Elite Jogging For Dummies

AM: Easy miles with the Holladay crew. It was snowing when I left my house, but not too bad on the run. In fact seeing the snow on the blossoms was pretty nice. Included a couple of short surges, but nothing too notable.

 PM: I ran home from work.  On the way, I saw Sam walking down State Street. Then I ran into my friends Dave & Keli out for a run. Dave never runs, so this was a surprise. I ran with them up Memory Grove and around the horseshoe back toward the Capitol. Then I dropped down to Memory Grove again, and ran home on 4th Ave. 
 

This morning was cold (surprise!) on the thermometer, but the conditions were actually very good.  I did most of the Ensign Elem. loop and added a couple of miles by running up City Creek to the 1 mile marker.  Water is starting to move quickly in the creek now.  Almost everything looks like it's turning green.  I have no idea what my pace was. 

Law Day Run 5K today. I have to go to the airport right now and don't have time for a full report, but here's the executive summary:  I managed to recruit a very fast Speed Team to represent my law firm  (Manning Curtis Bradshaw & Bednar) in the Speed Team Division. Our "A" team for the five-person Speed Team Division included Sasha, Jeff M, Josh Steffen, Megan Call and Johanna Nielsen.  (I was on the B Team). The A Team rocked the house and held off the Workman Nydegger team led by BJ Christensen and his friends.  BJ won overall, but we got to keep the speed team trophy for another year (It's now ten years in a row for our firm).  In the end, it wasn't all that close, particularly because oure women were VERY fast. Our "B" team placed third.

I finished 6th overall, running what for me was a decent race amidst some very good competition. Thanks to everyone for running!

TTIP/Golf Course loop, nice and easy with good weather conditions.

The original plan this morning was to do a tempo run in Liberty Park, but having just run there on Saturday, I decided to mix it up. I ran down to Memory Grove and up to the horseshoe at the bottom of City Creek.  I decided to do a series of mile repeats along the road between the horseshoe and the Captiol, also known as Gravity Hill ("I found my thrill ... on Gravity Hill ...").  It's more or less flat, slightly downhill in the direction I was running the tempo (north to south). 

First mile was conservative as I was still waking up, 5:27.  Then I jogged back to the start and ran the second one, feeling much friskier, 5:04.  Then I elected to mix it up with a two mile effort. So I ran back two miles easy to 11th Ave and G Street.  I turned around and started the two mile run. The first mile has the nice 11th Avenue grade, and then some nice drop to the horseshoe, 5:02.  The second mile was out to the Capitol on Gravity Hill, I struggled a little at the horseshoe where there is a tiny little gain in elevation, but managed to finish reasonably strong, 5:17: two miles in 10:19.  I jogged back to the horseshoe and decided to run one final mile down Memory Grove: 4:48.  It's a nice downhill.

Met up with Josh and Megan this morning. We ran an easy 8 mile loop via the U/11th Ave/Memory Grove.  We ran into Casey and Kathryn, also out for a run, and chatted with them for a bit.  Those guys are planning to do the relay at Ogden.  They should be pretty quick.  

After dropping off Megan and Josh, I added a couple more miles, including some drills on the grass at the end:  butt kicks, high knee skipping, carioca.  

AM: Run with the Radda crew from GFC. We had thirteen people in our group this morning, and for once the men barely outnumbered the women. We were like a herd. The conditions were amazing this morning, nice and cool with post-rain shimmer on everything. The canal section is like running Oregon--very lush. Quite a contrast with the ice and snow from only 7 weeks ago.

Pace was easy this morning. I need to take more time after the run to stretch, as I feel a little tight. I'll try to do it tonight. Need to keep things loose for the next week.

PM: Heather ran down to my office pushing Jack and then we all ran home from my office together. We stopped at the little play area on 4th Ave on the way home so we could push Jack in the swing for a minute.  Strange thing happened.  There was another little boy we didn't know there playing in the sand, probably four years old.  When we arrived, he looked up at me and very earnestly asked "are you Jack?"  Sort of startled, I said, "no, but he is"--pointing to my son.  The boy didn't offer anything more to provide any clue about his intuition. He just sort of acknowledged that Jack was now there and he continued playing.
 

I came to work early this morning, 6:45 with the plan to take off at  11am and hook up with Kevin Tuck for a run up City Creek. I met him at the bottom of Memory Grove and we ran up past the water treatment station. It was sort of raining a bit on the way up, but the weather was ideal overall.  On the way down, Kevin's hamstring started to give him trouble and he urged me to go on. I felt like a bad friend leaving him, but he insisted and I genuinely believed he wanted me to keep going, so I continued my easy run down the canyon. I hope he made it down ok!

This morning I met up with Adam RW, Steve and Josh at Foothill Sbux for one last semi-long run before the marathon. We ran a pretty nice loop with plenty of variety.  We headed up through the golf course, caught the Shoreline trail at the bottoom of Emigration Canyon, and then headed north on the trail to Red Butte. We ran to the Red butte gate, down to Shoreline again and to the bottom of dry creek. We threw rocks at the pipe. Steve hit it on the first shot, it took me like seven tries. Next we cruised down 11th Ave to Memory Grove, then down to the 4th Ave stairs to start the long climb back toward Foothill. I had to stop at my house for a quick deposit, and we continued on through the U to foothill and the finish. Really easy pace this morning. It was a fun run and I enjoyed talking a bit to new Steve. We cooled down at the Sbux where Adam and Josh brought me up to speed on the highs and lows of a life in the sciences.

Easy U/Avenues loop this morning.  Oregon-like post-rain conditions.  Really great for running. 

Easy run out to the mouth of Emigration Canyon via TITP.  Picked up the pace on the return, just to feel the legs turning over a bit and to get a sense of form, but nothing special.  37 degrees at the start. It's May 13th.
 

Easy Avenues loop.  I'm at the point in the taper where anything faster than 8 minute pace feels like really hard work and it is impossible to imagine running 26 miles all at once. 

Same route as yesterday, Avenues loop via Memory Grove. Since I have felt like I'm made of lead the last couple of days, I thought it would be a good idea to run one decent mile in the middle of the run today. So I ran a mile on 11th Ave down to B Street in 5:43. This felt ok. The upside of this run was that the conditions were great, 55 degrees and beautiful out. Birds singing, flowers blooming, unicorns flying . . .

Two miles easy this morning, just to feel the legs moving.  Mark gave me a massage last night and that seemed to loosen things up a bit. Of course, the calves are always a potential danger point in the marathon no matter what I do pre-race. With the heat, I'll need to be particularly careful to stay well-hydrated and try to avoid cramps.  Good luck to everyone who is racing tomorrow!

Ok, Ogden Marathon.

While I feel like I could write a novel about the race, I'll try to keep it semi-brief. If I did write a novel, though, it would be called "If Eden is this Hot, Who Needs Hell?"

Ok, to be fair, Eden wasn't that hot. But it did get very warm toward the end of the race as we approached the valley floor. All kinds of weird things happened to me during this race, some of which I will address below. Others, hopefully, will just fade out of memory.

Pre-Race: The night before the race I stayed up above Eden at my friend Kathryn's vacation house. Kathryn (a black sheep) and a few of our other black sheep friends, Derick, Casey, Johanna and Mark, were all running together as a relay in the marathon (team name "the Stinging Sturgeons" ... it's a long story). Also joining us up there was Lisa Madsen who had trained hard for the marathon and was primed to race well (she finished in 3:07, a 20+ minute PR!). We watched "Alone in the Wilderness," which, if you have not seen it, you should.check out this you tube excerpt. A great testament to patience, persistence and ingenuity. I suppose one could analogize those things to the marathon. I didn't make the analogy until just now, however, and my race shows it. Nevertheless, the Stinging Sturgeons won the relay overall so they got it right at least.

Race:

The pre-race was mostly uneventful. I stand in line for the porta potty next to Jeff Galloway pretty often, so nothing unusual there. The one thing that was a real concern was the weather--too nice at 6:30 a.m., way too nice. I had a jacket on, didn't need it. Didn't need a hat. Wore gloves for a while more out of habit than anything. When I finally stripped down to the singlet and shorts, I don't think I felt chilly even for one second. The sun was already beginning to beat down. This was not a good sign.

On Friday, Jeff Shadley and I exchanged messages about running together. He was shooting for 2:35. I told him that was ambitious for me, especially if the weather was going to be a factor, but I said I would hang on as long as I could. My pre-race goals were: 1) sub-2:37 for a great race; 2) sub-2:40 for an acceptable race. Although I would end up tanking toward the end, I think going out with Jeff was the right call. It gave me someone to work with and break up some of the race. On a better day, I would have been able to hang longer.

Anyway, the gun goes off and we're rolling down the canyon. The river is rushing with cold water, we're feeling good. Running in 5th and 6th place we were already totally alone between the pack of four ahead and the other chase packs behind us by mile 2. It was like being out for a long run, no one in sight.

It was within the first couple of aid stations that things started not to go well. With the heat, I knew it would be important to hydrate at every opportunity. The problem was that things weren't staying down very well. It's not uncommon for me to burp up a little bit of my pre-race nutrition and hydration during the early miles of a race. You can't call it puking, more like spitting up. Usually that goes away quickly, but in this race, for some reason, I continued to do that all the way until about mile 20. As I reflect, I think this took a toll in this long race. I needed to be able to keep down all the fluid I was taking in, but I just kept foaming it back up. (Mmm...that was some good red Powerade, let's see that again!). It probably also brought up some of the gels I was taking too, depleting me even more. One reason I suspect this was a factor is that after the race I was immediately very hungry, eating everything I could get my hands on. Usually, it takes me ten minutes or so before anything other than a bit of orange or banana sounds good. On a side note, the only significant change in my pre-race routine was that I had quite a few grilled vegetables the night before along with my pasta. Usually I just go with pasta. (Note that the veggies were great, however).

Back to the race. So, we're cruising along through mile eight and I'm foaming up a storm, tyring to assure Jeff this was normal (even when it was becoming quite abnormal). Splits were 5:53, 5:59, 5:49, 5:45, 5:43, 5:45, 5:48, 5:48 for miles 1-8 (based on my Garmin, the markers were off). Mostly, this felt good, but I didn't have that feeling like I was just going through the motions. I knew I would have to work through the next section to get through Eden and to the Canyon. Jeff and I started to trade leads every half mile or so, which worked fairly well for a while. Neither of us was being very militant about sticking to a schedule and there was some flexibility in it.

So then we're rolling towards Eden. I'm glad I had the Striders series experience to guide me through all of this a couple of times. It is a tough section for any race, particularly a marathon. The toll that rollers take from you on the uphill is almost always greater than the benefit you get from the moderate downhills. The goal was to hit the half in about 1:18. We rolled into Eden around 1:17 something, and this seemed like we were right on pace. There was an exchange point for the relay and a good crowd and I almost missed the aid station, but that was probably my last hurrah in the race. Mile splits for 9-13 were 5:55, 5:57, 6:07, 6:04, 6:08. Slowing down would be come a significant trend very soon.

We climed up through the hill at 15 which wasn't so bad since we took it so easy. Once we were winding toward the mouth of the canyon, I was still foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog at each aid station, but I caught a little second wind and I was looking forward to the descent into Ogden at 18. Mile splits 14-18 were 6:02, 6:28, 6:06, 6:07, 5:51. Around 17.5 or so, Jeff started to pull away. No problem, I knew I would have to run my race. But I was still looking forward to the descent so I could really pick up some time. But as soon as I started to drop into the canyon, I suddenly had this realization ... "hey, wait a minute ... I can't run very fast!" I realized that I was beginning to tank at the very point in the race that I should have been picking up time. The first couple of miles into the canyon have a pretty runnable grade and it was wasted on me. I realized I was hitting the wall--something that hasn't happened in a long time--and I knew I had to improvise. Too bad I couldn't come up with anything useful other than just to keep going. I had a few momemts where I felt like I was recovering, but for the most part, I was fighting many factors. My calves started to cramp up intermittently (which is my own personal death rattle in the marathon) and it was way too early for that. The thing is, there is no graceful exit. You either quit or you keep going. I kept going. It was painfully ugly, but I kept going. Splits from 18-23 were 6:07, 6:14, 6:15, 6:09, 5:57.

At about mile 23.5 or so, I saw Josh Steffen and his wife Megan standing on the grass during the trail section. Josh yelled "CARBOOM!" which usually makes me laugh my butt off, but instead I merely turned my ankle on a curb and almost ate it. Nice. Josh jumped in to join me for a couple of miles. We were winding through half marathoners and trying to get water at aid stations. Josh keeps me laughing all the time when we're running, but I was pretty much brain dead at that point ... phoning it in. Josh said that I really needed to "dig." To which I replied ..."yeah, dig a grave." I'm usually not quite that morose. The trail section we were running at that point was nice and would be great in training, but I actually found it a little bit tedious with all the turning and little hills and having to dodge half marathon walkers, etc. It makes sense to have it in the race, but I wish I had prepared for it a little more.

So now the mile splits are really suffering, just like me. At some point, we emerged on to Grant Street and there is this painfully long straightaway to the finish. Being nearsighted, I am accustomed to having blurred vision of faraway objects, but this was ridiculous. Where was the finish, Draper? Josh dropped off at mile 26 to let me bask in the glory of my calf-cramped limp to the finish line, struggling to keep my composure and redeem some sense of dignity. I'm so glad I can laugh at this now, but it stunk at the time! Mile splits for 24-26.2 were 6:24, 6:32, 6:47, and 2:58.  My watch had 26.44 overall, so that last split is for almost a half mile. That pretty much sums it up.

When it's all said and done, I placed excactly how I should have placed, though I think I should have been a minute or two faster. The heat and my nutrition/hydration problems took a toll. I know from my bad attitude toward the end that it had to be a glycogen problem. I get moody when I'm hungry, and I was really, really moody.

After the race, I stood in the river for 10 minutes with Johanna and Mark. That seemed to help my calves, which feel pretty good today all things considered.

Although I think times were slow across the board, it was great to see the FRB Team putting in so many great finishes. It's an honor to run with so many talented men and women. Congrats to you all.

After the race, Josh and Megan stopped by my house and Josh presented me with a small reward for my race, a vanilla creme filled donut covered with chocolate, sprinkles, and orange stripes. They thought I wouldn't eat it. Ha! I devoured it in not time! It was awesome.

This morning I drove over to the Steiner swim complex, parked, and ran 1.3 miles around the adjacent park at Guardsman/Sunnyside.  I just wanted to move my legs a little and see how things were working after the marathon.  For the most part, things were working well. The calves feel good and the quads are surprisingly resilient.  Mostly, my legs just feel heavy.  The only pain is in my left hip, I think it is an IT band issue. I'll roll it out later today.

 After my little jog, I swam 500 meters in the indoor pool.  The outdoor pool is open now, but there was construction just above the pool and they were blowing dirt right over the water. No thanks!  This was my first time swimming this year, and it felt really good. I still a pretty bad swimmer, but I didn't lose as much technique as I thought I might (not that I had anything significant to begin with).  I hope to swim a couple more times this week to give my body a little break after the marathon.
 

Yep, I'm really cranking out the miles now.  I had an early meeting to get ready for and since I didn't get out of bed until 6:20, I decided two miles would be just fine. And you know what? It was! 

Continuing my recovery week ... I parked at Steiner and ran around the park and the University Village.  I had planed to really amp up my miles and go for three, but it started to rain pretty hard and got very cold at about 1.5.  I had no hat or gloves and that was enough to lure me back to Steiner.  I then swam 500 meters in the indoor pool. That felt really good.  I wish I had more time to swim, it's pretty relaxing. 

I know, now I'm just getting cocky with the miles.  More easiness this morning.  I parked at Steiner Aquatic Center and ran over to Miller Park for some Oregon-like trail running in the misty greenness.  

 Then I swam a bit in the pool, but didn't have much time.  Still felt good though.
 

Easy six miles this morning before packing up and heading to the airport to spend the weekend in Victoria, BC. 

Victoria, BC. No running today. I didn't bring my stuff because I thought I could benefit from the time off.  Boy was I wrong about that. The weather was ideal and there is so much good running terrain.  It's quite a charming, beautiful town. Note to self, always bring running gear no matter what. 

This morning I started running again. A week of easiness after the marathon was quite enough to give my legs and mind the break they needed. Being in BC over the weekend and lamenting that I had not brought my stuff to run, and not being able to run, made me really anxious to get back out there. 

So even though it was raining pretty steadily this morning I headed out and did the Ensign Elem loop.  Mostly easy pace, but I did pick it up in a few sections to test my leg turnover. I still have that slightly heavy, uncoordinated feeling after the marathon, but not too bad. I have also gained a few pounds since the race, which I hope not to keep.  You can't eat like you're running 80 miles a week when you're only running 15 mpw without getting a few too many calories.

The plan was to go 10, but I had some tightness in the left hip early in the run that was enough to have me back off. After a few miles, though, things loosened up well. I threw in some fartlek-style point-to-point surges (nothing longer than .5) just to see how those would feel.  Mostly, they were good. I felt like I had something resembling "fitness" this morning--but it was only a resemblance. I ran the same Ensign route as yesterday, but was four minutes faster today because of the surges.

 

Met up with Josh and Megan this morning. I got to hear all about the 5k fireworks at Magna and the speedy times galore.  I wonder what the times at that race would be like if Demetrio did it in September at the end of everyone's summer training? 

 Anyway, we ran up to 11th Ave and then to the 1 mile mark up City Creek.  A very small amount of sprinkling at the beginning, but the weather was great overall, warmer than expected. 

I still generally feel really sluggish. I have a massaged planned for tonight, and maybe that will wring out some of the staleness in my legs.

Run with the Holladay Crew this morning, from GFC at 5:45.  A few sprinkles, but overall nice conditions.  I had a massage last night from Mark and that seemed to help open things up a bit. He worked on my psoas which helped me feel better as soon as I got off the table. 

This morning I ran over to This is the Place, then I hopped up on to the Shoreline Trail and headed north.  When I hit the construction at Red Butte, I turned back west and ran home through the U and Federal Heights.

Cucina loop with a giant herd of runners. In fact, we had a group of 18 at the start! It felt less like a run than a migration.  What a great morning to be out with so many others to enjoy the big climb, the stellar views, and the speedy descents. The route goes from Cucina at 2nd Ave and Q Street up and over through the Avenues to to City Creek, to Shoreline Trail to Dry Creek with the Special Deluxe Extension to Red Butte Canyon and then back through the U to Cucina.