All about limitations

Today's run was just to the left of crappy in my humble opinion.  Nothing seemed to be going right almost from the get go.  The plan was to extend things a bit and run a 13.5 miler in what was hopefully going to be tolerable heat.  As it turns out, my camelback esplodid (sic) about .25 miles into the day's activities and mentally at least, set me off with less than optimal morale.

And as is often the case, the ship of expectations had a rather violent confrontation with the rocks of reality when my unmotivated ass met the pernicious heat of Virginia in July.  Er, ouch.  It was like hot and stuff out there.  At eight o'clock it was closing in on miserable and frankly, it was all I could do to finish.  I developed a very solid respect for the Badwater participants who would have likely considered today to be a bit of a joke.  To make matters worse, my wife recognized the brutality of it and started to worry.  From now on she will wake up to a map and estimated time of return; unfortunately I scared her a bit today which wasn't cool.

So, to summarize, 13.5 miles in 2hrs and 10 minutes during a 100 degree heat index.  It sure felt like crap.  Not sure how that looks on paper.

By Marcus with 3 comments

And suddenly there was blood and I saw stars

It's been an interesting last few days to say the least.

I feel as though I've crossed a couple of major thresholds on a couple of different fronts.

On Sunday I ventured into uncharted waters with a 12.5 mile run.  Overall I felt great, despite the fact that the plan called for a 10 miler until a wrong turn added 25 percent to that.  Whoops.  It was a great confidence boost however as I was fairly confident that with a couple more gel packs and some water I might be able to comfortably knock out 5 or 6 more.  Monday's rest day was really the first time that I have felt any kind of real soreness that I had to pay attention to.  The other issue was the hot spot that I developed on my left toe; I'm pretty sure this is a result of my feet spreading due to all of the minimal running I've been doing.  The feet feel great in general, but they are definitely getting larger and fit much more snugly inside my flats.  I ended up with a good size blister that has needed some TLC ever since.

Today I went for a 6 mile Frappe run (defined as a pace I could do while sipping one) which I admittedly applied a healthy dose of over-exuberance to.  The result was this gore-fest :)

I suppose the good news was that I actually thought I had stepped in something when I finally looked down at the end of the run.  I really never even noticed the slight pain.  Sure does look cool though.  Rah.  I also got my new Nike XC Streak flats in the mail today (see left) and I'm jazzed to take these out for a spin.  Almost no padding or heal rise here.  Marshmallow shoes make my knees hurt.

The other milestone has been the progress in my Urdu class.  I absolutely love being able to read the Arabic script and focus on learning a language for the majority of my day.  I think the average person would be shocked at how much they can learn if that is all they have to focus on; I feel exceptionally lucky to be able to do just that.  I'm even more excited to be able to watch actual Bollywood movies in Hindi without subtitles.  I know it's geeky but it is what it is.  I make no apologies.

My teacher, Meneza, felt as though we needed a little extra encouragement to get out of "nursery school" and into Kindergarten, so she made us write our names on a piece of paper, and then started adding stars for effort. 

All of my instructors are awesome and really committed to our success.  No training to time standards here and big boy rules apply.  It's awesome.  To say nothing of the brand new laptop and Ipod Touch I was issued.  ISSUED I say.

By Marcus with No comments

Learning a new language etc

The last week has been a bit crazy to say the least.  On Monday I started learning Urdu here in Washington D.C.; basically because I just wanted to and secondarily because it will very likely come in handy in a variety of ways during the next few years of my career.  I knew that merging my new "job" of learning a language and my marathon goal was going to be a challenge and the reality definitely lived up to that reputation.  Urdu is not officially kicking my butt yet, but the combo of getting up early, running, commuting, homework and various household duties certainly took some mental adjusting on my part.

The fun part is being able to pronounce words that had previously appeared to be squiggles.

Great feeling.

As for my runs, they are coming along nicely as well.  Times are coming down slowly but surely and my heart rate has been slowly sinking.

Before I head off to class again, I just wanted to recognize and thank those individuals that I have not actually met nor have connection to, but have donated money to the Fisher House anyway.  This is an amazing leap of faith and I am so appreciative.

Shakria and Khuda Hafiz!

By Marcus with 6 comments

The Dawgs are fine but the Dog was smoked

Friday marked the last official day of leave for me; the easy going days of being able to eat right, run when I want and chilling in the pool during the afternoons are going the way of the Dodo bird come Monday, and yes I understand there are little tiny violins playing everywhere right now.  It was fun while it lasted.


I'm quite sure that the challenge meter is going to effectively peg here in the next several weeks.  I'm very likely to have one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" moments very soon after I "discover" that trying to learn an entirely new alphabet/language and train for a marathon simultaneously (while trying to remain sane) is, you know, like hard and stuff.  For those that know me though, this type of behavior is largely status quo.  I have a tendency to get immersed (read: obsessed) in the hobbies that strike my interest.  Some stay for the long haul (golf, poker) and some silently fade away (hockey, bowhunting, shotgunning).  I don't know why that is, but I kind of like my hyper-focused hobbying.  After a few weeks, I feel like I really know something about my current interest.  I'm also pretty sure my wife wishes that she didn't know half as much about things like building poker tables.  Turnabout is fair play though I suppose; after all, I've been to the Longaberger Homestead.

In any event, I managed to get 32.5 miles underneath me this week wearing not-a-whole-helluva-lot on my feet.  For five of the six days I was wearing my trusty Zoom Waffle's:

Not much to these, to be sure, but they get the job done and I never really feel like I need much more support given how I'm running now.  I can however feel a touch of tendinitis around my right ankle so I'm considering giving these a shot:

Now listen, I can hear what you're saying already so chill.  

"All this talk about barefoot running and running minimally and you want to go buy yourself a pair of marshmallow shoes again."

It's not really like that.

The Kinvara, though it looks like a regular running shoe, actually only has about 4 mm of "rise" in the heel, meaning that the base of your heel only sits about 4 mm in elevation above your forefoot.  That's pretty darn good (although many folks are now "zero dropping" their shoes by hand or cobbler such that they are dead flat) for a stock shoe.

My intent here is to get a shoe in the rotation that will give me a chance to get some long runs in without destroying my legs or feet when my form goes to crap.  Essentially, running with less on your feet means that you really need to make a conscious effort to run correctly; plant your feet correctly, pull up rather than push off, etc.  When you get tired, your form naturally takes a long walk off a short pier and if you aren't careful, you can do quite a bit of damage.  My long run last Sunday of 9.2 miles showed me that my focus really takes a nose dive past the 7th mile.  I'm fairly confident that I can get that concentration where it needs to be in time, but during that process I need to push my legs a bit.  I need a little more room for error than my Nike's can give me right now.  There are a few other technical concerns I have with the shoe, but that's going to make this entry look even more like an article in Consumer Reports so I'll just move on.

Today I took this:

On a run with these:

Anyone care to guess the price of this Showcase Showdown?

Well the dog was free (at least ostensibly, until you start counting flip flops eaten, etc).

And the shoes were a whopping six bucks at Wal-Mart.

Sweet.  Three mile recovery run here I come.

I have to say, they give the Vibrams some stiff competition.  There really isn't much to these shoes and that's pretty much the point. I'm telling you, once you square away your form, you can truck around in pretty much anything.  Had Jeff (the aforementioned flip flop devourer) not been absolutely sand bagging it due to the humidity I could have easily knocked out a 8 min/mile pace despite the route being rolling hills.  If there was a drawback, it was that they kept rubbing my achilles.  Not to the point that it was blistering, but more like the feeling of a blade of grass tickling the back of your leg.

Overall, they got the job done and they'll stay in the rotation for these Saturday recovery runs.

Not sure if Jeff will hang quite as tough :-)

By Marcus with 1 comment

Esplodin' the Mercury

In hindsight, I should have given some warning about the light blogging that might be occurring over the weekend.  It started with the girls and I making a five hour round trip to NC to drop off our oldest for some beach fun with her friend and didn't end until we had landscaped, gotten in some pool time, exploded some fireworks and made one of these:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a proper low-country boil.  It was absolutely delicious and a total spur of the moment decision on our part.  We were planning on having no visitors and what, at least initially, looked like waaaaaay too much food.  I wish I had a picture of the post-meal carnage but suffice it to say, we killed it.  A four person family with two elementary school kids, we put away enough chow for 6 people.  It was AWESOME.  The perfect meal to have the night before a long run on Sunday.  Hat tip to wifey for hatching the idea at the pool.

What wasn't awesome was the heat.  The news is not kidding around.  It's freaking hot.  The only thing worse than the heat is watching the douchey Fox and Friends hosts try and talk about the heat.  (Actually, listening to them talk about anything is pretty painful to be perfectly honest.)  As much as I HATE getting up early, it's really the only option for running right now.  And no time like the present, as I will begin my language classes next week; it's about time I get back to something approximating a working man's schedule.

And so, I dragged myself out of bed on Sunday morning around 6 am to try and knock out the long run of the week.  9 miles was on the calendar and I was feeling pretty good.  I felt strong too despite all of the hills around here.  As much as I wanted to push it, I stayed as close to a 10 min/mile pace as I could.  From the research/conversations I've had so far, it's seems fairly critical to not only get the long runs in, but to do them at such a pace that teaches your body to burn a little fat while it's running.  This in an effort to keep from doing this:

It seems crazy, but this is what happens when your body just simply runs out of energy.  There is nothing left.  No amount of will power, prayer or wishful thinking is going to get your body to burn calories that aren't there.  It's a fairly painful thing to watch as you know that this guy is only 200M from the finish line; he can SEE IT and can't get his legs to move.  That's powerful and scary stuff.  Plenty enough motivation to make me drag my sorry ass out of bed on a Sunday morning. They are the famous last words of every would-be marathoner out there (of which I am one) "I will not bonk".  I don't think I can yet work up the courage to utter those words exactly, but I can say that I'm damn sure going to do everything I can to prevent it.


But I digress.  The run felt pretty good, I hit the 10 min/mile mark right on the nose (chosen as it's about two minutes per mile slower than I hope to run; hope being the operative word) and it wasn't until mile 8 that my body started to ask for calories.  And by ask I mean to say that my stomach growled so fiercely that I could actually FEEL it over the din of my headphones.  So note to self, probably need to start banging some calories into my system around mile 6.  Overall though, I was stoked that I could feel a few more gears behind the pace I was holding onto.  Less is more at this point.  Or so says the book/experts/blogosphere/wiki's/coloring books that I'm using as reference materials.


In other news, my buddy Michael is giving barefoot running a try on his home beach in Santa Monica.  He's had some Plantar issues in the past and I've convinced him that giving BFR a try might go a long ways to reducing that pain.  So far so good from what I've been told.  I'm horribly jealous that he 1) doesn't have to deal with this heat and B) gets to run on the beach barefoot. *Shakes fist in the air*


The other esplosion (sic, for you smart asses out there) has been the mercury on my little donation meter.  We crushed the 1k mark.  Wow.  Friends and family your generosity has astounded me once again.  I sound like a broken record but, it is what it is; thank you again.  We'll keep upping the goal and see how many more donation meters we can break.  


And finally, my wife is becoming quite the expert with her iphone.  Too bad she doesn't have better material to work with.  While holding a beer no less.  And yeah, it's a Miller Lite.  And yeah, it's Star Trek the Animated Series.  I make no apologies.

By Marcus with 2 comments