running

We just watched the Netflix series “Losers” (which we learned about through Nick Bertozzi’s (@NickBertozzi) involvement on storyboards) and it was both short and great. If you enjoy good storytelling and don’t mind some sports in the mix you’ll like it.

It’s also not about losers, and I’m sure the creators gave it a misleading title on purpose. The show is more about moving forward after failure—sometimes repeated failure. None of the people featured are winners in the sense of gold-medals or “We’re Number One!” chants. Their stories are more interesting than that. It’s hard to pick favorites, but if you only want to sample a few, try “Judgement,” “Stone Cold,” and “Aliy.”

The reason I’m writing about this is not because I want to start a new career as TV reviewer, but because the show brought to mind my two favorite sporting events I’ve watched, neither of which ended as wins, exactly:

Tigers v. Angels
August 26, 2015

Justin Verlander, after a season that began on the disabled list and proceeded through to some minor league play and a so-so W-L record, started a kind of nothing late season game (the Tigers were a bad 59-66 at that point, the Angels a barely average 64-61) that night, and we were relaxing at the ballpark because night baseball in Detroit is relaxing. But as the game progressed and he kept pitching and kept striking out batters it got exciting. Kat—still pretty new to all this—was confused by all the cheering, since on the face of it the game was getting kind of boring by the time of the 7th inning stretch. Since I’ve been watching since I was a kid and was a particularly superstitious kid at that (in Little League, when things were going well for my team, I ate the exact same Cobb salad…with turkey instead of bacon…before every evening game) I hadn’t pointed out to her that Verlander hadn’t given up any hits and only two walks until she asked.

The Tigers won easily, Verlander completed the game, easily, but it wasn’t a no-hitter in the end. Watching him as he threw one bad pitch that caused him to miss out on this by, literally, an inch, was simultaneously not fun and the very definition of seeing professionalism in action. It was a great night for fans, and we cheered until he came out for an encore.

Well, okay, it’s not like he threw more pitches, but the usually stoic Verlander seemed touched by how much we appreciated the show he’d put on. A win.

Kipchoge v. 2:00:00
May 6, 2016

Publicity stunt? Maybe. Two-plus advertisement for Nike? Probably. But…

We were watching a movie at home on Friday night when I said I was going to stay up a little longer to watch the start of a race (a time trial, really) that would begin at 11:45 local time. Kat thought I was nuts, but after months of training and preparation and secret shoe development, three runners were going to take a shot at running 26.2 miles in under two hours. It wouldn’t be an official world record because of the insertion of fresh pacers every 1.5+ miles (and a pace car throughout) but it would still be an amazing feat if someone managed it.

I’d been following this effort casually, largely via Ed Caesar’s (@edcaesar) great articles about the run-up in Wired, so I wanted to see what this would look like. You know, the first 15 minutes or so.

So we watched. And the ballet of the pacers and the beauty of Eliud Kipchoge’s running kept both of us up for the whole thing. Yeah, we watched the three people run in a short and not-at-all-scenic loop for more than two hours.

And when we weren’t watching Kipchoge look gorgeous every step of the way, we watched some advertorials and listened to some pseudo-science and groaned through some hyperbolic commentary.

(When the announcers said he was only X seconds behind pace now, “so if he can run the next few miles 20 seconds faster he’ll still do it!” I had to laugh. It’s as if they were talking about your average jogger who, approaching the end of their first 5K, starts sprinting to look good for a photo their spouse will post on Instagram. I mean, he was already running a 4:30-something mile…to pick up the pace by even a second or two would be virtually impossible. And that thing where it looked like he was smiling there near the end, the only change in expression he’d showed through most of the run? I don’t think he was happy to be falling behind pace. As he said afterward, “Three laps to go, I felt a little tired in my legs.” You’d grimace too.)

Anyway, you can probably tell  by the title above that the two hour barrier didn’t get broken that night. But it was still worth staying up well past our bedtime, and the National Geographic documentary is well worth an hour—only an hour!—of your time. And Eliud Kipchoge is about as far from a loser as I can imagine.

You have to click on track 02 to hear this, but it’s worth the extra effort! You can go the YouTube route for a live, unmixed version. You’ll get to watch the Pips do their thing…and that’s always worth your time.

Around March I wondered if 2010 was my last good year of running. Not that it was brilliant — I had my share of injuries and didn’t meet my own expectations in any but one race. And no elite Kenyan runner ever gets a worried look when he or she sees me limbering up near the starting line. But still, it was pretty good, and I was pretty healthy. No ankle sprains, for one thing.

In 2011 I had more than my share of injuries, assuming my share is zero. Which it isn’t. So the one big one that got really…chatty with my hip and lower back, and which has nagged at me for almost two years, and which has resisted both rest (to be fair, I’ve probably not given it enough of that) and physical therapy (more than enough of that, darn it, and more than enough ibuprofen too!) coupled with a couple of minor re-sprains, made me melancholy. But all in all, I shouldn’t complain. I got three decent trail races in, taking home an age-group mug in two of them and a gigantic glass for completing all three in the Running Fit “Serious Series.” And Dances With Dirt, always fun, was, well, fun! Thanks Sarah, Merry, Julie, and Dave!

The day after Dirt I left for the book tour, and that meant too many cities with too many unknown routes and having only bits and pieces of days that were my (in theory) own to fit a run in. So training for the Detroit half-marathon became dicey. But I stayed healthy throughout (a miracle given the number of planes I flew on and hands I shook) and mostly pain-free (thank you, naproxen) and was able to get maybe 75% of the work in that I needed. And that included lovely runs in Los Alamos, where the air is thin, along the Hudson and Charles Rivers in NYC and Boston, a lovely trail in Durham, and a long, hot, and dry 9.5 miles of road in Austin that surprised me by not killing me.

So, Detroit arrived and Dave wasn’t there to stop me from going out too fast. (His nagging injury this year was worse than mine.) Without the voice of reason I went out…you guessed it…too fast, and was at about last year’s pace at the 10K mark without last year’s training to back it up. That yielded predictable results: I was already fading during the international underwater mile, and stayed slow for the next five. If the splits are to be believed, I actually picked up the pace again at the end — the race photos show me grimacing at the finish, so maybe I did — but a smarter overall run would have netted me a better time. Still, I was about 5 minutes faster than I had predicted for myself the week before, and snuck in under the wire to finish within the time range I predicted in January. By one second, but I’m grateful for that second!

I haven’t run since because it’s really and truly time to try to heal the tendinosis and the tear underneath the left Ischium. By spring? Here’s hoping, because I miss it. Right now.

I just finished a 10 mile trail race with Jimmy Rogers’ “That’s All Right” running through my head for most of the time I spent on the course in beautiful Sleepy Hollow State Park. Sometimes Johnny Cash worked his way in, as did Lucinda Williams and Joss Whedon. (“Bad Horse” if you must know.)

Occasionally real thought happens too. After casual runs I’ll often drip sweat all over a sheet of paper as I write down plot points, exchanges of dialogue, and solutions to storytelling problems that have shown up unexpectedly. Many times these will be good and usable, but I can almost never make good and usable thoughts happen on purpose. They mostly show up unbidden, like commercials or airchecks on my internal radio station. Then it’s back to the song (fragment) of the day, whatever that is.

It turns out I’m not alone. This morning at breakfast our friend Kris talked about how she does this while swimming, and even some of the greats deal with endurance training and racing via song. Or worse. Specifically, I heard the amazing Diana Nyad talk about her swim from Cuba to Key West (!), a swim she began just a few hours ago, and she describes what goes through her head during hours in open water. Listen to her at NPR and then track her progress at CNN.