Day 10: I am so fucking slow

Apparently I've become a pavement sissy. I always thought that those trail runners that tell stories like, "there was ONE MILE" of pavement in that 100 miler and now I have a stress fracture!" were prima donnas. I mean, come on, it's not THAT hard. But after 3 years of 90% trail or treadmill, my legs and my wafer-thin shoes do not tolerate pavement as they once did. Actually, I wonder if a lot of my old slowness was due to the cumulative impact of mostly concrete. But anyway, after 14 miles on road yesterday (or at least 5 or 6 where I couldn't run in the dirt along the side of the path) had made my shins unhappy indeed. 

Also making me unhappy indeed today was that the only miles I had been able to knock out at work were 1.7 miles walked while answering emails, so I had to run 16.9 miles consecutively without any snack breaks and all on hilly trails.

I did not run so fast. The last 5 miles were spent running back and forth along a few short lengths of trail to avoid any major hills. There were laps run around the parking lot. But I finished, and I finished running, so there. 

Day 9 I am so fucking fast

(Funnel cakes make good recovery food)

After landing late the night before from a weekend in lovely and exotic Arkansas, I decided to take the morning off of work and run instead. Rather than running on trails that are slow and hard to get to, or the treadmill (which is located AT work), I decided to run out my door to the bike trail a fraction of a mile away, maintain a comfortable pace for an hour, and then turn around wherever I happened to find myself after an hour. That happened to be 6.9 miles from the house, meaning I had dropped about 45s off of my normal cruising pace. Go me!

Curious whether I could comfortably maintain 8minute pace without going anaerobic after so many miles, I put in 5h at work and then started running again, polishing off a 24-minute 10k with relative ease. Normally, this is tempo pace for me. 

I was too hypoglycemic afterward to find my way to the end of a sentence, but damn, I'm a stud. 

Day 8: Survival

Before I started "Iron War," I read "Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why" by Lawrence Gonzales. Good book, you should read it. I'm going to paraphrase part of it here. Gonzales explains that people in survival situations – castaways, people lost in the woods or on a ski mountain, those wounded and unable to get out of whatever remote location they've become stuck in – go through many of the same stages of grief as the dying. A surviver goes through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, and then when it's time to reach the final stage, those who die choose acceptance. Those who survive reach another state; a kind of acceptance without submission where they accept their lot, but become certain that they are going to survive, no matter what. It's not that they are immune to bear attacks, the elements, and the like, they just resolve to fight and realize that they have the strength to endure.

Overblown prose aside, my quest is somewhat about a simulated survival situation. I know that if you held a gun to my head every day, I would find a way to cover 30K a day, but what kind of trails and mental depths would I have to go through to get there? What would it feel like, and who would I be when I came out on the other side. Cramming it in while still managing to work full time is a kind of death march in itself, with working being the death march part.

Today I felt good. I woke up not feeling sore, and knew I could run 18 miles today, and run every step of it (although I wound up cycling most of it today for other reasons). Then I knew I could wake up and do it again tomorrow. Not that it's easy, but today my body seems to have finally hit homeostasis.

And with that, I'm taking 5 days off. I need to go to Arkansas, which will be a kind of survival situation in and of itself.

Day 7: Stinky!

Today I really feel like I'm getting this down. I'm finding ways to cram short runs into my day so that I still have time to rest and attend to errands at the end of the day. Today's approach: skip not only showering, but forget changing too.

When one client canceled at the last minute, I happily found myself in a position to run a solid hour before my next client. I did run that hour, pushing the pace to cram exactly 7 miles into my precious hour. Warming up takes longer, but once I'm warm, running in the mid-8's feels easy. Maybe I can even get that cruising pace down over time?

But my bonus run came at a cost: An extra chance to run meant that the day's 30K would be broken into three rather than 2 segments, and I only had two workout outfits. I was faced with a choice: change back into work clothes and let my sweaty clothes hang dry in my locker, or wear them until they dried and then just run in them again. I decided to go for option B: throwing my uniform shirt over a soaked sports bra, and running up to the pool in my sweaty running shorts to let the sun and wind dry my crotch sweat out of them while I paced the pool with my client.

Then it was back to the treadmill. I had an exam I had to take for a promotion in just over an hour, but I wanted to get in 7 more miles. I started out even faster than before, but this time around the day's 12th mile I figured out that my functional threshold is still 8:11 min miles. If I wanted to get in 7 miles, there would be no time to cram for the exam. I only made it 6.5 because of an urgent bathroom break.

With 5 minutes to spare, I ran to the locker room and put on my fresh running outfit. Still sweating into my "fresh" clothes, I turned up to the exam with a recovery shake and seaweed. I stank up the office like sweat and left seaweed in my boss's keyboard as I took the test, but I passed. Then I was finally free to finish my final 5.1 miles outside.

Not really in the mood to deal with any major hills, I turned up at the only place I knew where I could do the world's most boring 5-mile flat out-and-back while still running on dirt. I was feeling really good physically and ready to run the last 5 miles. I have this whole juggling act down! I had everything ready to leap from my car and start running when... where was my Garmin? No, I swear I just saw it in my lunch bag and... Shit. I turned my whole car and everything in it inside out looking for the Garmin, but to no avail. Every time I think I'm getting my shit together, I seem to lose something essential.

Now what? Outside and without a GPS, all I had was a watch and my phone. Runkeeper has never worked for me on the trails, and the MapMyRun app is notoriously inconsistent, frequently overestimating my mileage by up to 25%. The only answer was to run to time. But what pace? To be safe I assumed a 10-minute mile, which meant 25 minutes out, and 25 minutes back. I probably wound up running closer to 19 miles today, which kind of makes me feel like a badass.

Day 6: Mark Allen Still Haunts My Daydreams

Many, many years ago I wrote a post about how Mark Allen haunts my dreams. Well, as I ran the day's 30K, I began listening to Matt Fitzgerald's "Iron War." I've seen the entire footage from that 1989 Ironman, heard interviews with both Mark Allen and Dave Scott about the race countless times, and I think the story's been told to death, but I love Matt Fitzgerald and will faithfully read everything he will ever write. So there I was, listening to the tale of the Iron War for the bajillionth time as I ran the last 8.6 miles of the day's 18.6 miles.

I had already run 7 miles on the treadmill that morning, and done a lazy 9 miles on the bike to make up for 3 miles that I thought it would be unwise to run before I hit the Los Troncos trail. I ran the trail not feeling particularly strong, but also not feeling weak either. I just didn't feel like I had the turbo boosters on today. But I had still comfortably averaged 7mph in my earlier run, something that had been a challenge even a couple of weeks ago. And I finished the 8.5 mile hilly Los Troncos trail in only 4 minutes slower than my best time for the trail.

As I got in the car, I was still listening to Matt Fitzgerald talk about Mark Allen and how he used what I have disparagingly called the "zone 1" method of training in the past. In essence "Zone 1" training is where you determine a heart rate below threshold, and spend nearly all of your training time there. The idea is that you wind up getting really fast while not going very hard, but it always seemed like a load of bullshit for lazy people to me. But then Mark Allen crashed my daydreams again, and I realized that, isn't that exactly what I'm doing right now? I'm running only as fast as is comfortable so as not to poop myself out too much. When an effort requires me to dig or push in order to keep running, I just walk. And against all odds, I appear to be getting faster.

More evidence is needed, of course. But if I wind up a faster runner at the end of this gluttony of overtraining, then I think that we will all have to eat our hats in one way or another; me because the Zone 1 method of training seems to have something to it, and you because you thought that I would just get fat and slow and injured. For my own sake, I hope we're both wrong.

Day 4: If I can get through today...

...I can do anything. 

-5h sleep

-9 sessions between 5am and 3pm

-Less than 30 min seated all day

-65.8 miles in my legs since Sunday, BEFORE I started the day's running

-Approximately 1600 calories consumed from start of workday to finish of workout (13h)

My 30k looked like this:

-1 mi walking between clients (so I wouldn't need a shower)

-3.5 miles descending speed (finishing at 8:00 pace) when a client canceled

-2.4 mi at lunch, descending speed to 8 min/mi

-Ride 23 mi on spin bike (7 2/3 mi run equivalent) after last client until kicked out by spin class

-4.03 mi run descending to 7:56 pace. 

And I did it. I am invincible. I need a nap. And a burger. And a cupcake.

Day 3: Rules of the game

So I've decided to run 30K a day for 30 days. I mentioned that. Why am I doing this? You can see a previous post about marathon monks to learn about where I got the inspiration from, but I'm not trying to emulate those monks. I'm just curious about what will happen. Can my body handle it? And if my body can handle it, then what will happen at the end? Conventional wisdom says that I will get slower, but I want to see if it's true. Today, anyway, on my 30th birthday – and the third consecutive day of running 30K – I was running faster in the last 5 miles of my day's run than I did at any point in my 7 consecutive half marathons a few months ago. In fact, that little stunt seems to have launched my running to a new level... but I digress.

Here are my rules for the challenge:

1. Once begun, I must run 30K a day (or equivalent, see below) on every day that I work. Weekends and vacations (5 days in Arkansas for a wedding), I will not run.
2. The 30K can be broken however needed to fit into my work schedule. They may be run on treadmill, trail, or road.
3. In the event of small injuries, I may 

Day 5: Dehydration

The biggest challenge so far has been sweat. Sweat leads to chafe indoors (not to mention annoyed looks from maintenance staff and concerned looks from everyone else), and severe fluid losses outdoors. I tried getting a hydration pack, but look back on Day 2 to see what happened with that.

Day 5 was a hot one: about 87 degrees of dry heat, meaning the first really hot day that I would have to take on in my 30 in 30 challenge. I planned to run 4 miles indoors, and then hit a 7.4-mile loop on a place called Windy Hill, which I would run twice. But since I've been living in San Francisco, where the summers look like early April wherever you live (highs in the 50's and overcast), this is the first time my body has had to deal with heat in 3 years. In the past, heat has not worked out well for me.

Windy Hill climbs and descends some 1200 feet, with a flat and exciting mile along the ridge at the summit (I have a video from the top, and maybe I won't be too lazy to upload it later). My first climb was a slow walk-jog on the sunny side of the trail, and then a tender-footed descent through the trees on the back side. Realizing that I was way, way behind schedule with 7 miles to go, I decided to cut out one mile and walk the last mile at home with my lovely girlfriend and the dog. That would make it easier, right? Well, not really. I would get to cut out the exciting and fun flat at the top of the ridge, but still have to climb the hill in its entirety in my final 6 miles. I ran 3 miles straight up, and then turned around and ran back down the way I'd come.

When I got back to the car, I'd been running for 2.5 hours on 32 oz of water in heat in the mid-80's. I was covered in salt and my muscles ached all over. For the first time I doubted the viability of this adventure. After drinking over 3 liters of water before bed, I still woke up with a raging dehydration headache. I put away another 3 liters of water in the morning before starting on the day's 30K.

Day 2: Review for Nathan Women's Intensity Hydration Pack

Today I tried running 10 of my 30K with my new Nathan Women's Intensity Hydration Pack. I liked the sexy blue, and that I could carry more water onboard than just a 16oz handheld bottle.

Here is my review:

Day 1: Mayday! Mayday!

For my 30th birthday I've decided to run 30K a day, every day that I work, until I've done it 30 times. Since I'm only doing it on work days, the 30 days are not consecutive. Why? I'll save that for another post. I've got a better story.

Today was Day 1 of my 30 in 30. Today I also happen to be on my period. It's gross, but it's a fact of life, and it's relevant to the story. When it's "that time of the month" a girl has a decision to make: stick a diaper in your underwear or jam a wad of cotton up your twat. Both are unpleasant and offer all disadvantages and no advantages. I went for the crappy "disadvantage" that they have free at work with no wings and cheap adhesive. Then I went out to the treadmill to zone out and watch some TV.

18.6 miles on a treadmill might sound like torture to you, but I don't mind it, especially if I have limited time. Treadmills do make me sweat more though. I sweat a lot. By mile 16 I was soaked in sweat, my shorts were plastered to my legs, and the maintenance lady on her hands and knees cleaning in front of my treadmill was looking really pissed at the sweaty mess I was making. But I was still feeling really good, able to push the pace from time to time to keep it interesting when... All of a sudden... Oh fuck!

Is that?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure... What do I do if...?!

It felt like my "disadvantage" had shifted. If it had just drifted backward in my underpants, that wouldn't be so bad, so I dropped to a walk and tried to discretely investigate. In case you're wondering, No, there is no way to discretely check that something in your underwear is still in your underwear. Something was definitely wrong. Or had I started my run with a pad at mid-thigh?

This was bad. There are 2 bathrooms in the building: each about 100m away in either direction. Behind me was another row of cardio equipment. All I could picture was my bloody "inconvenience" falling out of my shorts, hitting the treadmill, being launched across the room, and flying into the shins of the 2:20 marathoner running directly behind me (how often do you get to say that?!). MAYDAY! MAYDAY! SOMEBODY HELP ME! 

I stopped the treadmill and waddled to the bathroom, pressing my thighs together the whole time and all the while ready to react faster than the speed of light if my "problem" plopped on the floor along the way. Somehow I made it to the stall, pulled the world's grossest pad out of the bottom hem of my shorts, and cleaned myself up. 

But I still had 1.8 miles left to run... 

Use your imagination.