Ten Thousand Miles

Running Past the Bombs, Pt 3: A Pyrrhic Victory

The Boston Marathon can’t be your first marathon. You first have to have run a lesser marathon at a crazy fast time. Only then are you permitted to wear a race number in Hopkinton, MA, 26.2 miles from the finish in downtown Boston. There is another marathon for which you have to qualify but that one leads to the Olympics. This leaves Boston as the one marathon that most serious runners aspire to.

Every Patriots Day, the little town of Hopkinton swells with crowds of runners, support staff and spectators. Hundreds of school buses disgorge lean, fit, clear-eyed, serious looking men and women. They file towards the athlete’s village. You can tell a runner from a distance. It is a confident walk, sure, light yet in control, balanced, natural, effortless, as if after all the times they have bounced off the ground, they now have a comfort from it, a oneness with it. A runner’s motion is fluid, efficient from practice in using muscles and movements that contribute to forward – and nothing else. Their hair is short or tied up so doesn’t interfere. The clothes, their talk... you soak it in. You are with real runners now. You’ve already heard some casually mention it is their their 10th or 15th Boston.

After the anthem is sung and the gun goes off, the prerace distractions all fall away, the worry about inadequate training, a nagging pain, the chit chat in the starting corrals… You hope you won’t embarrass yourself among such an elite field of athletes. You don’t want to fall while pulling your throwaway sweatshirt over your head, let too many pass by as you falter, or have to walk, or splash Gatorade all over your face trying to drink while running. Mostly you want to finish – and then at some respectable time. The crowds lining the roads to Boston are like nowhere else. It’s as much their race as it is ours. They cheer loudly. Not just for the leaders but the middle of the pack, the stragglers just trying to hang on. An injury I had been nursing flared up. Still, we all got love from the crowds that line the route. People stood for hours watching us go by, long after the elite runner flash by, they are still there, exhorting you to not give up. “Looking good, number 7965, don’t give up.”

For the last half of the race, even walking is painful. The crowd, however, is working harder than I am. I’ve reached the bottom of every reserve, walking until shame makes me run again, each time the pain in my groin getting fiercer. But I must try to run down the last straightaway. The crowd demands it, the wall of sound greets you as you turn left on Boylston Ave towards the big blue structure over finish line with the unforgiving clock flashing the number that reveal your true measure as a runner. It’s all I can do to force a smile for the overhead cameras and raise my hand in victory.

A few minutes later, the bombs would go off.

Running Past the Bombs, Pt 2: The Long Road to a Marathon

It’s a week after the bombs went off. My legs have almost stopped hurting from the race. I’m walking normally. The race organizers sent all runners a list of symptoms of post-traumatic stress and it seems I have some of them. I’ve talked to many others now: other runners, my wife, even people whose life changed by being near the Sandy Hook massacre. Still there is a lot to sort out. Maybe examining the road that led me to Boston will help.

I can still see families rushing towards the scene as I was walking away from the finish line where the bombs went off. I still had no idea what had happened so I just pointed back to the family meeting area, where they would have met their runners in previous years. They seemed to be in quite a hurry, I thought. I didn’t know that noise I heard was bombs, the race had been stopped and the finish area was closed off. Thousands of runners were cut off.

The Lure of the Marathon

Most runners are too sensible to want to do a marathon. But when I switched to running from cycling, the marathon was my only goal.Cycling has its big events, like the centuries (100 mile rides) and double centuries. Just training for a double century can take over your life -- and cycling can easily take your life -- suddenly. A series of crashes had left me with multiple healed bones, surgical scars and patches of skin of different color, a reminder of road rash. Running would be safer.

After being used to long cycling events, some of which go from morning to well into the evening, the only running event that seemed worth doing was a marathon. It was what serious runners did.

There’s no skill in running for distance. Skill is hitting a ball that’s coming at you at a 100mph. Or throwing a perfect spiral into the outstretched hands of a receiver -- who, by the way, is running faster than any marathoner has ever run. Distance runners are just grinding it out, hour after hour, pretty low quality running. It’s about quantity. Get used to the pounding. Soon (not soon enough) the joints will start obeying the master (you) without complaining. Marathon training wears out very expensive running shoes every few months. For every marathon, you will run at least 300 miles to train.

So you run. You complain because it hurts. They ask why you do it. But there is no good answer.

Running Past the Bombs, Part 1 – A Personal Account of the Boston Marathon 2013

I knew it was not going to be a good marathon. I was nursing an injury that had prevented me from running anything longer than 8 miles. But this was no ordinary marathon. This was Boston, every marathoner’s dream is to line up in Hopkinton on Patriot’s day, 26.2 miles away from the screaming crowds at the finish on Boylston Street in downtown Boston. But at mile 15, as the groin pull was turning severe and several leg muscles were seizing up in concert, I had to stop running. Ashamed to be walking, I looked at the ground, walking past crowds who had come to cheer on the best runners on earth. I devised a plan of rest and running that would at least preserve a shred of dignity and let me run the last mile. Little did I know that my plan would put me within minutes of the bomb blasts that would kill 3 and injure over 170.

Marathon’s are hard. The first marathoner died. There was a Chicago marathon run in heat in which 2 runners never recovered. But runners say they are dying all the time. It’s a figure of speech I'll never use again. Or “running my legs off.” In Boston, people had their legs amputated after ball bearings and nails tore through flesh and shattered bone. What was my suffering compared to theirs? I won’t feel their pain. One mother had 2 children who will never walk again. That’s real pain. In less than a week, I can run again. I no longer want to. Those people came to see us run. Oh, God. Did we lead people to their disaster?

My wife was almost there in the crowd. We had plans for her see me finish. But as my finish was becoming uncertain, I cancelled her flight. She would have been waiting for me right there, standing with the crowd. May be she would have seen me run by and met up with me before the blast, maybe only 10 minutes earlier. Maybe.

Disasters have a way of making survivors recount the series of events that led to their narrow miss, speculating on actions done or not done that affected the outcome. It was a sentiment often expressed in the aftermath. Boston finishers tend to wear their distinctive clothing after the race. Groups of them were clustered in lobbies, airport gates, probably bars, recounting tales of dumb luck, some conscious decisions, a bad move that in hindsight proved fortuitous or a good move that put them near the blasts.

It’s now a week later. I’m not feeling lucky, or smart to have avoided the mess. I’m feeling guilty to have finished the marathon and walked away, responsible for the ones who could not, for causing my family and friends to worry, for a city to have stopped in its tracks, for being part of an event that could be such a choice target. For what, so I can hang up another medal? 

 

Polar 725S Erratic Readings and How I Fixed Them

Soak It

My Polar HRM started showing zero for my hear rate. I knew I wasn't dead so I thought it was simply a matter of replacing the battery. But that didn't fix it. It would show a reading some times but it wouldn't change even if my exertion changed and then again, the reading went to zero. I thought I had bought a bad replacement battery. However, after I went to the www.polarusa.com, I read you should be soaking the transmitter band (the thing that fits around your chest) every so often. I hadn't done that since I bought it for Christmas! Apparently, the sweat leaves enough residue after a while twhich throws off the reading. Sure enough, that fixed the problem. Well, it fixed one problem.

I got nice, believable readings the next ride I did -- which was a full double centrury. However, the next ride I did 2 days later, I noticed erratic reading again. This time, the reading were extraordinarily  high, in the 200's (my max is only 178).

Static Electricity

I was wearing a fresh jersey but unlike most of my rides this year, no base layer. I suspected it was static electricity causing the problem as I had noticed the problem before with another HRM and new jerseys with no base layer. i stopped near a road sign that had a metal pole stuck in the ground and touched it, hoping it would bleed off any charges that were building up from my jersey flappin against my chest strap transmitter. Voila! I saw the HR immedialely drop to a believable reading and I had no more problems with it for the rest off the ride.

Central Coast Double 2006 - Part 1, the Melt Down

Whew! That was a tough one. I had an unexpected melt down after about 150 miles. Could it be that I had blazed through a couple of rest stops which resulted in a severe lack of electrolytes? I did manage to overcome that (details to follow) but I'm sure that I lost anywhere from half to three quarters of an hour because of it.

Long story short -- I finished at 8:23PM. Two rider who finished ahead of me and I were told 56 riders had already come in. I had expected to do better.

Now to piece together the details from my Polar HRM. In a confused mental state -- no doubt due to my dehydration -- I had pressed the wrong buttons which stopped recording data. I had to start and stop several times before it managed to pick up my heart rate again resulting in 4 separate files.

Devil Mountain Double Elevation Profile

(click on image to enlarge)

data from Polar 725s, interval 15s

Hello, road bikers

While there is ample material about professional road bikers and their races, there is not much written about recreational road bikers. This is NOT for those supermen and women who can maintain a steady 25mph pace,  who get a trio of new bikes every year and spend 6 hours a day on the bike. This is for riders like me, who love to ride but balance that with work and family, who yearn for the latest dream bike but have to justify every little upgrade and who look forward all week long about their long ride on Saturday.