the submarine bubbling noise my snorkel makes as I stand, upside-down, on the bottom of the sailboat in Lake Michigan.  It's a smaller spartan barque - a J/24 - and that means racing.  When I was twelve my dad bought the 1979 hulk in lackluster condition from a retired sailor in Racine, Wisconsin, going straight to work on it with the same can of elbow grease he used on our house and cars as I grew up.  This boat is a classic, he says.  It'll be the envy of the sail yard one day, if we can keep the water out of the hull.

We're anchored in sixteen feet of water a quarter mile off Atwater beach in Milwaukee last summer above the wreck of the Appomattox, a steamer that stranded here during a storm in 1905.  The crew gave up on her after two weeks of wallowing on the rocks.  I push off our own hull,  diving straight down until my ears pop and the water is chilly.  I can make out one side of the 319 foot steamer looming through the blue-green, slightly opaque water, imagining what it looked like in 1905.

View of Caesar's Head climb from Zap
Fitness' private jet

The Appomattox floats into my head because my ears are popping again during a hard run up to Caesar's Head State Park in upstate South Carolina on Friday.  I've flown dozens of times in the past few years without pain in my ears, yet climbing 2100 vertical feet up 7.4 miles on highway 276 is making them ring, probably because I don't have the luxury of yawning at this breathing and heart rate.  I'm too busy maintaining the tightly spinning feedback loop in my mind that I've set up to stay focused: "this hurts." "shut up." "it hurts." "feet under you." "f*** this is hard." ""shut up... knee drive."  The focus is incredibly easy to break out of as we grind up switchback after switchback through deciduous forest interrupted occasionally by Walhalla Sheet rock outcroppings to the top.  I try to keep Kevin's blue shirt within sight up ahead.

A staple in Zap Fitness' repertoire, the long sustained hill climb is a very aerobic, strength based session done at low speed that erases the pounding of a similar effort on flat ground.  My time of 47:59 on Caesar's head comes out to 6:29 minutes/mile.  On flat ground, I'd need to run almost two minutes per mile faster to achieve the same aerobic effect, but would be hurting much more the next day.  Our other reason for climbing big hills is form improvement.  Pete tells me it will help reduce extraneous lateral motion in my stride and keep everything moving forward.  Even so, we don't want to end the day with the memory of just 6:30 pace in our legs.  At the top we run 8 x 200 meter strides, getting faster on each as a group.  The first few felt sluggish coming off the climb, but we were rolling well by the end.

Being a rookie on the team, Friday's Caesar Head is only my second climb and I'm still getting the hang of them.  At the top I'll admit I threw a bit of a temper tantrum, partly because I got my ass handed to me by Kevin and Cole.  Thinking about it though, this is why I joined Zap Fitness.  My future improvement depends on the continued development of my strength and efficiency.  Sure, I could go out and rip intervals on the track all season long and maybe retire a 13:20's-low guy in few years.  But real, deep-down improvement begins with things like a little pride check from super strong half marathoners and 10k guys during a session a little outside my comfort zone on Friday.  Besides, I can always get back at them on fast stuff like the 200s.  It's a nice dynamic.

The crew at the top of the Caesar's Head climb.  This is purportedly the last known photograph of Chris' beard before he shaved it.  Left to right Kevin Schwab, Cameron Bean, Chri$ Moen, Joe Stilin, Cole Atkins


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We have another two weeks of training camp down here in Greenville before many of us open up at the Raleigh Relays (pronounced rolly, not ra-lay, apparantly) and we return home to Zap in North Carolina.  Besides training I've been filling my time with several side projects.  I'm working with a friend on an entry to a worldwide sustainable engineering competition.  We're designing a wind energy system that uses a kite to generate power in disaster relief areas, places not accessible by large trucks, ocean buoys, and mountainsides.  In the interest of eventually being able to label myself as a halfway decent writer, I have three short stories in the works.  Two of them are collaborations with team mates Cole and George.  We each write about a paragraph and switch off.  The other is based in Austin, Texas.  And of course, I've been reading a lot.

You might be waiting for the tie-back to the Appomattox.  Well... aren't we all searching for something in a world that's slightly opaque at times, might feel chilly, and for which we may have to feel some pain in our ears to find?