The Good and the Ugly

The Redbuds and Dogwoods are bursting with color here in Richmond, but there weren’t any in the woods of Prince William Forest Park on Saturday. The only foliage we saw were the dead remnants of last year’s beech leaves clinging desperately to dry branches until this spring's new growth finally drives them off. 

I ran with a bunch of Marines on Saturday. The Irish Sprint 10K is organized by the US Marine Corps and finishing gets you a guaranteed entry into October’s Marine Corps Marathon. Judging from quantity of high and tight coifs, plenty of Marines participated too.

The course was about 50-50 roads and trails. The first half was heavily rolling terrain with a fundamental uphill trend. The second half was mainly flat and downhill, but the diabolical race director set the final 300 meters on a steady incline. On that last stretch, I passed one guy chugging along rhythmically muttering, “Dig deep, dig deep, dig deep.” And he did.  

I think all the top finishers were active or retired Marines. Even the first place masters winner was a 45 year old retired Lt. Colonel who finished in 38:56 which works out to less than six and a half minutes per mile.  The first masters woman was a retired marine also and member of the Marine Corps Marathon Hall of Fame. These are serious people.

Yes, the morning beer was green

Third place overall went to a high school freshman at 38:24. Yikes. I haven’t timed any of my training runs yet, so I had no idea what to expect. I finished in 50:55 and that works out to about 8:13 per mile. Given the tough course, I’m plenty happy with that.

My number one fan, inimitable support crew and all around favorite person, Kimberly Anderson, was waiting for me at the finish and got this shot of me enjoying a green beer with St. Patrick and a fine bagpiper.

The organizers arranged for music at three places along the course. But I have to tell you, the music at the start line was like none I had ever heard before. The DJ played some violent metal-head, warrior-like Marine Corps songs with eerie  rumbling beats and lyrics that would curl your hair – lines about marching on into the fire…. Then he mixed in some IRA drinking songs with lyrics about avenging the deaths of your Irish brothers and stuff like that. Chilling, but fun.

So Saturday was a good day. Finished a tough 10K number 9 of 111 in my age group and in the top 12% of nearly 1,700 finishers overall. Sunday was not so good. Sunday I made a big training blunder. Here’s what happened.

I scheduled a 20 mile run for Sunday. We usually like to do long runs point to point. Kim typically meets me at the halfway split with food and fluids, then she picks me up at the finish and we go have lunch. This week she had a handful of students collecting ribbons at a horse show so I was on my own.

I planned poorly. I laid out a loop course, but didn’t stage any food or fluids. I figured I could stop at a convenience store along the way if I needed to reload. I also planned to run my marathon pace as far as possible – I need to beat nine minute miles in order to easily qualify for JFK 50 Miler. The temperature was a lot hotter than I thought.

The first ten miles I was right on. Even with a stop at mile six to try to fix my broken glasses and mess with my tunes. I stuck to sidewalks on the big rolling hills along Broad Street and Lauderdale Road. A quarter mile up and a quarter mile down (I’m guessing). I started bonking during the eleventh mile as Lauderdale goes up and then down into Patterson. I was running out of fluids and had no food. But I made eleven miles in 99 minutes – right on schedule.

There’s a Dairy Queen at the corner, and I bought a coke. Drank half of it and dumped the other half into my CamelBak. That was a big help. For about fifteen minutes. Never entered my mind to get something to eat. What a dope.

This pic was taken at roughly mile fifteen

Patterson has big long rolling hills, just like the ones on Broad Street in the first half of the course. It's like running along an interstate that has an intermittent shoulder. There was no shade and the temp was getting up towards 80. I hate heat. I am very much a cold weather guy. By mile fifteen I was out of fluids again and there were no more convenience stores or fast food joints.

My legs had long since ceased to act like legs and had become more like jointed lead logs that I had to keep throwing forward from the hip. When I finally got to Manakin Road and knew that I was only four miles from home, I got an unexpected attitude adjustment and kicked up the tempo, but it only lasted 150 yards. Before I got to Hermitage Road, I was so dehydrated my hamstrings and glutes had seized up and I knew it was all over except the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I got back home under my own power so it didn’t qualify as a DNF. But I walked the last three miles. Ignominious? Yep. But I learned a good lesson. The eighteen miler I did the week before went so well that I didn’t treat the twenty with the respect it deserved.

I’m going to do twenty-one this weekend, but I have some energy gels and food bars to take along. I’ll also have a better plan and execution. Thanks for reading. Don’t forget our wounded warriors and the Semper-Fi Fund. Small donations all add up. $10 or $20 is fine and a big help. Click on the link and help me get to $10,000 by November.

Time to Shift Gears

I had to shift this training program into a higher gear last week. Learned the JFK 50 Mile Ultra has entry qualifications. I was not aware of this until they posted registration on their website. I can do it, but it’s going to be tough. The cleanest way is to run a sub 3:45 marathon before the first tier registration period ends on May 10^th. The cheesiest is to get a charity entry. There are options in between.

I hurled off this bridge in the '04 NYC Marathon

The training has been progressing well, but I haven’t been focused at all on speed -- just getting in the miles. My personal record for 26.2 is 3:42, but that happened in 2002. Yikes, ten years ago. Last time I ran that distance was 2004 and my time was 4:01 – but I got sick and hurled off the Willis Avenue Bridge going into The Bronx and that slowed me down.

All along, I've been pointed towards the New Jersey Marathon in Long Branch on May 6^th, which means the schedule needn’t change. I’ll just have to run at close to a personal record time. I'm pretty confident I can do this, but it ain't going to be easy. My charity, The Semper Fi Fund is not one of the “official” charities of the JFK, so in order to get a charity entry, I’ll have to do some weaseling around, and that doesn't thrill me.

Saturday I ran 18 miles and Kim and I had another Village Café lunch. The big accomplishment was hitting a wall at about mile 16 and defeating it. The course ended a few blocks past the hill on Monument Avenue in front of Bon Secours Hospital. I hit the wall before the hospital, and busted through it as I came up on the hill. The last mile was like a dance. Duane Allman’s guitar on Soul Serenade was the soundtrack.  

Today I flipped the training schedule from afternoon/evening to morning. I went out the front door somewhere between 5:15 and 5:30. It was still dark. Saw zero cars on Manakin Road until the subdivisions starting disgorging the first leavers just before 6.

Running before dawn is like running in the night, and you know how I like running in the night. But running before dawn is safer because there’s fewer cars. When you run before dawn, you feel like you really own the road. You can run right down the middle. Right on that yellow line. It feels odd running in the center of the road in the daylight. Even if there’s no traffic. But in the dark it feels close and intimate. Perfectly natural.

Switched the diet as well as the schedule. I’ve been reading that fat burns more efficiently than carbohydrates. Supposedly, if you can train the body to burn more fat it can lead to higher endurance because the body has a far larger supply of fat than could possibly be burned in a 50 mile run. So we’re trying to reduce the carbo intake and increase proteins and fats. We’re a house full of carb junkies here, so it’s not the easiest thing in the world, but lots of beans, eggs, dairy and chicken lead the way.

I also discovered a supplement called Vespa – which means wasp, not motor scooter. This is supposedly a synthesized amino acid substance derived from the Asian Mandarin Wasp which has the highest endurance of any living thing on earth. I don’t know if it really works, but I seem to perform better and recover faster and easier from long runs when I’ve taken it than when I haven’t. I’ll report back after I’ve used it longer.

Saturday is the Irish Sprint 10K in Quantico. It’s about half and half roads and trails. Finishing will get me a guaranteed entry to the Marine Corps Marathon in October. Since I haven’t timed any of my training, I have no idea what finishing time to expect. Stay tuned for results. Sunday. I’m going to go twenty miles from home down to Shockoe Bottom – the old historic district in Richmond.

While I’m doing all this running, your job is to make a donation to the Semper-Fi Fund for Injured Marines. These injured heroes deserve your support. You can make a small donation, a large donation or a regular donation – seriously, you can set it up to hit your debit card for ten bucks (or more) each month. You won’t even notice it. Thanks a lot. See you next week.

Running for a Sailor Sandwich

I was supposed to run the Richmond downtown trails system Saturday with the Richmond Road Runners Club. It rained like hell Friday and the forecast called for it to keep coming down through Saturday morning, but the guy who organizes these monthly trail runs said it was going off rain or shine. Feeling macho, I told him I would be there.

I only ran those trails once -- the James River Scramble a few years ago, and there were so many others running that I didn’t have to know where I was going. People say the trails can get confusing, so it’s best to have someone show you around if you want to make a habit of it. I wanted to learn my way around, yet the more I thought about running on wet rocks and mud the less appealing it seemed. That damaged ankle is still only about 85% and I can’t afford another two week layoff.

I chickened out at about 3AM. They have one of these trail runs every month, and maybe April will be dryer. Certainly the ankle will be stronger. I felt like a wuss for bailing on the trail run, so I decided a nice sixteen mile road run would be sufficiently grueling but less likely to screw up the ankle again.

Last week I ran fifteen miles west to Goochland Courthouse and got some killer Pizza at Rocco’s. I decided to go east this time -- down into Richmond. Kim offered to drive out after an hour with some refreshments and fluids. I said, “After you pick me up at the end, we can go find lunch.”

She said, “We can go to the Village Café and get some onion rings.”

I’m sensing a theme here.

The route isn’t difficult to follow. Walk out the front door, cross the field, run south on Manakin Road. At the end of Manakin Road, turn left onto Route 6. Run twelve more miles and stop. I laid it out on MapMyRun.com and the overall elevation trend is flat and downhill for the first nine miles to Lauderdale Rd and then a steady uphill for three solid miles to Parham Road. After that it’s basically flat to the end.

If you’ve actually driven it or run it, you know it ain’t that easy. I don’t care what MapMyRun says the “trend” is, that road has lots of rolling hills all along the way. They’re right about the three solid miles of uphill from Lauderdale to Parham, though.

What a difference a week makes. The hills on that route did not seem as tough as the ones heading west. I took a four minute break when Kim came by with water and a banana. I even walked a couple of times on those long excruciating hills, but I felt pretty darn good at the end. Last week I could hardly stand at the end, this time I stretched a little and walked up and down the sidewalk waiting for my bride.

Village Café is a five minute drive from where the run finished. It’s on Grace Street a block off Broad in the VCU neighborhood. I changed in the truck while Kim drove. The streets are narrow and there’s always a lot of activity on that corner, but we found a parking spot on the street right in front of the place.

I’ve said before that barbecue is an art form here in the south. Well, they really know how to fry stuff, too. Village Café is superior at deep frying stuff. If you have a cholesterol issue, you don’t want to go within ten feet of the place, it’ll probably clog up your arteries just walking past the door. Every now and then, though, you’ve got to go for the grease.

That's the booth, don't know the girl

The woodwork on the booths in this joint is all authentic arts and craft style hand carved and inlaid designs. The place has a really funky vibe. On the weekend it’s mostly students. Weekdays you can add a good ration of business types and there’s always a sprinkling of street people. The tables were all filled when we got there, so we found two spots at the bar.

They have about a dozen tap beers and plenty of bottles. I’m an IPA fan and Kim had a Bock. I didn’t even need to look at the menu. Hell, I just ran sixteen miles, I’m having a sailor sandwich and onion rings. Kim got a sausage sandwich and some of my onion rings.

The onion rings have beer in the batter. They’re almost the size of a saucer and one person can’t eat a whole order. Except maybe as a main course. Guy Fieri from Food Network’s Diners, Drive Ins and Dives was there a few years ago and filmed them making the onion rings. But he said the best thing on the menu was the Stromboli. He’s a dope; it’s the Sailor Sandwich. 

Sailor Sandwich  (Not usually open-faced)

You know what a Sailor Sandwich is? A Richmond original invented during WWII, it’s corned beef, knockwurst cut lengthwise and melted Swiss on greasy grilled rye bread. I can’t believe I ate that whole thing. Kim only ate half her sausage sandwich. I had three beers and Kim drove home.

It’s two weeks ‘til the Irish Sprint 10K at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virgina and I’d like to go there as one of the top fundraisers so far this year. Won’t you take a minute and make a small donation to the Semper Fi Fund for Injured Marines? It’s secure and easy do – just click on this link. $10, $20 – whatever you can spare for this important organization. Thanks.  
  
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