18:43 5k.

Either I'm a pretty good judge of my own fitness or I'm good sneaking under whatever limits I set upon myself.

So I ran 18:43 this morning after stating that I hoped I could run under 19:00.

After one mile (5:56) I started thinking I had a shot at running under 18:30, but by two miles (12:05) I knew I didn't have enough left to run the last uphill mile fast enough.

The course was downhill for the first mile, flat for the second mile and uphill for the last mile or so.

As usual, a bunch of kids went out way too fast and were huffing and puffing after half a mile. I settled into fifth place after passing the group of oxygen indebted youngsters. At one intersection early in the race, no one was posted to direct traffic and there was a frighteningly close call when one runner started into the roadway before realizing that a car was coming fast from his left.

There's not a lot to say about the race from my perspective. I went out under control, passed fourth place a little after a mile and finished fairly strong with a 6:38 for the final 1.1 miles, which is 6:02/mile pace.

I've noticed that races seem a lot less dramatic now that I'm older. I used to fear the discomfort, get nervous about where I'd place and worry that I'd bomb. Now races are much more matter-of-fact affairs for me. I know about what pace I should run, I don't really care where I place, and I rarely bomb anymore, mostly because I'm smart enough to go out conservatively. I don't crack late in the race because I don't let myself back off when it gets unpleasant and I don't let myself overrreact to the discomfort like I used to. If you do this enough times, you eventually understand that the last mile is going to hurt (if you do it right) and that it sucks but that it inevitably ends, so there's no reason to be overwhelmed by it.

The way that I race is probably part of the reason that I don't find much drama in races anymore. While everyone else takes off like it's the running of the bulls, I am content to settle into a pace I'm pretty sure I can maintain the entire way. What usually ends up happening is that if I catch someone late in the race, it's because they went out too fast and, as a result, they've got little fight left in them because they wasted it all in the first couple of miles.

The other reason I rarely find myself in any kind of battle toward the end is that my fitness level usually gets me stuck in no man's land after a mile or so. Today there were three guys fighting for the lead and the top two ended up going 16:21 and 16:28. The next guy was also well out of sight by the time I finished. So there was a huge gap between third place and me. The guy who finished fifth was ahead of me for the first two miles, but when I caught him just past two miles he was cooked and he may have finished half a minute or more behind me. In other words, the guys who train to race usually end up way ahead of me and the people who don't usually end up well behind me. Most of the time my race is more like a time trial than a real race.

Nonetheless, I feel good about how I ran. I averaged just a little over six-minute pace off of practically no speedwork. I'm thinking that by the end of the cross country season I'll be back under eighteen minutes. I'm still planning to run the Nittany Valley Half Maraton in December, but after running six-minute miles for 3.1 miles, the idea of trying to run 6:15 or 6:20 pace for 13.1 is pretty daunting. But that race is still over two months away, so while I've got a lot of work to do, I've got a lot of time to do it in.

I've also got the benefit of plenty of fat I can shed which only compounds the gains I make in fitness. Even though I've lost about fifteen pounds so far this year, I'll still pretty heavy for a guy who's 5'7" at 164 pounds. I'll be fast again, it's just going to take a little time.

Things have been happening so quickly that I haven't had the time to maintain a normal life, coach and then blog about it. Our team went through a stretch of six meets in forteen days. There's no way I could sit down and flesh out all of the stories.

Instead, I'm just going to talk about myself for a minute here. I hope you won't mind.

Tomorrow I'm running a 5k road race. It's my first quasi-serious road race in over a year, so I'm a little nervous, in part because I don't want to run poorly, but also because I have a small hope that I'm going to pleasantly surprise myself.

I've already promised myself that I'm going to try to run under 19:00. I think this is doable considering that I ran 20:04 three weeks ago on our cross country course. The race I'm running is pretty flat and I figure the change of surface alone is worth thirty seconds or so. I'm in much better shape than I was a month ago, so I don't think that's too ambitious.

I'll post more tomorrow reporting on how the race went.

First two meets.

Last Wednesday we ran against Penn Cambria in our first meet on our home course. For a lot of our runners, it was their first race ever other than our time trial.

After we ran the time trial I had told the kids that their times would improve in the first race because the weather was sure to be cooler and that it couldn't possibly be worse. I was half right; it wasn't worse, it was identical: low-eighties, sunny, humid.

We knew little about PC's girls team because they were only returning two girls from last year., one of whom was fifth at districts in 2006 and, based upon her time in a road race a month earlier, was almost certain to win. The other was about four minutes slower. Based upon the results of our time trial, I predicted that Mary, our best runner, would probably finish in second place. Little did I know that apparently PC's entire soccer team joined the cross country team. At first we weren't sure if they would even field an entire girls team. When they showed up it looked like they had enough members to field a football squad.

While the girls lost the race 17 to 48 -- I'm starting to think soccer players make good cross country runners -- most of them set personal bests. Mary finished fourth in 24:34, muttering "Sorry, coach" as she ran by me near the finish, as if not finishing second was somehow shameful. The next three girls finished within a minute of each other. Nicole ran 26:24, an improvement of several minutes over her time trial. Chelsea was next in 27:01 and Colleen was close behind in 27:14. Colleen's last 1.1 miles was 9:14, fastest of all of the girls except Mary.

The day before the meet I cautioned the kids that sometimes it's not a good idea to wait until the last 50m or 100m to kick, since just about any runner will sprint from that far out, and if they're running next to someone with more pure speed, they'll probably get beat. However, not many runners are willing to run really hard for 1/4 mile at the end of a race and that they might be able to pull away from someone who might otherwise beat them in a sprint by running really hard for the last 1/4 mile.

Colleen apparently took this advice to heart. Her last 1/4 mile was faster than just about every runner in the race -- including the girl who won and finished over five minutes ahead of her.

Megan finished last, but she did beat her best time from the time trial by about a minute, running 35:05. She stopped to walk frequently, but finished with a good sprint, after which she proceeded to drop to her hands and knees and throw up four or five times on the grass behind the soccer goal. You just don't get this in other sports.

In they boys race we were a little more competitive, although we also lost that race 23-35. On the bright side, Pat won overall, running 18:11, a full two and a half minutes faster than he had in the time trial. Disappointingly, Scott ran 19:51 which, while it was 33 seconds faster than his time trial, was much further behind Pat than we thought he would be. Scott had been talking negatively before the race, saying things like, "I don't feel a good time today." Maybe he was just sensing that something wasn't right or maybe he just psyched himself out. We wouldn't know until Saturday.

Andy, who is just coming back from hand surgery, and who was running with a cast, ran 21:52. Tim, our former quarterback, went out in 6:02, which put him just eleven seconds behind Scott. I was excited when I saw him trying to be competitive, but I was concerned that he was going to fade, and he did. His second mile was 7:48 and his final 1.1 was 8:30. He finished in 22:20, just a second ahead of Nathan, who had been almost 40 seconds behind him after the second mile. Nathan ran a fairly smart race and beat a PC kid with a nice kick at the end.

Our last runner, Derrick, a freshman, finished far behind the field in 32:32. He said at the second mile that he had forgotten to take his inhaler, which made me angry. What is it with these kids with asthma forgetting to take their inhalers????

Anyway, Derrick joined the team two weeks after practice started and had never really done any distance running before. Not surprisingly, he was unable to run the whole distance. What he would do was sprint until he was too exhausted to do anything but walk and would then walk for several minutes. No matter how many times I told him to pace himself, he kept doing the same thing. I didn't get upset about it because it was, after all, the first race of his life.

Today we ran the Forest Hills Invitational, a race of about eighteen teams. The course is much flatter than ours, basically making a giant loop around a bunch of cornfields. There are two short, steep hills shortly after the first mile, but other than that, it's a pancake.

Last year, our boys finished next to last and we only had one girl on the team. I hoped the boys would finish higher than last year and that the girls would set some PRs. I was pleasantly surprised at how they exceeded my expectations.

The girls finished 13th out of 16 teams, but every single one of them set a PR. Mary ran almost 20 seconds faster than she had on Wednesday while Nicole ran over a minute faster. Colleen PR'd by more than 20 seconds. Megan was the most impressive PR of the day. She finished over four minutes faster than her previous time, running 30:45.

Before the boys race, I had a talk with Scott and told him that Pat was absolutely not 1:40 better than him. I told him that I expected him to run under nineteen minutes and finish in the top 25, which would get him an award. This seemed to boost his confidence a bit. While he didn't get an award -- he finished a hearbreaking 26th -- he did run 18:53, only 31 seconds behind Pat.

On the bus trip up to the race, Andy had been telling me that he was going to run under 21 minutes. I told him I was going to hold him to that and remind him of it during the race, which I did. Andy was close, but didn't ended up running 21:10, which is almost 45 seconds better than last race. Tim ran a much, much smarter race. He went out somewhere in the mid-sixes and finished just a few seconds ahead of Andy.

The big surprise of today, though, was Derrick. He was running in the junior varsity race. This morning Vicki asked him what he wanted his best time to be by the end of the year. He said he'd like to be running in the 23's. Vicki said that was a rather big leap to make and that maybe he should shoot for something more reasonable, like trying to get under 30 minutes today, and potentially under 26 minutes by the end of the year. Later, I took him aside and told him that, while it would have to happen gradually, there was no reason not to shoot for the 23's by the end of the year.

He went through his first mile in 7:20 or so -- behind Andy, but still faster than I wanted to see. My dad and I were communicating from different parts of the course by walkie-talkie. After the first mile, I told him that Andy was running well and that Derrick had probably gone out way too fast. Then I ran to the two-mile mark to wait. At about fifteen minutes into the race my dad radioed and said, "Derrick just went by and he's ahead of Andy!" Sure enough, here came Derrick, looking confident. I told Derrick that if he kept it up, he'd be in the 24's today.

After Andy, who also looked like he was on his way to a PR, went by, I ran back to watch Derrick head up the first hill and saw him walking. I thought, well, here we go, the catastrophic collapse of what could have been a good race for him. I yelled at him to start running again and he suddenly yelled, and I mean yelled, "RUN THROUGH THE PAIN!!!" and start sprinting. My first thought was that Derrick was embarassing himself and that I wanted him, for his own sake, to stop acting so eccentrically. I yelled back at him that he needed to slow down. He didn't. Derrick may be getting in better shape, but improving his ability to follow certain instructions may take longer.

I then went near the finish line to see how he'd do. When he came into view, about 200 yards from the finish, he was walking. I ran over to him and told him he didn't have far to go and that he needed to get running again, at which point he yelled once again, only this time not forming words, but this time just sort of roaring and sprinting as if he were about to attack someone nearby. I told him that no one wanted to hear him make noise and that I wanted him to focus his energy on running. His screaming/sprinting quickly tired him and he began walking again, this time a maddening fifty yards from the finish. I, not following my own advice about screaming, started telling him to, for God's sake, sprint, the finish line was right there! Derrick, all emotion, once more burst into a full sprint, although, thankfully, a silent one this time, passing one more runner before the finish line. He finished in 24: 37, shaving a whopping 7:55 off of his time from Wednesday.

If only every kid at every meet could have the feeling of shocking everyone on their team and setting a personal best by nearly eight minutes...

Tomorrow is our first meet. We'll be running a dual meet on our home course against another team from our conference. Because it's the first meet of the year for both teams, it's difficult to predict our chance of winning. If you go strictly on our time trial times, we'll lose badly. However, I'm not too concerned with those times for several reasons.



First, it was much hotter and more humid on the day we ran the time trial than it will be tomorrow. Second, none of the team was wearing spikes or racing flats. Third, it wasn't a real race. The cooler, drier temps and the fact that the kids will be (or should be) wearing racing shoes will almost certainly lead to faster times. I don't know how some of them will react in a race situation. Some kids are workout heroes and others really only show up on race day.



I have the feeling that Pat and Scott are of the latter type. I was pretty surprised when I beat them in the time trial. From what I'd observed to that point, I shouldn't have beaten either one of them, even though I was wearing racing flats and they weren't. In Pat's defense, he had just come from soccer practice and was surely tired. I'm not so sure why Scott couldn't stay with me. The way Tim has been coming along, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he beats one or the other of them. I can see Tim going to the well more readily than them.

10 miles Sunday.

I woke up with a slightly scratchy throat yesterday and haven't felt well since I finished my ten-miler, so I'm taking the day off.

On a positive note, American Matt Tegenkamp got fourth in the 5000m at the World Champs with a fantastic kick after a brilliantly run race during which he sat on the lead pack for 4600m and then powered past most of them in the last 200m to finish fourth. He missed bronze by .03 seconds.





The only runner with a better kick was the winner, naturalized American citizen Bernard Lagat, who passed the entire lead pack as easily as if he had just hopped onto the track with 200m to go.

Lagat also won the 1500m. I'm more excited for Tegenkamp because Lagat was a world-class runner prior to becoming an American, whereas Tegenkamp was born and raised in the US. Tegenkamp has also quietly and steadily developed himself into a world-class runner while receiving little of the hype that has accompanied Webb's and, to a lesser degree, Ritzenhein's every race.

That is not to say I'm not a fan of those two, because I am. I feel particularly bad for Webb, who, after his amazing track season, appeared poised to medal in, if not win, the 1500m . Instead he finished eighth.

He was, for an athlete, unusually vulnerable and candid in his post-race interview. I think he needs to mature emotionally before he'll be ready to really compete with the big boys. There is a coldness and detachment the best competitors have that he still lacks. Webb wears his heart on his sleeve when he races while best racers seem to have what I can only describe as an heartless disinterestedness. Webb seems to want to be a hero, while the people who beat him treat the race like a hunt for prey.

Ritzenhein seems not to have found his niche, which, in my humble opinion, is on the cross country course and on the roads. He simply doesn' t have the wheels to compete at the 5000m or 10,000m on the track. He is a tough competitor on grass and asphalt, where pure speed means less and this is where I think he should focus.

The other good thing is that Sunday marked six weeks and one day since I've had any alcohol. That is the longest period I've gone without a drink since my sophomore year in college. Now I've just got to cut out snacks that come in foil bags.

Recap

Monday - 4 miles, including 3 x 300m hill. We were going to do four repeats but ran out of time.

Tuesday - 4 miles. Was going to do five miles but after we ran to St. Mary's and back, my dad had the group run a small loop in progressively faster times until all but one runner were eliminated. I deliberately lost on the second loop because I didn't want to do any hard running the day before a race. I jogged around while the game continued, but then stupidly jumped in on the last one and ran nearly all out, after which my legs began reminding me that I had run ten miles two days prior and hills the day before. I jogged another mile to cool down and felt so lousy doing ten minute pace that I thought it would be best for the time trial the next day if I didn't do anymore.

Wednesday - 5 miles, including 5k time trial in 20:04. Wednesday turned out to be the hottest day we'd had since the previous Friday, which I describe in an earlier post. It was in the mid-80's and humid; not ideal for a race. Surprisingly, I won, but I had several advantages I would not have had under most race circumstances. First, I was the only person who wore racing flats, which, over 5k, are worth perhaps half a minute. Second, Pat, who has been arguably our strongest runner thus far, arrived from soccer practice just minutes before. The third advantage was the most important one: no one else seemed to care as much as I did.

I was just hoping to run under 21 minutes and thought it pretty unlikely that I would run faster than 20 minutes. After a first mile in 6:17, I was in second place to Pat, who went through in 6:15. I passed him less than half a mile later, just before we turned from the grass field which surrounds the school to head uphill into the woods, and he was already breathing hard. The second mile (whose accuracy I doubt) was a 6:41. Once in the woods, a narrow and root-ridden trail leads uphill for approximately 300m, during which I started thinking, "I've got to do this once more before the finish?"

When you reach the top of the hill, there is an equally long descent out of the woods. When I got back down to the field in front of the school there was finally enough open space for me to look back and see what kind of lead I had. At that point I had maybe fifty yards on Pat and Scott looked like he was catching him and would pass him soon.

When I entered the woods for the last time, I was pretty sure I was going to hold them off, but when I turned around about 200m before the finish, Scott had put a lot of distance on Pat and seemed like he was running faster than I was and I was a little worried that he might catch me. In retrospect, I should have realized that there wasn't enough real estate for him to catch me as I finished 20 seconds ahead of him, but had we been running another half mile I think he might have.

Pat finished exactly 20 seconds after Scott and Tim finished about 1:40 after Pat.

The times turned out to be slow, but we told the team to forget about them because of the heat and the fact that, for many, it had been their first race ever. We race on the same course this Wednesday and I expect many of them will run much faster.

Thursday - Five miles on the treadmill. I hate the treadmill. How can eleven minute pace feel so hard?

Friday - Three miles at PSU's track. I was going to do some striders, but I felt so crappy from the beginning just running ten minute pace that I decided that with a six-miler scheduled for Saturday morning, I was better off cutting it short and letting my legs recover. I'm hoping that if I take the six miles extremely easy that I'll bounce back enough to get ten miles in on Sunday.

Brief notes on long run. The price of freedom is country music.

Long run today.

Got ten miles done this morning. I didn't feel well during the first mile, but by the time I reached the Altoona Campus I was running 8:30 pace and I came back about two minutes faster than I went out even though I added on some distance at the end to make sure it was ten miles.

I was glad this went well. For the last couple of months I've had some lousy long runs and the last time I tried to run ten miles I quit after only having run three. I got some good advice from this guy and it's made a difference. I was trying to do too much during the week and ended up too tired to run well on Sunday. He suggested I keep the mileage consistent during the week, cut the long run back a little and build it every week. I was being too impatient and trying to go out and run ten miles every weekend when I just didn't have the fitness. Over the last three weeks I've done 6, 8, and, 10 on Sunday and this gradual buildup has worked much better.

I'm looking forward to this week. We've got a hill workout tomorrow and a time trial on Wednesday. I figure I'm only good for 21 minutes or so over 5k, but perhaps I'll surprise myself.

Unrelated to running:

I went to a Curve game tonight with my family. Two things I don't really understand the appeal of: baseball and fireworks. To me, baseball games are slow moving and boring. Plus, the defense has the ball. That's just wrong.

The other thing is fireworks. I'm sure the first time you see them when you're a kid they're pretty cool; they're brightly colored and they explode loudly. But by the time you're an adult, you've seen them probably dozens of times and there is little variation between one show and another except in length and the volume of the explosions.

Oh, a third thing whose appeal I don't understand: deliberately, lugubriously, unbearably, irredeemably sappy patriotic country music which tends to accompany baseball and fireworks. If you know what makes people actually choose to listen to it, please explain it to me. And don't use other examples of unlistenable music, like much gangsta rap, as a reason I should like sappy, patrioic country music. That still doesn't explain what is appealing about it. And don't act like I'm a bad American if I don't like patriotic country songs. Just because someone wrote some patriotic words and sang them doesn't mean I'm required to enjoy listening to it.

This post is almost as long as yesterday's run felt.

Yesterday's run was a death march of not-quite-epic proportions.

It had been rainy and cool for the first half of the week, and Thursday's workout (which I was absent from for reasons detailed in a previous post) was completed just before a torrential downpour, which announced itself with frequent flashes of lightning that were so close that the thunder which followed occurred almost simultaneously. Sitting at my desk at work, looking out the window, I thought, "There's no way they got their workout done today." But they did.

The storm seemed to be the grand finale to several days of persistent gloom and soaking rain, but was in fact just the end of Act I of this week's unpleasant weather. The clouds and rain disappeared offstage Thursday night and on Friday the curtains rose to reveal a new leading cast: the sun and the humidity.

Since Friday was the first day we had seen the sun in what seemed like a week, Mia and I decided to make a lemonade stand. Or rather, Mia begged me to have a lemonade stand and I acquiesced.

If we had used our business model as an MBA project, I'm sure we would have failed. First, it was a weekday, which meant that most people were at work. Second, even people who were at home because of retirement, disablility, faking disability, being a housewife or homemaker (I don't what the preferred nomenclature is these days) , being a kid for whom school has not started, or self-employment (legal or not), were most likely indoors retreating from the heat. Thus, despite our bright yellow construction paper sign which hung from a metal pole conspicuously placed at the edge of the yard, and the high quality of our product, we had no customers.

Just as we were setting up, two little girls from next door came out and we gave them some lemonade, gratis (free samples are good PR; we should get some credit for that), and then my daughter brought nearly every plastic toy in our house onto the front porch.

As I sat and read a book about going to grad school, the front door opened and closed repeatedly as more toys emigrated from the living room to the porch. Eventually, the porch began to look like a yard sale and I told her that she had brought enough toys outside and that I would be quite shocked if any were still inside at all.

She replied, "Ok, I just wanted to bring out a few more. Now we have enough."

I resumed reading and then a few minutes later she came out with more toys. I asked (not because I didn't know, but because asking a question both you and your child already know the answer to is a rhetorical device parents are required by federal law to deploy in these situations) , "Didn't I just tell you not to bring out any more toys?"

Once again, she answered, "I just wanted to bring out a few more. Now we have enough." I said, "That's what you just told me!" She then just kind of stood there and looked at me, knowing that I wasn't going to force her to take them back in, but understanding that she had a statutory obligation to look at me apologetically while I returned an also federally-required look of stern displeasure and uttered a final, "No more," and then, "I mean it," as if to resolve an unasked question about whether I meant it or was just joking, before both of us could return to our respective activities.

A few minutes later the girls from next door had to leave and, before they did, they let out their cat, Binks. Most people bring their animals in when they leave the house; these people let theirs out. Binks likes to kill moles and leave them on the sidewalk or porch and gets into hair-raising cat fights late at night. Binks proceeded to plop down amidst my daughter's toys and I shooed him away annoyedly. He's an outdoor cat; I don't know what nasty stuff he's carrying around.

It was too hot to be sitting outside anyway -- or at least we have been too spoiled by air-conditioning to find any good reason to sit outside in uncomfortable heat and humidity for very long -- so we went inside, cranked up the AC and played Loot and Would You Rather? on the coffee table until my wife woke up.

Our practice was at 4PM, so it hadn't really gotten any cooler by the time we started running. The plan was to do the Boyer run, which is five miles long and is relatively flat. The only hill is early in the run, but it is at least a 1/4 mile in length.

I knew from the start some of the kids wouldn't be able to finish. I suggested to my dad that we encourage some of them to turn around after a mile and a half or two miles or to ride back with him after he stopped to give us water.

At the bottom of 17th street, which was only a mile or so into the run, Pat, Scott, Andy and Tim were in a group about fifty feet ahead of me and Mary was about a hundred feet behind me, but I couldn't even see Andy, Megan, Patrick, Colleen, Chelsea or Matt. As we passed a bank sign displaying the temperature, it read 100 degrees.

My dad was standing at the next corner and he asked me to tell the kids in the front group to stop at the Jaffa so that we could regroup and get some water. I don't know why he didn't tell them himself since they had just passed him about fifteen seconds earlier, but I was already a little addled from the heat, so that thought didn't occur to me at the time. By that point they had gotten about seventy-five yards ahead of me, so I had to pick it up in order to catch them. The pace wasn't fast to begin with, but the fairly modest increase in pace felt significantly harder than what I had been running.

Vicki was at the next corner and I saw Andy take of his t-shirt and toss it to Vicki; I thought it was kind of funny because it looked more like he was throwing it at her than throwing it to her. When I reached her I asked if she had her camera on her. She said she did and I told her she ought to go back to the bank and take a picture of the temperature display at the bank.

It took me another block to catch Tim and Andy, who had fallen off the pace Scott and Pat were setting. I gave them the message about regrouping and yelled it to the other two, who didn't seem to hear, so I caught up to them and told them. Then I slowed down again. I was hurting from just three blocks of running that, on a cool day, would have been no more than tempo pace.
When we reached the Jaffa, Pat asked me, "Are we just supposed to wait here?" I told him they were and then I turned around and headed back to check on the kids behind me.

I passed Mary about a block back and she said she was doing well. Then Andy (a different one), Colleen, then Chelsea and Patrick. They were alright, but I had my doubts about their finishing. When I got within eyesight of my dad's car, I saw them getting in, so I turned around and headed back to the Jaffa. They got there just as I did and gave the kids water. I told the kids again that if they didn't feel well to stop and walk and, if need be, wait for a ride.

Pat, Scott, Tim and Andy took off and I stayed behind to explain the rest of the route to Patrick, who got lost on a run last week. Patrick is a heck of a nice kid, the seventh of eight kids in his family, including a sister who was on my cross country team in high school. He runs with his back hunched over and his shoulders held high. While he runs slower than most of the team, his turnover is incredibly fast, which gives one the impression that if he straightened his back and opened up his stride he would suddenly glide down the road at five-minute pace.

After I was sure Patrick would be able to find his way back, I went on ahead and passed Colleen and Chelsea, both of whom were already struggling even though we had just stopped for water less than half a mile earlier. I was sure they wouldn't finish and I told them to walk if they needed to and to get a ride with my dad at the next water stop, which would be at Mansion park, another half-mile away.

I caught Andy and Mary a few minutes later. They both seemed to be doing well, although Mary joked that it must be nice for me to be bald since her hair traps the heat from her head. Eventually, I pulled away from them until the crossing at Sixth Avenue, where they caught up and we had to wait several minutes before it was safe to cross. Just before we reached Mansion Park, Andy stumbled on a curb but, fortunately, didn't hurt anything.

At the parking lot where my dad had parked we got water and I told him that he was going to need to pick up Colleen, Chelsea, and possibly Patrick. He had already picked up Megan, who had missed a week of practice while on vacation and wisely bagged the run since she was in no shape to run five miles in any conditions, let alone this oppressive and fairly dangerous heat.

I started running with Andy and Mary again and we took an alternate route down some well-shaded side streets behind Baker Mansion. When we turned onto Union Avenue there were some guys mowing the grass between the curb and the sidewalk. As we passed them a piece of bark or leaf flew into my mouth and stuck to the back of my throat and I spent the rest of the run trying to dislodge it and, in the process, no doubt making some nauseating noises.

The best indication of how brutal the conditions were came a few minutes later. Mary suddenly asked, "May I stop and walk?" I told her that she could stop whenever she needed to and that I encouraged her to do so given the heat. The reason this was significant is that Mary is extremely competitive and, though she's never said so, she can't stand for anyone in her general vicinity to be ahead of her. I've seen her sprint ahead of people at the end of a warm-up. She is often ahead of me on our distance runs, even though I'm pretty sure I would beat her by at least three minutes in a 5k. On one run in particular, she had been ahead of me the entire run but I began catching up to her toward the end. When she heard my footsteps approaching she would suddenly sprint until she was ten or fifteen meters ahead and then would slow down again. Once I'd started to catch up again and she would do the same thing once more.

When Mary stops to walk, you know it's bad.

I had to wait for a while to cross Union Ave because traffic was heavy. It was just after 5PM and it was Friday, so people were either just getting off work, heading to a bar or restaurant, or both. While I waited, Andy and Mary caught up to me again and we all crossed together, but it was clear that they were beat. As soon as I started running again, they dropped behind.

I wasn't going to have any problem finishing, but I wasn't feeling great. After the left turn at Pizza Hut, which is at about the four mile-mark of the run, you must cross about half a mile of blacktop parking lots for a hotel, Value City, Dunkin Donuts, a car dealership, a mattress warehouse, a Chinese buffet, an Army recruiting center, a Super Shoes and a car wash.

Once I got past Pizza Hut, which is shaded by some trees which stand on the bank of a small creek that runs behind it, the heat really hit me. With no shade from the sun and the with the pavement radiating heat from below, it felt like running inside someone's mouth. Soon, Mary and Andy were so far behind me I couldn't see them anymore.

In the last 1/4 mile of the run, I caught Andy (the other one, who had been running with Pat, Scott and Tim). I was surprised that he had been with them for so long. Yesterday was his first day back after being out for almost two weeks for a hand operation.

I got back and drank some Gatorade and headed back out to make sure Andy and Mary were OK. I met them about a couple blocks from school and was surprised to see that they were running. We all ran back together until, decidedly not surprisingly, Mary sprinted off when we reached the driveway in front of the school.

A few minutes later, as we all sat around in a daze, my dad and Vicki pulled up without Chelsea, Colleen and Patrick, whom I had told him to pick up. Matt, whom I hadn't seen since the Jaffa, emerged making wretching sounds into a styrofoam cup. I was alarmed and I asked my dad why he didn't have the other three with him. He said they had told him that they wanted to finish. We walked around to the front of the school and just moments later Colleen came in and a couple of minutes after that Chelsea and Patrick materialized out of the haze.

Chelsea seemed unhappy, but I couldn't tell if it was frustration at finishing so far behind the others or if she was angry that we had asked them to run so far in such conditions. I assume it's the former, because she had been offered a ride back at three miles and refused it.

In retrospect, I would have only sent Scott, Pat, Tim, Andy and Mary out for the five miler. I would have had all of the others, even the ones that did manage to finish, on a three miler. I will say this, though: yesterday was as unpleasant as running conditions get around here and, had we not had practice, I would not have run at that time of day. Nonetheless, I was impressed with the determination of Colleen, Chelsea, Patrick and Andy, all of whom are running cross country for the first time and none of whom have run that far in those conditions in their lives. I don't know if you can really extrapolate any predictions about how they will perform in a race situation from how they did yesterday, but I hope they take some pride in how tough they were and draw on that experience in other situations.

I was just glad it was over.

Every weekday but Thursday I leave the office at 4PM for practice. On Thursday, in order to make up the half-hour of work I miss by leaving early, I work from 8AM until 7PM. This actually works out well for me because the nature of my job is such that the early part of the week is slow and gradually picks up as the week goes on. By Thursday, I almost need a ten hour day in order to get everything caught up so that I don't start Friday behind and end up leaving with a pile of things on my desk that the back of my mind will think about all weekend.

Unfortunately, this means that in order to run I would need to either get up before work or run after I get home. Running before work was out of the question. I've been staying up far too late lately and needed to get a reasonable amount of sleep last night. I would have run at some point this evening, but after eating at my in-laws and not getting home until after 8PM, playing computer games with my daughter until 9PM, and driving to a video rental store twenty minutes away at 9:30 to exchange Big Brain Academy (which we rented) for Super Mario Party 8 (which we accidentally returned (does anyone remember hearing about the first seven Super Mario Party releases? I don't.)) because the woman that had rented Big Brain Academy only to open the case to find the latest in the Super Mario Party octology was leaving to go to a hospital in Pittsburgh the next day and really needed the game before she left. I don't know whether no one else would be available to rent the game for her kid while she was away or if they somehow set up their car or, more likely, SUV, so that their kid could play Wii on the trip. Whatever. If someone has to drive two hours to go to a hospital, the least I can do is make sure their kid has a game to play.

So I didn't run Thursday. No big deal. I had run six days straight, which is more consistent than I've been lately and those six days did include more hills and speed than I've been doing, so the zero was probably warranted.

Friday's run was a bit of a mess. The day before the team had run about two miles to a soccer field and then done striders and then had run back to the school. A couple were sore and tired since this was about five miles of running and some had probably never run that far in their young lives.

The plan, which I had no quarrel with, was for an easy day of about three miles. I would have like the senior guys to run more since three miles is enough for them. Turns out that the easy day included two of the biggest hills within the general vicinity of the school. Then, my dad's directions were not very clear on where the runners should go at one point and the faster runners disappeared into some woods. I had the two slower girls following me and I didn't know the path through the woods, so we took a slightly longer route. It was hot and they were already tired from the two hills and stopped and walked several times. They looked frustrated. I was frustrated, too, because most of the runners, along with the fittest ones, were going to run half a mile less than these two girls who were already dead after a little more than a mile from climbing two fairly steep, long hills.

Meanwhile, the rest of the group had finished long before because their shortcut through the woods made their run barely two miles. I'm not sure why my dad thought that the route was 3.1 miles long. It took me 25 minutes to finish and that was with backtracking occasionally to make sure the two girls were OK and that they knew where they were going.

On Sunday I talked with my dad about the training and the need to modify the schedule and he agreed to my suggestions. He had originally planned four workouts and one distance run, which would take place on Friday. I convinced him that there needed to be more plain-old boring distance runs for the sake of aerobic development and recovery. We settled on a plan for this week which included distance runs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; a hill workout Tuesday and tempo paced intervals on Thursday.

Today we ran the hill workout and it was tough.

We ran from the school to St. Mary's Cemetary -- which is a little over a mile -- to warm up.

The cemetary is directly across 10th street from some kind of juvenile detention home which is surrounded by tall chain-link fences topped by ominous loops of barbed wire. 10th street is a fairly steep hill which runs east to west if you're heading up it. St. Mary's is on the north side of the road. At the bottom of the cemetary, running perpindicular to 10th St. is a straight stretch of rutted dirt road about 150 yards long. At the north end of the dirt road it turns left and angles back toward tenth street in a winding manner; sometimes running briefly parallel to and other times roughly perpindicular to the dirt road.

We did three repeats on this windy portion, jogging down 10th St., turning left back onto the dirt road and then starting again at the far end of it. Then we did three repeats straight up 10th St. I hung with the two best guys on the team for all of the repeats, finishing a few seconds ahead or a few seconds behind on each one.

This pleased me as an indicator of my own fitness, but then again, I tend to do better on hills than a lot of runners, most likely because of my short, stocky build. In a race, these two would still dust me pretty easily.

The rest of the team did admirably well. Tim, in his first year of cross country after giving up football, seems to get fitter every day. Mary is going to be good if we can just get her under control -- yesterday on our easy run she seemed to think I was trying to race her every time I caught up to her and she would sprint ahead fifteen or twenty yards. This instinct has its pros and cons: I imagine she's going to be capable of tearing off heads in a race situation, but I'm just concerned she'll be too tired to actually do it because she runs hard every day. If Sam stays on the team he has the potential to be our three or four runner, but like Pat he also plays soccer, and he quit last year a few weeks into the season.

I hope the time trial next week goes well and that it will get Pat and Sam excited enough about XC to ditch soccer and focus on running.

First two days of practice.

Yesterday was the first day of official practice for our XC team. We have nine boys (possibly ten, as another is supposed to join tomorrow) and five girls. The range of experience and fitness in this group varies widely. Two of the boys are in good shape and are ready to do much more than the rest of the team; the remainder did little running over the summer and are getting by mostly on whatever raw talent they possess.


Monday was just a distance run of a little over two miles for the girls and any neophytes on the boys' side, while those that could handle it ran about four and a half. Some ran the entire distance, while others alternated walking and running. Several of the girls have never run before and may have walked more than they ran.

Today we did a light fartlek workout consisting of intervals of one minute controlled hard running followed by one minute of jogging (or walking, for the kids that aren't fit enough to run the entire time) and increasing the hard running by one minute each time until reaching four minutes. We then took a three minute break and did another set, starting at four minutes hard running and working our way back down.

Our two best runners ran within themselves and were able to complete the workout without difficulty. One boy tried to keep up with them but eventually, and to his credit, realized that they are fitter than he is, and backed off. My little speech before the workout about running under control appeared to have sunk in with him.

I had to tell one runner to cut the workout short since he was stopping to catch his breath and/or grab his knee. He refused initially and I explained to him that I wasn't merely making a suggestion and that he needed to end the workout for his own good, considering his asthma and knee. Not to mention, I explained, since I could see he was upset, that this was the second day of practice of a season that is over two months long and that there would be plenty of workouts to finish and, further, I didn't want to start digging him a hole he'd be too fatigued to dig his way out of.

This little speech did fall on deaf ears.

I jogged ahead in preparation for the next interval and as soon as it started, I turned around to see if he would listen, which, of course, he didn't. I jogged back to him and explained again that I meant what I had said and that I didn't want him to finish the workout and that I understood that he was upset but that I was doing it for his benefit.

One the one hand, I appreciated his determination, but on the other, the simple fact is that he apparently didn't run at all this summer and struggling to get into shape being unable to do the workout was the direct consequence of that. If he had that same dedication during the summer, there's no telling how much better he would be.

I think one of the challenges I'm going to have to overcome during this season is that my expectations about how much each kid should care about this sport are probably too high. I need to learn to accept each kid's level of enthusiasm (if any) and engagement and try to let things take their own course. There may be a few of them may not even last until the first meet.


Cross country is not for everyone. The aren't nearly as many spectators at the meets as there are at football and basketball games. At many meets, most of the spectators -- if not all of them -- are parents and maybe a few students who are already at the school for after-school activities such as band or some sort of academic club. These kids seem to be more likely to be friends with kids on the cross country team than, say, members of the football team would be. But even if your mom and dad and couple of kids from band show up to cheer you on, no one else really cares. And, if you do well, you're more likely to be ridiculed than congratulated.

At a school as small as ours, the chances are that the best athletes participate in other sports and that cross country gets the leftovers, the kids who tired of sitting the bench in basketball or football, or kids who have never done anything athletic and use cross country as an opportunity to do so. What you end up with then is a group of kids who end up in cross country not quite by default, but almost, and in large part because of and despite, their lack of athletic ability, which is not how most kids end up in a given sport.

But what you also get, at least most of the time, are kids without unjustified arrogance; kids who make good teammates because they know what it's like to be unsupported and ridiculed and don't intend to be the cause of that feeling in others; and sometimes you get kids who, like myself, suddenly realize that cross country is not just a sport they can participate in and feel good about, but that it can become a way of defining yourself; a way of delivering an emphatic and heartfelt FU to... well, when you're a teenager, nearly everyone: your asshole classmates who think you're weird, your parents for thinking you're normal and unexceptional, even your teammates who want you to succeed, just not as long as you aren't better than them, and even yourself, for whatever it is you hate yourself for when you're high school.

I guess I'd like to instill in just one of these kids the realization becoming a runner is not just fun (although if you get them thinking it's fun, that alone is a victory), but that it can become a serious pursuit in a way that is far, far more than just fun.

The Old Man and the XC Team.

Yesterday I ran with three of the boys that will be on the BGXC team that I'll be assistant-coaching this fall. Two of them are hoping to qualify for states this year and seemed to be in pretty good shape. At least, it seemed that way to me, since I was struggling to keep up with them in the first two miles and was completely dropped during the second half of the run. Fortunately, one of the other runners also needed an easier pace so he and I alternated a few minutes of running with a few minutes of walking on the return trip.

We ran the roughly two miles from BG to the fountains in front of Lakemont park and back. It was incredibly muggy and I was drenched after just two miles. A couple of us dipped our heads into the fountain to cool off, which cooling benefit lasted mere seconds.

Three girls, all of whom are taller than me, also came to run, one of whom is new to running and who has a black belt in some specific form of karate whose name I probably couldn't pronounce even if I could remember it. From what they were saying, there's a possibility that we may end up with enough runners to field a girls' team, which is a boon, since initially it looked like we'd only have two.

They all seemed like nice kids. Even the boys who had been pushing the pace during the first half of the run (I was too far behind to tell how hard they ran on the second half) listened respectfully when I gave an unsolicited lecture on the importance of not running too hard on their easy days. I hope it sinks in, but I won't be surprised if it doesn't; at least not at first. The dynamic involved isn't favorable: the kid who's in better shape now and who has been running twice a day, was the slower runner last season. The kid who probably expected to be coming in as the best runner on the team now finds himself a possible second, but close enough to first that he's going to try to finish every run and every workout with the top guy. It's rarely a good idea to make someone else on your team the standard by which you judge your own runniner. I've been in both of those roles and each is a recipe for burnout.

However, I've been running for fifteen years and these guys have barely been alive much longer than that, so it would be unreasonable of me to expect the sort of maturity, restraint and discipline that I couldn't find in myself for most of my running career; and I was probably more serious about it than either of these guys. But I think that will be part of the fun of doing this: trying to use what knowledge I've gained to help these kids succeed and, maybe, learn to want to take it seriously.

I ran ten miles Sunday, struggling to keep the last three miles under nine minute per mile pace, finishing in just under 1:33 and feeling pretty good compared to last week. What can I say? I've got a long way to go.

Monday, I played basketball for about the same amount of time and managed to injure myself four separate times: a blow to the temple as the result of an opponent's attempt to block one of my acrobatic layups; a cut and bruise on my right thigh from falling on it while trying to execute a spin move to the basket that was probably beyond my capacity for balance while in motion; a cut on my right calf of undetermined origin; and a bruise on my right quad from the knee of a man half a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier whom I abruptly stopped in front of on a fast break. The last prevented me from running for the following two days.

Tonight I ran on the treadmill. It was an awful seven miles with the iPod on shuffle and despute over a thousand songs at my disposal, I couldn't find one I wanted to run to. Once I've listened to a song a couple of times while running, it is somehow exausted for me for that purpose. This leaves me with a bunch of twittery acoustic girl folk which is better suited to hanging out and burning incense in a college dorm room than summoning the will to run in place while staring at a cinder block basement wall for an hour and fifteen minutes. So I end up skipping through dozens of songs before finding one that doesn't immediately remind me of previous unpleasant treadmill runs. Then I play about one minute of that song and skip through several dozen more before searching by artist and playing something by the Killers or some other band with an inflated sense of fist-pumping YEAH! underdog comback spirit, and even that stuff gets old pretty quickly.

I should have an adrenaline pump the way some people have insulin pumps. Before I get on the treadmill I could give it a squeeze and then air drum my way through five miles. Then I would also get an upper-body workout as well.

I ran five times this week, which is a good week given my current pathetic state of unfitness.

Last Sunday's "long" run was an eight mile death march which was the consequence of running only twice the week before, one of those days being a hilly five-miler on Saturday which sapped what little strength my considerably-sized thighs had in them.

I knew from the second mile that it was going to be a bad run, one of those runs where it seems like you can't run slowly enough to get into a comfortable rhythm, but I told myself (as I always tell myself) that I've been through death marches before and that I just needed to suck it up and keep putting one foot in front of the other until it was over.

This time there was a competing, reasonable-sounding voice telling me that perhaps I should just turn around and go home since it was warm, I had clearly lost some fitness by sitting on my butt all week and I was probably going to ruin the first part of the next week by forcing it on that day. Sometimes this is the voice of laziness. Last Sunday it was the voice of reason. I, of course, did not heed it since, for some reason, if I've told myself my long run will be of a certain distance on a given Sunday, then by-god that's what it will be (within a mile or two) lack of fitness and sore quads be damned.

I was strong-armed (or weak-legged) into a compromise of eight miles; my original plan had been to run ten. I paid for my stupidity with dead legs as I plodded through the next couple of days, but I promised myself not to go into next Sunday trying to run more miles on that day than I had in the preceding six days.

Wii gave in.

So my wife bought me a Nintendo Wii as a surprise the other day. I'm sure that the mention of said game system will up the number of hits this blog receives.

Initially, I thought that as far as video game systems go, the Wii could potentially have a positive effect on the overall health of people who would otherwise remain seated while wasting their hours playing video games. While it's true that I occasionally break a sweat while boxing armless competitors, male and female -- Wii don't discriminate -- I believe the cardiovascular benefits are offset by the damage that I am apparently doing to muscles and joints I was heretofore unaware of.

By the end of the night the day I got it, I had a constant pain in my left shoulder which increased when I breathed in. I assumed I had either dislocated my shoulder "playing" baseball, or I was having a heart attack. The following day I woke up with pain in the opposite shoulder which did diminish as the day went on. However, that evening I began to get numbness in my fingertips from trying to "throw" the baseball too hard. I "boxed" for about an hour, nearly elevating my Mii (which bears an uncanny physical resemblance to myself) to pro status by beating a variety of opponents whose bodies resemble large spheres fixed atop a collection of elongated cylinders and which appear to have been designed by a fourth grader. This morning I woke up feeling like a butcher had been quietly trying to separate my lats from my ribcage all night.

It's a sign of the times that you can actually get physically injured while playing video games. I should stick to real exercise. It's safer.

While I haven't stuck to my plan to avoid beer and potato chips, I did run ten fairly hilly miles last Sunday. Because I am going bald I had to coat the top of my head in sun tan lotion. After an hour of running in more or less direct sunlight, I took off my shirt and tied it to my head like a turban just to be on the safe side.

A couple of weeks ago I got a blister on the ball of my left foot while playing basketball. At first I left the skin and its little lake of fluid intact but eventually it got punctured somehow, so I removed the dead skin with toenail clippers. This eliminated the weird feeling I'd get while walking of the dead layer of skin moving around and tugging at where its perimeter attached to the living part of me; however, the skin underneath, red as a screaming baby's face, was not yet ready for full-time duty, so I'd cover it with a big rectangular Band-Aid before work and then change it before my runs. For some reason, probably because I was running in the morning rather than after work, I forgot to put anything on it before my long run. About four miles into the run I started to feel the ball of my foot burning and considered turning around, before asking myself rhetorically, what's the worst that could happen? I'll get another blister? But then I started thinking about what, literally, was the worst that could happen. While your own conclusion might be different, here's what my wandering mind came up with: I could get a staph infection which would go undiagnosed because I would relate its intial symptoms to the blister and, thus, miss a crucial chance to halt the infection. Then it would spread to my bloodstream and migrate to my heart where it would eventually weaken me to the point that I would have to be hospitalized. Unfortunately, I would be in a delirium from the now-widespread infection in my body and would be unable to relate my life-saving explanation for my condition. The doctors would determine the cause of my illness too late, coming in to my room to explain that they had pieced it all together, only to find my EEG displaying a flat green line and emitting that familiar (if only to most of us through TV and movies) high-pitched tone which, for some reason, indicates death so perfectly.

Just to let you know, this didn't happen. The ball of my foot was just a little sore afterward.

My run took me out Brush Mountain road, which cuts through the woods on the side of a mountain with the interstate a couple of hundred yards to my left and the top the mountain about a quarter mile to my right and becomes a dead end after almost exactly two miles. It rises maybe a couple hundred (based upon my rudimentary topographical map reading skills) feet or so over that distance through a series of long grades followed by shorter downhills. Although my paranoia about bears is improving, I still jerk my head in the direction of anything that sounds like an animal moving through the undergrowth even though it almost always turns out to be something small and harmless like a squirrel.

It's a good road to cover on your first long run in a while. Its hills aren't the kind that leave you gasping at the top and then pummel your quads on the way down, but it does contain just enough of those aspects to be useful preparation for the hills that, when you reach their base you have to tilt your head back a few degrees in order to see the top and whose descent can leave you with battered quads miles from home and which can turn an otherwise relaxed run into a death march.

It was also reassuring to be able to finish that run without much struggle given that in a couple of months I intend to three times that distance at the height of summer.

Line in the mud.

As I mentioned in my last post, I plan on running 30 miles on my birthday this year. This feat of pointless challenge will be attempted here.

Shh! Don't tell my body!

I have about fifteen weeks to prepare, which is plenty, or at least that's what I tell myself. Today I'll run eight miles on the treadmill since the weather here is lousy and quickly getting worse, a Nor'easter supposedly bearing down on us at this very moment (although I'm not sure how a storm that has stalked its way toward Central PA from the west qualifies as a Nor'easter, unless that big storm from the west will somehow set one off -- and who cares, really? The overexplanation on local TV of how weather works is a pet peeve of mine. The sportscasters don't explain the rules of basketball when reporting the scores do they?). Next week I'll run ten miles on Sunday. I'll probably increase it by a mile or so every two weeks from there. Even at that rate, when I step out onto the trail on July 26th, thirty miles is going to be a hell of a lot further than I will have run to that point. That doesn't worry me too much though because I once ran twenty-two miles on that same trail on a whim and without feeling like I was anywhere near spent.

In order for this to work, though, I think I'm also going to need to lighten up (which is hopefully a by-product of my soon-to-be-explained method). If I'm going to drag my ass over thirty miles of Rails to Trails pushing a jogging stroller full of water and Gatorade, I'd like that ass to be considerably smaller and lighter than it is now. My method for accomplishing this is quite simple, though not easy: run a lot, don't drink beer, don't eat potato chips. I'm a man of lofty tastes, I know.

With a friend's wedding in June set in an idyllic locale which practically screams "You're on vacation! Have a drink!" and day after day of soul-sucking stress and boredom at work between now and July 26th, getting there without soaking my liver to the point that it needs swimming trunks and a snorkel is going to be more complicated than the act (if not doing something can be called an act) of maintaining my abstinence sounds.

To keep myself motivated, I'm going to keep a running (pun not intended, but I'll leave it) tally of how many days I've gone without consuming the forbidden items and how much wiggily-jiggly I've managed to jettison as a result.

I'm starting out at 175lbs and 0 days of beer-stinence and chip-stinence. Here's hoping the the former goes down and the latter goes up.

Precipes Approached.

As my age creeps ever upward, so does my weight. In July I'll turn thirty for the first time, and if I'm not careful, soon I will weigh 180lbs, which -- if you believe those guys down at the National Institutes of Health -- is in the high end of overweight for a 5'7" male.

Granted, I come from stocky stock, but I once weighed 130lbs at this height. However, after years of adhering to the aphorism "Eat, drink and be merry," particularly the eating and drinking part, I now weigh what a normal 6ft tall male should. Further conceding that I have the legs of an NFL running back (albeit white, slow ones) and a broad back on which I grow vast fields of harvestable hair that would make Yoakim Noah jealous, I still need to shed a few pounds.

Last year, when I started this blog, it was with the hope that it would motivate me to lose weight so that I could run quickly at a 15k in my hometown this year. Now I don't really care about being fast; I just want to be in good enough shape that I'm always ready to step out the door and run as far as I like -- be it 10 miles or 20 -- without a problem. I also plan on running 30 miles on my thirtieth birthday and a marathon this fall and I have a hunch that would be easier to do if I was carrying around twenty or thirty pounds less adipose baggage.

You'd think that I'd have learned that you can't rely on a blog to motivate you to do anything; not even update said blog.