How's the foot?

Sorry my blog's been a bit of a snore-fest lately.  Feel free to navigate away and come back in a few weeks.  I won't mind.  

Anyway, people have been asking me how my foot is holding up.  It doesn't (and never did) hurt to ride on it, so I've been back on the bike recently.  However, my training time has basically be

en cut in half, which I'm sure some of you trolls are happy about.  (And of course by trolls I mean people who care about my wellbeing more than I sometimes seem to).  I have been avoiding walking and standing on it at all costs, and the pain seems mostly gone.  

Mostly.

I can still feel the ache sometimes, but at least I can walk to the train in the morning without pain.  It feels like it is going away.  The big question is:

¿Am I going to run the Hartford Marathon on Saturday?

Good question.  I haven't actually tried to run on it yet, so I guess we won't know until this weekend.  Unless it hurts to run a block or two on Friday, we're going to give it a shot.  Here is the plan:

Step 1: Buy new shoes

It has been pointed out to me that suddenly I have flat feet.  For someone who always had high arches, this is perplexing.  I will go to my local running geek store and have them do their thing to pick the correct shoes for me on penalty of death.

Step 1.5: Bite any smartass who tells me not to run a marathon in new shoes

I know that, Mr. Smartypants!  But wh

en it is between getting blisters in new shoes, or running a marathon on the shoes that hurt me and have kept me from running for a week or more, I'd rather get the blisters thank you very much.  And anyway, I'm tough.  I can handle it.  I think popping blisters is pretty much the most fun that any one person can have.  So why don't you have a big glass of shut the hell up juice!  (Again, thank you for caring, my dear trolls).  

Step 2: Drive down to Hartford and pick up race packet

No matter what I'm going down to Hartford.  Marathon or no marathon, I would not miss the chance to hang out with hetero life partner, Angry, marathon buddy, Cranky, and fellow tri-geek, Iron Bob, nor would I miss the chance to pick up freebies at the expo!

Step 3: Show up at starting line of marathon, begin running

If all goes well, I plan on running this damned marathon.  If my foot hurts, I plan on continuing to run this stupid marathon.  If my foot hurts like I'm going to have to take a week or two off of running to let it heal, I will continue to run this stupid marathon. Because taking 1-2 weeks off after a stupid marathon is a good idea anyway.  If it starts to hurt like "oh fuck, I'm going to have to see a doctor" or it is slowing me down considerably leading to a 5-hour marathon (aka waste of time), I will sit down at the side of the road and demand to be taken home.

Satisfied, trolls?  No, really, you're the lovable kind of troll, I swear.  You know, the kind with crazy hair that walks around naked.  

But don't you hate admitting you're injured?  Don't you hate it when people are like, "Resting is when you get stronger", or "injury is just your body's way of telling you to rest", or "you shouldn't run a marathon on an injured foot", or "running is bad for you", or "I told you so", or "being a vegetarian is bad for you", or "be patient", or "you should put money in a savings account each month", or "can you PLEASE put away your laundry so that the kitten doesn't pee on it again", or "can you please edit Grade K theme three", or "no"...  Yeah, I hate it when people tell me that stuff too.  

Attempted Murder

If you remember 2 weeks ago, Curly (which is not his real name, of course) was the newest member of the Straight Men Over 40 Who Adore Claire club. It's a pretty big club. By the end of the ride he was certain that I would be on the podium at the end of the 2009 Longsjo Classic, a local stage race in Fitchburg, MA in July.

As we've discussed before, I know better than to believe the Straight Men Over 40 and their flattery. I am a better-than-average cyclist, but there are some FAST women out there. I don't kid myself into thinking that I'm the best thing on two wheels, but I am curious about how I stack up. Especially after Fellow Chick Biker's (totally fair) comment, I really wanted to have a point of reference in a REAL bike race, so I started poking around the web site, and decided to ride parts of the course this weekend; the most important being the Time Trial course. It's hard to know how fast one could go in a pack in the road race or crit stages, but a time trial is just you, the road, and a clock. It seemed like a pretty good gauge.

The road race course goes up Mt. Wachusett, the highest peak in Central Massachusetts (thanks to the little fairy who let me know it isn't ACTUALLY the tallest – point is, our mountains aren't very big in these here parts), at a towering 2006 feet above sea level (1000' vertical feet from top to bottom). So I mapped out a rout that took me up the time trial course, did one loop around the road course, and back to the car. The only recruit I could find to tag along with me was "Bring It On Anne", training partner and shit-talking nemesis. Anne called my bet and raised me 50. "How about we leave from a little farther east, like my house, and we ride to my friends' house in Jaffrey, NH for a round 100 miles?"

I really, really wanted to do this ride.

I knew that riding 100 miles all uphill, finishing at 1000' higher than where we started, and with a mountain in the middle was going to be a really challenging ride, but I really, really wanted to do it. Anne had ridden over 100 miles before... once... 3 months ago, and hadn't ridden more than 60 miles since. "Do you really think I can do it?" she asked.
"Of course," I said. I didn't want to kill Anne, but I really, really, really wanted to do this ride.

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence and then success is sure."
-Mark Twain

If there was anyone that I would drag on a 100-mile ride over a mountain when they weren't necessarily 100% sure what they were getting into, it was Anne. Anne does not show weakness. She will put herself in the hospital before she quits fighting. And when the going gets tough, I've never seen anyone that can just dig in and find the strength to finish strong like Anne. It's like she doesn't even KNOW this stuff is supposed to tire her out, so she doesn't get tired (or she just hides it really well). Part of it, I think, is that she's relatively new to the sport and hasn't quite figured out where her limits should be or how truly extraordinary some of her feats of superhuman strength are, but part of it is that Anne is just tough as nails.

Plus, anything that would prove to her once again that I'm one badass mofo on two wheels would be pretty satisfying after she committed the mortal sin of not falling to her knees before my superior cycling abilities.

We set out from her house in Watertown, MA at 36 feet above sea level at about 8 am. After a few false starts and a trip to the dry cleaners for some safety pins, we were on our way. "I don't want to read on your blog about how slow I am, and how much you had to wait for me!" she said as she caught up to me at the top of each hill. Me?! I would never do that! And anyway, Blog? What blog? I don't have a blog! It wasn't in my best interest to showboat for Anne dropping her every chance I got. First off, I didn't want to have to scrape her up off the shoulder of the road somewhere in western MA and somehow figure out how to get her to New Hampshire if she bonked. And secondly, she had the directions. Anne's job was to save herself for after the mountain, and my job was to not set a pace so stiff that I would have to carry her the last 20 miles on my handlebars. There was no shit talking, no taunting or sparring, we were just two friends riding through apple country in the middle of the fall, the best time to be riding through this part of the country.

But god, it sure was windy! There was a 17 mph wind (I finally figured out how to check!) coming out of the west northwest, and guess what direction we were heading? Every time we passed a flag pole, the flags were flapping away in the direction that we were coming from. "Who's a badass, Anne?" I asked.
"You?"
"Yep, but you know who's second-most badass?"
"Me?"
"No. Me on a bad day, but you're a close third."
I tried to ride in front and block the wind as much as a little smurf like me can, and congratulated myself on doing a pretty good job when Anne came up next to me and said, "I'm really, really trying to stay out of your draft zone. I want to be able to say I did this of my own power, but god, it's windy!" I stared at her stupefied. Here she had carte blanche to sit behind me and let me pull her all the way up to New Hampshire and she was purposely hanging back so that she could fight the wind too. I'm telling you, Anne is one tough motherfucker.

Of all people, Curly was driving by at one point and pulled over to ask about our ride. "Who's the guy with the crazy hair?" Anne asked. Anne didn't know about the Straight Men Over 40. If she's nice, maybe I'll let her hang around me more and she can meet some of them. God knows I'm not interested.

After getting a bit lost Anne and I finally found our way to the bottom of Mt. Wachusett. Before you hit the bottom of the mountain you have to climb about 500 feet over a mile up a roughly 8% grade (reaching about 10 in parts) to get to the base of the ski resort. Anne, who had a triple, fell away behind me and I kept trucking to the top of the hill. This was steeper than I remembered. Despite the cold and the wind I was pouring sweat. I was in my seldom-used smallest gear, my legs were burning, and I was breathing pretty hard. This was steeper than I remembered... Gosh, I hoped Anne was okay! When the hill finally let up at the top I stopped and caught my breath. I waited until I saw her coming up over the edge of the hill with her head down.
"Why'd you stop?! No stopping till we get to the top!!!" she yelled.
"How are you doing?" I yelled down to her.
"SUCKING WIND!!!"
"Well you're still talking, so you can't be hurting too bad!" I yelled back and mounted again.

I stopped around the corner into the ski resort to make sure she hadn't missed the turn and hopped on my bike again as soon as I saw her so she wouldn't catch me waiting and we started climbing the mountain. The first climb was pretty shallow, and I thought maybe I hadn't gotten us into too much of a mess after all. When the road forked half way up I stopped again to make sure that she didn't take the steep way up. The "shallow" way still reached grades around 12+% and hovered around 7 or 8% for long stretches. Again, when she came up over the ridge she yelled at me for stopping. "Well old people like you are known for keeling over dead from heart attacks," I told her. "I just want to make sure that I'm nearby so that I can ride to the hospital with you."
"I have Blue Cross/Blue Shield, by the way," she'd told me earlier in the ride. Later on she admitted that I'd made her feel old and slow going up that hill, and I regretted calling her old or insinuating that she wouldn't make it. Truth be told, I expected my phone to ring at any minute and for her to tell me that she was turning around, but when I stopped again at a vista point just shy of the top, there she came again, head down, chipping away at the mountain. "Are we at the top yet?!" she yelled.
"Nope, but we're almost there."
"Then why'd you stop?!"
So I mounted again before she could smack me and rode away at my blazing 7mph the last 200 or so vertical feet to the top. Before long Anne turned up, pushing her bike. She'd ridden all the way up that mountain only to push her bike the final 25 yards to the top. "How much will you give me to not tell anyone you walked?" I joked. But we'd both made it, and we could see most of the state from up here. It was almost worth it. We wandered around, accepting the congratulations from all the people who had driven to the top and then took a couple of photos and got back on our bikes.

At the top Anne didn't even try to push me over the edge.

Down we went, over frost heaves the size of speed bumps and reached the bottom of the hill it had taken us about half an hour to climb in less than 5 minutes. Next, it was off to Fitchburg to the time trial course. The time trial course is 10 kilometers and climbs about 800 feet in the first 5 miles before dropping about 100 feet in the last mile to the finish. Last year the women's Cat 1/2 winner finished with an average speed of about 20.75 mph, and the women's Cat 3/4 winner finished with an average speed of 19.6 mph. The hill looked pretty steady, and I figured it'd be a big-ring climb that looked and felt like a false flat, then a fast push to the downhill finish. Piece of cake.


I told Anne I'd meet her at the top, and took off up the hill. The first thing that I discovered was that this was NOT a big ring climb. I hardly touched my big ring the whole way up, and was heaving in no time. Fuck! This sucked. Another thing I didn't expect was for this to be the worst road surface I have ever ridden on. There were potholes and crumbling patches of uneven pavement across the whole road the whole way up. It was the kind of uneven road where you can feel it pulling the speed out from under your wheels as it throws your bike all over the road. Normally on shitty pavement the best thing to do is to go into a hard gear so that you can hover over your saddle so the jarring doesn't fuck with your cadence quite so much, but the hill was so steep and I was riding hard enough that I couldn't hold a higher gear, so I just rode and groaned as the road shook my fillings loose. I rode as hard as I could with jaw hanging open and teeth borne trying to time my spastic breathing to my cadence, and my spastic cadence to my breathing. I still had a dead-on headwind, and every time I crested a ridge the wind would smack me at its full 17 mph. I screamed or moaned out loud more than once (when I ride hard it really does sound like I have tourettes). There were several moments where I thought of quitting right then and there and just getting off my bike and sitting in the leaves at the side of the road until Anne turned up. I thought of quitting cycling altogether. I finally arrived at the end with an average speed of 16.1 mph, good enough for third-to-last in the Cat 1/2 race, and mid-pack in the Cat 3/4 race.

The course was not as flat as I thought. It even got up to a 10% grade in spots. False flat my ass!

Rationally I knew that it wasn't fair to compare myself to the results. I knew that when those women had ridden back in July that they didn't already have 80 miles in their legs. I knew that probably none of them had just ridden up a mountain (the TT is the first stage in the race), and that it was very unlikely that they'd had a 17 mph headwind. I knew that most of them had been riding a time trial setup (I took my aero bars off weeks ago), and probably didn't have enough water and food on their bikes for a full weekend. I knew that I hadn't really done much time trial-specific training this year, and by next July I'd be in better sprinting shape if everything went to plan. But still, I was disappointed. Fellow Chick Biker was right. I suck. I went back and found Anne and we rode out together. "Oh my god!" I said. "That sucked more than anything has ever sucked in my life." She agreed, but I couldn't get over it. I was crushed. This was going to be harder than I thought.

We only had about 20 miles left to Jaffrey, and if Anne was hurting, she didn't show it. We stuffed her full of gumdrops to make sure she had enough fuel to make it, but she was solid as a rock. She expressed concern once about her knee, but that was it. To look at her, she seemed fine. Later she would admit that she was cranky and tired, but the meltdown that I was expecting around mile 85 never came. In fact, she looked just fine. I, on the other hand, was a bit worse for the wear. Normally on rides of this length I'm by myself (or not committed to any one riding partner's pace anyway) and free to pick the pace. Normally I would have spent way more time out of the saddle (especially on the long climbs), and my crotch was KILLING me from being sat on all day. Also, I was finding that riding at a more relaxed pace was actually HARDER. Going at a slower average speed, I was covering less distance with each pedalstroke, and I was having to ride much more to cover each mile. Although I was spending a lot of time coasting, I was losing a lot of momentum too, and although we weren't riding very hard it was still taxing to pick up the momentum once I'd given it up. I was really surprised to find that riding 100 miles at a slower pace was actually HARDER than riding fast. It gave me a lot more respect for some of the slower riders who have to work that hard all the time. And there was Anne, who I'd dragged nearly 100 miles already, over a really challenging rout, and she hadn't so much as complained this whole time. She really was unbreakable!

Couldn't resist sharing this. I found it on Youtube the other day and thought it was just great! See the longer version here.

We finally turned up at her friends' house in Jaffrey, NH around 4:00 after 97.66 miles, 8 hours on the road, 6:36 of which were in the saddle. We had climbed over 4,500 cumulative feet, and were now roughly 1,110' higher than where we had started this morning. On the last steep hill up to the house, Anne let out her biggest concession to fatigue: she groaned. Once.

Safely off our bikes and in the house we shoveled our faces full of chips and pretzels and took the world's most satisfying hot showers. I was glad to be out of the saddle, but not as glad as Anne. I hadn't realized she was so tired. She spent about half an hour stretching out, then needed a back rub. As the night wore on she had to keep getting up and stretching, and although she wasn't visibly stiff standing up and sitting down, it was pretty clear that she was hurting. I know that I'm stronger over distance than others, but I hadn't really appreciated the world of hurt that I'd been putting her in. If there had been any doubt left in my mind, there was none now. Anne is one tough motherfucker.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still way more badass than Anne for being able to ride a rout like that without getting very tired. Even on a bad day I'm way more badass than Anne. But compared to the general population, Anne is one badass motherfucker.
(Thanks to Kevin for the photos!)

RICE makes you fat

Things are not going well in Claire country. They are not going well at all. I'm stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare where my driver's license has been revoked. It's a long, long, frustrating story and basically boils down to a policy that the DMV has that they don't properly notify you of payments due. Let's just leave it at that. If I tell you the story I might cry again and that won't help matters any. The point is, it's been upsetting me.

On top of that, horror of horrors, I'm injured. It seems incredible, after all the shit I've put my body through over the past year that what put me over the edge was a 3-mile easy run. Monday I was running along at about 10-minute mile pace just thinking about life, flowers, butterflies, stars, puppies... when I started to get a bit of an ache in my left foot. It wasn't too bad, and things ache all the time only to feel fine the next day, so I finished my run (hey, I had to get home, didn't I?) not too worried about it. I ran some cold water in the tub and soaked my feet for a few minutes, and then forgot about it.

The next day it didn't hurt in the morning, and I forgot about it. I forgot about it on the walk to work. I forgot about it while at work. Then I remembered about it on the walk home from the train when it started to ache a little bit. But I'd just found out about my driver's license, and I really, really, really needed to run and I needed to run HARD. And anyway, if I were injured, I would get some warning before I really fucked it up, and I could back off. So I put on a different pair of shoes and started running. I was doing half-mile repeats up a slight hill, and while I was running fast the foot didn't hurt, but running slow back down it ached like hell. So it's not running FAST that fucked me up, it's running SLOW. What the fuck?! I hoped it would go away as I warmed up, but instead it got worse with time: it was fine on the way up, but killed on the recovery run back down. So after three repeats I turned around and hobbled home. I paid special attention to exactly where it hurt, and where the pain radiated through so that I could look it up when I got home.

Immediately I sat down at the computer and searched "anatomy of the foot" and found what seemed to be the culprit: the Peroneus Brevis tendon, a tendon that goes from the lateral head of your gastrocnemius (calf muscle), under the bump on the outside of your ankle, and tucks under your foot to insert at your fifth metatarsal (the bone mid-foot behind your pinky toe). The alternative is a stress fracture, but I do not have a stress fracture because there is no cure for that other than total rest for 6 weeks, which probably means crutches.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck! I'm supposed to be running the Hartford Marathon next weekend! I'm supposed to be running all this fall and finally becoming a fast runner! I'm not supposed to be injured.

If I get an overuse injury, shouldn't it be in one of the big muscles or joints? Not the tiny little peroneus brevis tendon that is responsible for "plantar flexion and eversion" (curling your foot and rolling it outwards). I do neither of these in road running. Sure, I turn my ankle all the time when I'm running on trails, but I haven't run on trails since last Wednesday. It certainly didn't hurt then. Come to think of it, if this were an overuse injury, why wouldn't it start to hurt when I WAS on a trail with my ankles rolling all over the place??? If I'm going to be taken down, I want it to be something dramatic, not the inflammation of some tendon no one's ever heard of. I feel I'm entitled to something really badass that includes exclamation points at the end, like Exploding Gluteus Syndrome!!! You know, something that involves sparks and maybe a bang, or at least a pop or a crack.

But no.

I have a pretty good idea of what caused it, the same thing that causes most sports injuries: overuse. I haven't bought new shoes in a long time. In fact, one of my pairs of shoes is over a year old (although they haven't been in the rotation for much of that time).

On top of that was my decision to run more in order to run faster. I figured I'd train like a runner, running every day with easy 3-mile runs on the "off days" instead of bike rides. So I ran Saturday and Sunday, Monday I ran easy and it started to hurt, and Tuesday it got worse. What's really frustrating, though, is that I broke none of the 3 commandments of running: I didn't go too far (it was a short run that killed me), too fast (it was slow running that did me in), or too soon! I have done similar running volume and similar intensity many times before with no ill effect. And too soon? Come on! Certainly I have enough of a running base in me to be able to handle an easy 3-mile run!

There's no use in seeing a doctor for now (although I finally have health insurance again!!! yippee!), since what he is almost certainly going to do is tell me to RICE it: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation until it gets better. I don't need to pay a copay and lose several hours of work to hear that. And anyway, doctors hate distance runners. They're worse than fat people. They can't WAIT to tell you that running is "bad for you".

I'm doing everything I should, staying off my feet, icing them, taking Advil (right, Judi?). But I am grouchy. I'm back in that place where I can't drag myself out of bed in the morning to go to the gym. I'm bringing healthy lunches, but going out to buy pizza and cookies instead. I'm eating all kinds of high GI foods, processed foods, and crap I would never normally eat. I'm getting fat.

Which brings me to another point: Rest. I hate rest. It makes me grouchy, depressed, and frantic. I know you need rest, but I prefer to take the "active recovery" option, the one where I sit in the back of the lane and just swim easy, or where I ride my bike easy with slower cyclists and enjoy the ride. Complete and total rest has dire implications for me. What if I get fat? What if I lose my fitness? What if next year I don't have the drive to get in as good shape as I am this year??? I mean, if you're just going to sit around on the couch, you might as well do so with drink in hand.

I know that you need to take time off, and also work rest into macrocycles with the off-season and so on. Rationally, I know this. This is what I would tell anyone else: that they need to take time off to rest. But deep down in the core of my being, I think it's a bit blown out of proportion (read more about it here). You need to let your fitness dip, sure, but get out of shape? Sit on the couch until I'm back to running 10-minute miles? Get fat? Sometimes I think I'd rather get my legs chopped off and continue training than be subject to that.

This weekend, a washout

This weekend was supposed to be great. It was going to be a breakthrough weekend physically and mentally. I was going to see friends, do races I'd been looking forward to, set PRs, laugh, smile, and be merry.

Life is full of disappointments.

First off, it rained. A huge storm blew through on Friday morning, and it's been raining pretty constantly since then. Now, Monday morning, it still has not stopped. Despite Ray of Sunshine Damon's argument that training when the weather is bad just makes you stronger than the competition, I HATE the rain. Dreary days make me sad, grouchy, depressed, and most of all, wet.

Saturday morning was the Wicked Half Marathon in Salem (of witch-burning fame). It was going to be great. I had wanted to do it since I saw the t-shirts last year. The WICKED half marathon, get it? Wicked because it's in Salem, the witch city? Wicked because it's near Boston and we say wicked here? Wicked because wicked kind of means cool and badass at the same time? Get it??? And it was only a half hour away. Then when Michelle said she wanted to do it with me I was thrilled! I knew I could run a PR, but with Michelle to pace off of I bet it wouldn't even hurt!

But life is full of disappointments.

First, Michelle canceled on me. You can't really blame her, the race had an early start and she'd only gotten in from a week in San Jose the night before. So I was already pretty disappointed as I drove alone through the spooooooooooky fog in Salem at 6:15 in the morning. It was eeeeeeeeeerie driving around so early in the morning when no one was out. Come to think of it, where was everyone? Salem is a really confusing place to get around, and it took me awhile to find the right place. Finally I did, but it was deserted. Mysteeeeeeeeerious Actually, scaaaaaaaaary. I went up to the door. It was locked. Creeeeeeaaaapy. By this time I'd figured out that I was in the wrong place, but like an idiot I hadn't printed up a copy of the race directions to find out where I'd gone wrong. You know how sometimes the night before they have packet pick-up in a different place from the start? Yeah, I'd gone to the nighttime packet pick-up place, while the race was starting some 10 miles away. Fuuuuuuuuck.

But sometimes you fuck up. And life is full of disappointments.

So I did not run the Wicked Half Marathon. I went home and ran 6 laps around the pond a mile from my house, the same fucking pond that I run around all the time. I figured it was about time for a half marathon PR, and I didn't need any stinkin' organized race to do it. I figured 8:20 miles would be a pretty challenging pace to run, but I resolved to be tough and soldier through. Alright, it would be really tough, but since I figured I wanted to be able to run a marathon in 3:39:59, I might as well get used to running 8:20 min/miles. Sure, all evidence suggested I couldn't run 13 miles at that pace, and barely run 10K at that pace, but I was sure I could suffer through it.

You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find... that life is full of disappointments.

The first 2-mile loop I felt great. I meant to be running 8:20 pace, but every time my eyes drifted off my wrist, I would drop down to 7:30 pace. I was a rockstar! Still, I somberly reminded myself, you don't want to tucker yourself out. Keep the pace.

The second 2-mile loop I managed to hold roughly the pace I wanted, like clockwork. I had finally mastered this pacing thing! I was feeling pretty proud of myself, but I was feeling pretty queasy too. When I run around my threshold it makes me feel like I'm going to poop my pants. I had assumed that this was just something that happened to everybody, but apparently it does not. It has nothing to do with an actual need to evacuate my bowels, as I found out early on (I can never actually go afterwards). It just feels like really bad menstrual cramps, or when you've eaten something that doesn't agree with you. Alright, it feels like diarrhea.

Anyway, by the time I set out on the 3rd loop I felt like I was going to shit my pants and decided to slow down a bit to see if I started to feel better. Then I planned to speed up.

But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and shit happens. And life is full of disappointments.

I never sped up. In fact, I slowed down. I got this feeling that I never used to get, but I get now. My legs feel fine, my muscles aren't sore, and my turnover is fine. I just get tired. I can get enough air, but it's like there isn't enough oxygen in it. It feels like someone has turned down the volume or something, and I just want to curl up by the side of the road and take a nap. I THINK I am beginning to understand the need for proper pacing, and the implications of going out too fast.


Long story short, I completed 6 laps around that stupid lake (laps 4-6 tacked on another half-mile loop). I had hoped to run around 1:50 (8:24 pace), but I ran 1:56:57. Only about a minute and a half faster than my PR from February. Worst of all, I was only about 11 seconds faster than Anne's half marathon PR (under similar unofficial circumstances: loops around a different pond)! I knew I was better than that! I have been spending some quality time with the Jack Daniels VDOT tables, and he thinks I should be able to run 1:50:59!

I went home exhausted, deflated, and soaked to the bone. And I was disappointed. Life is full of disappointments.

I had planned to run the Vermont 50K the following day, Sunday. Now before you go all crazy on me, there was an actual logic to this. My big A race for this winter is the Disney Marathon, and I want to have a good race there. The only problem is that I'm also signed up for the half marathon the day before. This was actually NOT my idea, but that's another story. So what I wanted to do was actually get some overdistance training in my legs before I started my main training block, and I wanted to make sure it came in the form of back-to-back long runs so that my legs would be prepared to recover quickly for the marathon the second day. But because road racing is so hard on the legs (or mine anyway), and because I find my main limiter in the late stages of a marathon is mainly pain from the pounding rather than actual muscle fatigue, I wanted the second run to be on trail. See, not only do trail runs have less pounding and impact, but also there would be less pressure to run the whole, entire thing, thus lightening the load on my joints while maintaining the time on my feet and distance covered.

See? There is a method to my madness. But shit happens, life is full of disappointments, and there are days when it rains on your parade. You don't always get what you want.

This is what the Vermont 50K would entail:
Driving 2.5 hours to Vermont on Saturday midday to sign up (there was no race-day registration and I wasn't signed up yet).
Sleeping in my car at a campground (since I do not have a tent, nor am I the tenting type, especially in the rain).
Figuring out dinner, breakfast, and coffee in an unfamiliar place.
Then running 31 miles through a ski resort (we're talking alpine skiing) in the rain on trails that had been rained on for 3 days straight now.

I knew I COULD do it, but I knew that with the mud and the rain and the "camping" I would be miserable. And the performance from my legs that morning mad me think that maybe this wasn't the week to push my running.

So I stayed home. Life... sucks.

Instead I went on a 13-mile run with Michelle in the morning. I had slept really badly the night before, had already sent a text message to Michelle saying "If I'm not at the end of your driveway at 7:30, I'm not coming". When my alarm went off I hit the snooze button and thought, I'm going to lie here until that thing goes off again, and if I hear rain then I'm going to turn it off and go back to sleep. But I didn't hear rain. Fuck.

Life is full of disappointments, and it never rains when you want it to.

By the time I got dressed, though, it was raining again. And it rained the whole, entire time we were running. My body did that thing again, that thing where I just wanted to lie down at the side of the road. "Do we have to run 8-minute miles??" I whined. Then it became, "Do we have to run 9-minute miles??" Then "Do we have to run 9:30's?" What I really wanted to do was stop running and walk home, or curl up and sleep in a mud puddle at the side of the road. Eventually I DID let Michelle run on without me and I shuffled home by myself, disappointed and tired. I fell just short of a marathon over the weekend, which I suppose I should be proud of, but I'm not. Hey, it was over 2 days, it doesn't count.

I had such high hopes for this weekend, but it just fizzled. I'd planned to run 18 miles more than I did. I'd hoped for a PR and a huge mental breakthrough in the same weekend. I ran 26.16 miles in 4:03:05, but that's like adding up all my best mile splits of all time and saying that I'm a 3:15 marathoner. I know, I know, I need to rest.

I want to be a good runner, but life isn't fair, shit happens, and sometimes it rains (and more often on the weekends) on your parade. You can't always get what you want, and life is full of disappointments.

I knew it!

I fucking knew it.  The weather really IS worse on the weekend.  And it's all your fault!!!  Anyone who lives west of me, park your damned car!  I'm sick of sunny Tuesdays and rainy Saturdays.

Reason No. 421,964 to wear a helmet

(Are you listening, Judi?)

I can't afford a new train ticket, so I'm back to riding my bike to/from work.  Now that school's back in session and everyone's home from vacation, there are even more wackos out on the road. More cabs with non-functioning blinkers, more trucks making deliveries and parking wherever they damned well please, more of the no. 77 bus, more Berklee School of Music kids stepping out into the street without looking, more drivers talking on cell phones swinging in and out of the bike lane, more insecure drivers hugging the right side of the road, more everything.  

But this morning was bad.  I won't even try to figure out why a lawnmower was driving down Mass Ave at rush hour.  I don't even pretend to know what divine power gave him the right

 of way to run a light and cut me off.  That was weird, but that wasn't the most frustrating part of my ride.  No, the most frustrating part was when, 3 blocks from my office a school

 bus mysteriously stopped (without signaling).  Was there a light up there?  I couldn't see what was going on ahead of the school bus, so I went to the left of it to go around.  Next to the school bus was another semi, so it was a tight spot.  I'm rolling on through the 2-foot channel be

tween the two giant vehicles, hearing the screams of little children inside the bus, when suddenly, about 10 feet in front of me I see the little stop sign that sticks out when the bus's doors are open

 start to swing out.  A second later, now about 5 feet away and too late to stop, I realize that the stop sign is right at face level.  I ducked my head.  The stop sign grazed the top of my helmet, and then I heard a THUNK as my backpack smacked right into it.

Also, I would like to address Fellow Chick Biker's comment on my last post.  She said,

"yeah, yeah, you are so talented, blah. enter a real road race and we'll see if you can hang."

First off, that is just exactly the opposite of what I was saying in my last post.  If she'd actually read the whole post, maybe she would have seen that.  I know I tend to go on a bit (these race reports are more of a scrapbook for me than for anyone else), but if you're going to say something that confrontational to someone, I believe you should find out if they've at least addressed the topic in the post that you're commenting on.  Then again, maybe she can't read. What I was saying was that I haven't competed in a real road race, and it isn't fair for me to think much of myself because I don't know what the riding is like in a real road race, and I don't know if I could hang.  Other people are telling me I'm good, but I've learned the hard way to never underestimate the competition till you've toed the line.

Still, in my defense, I am not a triathon-only rider.  I have a fair amount of experience riding with serious road riders.  What Fellow Chick Biker does not know, and would have found out if she'd taken the time to ask is that I rode in Europe for over a year, WITH a club, and in several races.  I won a climbing preme in one of those races. I was the first chick overall up that hill.  The rides I did were not super competitive, but still, I have seen the inside of a peloton in my day. Another thing that Fellow Chick Biker would not know unless she had asked is that I still ride with road riders.  There is a competitive group that leaves from the local bike shop on Saturday mornings.  I don't know what category they are, but they are active racers and strong riders. There is a "deliberate" group, a medium group, and a "fast" group.  I go with the faster guys. And I can hang with them.  I'm one of the few chicks who ever has been able to ride with the fast group on the Saturday morning rides.  So, Fellow Chick Biker, you're right.  I have never entered a real road race, and I don't know if I can hang, but I never said that I could.  I never said I was the next Lance Armstrong, or even the next Kristen Armstrong.  If I ever say I'm a strong cyclist, it is only in comparison to my swimming and running.  Maybe you're faster, maybe a lot of people are faster.  That's fine, whatever, I don't care.  I just enjoy riding my bike.  I'm not the one saying that I'm going to take the cycling world by storm when I get into cycling seriously next summer.  I'm just going to ride my bike hard and let the cards fall where they may.  

And as Grouchy Co-worker Caitlin says, "Haters, go fist yourselves."

How to REALLY wear the skin off your butt in 2 days

Remember way back in May how I rode 154 miles in a weekend and thought I was such a badass? Well I've built up a little bit more confidence and endurance on the bike since then, and this weekend more by chance than suicidal tendencies I planned myself back-to-back centuries. I was cognizant that I was coming up on my 1-year anniversary of sobriety and maybe I should do something big to celebrate, but that was more of an afterthought. Mostly, I just wanted to ride my bike as much as I could before winter forced me inside (or at the very least into a pair of running shoes).

So on Saturday I packed up my bike and set off for Lake Winnipesaukee (don't expect me to try and spell that name again!). It was a brisk morning, and Mindy turned up dressed like she was ready to climb Mt. Everest in snow gloves, arm warmers, crampons, and the shiniest pair of tights I've ever seen. Okay, I'm lying about the crampons. The only concession I'd made to the cold was a thin long-sleeved jersey to go over my regular jersey. Turns out Mindy was right. As we rode I lost feeling in my hands and feet and the cold really sapped my energy.

Know what else sapped my energy? The hills. Now you might think that doing a loop around the perimeter of a lake would be flat, because all water is level, and therefore the land around it should be level too, right? You would be wrong. If there was a flat inch on that course, Mindy and I must have missed it. We climbed roughly 3,000 feet in 60 miles, all broken into tiny 2-3-minute chunks. We were constantly either climbing or descending.

The scenery was beautiful. When we started the sun was out and mist was just coming off the lake. The trees started to change colors in New England this week, and there were bursts of color all over the horizon. Not far off we could see the White Mountains, and everywhere there were cute little towns and back country roads. And of course, there was the lake. Poor, poor drunk people who are sleeping in and hung over this morning, I thought. And they call me crazy?

The only blemish on the rout was the McCain signs we kept seeing everywhere. What the hell is up with New Hampshire?! It's bordered by Massachusetts and Vermont, arguably two of the most liberal states in the nation, with the third bordering state being Maine, whose politics are only slightly to the right of the far, far left. But New Hampshire is like our own slice of the Bible Belt right here in New England. I've heard it suggested that it's part of the "Live free or die" mentality that they have up there. They don't want taxes, they don't want anyone to tell them to wear a seatbelt or a helmet, and they don't want the damned government in their damned business, thank you very much! Mindy and I must have seen around 200 motorcyclists, and on all those heads I only saw one helmet. You know where it was? Strapped to the back of the motorcycle. And THESE are the swing votes that are deciding our fate?!

Anyway, the traffic prevented Mindy and me from talking much over the course of the ride (which I was, of course, disappointed about!), but we got back to the cars without major incident, then we parted ways and I turned back around to ride another 50 miles on my own. All was going great as I rode down a beautifully-paved road with the widest, cleanest shoulder you ever did see, until my directions told me to take the freeway. Damn. So I turned around, rode back to the car, and called it quits at about 97.6 miles.

I hadn't brought enough cash with me to buy snacks and liquids, and I'd kind of skimped on my nutrition, and by the time I got home at 5:00 (11 hours after leaving) having only ingested about 1.5 liters of Gatorade, a bag of gum drops, a Baby Ruth bar, and a small bag of Chex Mix, I was kind of seeing stars by the time I came in the door. But I drank as much as I could and ate some broccoli (which I'm convinced cures all ills) and got my shit ready for tomorrow: the Charles River Wheelmen's Fall Century.

But here's the problem: shipping my stupid aero helmet back to the UK had cost me way more than I expected, so it was between paying for the century and paying for the gas to drive there. I looked at a map and saw that the start was only 20 miles away, just beyond Concord where many of my training rides go anyway. So I figured, What the hell, I'll just ride to the start.

So I did. I hopped on my bike at 6:30 in the morning, went to Starbucks and filled one of my water bottles with iced coffee instead of Accelerade, picked up $1 worth of candy at 7-11, and rode to Acton. All was going well until I took a wrong turn on a rotary and found myself on the freeway. It was only 7:30 on a Sunday morning and I was going to stick it out, but the debris on the shoulder got so thick that I eventually had to turn around. It's a good thing, too, because it turns out that Rte 2 and Rte 2A are totally different roads going to different places. I just turned myself around and rode the wrong way back up the freeway, back around the rotary (the wrong way), past the State Police station and the State Penitentiary, and on my merry way.

I arrived at the start as most people were already leaving, which was just fine by me. I didn't want to get stuck in the trap of trying to stay with the big guns for the first half of the ride only to find myself 75 miles from home and bonking. Also, it meant that there was no line for the porta-potties. This wasn't my first rodeo, and I knew that I'd catch up with the middle of the pack before long, then I could leapfrog up as I saw fit.

I passed a group of riders right out of the gate, and one woman with super high handlebars and clip-on aerobars (that doesn't work, by the way ) tried to keep up with me. She couldn't, of course. When we hit the first stop sign after about a mile I was already far enough ahead to have crossed the intersection before I heard a scream behind me and I turned around in time to see her go down. There was no one around her, she hadn't been moving very fast, I hadn't seen her wheel go out from under her, what the hell happened? "Are you alright?" I asked.
"Yeah, just couldn't get clipped out in time," she said.
I said what I could to make her feel better, things like, "I won't tell anyone," and "Any blood?" but I swear, that has never, ever happened to me. How incompetent do you have to be to just not clip out in time? (By the way, this is TOTALLY different from, Rocketpants' experience: Rocketpants' fall: unfortunate sequence of events, this lady: incompetent.)

Before long I had fallen in with some Straight Men Over 40 and predictably, they loved me. Then we caught up with an even bigger crew of Straight Men Over 40, and they were tickled pink to have a girl in their midst who was keeping the pace and making old man jokes like, "This is the weirdest-lookin' downhill I've ever seen!" when we were going uphill.
"Hey, didn't I see you riding to the start?" one guy asked.
"Yeah."
"I told my friend Mitch that you were riding to the start, but he didn't believe me. He thought you'd have to be crazy to ride to something like this."
"I've been known to make some pretty bad decisions..." I admitted.
"Hey, Mitch, this is the girl we saw riding to the start!" he yelled to another guy in the pack. "I told you she was doing this thing!"

It was encouraging to have the adulation of so many Straight Men Over 40 marveling at how I'd ridden to the start and I was still keeping up, so I felt compelled to show off a bit. Where normally I would let myself drop back a bit on the hills, I rode hard to keep the pace. I made sure I stayed in the front third of the pack, and made excuses to take pulls and push the pace. Then, at about mile 20 (which was mile 45 for me), I ran out of liquid. I hadn't ever really caught up on my hydration from yesterday, and replacing one of my bottles of sports drink with a diuretic had had a double-whammy effect.

And that was when we hit the hills. Steep, terraced fuckers that just went up and up around every corner, and when you thought they were over, they went up some more. "Do you guys know where the first water stop is?" I asked.
"At about mile 50," one of the guys told me. Fuck! I was going to have to ride another 25 miles, over an hour, without any liquids, and it was starting to get warm. I hoped it would be downhill, but is it ever downhill when you need it to be? I could feel that I was fading a bit, and it was taking a little more effort to stay with the group. We climbed about 750 feet in short jags over the next 15 miles, and I tried to be cheerful, but my good mood was rapidly disappearing. I couldn't be fucking around with a group right now, I needed to get to food and water as fast as I could. On a steep, 20% grade I took advantage of the 50-pound advantage I had over most of these guys and dropped the group. I went on ahead as fast as I could, I didn't want to be messing around braking on the descents and I wanted to be alone when I inevitably got grouchy.

I reached the top and had a beautiful, expansive view of the foothills of the mountains in New Hampshire to one side, and the farms and rolling hills of Massachusetts to the other, and even more fall colors as far as the eye could see. But I had other things to think about. I sped down the hill, and with 75 miles on my watch, I was worried that I had missed the food stop. I interrogated the next guy I came to, and probably wasn't too polite about it, since I thought we'd missed it and was getting ready to blame him for it, but he told me we still had 5 miles to go.

When I finally hit that food stop with my mouth phlegmy and sticky from dehydration, I had one and a half bottles of water, two bananas, a bagel, a cookie some pretzels and maybe some other niblets. The Straight Men Over 40 thought it was hilarious that I'd dropped them. I was just surprised I'd made it 75 miles on such little food and water.

Now recharged, I saddled up with the Straight Men Over 40 and we started to climb right out of the aid station. I dropped them in the first quarter mile, and decided that I wasn't obligated to wait for them, so I rode the next hill alone. On the descent I was caught by an overweight guy who felt the need to talk about all the centuries he'd done, probably to compensate for what people might think of his weight. I was happy for him and the eighty-something pounds he'd lost, but I found it an obnoxious way of bragging, and couldn't wait till the next hill to drop his fat ass.

Then I picked up another Straight Man Over 40. When he passed me and couldn't drop me he asked if I wanted to work together. He was about a foot taller and had almost 100 lb on me, so I said sure. He had the kind of big, curly hair that you can tell he would talk a lot, but I was too lazy to drop him. "You can save like 30% of your energy by drafting..." he started to explain. I hate it when people try to explain the basics of cycling to me, because there's no way your can tell them, "Dude, I know," so I just let him talk until he was spent. Then it was my turn to pull. I hopped in the front and set a stiff pace for him to keep up with. I was feeling really good again after my feast at the last rest stop. "You're riding pretty good for mile 70," he said.
I looked at my watch, "Actually, 95," I corrected him and smiled. His face was pretty priceless.
"My god, you're ready for the Tour!" he said when it came out that I'd ridden 100 miles the day before (I forget how, I know I didn't bring it up).
"Yep, if they'd let women in," I joked.
We talked about the tour, about cycling, about races, and he got increasingly flattering about my riding. "Man," he kept saying, "I can't wait to tell my brother about you... making me hurt like this after 100 miles!" then an I can hardly believe it chuckle. His brother was apparently an even bigger cycling geek than he was.
He was more and more flattering about my riding, and he boosted my ego so high that I continued to ride hard. "You should get into racing," he was saying. "You could be a Cat 2, at LEAST!"
I know I'm cocky about my riding, but I'm conservative about expectations about where I'll stack up against real cyclists. I may be strong in small-town races, but I know that there are women out there who ride like beasts. I figure that if 18 mph fitness is like running a 10-minute mile, 19 is like a 9-minute mile, 20 an 8-minute mile and so forth, my skill is about equivalent to 7-minute pace: pretty good for an age grouper, but that's warm-up pace for a champion. The best women in the world can do 40 km time trials at 23 miles per hour or faster, I don't even know what their speeds look like in pack riding. There's nothing I would like more than to be paid to ride my bike, but women don't get paid to ride their bikes. While even the lowliest male domestique gets paid $60,000 per year, even the best women in the sport are riding for little more than free bikes and smalltime prize purses. It makes me angry.

At the 75-mile aid station (roughly 100 miles for me) I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a handfull of pita chips, the Straight Men Over 40 caught up and joked about how I'd dropped them, and so they wouldn't offer me a ride home anymore, and then Curly and I set off again. He now had me competing on an international circuit and I was getting a bit tired of it. Anyway, I was dropping him on hills, and he was having to ride pretty hard to catch up, my drafting advantage was gone. Then 3 riders sped by, lead by a woman, and I took off after them. Ain't no woman going to pass me!

They were riding a pace that made me work my ass off, but I was keeping up. When it was my turn to pull I rode till I was slack-jawed and breathing as hard as I could. I was going so fast that I hardly had time to point out the potholes before we were over them. I kept going for longer than anyone else had been pulling just to prove a point, and then the other woman took over, keeping the pace high. As I drifted back I heard one of the guys say to the other, "Where did these chicks come from?!" Those final 10 or 15 miles were the fastest I rode all day, holding an average of a little over 21 mph. We were riding so hard that we missed one of the turn markers on the road and everyone had to stop and figure out what to do. Thankfully, after that we slackened the pace, we were already at about mile 97 (122 for me) and it was time to cool down anyway. Curly was dropped.

Unfortunately, this group seemed to have a pretty abominable sense of direction. We found the course again, but before long the woman yelled out for us to make a right turn. I hadn't seen any turn signals. I was second-to-last and slowed down for the sharp turn, but the guy behind me didn't see us slowing in time. Suddenly his brake hood was up my ass and he was pushing me down the road. "HEY!!!" I yelled. The brake hood got out of my ass, and then rolled right back into it again. "HEY!!!" I yelled again. We made the turn, and immediately the front two started saying, "Wait, this isn't right!" I didn't even stop, I just turned around and rode right back out again, alone. They caught up and the guy who'd hit me apologized. "If you wanted to grab my ass, all you had to do was ask..." I said, trying to be nice about it, but now I wished I could drop them. I rode the final few miles with them, and then they sailed right past the high school. "It's over here, guys!" I yelled after them. They kept riding, and I just stopped and turned my bike right around. They never turned up in the parking lot, and I wonder what happened to them.

I shoved some chips into my face and made myself a sandwich before Curly rode in. He gushed a little bit more about my ability to drop him after 125 miles. It made me a bit nervous, half the people sitting around at the finish were women, and not the kind in pink fashion jerseys riding Bianchis either. Letting Curly talk me up was almost like bragging myself, and you never know who's listening. "Well, we'll see next summer," I said at a volume level with his (loud). "I've gotta work my way through the system first... There are lots of talented women out there." Then I made an excuse about not wanting my legs to cool off too much and hopped on my bike and headed for home.

There wasn't much skin left on my ass, and I had a generalized fatigue deep in my legs, but I had no problem riding the last 20 miles home. In fact, the biggest pain was the one in my ass riding over rough pavement, so I just clicked up a gear and stood up. Biking is easier on your joints, bones, and muscles than running and as long as I kept eating, I felt like I could have gone on forever. I pulled into my driveway after 146 miles, and got off my bike.

This week my legs have been tired and heavy, but not exceptionally sore. Still, I've been taking the train into work.