Maffetone Method. Nope

Before I begin describing my experience with the Maffetone Method, let me quickly explain what it is; and what it is not. The theory (postulated by one Phil Maffetone) goes that most endurance athletes spend too much time in their “anaerobic zone” - someting Mr. Maffetone defines differently from most physiologists as the sustainable pace where the majority of one’s energy is derived from carbohydrates instead of fat. Maffetone takes your standard low heart rate base miles formula and takes it about 10 steps farther: turning down the heart rate recommended by other low-heart-rate advocates, and arguing that you should do all your running at that pace. He claims that you will soon become so ridiculously fast at your “easy” heart rate, that all other efforts that you layer on top of that will increase by a proportionate margin. His book gives case studies of 45-minute 10K runners who start with “MAF” heart rates at 10:30 min/miles eventually being able to run 7:30-miles at their MAF HR, and subsequently taking more than 5 minutes off of their 10K PR’s.

Mark "Grip" Allen claims that the Maffetone
method of training helped him make the leap
from elite to unbeatable. That and some peyote.

The description is plausible, and the case studies persuasive, especially that of Mark Allen. Plus, the idea of trying a completely different way of training that a guy who wrote a book insisted would get me results far superior to everything I’d ever tried before was appealing, despite my incredulity. So after my post-Boston break from running I decided I would use my unstructured summer running to give the Maffetone Method a fair shake.

May - Baseline

I took about a week completely off of running after the race, stopped eating clean, and in general started doing the offseason thing. I still ran about 4-7 miles per day, about 5 days a week (compared to an average of 10 miles per day, 7 days per week), and my MAF heart rate let me run about 6.7-7mph (8:35-9 min miles). By the end of May, my MAF pace had dropped to between 6.5 and 6.7 mph (9-9:15 miles). I thought maybe I could chalk that up to a general decline of my marathon fitness, decreased mileage and a focus on building muscle.

June - Where things really changed

For the first half of June, we went on a 17-day vacation to Europe, where I did no running whatsoever. When I got back my MAF pace had dropped to about 5.5-6mph. I suppose I expected a bit of a decline, but I also expected to build it back quickly. I was only away for a couple of weeks, after all. But nearly a month later, my runs still average about 5.7mph. Obviously the Maffetone promise of running faster at your MAF heart rate were not bearing out.

July - Nails in the coffin

But what about the promise that your race performances would improve from running slower? If Maffetone (and the haters) were right, and high volume/high speed leads to overtraining, then my race performances shouldn’t drop off by as much. Maybe? My coworker and I signed up for a 10-mile pancake-flat race two weeks after I returned from vacation. Normally, my coworker runs at a similar to slightly slower pace than I do so I started running next to her. Immediately my hamstrings blew up like I was trying to race up a steep hill and I started breathing like a moose in heat. I wasn’t able to keep up with her 8:45 pace (usually a fairly easy pace for me) for even a mile. I finished that race with an average pace of 9:00/mile and felt like I’d been run over by a tractor for the rest of the day. I mean, that race felt really, really horrible.

Thinking that that day may have only been a fluke (maybe I was fighting something; maybe I hadn’t slept well that week…), I decided one day to turn off my high heart rate alert, and just let myself go for an easy 7.5 mile run based on feel. It was a disaster. Averaging 9:20 min/miles I staggered through the 7.5 mile run to work feeling like I was carrying a 100-pound backpack at 10,000 feet. Could I have slowed down? No. Running slower felt no better, and getting "comfortable" would have reduced me to a walk. When I checked my average heart rate, it was similar to that of a 10K several months before where I had averaged a 7:12 pace (a pace that had disappointed me at the time). This was bullshit. I had just run a 3:37 marathon that I had been disappointed with, and three months later could barely sustain 9:20 pace for a one-hour workout. This is where I cut off the experiment.

Conclusions:

The Maffetone Method doesn’t work.

It may work if you are an inexperienced runner who treats every workout as a race, and runs a low enough volume that you don’t need to vary your pace. It may even work for someone who’s never run in their entire life. It doesn’t work for me.

I probably could learn a lesson in taking my easy runs a little easier. I’ll do that. But right now I’ve got a whole bunch of base miles to run to make up for the extra 2 minutes per mile it takes me to run now, and I just don’t have time to run those miles at 11-minute pace.

Boston - draft

I started writing a race report, and the draft has been sitting on my desktop unfinished since April. I'm posting it here unedited for posterity.

This is a story about having to work a lot harder than you thought for something. It is not so much a story of perseverance as it is a story of serendipity in the places you least expect it, and adversity in the places where you feel like life owed you a break. It is also a story about being really, really cold.

I ran my first marathon 10 years ago, almost to the day. I ran that marathon in 4:45. For years I ran marathons -- sometimes trained and sometimes untrained – always clocking an underwhelming 4:00 to 4:15. What I learned from this experience was that 30 miles per week won’t make you faster, and that The Twenty Mile Run is the most wretched workout in all of sport.

Turning 30 taught me patience, and I learned that to run faster, you just have to run a lot more. Since then, I have clocked a handful of marathons in the most frustrating of all time windows: 3:35:01-3:40:59, a time that would have qualified me when I was slow and the qualifying times were slower, but are not fast enough to qualify me with the new standard. I have had one fantastic race, but as I continue coming home in the “close, but no cigar” neighborhood, all I want to know is that it was no fluke. So my only goal this week was to qualify for Boston at Boston.

In my build-up to the race, I had one cold, one stomach bug, and one major nagging injury caused by a high heel and one wrong step. Who knew a big toe tendon could be so important? But it haunted me for hundreds of miles, migrating through my heel, arch, shin, and ankle. I also ate better than I’d eaten in my entire life, cutting out all processed grains, added sugars, and cheese for 3.5 months leading up to the race. But that’s a story for a different post. I arrived in Boston feeling good, and secure that only my own stupidity could get in the way of me and my 3:30 goal time. I was even foolish enough to keep in the back of my mind that there were certain graphs that projected I could run this thing in 3:11 (cue 90’s sit-com laugh track).

When we landed in Boston the Thursday before the race, it still hadn’t hit me yet. It didn’t hit me in the rental car line, when I saw half a dozen people wearing marathon jackets. (“Beat her!” Richie Porte whispered at me, pointing at a woman wearing this year’s jacket, a metric ton of make-up, and a sparkly headband). It didn’t hit me when everywhere we went, people asked me if I was there for the marathon. It only hit me when I walked down Boylston Street the Friday before the race and saw all the cops, jumbotrons, and scaffolding going up around the finish line. Only then did the realization punch me in the gut that THIS IS REAL!

Luckily, we weren’t staying in Boston, so I stayed away from the hype or else I probably would have had diarrhea all week. The expo on Sunday morning was about as much Marathon Madness as I could handle.  There’s only so long that you can be jammed in between 30,000 of your closest friends and their families trying to decide between the same 5 t-shirts (do I want the one that says “wicked,” “runnah,” “Boston Strong,” the one with the big BAA logo, or the one with the small BAA logo?) before you scream “Get me the fuck outta heyuh!” and a kind National Guardsman with a machine gun escorts you back to the safety of the fresh air.

I had been obsessively watching the weather since the 10-day forecast was first posted. I watched the weekend storm move forward, and the mid-week storm move backward until both shitty days had converged right on Marathon Monday, with sunny days to either side. There was still hope until Sunday afternoon that the rain would hold off until everyone but the charity runners finished (who cares about them, they’re not in a hurry, right?). But not even that came to pass. Watching the evening news the night before, the smug weather man on News Center 5 smirked as he reported 45º highs, steady rain, and 15mph headwinds all day. Then again, I had the race of my life on an unseasonable 27º day in Sacramento. Maybe it would be good…

…And maybe it wouldn’t . I’m always cold, and everywhere we went that weekend, I wound up needing to buy another layer of clothing. It is a scientific fact (that I just decided was true) that 55º in Boston is much colder than 55º in California. And 55º in Maine is even colder than that.

Race morning

I won’t bore you with the details of getting to the start. There were blocked streets, long walks, port-a-potties, school busses, and soldiers everywhere. I was seated on the bus with a girl whose number was roughly the same as my own. We discussed running together, and perhaps if I had run with her the race might have turned out 2 minutes and 41 seconds more satisfyingly. However, on the ride out to Hopkinton she told me about how she had missed her start 2 years in a row because she was still in the port-a-potty line, so when it came time for her to make her last piss stop and I didn’t have to go that bad, I let her go. Against all odds, my bus was also right behind my friend Chris’s bus. I have talked about Chris before: he is the guy that ran some 70-odd marathons in 2012, and calls it a light year when he only does 6 100-mile races. Chris, New Bus Friend, and I made a happy band of travelers as we set up camp to wait for the start.

The sheer mass of humanity at the start was something to see. There were runners dressed in the ugliest clothes they could find in the back of their closets packed cheek-to-jowl all over the Hopkinton High School grounds, and up to the starting line. There were also snipers on the roof, which made the idea of an illegal pee in the bushes a little less appealing. By the time it was time to walk the kilometer or so to the starting line, I couldn’t feel my feet. I thought I’d taken off my sweat pants at the last possible moment, but the herd just kept going and going as we pressed to the start. And there were soldiers everywhere. I stood there getting colder and colder as we waited for the starting gun to go off. Surely I’d warm up, right? So off came the gloves, and the hat, and the sweatshirt too.

By the time I realized that I’d thrown out my iPod in my sweatpants, I was already in my corral and it was too late to find them again. Usually, I don’t like to race with music but I’ve found that on very special occasions House music can put me in a kind of trance where I run a little bit faster and don’t feel the time passing and am completely present in my body. Perhaps if I’d had some external metronome when my internal pacing mechanisms broke down, things might have turned out differently.

I also had an old long sleeved race t-shirt on that I had planned to throw away, but it was too cold and I wound up wearing it the whole race. One thing I learned: If you run a marathon in a shirt that says TURKEY TROT in big letters, for 3 ½ hours everywhere you go people will yell, “GO TURKEY!” at you.

With all those soldiers around, I expected there to be a national anthem, but instead some Berkelee student sang a song about the marathon, and then there was a pop. “Was that it?” I asked. Someone around me said something to the effect of, yeah, you dumbass! Then we started flowing forward. I almost missed the starting line. I was expecting an arch, but looked down in surprise to find that I was standing on a blue band in the road that said “START.” And so the dream began…

The Race

I am a short person, so running in tight groups of tall men with flying elbows is stressful for me. Usually, I’m out of the elbows in the first mile or two but this is Boston. There are 30,000 runners, and the average time is right around the time I was running. I wouldn’t be safe from elbows until after mile 16, and I would never really feel completely safe from a broken nose. One good thing about running in a crowd, though, is that it keeps you focused during the first few miles of a race – when you feel good, so you can’t win your race but you can sure as hell lose it.

As I ticked away the first few miles, I only looked down at my watch at the mile markers to see my split for the previous mile. I wanted to spend the race enjoying the experience and feeling my body, not watching my wrist. But every time I looked down, my watch was telling me my splits were 8:00, 7:56, 7:48, 8:03… I had planned to run between 7:30 and 7:45 on this first downhill stretch, but this felt HARD. It felt like the first 100 steps of the run, when you feel old and tight and achy, and like your legs don’t move right. In fact, I couldn’t feel my legs at all. The only way I knew that my foot was hitting the ground was feeling the impact in my hips. I was completely numb below the waist, and would stay that way for the rest of the race. In 26.38 miles, I never warmed up.

To make matters worse, in the first few miles, it started raining. It rained that steady rain that soaks through to your base layer, and then keeps soaking. From what I remember, it would continue to rain until I hit Cleveland Circle around mile 23 or 24. Then the wind picked up, a cold, raw wind that came right out of the east and blew through all your clothing. By Mile 8, I knew I was in trouble. I kept feeling like I would bonk at any second, and yet I never did. I just never warmed up! By Wellesley and the halfway point, I was starting to wonder if I would get pulled off the course with hypothermia.

At Wellesley, with all the sopping, screaming co-eds I had to smile.. I smiled and sped up, enjoying the moment. But even that little acceleration felt hard, and I could feel my heart kicking up a fuss. Once I hit the Newton hills, I felt the same thing. My legs and breathing could handle the hills, but for some reason they just felt so much harder than they should have.

I had promised myself that no matter what happened, I would stay present in the race and enjoy the experience, but I have very little memory of the whole thing. I remember a Canadian man peeing at the side of the road in Hopkinton with kids across the street, I remember a runner falling on her ass at an aid station somehow facing the wrong direction, I remember Wellesley, and I remember the rain. But I remember very little else from the course.

One thing I do remember was that I couldn’t feel my hands. I had two wooden claws at the end of my arms, and when I went to dig my gummies out of my pocket at each mile marker, it took me several minutes to snag one in my claw. Then, I didn’t have the dexterity to get the food into my mouth, so I would just smear my hand across my face, licking, biting, and slurping until the candy finally found its way home. This act was repeated at every mile marker, in front of the tens of thousands of hearty folks who came out despite the weather. I still run with a water bottle so that I won’t have to stop at the rest stops, but at mile 18 my bottle was empty and I knew that if I stopped even for a few seconds to refill my bottle that I would start shivering and that would be Game Over; I wouldn’t be able to continue. So I just threw my bottle away at the side of the road. I hoped all the soldiers wouldn’t think it was a bomb.

By the time I came up heartbreak hill, I was despondent. I had realized that I wasn’t going to bonk, but this race was never going to get better for me. I was desperately searching for something to enjoy about this miserable race to keep me alive for the next 5 miles, but I couldn’t find a single damned thing. Then, over my left shoulder I heard a lunatic screaming my name. I looked over, and there was Red, rifling through some soggy poster board with 2 miserable looking nieces around her feet. “SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” she shouted.  It was exactly what I needed. For the first time all day, I felt like I could do this.

Red’s screaming carried me through the next mile or two, until I hit Boston-ish. Honestly, I have no idea where I was (mile 23? 24?) when I heard my name again.  There was my mom beaming, and my dad trying to take pictures. They got one shot of me looking very surprised. That shot would show up later on Facebook and a company-wide email, since it was the only picture anyone got of me that day.

Finally,  after mile 25 I heard my name, and turned around to see Tetas cheering for me. At first I couldn’t see Richie Porte, but then I saw a poncho with a huge smile perched on a barrier waving and screaming.  If it hadn’t been for my support crew buoying me through the last few miles, I don’t know what dark places I would have gone to in my head, and whether I would have ever recovered from the scars.

Finally, I saw the 1-mile to go sign. For the first time in miles, I looked down at my watch. I had less than 6 minutes before the BQ door closed, and I would get the chance to put myself through this shit again next year. Perhaps if I’d been looking along the way I could have made up the 2 minutes that I needed, but there was no way now. I just tried to enjoy it.

…I’m so cold…

…Don’t forget this moment…

…I’m so cold…

…There’s the finish line. Can you accelerate? You can? Well shit, maybe this could have been over sooner…

…I’m so cold…

…Don’t wish this moment away…

…. Why isn’t the finish line getting any closer? It looks like a thong…

… I am so freaking cold, and I’m about to get colder…

…And stop.

The Aftermath (the shivering, and the warm and fuzzies)

We crossed the finish line, and then had to walk about a block to where they were handing out water. I assume that this was so we wouldn’t back up in a traffic jam and block the finish. Then we walked another half a block to where they were handing out medals. “I need a hug,” I told the 50-something woman who handed me my medal. She didn’t seem too thrilled with the idea, but she let me grab her by the neck, and then sent me on my way. Then we still had to walk another half a block to where they were handing out the space blankets. To their credit, they were more like “space capes” with hoods, arm holes, and Velcro to keep them closed, but it meant that we had to line up to have a volunteer dress us. I got in a line, and then right when it was my turn I got cut in line by a pair of elbows. By that time the cold was coming from deep inside me, and the blanket did little to slow my metamorphosis into a popsicle.

As cold as I was, I must have looked worse than I felt. Everywhere I went, people came up and asked if I was okay in that, “Do you need to go to the medical tent” kind of way. One guy asked what letter I was looking for in the family meeting area, and it took a great effort to say “L” in a way that could be understood. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllll,” I slurred, biting my tongue pretty hard in the process as my jaw continued to slam together violently.

Somehow, despite the billion miles I had to walk from the finish line to the letter L, I still beat Richie Porte and Tetas to the meeting spot. I had my space cape on top, and a generic space blanket tied around my legs, but the icy wind was still blowing. First, two women I’d never seen before in my life came up and encircled me in a bear hug to keep me warm. Then another rubbed my arms while they both placed themselves strategically to block the wind. Then, when they left, a woman came up. She muttered something that sounded like French as she looked me meaningfully in the eyes and smiled. Then she proceeded to take off her scarf and tie it around my neck, looking me warmly in the eyes the whole time. These strangers were all so caring and giving, I was touched. I don’t know if it was because I looked like death, or if that’s just what the Boston Marathon brings out in people, but it warmed my heart to the race in a way I did not think it could be after the miserable morning I’d had.

Once reunited with Richie Porte and Tetas, we still had some 3 or 4 blocks to walk to Red’s fiance’s work, where I had a change of clothes and a shower waiting for me. I was still clutching a bag of food, but I couldn’t get my claw away from my body, let alone into the bag and then up to my mouth. So I just hobbled. My hip flexors were spasming. In fact, my whole body was spasming. But at least I could walk my ass out of there.

We walked 3 or 4 blocks to the Prudential Center, with icy winds blowing my mylar outfit off my body and away behind me. In the Pru, Red’s fiancé had stashed a change of clothes for me, and said I could use the shower. Richie Porte helped peel my clothes off of me, and then I pulled down the seat in the handicapped shower and sat there luxuriating in the warm water for ages. It was hours before I finally got the cold out of my bones.

In the middle of the night that night, I woke up with  my foot screaming with a throbbing nerve pain that begged me to plunge my foot back in a tub of ice. It was the same spot that had bugged me on and off through my whole training, but when I woke up I wasn’t even able to put weight on the foot. Throughout the day, I was able to get the muscles warmed up enough to put weight on it, but it was still more painful than it had ever been in the life of the injury.  How could I have done myself so much damage and never felt a single thing? The cold must have made me truly and profoundly numb to run through pain like that without an inkling of what I was doing to myself. Thank god for small graces, but it also brought home how much I really was under duress. When I finished that race, I was still able to accelerate. I felt like I could have kept running, and I didn’t really feel any worse at mile 26 than I did at mile 6. People argued that the headwind slowed people’s times down, but how much more time could I have made upwithout its heat-robbing effects.

The trouble with peaking for a race when conditions aren’t right is that you never really know how much better you could have done. You don’t get a second chance to be at your best. I sacrificed more for this race, and arguably trained harder than I have trained for any marathon, and it is frustrating to have landed right back in that same 5-minute window just outside a qualifying time. Do I really want to run Boston again? HELL no! Not knowing what New England weather has to offer. But I still want to know that it’s not a fluke that I got there to begin with.

So I will run another trained marathon again (in fact, I’ve already signed up for a famously fast course with pacers), because I know I can still improve. I need to fix some muscle imbalances, and build back up much of the muscle that I’ve run off. I want to get back to trail running. Then I will repeat my training with a few tweaks (I will race more, and control the pace on my easy runs… once I can find a reliable heartrate monitor). And then I will have my revenge.   

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...