Boston

This post is late. Like everyone else, I have been glued to the television and social media to make sure that my friends and loved ones are okay. Monday was a frantic day, loading and reloading social media because I didn't even know who to check up on. Anyone could have been there. Many people that I know were there but everyone is okay. Thank god. I did run cross country in high school with one of the cops that was shot, but I barely knew him.

When a client first mentioned something about an "explosion at the marathon finish line," I thought it was an MIT prank gone awry. An explosion at the Boston Marathon finish line? What? That makes no sense. No one would notice a dancing bear at the Boston Marathon finish line. I've been there. It's pandemonium. Then I walked by a TV screen and saw what he meant: runners crossing the finish line, and then an explosion, a man that looked like Grandpa hitting the ground, and other runners turning around as they ran the final few yards and hit their watches, because who's thinking about danger at a marathon finish line? All I could think about was how many times I'd had the thought at a marathon finish line at that moment I couldn't get out of the way of a speeding train. The stories of the runners who jumped to help the injured, or kept running to the hospital to donate blood hit me and every marathoner right in the heart. And what about the people 5 blocks back who just wanted to finish and now had to walk farther in the other direction with no food or water just to get home? Of course these people weren't the victims, but it's human nature to ask, who would I be in this tragedy?

Once the crowds were cleared, the victims' families had been reached, and the immediate shock of the incident had passed, the rest could sink in. I heard criticism of runners standing up self-righteously on the news and saying, "This will not keep me from running!" This is not about you, you self-important ass. Yes, there is a tendency for everyone to make tragedy about them, but it's true, this attack was not an attack on running. The Boston Marathon just happened to be an obvious target for some sickos to get some attention by hurting and killing some innocent people. But all the same, for the fitness community, it hit close to home.

As athletes and runners, we know that running stands for good. Runners and endurance athletes are not all saints, but when we are running, often that is the most positive thing in our lives. Running is the only way we know how to solve life's unsolvable problems and become better people. Whether becoming a better person means raising money for cancer research, or just blowing off steam so that we don't strangle our boss, when we are running we are innocent; as benign and separate from international politics as a classroom full of kindergarteners.

The finish line of a marathon symbolizes more than innocence. The finish line symbolizes achievement, and the culmination of months and years of runs that have brought us to that finish line better people. The finish line symbolizes overcoming fatigue, pain, and adversity to reach a goal that is important enough for you to endure that discomfort. The marathon finish line is an allegory for overcoming the adversity in life as well. If you can finish a marathon, then you can get through this tough patch at work, or survive a new baby, or survive the grief of a break-up, and come out stronger in the end. The Boston Marathon especially is the subject of every distance runner's fantasies. While most marathons are the culmination of months of work, the Boston Marathon is often the culmination of years of hard and dedicated work, a lifetime achievement that no one can take away from you. Something that will give you confidence forever.

The finish line of a marathon is also when you get to share your lonely sport and its quiet accomplishments with the people you love. If you have never run the Boston Marathon, then you should. There are people cheering for you every step of the way, and the entire city shuts down to come cheer in the runners. It is the only event I know where the Red Sox game that happens every Marathon Monday Morning is the opening band to the Big Event. This is the chance for family, friends, and loved ones to take part in your accomplishment. And in Boston this year, it wasn't the runners who were killed, but the spectators: the people who took their day off to celebrate our accomplishments.

And now runners around the country have been shaken to the bones. And as runners, we don't know how to fix the evil of the world except to run. So I will continue to run. Not because Boston was an attack on runners, but because running is a sport that I love, and I want to make it possible for myself and other runners to make the world a better place by placing finish lines on every road that we tread.

What goes SPLAT? Claire hitting the wall

I have been dying to see where I'm at with a race. I don't think I've ever been training so little, running so much, or running so strong (not fast) in my life. But who knows. I've been trail running, how can you possibly quantify trail running? How about a 50K to see what happens?

When I left off racing and 50K's I had just made a major break-through. I hate having sticky hands from when they refill your water bottle and slosh sports drink all over your hands, so I decided to run a whole race on water and electrolyte tabs (and real food). At every aid station I took 2 salt tabs and ran with water in between, and that "wheels falling off" feeling that I took for granted as happening at mile 18-20 of every race never hit. My last mile was my fastest mile, and much to my amazement I placed in the top 3 women that day. (To be fair, it was the weekend after a major trail race, and all the heavy-hitters had raced the week before and were home resting). But that was on December 31, 2011, and I hadn't run more than 13 miles since.

I showed up at the start with my coworker, the trail running convert. Well, he was converted to trail running, but he still doesn't get the whole low-key vibe of the scene. He wanted to show up an hour and a half early to get a FULL warm-up. He turned down coffee because he said his stomach got upset before races, and even before some workouts, and indeed he felt like he was going to vomit all morning. While waiting for the start, a woman struck up a conversation with me, and I had to apologize for being distracted and staring off toward the bathrooms as she was talking. "Sorry, my friend isn't feeling well this morning, and I'm afraid he might be puking in the bathroom and miss the start. If you see a guy wearing a Captain America shirt come up the hill, he's with me."

"Oh no, he's fine," said her husband. "I saw him bouncing around down by the bathroom" (said with clear confusion and a little bit of distain). That would be Captain America's dynamic warm-up. I believe that dynamic warm-ups have a place in running distances a half marathon or shorter, but a 50K? Seriously. When he finally came up to the start a minute before we left, he was shiny with sweat and breathing hard.  I looked around and noticed he was the only one sweating. He was also wearing head phones. "I don't want to hear any of the other runners giving me that, 'Hey, good job!' bullshit," he said. "I'm here to race."

The course had a profile like a pair of boobs:

About 5 miles of climbing, about 5 miles rolling, 5 miles down, 5 miles back up, 5 miles rolling, and 5 miles back down. My pacing strategy was just to run until I got out of breath, then walk. But for once in my life the hill was a steady run-able grade. I ran up 90% of the first hill, only stopping to walk when I knew I was near the top and everyone else around me seemed to be walking. Then I ran the rolling hills to the second aid station at mile 11, where I fueled up on salt tabs, water, and potatoes and asked how long it would be until I saw them again at the top of the second boob. "9.8 miles," he said.

9.8 miles seemed like a long way to go without water, especially since half of that distance was uphill and we had already run 10 miles, and had 10 to go when we got back, but whatever. What can you do? I ran down the hill, and then I ran back up the hill. I counted my paces, and every 100 paces I asked myself if I needed to walk. But with only one or two exceptions, the answer was, no, I can easily run another 100 paces, so I did.

When I reached the aid station again at mile 20, my head was pounding and my legs had stopped cooperating. I wished the uphill would go on and on forever, because suddenly the increased pace of the downhill was making me feel like my legs had fallen off. The next 10 miles of rolling and downhill were a struggle, even though the hardest miles were behind me. I ran like a zombie, plodding along on legs that felt like they were running smoothly but the miles wouldn't budge from in front of me. I think there is probably still a singed redwood out there where I blew to high heaven.

Running down the final hill I began to talk to myself out loud. "Just relax," I said. "Don't worry about it. You'll get there eventually, and you can sit down then. Don't look at your watch, you'll get there. Just don't panic." It was a strange difference from how I used to talk to myself: "Hurry up, kiddo. Harden up. You can gut it out. PUSH!" I'm not sure if I would have run any faster if I had taken the drill sergent tone with myself, but my calves, hips, abs, and shoulders were so sore that I thought that relaxing would be the better strategy. And wouldn't you know, I did get there eventually. I only looked at my watch twice in the last 4 miles, and just tried to relax.

The last 10K I managed to run a blistering 12-minute pace downhill back to the finish, but I did finish most of it running and did not curl up for a nap on the side of the trail. All I wanted to do was lie down and fall asleep. I had been "tired" and "sore" before, but very rarely "sleepy."

I lurched, stumbled, and tottered the final several hundred yards to the finish line to come in in 5:59:12. I'd finally broken that 6 hour barrier in a 50K!

Could I have paced the race better? Sure. Could I have run a little faster in the last 10 miles with a different nutrition strategy, I'm not sure. However, I was glad that I hadn't held back in the first 20 miles to finish strong. I had run the hardest part of the course, feeling strong and passing others but never being passed on the hills. Now all I need to do is get my endurance back, and I feel that I could actually race over that distance. The idea of racing a distance longer than 2 hours always seemed impossible for my little stocky body that hates running so, but maybe in my old age I can find something about running that I can be at peace with.

Legit

"Look at you, running at incline..." (said in a purposely condescending tone).

You know what's humbling? When your self-esteem is based on your achievements, and then you come to a new place and no one knows your achievements. Who wants to constantly be proving themselves? These days I just fly under the radar and wait for people to notice.

When a coworker said to me, "Look at you, running at incline..." I wanted to say, "Do you know who I am?!" Instead I said, "Who do you think I am?!" Small difference in words, big difference in meaning. I don't need to prove myself anymore.

Then I ran a half marathon every day for a week, just to see what would happen. Monday through Friday, those half marathons were run on the treadmill. Then people thought I was crazy. But when I finished without any major detriment, things changed subtly.

Then I started trying to coordinate with the coworker mentioned above. It looked a bit like this:
Coworker: Double Dish on Saturday? (The Dish is a 3.5 mile boring-ass hilly paved run around a big satellite dish near the Stanford campus).
Me: The dish is ugly and boring
Coworker: PG&E then?
Me: PG&E is boring
Coworker: Well where do YOU run then?
Me: Why don't you come run Foothill with me? 8 miles, hilly, not boring.
Coworker: Where?
Me: Dude, it's like 5 miles from work! You realize there are trails everywhere around here, right?!

So he joined me on my next 8 mile run through the woods on a trail called Los Troncos that DOESN'T have 200 parking spots at the base. 8 miles of single track that climbs interminably for the first 2.5 miles and then drops you slowly on a flowing roller coaster of single track that whips you around trees and on several-inch rims carved into the side of valleys and canyons. He showed up in road shoes with no water and barely kept up.

"I think I'm going to call you Troncos from now on, after the trail," he said.
"Don't call me Troncos, that means tree trunks. It makes me feel fat!"
"You know, Troncos, I thought we were trail running before on PG&E, but you could drive two cars side by side up that trail. That section at miles 4 and 5 was like straight up Sonic the Hedgehog action. When are we doing it again?"

For the next two weeks he bugged me every time he saw me, "Hey, Troncos, when are we running again?" "Hey, Troncos, when are you bringing me up there again?" We ran it one more time, and then he was able to follow the trail on his own without getting lost.

"Hey, Troncos, when are we running that trail again?"
"Why don't we run a different trail next time?" I said. "You realize that there's nothing but trail all the way up to San Francisco and all the way down past Santa Cruz, right?"
"Alright, where are we going next time?"
"Montebello."

So today we ran Montebello: coworker hacking up phlegm up every hill and carefully stepping down every hill as I coasted waiting for him. Back at work after a shower, I saw him again.

"Troncos, Troncos, Troncos. Who woulda thought that you're legit?"

That's right. Now spread the word, because I don't want to have to school everyone here!

Failure is not an option

Remember those Marathon Monks I was talking about? Well I'm still thinking about them, and why we endurance athletes are drawn to stories of extreme endurance over long periods. Why did Dean Karnazes's 50/50 stunt capture the imagination of so many? Why do the 50 state marathoners feel the need to add coherence or a pattern to their marathons? Why not just run 50 marathons in the 6 states that border your own?

One recurring theme that I see in many of these endurance epics, whether they are blogs or books is the idea of meditation or zen. You set out to complete a task and cover a certain distance that will take all day and a great deal of physical and mental energy. You might think that you're going to get a whole lot of thinking done, but it rarely works out that way. Instead, the universal experience seems to be that your mind stops following a single line and eventually hits a meditative state where thoughts come and go with the same detachment and vividness as that period between sleep and wakefulness. On long runs and rides, I have had the same bar of one song stuck in my head for 10 hours, or have relived a forgotten experience from my past with such vividness that it's almost as if I'm back there again. When your mind is relaxed, that's when you are able to think along different lines and you can think outside your normal constraints and see windows where you only saw walls before. I usually say I do my best thinking with my pants off because all my best ideas come when I'm in the shower or on the toilet -- when I take a break. I've had those thoughts on runs too. This feeling of meditation must be what the monks are after when they give up their lives to run thousands and thousands of miles over 8 years. The more entrenched you are in your usual thought patterns, the more you wish for enlightenment, the more you must need to break out of them through hours of repetitive stepping and breathing, I guess. If one day of running can cause you to think deep thoughts, what must 8 years of ultra running every day do to your mind? No wonder they say they achieve sainthood in life!

There is another thing that draws me to their story. It is the fact that they cannot quit. If they quit, or if they can't run one day, then they commit to kill themselves. One thing that I think about a lot with my clients is how to override the instinct to stay within your comfort zone at all times. If I held a gun to my clients' head, they would surely not need that extra 10s of rest. But obviously I can't walk around holding a gun to someone's head for an hour a day and get away with it. But if your life depends on completing the task you set for yourself, failure is not an option. You stop thinking about how you CAN'T and instead the brain and body work on the question of "how can I go on?" There is always a way to go on. Find a way to continue, or die. As someone who has suffered from burn-out in the past, and who is always battling the urge to make excuses to take the easy road, I'm intrigued by situations where failure truly isn't an option.

One thing that the successful monks have described about their experience is that they learn that their own suffering is insignificant in the face of everything in the Universe. If you are tired, sore, or bored, the world doesn't care. If you quit and kill yourself, the world doesn't care. No one cares if you fail but you. So those who achieve great things in life; the Steve Jobses, Nelson Mandellas, Lance Armstrongs (drugs or no, he just wanted it more), Mohamed Alis of the world are simply those who recognize that for them to achieve greatness, they simply cannot make excuses, so they make the hard decisions that no one else will make. You can always quit, but for those who don't quit, there is greatness waiting at the end of it.

I recently finished "Running with the Kenyans" about another group of people who just run, forget the limitations. Unlike the Japanese monks that go for unbroken streaks unheard-of distances, the Kenyans defy all known speed limits; starting out too fast and only getting faster. The Kenyans have rewritten the record book and completely dominated in a sport that is everyone who is a citizen of the world has access to. And yet the Kenyans dominate to a point where it doesn't seem fair.

The author goes to live and train in Kenya for 6 months to discover the "secret" of the Kenyan runners (as if there were one that had been eluding every western scientist for so long). In the end he concludes it is the confluence of location, culture, and opportunity that means being Kenyan that also produces great runners. One of the factors that he identifies that I haven't heard before was that Kenyans grow up living a Hard Knock life, where making it big by winning an international road race is the only way to get out of spending your life doing hard labor. The style of training that he discovers is primitive in the same way that saving your money in your mattress is to advanced prospecting and investing. The Kenyan runners run fast when they feel good, and don't when they don't. Coaches (often Europeans) don't share the training plans with the Kenyan athletes, who just turn up to run and then run "fast" or "slow" based on feel, not splits. Finn describes one fartlek workout, attended by hundreds of elite runners where the workout was 25x1 min on/1 min off. Regardless of pace or ability, these 200+ runners all set out at the same time, and when their watches beeped, they ran fast, when they beeped again, the athletes all slowed down. When they had run for 50 minutes, they walked the rest of the way back home. Not measuring your training is another way that developing a keen sense of self and the body can lead to results far better than those that you could imagine through a structured training program.

Remember that itch that I was talking about; the itch to do something greater than? Well, I've been marinating on this idea for long enough that I think that I'm ready to commit to it. I want to try a new challenge; something to make me better. I have an idea, but what if I fail? What if I'm not strong enough to take failure off the table. Then what?

Slop

Slop, slop, slop. That's the noise that my feet made as I ran up the trail that had been rained on all morning. It was that slippery, clay-ey stuff that turns into a slip-n-slide when it gets wet. And now it was wet enough that my foot prints were about an inch deep and smeared.

If I were a better photographer you could see that
the mud was sticking out the side of my shoe.

The bottom of my shoe

I had just been listening to a section in the audiobook Running with the Kenyans where he describes how it's the weight of our shoes that messes us up, and now here I am with my shoes so heavy with stuck mud that I could actually feel the gravity of my shoe laces as my shoes tried to fall off my feet with each step. There was mud stuck to mud stuck to mud on my shoes so thick that there was mud sticking out an inch in all directions from the sole and you couldn't see any of the treads on the bottom. The mud would stick to my shoes, but my shoes couldn't get purchase in the mud. My legs had better look so buff after this! Every few steps I shook my feet and huge clods of mud came up and smacked me in the ass and the back of the head.

But I made it up that 1300 foot hill. I made it up, and then I ran back down it, and not once did I slip and fall on my ass, and THAT is a victory I can be proud of!

The last time I climbed this hill, I hiked it with my girlfriend. One thing you should know about me is that I am a very slow walker. Normally, she is very patient with me and my little legs, but that day I had sat on my ass shopping online while she did the dishes (my job). So when we went hiking, we hiked at HER pace. Me hiking at her pace meant every 10th of a mile or so I had to break into a run to catch up.

Even with an extra pound of mud on each foot, even climbing the hill the opposite way in the steeper direction, running it was still easier than hiking it. When I hiked it, my ass was sore. And that, my friends, is ALMOST as much of a victory as not falling on your ass in mud that looks like a 1300ft mountain of shit. I'm pretty sure that there's a million-dollar idea for a Nike or Gatorade commercial in here somewhere. Talk to my agent...

Lost

God help me find my way in these woods!

As far as I can tell I'm standing at the corner of the Valley View Trail, the Valley View Trail, the Valley View Trail, and if I go down that way, the sign says I will meet up with the Valley View Trail in .2 miles. I mapped out this route before I left on Map My Run, but right now all I can see on my phone is a red line that is my intended route and the glowing blue dot that is me leaving a blue slug trail that vaguely resembles the planned route...sometimes... To within half a mile. Other than that, this lovely single track that just dumped me out of the redwoods into a meadow where the Valley View Trail crosses itself 5 different ways has been reduced to a grey grid on my phone with no other clues. I don't even know which way I'm facing. I have run twice down every single variation of the Valley View Trail, and I'm still circling the crossroads.

To make matters worse, there is a class of about 25 middle school students gathered at the crossroads. I feel like if I walk past them one more time, one will start shouting "Stranger Danger!" and then I will be arrested. I hate children. I can feel their judgement on me.

I go off trail in the direction that this imaginary trail might be, seeing as it is the only direction that I have not yet explored, but only make it about ten paces before I have to admit that there's no trail here. Instead, I hide in a bush and hope the teenagers will go away. They don't.

I crash out of the woods (a spot where you would really have to be crazy to think there was a trail) and run past the kids as fast as I can and just run back the way I came. Fuck this place.

This is the second time this has happened to me in the same spot. The last time the sun set on me and I wound up running until I found a road, the running on the road till I had a signal and sending 2 text messages:
(To girlfriend) I'm running north on this road. Please come pick me up (with location pin included).
(To client) I'm lost in the woods and don't think I'll be back in the next hour for our appointment.

I need a new app.

Transcendence

It's time to dust off the old blog. Whenever I'm posting regularly on this blog, it helps me to transform and become a better version of myself. In 2008 I left a failed life behind and became the person I will be for the rest of my life by racing my ass off. In 2010 I stumbled, and had to work out the bugs and reinvented myself again. When I stop writing, I seem to lose myself. Blogging has changed since I started in 2007, and I'm going to attempt to change with it. Longwinded posts lose readers, and if it doesn't fit into 140 characters and a pithy photo, then it's not worth reading or sharing. So I'm going to use some self-control to sweep the curser over large blocks of type and keep it short.

But not today.

My life is in order in a way that it never has been before. I live in a place that I love. I have a job that I'm good at and earns me enough money to support the lifestyle that I want to live. I'm in a great relationship with a woman that I adore who accepts me for who I am, and makes every day happier. I've achieved things that I'm proud of and don't feel like I have to prove anything anymore. And for the first time in 3 years I have the time and energy to turn back to goals. But what goals do you set when you don't really care about the results anymore?

Because of my 12- to 14-hour work days, I haven't been able to ride my bike much for over a year, but that's okay. When I hung my bike up, I was so burnt out on riding that I was ready to pardon myself for expectations that I didn't have the gumption to live up to anymore. The other day I rode my bike for the first time in forever, climbing up a one-hour hill, and realized that in my heyday, every ride was full of self-loathing. When I rode with self-acceptance I didn't know what to think about and kind of got bored. Bored and cold.

Instead I've been doing a lot of trail running. The Bay Area has to have the best trail running in the country, and lately my training plan is to find the green spaces on Google maps and explore a different one every day that I have time. I like trail running, because when you're climbing a 1000' hill or finding your footing at 8 min miles over flowing single-track you can't concentrate on a clock, just staying upright. Just getting up the hill is accomplishment enough, and who cares how long it takes and if I walk a bit along the way?

Yet I'm itching to test myself again. When I think back over the accomplishments that I'm most proud of, it's not the ones I trained for that I'm the most fond of. It's the ones where I came in with no expectations, and the results were secondary. I miss the days where I had a greater purpose, and adventures were just a way to keep it interesting. In 2008, I had no expectations and did whatever race sounded like it would create the best race report, and I had a blast. In 2009 I fancied myself competitive, and set success/fail goals; then I didn't meet any of them. In 2010, all I had to do was survive, and while there were extreme lows, loneliness and desperation also led to experiences that I never would have thought of otherwise. 2011 and 2012 were about balancing out my life, and my interests lay more in business than in sport.

Now I have the itch again. I'm itching, but I have no clear goals, and nothing to run away from. I don't know where to scratch.

What fires me up these days?

I have this friend Chris. When I met him in January 2012, he had started a 60-day challenge to work out every day and finish with a marathon. Every day Chris posted a picture from his workout on Facebook, and so part of the challenge became finding the best moment of the workout and sharing that moment with his friends. So hanging out with Chris feels like you're taking part in the most fun life ever.

Somewhere around day 65 of the 60-day challenge, Chris decided that he was going to run 60 marathons in 2012. People told him that he was going to burn out, he was going to get hurt, he was going to get slow. And around April, it seemed to be happening. Chris's knees were sore and his ankles were constantly giving him trouble. And just then, that was when things started to change. By May, Chris was getting faster with every marathon, and had decided to run not 1, but 2 100-mile races six weeks apart, and with a week of 7 consecutive marathons in between. (Did I mention he also had a few weeks that summer that he was shitting blood?). And it's not just the adventures that I see Chris having every day and the who's-who of ultrarunning that he tags in his Facebook photos that light a fire in the pit of my belly again. Something intrigues me about the "wall" of impossibility.

The human body has limits. I have found that from personal experience. But when there is a higher calling, those limits seem to fall away and there is something on the other side of overtraining. I've started thinking of it as "transcendence." Chris's story is not the only example I've found of it. On a smaller scale it's the "second wind" that we have all experienced in a tough workout. On a large scale, there are cases like Chris's. For example, in the book "Wild" Cheryl Strayed talks about how showing up on the Pacific Crest Trail she could barely walk under the weight of her 70+lb pack, but after a dark breaking-in period she reached a point where she could hike 20 miles per day for days at a time.

And then there is my newest obsession: The Marathon Monks of Mt. Hiei in Japan. These monks run 30-40K a day (depending on the course) for 100 consecutive days. After the first 100 days, they get the option to quit or to continue. If they continue, they commit to 7 more years, at the end of which they achieve living sainthood. But if they quit, then they must kill themselves. The remaining 7 years are as follows (according to Wikipedia):

Years 2&3: 30K a day for 100 days

Years 4&5: 30K a day for 200 days

Year 6: 60K a day for 100 days

Year 7: 84K a day for 100 days, followed by 30K a day for 100 days

Year 8: 30K a day for 100 days

There's something to be said for doing something extraordinary every day NO MATTER WHAT. Tired? Keep going. Bored? Keep going. Sick? Keep going. Injured? Keep going. Wild boar attack? You guessed it: Keep going!

How much more would we be capable of if our lives really did depend on it? (This is true of most things, not just sport.) By the end of the journey, the monks describe a feeling of oneness with nature and being able to know the exact moment when the birds will start singing, and being able to smell the weather days ahead of time. All that metaphysical stuff aside, they describe a feeling of understanding how small a role they play in the universe and the insignificance of their personal suffering. And THAT is what I'm after: the feeling that no matter what mini drama I'm going through ('I don't WANT to wake up at 4:00 every day this week!' 'I don't FEEL like doing the dishes!' 'I'm too TIRED to do 10 sessions today!' 'I had a rough day, I deserve to eat this!'), that none of it matters, and it's those who have the strength to transcend their melodramas are those who achieve extraordinary lives. I guess that's called self-discipline.

The question is what balance of challenge, expectations, and rest is the right combination to create discipline and not burn-out? I have no idea.