Keeping Pace at the Vermont 100

Prologue
I almost got into some random person’s car in White River Junction, VT. A couple of times. It’s because I didn’t really know what my host John, the director of pacers for the Vermont 100 race, looked like. But on the third try to get into a stranger’s car, John finally spotted me, looking like a foreigner in the strange land of Vermont.

Field testing the Garmin 310XT

People who know about my running problem know that I am also not disciplined. Running is way too fun for me to treat it with real goals and stuff. My goals for running are pretty simple: go somewhere cool and enjoy doing it. Of course I could take the train and accomplish that same task, so there is the component of the sheer motion of running that I absolutely love. The rhythm of running is a beautiful thing to experience, and I am thankful every day that I am able. That said, it also turns out that, perhaps owned to my scientific and analytical nature, I am intensely curious about all the sorts of numbers that one can assign to running. How fast am I going? How far did I go?

When I first got a heart rate monitor (HRM) about three years ago, I was intrigued by the simplicity of the measurement. My first HRM was a Suunto T3, and I managed to wear out the heart rate strap and break it after about a year. As a replacement I moved up to the Polar RS200, a watch that is marketed as running specific and even features a dot matrix running man on the time display. Polar are clearly the heart rate gurus, having invented the technology so many years ago, but the pace of technology has quickly learned to keep up, for the most part. The RS200 was not without its shortcomings, which took me about a year of running to fully appreciate. It only holds the last 16 workouts. It has 3 lines of data. The lap button isn’t fool proof on the run. And most importantly, to get any notion of how speed and distance progress over the course and during a run, one has to rely on a crude approximation given by the speed and distance sensor that attaches to the shoe, powered by 2 heavy AAA batteries that frankly didn’t last a month of running.

It was fun while it lasted, and while I’ve had my eye for awhile on the Garmin Forerunners, I wasn’t ready to go for it until Garmin caught up in the following, relatively minor areas: battery life and heart rate strap comfort. For GPS technology tracking distance and, combined with time, speed, it is incredibly appealing, considering the amount of trail running I do, where it is hard to estimate distance, especially given the amount of time I spend lost and running around in circles. Figuring out pace and “performance” is always tricky, and I admit I like to know at the very minimum how far I’ve gone and how long I was out there.

Enter the 310XT. It sounded like the answer to all of my problems, and I couldn’t have gotten ahold of one fast enough. Just in time to be a pacer at my first ultramarathon, the Vermont 100, I put it through a couple of short runs to get used to it and familiarize myself with it. Additionally, I was able to use it for the entire 17 hours and 22 minutes I was pacing at the race (63 miles) on a single battery charge. While I didn’t quite push it to the advertised 20 hours, 17 is not bad and at least plenty for all races up to about 60-70 miles. I guess I’ll have to have a strategy for 100 milers.

What’s possible

Every once in awhile, you meet people who readjust your expectations of what’s possible. I met a couple this weekend who reminded me of this. I ended up staying with them while we were guests of another great family. Their relationship is clearly something special, and it only took the very short time we all spent together for me to sense this. To be clear, this is not a commentary on my spidey sense but rather a commentary on how great together they are. They describe their relationship as being mutually best friends, and he is bothered by the fact that he cannot spend as much time with her as he would like. Hopefully they had some good time together this weekend, especially while she paced him for the last 16 km (10 mi) of his very successful race. To be able to share that with your wife and best friend must be something special.

Together, they love to talk and to laugh. They share the most natural comfort and ease with one another. They played together with the kids, who absolutely loved them both. They both own infectiously passionate personalities, which is evident in every discussion. Their curiosity seems endless. He’s a great guy and an amazing athlete. For her part, her beauty extends with a great voice and laugh. She absolutely exudes warmth.

I am confident that they are not without their share of problems, but it’s only based on my loose theoretical assumption that no couple is perfect. After all, they are human. Nevertheless, observing and being with them this weekend reminded me that achieving the goal of a relationship with someone whom you respect and admire and love is possible. Amazing women do exist. Now it’s just a matter of finding one to put up with me!

The media as a tool

Perhaps for the first time in my adult life I’ve really paid close attention to local affairs. In Boston, it’s apparent that we rely on several services that are irreplaceable, most notably the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA), who among other things is responsible for our heavily used public transportation system. This year, I’ve noticed that the media has picked up on two different, relatively large organizations in Boston who have painted a grave picture of their current financial situation in hopes of mobilizing public outrage against governmental inaction.

The Fells Skyline

I’ve been kind of flirting with the idea of going up to Middlesex Fells in Medford to run some of the trails. Since I found myself mysteriously awake at 5:30 one morning, I decided to take the trek via public transportation (two trains and a bus) and go run the Fells.

TdF ‘09: A chance for Lance

I’m a big fan of the grand tours of bicycle racing. Currently ongoing is the greatest grand tour of them all, the Tour de France. The big American news of this tour is that seven time champion Lance Armstrong is back in the mix, except this time there is some confusion regarding his role. For the uninitiated, the TdF is largely a team event, though the glory generally goes to the individual riders. These two concepts are not at odds; both have their place in the sun. Bike racing at this level requires a team of so-called domestiques who help the rider on their team who has the strongest chance of winning the entire Tour. This rider must have all around abilities to be able to ride competitively in the flat stages as well as the mountains, day in day out, for the entirety of the three week tour.

The big drama for Team Astana, for which Armstrong rides, has been whether or not he would be in the role of domestique for Alberto Contador, an excellent bike racer in his own rite and easily more race-fit, considering that Armstrong is only months out of retirement. However, anything can happen in three weeks, but who would have guessed that today’s transitional stage 3 from Marseilles to La Grande Motte could make a big difference in Team Astana’s race strategy?

Contador missed a large break of the main field (called the peloton), while Armstrong stuck with the break to gain almost 40 seconds on his total time. This puts him in a position to collect the maillot jaune (yellow jersey) for the overall race leader in as soon as one day, with tomorrow’s team time trial, which Astana could well win.

What does this mean for Team Astana? Will Contador be satisfied in a new role as a domestique for Armstrong? Will there be an internal competition for the leader position, and what will this ultimately mean for the team? And finally, does Armstrong have what it takes to go on for an 8th TdF victory? While these questions are certainly not new and the subject of mass speculation in the weeks leading up to the Tour, only now do those discussions really have any legitimate meaning. It will be very interesting to see how everything unfolds over the next 2.5 weeks.

Passed by a cyclist and a car full of girls

I’ve been chasing women all my life. In fact, on foot, no less. My parents love to tell me the story of Hazel, the girl whom I chased on the playground in first grade, who apparently told me, “I’m sick and tired of you!” Strangely, all other pursuits in my life, in High Fidelity style, have been just a twisted, grown up version of that story. Nevertheless, there’s something about a carrot dangling from a string that this rabbit can’t help but chase.

Today’s run took me into the hills of Brighton and Newton, MA, for 10.3 miles, before finally ascending Summit Ave hill and returning home. Right around the peak of Outlook Park at the top of Summit Ave, a friendly (and cute) cyclist passed me with a greeting, which was plenty to help me finish the hill strong. Thanks Friendly Cyclist. (This sounds ominously like the beginning of a Craigslist missed connection ….) On the short, steeply downhill jaunt home, I passed an intersection that had a car waiting for me to cross. I gave them my standard samba greeting and passed in front. The four women in the car the proceeded to turn onto the street in my direction, laughing hysterically and mimicking my greeting. They were rubbernecking to get a glimpse at the drenched running fool and took the same turn, seeming to get great pleasure from all of this, which I found hilarious at the end of a great run.

The run today is my second favorite Boston hills run. There are a few good, steep climbs, but there are a lot of long, steady climbs as well. Each has its own allure. The steep climbs are all about power, while the steady climbs require some calculated endurance. When they are in quick series, it’s a pretty grueling climb.

Here’s the elevation profile:

The siren song of the ultra

The 26.2 mile marathon is a long race. They say glycogen stores in your body are depleted by somewhere around mile 22 and beyond that, your body is just being damaged. Millions of people each year are signing up to run in marathons. I’ve never done a marathon. I’ve done 20 miles in a single run, and that was hard. Thankfully, about 16 of them were done with other people. About a month ago, I ran 16 miles on a solo run in the heat of the morning, and aside from lack of proper nutrition on the run, my legs felt fine. The only thing frustrating about that run was not really knowing where I was at times. I took two days off for good measure and then went out for a 9 miler. Anything below 10 miles is no longer a “long” run.

I know I can do a marathon. In my current conditioning, I could probably go out tomorrow morning and run 26.2 miles, albeit very slowly. I’m also convinced that anyone can train for and complete a marathon. For most people, even runners, it’s a 3:45:00 to 4:30:00 ordeal that is undoubtedly very hard but ultimately well within reach. It is a worthy goal to finish a marathon; one cannot ever discount from meeting anyone else’s personal goals. It’s also a worthy goal to lower one’s time on the marathon course — to run the marathon for speed. This is a goal I’m not sure I’ll ever desire to train for. It requires speed work and probably true “training,” which is something I’m free to admit I don’t at all enjoy. My speed work is to run fast when I feel like I can run fast. My long runs end up on days when I feel like running slowly but feel like I can run forever. (I’ll run hills any time, though, because I love running hills.)

So what kinds of goals might I aspire to in my running? I enjoy conquering trails and hills. I like it when I’m faster today than I was last week. I want to keep running injury-free. But I also have that occasional obsessive pang to run something that pushes my limits. I have seen a lot of folks run marathons. I have seen far fewer folks run ultramarathons. I wonder, aloud, if anyone can run a 50 miler. Can anyone run a 100K or a 100 miler? For now my answer is, I don’t truly know. I don’t know what it takes, although I suspect that it’s a completely different kind of endurance event.

Ultrarunning seems to require a different kind of endurance. There is a physical limit, for sure, but there seems to be the allure of the sheer mental challenge. I think ultras have a very real ability to break people. It’s an exercise in humility to be broken. For those of us who are so fortunate to be active in the sport of running, there is something humbling about pursuing this state actively. I can’t help but feeling like this is a worthy pursuit.