Boston - part IV (post-race)

I found Shawn stretching just past the finish line, so I grabbed him and we shuffled with the other cattle toward the finisher’s medals and food and whatnot.  This was easily the most unpleasant part of the race for me.  As I felt increasingly crammed in, I became increasingly irritated, to the point where I stepped out of the line to just breathe and not be around people for a minute (most heartfelt apologies to Shawn for the crankiness).

We shuffled slowly past the medal people, the space blanket people, the random nasty Gatorade recovery drink people, the bagel people, and into the throng of stinky runners trying to get their drop bags off the buses.  This took approximately 16 hours as far as I can tell.  Luckily, it was not a problem because the Harris family was also having trouble getting to the designated meeting spot due to ALL THE FRICKING PEOPLE AROUND!  When we finally did reunite, we determined it probably just made the most sense for Ronnie and I to just take the T directly to the airport and enjoy the ‘ho bath’ facilities in the terminal.  So we walked to a T station that looked slightly less crowded and parted ways with Shawn and Mina, setting our course toward a reunion of other members of the Durm crew.  I pity the other people on the flight, as there were at least 20 of us who had run that day, and I’m pretty sure a good number of us had not showered after the fact.

A couple of weeks after the race, the official pictures were posted and our official finisher’s certificates arrived.  I was super amused to discover that, despite running together for 19 miles, there are NO pictures of Shawn and I together.  Shawn also astutely noted that he finished in the bottom 40-50% of finishers overall, for his age group, and for his gender.  I checked my certificate and discovered I had done pretty much the same, and immediately pronounced us the bottom of the cream of the crop.  …which, I guess, isn’t that bad when you think about it…

And so ends my Boston experience.  It was kinda fun, but probably not worth the hassle.  Shout outs to Jason, though, for being the first NC finisher, and Ken, for probably getting more black toenails than anyone else on the course.  …and to the other Karen running near me for a good 5 miles – your fans became my fans, which was kinda fun J

Boston - part III (THE race)

The start was pretty uneventful – Shawn came back to my corral, and we started with a girl wearing a Grinnell shirt – I swear I am to be haunted by that stupid school forever…  We staunchly refused to run until we hit the starting line, so Shawn and I power walked up the hill to the start, discussing our pacing strategy (he wanted negative splits, I wanted something in the 8:20-8:40 range… these were likely to be mutually exclusive goals).   And then we were off!

The first several miles of the race were pretty uneventful: my pacing strategy won out, but we were running pretty comfortably and I was enjoying the sights of all the little MA towns.  One very sad note, though, is I ended up ditching my pink lost and found shirt about 2 miles in.  I thought about tying it around my waist, but determined that would be really annoying for 24 miles, and reasoned that it was a found shirt anyway, so this would just be a continuation of the circle of life.  That being said, I miss that shirt.  A lot.  It was a great shirt.

Around mile 7 we saw Shawn’s family for the first time.  Shawn was so excited, he literally shoved me out of the way to go high-five them.  Yes, that’s right – I’m putting that out there in public.  Luckily, I wasn’t injured and was able to also nab a few high fives in the process.  I also high-fived about 800 little kids over the course of the race because a) it was kinda fun, and b) it distracted me from the fact that the course has approximately no turns.  Shawn distracted himself by running wildly back and forth across the road looking for soft surfaces to run on (“Do you think it’s okay to run behind all the spectators if there’s a worn path in the grass?” “Um. Maybe? ..but it seems kinda weird”)

Around mile 9 some guy stepped up to the curb and yelled “Who wants a Fig Newton?”  I realized at that moment that I ABSOLUTELY wanted a Fig Newton.  In fact, there was nothing I wanted more than a Fig Newton.  …except maybe for that licorice that kid is handing out over there…  So I grabbed both and trotted along with my Fig Newton and my licorice, wishing there was a race photographer to document how seriously I was taking this endeavor.

Somewhere in the 11-ish range, we came upon Leigh Ann, who was recovering from an injury earlier in the spring.  We picked her up and headed toward the shrieking up ahead.  What they say is true: it is absolutely the most amazing noise, and you will probably never hear something like it again.  Running through the aisle formed by girls holding signs saying “Kiss me, I’m xxxx”, was truly awesome.  We ran along high-fiving the girls as upper-middle-aged men dodged in to grab kisses and then back out looking immensely pleased with themselves.  It occurred to me at that point, that based on qualifying times, we were running mostly with upper-middle-aged men and young women, which was an interesting combination as we faced this section of the race.  Suddenly, I spotted a girl holding a sign saying “Kiss me, I’m from Boulder, CO!”  “That’s my girl!” I thought, so I dodged over, planted a kiss on her cheek, and dodged back out feeling immensely pleased with myself.

The stretch between Wellesley and Newton was pretty uneventful.  Leigh Ann dropped back and I think we got to turn somewhere (or maybe the road just bent?), but otherwise, we mostly just chugged along, making our way to the hills.  In all honesty, the hills really aren’t that big, but as noted many times before, they do come at a time that just makes them kind of a pain in the ass.  Also, I really feel like the first hill was worse than the famed Heartbreak hill, but maybe that’s just me, and maybe it’s because I wasn’t expecting that first one.  …and maybe it’s because I stopped to refill my water bottle in the middle and sent Shawn ahead, so I was a) a little bit rested, and b) probably a little bit of a slacker.  Regardless, I made it through the hills without incident, though I did walk the water bottle aid station not so much because I was tired, but more because I was sick of running with the exact same stride in the exact same direction.  Walking was a nice change of pace (HA!  Get it???   pace???).  The back side of Heartbreak was amusing, as apparently nobody told half the pack that the finish was not at mile 22.  People literally went sprinting by me down the hill.   I suppose its possible that they had all saved up for a 5-mile kick, but the carnage I saw walking/sitting/stretching by the side of the road miles 23-26 leads me to believe this was not the case.  I hit mile 23 and thought “Gosh – if you had run here as fast as you did at Des Moines, you would be almost done.”  Stupid slacking.  Though, to be fair, I don’t know that I was really in the same shape as I had been in October – like I said previously, the mileage was there, but the speed was lacking.

So I motored into Boston, noting the guy in the singlet who was already on the train BACK OUT OF TOWN, and consoling myself by noting that he had probably been in the first wave, which had a 20 minute head start on me (yeah – THAT’S the reason…).

The finish was uneventful – I caught the girl I had decided in Newton shouldn’t beat me, so that was good, and I cruised in 5 min under my arbitrarily set goal time of 4 hrs, so I felt reasonably good about the affair.  Then clusterf*ck #2.

Boston - part II (pre-race)

Okay, so now that I’m on a plane heading for the next adventure, I will finally address Boston.  It’s been on my mind lately because last weekend I had the chance to see a whole bunch of people that I may not have run across in the last month, so the question “How was Boston?” came up several times.  My answer varied in the specifics, but the gist was always the same: it was fine – I’m glad I did it, I think I generally had fun, but I can’t say that I have any burning desire to go back and do it again.  I mean, if a bunch of people were going and wanted to spend a couple days in Boston, I could probably be talked into it, but I won’t be leading that brigade.

In my esteemed opinion, Boston can best be described as two clusterf*cks with a  longass straight run in the middle.  There are no points in the whole ordeal, aside from maybe the expo, that are designed to handle 27,000 people.  None.  This is not to say that the folks running the show don’t do a good job with what they have, but they can only do so much with tiny New England towns and a downtown area that was constructed before the era of big cars (read: the finish area is bounded on all sides by tiny narrow roads).

As noted previously, we escaped much of clusterf*ck A by staying with Shawn’s amazingly generous brother and sister-in-law, who got up and drove us to Hopkington so we could avoid the pre-dawn bus ride from the city and the 3-hour wait in the field/parking lot up the hill from the start. I was particularly pleased with my ensemble: brooks hat, original green horsefly umstead shirt, pink long-sleeved zippy lost and found shirt, black half tights, and awesome rainbow leg warmers created by cutting the feet off awesome rainbow socks from Target.  …and a garbage bag…because it was really windy and we had to part with our warmups quite a while before the race actually started.

Shawn and I located our drop bag buses and made our way down to the start area, hoping to get in a quick pee before taking off.  Predictably, we were not the only ones to have this grand idea, so the portajohn lines were suuuppper long.  Luckily, there was an open lot next to the portajohns, and even more luckily, the masses had organized themselves into a ‘his’ section to the right, and a ‘hers’ section toward the left, so we did our bidness and met back up at the street.  Unfortunately, as I was making my way back to the road, I ran across someone who had missed the his vs. hers memo and a got an eyeful of the ‘shaking out’ part of the procedure.  So now I have that in my arsenal of experiences.

Boston interlude

I'll finish my Boston writeup some time when I'm not supposed to be grading papers... I promise.  I, however, wanted to note to the world that I picked up my wedding dress today.  It's lovely.  It's white...with a hint of blue...  Who's my designer, you ask?  Nike.  Really.  I'm actually quite angry with Nike right now over their crap customer service policy re: items purchased at a race expo that turn out to have semi-major flaws, but alas, they had the *perfect* dress, and as we all know, when a girl finds her perfect dress in a catalog, the only proper thing to do is order it, sight unseen, in two sizes.  You can do that when your wedding dress is an off-the-rack tennis dress.  Score one for the nontraditionalists.

After receiving an email this morning from Jason "David's Bridal" Page, and a follow up from the lovely Kim "why is my husband answering the phone at our store 'David's Bridal'" Page, I ventured over to Bull City after hauling our catering point-man over to Umstead to check out the wedding brunch site.  I'll get back to the dress in a second, but I wanted to throw this out there as well: I imagine people in catering have a lot going on right now with graduations galore coming up, but the following conversation was not super confidence-building (noting that it was not the owner of the business I was talking to, but our assigned event point-man):
"You're having the wedding at your house?"
"No - the reception is at the house"
"With brunch?"
"No - the wedding and brunch are here at the park"
"In the afternoon?"
"No - at 8:30AM"
"Oh....*puzzled look*"
Now I know that they probably don't do many 8:30AM weddings, and they probably also don't do many weddings that are followed by brunch AND an afterparty, and I'm sure they'll look over the plans again somewhere closer to the date, but I still have visions of Victor and our lovely brunch sitting at the house while we all die of starvation, and a pile of turkey breast arriving at Umstead sometime Sunday for the horseflies (don't even get me started on wedding day horsefly fears) to eat.  Regardless, take away previous point awarded to the nontraditionalists :(

ANYWAY, back to the dress.  I arrived at Bull City and found Jason and George looking just a wee bit bored and searching for entertainment.  Apparently 4PM on a Thursday is not a big time at the store (note to anyone looking for extra super customer service)?  Their faces positively lit up upon my arrival (I may be exaggerating a bit here... but they did seem a little happier to see me than normal).  I'd like to think it was because they were excited about spending a few minutes with me, but I think George was really looking forward to mocking my ordering of a tennis dress from a running store and Jason was still secretly uber-excited about finding the perfect blue to go with Ronnie's vest and wanted to see it in its full glory.  I was slightly less excited as I was secretly wondering if either dress would fit, as I seem to have ventured into some sizing void by dropping 5 lbs to get down to fighting weight (and find my abs again).  Luckily, when I pulled out the dresses, I found the medium was... pretty good... a little loose up top, but nothing a little tailoring wouldn't fix... not sure if the tailor people are up for an integrated sports bra, but was to be a problem for another day.  The small was... um... scandalous.  As Jason put it (not having seen the disaster as I did not wear it out of the dressing room), "it took the wedding from family-friendly to NC 17".  There was really nothing left to the imagination.  At all.  AND it was white. So that helped.

So medium it was.  As an added bonus, the fine folks at Nike had sent a wind jacket in place of Ronnie's shirt, so I scored a new jacket ... and Ronnie may be going shirtless.  C'est la vie.  At least his vest will match the dress....though without a shirt, he looks kind of like a stripper in the bowtie, vest, and tails, so perhaps I should have gone with the small to maintain the theme?  ...but I digress...

So I took my medium dress home and pondered what to do about the ineffectual (and oddly bulky and visible from the outside) integrated bra.  ...and then I did what any normal bride-to-be would do: I cut up my wedding dress.  Take THAT ineffectual bra!  So now that I've gotten rid of the weird, bulky, ill-fitting, ineffectual bra, the dress actually lies much better...though it is now completely lacking in support and a little see-through (still a good match for shirtless Ronnie and the NC17 wedding... which is what I will name my band if I ever start one).  So my next mission is clear: find a bra that will accommodate the asymmetrical neckline of my now customized wedding dress... and plastic wine glasses...we need plastic wine glasses.

Until next time, my pretties...

Boston Marathon - check! Pre-gaming

I'd feel like a bit of a jerk if I wrote up a 3-part post about trying to qualify for Boston and then didn't write anything ABOUT Boston...  So...here goes...

As soon as I got through Uwharrie, Boston began to loom on the horizon, so I forced myself through recovery (involves a lot of the inner football coach saying, "you are NOT tired - KEEP RUNNING!  You can slow down if you MUST, but KEEP RUNNING!") and began ramping up to the gold standard 20+ mile runs again.  From the second I registered, I had been waffling about whether to TRY at Boston or not... On the one hand, I wanted to justify my place there, but on the other, I didn't want to hate the whole experience and miss out on things like kissing the Wellesley girls and high-fiving 800 little kids.  It was pretty much going to come down to a game day decision, but I figured I should probably try to train for the former possibility because it certainly couldn't hurt the latter.

It turns out TRY was the operative word in "try to train" above.  While I got all my long runs in, no problem, the track workouts were lacking due to a particularly insidious combination of work commitments, social commitments, and obnoxious weather in the 2 mos leading up to the race.  That, coupled with an absolutely horrendous sleep schedule the week prior pointed me to the "enjoy the experience" side of things.

SO we arrived in Boston the day before the race, realizing, of course, that we had forgotten the little cards that said "if you don't have this with you, you can't pick up your packet".  We suspected this was not actually the case, and that they were just trying to gently encourage people to remember them, but we were still a little apprehensive as we lined up to get into packet pickup.  Fortunately, our suspicions were right and the nice lady in the 'problems' booth printed us new ones.  We then picked up our packets and headed to the expo to try out all the next big things.  Here are my reviews:
Pom blueberry juice - awesome
Power bar nuggets - awesome
Weird pink Gatorade recovery beverage - decent
Cherry extract drink - wow.  that sure does taste like cherry... really... a lot
Fage Yogurt - yup - tastes like yogurt.. thank you!
Weird fruity herby water - surprisingly awesome... though it made me have to pee REALLLY bad
Anything given away at the GNC booth - DUDE - people really drink/eat this stuff???? That's just crazy.

Then we proceeded to Acton, MA, where Shawn's family awaited us so we could go candle pin bowling.  It turns out I'm even worse at candle pin bowling than I am at regular bowling.  ...unless I go two-hands-between-the-legs-granny-style, in which case, I rule!  If there had just been 3 more frames, I'm pretty sure I would have caught and passed Ronnie, who was trying to emulate the pros and becoming progressively worse.

Our final pre-marathon stop was Shawn's brother's house, where we ate dinner, rummaged through our freebie bags, and found proofreading errors in the official Boston Marathon Race guide before going to bed where a giant black cat stationed herself just above my head to stare at me for the better part of the night.

wiki leaks....

Uwharrie 40 miler

This is an exceptionally difficult blog post for me.  This is strange because if you've ever talked to me, you know that I love this race.  LOVE.  If I could make big puffy heart letters here, I would.  That being said, I generally do my best writing when I have some sort of dramatic inspiration (see examples A, B-1, B-2, and B-3).  This year at Uwharrie was decidedly the opposite of dramatic.  I had the vague goal of completing the mission in under 9:00 and not doing anything stupid (aside from signing up to run 40 miles in the forest in February).  I had no idea if either of these things was possible (#2 seeming highly unlikely), but it's good to have goals.  I also set the "totally attainable" goal of a PR (not counting last year's weather-shortened, flattened course PR, which was totally NOT attainable on the full course), and the "I'll be really annoyed with myself if I don't attain" goal of finishing (Dream Small).

Trying to learn from previous mistakes, the pathway to achieving goal #1 involved not going out too fast.  Let's make that sub-goal A.  So I walked up the big hill at the start and forbade myself to run anything with an incline greater than 1% until at least the turnaround.  I also made myself run slowly between walking bouts just to be sure I would have plenty of energy left for the second half. SO I crested the first hill and began jogging down the hill when off to my left, a bush moved and, upon second glance, I realized it was one of the Army guys that race director Kim had mentioned might be wandering around the forest doing exercises.  THEN I realized that there was a whole line of them off to my left.  I chuckled at my inadvertent confirmation that camouflage REALLY DOES WORK and ran past, thanking them and realizing that I really meant thank you on two vastly different levels - thank you for moving off the trail as we passed by, and thank you for dedicating your life (or some sizeable portion thereof) to making sure I can do this safely year after year.  I spent a minute waxing poetic about this, but my train of thought was quickly derailed shortly thereafter by giant mud puddle #1... which was followed closely by giant mud puddle #2.  In the interest if brevity (ha!), I'll say that I was wildly successful with sub-goal A.  So much so that I realized at mile 14 that I was on pace to hit the turnaround somewhere around 4:40.... if you do the math, that pretty well eliminates my contention for Goal #1 (negative splits are HIGHLY unlikely on this course as 1, it's uphill on the way back, and 2, as noted in a comment on another blog, the hills are WAY bigger and steeper on the way back).  Soooo I started breaking the sub-goal A rules a little early and began to run some uphills beginning at mile 16 (no - I did not run THE uphill at mile 16), and pulled into the turnaround somewhere in the 4:35 range, feeling unnaturally good and still laughing from the most awesome trail encounter ever with my friend and eventual 40-mile female winner, Shannon.

I left the turnaround with two new goals: run as close to even splits as possible and keep my socks from drying out the whole rest of the race.  I deemed both goals to be highly attainable (especially given the vague nature of the first goal) and happily splashed my way back to the start with two little coach angels on my shoulder: my buddy Jay, with whom I ran 34 of 40 miles last year, who was constantly reminding me to run a little faster than I wanted to on the downhills, and that weird coach voice from Des Moines, reminding me that I would never make anything close to even splits if I didn't run some more of the uphills.  The awesome thing was the coach voice was much less belligerent this time, and even gave me a high five when I made it to the 38-mile aid station faster than expected (outwardly, I may have given myself a self-five, which may have looked crazy, but it was really just because the coach voice doesn't have arms).

Anyway, the last two miles were great - until I got to the top of the big hill and then remembered that I had a half mile of steep downhills through rock fields before the final descent.  As I picked my way through what seemed to be giant pieces of broken glass accented by razor blades, I harkened back to something I had said 5 hours before about the ridge between 16 and 17 being my least favorite part of the race and amended my statement.  I dislike the ridge between 16 and 17... I intensely dislike the rocks at mile 39.  I even told them so.  Yes, out loud.  What?  I self-fived myself 1.5 miles back - this should not be surprising.  I also (silently) apologized to the ridge for misclassifying it.

Then I turned and ran down the last hill to finish feeling probably better than I had the previous 2 years and with a 10-minute PR on the full course.  So yes - I achieved goals 2 and 3, and return goals 1 and 2 (my feet were soaked for 9 whole hours!), but I still have not conquered that sub-9 uwharrie, so it looks like I'll be back at it again next year...

So in the end, there was no real drama, no awesomely cynical compositions in my head - just a really pleasant day splashing through the forest and successful achievement of most of my goals for the day.  How uninteresting!

That being said, it was a truly lovely day, and I have much appreciation for all the people who helped make it thus - Kim and Jason, all the fantastic volunteers, everyone I saw on the course, and Shannon "the multitasker" Johnstone.

Oh - and I made a mental note to remember the ridiculous songs that went through my head during the course of the run.  I've forgotten many, but here's a small taste so you can see what I mean:
Sweet Child O' Mine - Guns and Roses
The Llama Song - youtube??
Raise Your Glass - Pink
Some nursery rhyme tune - I never did figure out what it was...