No you're not! You're just not. So stop saying that you are.

You all know how I feel about bitches who are too big for their britches and inflate their potential because they are too ignorant of the challenge that they are undertaking to have an accurate sense of their abilities. In short, when they say, “I can do that!” I want to say, “Bitch, no you can’t!” This is a rant about one of those situations.

There is this woman that I know through work, but have never met. She lives in Chicago, but she is the assistant to one of my boss’s best buddies and closest business associates, who splits his time between Chicago and the Bay Area. So I have a lot of contact with her and people who know her. One day, I received an email that happened to mention “Hey, HotShit won the [insert name of a Middle Eastern capital city] Marathon today!”

This was my cue to start stalking.

I applaud the brave Middle Eastern women who are competing in
international sport without compromising their culture and faith.
But women’s sports in the Middle East are not as competitive as
women’s programs in the western world.

I found out that HotShit (not her real name) had run a 3:09:35 time to win the women’s division of the [insert name of a Middle Eastern capital city] Marathon. Of course I was impressed-jealous, so I kept researching and found that she had a marathon PR of 3:03 in Chicago (a notoriously fast course). One slow day I asked her what her slowest marathon time was. She said that in her first marathon she ran a 3:07, and she was “hooked!” I rolled my eyes, and my imaginary rivalry stalled there for a couple of months. Then, another person from her organization happened to mention, “She’s going to the Olympics in the marathon.” I could hardly contain my disdain. 

“No she’s not!” I insisted.

So here’s what we know about her:

• She is clearly very talented (top 1%), since she was able to run a sub-3:10 marathon in her first marathon. However, she has not shown the one-in-320-million talent it takes to be a contender for the best in the country.
• She has not shown a great improvement curve, as she has only improved her time by 7 minutes in subsequent marathons as she learns from her experience
• She has been an Olympian before, competing in alpine skiing. So she should be familiar with the concept of Olympic qualifying and selection
• She is a much faster marathoner than I will ever be (which I admire), but is far less experienced in endurance sports than I am (which I disdain only in people who shoot their mouth off when they have no idea what they’re talking about)

All of these women qualified for and ran in the Olympic trials
in 2012. Only 3 of them made the team.

First of all, the Olympic marathon team won’t be selected until Feb 13, 2016. So as for the next 360 days (as of this writing), no one is running in the Olympic marathon. Second, to get one of the 3 Olympic team berths, she will need to take top 3 in that trials marathon (unless no one runs the A standard time in that race; then only the winner gets to go). To even get to run in the Olympic trials race, she would need to run a 2:43 marathon, or a 1:15 half marathon.

So to recap: to even get a chance to try to qualify, she will need to take 20 minutes off of her marathon PR, or 15 minutes off of her half marathon PR in the next year.

This is my incredulous face.

Let’s assume she gets to the starting line of the Olympic trials. For the 2012 trials 227 women qualified, with 45 of them meeting the A standard (2:41 that year). She would have 2 ways to earn an Olympic slot that day:

1. She could beat 225 of her 227 competitors (in 2012 Kara Goucher achieved this with a 2:26:06).
2. Or if nobody else ran faster than the A standard of 2:37 (unlikely) then she could get in with a slower time, but would have to win outright. (If the winner of the marathon trials doesn’t achieve the A standard time, only one athlete - the winner - is sent to the Olympics).

Now that you understand all of this, let me remind you that her marathon PR is 3:03. That would have earned her 169th place in the 2014 Boston Marathon alone.

Color me incredulous.

The other day, her boss (my boss’s good friend) came bursting into our office in his running clothes, sweaty, and yelling over the music in his headphones. We made small talk with him, offered him water, and asked him the usual questions about his run. Soon enough I said, “Yeah, but Mr. Millionaire,” (not his real name) “can you run faster than HotShit?”

“She’s going to the Olympics, you know,” he said.

What? For [Middle Eastern country that does not encourage women’s sports]? Cuz she sho’ as shit ain’t running for this country, I wanted to say, but didn’t. It was his conviction that annoyed me. Like it was fait accompli.

I realize that my being so offended by this is incredibly petty. However, I am someone who has worked very, very hard to improve my running times. I have taken 35 minutes off of my best marathon time in a year, and it took a lot more work than she is doing.

I also think it is important to know that even with talent (which I do not have), nothing is given to you. Even the best marathoners in the world lose races. It is extremely arrogant for someone to shoot their mouth of saying that they are going to do something when they have not put up any times that even put them in the same galaxy as their supposed goal. There is nothing more insufferable than entitlement from those who were born with greater advantages than years of hard work have gotten you, and they still feel like they are owed more success without putting in the work.

And why would you set yourself (and your friends) up for that kind of humiliation in a high-profile race like that unless you were sure of success? In 2016, people all over the country are going to tune in to watch the Olympic marathon, and all of her friends and acquaintances and going to look for her. And she won’t be there. Meanwhile, all of Mr. Millionnaire’s friends are going to tune in and say, “Hey, Mr. Millionnaire, which one’s your assistant?” And he’s going to have to say, “Yeah, she didn’t even qualify for the trials…”

"Fun run?" How is this fun?

10K races really hurt. Whenever I have a 10K coming up that weekend, I start getting this creeping sense of revulsion and dread starting around Wednesday. I feel revulsion because I know that I’ll feel like my insides are rotting out after the first mile, I’ll spend the next 3 miles feeling like I’m going to poop my pants, and I’ll spend the last 2.2 miles hoping that I can hold down the puke until the finish line. I feel dread because I know that I simply do not have the self-control or pace awareness to prevent this pain, so I know with absolute certainty that I will be suffering acutely for 30 min.

One day I realized, Claire, there’s no reason to be scared. You can’t run any faster than you can run. So just run within yourself, stay at an intensity where you can breathe, and you won’t have to suffer for more than a couple of minutes at the end. It was freeing for the first mile and a half as I paced my steps to my breath and tried to run within my ability. And then my intestines threw up their hands in frustration and tried to flee my body through my butt hole.

The problem is that if you’re racing a 10K properly, you should be sitting right at your VO2 max, but it takes a few minutes for a too-fast pace to hit your heart rate and nervous system. Reach so much as a toenail over that red line, and you will NEVER get your oxygen debt and lactate levels back under control unless you seriously cut back on your pace. But there is always some bitch in pink just ahead of you, and she may beat you, but you just can’t let her go without puking on her shoes. So you have no choice but to pickle there in your self-loathing, lactate, and half-digested chime.  

Which is just a long-winded way of saying that I really wasn’t looking forward to the 10K this weekend. If I could think of any other way to benchmark my fitness that didn’t hurt, I would have done that instead. I didn’t feel up to racing a half marathon yet, and hey, the registration was only $34. I didn’t think I could be any more unenthused, but then I found out that it was going to rain on race day for the first time in over a month. Awesome.

When I showed up the air and ground were all moist (one of the more disgusting words in the world), but the rain held off until I was done warming up and had dropped my sweats in the car. Then, I huddled under one of the tents like a peevishly wet stray cat waiting for the race to start. It rained harder by the minute.

In Boston, races like this draw a pretty even split of serious runners and the “group hug” types, but in California the Oprah crowd dominates the small events. Usually the slower crowd is somewhat inspiring (it is indubitably harder to run for 75 minutes than for 45). I do miss having a number of superior athletes to motivate me, but normally being a minority of people running without a feather boa doesn’t bug me. However, on this day when a group of about 20 “women of a certain age” (and a certain weight) in matching XL t-shirts with some “girl power” slogan threw their arms around each other and started a 90-second-long breast-thumping chant that went something like “We are the Mighty Twats, we run because we don’t give a shit that we run 12-minute-miles!” I just about lost it.

Finally it seemed close enough to the start time for me to step out from the Mighty Twats’ shelter and stand in the exposed starting corral. I scanned the other runners to see who I thought would be running faster than me, whose way I should get out of, and who I thought I could pace off of in those uncertain first minutes when you’re establishing your rhythm (usually a straight man over 50 is my most reliable metronome).

• The clump of kids so close to the starting line that they were leaning over it: no need to get in front of them, they’ll take off like a rocket, and by the time they poop out and I catch up with them, the group will have already thinned out. The nice thing about getting around pooped out kids is that their elbows aren’t right at my face height like the grown-ups I usually wind up passing in the first half mile.

• That tall chick with the gorgeous legs that looks like she stole them from an athletic mannequin in the Nike department: I could pretty much count on not seeing her until the finish line.
• That chick around my age with no pink on that looked like one of those Boston mommy athletes that would rip your legs off and still have the energy to carry her 2 toddlers over the finish line: I figured I could hang with her for the first mile or two until things got real.

I picked out a handful of 50-something white guys with unironic mustaches that would probably wind up running a similar pace in case I needed human metronomes and waited for the MC to finish his little pre-race speech.

“It’s a good day for a PR,” he said. “The course is mumblemumblemumble…” Hang on! Did he just say the course was half a mile short?!?!?! That would be uh-MAZE-ing! I wasn’t going to complain if they wanted to make this torture any shorter. He yammered on and on as we got wetter and wetter, and only when we were already thoroughly soaked and a little purple did he lead the kids in a count-down from 10.

I started timing my breaths to my steps, and counting down from 100 and tried not to get elbowed in the face or stuck behind someone who would slow my roll. Within the first mile I had passed all but one of the kids, I was running right off the shoulder of the kick-ass woman with the New England face, and could see the woman with the amazing legs up ahead. Out of nowhere one of the straight men over 50 with an unironic mustache sitting right behind me said, “You’re like a machine. Every time I look you’re sitting right between 6:50 and 6:55.”

“Shut up! You’re not supposed to tell me!” I whined. The spell was broken. I wished that I could elbow him in the face. I was no longer just focusing on my breath and my steps, now I knew how fast I was going and the inner dialogue became, This is what 6:50 pace feels like. Is this too fast? Can I maintain this? Does this hurt? Am I in trouble? Can I keep up with this? Are these people too fast for me? Maybe I can catch the lady with the amazing legs! She’s wearing pink… “But the key is to maintain it over the whole thing…” said the straight man over 50 with an unironic mustache. Thanks a lot, douche bag. I’d never thought of doing that. Ass hat! He trailed off mid-advice because I murdered him.

Me and Kick-Ass New England Face had been slowly reeling in the lady with the legs that won’t quit over the second mile, and when she slowed up on a short incline we both passed her in quick succession. Alright, it’s true. She’d been wearing pink, and I’d probably been running too fast to catch her. Between the hill, the ass hat with the unironic mustache’s coaching, and losing my visual pacing benchmark I fell out of my rhythm and let the ass hat (who I had not muredered after all) and New England face pull ahead. Now I was all alone in the world.

I had planned not to look at my watch until I had caught that one last kid up ahead, but the kid was still up there, and pulling further and further away. If he had made it almost 3 miles without crapping out, he probably wasn’t ever going to. Incredible! He couldn’t have been older than 9 years old! I knew that there were some fast kids out there, but I’d never seen one that could maintain that kind of speed over such a long course. (Update: He was actually 10, and finished in under 6:40 pace.) I’ve been seeing more and more kids keeping pace with their parents in races longer than 5K. I wonder if more children finding their way to running sooner with help the US find its way back to being a distance running superpower again. I was surprised when I hit the turn-around to see several of the kids that I’d passed at the start not far behind me and still running as well. These kids clearly had the experience not to try to race the whole thing, and the fitness to run continuously for almost an hour.

I, on the other hand, was having some trouble. When I did eventually look at my watch (set to heart rate), it said 177 bpm. I hadn’t raced with a heart rate monitor in a long time (ever), but based on what I had seen in training, that seemed too high. Too high indeed. When I fall apart, there always seems to be an outside factor that causes it: a gust of wind, a small incline, having to speak, having to smile at someone, an unusually large tuft of grass in my field of vision… all things that are tremendously unjust impositions that I could not be foreseen and am a victim of. I’m running along fine, and then all of a sudden, I have to step up onto a curb and then all of my strength and composure fall away and suddenly it feels like I’m running on Jupiter where gravity is like 25x what it is on Earth. In that race, the evil force was a short, quarter-mile detour onto a dirt path made of deep, soft epoxy. This detour was obviously included in the course to cause me to give up my life force and crawl into the dry riverbed and die.

When I got back onto the main trail again, I could hear footsteps behind me. I tried for a few moments to hold off the footsteps closing behind me, but what was the use? I still had about 2 miles to hold myself together, and I would rather not be THAT uncomfortable. I was wheezing and hacking, but breakfast was behaving unbelievably well and staying right where I left it: on the inside. I wondered who would come around on the feet I was listening to, and to my dismay, it was the chick with the legs that wouldn’t quit. And she looked perky. She flashed a gigantic smile at me and some “You go grrrl” type encouragement and ran on ahead. I hoped that she was really, really, fast so that I wouldn’t be tempted to put myself in any further discomfort by chasing her down.

From then on, there wasn’t much else to report. Had I been in Boston with the deeper fields, I would have at least had other people around me, but as it was I just had Legs’s pink back gradually getting smaller in my field of vision. She finished 21s ahead of me… I could have pulled that out of my ass I suppose, but it was raining and also I didn’t care that much. And also it’s easier to not try and say you could have than to try and find out you can’t.

As I came back into the field where the finish was, the 5K runners were rejoining the course from the right and spectators with cameras were blocking my way. I almost gave an elbow shiver to some proud mommy, and wasted my final breaths on screaming something like, “Move, bitch!” (pronounced, “Excuse me!”). I managed a pathetic little kick up to 6 min/miles in the finishing corral, so I clearly didn’t leave it all out there. I crossed the finish line, stared into the garbage can for a minute to make sure that I didn’t need to puke, and left.

I had pulled off third woman overall, and second in my age group. There was probably hardware in there somewhere, but it was raining and I had a massage/hot tub to get to.

Remind me to tell you about the last time I left without a trophy… Funny story...

What my puppy teaches me about growing old

In my adult life, I’ve had periods of a couple of years where my fitness improves in huge leaps, and others where I find myself in a creative rut and a fitness lull. At the moment, I’m riding the crest of another fitness high; eating clean, getting faster, and actually working my way through Tim Noakes’ denser-than-bad-cheesecake “Lore of Running.” Reading this brick last night in preparation for going to bed at 8pm, I got to a section about the aging runner. Noakes says (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Every runner reaches a point where their best days are no longer in front of them. Furthermore, by a certain point, you should mature to a point where your competitive urges have been satisfied. Beyond that, running should be for health and enjoyment, since you're never going to get any faster. There is evidence that every runner has a finite number of training miles in his or her legs. If you love running, cross-training may be a good way to ration the miles remaining to you so that they will last you for the rest of your life.” This was the first time that it ever occurred to me that getting old was something that was happening to me as an athlete (I've been old as a human being since I turned 28).

If you’ve known me for a long time, you know that my relationship with running has followed the same plot arc as When Harry Met Sally, passing through mutual indifference, hate, surrender and acceptance, and eventually unpassionate but comfortable love. For years I also wanted to qualify for the Boston Marathon, but that story followed more of the unrequited circles of the love story between Screech and Lisa Turtle. I would sign up for a race thinking that even though nothing had changed about my training, that this time I would seal the deal. And the marathon (Lisa Turtle) would put up with me for about 15 miles, and then smack me in the face and send me slinking home with no doubt as to what a bumbling loser I was.  

Ten years later, I finally figured it out quite by accident on something like my 20th marathon. This current build-up is something like my victory lap, one more serious serious season where I pull out all the stops to see what I can squeeze out of myself. But when it’s all over, there is no next mountaintop quite as inspiring to justify the level of commitment it would take to get there. A three-hour marathon? Forget it! I would still need to cut another 25 minutes, and the last time I ran that pace in a 5K I puked my guts out at the end. (However, to be fair, a woman in all pink and pigtails finished after me, and when she saw me grabbing my knees and puking up magenta vomit, she said with disgust to her male companion, “That was the girl I was trying to beat!” At which point I let loose with another stream of pink vomit. Which tells you exactly what I think about women who wear too much pink.) Another Ironman? Been there. Done that. Wasn’t fun either time. Go into the stupid far ultra thing? Why? Nothing good happens after your 6th hour of consecutive exercise. Run faster over shorter distances? See the above anecdote about pink vomit for a strong argument against this one.

The Oatmeal just about sums it up.

Lately my fantasies haven’t incuded any podiums, medals, finish line clocks, or trophies in them. Instead, my athletic fantasies have included a log cabin without wifi, a 50-mile drive to the nearest grocery store, and me and my dog going for long trail runs every day for just as long as we feel like. There’s something about running with him that makes me unspeakably happy. Actually, I know exactly what it is that makes me so happy: his dufus grin that he wears the whole time that we’re running - ears back, tongue flopping around, and a doggie grin so big it makes his eyes look all fucked up.  

When I’m with my pooch, I can’t worry about the pace, because sometimes we just have to stop and sniff something. Because I can’t tell if he’s sniffing around to find the perfect pooping spot or just because some wascally wabbit passed by that way recently. There's nothing to do but just stand there and let my heart rate drop and the clock tick away. In this way, my dog has taught me patience.

Then again, sometimes the wascally wabbit himself crosses the trail in front of us, and my dumb dog tears off down the trail dragging me at a 6-minute mile over rocks and roots. I may have the same look on my face that my mother had when she was teaching me to drive on the freeway, but when he does finally slow down and look at me he’s got such an excited look of, “Did you see that?! Did you see it, ma?! I almost caught it!” that my apoplectic heart swells.

Sometimes the wascally wabbit is off in the bushes, and Oscar unexpectedly takes off in a perpendicular line to our intended path. For half a second I have enough time to think, “oh shit, better brace myself,” before the leash around my waist ruptures my kidney while he simultaneously comes boinging back to me when the leash recoils mid-stride. You can’t pace through that kind of thing.

I think that all of this means that I am maturing (or ripening). I can’t imagine a life in which I don’t work out every day, but I think the next challenge will be learning to work out every day without a goal. I wonder what that looks like... I have a feeling it looks like a dufus block-head dog tearing off down the path after a goose or deer with a shit-eating grin on his face, tongue hanging out, and no plan for what he would do once he caught that wascally wabbit except that it will be really fun… and be followed by a really great nap.