A Wardrobe Malfunction

Or maybe a brain malfunction... No fines were levied and no animals were harmed in the process. The Pacers Fun Run tonight was sparsely attended, likely attributable to the 15 degree temperature and occasional wind gusts (They're calling for a wind chill of -5 overnight). I wore a few extra items tonight that I didn't wear on the 31st, but nothing new on my torso. By mile three (of five) I was feeling discomfort in the nether regions, and I'm not talking about chafing! By the end I was convinced I had a large blister on a place where no man should ever find a blister, and probably some sore or bleeding nips as well. We couldn't really stop as we weren't wearing enough to stay warm if we weren't running. Back at the store all it took was an oblique reference and Liza (Pacer's staff - she ran the Athens marathon last year!) headed for the men's section. Seems they make garments with a special wind-proof panel in the front for weather like this. The breathe-ability of technical fabrics also lets the chilly wind in places it has no place being!! They were out of them, but I'll make sure I get a pair before venturing out in weather like this again!

Finishing 2008 with a bang!

2008 was a banner year for my running.  I capped it last night by running the King Street Mile *and* the Fairfax Four Miler two hours apart.  

Being that I am a distance runner I seldom have the opportunity (or desire) to sprint a mile.  I usually run the last mile or so of a race at maximum effort, but that's after running many miles during which I had to keep a reserve.  The luxury of toeing the start line and going all-out just isn't available in my usual fare, so I signed up for the KSM to see what I could do.  I've never run just a mile so my only reference is mile splits during a run.  My fastest split was mile 6 at the 2008 Marine Corps Butler Relay (a 10k) in March where I pulled a 7:30.  That mile was mostly downhill too, so going into the KSM I was hoping to beat that.  Mother Nature wasn't smiling on us as it was a nippy 15 degrees (F) with the wind chill (40 mph gusts) and we were running right into the wind.  I parked near the finish and ran about 1.5 miles to the start to warm up.  At the 'Go' shout (no starting pistol for us) I took off, quickly finding big, fast people to draft (watching all those NASCAR races taught me something!).  I did a double-take as I glanced at my watch at the 1/2 mile mark and saw only 3:25 had elapsed!  I was still feeling good so I kept it up.  The last tenth felt like a huge alien was going to erupt from my chest, but I finished in 6:38!!  Wow, great, now cool down a bit and head for the car as I have just under two hours to get over to the City of Fairfax for the Four Miler and traffic is all boogered up thanks to those winds knocking out power lines.

The Four Miler had challenges of its own.  A tree fell across Old Lee Highway and brought down power lines, so the course had to be changed at the eleventh hour.  It was now dark and even colder, with the wind chill hovering around 10 degrees as we completed four laps of downtown.  Even so over a thousand people finished the race!

Blog updates

I'll start by apologizing to my loyal readers (both of  you!) for the lack of posts recently (yeah, over seven months).  I've had trouble over the last month accessing the database on my hosting account so my posted run numbers haven't been updating.  I finally fixed that this evening thanks to a delicate adjustment with a sledgehammer.  I updated the Run Log to show two upcoming races instead of one (ohhhhhhhh, a 100% improvement!) and added a mile to the Personal Records section.  I've also added a few items when you hover over items on the PR section.

For my geek readers, I ran into a few problems with the new year that required changes under the hood.  Specifically, "last" week gets complicated on the first week of the new year as I can't just grab the week number and subtract 1.  Supposing that I check for a week# = 0 result, then what do I set last week to, 52 or 53?  Huh, week 53 you ask?  Since our year doesn't divide evenly by seven we don't have the luxury of January 1st always being on Sunday and so on.  This means we usually have a partial week at the beginning of January and another partial week at the end of December in a given year (part of the week is this year, part is next/last year).  Now I could just hope that you don't look at the numbers this week or the end of December, but that offends the purist in me.  

Digging into the issue, I found a lot of options.  Seems that the week functions in MySQL have eight different modes depending on your first day of the week and what you count as your first week (week 1 is the first week with a Sunday in this year, or with more than 3 days in this year, etc).  My logs are based on Sunday being the first day of the week, so with 2008 this week is actually the 52nd week of 2008 through January 3rd, 2009.  January 4th will start week one for 2009.  Just what I needed to start the new year, a little brain pain!

Two weeks, two halves, two PRs!

Wow, what a race.  The Marine Corps Marathon staff put on their inaugural Historic Half (marathon) in Fredericksburg, VA yesterday and with few exceptions it was top notch.  3822 runners finished the scenic but brutal course, yours truly being one of them.  

I opted to sleep in my own bed Saturday night and left home about 5 am for the trip to Fredericksburg.  Traffic was light and the State Police left us alone.  It seemed everybody had the same idea and parked in the nearby Walmart parking lot.  The crowd surprised a number of travelers overnighting in their RVs and some of them quickly packed up and left to avoid getting trapped!  In addition to beating the road closures, I left early to give time for warmup before the start.  

I usually use the first couple miles of the race to warm up, but I wanted to attempt a new PR and to possibly even break the two hour mark (my existing PR was 2:02:45) so I spent 20 minutes jogging about and then did some stretching.  This worked well as my first mile was a 9:42 instead of the 10:53 at Frederick.  In addition to the pre-race warmup I was using a different strategy because of a major hill between miles 10 and 11.  I planned to build a comfortable cushion of time early in the race so I could slow down on that hill and still achieve my goals.  Boy was I in for a surprise!  Let's start with the published elevation profile:

Looking at this I see a slight climb in the first mile and then it's all downhill to mile eight with a big climb between 10 and 11.  However; like statistics, the product is only as good as the data used.  In this case it appears they calculated the elevation at each mile marker and then drew pretty blue lines between those values.  Let's take a look at the *actual* elevation profile:

Those lines aren't so smooth anymore are they?  Miles two, three, and four provided some unexpected climbs!  Miles three to seven found me deep in the eights, the fastest mile being 8:25.  The downhills stretches helped smooth the slower climbs, but the damage was done and by miles nine to twelve averaged 10:00 as I nursed a stitch.  Somehow I managed a 10:10 between 10 and 11 on that mother-frakker of a hill, even stopping several times for short walks!  I made it back into the mid eights for the last 1.1 miles and finished in 2:01:49.5, setting a new PR :)  Unlike Frederick I was pretty spent at the finish line; I didn't have more to give those hills!

I had the pleasure of celebrating distance PRs with several friends in Fredericksburg as they ran their first half marathon.  It's good to see that running is contagious!

Another record falls!

This morning I smashed my half-marathon PR by 4 minutes and 29 seconds at the Frederick Running Festival.  In its sixth year the festival has grown quite a bit but is still small and cozy.  The course is fast and travels through downtown Frederick, lovely neighborhoods, and then took a spin through farm country before ending at the fairgrounds.  Other than poor planning wrt ordering enough shirts in the popular sizes the event went off without a hitch.  

I started with a 10:53 pace the first mile and quickly marched down through the 9's until mile 7 where I maintained about an 8:55 average for the last six miles.  I never felt that I was pushing too hard and I didn't step it out the last mile or two as usual as I was already hitting a helluva pace.  My Garmin has a nice feature called 'Virtual Partner' where you can program a distance/time combination and it will show two figures on the screen with the distance ahead/behind the virtual partner.  I programmed my previous PR of 2:07:14 (~9:41/m)  into it and by mile four I was shrinking Virp's lead.  Since the GPS distance run is usually longer than the certified distance I knew I needed to be at least 1/10th mile ahead of Virp at the finish.  Once I figured out that my knee was going to cooperate (more on this further down) I endeavored to build a comfortable margin so that I could ease off if the need arose.  At mile 13 I was over half a mile ahead of Virp so no worries there!  The finish festival was a cattle chute as usual but they get bonus points for having Munchkins - for some reason little donut holes seem much yummier, maybe because you get more sugar on them!

The best part of a distance run early in the morning is having a big breakfast afterwards, in today's case a bunch of goodies at Waffle House.  The waitress looked at us a little funny when Kris and I ordered enough food (especially hash browns) for four people :)

Back to the knee issue, I'm suspecting that my new Brooks shoes are causing my knee to act up.  Every Tuesday (and some Thursdays) I run 5-ish miles with a group from the Pacers store.  Every Tuesday my knee acts up and every Wednesday morning I'm hobbling around.  Today I decided to break out the old Mizunos (the pair I ran the Marine Corps in) and had only minor discomfort after 13 miles...  I need to chat with Chris at Pacers about these new shoes!

Time for a well-earned 90 minute IPA from Dogfish Head :)  In two weeks I'll run the Marine Corps Historic Half.  I should have taken it easier today so that I won't have to work so hard then, but the urge to beat 2 hours is growing!!