Lions and Tigers and Squares

Staggering around like a drunken sailor in a bad storm, it took me a good ten minutes to finally admit defeat and limp into the Gate River 15k finish line medical tent.  Through chapped lips I kept telling my team mates and friends I would be alright, as a voice in my head kept saying "you know you're not ok."

Internal monologue.

You need to go into that tent.

I don't want to.

Whats the square root of 169?

13.  Doesn't matter, I'd only ask myself questions I knew the answer to.

Chris told me he read you release DMT right before you die.  Am I about to die?

What, are there researchers giving surveys at peoples deathbeds?

I feel really lucid, which means I'm going to die

And so on.  You're reading this, which means I didn't die, unless artificial intelligence has finally gotten smart enough to fool you.  Of course a machine would deny its own existence. Or would it?

My temperature in the medical tent was 103.1 taken well, back there.  I hoped after they cooled me off for half an hour with ice and wet towels that an oral thermometer would suffice for the required re-measurement.  I also knew that using one would be bad science. Needless to say, they used good science.

The ice-filled Lowes painters hat I donned before the start made me look kind of like Joan Benoit or Dave Wottle and made me want to Never Stop Improving, but it did little to prevent me from achieving critical core temperature.  Either way, there's something badass about pushing yourself to the limit and getting heat exhaustion to prove it.  Finishing 19th, I was initially disappointed, but while enjoying the Jacksonville afternoon at a friend's party I drew positives.  

Tyler Pennel (c), Griff Graves (r) and I combined for a second place team score
at the Gate River Run / US Road 15k Championships

Never let anyone, including yourself, take an all-out effort away from you.  I've questioned my effort and toughness after a bad race before, and it's not a good place to go.  You don't suddenly just get less tough.  The killer instinct you've honed in countless training sessions and races doesn't go away.  Unless you're Prefontaine, you have one, maybe two critical moments in each race.  Whether to follow an early surging pace or to start kicking far away from the finish, for example.  You have to trust that instinct will surface at that moment, and if things don't go your way, realize that your body can only do what it can do.  

Mistrust in your grit is often false and destructive self-analysis.  That mistrust probably accounts for most of many people's post bad race anxiety, and it sucks worse when it's shaken not stirred with pain into a cocktail of depression.  I've found the quickest way to stoke the fire isn't by agonizing over results or splits or other people or past, more glorious races, but (this may sound cliche) actually looking for positives in the race you just stumbled through.  They won't be positives you'll hang on your wall, but you're not weak for settling for sub par achievements either.  As weird as it may seem, running myself into a medical tent was my positive in Jacksonville.


Gate River was our final fall and winter foray into cross country and overdistance.  Now it's time for a later than usual return to the track.  Imagine a full sized, half starved tiger released towards a huge slab of red meat on a cedar stump across a gently sloping downhill grassy field - that's me.  It's a calculated debut designed to extend the season well into August and even September.  Sans indoor racing and with a week-long break after the Gate River run, my legs should be well prepared for the hands-to-knees acidic workouts and races ahead.  I'll begin with a 1500 at Princeton next Friday against some velocitous tigers, lions, and other assorted beasts.  Can't wait.

Now for what we call running porn.  The last two weeks have seen some of the best training I've ever done with Zap Fitness.  I won't go into details.  But two weeks ago as the gray mountain skies sent flakes of snow laterally across the whitecap kissed aqueduct of lonely Bass Lake, five 1500 meter repeats on dirt working from 4:26 to 4:19 began a series of fitness-bumping sessions.  That Sunday in better weather we went 18 miles on the long run with a nice 5:13 final mile.  The first major track session of the year was with Tyler that next Wednesday, run entirely "ins and outs style" (faster straights, slightly slower curves).  Beginning with 2400m at 4:40 pace (7:00) we went on to run 8 x 800m working gradually from 2:13 to 2:07 for an anaerobic bank deposit.  More training with Tyler on Saturday saw a 4:15 fifteen hundred on Bass Lake and threshold climbs in the carriage trails of the park.  

Zap Fitness practice on Bass Lake in Blowing Rock.  L-R Griff Graves, Joe Stilin, John Simons, Brandon Hudgins, Tyler Pennel, Chris Moen, George Alex.

Hump day this week brought with it one of the hardest sessions I've done in some time, mainly because of its length at a fairly intense rhythm.  Everything was run back and forth on a slightly hilly paved one kilometer section of the brand new Middle Fork Greenway that will eventually connect Blowing Rock and Boone.  Bouts of 2 kilometers, 6 x 1 kilometer, and 2 kilometers formed the meat of the session, the five of us averaging 5:55 for the 2k's and 2:53 for the 1k's.  Tyler and I threw in some economy (speed) with 3 x 600m "snowballs" (getting faster every 200m) and 3 x 200m touching under mile race pace to finish.  We're beginning to stir not shake together strength and speed within these sessions, and feeling fit has been feeling good.

After Princeton it's the trip to Palo Alto, CA for the Payton Jordan Invite and a 5000 opener.  I've run there the past two years and it's been one of the best distance meets in the US every year.  From there we'll head to the Oxy High Performance meet in LA two weeks later and then begin gearing up for US Outdoors later in June.  Those months are sure to bring more good tales and hopefully less thermometers.  Thanks for reading!


Next few races:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
April 17	Larry Ellis Invite	Princeton, NJ	Track 1500
May 2	Payton Jordan Invite	Palo Alto, CA	Track 5000
May 14	Hoka One One Midle Distance Classic	Los Angeles, CA	Track 1500

Here we are on the second of six one kilometer repeats on Wednesday:

First ever ZAP workout on the new Middlefork GreeenwayTrail which will ultimately connect Boone to Blowing Rock. This is the Tweetsie Railroad section recently opened.
Posted by ZAP Fitness on Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Nap Fitness

Carpet Bagger.  It's an apt caricature of life in rapidly unfolding 2015.  I began in the North, waking before the early January sunrise to the first snow I'd seen in Milwaukee this winter for a flight back down South.  "Don't go just yet" the white blanket seemed to plead as it dissolved in blue deicing fluid over the plane's wings.  Brief solitude in the mountains and Zap before bouncing to Scotland, to Tallahassee, to Boulder, to Ireland, and to Greenville, South Carolina.  We're vagabonds at times, us runners.  Train hard.  Rinse off.  Recover.  Race.  Recover.  Repeat.  Compete with your similarly tasked friends across the country, catch up for 90 minutes at a post race party, and see them again at the next one.  I'm not complaining.  Sometimes it feels like we're on tour, with(out) (tens of) thousands of screaming fans, (coach) buses, the (illegal) drugs*, and the (big) money.  But it's an honest, fast, fun life, and one I'm really thankful I get to live.  Things are going to settle down next week when Zap Fitness makes its springtime return to Zap Fitness, but we're as eligible for a trip to California or Istanbul while cutting Zap's grass field or fixing fence posts as we ever are.

Though the pace of travel and racing feels quick, the in-between times reserved for training and doing laundry are relaxing.  The most important thing I've learned since leaving college is how to chill the fudge out (You take fudge and refrigerate it. [too dry?] {My humor or the fudge?}]).  That manifests itself across the board: the nap between runs, mentally handling a string of hard training weeks with few distractions to break the days up, and in the pace of easy runs.  Pete often begins his Top Secret Zap daily training emails with a quote or tidbit, and one from about a month ago sums the idea up well:

"Handle boredom well - so many athletes I run into struggle with running and doing all the ancillary things associated with their running and little else. Put simply that is what the best in the world do but many fight it in our 'need to be productive all the time' western society."

     - 2 x Olympian Peter Pfitzinger (from a NE Runner Column Aug '91 - What it Takes to be a Pro)

But reading about boredom must be boring.  You'd rather be boring a hole in a board during a boring boarding school advisory board meeting about room and board.  Physicist Niels Bohr once said "An expert is a man (or woman) who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field."  He's talking about being bored.  More specifically, about focus on one single thing for a long time.  Wouldn't you rather fully complete something that took a long time than leave a bunch of competing, partially finished projects to die?  There is always time, lots of time.  I'm slowly getting better at what Pfitzinger described, trusting what I am doing and not worrying about what I could be doing.

The Wanderlust continues, bringing Tyler, Griff, and I to Jacksonville, FL for this Saturday's Gate River Run / US 15k Road Championships.  The race marks my last foray into over-distance before track heats up.  15,000 meters (roughly 9.3 miles) is traditionally a good ways for me, but I'm excited to continue breaking out of my mold and testing myself against the race's best ever field.  It's a flat course until the large hill in the eighth mile and blazing downhill in the ninth to the finish.  There's a handsome prize purse, bonuses for the fastest final mile, and a team competition with payout.  All that makes for an exciting run which will be live here (for free!) at 8:30 EST on Saturday morning.

Preparation for Gate River has gone well.  My most recent race was a 13:58 5k win on the roads in Armagh, Northern Ireland.  Since then the past three weeks of training in Greenville have been bountiful.  Last Wednesday Andrew, Griff and I worked well together over three sets of track 1200m snowball (get faster and faster) + road 2k threshold followed by track 4 x 400m for economy.  On our third set we were 3:17 (69, 65, 61) for the twelve hundred and 6:01 (3:04, 2:56) for the 2k.  It was a manageable workload executed patiently which always bodes well.  Nothing killer, but a fitness booster.  And on Saturday we were 5:06, 4:43, 4:45, 5:02, 4:44, 4:54 for the miles on a 10k progression run with hills.  

European Championships Steeple Chase Silver Medalist Krystian Zalewski (r) and I battling
in Armagh, Northern Ireland.

A close second on my list of things to look forward to after the 15k is our return to Zap and the mountains.  Winter training camp is over, and I can't wait for the silence of the woods, the icy rush of the creek outside, and to work on all the projects I have in mind.  I'm going to finish building our garden fence, plant the garden, re-finish some old rocking chairs, build a desk, and then go fishing.  There's something special about that place in the woods - maybe it just seems like home to me now.  As long as I find time to be bored once in a while.  Either way, I hope all this carpet bagging brings a profit in Florida.

Float On Down

Monday night I sat in an eddy pool in the creek on the edge of Zap Fitness' campus. The waning half moon cast age-smoothed boulders around me in shadow but was luminous enough to reveal the colors of pebbles in the stream bed.  While cold water washed over my legs, trout minnows nibbled at my toes, no doubt cleaning the gnarled result of the miles I've been running.  Sitting under the moon, stars, and canopy of pure green forest after a long day of travel, I reflected on the season and races and training to come.  The only sound was of the creek racing between the two large boulders that held back my pool.

The night before in Portland, David McNeill was quickly opening a gap on the field during the third lap of the Portland Track Festival 5k after a slower half mile split of 2:12.  Third in a chase pack with Mo Farah and Aron Rono, I felt the pace surge as Farah worked to stitch the rift to the Australian.  By 2k we four ran in a straight line, locked into 65 second quarters.  This was it: a chance to exploit the stellar training of momentum May in cool Pacific Northwest conditions under the lights.  Minutes before on the line, my blood stream a cocktail of adrenaline and caffeine rushing after pre race strides, the anticipation of the start reached near uncomfortable levels.  I love every component of racing:  The nervous excitement of the warmup, the focus on the track during the race, and the runner's high saturated wind down afterward.  I've come to thrive on the highs and lows of a meet, and being on the line of a race might be the most alive I ever have and ever will feel.

3000 into the Portland Track Fest 5k, Mo Farah leads Aron Rono, Tyler Pennel and I.  German Fernadez is in fifth and David McNeill (orange shorts) sixth.  We had a great crowd cheering us on.

Two months ago in the Mt. Sac Relays 5k it was only halfway into the race when I faltered, bleeding places and time.  Tonight I flew through that mark relaxed, smooth, and on the rail.  On the backstretch I heard children screaming "Go!  Go Daddy Go!" and thought "I'm racing men with kids, that's funny" before realizing they were the Olympic champion Mo Farah's kids cheering him on.  Daddy surged on the seventh lap with Rono following and I made the second major pace change of the race to catch up.  Zap Fitness team mate Tyler Pennel bounced along behind me.  McNeill having dropped back, our pack of four split 8:42 at 3200 meters as Tyler surged to the front.  In the next 200 we formed a Mo Farah - Zap Fitness sandwich with Tyler bravely leading.  A half mile later we passed 4k, the checkpoint where I met my demise a month ago in the Payton Jordan 5k.  Again I broke through, running stronger this time around.  McNeill had worked back into our pack and now took the lead from Farah, pushing hard with two laps left.  I swung wide and closed the gap over the next half lap, splitting 30.0 seconds from 700 to 500 from the finish.  At the bell, Farah hit the afterburners and scorched a 53 second final lap.  Finally the lactic acid caught up with me and all I could manage was to hold pace for 13:36 and fourth behind Rono.

In the moments after I felt disappointed with the time.  It wasn't a personal best or under the US 'A' standard.  But having watched the video and thought about it, I realize how well I raced.  Making at least three significant pace changes throughout probably took the sting out of my kick.  In the larger time frame of the season, I did the best I've done yet, coming within a lap of running a perfect Five.  The best part is that I have opportunities to execute that finish this summer.

In the past two years I've run 13:33, 13:34, 13:36, 13:38, and 13:40.  That's consistent, which is desirable.  But it's also somewhat frustrating running without improvement.  I believe that enough water against the dam yields a breakthrough, and that I'm on that edge right now.  No matter what level you're at, there will be times when you can't seem to get faster.  Sometimes a change in training and a fresh mindset is needed.  But there's nothing better for a runner than patience, poise, and belief that the breakthrough will happen.  Every performance, good or bad, is a movement towards that day we all dream of.

Back in the creek I watched a fallen leaf trapped in the eddy float slowly once, twice, three times in a circle around my pool. Finally it found the gap between the boulders downstream and went rushing onward.

Race Results

Race Video

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** *


Bit of an update on my remaining track schedule:

June 26	USATF Outdoor Championships	Sacramento, CA	Outdoor 5000
July 5	Flanders Cup Oordegem	Oordegem, Belgium	Outdoor 1500
July 12	Flanders Cup Kortrijk	Kortrijk, Belgium	Outdoor 3000
July 19	KBC Nacht	Heusden-Zolder, Belgium	Outdoor 5000

I'll be blogging regularly during my European travels, be sure to check that out!

Positive Derivative

Wouldn't it be nice
    if running was predictable?
        If all the work you put in
              determined exactly what
                                you got out.
                                    If, for example,
                                        a great workout
                                           always meant
                                           you were ready
                                                    to run fast
                                       in the near future.
                                   Or if taking
                     some down time
          always made you
    actually feel better.
     In short, if running
                 was logical...
                             If In
                               exactly equaled Out.
                                    But it doesn't all the time.
                                     Call it what you want -
                             a coefficient of chaos
                       or a white noise term.
                          It's a deviation
                             from expectation.
                                Sometimes you'll be
                                          above average,
                                       often below,
                                   and occasionally
                                you'll run about how
                          you thought you could.
                       I think that's why
                   people compare
          running to life.
             Because no matter
                 how hard you try
                          to control it,
                                a certain piece
                                        will always be
                                                unpredictable.
                                                     Celebrate the favorable
                                                                           outliers.
                                                                  But don't dwell
                                                              on the individual
                                                            shitty ones.  
                                                                 The goal should be
                                                                         to minimize the
                                                                               fluctuation and
                                                                                                  keep
                                                                                                    your
                                                                                                      average
                                                                                                       performance
                                                                                                                sloping
                                                                                                                  upwards.

Check out the lap (400m) splits from my most recent 5000 in Palo Alto, California.  You don't have be good at math or know the first thing about running to see what happened:
64   64   64   64   63   64   65   65   65   65   71   72 

I died.  Payed the pied piper.  Bonked.  Blew Up.  Contracted a case of Rigamortus Rex.  I had been on pace for 13:25 and ended with 13:44, far off the US "A" standard of 13:32.

In the hurt locker during the final kilometer of the 5000 at the Payton Jordan Invite

Looking more closely, however, I draw some positives.  Up until 4k in, the pacing was impeccable (thanks Donn)  Instead of tailing off the pace with a few 67s and a 69, the guillotine came down, taking me straight from 65 to 71, and that's fairly unusual.  Apparently I lost my head and forgot that there was another kilometer left.  More likely, I was so dialed in against the pain that it took a tidal wave of fatigue to knock me over, and when it did crest over and fall it really pitted me.  The upshot is that I made it 80% of the way to a great run.  That last fifth can be fixed.

When I look at my trajectory's derivative (can't help but be a nerd), where I'm going, I'm very much encouraged.  Two weeks before this race I ran 14:11 at Mt. Sac.  Right now I'm fluctuating widely in my performance, but the average is definitely rising.  By the end of the season I'd like to run more predictably by tuning out the white noise.  I have a concrete plan for doing so.

We got to work this week with a ten mile progression run out on beautiful Todd Road, one of the few truly flat places to run that distance in the Blowing Rock / Boone, NC area.  At a mild altitude of 3850 feet, Todd follows the New River basin and curves through forest and farmland.  I ended up averaging 5:18 / mile with a few slower miles to start.  The last couple miles were both 5:01 but weren't easy, confirming my need for this type of run.  We'll keep strength sessions like these in our routine well into the year.  I think a lot of people make the mistake of removing them prematurely in the racing season, and lose the backbone of the strength they need to finish well.

With no races until the Music City Mile in Nashville on June 7th, I've deemed this month "Momentum May" because the next few weeks are about stoking the fires of aerobic fitness before returning to racing in June and July.  That means a few weeks of solid volume in the 90-100 range, some longer long runs, and a few good hilly efforts in addition to the event specific interval sessions we do on the track and grass.  It also means getting in the habit of attacking the secondary but very important supplemental activities from now until the end of track season.

Zap Fitness at Half Moon Bay on the Pacific.  Pictured are George Alex, Tyler Pennel, Joe Stilin, and Chris Moen.

As I've become more and more settled into a life at Zap dedicated to running, the days have gone by surprisingly fast.  I'm not spending any more time actually on my feet running than I ever did while I additionally had commitments to school or work.  Yet the days get filled with the little things that support that running.  A big conversation at Zap this year has been about nutrition and hydration.  It's one thing to understand the top level view of what and when to eat and drink, but it's another to know how to use that information in your individual diet.  What to bring to the end of a run.  What to eat when you wake up; what not to eat when taking iron.  How much to eat, when, and in what carb/protein amounts to maximize recovery.  If I can eek out an extra 0.5% from a workout because I had food and hydration ready to go, awesome.  It's something I never did a good job of before this.

Coming out of Momentum May the racing starts and doesn't stop until August for me.  The next two races will be a mile in Nashville followed by a 5k at Portland Track Festival.  Then there's the US Outdoor Championships in Sacramento after which I'll head to Europe again for some overseas racing.  Here's to keeping things moving upwards!