Being Like Mike

Wow. Cory's last blog is really good! Who knew he had thoughts? It's kind of embarrassing for me--having to have a shirt made with an arrow and the legend "I'm With Erasmus."

Not that I'm a superficial guy myself. I even have a favorite philosopher, but in my case it's a contemporary thinker--Mike Tyson. Not only has Mike offered the deep thought, "If I only tattoo half my face, then I must only be half crazy", but he has given me a philosophy of life: "Everybody has a plan, until they get hit in the mouth."

I'm going to postulate that what marathoners and ultramarathoners are about, after you scrape down past the DSM IV stuff, is about Mike's philosophy. 'Cuz one thing I know for sure is no matter how prepared you are and how smart you are, a race like the JFK is going to hit you in the mouth. And more than once. Something will happen that throws up all over your plans like a President at a Japanese state dinner.

We wish it weren't true; we wish races were about having done good training and having a good race strategy, and then the race itself is easy. But what racing is really about is how you handle the throw-up. Your best success, unfortunately, comes from doing what is not easy.

At least, that is what Tysonists believe. And while I belong to no organized religion, I am attracted to the "hit in the mouth" message of Mike.

That and the idea of following his advice on relationships. I will be sure to shout to the other runners, "My style is impetuous. My defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious. I want to rip out your heart and feed it to you. I want to eat your children." Who wouldn't be charmed by friendly banter like that?!

Herman or the Hottie?

     The question that comes up when considering an ultra-marathon, or a regular old 26-miler for that matter, is: Why do it?  For non-runners the answer seems to come easily. "Because you're nuts", they say, some with more distain than others. (The ones that love you usually say it with what passes for fondness. Your friends say it with a slight shake of the head that signals "I like you but sometimes you're just a little on the flakey side". And strangers and others who may feel a little guilty about not exercising say it with barely concealed disgust.)  The only answer that really matters, of course, is the one that works for you.  It may be that you're one of those lucky people who are satisfied with the realization that "I just like doing it."  If so, bless you.  Chances are, however, that some time or another, on one of those really dark, gloomy, cold, wet, windy, miserable, dead-of-winter twenty-milers you've asked yourself "Why the hell am I doing this?" I distinctly remember two particular runs over the years when the rain and snow was blowing sideways with the temperature in the teens and the slush-ruts in the road held ankle deep ice water that splashed up to my groin with every step when that question pounded me in the brain like it was on a pogo stick.

     I hate it when that happens.  It ususlly means I'm over-trained, hung-over, or just really feeling my age. I'm afraid to open that Pandora's box and analyze whether all the five a.m. alarms are worth it. But sometimes it's just unavoidable--you've got to come up with an answer that works for you or just stop in your tracks.
     Lately,  I've concluded that one of two people can supply the answer: Herman Melville or Paris Hilton.  Melville knew that humans must have goals and the most valuable goals are the ones that cost you the most dearly and, if you pursue them to the point of obsession, they may destroy you in the end.
     Paris Hilton, on the other hand, knows how much fun it is to look in the mirror.  Ever since Narcissus humans have loved to see their own reflections. Those of us who don't get as flattering a return from a mirror tend to hold up other surfaces to measure ourselves by.  Like a 50-mile stretch of road.  In that sense an ultra-marathon is like a mirror for plain looking people.  Or, if you want to be a bit more generous to us and a bit less so to Paris, she's shallow enough to be satisfied with herself simply if she thinks she looks "hot" but runners need to feel like they've probed deeper into themselves and found something of merit because they didn't quit at 38 miles.

     So, who's more correct, Herman or the Hottie? You've probably dealt with the question yourself and have a pretty good idea what your answer is. As for me, call me Ishmael. 



            

Herman



The Hottie

                          

TIN FOIL HATS

     Ok, I admit it. When I went to crew for Jim in Leadville for the 100 I expected to see a bunch of skeletal, grinning weirdos in tin-foil hats communing with their home planets as they rattled their boney ankles over the rocks.  It really wasn't like that. Oh sure, there were some obviously disturbed types that you wouldn't look you straight in the eye on the subway but there were relatively few of them--probably no more than in any crowd.

     What I saw was a group of seemingly normal people who just happened to be facinated with the idea of trying to run 100 miles. Now, by "normal" I don't mean the kind of normal you see in a crowd of random people at the mall and certainly not at the Indiana State Fair, where the big hit this year (I am not making this up) was fried butter. I mean normal in the sense that they probably have relatively sane day-to-day lives that include friends and families.

     In fact, most of them had friends and/or family members there to crew for them. As far as body types go, they weren't all gristly Mick Jagger-Madonna clones. There were a few of those, sure, but just about all types, except for the truely overweight, were represented. There were some pretty beefy guys and more than a few kinda fleshy people. In fact, being fleshy didn't necessarily seem to be a big drawback. There is some scientific support for the proposition that after your body burns through all the glycogen it can store, it switches over to fat burning for energy. This is not to say that being fat is a good thing--it's not. But we all have some body fat, even Jagger if you look hard enough and, as it turns out, science says a little body fat is a good thing in an ultra marathon.

     Women make the transition to burning fat more efficiently than men, which probably accounts for the number of women who seemed to be doing really well at Leadville.  Also, most of them seemed to have dialed in their mental approach to the challenge of the race. They were so smooth and serene. While a lot of the guys, especially the younger ones, would come charging into the aid stations and bark at their crews, "Gimmie my Power Bars", "Where are my special socks?",  the women would tend to glide in smiling and their mostly female crews would hug them and say things in pleasant voices like "Oh, Sweetie, you're doing so well". The best runners seemed to have a kind of zen thing going and the best crews just seemed to know that psychological support is as important as groceries.

     One thing they stressed at the pre-race meeting is that you can keep going long after you think you can't. So far, the hardest training I've done is a hilly 15 on one day and 30 the next. I did notice that even though it was profoundly uncomfortable toward the end of the 30, it was, in fact, possible to keep going. What they didn't mention at the pre-race meeting, however, is that the realization that you can, indeed, keep going does nothing to lessen the really irritating, pervasive discomfort.

     Oh well, nobody's making us do this and it is kind of interesting to search for that zen-like serenity that the women showed at Leadville. Maybe I need to get in touch with my feminine side. Like Yogi said, "90% of the whole thing is mental and so is the other half."

                                                                              

Whining into Race Shape

Cory has reported "the facts, ma'am, just the facts" of our exploration of the race course, in a manner that would make Jack Webb proud. (However, unlike Jack Webb, it is possible that Cory could provide a rendition of "Try A Little Tenderness" that would not make you Try A Little Neuro-Toxin.) [Before you accuse me of slandering Jack Webb's memory, go on the internet at http://www.bomb-mp3.com/index.php?search=try+a+little+tenderness+jack+lemmon and give Jack's version a listen. There are some things even the First Amendment shouldn't protect.]

Anyway, now let me give you my perspective on the weekend's benefits. First of all, I learned that there is an official highway sign that contains the information: "CAUTION. WATCH OUT FOR D.U.I. DRIVERS." I saw it beside the road in western Maryland. It was right after I passed "Scott's Pizzaria", which struck me as two words I would not normally associate with each other. Truly, travel broadens one's horizons.


The biggest benefit of the trip, though, was to help me whip my whining skills into race shape. Luckily, I was able to get a great workout of complaining in on Saturday. "The weather's too hot!" "These rocks are too hard!" "This hill is too steep!" "This trail is too bumpy!" "This is hard work!" "I'm tired!" "I'm bored!" "My feet hurt!" "My knees hurt!" "I'm not having any fun at all!" All useable complaints for the 10+ hours of running, walking, crawling and/or whimpering I expect to be doing on race day. My physical stamina may fade during the course of the race, but--thanks to my first-rate training regimen--my mental attitude will be as stoutly negative at the last step as at the first one.

Thanks to this training, if I complete the JFK 50 Miler on November 20th, I will know in my brainwashed brain that I have achieved a super-human accomplishment, that no person in all of history and pre-history has ever suffered one-tenth as much as me, that at a minimum I deserve sainthood for what I have endured. It is only my modesty that keeps me from pointing out that I truly am the greatest human being of all time.

Preview

     Jim and I went out to take a look at the part of the JFK 50 course that's run on the Appalachian Trail. Wow. It was an eye-opener for an Indiana boy. The race starts in Boonsboro, Maryland and you run the first few miles on a highway leading out of town to where you jump onto the Trail. Those first few miles are bad enough in that they seem to go uphill forever. It isn't long after you get on the Trail, however, before you realize how good you had it on the road. This is the elevation map for the course:         

     As you can see, you climb over 1200 feet in the first five miles or so. What you can't tell from the map is that the footing is absolutely trecherous. In some stretches it's like running on cobblestones that have all been sharpened to a point. In others, it's like they tore down a five story building, piled up all the rubble, and marked a trail right over the top. Here's a picture of a random portion that was actually one of the more innocent parts:

     Seeing this firsthand has caused me to lower my expectations for what kind of pace we can carry over the first fifteen miles. There's a lot of technique required to run trails like this well without breaking your neck and I, for one, haven't got those skills.  Even Jim, who's run the entire Leadville course, said that patches of the Appalachian Trail are worse than most of Leadville in terms of runability. I saw large portions of the Leadville course and I know what he means. While parts of it looked unrunable to me, at least they are clearly so, like the steeper side of Hope Pass. The thing about the Trail that's dangerous is that you are tempted to run by seemingly harmless stretches that all of a sudden turn into ankle-breaking mine fields.

     Six weeks to go until the race. I think I'd better try to find somewhere around Indy to practice Trail running. Maybe they've torn down a big office building somewhere.

FINGERS CROSSED

      We're seven weeks away from the JFK and so far, so good. Our training has been going well. Jim and I run together on Sundays and make up our own programs during the week. There seems to be a consensus in the information we've found on the internet that the best way to train for an ultra is to put in some pretty significant back-to-backs on the  weekends. For me, that means running up and down whatever hills can be found in good old Indianapolis (they're aren't many) on Saturday and going long on Sunday. We've done the first of what will be three thirty milers and we'll hit it pretty hard through the rest of October. The JFK is on November 20th, so we'll taper for the first three weeks in November.

  

      I have no doubt that Jim will  be ready.  After doing well in the Indianapolis half marathon on  May 8th and the Fargo marathon on  May 22nd, he went on to run the Rainier to Ruston Fifty Miler in Washington state ( race motto: "You can rest when you're dead") on  June 5th,  where he promptly set the "Men's Super Master (aka: "geezer") Course Record" by turning in a 9:11:04. That's Jim above being congratulated.
  
      That's a half-marathon, a full marathon, and a 50 miler in less than a month. Not bad for an old dude. But that's Jim. I don't think he's ever been out of shape. In fact a few years ago he spent several months in the mountains in South America teaching math to indigenous kids. (It isn't bad enough that they have to live in poverty high up in the mountains where there's never enough to eat and life is hard---they make 'em learn math, too). While living and hiking in the cold, damp, thin air he managed to get a nasty case of pneumonia. He drug himself down out of the mountains and made it to the capital where he sought help.  After unsuccessfully attempting to shoot himself in the butt with a syringe full of who-knows-what they sold him at a pharmacy, he stuffed down a handfull of the "miracle drug" they also provided (which turned out to be ibuprohen) and somehow got his obviously diseased carcass onto a flight home. They met him at the airport with an ambulance and slapped him straight into surgery where they cut him open and drained the fluid out of his collaped lung. I saw him. He was a shade of bilious, Grinch-like green you don't usually see on living people. Three months later he ran the Marine Corps Marathon. See what I mean? I think he can handle the JFK.

What Now?

If you have read the prior posts, you know that Cory and I have told ourselves, and anyone else who will listen, that we are going to run a marathon, a 50-mile race, a 56-mile race, a 100-mile race and climb a 19,000 foot mountain before next September.

So now your question becomes, where will this scheme go off the rails? Because surely a spectacular, fiery crash is the way this will end. I don't know about Cory, but I agree with you completely. Sooner or later, this madness will go terribly, terribly wrong.

Only, not just yet. We ran our first 30-mile training run last weekend; Cory ran 18 miles and 20 miles on consecutive days this weekend; and I ran 9 and 20 miles on consecutive days. Next weekend, we go out to Maryland to survey the first 15.5 miles of the JFK 50 mile race. The course rises 1200 feet in the first 5.5 miles and then zig-zags like the teeth of a handsaw along the Appalachian Trail for the next 10 miles. We don't have any place in Indiana that can prepare us for that part of the race. (The difference in elevation between the lowest point in Indiana and the highest point is about 900 feet.) Our plan is to do a 30 mile run including that first 15.5 miles of the race course.

This provides us with our first really good opportunity to smash some vital body part. Steep ups and downs on a rock-strewn, leaf-covered trail are excellent places to tumble. So the madness may soon be over. Keep your fingers crossed and your animal sacrifices active!