Has Been

I used to be quite good at cycling. I wasn’t the best there ever was, but I was good enough that I knew that at most club rides, shop rides, group rides or triathlons I could hang with pretty much anything that most other people could lay down. There was the occasional exception - like I said, I wasn’t the best there ever was - but it was the best feeling in the world to have someone accelerate away from me and be able to dig in and follow… and then answer with an attack of my own. I once rode a century in comfortably under 5 hours. I once averaged over 22 miles per hour for a 58-mile time trial. No world record, but I had earned some swagger.

Then, over 3 years ago I stopped cycling. It had stopped being fun, so I just hung up my bike on March 10, 2012 and started doing other stuff. And there my bike hung in the garage collecting dust until recently, when I decided that I wanted to start riding my bike to work again. I took my fixie down off the wall, took it to my local bike shop, described exactly what I wanted using all the right jargon, and took home my revitalized little fixie a few days later.

I was enjoying riding to work, but the quickest way to get there was on a bike trail (I know, I know, I HATE bike trails… but it cut 10 min of traffic lights off the trip!), and that damned trail had a lot of tight turns. On a fixie, tight cornering can be kind of sketchy, because you can’t really control where your pedals are at any given moment (since you have to pedal constantly), so there’s always a risk of scraping your pedal on the ground when you lean into a corner. So I took my racing bike down off the wall a couple months later, and walked back to my local bike shop.

This is where our story begins.

When I came to pick up my racing bike, they had forgotten to put new tires on. He first took me over to the super-skinny racing tires. “Aw, there’s no need,” I said. “I’m just going to be riding this thing to and from work.”

The guy stopped and looked at me with disgust. “You’re going to have the best commuting bike on the road,” he said. But what he meant was, that’s too much bike for a commuter bike, you dumb bitch. I hate Silicon Valley where people use top-of-the-line racing bikes just to go to and from the farmer’s market. It’s true. I’ve seen $5000 bikes locked up outside the bar with a cable lock less than a mile from this bike shop. But that’s not me. The $30 U lock in my hand was for the fixie I bought on Craigslist for $300. I wasn’t about to lose a $100 lock if my cheap-o bike was stolen. I know that you don’t lock up carbon. Duh.

“Oh, I know,” I said. “This bike has had its racing days, but now I just want to pull it back out because it’s kind of sketchy cornering on some of those tight bends on the bike trail on my fixie.”

His contempt grew deeper upon hearing the words ‘bike trail.’ “Well, actually, there’s a difference between a single speed bike and a fixed gear…” he started.

“I know,” I cut him off. “I ride a fixie.”

“That bike I fixed up for you a few months ago? I put a freewheel on it.”

“No you didn’t,” I said, starting to feel my blood boil. “I would never pay for that. It’s definitely a fixie.”

“On a fixie you can’t coast,” he corrected me patiently.

“Believe me,” I said. “I don’t mess around. That bike is a fixed gear.”

“Oh sure.” He gave up.

I was apoplectic. Not only had he accused me of riding a lamer, less skill-dependent bike, he had also accused me of being too dumb to know the difference. It was like saying to someone who had bought and fixed up a ‘69 Mustang, “Oh yeah. That ‘89 Toyota Cellica with the Duct Tape holding up the ceiling upholstery is yours, right?”

He had heard me use the language. I had dropped details about my riding history, including that I used to race, that I knew all the names to all the parts, and I remembered my bike’s entire maintenance history. And yet something about me still gave him a strong impression of no fucking clue. In his head I was no different than the woman who came in right before me to have air put in the tires of her beach cruiser, and paid an additional $75 for them to blow the dust out of the grooves in her handlebar grips. It made me want to challenge him to a throw-down right then! I railed about it to anyone that would listen for days.

A few weeks later, I was at work (my job now is as an executive assistant to a venture capitalist rich guy). In setting up a meeting, another assistant in the company mentioned that her boss couldn’t make a certain time because he was the chair of a big east coast charity ride that would be going on that day. Joking, I said, “Your super secret assignment, [Assistant], is to find out who rides faster: me or your boss.”

“Haha, you’re killing me over here, Claire,” she said. “Boss is quite an experienced bicycle rider, and he does it quite a bit, so I’m sure he is very fast.”

Dismissed and denied!

This bugged me for the rest of the week. He’s a cha-ri-ty rider! Just because he rides a lot doesn’t mean that he’s fast! I’ve ridden with plenty of straight men over 40 who ride their bikes every weekend - slowly - just so that they can have a big brunch afterward. And so their bellies grow. Again, the assumption is that there’s no way I could actually be, like, fast. Or know what I’m doing. Hahaha, Claire, you’re so funny. You think you can take on the boys. But when I used to ride, I DID take on the boys. I rode faster than John Kerry, remember?!

“Why does it bother you so much,” Richie Porte asked me when I was still seething a few days later. “Why does it have to be a competition?”

I’d asked myself the same thing. Am I just a spandex-clad Napoleon? Isn’t getting this belligerent when my dominance is challenged the sign of a weak, insecure person? Why can’t I just focus on myself and let other people do their thing?

“Because,” I said, “these guys are smarter, richer, more powerful and better connected than I could ever dream about being. They never have to take no for an answer with anything. I know, because it’s my job to figure out a way around every rule that the rest of us have to live by. But that’s what they’ve worked for their entire lives. But that’s just in their context. I have spent my entire life working toward something else, and in that realm, I want to be powerful and successful. I don’t care that people ignore my emails and treat me as if I’m invisible when I’m seating meetings in the VC context, because that’s not what my life is dedicated to, it’s just what I do from 8-6 every day. But when people dismiss me sight unseen at something that I really care about… something that I feel I’ve accomplished something in… in my context because I am unimportant in their context… that makes me feel like I don’t matter. I don’t need their approval, but I do need to know that they are not superior human beings.

When the world comes to an end and we’re all surviving on our physical wherewithal, I want to believe that I would be the VIP.

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…”