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running

The (First) Year of the Dog

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After wanting to have a dog in my life basically all of my life, it finally happened a year ago today. That’s when we had Bella in for an sleepover, in part to find out whether she and Pepper (our cat) would get along…or at least tolerate each other. That went fine, and when the next day arrived we decided to tell the person we adopted her from that unless they objected, it might be less confusing if she just stayed.

In for a penny, in for 35 pounds.

Everyone shed some tears that day — she’d been well-loved at her previous home, but circumstances had changed there and she needed a new place. So we abandoned our original plan, which was to wait a while longer and then adopt an older, non-shedding breed/mix. What we ended up with is an energetic** three year old Australian Cattle Dog, Golden Retriever, Miniature American Shepherd, Pomeranian, Beagle, Portuguese Podengo Pequeno, etcetera etcetera mix. Yeah, we did the DNA test thing, and they may as well have just returned a verdict of “Breed: Dog.” She has all the fur colors you could ever want to find, and we do find them everywhere, so I’m sure at this point our respective microbiomes are all well integrated too.

She’s not perfect — Bella had spent almost no time on a leash until she moved in with us, and that coupled with a very strong “OMG I SMELL RABBITS DON’T YOU SMELL RABBITS LET’S GO GET ALL THE RABBITS!” attitude makes her a challenge on walks. And though I can get them both to eat treats out of the same hand at the same time without any fuss, she’s too jealous of attention given to Pepper. There are other non-ideal aspects, but most are in the “Hey, dogs are gonna act like dogs, so whaddaya gonna do?” category.

(For instance, there are days when we feel like we’re on the wrong side of the window in Patrick McDonnell’s “Mutts”.)

All that aside, we think her life is better here, but she loves to be loved so Bella probably would have done fine anywhere. She sure has made our lives better, though, so here’s to you sharing the same happiness we feel (and that she feels) when we see her run or flop over or meet a new friend. And every new person’s a friend.

 

** Energetic is okay! Bella arrived just as my human running partner needed an extended time off to heal up from some injuries. So in this first year she and I logged 74 runs for 339.6 miles together. It would have been more except we didn’t run together for the first two months: she was a country dog and her feet needed to get used to sidewalks and roads.

In those 74 runs I’ve tired her out exactly zero times.

Running in 2019

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Coming out of the Canada-U.S. Tunnel

It doesn’t always look it, but I like to run, and I just closed out another year of races with the always beautiful Detroit half-marathon, the race that takes you across the Ambassador Bridge at dawn and back into the U.S. via the International Underwater Mile™. I had my best time through the tunnel between Canada and the U.S. in a while (7:14) but I couldn’t hold on to that pace. A knee injury and a couple weeks of training lost to Blue-footed Boobies and marine iguanas and Galapagos Giant Tortoises (okay, no regrets!) contributed to low mileage before the race this year, and add in aging (ugh) and my calves started cramping and threatening to pull soon after that shock of cold air greets you coming out from under the Detroit River.

So, here are before and after shots of my body reminding me “There are now a lot more age groups younger than yours than there are older ones.” Actually, I never look like I’m having a good time while I’m running, even though I usually am, so that grimace may not mean what you think it means. But things did start to go south under Cobo Center and the People Mover, so maybe?

Anyway, I gave up at least a minute in the last 5k when on a better day I would have gained some time. But hey, I had some good trail races earlier this year so I can’t complain. (Good races for me, that is; no Kenyan egos were harmed by my presence, I assure you!)

Me less than a mile later. Okay, it’s really a Galapagos Giant Tortoise. But you knew that, right? (Because I don’t eat during a race.)
The real me, and not as unhappy as I look, I promise!

The nicest thing about the day: Apparently another runner was using me as a pacer. He passed me in the last kilometer and beat me by about 20 seconds but found me in the corral after the race and thanked me for helping him run his first sub-1:40 half. Well. Cool! I had no clue, but you’re welcome, and that changed it from a meh race to a good race. So thank you! I broke 1:40 too, which is okay, I guess, but given a stronger-than-expected start I wasn’t delighted with the weak finish. Not sad, since I figured that would be a respectable time given injuries and lack of training, but ya know, I’m never satisfied.

And next year? At the very least, I need to arrive early enough to park on a lower level. The post-race stair climb to the 6th floor parking level this year? Ugh. 🙂

“Losers”

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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.

 

 

Detroit, Sunday Oct. 20, ~5:30-8:30am

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Free Press Marathon logo

Here’s today’s pre-dawn playlist. Don’t worry, I listened via an iPod, so I didn’t disturb the neighbors at The Inn on Ferry Street*:
The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles
Are You Sure Love Is the Name of This Game by Stevie Wonder
The End of Our Road by Marvin Gaye
I Heard It Through the Grapevine by Gladys Knight & The Pips (The Randy Watson Experience Sympathy For The Grapes Mix)
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.
My Two Arms – You = Tears by The Elgins
Then I ran the Detroit Half-Marathon, and posted my best ever time.** Coincidence?
* Which is a wonderful place to stay…just off Woodward, close to Wayne State and the Cultural Center.
** Which will cause no elite Kenyan runners to reconsider their life choices. But I’m happy. And tired.

The Year in Running

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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.

What do you think about when you run?

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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.

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