Doubt ...

Races coming up.  Spartan Race in a week, Pisgah in 6 weeks.  I'm starting to worry.

Intellectually, I know I need to race periodically, and some of them are great fun.  Checking out new trails, good vibes.  I particularly enjoy team races.  Been a long time, tho.  Next summer I'm hoping there will be somebody out there healthy enough to help me meet a few of my goals.  I need another Death Race, or Trans-Rockies, or Rim to Rim, or whatever.  

But the Spartan Race?  Do I really want to jump over fire and climb greased walls?  Right now, it seems particularly far from what's been great about my return to the trails and mountains.  Being out there with Jax, the mist drifting through the trees, wind whipping across the ridges ... not the exact opposite of the Spartan Race, but not that far from it.  But Rick is coming, and I strongly suspect there will be the opportunity to sample a local brew or two.  I'll berate him about being slow and fat, knowing full well he could whup my ass like a scared little girl.  There is an upside to most everything, no?  I suspect as long as the Spartan remains jovial, I'll enjoy it.  As soon as the guys with the crested helmets and capes start taking themselves too seriously, I'll stop having fun.  Oooh rah.  Really?  Really?

Some of the goofiness of Spartan reminds me of the Living History Farms Race, outside of Des Moines, Iowa.  Held sometime around Thanksgiving every year.  Best.  Race.  Ever.  I've seen women run it in tuxedos, men run it in dresses, and a barefoot dude in a loincloth.  On Thanksgiving.  With bits of snow around.  Nutty.  Even saw a Chinese Dragon run it once.  Ever seen a Chinese Dragon come flying over an embankment to drop 3 feet into a frigid stream?  Now that's a good time.  So here's to hoping that Spartan will emulate Living History.  And I need to go back to Living History Farms.  Seriously.

Then there's Pisgah.  It's been over 7 years since I completed anything of this length.  I'm not getting ready fast enough.  This race seemed like a good idea a couple of months ago.  But my long runs are around 16 miles at the moment ... Pisgah will double that.  Double my long runs?  WTF?  Will I bonk 2/3 of the way through and get a DNF?  To be honest, 31 miles at the moment seems ridiculous.  I finished 14.5 the other day and was wrecked.  Granted, it was a lot of rocks and elevation change, but still ... doesn't seem on the same level as Pisgah.  Did I really used to be able to peel of 20 miles in the morning and then go to work?  When did I wake up and start seeing a fat, lazy, ass in the mirror?  Can I get back the glory days?  Statistically speaking, I should be able to get back to it and hold on for another 3 decades.  Crazy.  August is going to be interesting, no doubt.

I overslept this morning.  6:20 am my wife rolls over and pokes me ... "Aren't you supposed to run at 7?"  Ugh.  Not a great way to start the morning.  It went well regardless, once the scramble to get out the door was settled.  I suspect Jax was a bit confused, but as per usual, he took everything in stride and with a grin.  God I love that dog.  And I'm karmically sorry for abusing Katie's friend Steph.  I wonder if my face mirrors pain like that after a rough day on the trails?  Is she cursing the day I was born this very minute?

The Chia and Pinole are working.  Who knew?  No appreciable drops in my blood sugar today.  This is a big deal when contemplating a 31 mile race.  Better for me and much cheaper than GU to boot.  When did we stop paying attention to our ancestors?  When did we decide that we need to process the ever loving shit out of what used to be food and ship it 8000 miles to be consumed long after anything remotely natural has rotted?  When did we decide that we could improve hundreds of thousands of years of foot evolution with a piece of foam or two?  I drive down the street and see the 400 lb guy squeezed into his motorized wheelchair as it strains mightily to get him to where he's going.  Can gears and wires cry?  He's got ketchup stains on his shirt.  Tomorrow at work, he'll come in and ask me to give him a pill for his back pain.  Sure!  No problem!  Here's a little round tablet that will negate your lifetime of self abuse and neglect and make you forget the fact that your culture has failed you!  And here's another one that will encourage you to continue to avoid taking any responsibility for yourself whatsoever!  *sigh*

So I'll stick to the 400 year old cornmeal mix that might just be a great trick to get me through Pisgah.  And the Chia seed.  It worked today.  Today's trail was rough and muddy, but it was a good temp, not too hot.  I still felt good at the close.  Minus a tiny little ache on the dorsum of both feet.  This was worrisome.  Don't know what to say about that, as it lingers through the day.  The articles on metatarsal stress fractures drift through my thoughts.  Hate to say it, but it may be time to mix regular shoes back into my schedule.  Can't say that I'm excited about the concept, but I'm far less excited about the idea of a walking cast.  I'll keep an eye on this.  I need to remember to listen to my body.  It knows better than my head what's good for me ....

Infidelity

This week I cheated on my dog.

It's strange.  I went running without him.  Had good reasons ... it was in the 90's and he just can't tolerate that.  Not that he understands.  I've often joked that if you could hear Jax's thoughts, it would be white noise.  But he damned well knew I was going running.  It's the gear.  He recognizes running gear and starts to get fired up when it comes out.  So he was doing his typical running around the house, spinning in place, freaking out .... we're going running, we're going running, we're going running!

And then I stepped out without him.  I could see him through the glass.  He looked like I'd just kicked him square in the nuts.  Tail down and this faint look of confusion and betrayal.  I could hear his thoughts quite clearly that afternoon ... "Don't you love me anymore?"  (My wife tells me he spent the rest of the day in the bathroom sitting alone in the dark.)  So yeah ... I cheated on my dog.

I felt horrible.  As far as Jax was concerned, my going running and not taking him was the height of betrayal.  Frankly, I don't want to run without him.  This particular jaunt was with Tom Guggina, and old friend and running buddy.  I drove down to Pisgah State Park in NH and met him there.  Tom and I used to run together in residency, but then I had the poor sense to move 1000 miles away.  Returning to the North East running with Tom is something of a homecoming, then.  A big part of who I am developed out here.  I miss those days, and to some degree, I expect that I'm trying to recapture them.  I had about half a dozen friends that I could call and hit the trails with.  My running is something of a spiritual thing for me, but that doesn't mean that it's better when I'm alone.  Quite often it's not.  Many things in life are better when shared.  I think it's the same for cruising over the ridge-lines in the early morning light.  Experience somehow holds more meaning when there's another soul sharing.  Not surprisingly, Jax fills that void for me these days.  Jax doesn't hold me to a schedule, though ... which is not a great thing.  So I need people, too.

So Jax and I made it out yesterday morning.  It was a bit of a spontaneous break-out.  Temps here have been in the 90's for nearly a week.  Runnable, but not conducive to any real distance and often a good deal less enjoyable.  I had worked the overnight and when I stepped out in the morning it was under 70.  So off we went.  As the day wore on over our 15 miles, it got hot, and the terrain was pretty rough.  Now both Jax and I are limping.  I'm certain that he's much happier for having gone, but I think it may have torn up his feet.  So I worry and doubt and fret for him and myself, as is the nature of an unoccupied mind I suppose ... but that is a topic for another day.    

Brutal ...

So today's little escapade involved 16 miles on the AT.  It's time to be hitting the bigger mileage if I'm gonna be ready for this 50k in September, but this was an inauspicious start.  

I slept late.  I'm not good at getting up "early".  Never have been.  Early for me is anything before 10 a.m.  It's not that I don't like mornings, I just hate the process of becoming awake to enjoy them.  And I stay up too late.  Truthfully, some of the best trail runs are right around dawn.  The air is (usually) crisp, the light is amazing, and the terrain takes on a whole new feel.  Fog banks pop up here and there, giving the mountains a very serene, old, and distant vibe.  It's awesome.  Too bad that I suck at getting out of bed.  *sigh*  On the upside, Katie Lyford has joined me for a couple of runs and we've scheduled them early. When I have somebody waiting for me, I can get out of bed.  So this is good.  We run slower as well, also good.  Training is always better with variety.  Going full speed on every run is a good way to burn out, at least for me.  There are freaks of nature out there ... ahem ... *Rick Kraics* ... to whom this maxim probably does not apply.  I don't mind.  I'm slow anyways.  Honestly, I have relatively little desire to be fast.  I enjoy being out there and covering the distance.  And then I figure if you've collapsed on the trail as I run by, it doesn't much matter if you had an early lead on me.  At present, Rick can blow me away on distance as well, but I've got time ...

So today's run, not surprisingly, did not begin until the afternoon.  Could've been earlier, but I repeat myself when pointing out that I'm a bit lazy in the a.m.  It was in the low 80's, per weather.com.  Didn't seem as humid as when Katie and I went out earlier in the week.  That day was HOT and nasty, even affecting Jax quite a bit.  But for whatever reason, I ran well anyways.  Not so much today.  From the start I felt sluggish.  I hadn't planned on running up the bigger hills, given my planned distance, but today I couldn't have even if I'd wanted to.  I'm not entirely sure what the problem was.  It had been a couple days since my last run, and that one had been quite short, so I really shouldn't have been fatigued.  Got 8-9 hours of sleep, so that was fine.  I do know that I should have been out there earlier, when it was cooler.  I'm also thinking I was probably not hydrated well enough from the get-go, and probably ate the wrong things.  I'd had a couple of hard-boiled eggs, some walnuts, and some blue chips with hummus.  I felt a bit bloated.  Perhaps I needed more time between eating and the run.  Perhaps something lighter.  I'll fiddle with it as time goes on.  Incidentally, I ordered Chia seeds.  Yes, Chia pet seeds.  The Tarahumara eat them when they run.  If this works, I may look into their diet a bit more closely, although I'm planning on drawing the line on BBQ'ed mice.  Not that I find the concept that bothersome, actually.  Just pointless.  Mice?  Really?  Really?  As in the tiny little hairy gray f@ckers?  I don't get it.  Not even with a good steak sauce.  Then again, I don't live in an incredibly remote canyon in Mexico with virtually zero modern amenities.  Very interested in trying the Chia out, however.  Apparently nature's Gu.  Slow release carbs and hydration.  I'll be stoked if it works, given that they're non-processed, no preservatives, and that they're gonna be roughly 1% the cost of Gu.  I need to see if there have been any scientific studies done on them.  More on that in a future post.

Between the heat and feeling crappy, I was cooked from the word go.  I'm not sure whether it would have been a good idea to cut it short, or keep going, as I did.  I finished, although at a walk and in a hell of a lot of pain.  I don't really mind that tho.  I expect that the roughest runs are the ones that result in the most growth, both mentally and physically.  So maybe my suffering today will pay off bigger.  I don't know.  I need to drop somewhere between 15-20 lbs.  I'm not really worried about what I look like, but I know for sure I would run a lot better without the extra baggage.  Takes a lot of energy to haul around a spare tire.  When not running or paying attention to my diet, I hover around 210 lbs.  When I was in residency, I was under 190.  I would like to get back there again.  Less weight = faster and easier, no?

Today's jaunt was not helped by the fact that I severely underestimated the vertical.  Didn't have an altimeter, but I'm quite certain I did over 6k between all the ups & downs.  The 20 mile route that Chad LeBlanc and I used to do in residency probably had less than 1000 feet of elevation change.  BIG difference.  I'm not afraid of the elevation, especially as it'll leave me stronger on the back end, but obviously I need to train differently.  Ultimately, feeling crummy + heat + underestimated route = ran out of water at mile 11.  Good times.  At that point in time I finished my last Gu figuring that when my mouth got dry enough I wouldn't be able to choke them down anyways.  The last 5 miles were mostly downhill, but it was still pretty rough.  My proverbial goose was already slow roasted.  By mile 14-15, I had bonked pretty hard and was reduced to mostly walking.  It sucked, but at the same time was pretty awesome.  I know, I know, I'm a spaz.  If not, I wouldn't have spent an hour on the phone last night trying to convince Mike Barthman to take up barefoot running and read the book "Born to Run."  Brings me back to two of my favorite quotes.  1- "You owe it to yourself to live outside the box and suffer a little bit." -Charlie Engle, and 2- "It doesn't have to be fun to be fun." -Mark Twight.  At what point in time in my life did I decide that being in a lot of pain is awesome?

  When we got to the parking lot, I walked down to the trout stream and sat in it to ice my legs.  Jax was confused.  My thighs and calves felt vaguely like they'd been beaten with a rubber hose and my hammies would start cramping if I wasn't very careful about how much I flexed my knees.  Fortunately, there were two 20 oz diet cokes in the truck, both of which I promptly sucked down.  It's now 8 hours later and I'm guessing I've put down 2 liters of fluid since, but I'm still not peeing clear.  On the upside, I'm fairly certain I don't have rhabdomyolysis, my legs feel better, and my joints never bothered much.  I'll credit the minimalist shoes to that one.  The quick recovery may be the Udo's oil.  Stuff tastes like oily grass clippings, but if I can feel fine this fast, totally worth it.  Bottoms of the feet were beat up, but this wasn't unexpected.  I figure this will improve with time.  Even if not, it's a small price to pay for hips, knees, and ankles that don't hurt.

During my little dance with pain and suffering, Jax was entirely non-plussed.  Mile 15 and he was still chasing squirrels as if we had just started.  Bastard.  He did manage to freak a herd of cows.   We had to cut thru them to get back to the parking lot.  It was rather amusing.  They were clearly intrigued by him and followed him around, but they would get alarmed when he would move quickly, which he sort of tends to do.  So a curious bovine would edge close to him, run away, edge close, run away, etc., etc.  Multiply by a herd of maybe 20-30.  I was actually briefly concerned about being trampled by 2000 lb. cows running away from my 25 lb. dog.  Ironic, no?  But all in all, I'm still quite glad that nobody has told Jax he's not supposed to be able to run like this.  Not sure what I'll do when he figures it out.  Cry, maybe.  Next week I get to introduce him to Tom, and maybe Bear.  Bring on the next adventure!

Dye Mon, Gen Mon.

Beyond mountains, more mountains.  An old Haitian proverb that holds very true on Hispaniola.  Not a terribly big island but it seems to stretch on forever when you're there.  Obviously a product of the poor roads (and sometimes a complete lack of roads), but I imagine that the feeling is much closer to what it might have been like before the "modern" world.

Trail running in Haiti seems closer to what running should be like.  Granted, it's rough ... very, very rough.  But there's a pretty intense beauty to it as well.  And isn't the rugged nature of things the way the most natural, the most serene yet exciting at the same time?  What do we hate the most?  Treadmills.  They suck the joy out of running like the vacuum of space.  They disconnect you just about as much as possible.  Haitian trails are probably just about as far from treadmills as you can get, so I'm going with the theory that this is a good thing.  If you can let yourself go ... get past the heat & humidity ... start to enjoy the mountains, it's the best thing ever.

Last Saturday I went out by myself.  Did a bit of exploring and expanded my retinue and, per usual, wondered why I hadn't done so before.  I ran along a ridgeline with the most incredible trail .... popped out into some jaw dropping terrain.  Dancing along the rocks and gullies.  Views that force a person to pause & consider.  Made me think that this is the spot I might like to propose to my wife ... that is, if we weren't already married.

And then, the people.  Haitian trails have a tendency to run smack-dab into somebody's porch.  Creates the need to do a lot of end-arounds and back-tracks.  But there's the happy coincidence of running into people, sometimes almost literally.  These are folk that are tucked into the side of a mountain, their homes obscured by a few palms and some brush ... you'd never know they were there.  Suddenly you're cruising past the woman in her 80's vigorously scrubbing her wardrobe into the eye-popping white that only Haitians seem to be able to pull off.  Her gaggle of grandchildren scatter like chickens, screaming with laughter.  It's hard to imagine what they must think of this big, sweaty white guy come crashing around the corner, out here in nowhere, roadless Haiti.  The magic comes when you smile.  A quick greeting in my atrocious Creole produces giant smiles, waves, and a flood of conversation .... none of which I understand.  I've been going to Haiti now for a long enough time that it's embarrassing how bad my Creole is.  This needs to change.  What stories these folk must have to tell.  What they must be thinking ...

I got out three times this week.  Not enough really.  I miss the kids.  When I was out, I found myself wishing that Jax could've been there.  I can't imagine how much fun he might've had dashing around with these kids.  The screams of laughter, the waving farmers working their fields, and the ensuing parade as the little boys and girls took up the run.  One afternoon 3 little ones ran with us for most of the route.  Two of them had no shoes.  They ran giggling and with abandon, crashing down the slopes without care or consideration for safety.  They ran as if it were completely effortless, like smoke.  I actually broke into a sprint at one point in an attempt to catch a particularly quick boy.  I couldn't.  This boy with no shoes ... I hope that I can find and run with him again.