Twisted Ankle Marathon

Can't think of a better way to celebrate my birthday next year.

http://www.rungeorgiatrails.com/twisted.html

Course Map...

Elevation Profile...

Learning to make a video

About a month ago I got to do a 24 hour mountain bike race with some buds. It was the 24 Hours of Halloween. We did it last year and had a good time so figured we might as well do it again. It's a good time. There was a pro road rider (Rashaan Bahati - coming in for an exchange at about 2:45) there turning some fast laps. I managed to turn one lap faster than him. I'll take that with me to my grave. (The fact that he did more laps and they were on average much faster is...well...just a small detail.)

Looking forward to a 12 hour race in Temecula in January. Might try to do a better video. It seems sometimes the picture was clear, but other times it wasn't. Might need to fool with some settings. I'm open to tips and tricks if they are out there.

Ragnar Relay Tennessee 2010

My first Ragnar Relay is in the books. A few weekends ago my team, Southern Discomfort, and we finished the 195.5 mile course in 30:29:21. I think we signed up for a 10:00 plus pace. Well we blew that out of the water coming in with a average team pace of 9:21 min/mile. Nice work team!

In the first van, and running in this order were Me, Angela, Ashley, Tristan, Zach, and Heidi. In the second van was Daryl, Amy, Matt, Barry, Erin, and Amber.

I can say that was pretty prepared for the running part of it. What was really tough was running on little to no sleep. Right before my last and final leg I was able to squeeze in about an hour or two of sleep because they let us into the gym of an elementary school. It was a hard floor, but at least I could stretch out. And I was so stressed that I'd oversleep and miss my exchange with Amber that I had a hard time sleeping. It was also very cold that weekend. I was running my last leg at about 4 am and it was 26 degrees outside. As long as I have good gloves I'm usually ok. My face went numb, but that was fine, I could still breathe.

It must not have been that bad though, I've already signed up for another one in January down in Florida. This should be a little easier than Tennessee because there are no hills and it will be in the 50s. My legs are a lot longer, but smooth terrain will make then very doable.

Down hill both ways

I did my third half-marathon (maybe 4th, not too sure) a couple of weekends ago. It was the Silver Comet Half that happens every Halloween weekend. I did it back in 2004, three years after the race was born. Back then I posted a 2:04 time. This year I did it 1 hour and 44 min. I attribute this to the flatness of the course. I'm doing the Tennessee Ragnar this weekend with fellow PRS contributor Zach, so I've been training. I usually run at work because I work 30 miles from my house and it is just easier to run during lunch for me. Well in Norcross, Ga (most of Ga that is) there are a lot of hills. So that is what I've become familiar with. While I was running the Half on the Silver Comet I honestly felt like I was going down hill the whole time. It was great. There is no way I could have pulled off a sub-8 min pace on a hillier course. Think I'll try to do this one every year.

Check back later for details on my first Ragnar.

Also thinking about doing Florida Keys Ragnar....

Of course, we could just be Nuts...

What makes us "run, ride, race, suffer, etc?" Is it just the need for exercise to keep our human bodies healthy? I know plenty of people who do time in gyms exercising and they don't suffer in the same way we do. So I'm just curious. Why do we do it? Nurture, Nature, Birth Order, Personality Profile? Thrill Seekers? Explorers? -Only there's not much land left unexploered, so we explore the reaches of human endurance within the time allowed between day jobs, families, and more...common endeavors.

I know a guy who just finished his first century bike ride SOLO! Maybe there are more of those folks out there, but I don't think there are many. This Dad planned alone, trained alone, and rode alone for a completely unsupported 100 miles. -on a mountain bike even.

Maybe I'm making a bigger deal out of it than it is. Maybe I'm just jealous 'cause my racing season was non-existent. - But I need regular workout partners or I"m pretty much good for nothing. I say that, but then I trained for and ran my marathon solo... Maybe if you have enough "stuff" in your head that needs to be worked out, training alone isn't that bad. Or maybe, and I know this is true, some people just aren't that social. Incoherent babble after mile 10 can be more irritating than helpful. I get that. But since I'm not that, I don't really get that. And my first (and only, so far) century was supported, and thankfully, not completely solo.

Whatever the motivation, our friend just completed his first century ride, unsupported, solo, on a mountain bike. With his super loving family to cheer him as the only support he really needed or wanted, and the fire of determination within, he did it. Congratulations!

So, as founding members of the Privateer Racing Syndicate, our family took liberties, made him a race packet, gave him a Syndicate CD (slightly modified), and a race number. We also offer him membership on our little multisport crew. (Remind me to ask Zach permission to waive the qualification of competing in an event where you had to pay an entry fee. :) ) -I think he suffered enough.

And I mean suffered. The way we like it.

Giddyup

Different things get me going to run, ride, race, suffer, etc. These two videos are some of the most recent. One for the trails and one for the roads. The music on both is excellent. (For those of you with clean ears there is an S-bomb in the Gentlemen's race video at about 3:58 and an F-bomb at 6:21. Otherwise perfect for viewing with the family.) Great quotes from the Gentlemen's race video at 4:15 and 7:46:

"A defect in the gentlemen's mind confuses pain with joy."

"Who can flourish with a daily routine of compliance?"

2010 NW Gentlemen's Race from RAPHA on Vimeo.

Race Across The Sky 2010 from Citizen Pictures on Vimeo.

What get's you going?

The spring...

The Are You Tough Enough went well. There were some last minute shuffles to the team. Thankfully Tristan and Shonna have a ton of friends. We had a good result, conditions were nice and we managed to all be uh, er, mmm, at least self-mobile. Tristan aggravated a calf injury, Shonna took a pretty good tumble (she easily had the hardest legs - no pun intended) and I felt like the race wouldn't make my stress fracture any worse (I'm not sure I was right). They had a good spread at the end of the race. The race shirts were done by Pata-gucci, and very nice. The race apparently has a new quote each year. This year's quote was, “We're not here to earn God's love, we're here to spend it.” At first I was bothered by the quote, but after thinking about it, I really like it. We already have God's love - it's unconditional. We don't need to earn it. I feel like we spend it by doing things for other folks.

Ragnar Ralay SoCal also went well. We had a great team and an excellent captain (Ginet). We managed a decent result there too, and if you look at the website we took second in the ultra category. This is a dastardly untruth, but we haven't gotten around to letting the organizers know. I promise if they send us some sort of award or prize we'll come clean. Ginet posted some pics on FB. She tagged me in some of them, but its not actually me, it's my stunt double. Tristan's calf hadn't fully healed by this event so he did the brilliant thing and pushed through the pain, and........tore his calf. Atta boy. He's pretty tough – eats broken glass for breakfast and washes it down with gasoline. My foot was still not 100%, but I don't think I made it any worse. Shonna easily had the toughest legs (again, are you noticing a pattern), but she did stay upright this time.

I took the month of May off from running on hard surfaces. I tried to maintain some running fitness by running in the pool. What I may have preserved in fitness, I may have lost in sanity. Pool running is only slightly more boring than watching paint dry, with your eyes closed. Did one more race recently. I'll recap that one later

An update and an open apology

Didn't do the Solvang Century. Ended up helping a friend with some stuff.

Didn't do the March Triathlon. Stress fracture - left foot. Hopefully it's better by April 10th.

Now for the open apology part...the triathlon race director was cool enough to refund my entry fee since it was a medical problem. Cool. We already had a campsite reserved at the race site, so I figured to try to be nice I'd offer to volunteer since they were cool enough to refund my entry fee, and since we were already going to be there. I've also raced a bunch and relied on volunteers, but never helped out myself, so I thought it was time.

I got up early and headed down to the transition area. They told me they needed some help marking peoples' race numbers on their bodies. I grabbed a marker and jumped in. I didn't really get any training, I just tried to copy the other folks marking racers. We marked the backs of hands, biceps, left quad and right calf. What I didn't realize was that we were supposed to put their race number everywhere but the calf - that was supposed to be their age group. Oops. Let's just say the race officials were probably pretty surprised when there were folks in the 529, 213, 417, etc age group.

I wasn't done there though. I was marking a guy I knew and after I had marked his hand and a bicep, he asked me, "How did you know my number?" I replied, "Uh, I don't." As I had been yakking I never got around to asking him what number he was. I just marked him with the same number of the racer I had previously marked. Oops. We couldn't find anything to clean him up with so I scratched through what I had written and tried to make it look like his number.

When I saw him after the race I asked him how it went...and called him by the wrong name...for the second time that day. So in light of all that, I just wanted to offer an apology for all the mayhem I caused on Saturday. Maybe I should stick to racing instead of volunteering.

Upcoming sufferfests

March 12 - Solvang Century. May do about half (and quit very near our house) at a 25 mph pace with some dudes or do the whole enchilada at a much mellower pace with a different batch of dudes. Oh and I'm not registering, but I won't utilize the rest stops, so it's not stealing, just leveraging the mass numbers of cyclists on the road to stay a bit safer.
March 27 - March Triathlon. Did it two years ago and am hoping for a better result. Which would require better training. Hmmm, perhaps I need to temper my expectations.
April 10 - Are You Tough Enough. Trail relay from Montecito to Nojoqui Falls. Should be fun and a good tune up for Ragnar SoCal two weeks later. Also the first race with a team presented by the Syndicate!
April 23/24 - Ragnar SoCal. Route was changed and doesn't go through Malibu. Picked up more distance and hills. I couldn't be happier. Looking forward to escorting Ginet on her leg through some rough neighborhoods in LA on my bike, in running shorts. Who's gonna even think about attacking her, when they've got my milky white thighs distracting them!

Hope to have so good stories to share...

Oh yeah, and that one too

Back on January 30th, I raced in the Cat 5B division of the Poor College Kids Road Race with some guys in the club I'm part of. We had a good time and managed to put one of our guys (Paul) into 4th place, just missing the podium.

The race started fast. I was concerned Paul was doing too much work on the front of the pack too early in the race as we approached one climb so I caught him and offered some wise advice. (This coming from a guy who is in his third organized road race - yeah I'm a real genius.) I told him to take it easy and he said he was just trying to soften the pack up. Oh, yeah, good idea, and I faded back a couple of spots. I manged to stay in near the front of the pack most of the race, but when we were about 2/3 of the way through one guy attacked. I was sitting third wheel then, Paul was second, and the guy on the front had been there a while so he didn't have the gas to go get the attacker. I didn't want Paul to because I knew he had a better shot at a good result than I did. So I went after him and told Paul to come with me (what a hero, eh?). Well the problem was that I used up a ton of energy chasing the attacker down, and I brought the whole pack with me. (Usually you want to leave them behind.) So when we reached the foot of the last climb in the race I didn't have the giddy-up in my legs to stay with the pack. I managed to claw back a couple of places on the climb and descent, and work my way into a true middle of the pack finish. Oh well. Lessons learned that I will apply in future races.

That's how it went

The 25 Hours of Halloween went well. We managed a second place (of only four teams) in our division. But it was good enough to take home a pint glass. Riding at night was fun. On top of that we were blessed with a full moon and decent weather. The team members kept things mellow, but we managed to lay down some decent lap times. What amazed me were the dudes racing in the solo category. Solid. Also very cool was a team racing on a Project Rwanda bike (scroll to the bottom of the link for a good pic). The whole team shared one bike, so when they came in there was some seat adjusting and they were off. I think they may have been faster than us. Mildly embarassing.

I did have a couple of lessons learned: 1) Bring warm stuff to sleep in. I slept in the bed of my truck and woke up with a coat of ice on my sleeping bag! I know, in California of all places! 2) Bring many changes of clothes. Sweaty clothes don't dry well when it's dark and cool. It's hard to get your race face on when you are pulling on stinky, clammy clothes at 3 AM.

I'd do it again though. Currently tossing around the idea of a 12 hour race in Temecula later this year...

5K A Day

My new mantra. 5K a day.
There's too much going on to train well for anything, and too few available Saturdays to race. I was tempted to throw in the towel and take a few months off til I could schedule a race and work up an appropriate training calendar. Luckily, my better half had a better idea.
"Don't train. Run. It's your Prozac. Do 5k a day." So let it be written.
- I'll have to do some long runs each week though too many 5K gets pretty dull. This is probably a good time to work on getting faster, but I probably won't. :)