Run like hell.

Shortly after my bike Hell Week Coach Brian said he wanted to do the same thing with running. My heart sank – as much as I had been trying to fall in love with running, it hadn’t been happening. There was much less pain involved with each run, but I wouldn’t use the word love by a long shot. More like accepting being in a relationship with occasional domestic violence. In my case, the act of staying with it for the sake of the children had been the Ironman race. Once the kids were grown and moved out I could check myself into a shelter, change my name, and never run again. Realizing this was not the kind of relationship I wanted to be in, I had to figure out how to genuinely embrace running – for real.

Born to Run, Native Wisdom, and why I hate Michael Pollan

For some months everyone I knew in sport was reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and then chucking their sneakers to run barefoot. “Dude”, my cousin Chris told me, “my legs are like steel cables!” Coach Brian was giddily sprinting barefoot up and down San Vicente navigating tree trunks and slippery discarded Gu wrappers, then went and signed up for a 50K ultra marathon in the hills of Malibu. The more people evangelized the book the more it sounded like the moronic “Native Wisdom” arguments that Michael Pollan makes in The Omnivores Dilemma. In Pollan’s Berkeley-colored, Whole Foods isn’t liberal enough, left of Caesar Chavez world, returning to our ancestor’s way of life is the route to ridding ourselves of disease, stress, and strife. What Pollan conveniently forgets is that Native Wisdom means dead by age 35, and the moment western medicine and modern agriculture have been introduced to stone-age peoples their life expectancy shoots through the roof. My rage was coloring my view going in to McDougall’s book, and yet being in this sport was forcing me to figure out what the whooping was all about.

13.1 in 1:46. It wasn’t the shoes, it was the coach.

I had been feeling pain in my right ankle for a few weeks, which I finally realized was because I had broken down the soles of my shoes. I’ve been running on these shoes since August! I started using Training Peaks to track my shoe mileage in January, and according to the site I’d put 200 miles on the shoes. Its likely I’d run 500 miles on those sneakers; certainly a couple triathlons and half marathons. It was time for new shoes. I went back to New Balance and there’s a new model of the shoes I wear, now in hideous electric blue or bumblebee yellow. I now have a pair of ugly blue New Balance which correct my supination.

I am three weeks away from Oceanside 70.3, and I am knee-deep in heavy training. The slow tapering begins this coming week, but I’ve been going hard since last weekend and the Desert Tri training race. Today had a 1:45 descending interval run on the books. In the last few times I’ve done them I’ve gotten faster as the intervals get shorter, even though fatigue sets in slowly. I’ve been known to touch 7 minute miles doing this, which in the past I’ve blamed the Garmin for lying to me. I’ve come to acknowledge, slowly, that I am getting faster on foot. When Coach Brian offered to run with me after I went shoe shopping I happily took him up on the offer because 1) he’s a great, inspiring coach, 2) he gets me to run faster than I think I can, 3) company on a run is so much better than running alone, and 4) I really like his friendship. It turned out to be a breakthrough run for me.

3rd Annual City of Angels 1/2 Marathon and the secret of happiness

I have become the person who forgets he’s running half marathons. The constellation of things going on in my life in the last few weeks certainly has taken priority over many things, evidenced by my lack of blogging but continuance of training. I’m busy doing life rather than documenting it. But by forgetting to document it, I stopped reflecting on it and as a result I forgot to note that I was going to run a half marathon on Sunday. And yet, even with the chaos of life around me I still managed to run it coming off two months of rest and maybe three or four running sessions since starting training again. While I have become the person who forgets he’s running a half marathon, concurrently I have become the person who can crank one out with a halfway decent time with little to no warning. This will be handy when I have to hunt a mastodon for dinner.

Is it running away from something or running towards?

Sometimes I wonder which one I am. Putting one foot in front of the other in a robotic fashion, concentrating on landing mid-sole, scraping the mud off the foot and kicking up as the other foot does the same, keeping a straight line, tilting my body forward and keeping my back straight. This is the mechanics of running. But the limbic brain that tells the legs to piston and to keep firing even though there isn’t big game being pursued or a tiger chasing still requires stimulus. Some days I’m the hunter and some days I’m the hunted, the longer the run I wind up being all of the above.

Fatigued? Who knows?

Fatigue is deceptive. I was up before the alarm today, felt kind of nauseated on my way to the ocean. Got in the water and did three clumsy laps in the ocean, zig zagging in the higher surf and cloudy sky. Still, three laps is three laps and I came out of the water feeling better than I went in. Reaching forward, not diagonal, kicking at the surface of the water, and coming in to the lifeguard station while other people went wildly north off course. All in all a slightly above average swim, slower than usual. I figured I was still tired from the race. But then came the run.

Santa Monica’s home for wayward swimmers.

A strange morning swim today as Konrad, leader of the speed circuit, was absent for the first time. The club got under way at 6:30am, right on time, but once in the water it became a very different story. People spread all over the route, and with large swells putting the buoy out of sight for minutes at a time, I found myself zigzagging all over the map. Couldn’t follow a cap in front of me – they were way off. Sighting was fun, until I discovered I was sighting the wrong damn lifeguard tower. Instead of getting frustrated I indulged my current obsession with triathlon bikes and fantasized about what kind of bike I want.

Me + 1

I’m racing the Malibu Triathlon sprint distance triathlon on September 14 as a fundraiser for Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. (The apostrophe is intentionally left off, that is how they spell their name.) The sprint distance is a 1/2 mile swim, 18 mile bike, 4 mile run at Zuma beach, a gorgeous stretch of Southern California coast. The CHLA Team is about 140 members, and each of us has a fundraising responsibility as part of the race. The link on the right will take you to my fundraising page should you wish to make a contribution. I met coach Brian through the team, he is the co-captain of our team as well as having been successfully treated for brain cancer when he was 13. For him, and so many others, this race has a deep, personal meaning.

Running: new kicks!

Today was also an ocean swim, but the real kicker was that not only was D. waiting for me to run after the swim, but it was with his coach from Triathletix, Ian Murray. Ian is a world-class coach, one of the best. When I came out of the water with my hip smarting from yesterday’s crash and D. yelled at me to hustle and get changed, I thought it was just because I was so slow out of the water. Turns out he had much more in store for me.

Turning tricks: DIY super sprint!

When I go tup this morning I couldn’t decide if I was going to do a long swim and run, a swim and bike, or something else entirely. I decided to strip everything down to its bare minimum – no iPod, no bibs or costume changes – just a multipurpose swim/bike short, tri suit top, glasses, ID, watch, socks, and road shoes. It turns out that I wound up doing my own super sprint triathlon this morning, grinning like a doofus the whole time.