One Hundred Ninety-Nine

Last year, I ran. A lot. Running became a tonic, an escape, a medicine, an out; and eventually, a necessity to my mental well-being. At the end of it all, I stated a goal of 200 runs for 2012.

Thanks to a lot of anal record-keeping, unusually warm weather, and a gym membership; as of today, my total stands at 199 runs. They've come in all varieties.

• The breathless, weightless, wind-at-your-back feeling that propelled me to my first sub-35:00 five-miler.

• The July afternoon, heat index of 108, sweat rolling off my body in undulating sheets, the post-run stretch a constellation of droplets pouring onto my porch with the slightest motion of body.

• The busy weekend, accelerating to pass a waddling stroller-parent combo, or gel-pack sporting, headphone-wearing, all-weather clad chump; I love it when my breathing rate doesn't increase even when speeding up.

• The slow slog into a biting wind, wiping away tears from the cold, while still digesting a thick knot of honey ham and turkey breast...ah, the day-after-Thanksgiving run.

My favorite? The zen run where you lock into a pace, hold it, and feel like you're not even moving, like you're on an invisible conveyor stretching to some foreign horizon, feet slapping down on asphalt feels healing and restorative, like you're running on cotton balls or grass as plush as the ChemLawn-funk smelling yard down the block. One of these runs every two weeks is a blessing, a reminder why I run. And it's still an essential part of my mental well-being. The only things I spent more time doing in 2012? I'd wager on eating, cooking/planning meals, and sleeping.

(199 runs, 906.5 miles. For those keeping track at home...er, me.)

(Part of SmallBox's ThinkKit project.)

a year running

A Documentation of Running in 2011
OR
Proof of A Less Than Mild Case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Last November, I tweaked my knee. I'm not even sure how it happened; I woke up one morning for work, and it was mildly swollen. Flexing it to walk up stairs or elevators was almost impossible until the joint was warmed-up & stretched-out, around noon. I attribute it to walking through some urban fields on the way to return some books at the Irvington library branch. I stepped in a divot, or slid momentarily through a congealed pile of dog mess, twisting slightly some tendons or ligaments.

View NIFS Indoor Track in a larger map
NIFS Indoor Track. 97 runs; 417 miles.

After that, I was mostly laid up for nearly a month, beyond some stationary biking as December 2010 progressed. I joined NIFS, a fantastic gym at IUPUI, and began doing some bike/jog workouts the last week of December, before Amelia, Wes, and I drove 12-hours to spend a week with my family at a beach house in the Florida panhandle. A stovepipe of a building, 6 flights of steep stairs were required to get to the top floor, a small, lofted room, on the floor of which Amelia & I were sleeping on a mattress (well, mattress in name only). Climbing up & down those stairs for the week really strained my knee at first, but by the last couple days, I was feeling noticeably stronger. The stairs had healed my knee! Either that, or a week's worth of Yuengling Black & Tan had lubricated my body's joints so they felt no pain.

View Neighborhood Running Route in a larger map
Neighborhood running route. 54 runs; 257.4 miles.

On returning to Indianapolis, I made a goal to work-out/run 150 times in the year. I'd never paid for a gym membership before, and I'm a particularly cheap bastard, so I wanted to make it worthwhile. What began as a 3-times-a-week chore, morphed into 4 or 5 days a week, plus stationary bike riding...and eventually, into long runs once a week to train up for the Carmel (Half) Marathon (follow the link for my entry on the race itself).

View Canal Route 1 in a larger map
Canal running route. 25 runs; 130.5 miles.

July came, and running became a sort of morning obsession. In the height of Hoosier heat, I ran 20 times, each one reducing me to a pile of sweat on the front stoop, dripping random droplet constellations onto the dry concrete while stretching. The runs had become less training, and more therapeutic---necessary in their exertion-level; I needed it to clear my mind, to feel alright inside my world. I didn't see that coming.

View Bellingham Neighborhood Route in a larger map
Bellingham neighborhood running route. 3 runs; 12 miles.

Took some days off while on vacation, but I still took my shoes & ran neighborhood routes, not to mention did a lot of walking & biking around the beautiful Pacific Northwest. When I returned, I switched back to afternoon running, much to the pleasure of my digestive system, which has never become completely assimilated to morning runs (well; it responds in kind, if you get my drift). Internally, running was now something I felt weird if I didn't do. Even on days off (which I do need; 3 or 4 days in a row will render me stiff as a board until mid-morning, at least); I don't feel quite as lucid as on running days.

View Trail Route in Land o' Lakes in a larger map
Land o' Lakes nature trail. 1 run; 5 miles.

I began the year with the goal of 150 runs, though by late Fall I was chalking up a good four every week, which continued through the early winter months with the help of an indoor track. I pushed through the holiday season on the same schedule, hitting 182 official run/work-outs by the end of 2011, while at the same time getting back to my high school playing weight of 145. What can I say, I have the arms of an early middle-schooler.

View Carmel 2011 Half-Marathon in a larger map
Carmel Half-Marathon. 1 run; 13.1 miles.

My total for the year? As best as I can figure, 841 miles in 182 runs. On just two pairs of shoes, which have served me pretty well. Guess I'm about due for another pair; my goal for 2012 is 200 runs.

View Monon Trail in a larger map
Monon Trail. 1 run; 6 miles.

west, vol. 6 (interlude: maps)

During my travels, I developed a slight obsession for mapping. I've been using Google Earth (and maps) for a couple years at work, mostly unsuccessfully, but have finally found an outlet plotting points of interest, bike & hiking routes, and running loops. Running routes actually provided my entry-point; while running my neighborhood route at home, I plotted it via Google Maps so I could calculate the distance I was running.



View Neighborhood Running Route in a larger map
And here-in lies another obsession; when I began running almost 18 months ago, I began to keep strict track of the distance and time of each session, perhaps a way of tracking my improvement, but more likely an outgrowth of my somewhat obsessive-compulsive personality.

The small 4-bedroom house in the West-side 'burbs of Kokomo necessitated that my younger brother, Wes, share a room with me, in which we had homemade bunk beds, a Nerf basketball drawer, more Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles paraphernalia than would seem financially possible, and most notably, a 1960s-era map of the United States, measuring at least 6-feet across, that my Dad had salvaged from a defunct classroom set-up. I remember plotting points and routes on the map, far before travelling by plane. Most years, our vacation consisted of driving south to Nashville, Tennesee, to visit relatives, or further south to Gulf Shores, Alabama, where we camped in pine-covered swamps at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.



View Canal Route 1 in a larger map
Despite its flaws, the canal in downtown Indianapolis is a great running route. Though I hadn't ran on it till this weekend, it is free of street-crossings & most exhaust smell. Despite the Labor Day weekend ignorant pedestrians, long, reclined bikes piloted by poor-steering 12-year-olds, and fat, Segway-riding, jean-wearing tourists; running the smooth stones alongside the slow-moving, blue-green canal was a welcome relief from the neighborhood route full of potholes, buckled pavement, loose dogs, and throttling mufflers.

I remember running my finger along routes in-between cities, wondering how so many cities could be clustered in the tiny states of New England, and reading strange place names in my head; Nogales, Butte, Amarillo, Baja California. I had never been west of Missouri at the time, and so the West held a magical sort of realism, a place so full of names that it wasn't quite real at the time, more akin to the maps I pored over at the beginning of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which had equally strange names; Lothlorien, Mordor, the Shire.



Detail of LOTR map. I really like the contour lines denoting where the waters of Middle Earth begin. Just as when I was a kid, I always wonder what lay to the East of these mystically named lands...was it just vast nothingness? An evil worse than Mordor? I wondered the same thing about the edge of space, once I realized the universe was constantly expanding, which meant there was a constantly moving edge. Would you bump into it with your nose, like a sliding door made of glass?

At the age of 22, driving out West was a revelation in distance. Armed with only a free road atlas, highlighter, and a folder full of printed directions, we traversed the Deep South, Southwest, West Coast, Pacific Northwest, and Great Plains. All of the greens, pale yellows, and oranges of the 1960s canvas-backed map came to life in New Orleans, Albuquerque, Sacramento, and Spokane. The craggy-ridged mountain ranges were no longer bold textures drawn over blood-orange hued terrain; they were omnipresent in the horizon, looming over Seattle, obscuring San Francisco, bisected by a road lashed out of Salt Lake City that threw us out on to the plateau.



View Cabin in a larger map
Detail of the cabin weekend. Left point is the cabin, right point is Nooksack Falls. The green line is a trail running along the Nooksack River. More details on my encounter with the glacial-fed stream in my next post, West, Vol. 6.

Returning to the cool greens and yellows of Indiana was relief, though not temperature-wise, long-hair and patchy beard only exacerbating the 90-degee, humid weather. But on the eyes, after escaping through the harsh blues and yellow-browns of Colorado and Nebraska, the lush greens of Indiana, pole-straight cornfields occasionally interrupted by lush stands of elm, maple, and oak, the low-lying scruff of soybean leaves that seem a single solid mass until perpendicular to the exacting rows; the map wasn't lying with its colors, though accepting that I had traversed such a visual spectrum was still hard to swallow.



View Chuckanut Ridge Hike in a larger map
Hike taken on the last day of the 2011 Western Swing. Though the rise in elevation was only around 1300 feet over a couple miles, it was more taxing than I originally thought. Near the top of the ridge, I finally sprinted uphill as long as I could, bored by the interminable climb that had not yet produced a view. Ah, the patience of the Internet age. Less than 5 minutes later, we were rewarded with a sudden clearing on a sheer rock cliff, looking over Lake Padden to Mt. Baker.

Returning home from the West last October, after flying out over Mt. Rainier, the only identifiable Indiana object was Conner Prairie, identified by its stationary hot air balloon hanging stagnant over a quilt-work of crop fields and encroaching suburbia. There was no relief in this return, and there was none in my most recent return either, the night landscape of Indianapolis disorienting and unfamiliar, with not even a Lucas Oil Stadium sighting to grant me directional bearing. Again I had flown out in the height of a sunny day, passing Mt. Rainier while my seatmate took pictures out of the window. She noticed me staring, and paused so I could get a good look. I glanced, and realized that the view wasn't one that I could get tired of, wasn't one that I wished to leave.



View Bellingham Overlook in a larger map
A bike-ride-turned-hike to a spectacular ridge overlooking the city of Bellingham and the bay. An army of 30+ mountain bikers passed us near the top of the ridge, though I was glad we left our bikes at the trailhead a mile back. The trail opened to a dusty, street-wide path atop the ridge, and we plopped on rocks and tree stumps, eating blueberries and basil-wheat bread with goat cheese, warmed by the sun.

carmel half-marathon: luxe & reduxe pt. 2

(read part one here.)

A couple months before the race, my long runs were going pretty well. I was increasing them by a mile every other week, with the goal of running 13 a couple weeks prior to the race. I was staying close enough to my 8-minute-mile pace that the goal felt reachable. Unfortunately, about 4 weeks prior to the race I came down with some body aches that finally morphed into a nasty flu, which then wreaked havoc on my digestive system. I went out of commission for about 10 days, completely throwing my running schedule out-of-whack. I did manage to get in a 9-miler (in 80-plus-degree heat and 90% humidity) the Sunday prior to the race. Still, I felt like my goal was going to be tough to hit, especially with the heat wave Indiana had been roiling in during late May and early June. I managed to stay in on a Friday night, and cooked a bunch of pasta with some sauteed oyster mushrooms and home-made basil pesto. Throw in some extra bread, and a big salad with strawberries soaked in balsamic vinegar and pepper...that was dinner.


View Carmel 2011 Half-Marathon in a larger map
Rough route of the half-marathon. Running on the trails was a great idea...definitely the best part of the race.

The day of the race, the weather had cooled somewhat, and remained overcast (save for the last mile or two). Humidity was still high, but the temperature felt good to me (was probably close to 70). I think I was up at 4:30, warmed up some steel-cut oats that I had let soak overnight (I usually prefer cooking them fresh, but had to save a few minutes of sleep somewhere) with raisins, and cracked a hard-boiled egg as well. All that was missing from childhood camping experiences were the little salt & pepper packets that we'd hoard from various restaurant condiment counters. Drank the advised 20 oz. of water (I'd drank like a fiend the previous day as well), and finally made it out the door near 5:50 with Amelia, who was (un)happily going to pull an 8-hour shift after the race.

Got one of the last parking spots in the lot, pinned my number to my chest (wearing one of Dad's old Maconaquah track jerseys, from ~1974, with red & white vertical stripes topped with a teal letter "M" with wings), and walked to the start/finish line. The adrenaline was pumping a bit, dampened perhaps by the intermittent sprinkles from the gray sky. Oh man, now I had to pee. Real bad. There were lots of port-a-pots, but serious lines, so I waited for ~15 minutes (until they issued a loudspeaker warning to get to the starting area) to relieve myself, left the rest of my gear & a smooch with Amelia, and found the back-side of the 8:00-mile pace group. It was packed in pretty tight, though when the race started (after blasting a claustrophobic group of adults with "The Final Countdown") things spaced out almost immediately (to strains of Janelle Monae's "Tightrope", a perfect 2011 starting song).



I spent the first mile-plus being boxed in by a couple slower runners, maneuvering and accelerating around the catch up to the 8:00 pace runner (this was awesome, by the way, as I didn't have to think about how fast I was running the early miles). Since I always run by myself, it was actually pretty cool running with a big group of people (supposedly close to 5,000 registered for the 3 races combined). The runners began to string out pretty early, and I bypassed the first two early water stands, preferring to stay in the groove right with the 8-minute pack. A tall, older gentlemen asked me if I was wearing a North Central jersey, so I educated him on Maconaquah. He was running something like 9 marathons this summer, and soon zoomed past the group of 30 or so people I was running with.

Just past mile 4, the half-marathon split off from the marathon, while on a two-lane road just outside of town. I hit the turn-around, and proceeded to go back up the hill we'd just spent half a mile running down. I wasn't feeling awesome at this point, but managed to avoid getting a side ache on the hill, and at the crest, I caught up with a couple who were talking about their 8-minute pace (if my crappy $5 Target watch does splits, I can't/won't ever figure it out), so I proceeded to shadow them for the next few miles that wound through some (anti)scenic suburbs, albeit, with streets less pockmarked than my neighborhood. There were a fair amount of people and families in their driveways, which was pretty cool.


Feeling strong here...even if I had the crazy eye going on. May have been suffering from suburb-psychosis.

Passing through the suburbs, the field was pretty stretched out. I passed the couple I was drafting behind at a water stop (I just grabbed a cup and took a few sips at each, maybe tossing it on my head once), and after that it was fairly sparse. The course then exited onto a street, where I passed a few people on a hill before we began the trail section. This was the coolest part of the race by far, winding through some woods, over bridges, and in general cooler temperature-wise than being on the exposed asphalt. I was feeling extremely fast through this section, passing some runners, hugging all corners. Around mile 10, I had the thought that I might even approach the 1:40:00 mark, thinking I could run the last 3 miles in sub-7:00 time. Clearly, my brain was lactic-acid-addled.


David Rudisha of Kenya breaks the 13-year old 800m world record last year. Obviously lactic acid ain't bothering him a bit. I would describe my mood at mile 9 as "Rudisha-like."

Around mile 11.5, I knew what the oft-named "wall" was all about. The course had exited back on to the streets, and the sun was beginning to glow through the cloud cover. Add to that an obese woman in an SUV somehow exited (driving the wrong way down the lane) onto the course, and was doing a 40-point turn in the one-lane road...jackass. I hoofed it in the median for a few yards, then back onto the course, sucking down some exhaust and silently cursing. Right after this, it felt like all the muscles in my body congealed into one gelatinous, aching mass. "Oh, okay...this is the wall," I thought.

Simultaneously, the sun came out, the straightaways seemed to extend past the horizon, and to top things off, right before the finish there was a long, slow, excruciatingly boring Indiana hill. Powered through, somehow, and passed maybe close to ten people on the hill, rounded the final corner, saw Amelia & my Mom out of the corner of my eye, tried & failed to give a full smile, didn't collapse, and crossed the finish line.


Final results...118th overall out of 1000+. Most proud of my last 5K being a minute faster than my first, despite hitting the wall somewhere in the middle of those last few miles. Oh, and luckily I beat the 14-yr.-old right behind me. Phew.

Post-race, I consumed some Fritos, water, a pretzel and mustard at the Farmer's Market, then made it home just in time to lay around on the couch with a stomachache for most of the day, watching track-and-field and reading on-and-off. Hoping my next half-marathon will be the Monumental Half-Marathon in November, and I've been keeping a steady 5-days-a-week running pattern since the race, to which I'm hoping to add some light weights this fall.

carmel half-marathon: luxe & reduxe pt. 1

This past Saturday, June 11th, I ran my first half-marathon, my first competitive race since running a near-anonymous and painfully-slow 800 meters at some year-end 7th grade track meet. From then on, I played soccer year round through high school, and though my Dad coached high school track for thirty-plus years, it bored me to even entertain the thought of running without chasing a ball. Even 4 months ago, I would've said the same thing. No longer!


Dad on-track right before retiring from the coaching game. Fitting that hurdles are in the shot, as that was his event in high school. The last time I ran them, in seventh grade, I bit it hard on the cinder track at Bon Air Middle School. It may have even been while warming up, although if it was the race, I must've finished. That night under the tub faucet, I dug the leftover charcoal bits out of my new-scabbed knee with a screwdriver.
Fast-forward through 8 years of non-exercise, undergraduate degree-working, cheap (and then craft) beer-loving, live rock-and-roll playing & touring, off-the-grid living; I eventually ended up in Indianapolis with a full-time job, making enough money so that I no longer had to live on Oriental-flavored ramen, bananas, and pasta (my one-year Bloomington diet). Fairly sedentary, I was cooking and eating pretty well, depending on my always-active metabolism to keep me DeBoy-thin. I gained some pounds, had a nice little belly going on at, yes, 160+ pounds. Doesn't sound like much, but I never even approached 150 in high school, despite eating 5 times a day.

In the Fall of 2009, a friend from high school contacted me about playing indoor soccer at the nice facility at Carmel's Off the Wall Sports. I agreed, and immediately thought that if I was going to pay to play (not to mention drive all the way to, blech, Carmel), then I better at least try to get back into some sort of shape. My first run was twice around a pathetically small neighborhood loop:


View Larger Map

Roughly .6 of a mile, two laps left me breathless, sore, sucking wind and holding my arms up and behind my head (I must not be the only person who finds this posture relaxing...). Wow, I was way more out-of-shape than I thought. With my history of soccer and still slim frame, I falsely assumed I was in fair shape, or at least more fair than most Americans. Wrong.

The first game was brutal, sprinting back and forth on Astroturf, the thick taste of sweating in cold weather in my mouth. Lactic acid build-up hit me immediately, and an offensive run, even down the small field, reduced me to a gasping, ineffective defender. Ok...so I wasn't in shape at all. I ran a few times a week through the fall, then halted for winter, not ready to test the icy streets of the near-east side.


Asics GEL-DS Trainer 16. I thought running shoes were a farce, but as it turns out, my Dad's words were gospel truth. "Pay now, or pay later." Been running relatively pain-free since switching to these.
Amelia bought me really nice running shoes (my first pair) for my birthday in January of 2010, though it was really not till March till I started running again. I built up to a roughly 3-mile loop, running mostly mornings, especially once the heat of summer hit. I tried to run 3 days a week, plus the weekly soccer game, and began to feel better durning those as the summer progressed. In early fall, battling morning stomach-aches, my doctor advised me to run evenings instead, so I made the switch. After a vacation out West, I stopped soccer entirely, and began to focus on running. Using a wall calendar, I believe I ran about 150 days in 2010, with a goal of achieving at least 180 in 2011.

In December, I finally made the leap to join a local gym, though not just any. NIFS, or the National Institute for Fitness and Sport, features an indoor running track, among other amenities. This allowed me to begin timing my runs, and knowing pretty exact distances I was completing. For shorter runs, I began aiming for a 7-minute-mile pace (for 4 to 5 miles; still not quite there, as my fastest timed 4-miler is 28:05), while on longer runs (8+ miles), I tried to keep to a 8-minute-mile pace. At this point, I was running 4 or 5 times a week, with some bike-work or sprinting following most sessions. The NIFS indoor track has a little rubberized bounce to it, and is more forgiving than pavement, not to mention not having to look out for stray dogs, speeding minivans, and new-sprouted potholes.

At some point, I mentally decided I should run a half-marathon. Unfortunately, when the sign-up for the Indy Mini, I was dealing with a knee tweak, and didn't sign up since I wasn't sure how long it would be till I was at full-strength again. The Mini sold out quickly, and buying someone else's pass seemed an option for a minute, till I realized I didn't want to pay the transfer fee. So I settled on the Carmel Half-Marathon, the inaugural running of the race, found on a flier at NIFS. Yeah, I slag on Carmel and anyone else who lives in "Indy" but resides outside the 465 loop (suburbanites!); but I allowed myself to feel like I could run in their race. At least the streets would be better, I thought, with the kind of tax base that could pay for this. Plus, I run by myself, so a smaller crowd than the Mini's ~35,000 seemed more my speed. So I signed up...


Yeah...I did not wanna be in the middle of this, sandwiched between Carmelites with their sport beans and hairy dudes with iPods blaring their shitty, uptempo 92.3 playlist... That said, I'll probably run it next year.
Part two (the race!) to follow.