Hello; just thought I would post a quick update.

I know I need to get out to see more shows while here, I missed The Frames as I was travelling, but tonight I’m off to see Willie Nelson play with Ryan Adams. I really just care that Willie is there. Heading out on my own and getting tickets for 1 gets you a pretty wonderful selection of seats. The show is at the Beacon Theater - which means nothing to me but might to others. Should be spectacular!

Also got out to see the Broadway production Wicked this weekend with my guest - I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it, although I suspect a drama as opposed to a musical would still be my choice, and a smaller venue as likely as well. I don’t think I’ve been to a theater house here that I enjoy quite as much as the Big Secret Theater yet.

I’ll start with the marathon recovery process. After the run I felt reasonably awful but not as bad as after Redwoods. I slept good after the marathon, shocking I know, and the body felt tired but not broken.

I did a little bit of pre-planning on Saturday in the anticipation of being completely incapacitated following the run. I wasn’t sure I would be able to move much so I got enough food to get me through Monday, I figured I would be able to crawl back and forth to the fridge. On Monday morning I made my pot of coffee and felt pretty darn good. The biggest problem I had was that my feet thought I weighed too much, each time I stepped they screamed at me…. other than that I felt pretty good. The test for me is always if I can do a squat without the aid of anything and then if I can stand back up. After my first marathon it took 2-3 days to get there, after Athens it was about the same. After Redwoods I was able to perform an unaided squat the morning after with some pain but I was successful. After NYC no problem doing the squat on the Monday morning - now I didn’t feel great but not bad, compared to what I was expecting.

Monday I didn’t leave the apartment, didn’t put shoes on, I just showered, worked, read and stayed off my feet. I should have probably gotten that massage but working seemed like a good way to spend my time. Tuesday was much of the same, except I did sneak out of the house to get some more food as the stock was low. Wednesday I ventured out about 5 blocks from the house and put some real shoes on as opposed to sandals… something is not right on the top of my left foot but other than that I feel pretty good… especially cause I don’t have a marathon to run for at least another 6-10 months!

I’m not a big TV junkie to say the least and have managed to live pretty contently for the last 5 years without cable TV for the most part.. there have been short periods of time where it has been around and given the amount of hotels I stay in I do get cable a few nights a month at the least. Here in NYC I have gone without a TV altogether and I’m quite enjoying it. You see if I have a TV I watch it and then I get angry that I wasted my time sitting in-front of the TV when I could have been doing something productive (that’s just for me, I don’t really have thoughts on others and their TV habits or lack thereof). What I do miss though is the news. Well Mr. Internet has solved my problems, MSNBC now has the nightly news available online. So I have just finished watching the news and I am now ready to head to bed.

Now if the CBC would just start doing this I would be golden and living in the US would seem even more civil .

Things are going to get quite quiet around here on the blog for the next 3 weeks, I don’t have anything interesting going on that I plan to write about and I have a lot of work to get through. I do hope to get some turns in shortly and come the new year we will be getting trained up for the Haute Route, trying out new Alpine Touring gear, and posting neat tid bits about this trip.

Thanks again for the support and I’m glad everyone enjoyed the post on the NYC marathon.

cheers.

First thanks to everyone for the encouragement and comments. Neat to have a remote cheering crowd…. probably a better way to cheer anyway as marathons are not good spectators sports.

I’m clearly sore so this might end up being a long posting so here is the short version:
I didn’t keel over or cry, I finished in just under 4 hours - 3:59.44 - I had sort of hoped for another 3:45 performance but that was not to be the case… I suspected as much.

Here is the details of my race in summary.

Here is what my pace and body did - I’ll explain more below. (The elevation profile is at the bottom, if I knew how to use photoshop better I would make it match the width of the chart but I don’t know how.)

• Avg Heart Rate - 161 according to the HR monitor, 167 according to the data pulled from it and using excel - not sure which to believe but either way it’s low
• Avg Pace - 9m 08s with a standard deviation of 37 seconds; median pace was 9m 06s
• It was in the 20’s today and sunny so a hot run

My one summary of the race for me would be that the tank was empty from the start. I was not able to push myself at all during the race - with the tiny exception of the last mile and a bit where I could see a sub 4 hour marathon slip away and that made me angry enough to find something and get there with 16 seconds to spare. My heart rate definitely shows this, I should have been in the 180’s for the last 6 miles for sure and I should never have been in the 150’s except for the start where the crowds forced you to go slow, even low 160’s are rare for me as that is where my heart would be on a long slow training run but I had nothing and could not turn my legs over for love nor money… I tried both.

Now to the editorial part of the race:
I got to bed last night at a reasonable hour and set both of the alarms on my alarm clock and the alarm on my cell phone, I didn’t want to sleep in. I set the alarm for 5 knowing that getting out of bed by 5:15 was much more likely. I had a good sleep and got up as expected around 5:15 feeling resting and just as if it was any other morning. I put a pot of coffee on and jumped in the shower to ensure I started the day as clean and chaff free as possible. I had a big bowl of cereal, 6 cookies - actually they are fine chocolate filled wafers and they are delicious! After my coffee and a few glasses of water I headed out. I jumped in a cab and got him to take me to the NYC Library on 42nd (it’s in lots of movies and some day I’ll go inside and take some photo’s of the outside as they are missing from my collection). Upon getting dropped off I started to realize the size of this race, there was a line to cross to street to get in line for the buses - there were literally thousands of people waiting.

It took about an hour to get into a bus and my feet were sore from standing, this was not a good sign but I had resigned myself to fate at this point so it didn’t affect me much as I reconciled myself to sore feet at that point. Upon getting on the bus we made the drive to Staten Island, this was supposed to take 30 minutes, well it didn’t. For those that have run marathons before, you know you load yourself up on fluids before the race - and while during a race the world is your toilet - you would not getting away with going on the street in the line in the morning and the buses were without facilities. On the drive out we were at grid lock on the freeway in Brooklyn to get on to the Verazano Narrows bridge, at this point my bladder was past full but I figured I could not possibly be the in the worse shape and we were surrounded by buses with other runners who must be in worse shape than me. Not but 5 minutes after that thought crossed my mind - JACKPOT!

As we looked out the left window of the bus we seen a young lady (maybe 20’s) frantically rush out of a bus behind us and in what was an extremely comical event she pulled a couple 360’s on the grass looking for a place to ’squat’ knowing that there were literally hundreds of people in buses watching her. She in her moment of panic picked a little shrub which provided her with very little ‘protection’ from curious eyes and the British army looking boys came through with some repulsive comments - even for me. This poor woman was a pioneer though and she literally broke the seal on the buses. The British boys were next out of our bus - this was the moment I was waiting for so I followed them out and the freeway for a short moment in time became a massive public bathroom. We were under an overpass so the men used the public side and the women used the side behind the concrete wall - heck there was even a line up there were so many woman that wanted to get back behind that wall at once… I suspect this has to do with men being less worried about sanitary shoes and the such. Quite an interesting event, and I for one felt much better after this little event of public urination on a NYC freeway.

We arrived at the marathon start after an hour long bus ride and it was foggy out but you could tell once the sun burnt off the fog it would be a hot one. I found a nice little bit of grass and stretched for a bit, drank more fluids, starting taking my Tylenol and getting ready for the race. Marathon starts are great spectacles of public urination and this was not different just on a more massive scale, and I am sure that seen and used the largest urinal that I have ever seen, I think it was 50 meters long (It was basically a U-shaped tube with a diameter of about 16 inches that sloped down hill and emptied straight into a spetic truck and could hold 100 men using it at once, the flow at the end must have been quite impressive … anyway enough about going to the bathroom.

The NYC marathon is organized so well that it is hard to believe that there are 35,000 people running. I would say it might be the most organized and efficient race that I have ever run in. My number let me know where I needed to start and there are 3 routes that groups start on meeting up at the 8 mile mark. It only took me 3 minutes to get to the starting line from the sound of the gun - I thought it would be more like 10 or 15 minutes. It took me literally 10 minutes to get my t-shirt and race package on Saturday and while it took a while for the bus line-up that was more a function of how fast you can get someone on a bus - as all the buses were there waiting.

My strategy for the run was pretty simple - it always is at the starting line. I had no idea what my knees and body would be like so I wanted to take it really easy for the first 10K, I figured if I could get to that point my body should be warm enough and I should be able to avoid pain that would force me to stop. I would then take it easy for the next part of the marathon and hopefully at the halfway point I would feel good enough that I would have some energy to play with and push it if it felt good - with the expectation that I would not really push until the 18 mile mark (30 Km into the run). A good race would be a race with a really solid reverse split - last half faster than the first half; a bad race would be a race that at 10 k I was walking or had to pullout.

The start of the race was jammed, there were people everywhere and you could not get open space at all, it was somewhat frustrating but seeing as how this was my warm up I just sat back and relaxed and went with the flow, slow was good. My feet hurt right from the start but other than that and some stiffness things were going okay and at 10k I was happy with my time and how I felt. A 59 minute 10k is not something I would normally be happy with but I was focused on the legs and knees and they were behaving. The crowds were reasonably thick but the thing that struck me the most was that after 10k there were still runners everywhere and no room to move about freely without dodging, which means you do waste energy going around people and the such.

From 6 miles (10k) through to 11 miles (18k) I felt okay - to the point where I contemplated pushing a bit more, but I noticed that I was unable to push myself at all even if I wanted, I had nothing it was really strange but I figured that I would worry about it when it was time to push it for now we just wanted to feel really good at the half. At 12 miles my right knee instantly seized, it fscking hurt. I didn’t want to stop moving so I hopped on one leg using my right legs when possible and starting to bend it as much as possible until I could run on it again. It probably took 100m for me to put my full weight on it again and now I had something to be concerned about - serves me right for thinking things were going well. I started to exaggerate my kick with my right leg on every fifth to tenth step and kick my right but cheek. This seemed to stretch the IT band enough that things were functional, after a mile the pain went away it seemed…

I hit the half way point at just under 2 hours and I was pretty happy with how things were going minus that little knee problem from 5 minutes ago - I figured at this point that I could aim for a 3:50 finish time and maybe even a little better if I was able to find some juice in the tank.

Carnage on the bridge - the 59st bridge is at 15 miles and has some elevation to it but nothing of note, maybe 150 feet, this appeared enough as there was carnage as we ran through it. I seen two men crumple like paper dolls, 3 folks on their back whimpering in pain and a few other calling out for help from the medics - I have never seen so much concentrated carnage in a race up to that point and we still had lots and lots of race left.

Coming off the bridge I felt okay but my knee was starting to seize more often and I was already thinking that at least my walk would not be too long from here to the finish line. The run up first ave turned out to be good for me, my spirits and my knee which behaved. As I approached the 18 mile marker I realized that I was not going to be able to push it at all and in fact my current pace while not to tiresome or something I was struggling with, was all my body could do. As I previously mentioned this was weird and has never happened to me before - course I am not an athlete so Andy, Geoff or Neall have probably come across this before and can probably give better stories than this one. This was not a bonk as I was able to keep my current effort but trying to turn my feet over faster was impossible, I’ve always regardless of my fatigue been able to run faster than my lungs or heart wanted me to, at which point they would regulate me… this time my heart was at a comfortable 170 bpm and I was not breathing hard, I was sweating but at a normal rate for the type of day and effort but my legs could do no more at all and in fact were starting to be able to do less. It was also somewhat strange that at this point my heart rate had not started to elevate more than it had give I had been at it for about 3 hours by now.

Mile 19 took us up through Harlem, at this point I was starting to hit that wall and all the crowds in the world were not going to help…. what did help was the NYC residents and their treats! The race people tell you not to take food and drink from the fans as it may not be safe, I generally like to believe that humanity is more noble than that and why would someone come out and cheer and do something dumb like that. I also think we live in a world of fear and if we all started trusting each other a bit more I bet the changes would be amazing… plus I was just starting to hit the wall and I was looking for anything . From mile 19 through Harlem up through to mile 20 in the Bronx and miles 21 and 22 back in Harlem I was eating from the buffet! I had a great glass of red Koolaid from a little girl’s juice stand, a piece of gum from a little boy (Juicy Fruit), a zip lock back of pretzel things from a young juvenile delinquent look character (coincidentally these were the highlight of the smorgasbord), and 3 twizzlers. After my little feast I was feeling a bit better and looking at my time thinking that I just needed to do better than 10 minute miles (which are not fast) and I would finish sub 4 hours, I really didn’t want to see a 4 handle on my time. My legs still had nothing though.

At mile 22 I felt better but I could not keep a pace to save my life, I thought doing a little run walk would help - it didn’t I almost could not get going again… not being very smart I tried this again 10 minutes later and the result was worse. I knew I needed to keep running and when I came across the 24 mile mark I realized that I was off my 4 hour time and needed to get going. It was at this point in the race that I got angry, focused and was able to find some fuel in reserve and pick the pace up, at mile 25 I new I needed a mile time in the mid 8 minute mark, which I had not pulled off for a few hours at this point, which made me more angry. It was at this point in the race with 1 mile left to go that I found it and I was finally able to turn my legs over faster than my heart and lungs would be able to maintain which meant a little pacing to push as hard as possible without a blow up. At 400 meters I knew we were talking seconds, there was carnage all around me at this point, and I was also an angry and focused runner and was able to push and finish with a itty bitty bit of time to spare - I was no longer angry - but tired.

Back to the carnage, I am not sure if it was cause it was a warm day, or if it is simply a numbers game but I have never seen so many runner keel over in the last 2 miles - it made the bridge look like a small shelling compared to the bomb that went off in the park. I would guess every 200 meters in the last mile and a half there was a collapsed runner who was being attended to or needed attending to. As per normal for this race it seems, there was lots of help around and it was well organized, even for the wounded. After the race there was stretchers and folks in rough shape all over. There was also lots of folk standing up and at the end of the race it was still tight for running space which was odd.

Overall I think the NYC marathon is a must do, it is a great view of the city, great crowds, super relaxed non-competitive atmosphere, well organized and the route is not a boring flat route but has some contour and I can see why there was so many people from a long ways away that came to this race.

I don’t run for a ‘time’ per say, so while I wanted to get under 4 hours that was more of a mental goal at the time as opposed to a must for a marathon time. I like running marathons cause the make you go to a place mentally that as a people today we don’t do anymore and I think it’s healthy to know what really really wanting to quit feels like and working through it (at least for me). After my current ‘training’ I am more convinced than ever that way more than 50% of a marathon is mental and it’s a game. So I am really happy with my run, I was happy with Redwoods as well, I think I probably ran a better race there, both physically and mentally but NYC was still a great run and I enjoyed it a lot. I do think that I will want to run this race again, maybe as soon as next year - but first NAN! and I need to figure out where the next marathon is going to be for 2006. I can make a promise that next year I will train as this experience creates more grief than I need.

Now it is time to get fat! (well until I start to train for the Haute Route)

Couple last points:

• The new shoes worked well - I have a coupe new blisters but the old healing ones were not aggrevated - minus one that occur between 2 toes on my left foot and all shoes do that for me
• I did manage to get a reverse split… course it was measured in seconds (less than 10) but I will take it
• The medal’s we got are really nice… hehe

My drug consumption is of interest to folks sometimes so I’ll share my actions for this race.

I will also try to get a massage tomorrow as that was successful after Redwoods.

Well I arrived in NYC after a 3 week absence (actually a little longer). It was nice to get into the tranquility of the apartment after a week at a conference, I treated myself to a burger and beer at Baker Street last night. I slept great last night and today seemed like a regular solitary Saturday in NYC. Got up in the morning, went to putz around the town, bought a Wall Street Journal and went to the regular breakfast place. The friendly staff was welcoming and stated that it had been a while.. I guess that is starting to make me a regular. The difference with today is that I am to be getting ready for this silly marathon tomorrow, so lets check in with that.

1) Bought new shoes today - my New Balance shoes were not working and new was going to be better than them; so I left them back in Calgary to ensure I got new shoes… that was supposed to happen in Chicago but didn’t. I’m trying a pair of Nike Zoom Elite, based on my self evaluation and trying on different shoes I think they will work well.

2) My legs feel like shit, my knees are a bit sore from being in leather soled shoes and standing on a concrete floor at the conference and my muscles are quite tight. I did a 40 minute stretching session this afternoon which felt good, but now they are back to normal.

3) My last run was completely demoralizing in that I was unable to run 10K due to the pain in my knee’s. This helps the mental game that is currently being played in my head. So since my last run, the Redwoods marathon, I have had one run that was a failure and the long last run before that marathon was now 7 weeks ago. read: confidence low

4) I made a great dinner tonight with some meat sauce and goat cheese and basil ravioli - at least something good is going on.

5) I got a new toy to play with in the run… I forgot my heart rate monitor in Calgary and I’m going to need some quantitative data on how the ticker is doing as I don’t want to blow up, or alternatively not try hard enough that the endorphins don’t get a chance to try and hide the hurt that is going to be going on. NAN! its your after this run as I already have one, Merry Christmas - nothing like used presents .

I was unable to get the auto-updates to occur into the blog and I am too tired and stressed to figure it out. Call my sister I signed her up. I start running at 10:10 in the morning EST.

Punishment here I come!