Category: Running

Two Recent Trail Runs

13 K Copper Crawl Hill Climb, Miami, Arizona

Saturday morning April 17 found me toiling up the side of a mountain above the mining town of Miami, Arizona about 40 miles east of here on U. S. 60. The race is part of Miami's annual Boom Town Spree.  A great experience start to finish, from leaving the house at 5:35 AM to arriving safely home again six hours later.  A tough but interesting course mainly over dirt roads up, up, up into the foothills of the Pinal Mountains.  Out and back, with the turnaround point at Warnica Springs in the Tonto National Forest.  The race started from downtown near the corner of Live Oak and Adonis.  Great support, T-shirt, goodie bag, not to mention the  complimentary pancake breakfast and sports massage.

I enjoy the on-the-fly camaraderie of running events.  One has conversations, some of them unforgettable for a lifetime, with people many of whom one will  never see again.

Round Mountain Sunrise Challenge, Globe, Arizona, National Trails Day, 5 June 2010

I left the house at 4 AM, arrived at the trailhead in Globe around 5:15.  Gun went off at 6.  A very challenging 5 K (3.1 mile) rocky course through and over boulders and dry streambeds with plenty of elevation change.  Not even a worldclass trail runner could have negotiated the whole of this sucker at a run.  A delightful course nonetheless with scenic views and a friendly coterie of local diehards.  I took third place in the 60+ category.  (And yes, there were more than three in that category!)  But I had to pour it on at the end to keep from being overtaken by a crusty one-eyed 75 year old. 

What Colin Fletcher says of hiking is equally true of running, especially trail running: It is ". . . a delectable madness, very good for sanity, and I recommend it with passion." (The Complete Walker III, p. 3)

Walt Stack Remembered

Waltstack I find myself these days as enthusiastic about running as I was in the mid-'70s when I first took up the noble sport.  It is perhaps the proximity of the Grim Reaper, his sharp scythe glistening in the Arizona sunshine, that has imparted a spring to my step and a glide to my stride.  With the ultimate Repo Man on my tail and on my trail, I am out to grab for all the gusto there is while the sun shines.  I'm fixin' to make like Walt Stack who is gone but not forgotten.  How do you stack up?

The guy was a Commie, but I can forgive him that.  Running covers a multitude of sins.

5 K or Marathon: Which is Harder?

5K

Which is harder, to run 3.1 miles or 26.2?  They are equally hard for the runner who runs right.  The agony and the ecstasy at the end of a race run right is the same whether induced by 42.2 km of LSD or 5 km of POT.  Above, I am approaching the final stretch of a 5 K trail race (2nd annual CAAFA 5K Race Against Violence, Prospector Park, Apache Junction, Arizona).  The date is wrong: should be 3/21/2010.  I finished in 45th place in a mixed field of 113, and 28th among 44 men.  Time: 33:38.8 for a pace of 10:49.8.  That's nothing to crow about, but then I'm 60 as is the gal right behind me.  Twenty years ago I could cover this distance at a 7:45 min/mile pace.  There were five 60+ males and I finished first among them.  Not a strong field!  But a beautiful cool crisp morning and a great course and a great run.  I could have pushed harder!  Could have and should have.

LSD: long slow distance.  POT: plenty of tempo.  Both terms borrowed from Joe Henderson.

The First Step to Enjoying Running

Arthur Lydiard, Run to the Top (2nd ed. Auckland: Minerva, 1967, p. 4):

The first step to enjoying running — and anyone will enjoy it if he takes that first step — is to achieve perfect fitness.  I don't mean just the ability to run half a mile once a week without collapsing.  I mean the ability to run great distances with ease at a steady speed.

That's one hell of a first step.  But the great coach is right: you will never enjoy running or understand its satisfactions if you jog around the block for 20 minutes four times per week.   I find that only after one hour of running am I properly primed and stoked.  And then the real run begins.  Or as I recall Joe Henderson saying back in the '70s in a Runner's World column: Run the first hour for your body, the second for your self.

Race and Race

During my 26.2 mile trip from the Peralta trailhead to Apache Junction's Prospector Park, I had ample opportunity to observe the ethnic and social composition of my fellow marathoners.  Only two blacks did I spy, an observation in illustration of a general truth: (American) blacks are not proportionally represented at running events.  No, I am not hastily generalizing from this one observation.  I am illustrating a general truth by giving an example.  Generalization and illustration are distinct intellectual procedures.  For corroboration of the general truth, see here.  And don't tell me that I could observe only the runners that ran near me: I surveyed the whole field before the race began as I walked from the starting line to the back of the pack before the gun went off.

The tendency of liberals will be to conclude that 'racism' is at work, that blacks are being excluded, and will call for a government program to 'level the playing field' to use one of the sillier of their silly expressions.  It apparently doesn't occur to these nimrods that certain sorts of people simply have no interest in certain sorts of things.

Here is a piece on U.S. runner demographics.  Figures on race are conspicuous by their absence, a fact that reflects the political correctness of the age.  There is nothing a liberal  fears more than to be labeled a racist, and for a liberal, any mention of race makes one a racist.

Why Run?

If the sky is the daily bread of the eyes (Emerson), then hiking, running, and cycling are the daily bread of the legs and lungs. And   what better way to appreciate the sky, and the lambent light of the desert Southwest, than by running over mountain trails at sunrise?   Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.

The 26.2 Club

26.2 I affixed my 26.2 decal to the rear window of my Jeep Liberty this morning.  I've earned and have the right to advertise my entry into an elite club.  Sunday's Lost Dutchman was my second attempt but my first success.  The first attempt was Boston 1979.  My training had been overzealous and my knees were giving me serious trouble; fearing permanent injury I dropped out at the top of Heartbreak Hill, 21.3 miles into it, with Boston a mere five miles downhill.  (It was my first road race, I confess to running as a tag-along or a 'bandit' in today's parlance, I was young, I didn't know any better. Mea maxima culpa.)

How elite a club?  Joe Henderson, who has been marathoning and writing about it since the late '60s, says it well:

If you really want to know where you stand, don't count how many runners finish ahead of you.  Instead, turn around and look behind you.  Look especially at the people you can't see: those who trained for a marathon and didn't reach the starting line . . . who race but not at this distance . . . who run but never race . . . who used to run but don't any more . . . who never ran and never will.  [. . .]  Being a marathoner make you one in a thousand Americans.  Pat yourself on the back for doing something that 99.9 per cent of your countrymen or women couldn't or wouldn't do.

Don't call yourself slow, because you are not. You are fast enough to beat everyone who isn't in the race.  (Marathon Training, 2nd ed. 2004, p. 10)

Up With Running Skirts

Running skirt During my last road race, and as a runner who has long been open to callipygian inspiration, I spied something I had seen but once before: a female runner sporting a short skirt in lieu of the usual shorts. I thought to myself: Is this the beginning of a trend? Apparently it is.

Vive la différence!

With Whom Would You Rather Run?

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Sarahpalin_200908_477x600_6

No contest, right?  And she's faster than me!  She claims a sub-4 marathon (26.2 miles in under four hours).  On Thanksgiving 2009 it took me over an hour (1:07:37) to crank through a 10 K (6.2 miles).  My excuses?  It was unseasonably hot and I was 10 lbs overweight.  Plus I have no athletic talent.  I am powered by will alone

Like her, I favor ASICS gel running shoes: anima sana in corpore sano.

Jim Fixx Remembered

Fixx_cp_2857454 It was 25 years ago today, during a training run.  Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest.  He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart.  It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years.  I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf.  It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket.  I read it when it first came out.  Do I hear $1000?  Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen.  Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.

See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre.  And here for something on George Sheehan.

Kerouac 5K

Marycarney Jack Kerouac's "Springtime Mary" was Mary Carney, described in the novel Maggie Cassidy and depicted on the left; mine was a lass name of Mary Korzen from Chicago.  She didn't get me into running, my old friend Marty Boren did; but she lent my impecunious and sartorially challenged self  her shorts in which I stumbled in my heavy high-topped boots around the Chestnut Hill reservoir on my first run in the summer of '74.  35 years a runner, but going on 41 years a Kerouac aficionado:  I read and endlessly re-read On the Road as a first semester college freshman.  (And a week ago I found a copy of the original scroll version of OTR which came out in 2007 (1957 + 50) in a used bookstore; completist and fanatic that I am, I of course purchased it.) Running and Kerouac being two constants of my life, I was happily surprised to hear from a local runner that Lowell, Mass. hosts an annual Kerouac 5 kilometer road race.  Kerouac was a track and football star in high school, winning scholarships to Boston College and Columbia.  Had he chosen BC he would not have met Ginsberg and Burroughs the other two of the Beat triumvirate, and I wouldn't be writing this post.

Appropriately enough, given Kerouac's prodigious boozing which finally did him in at the tender age of 47 in 1969, the race starts from Hookslide Kelly's a Lowell sportsbar.  Here is a shot from Kerouac's football days, and a photo of one of the covers of Maggie Cassidy:

Football_med

200px-Maggie-cassidy-cover 

Asics

Why are Asics running shoes so called?  After purchasing a pair on Saturday I was pleased to discover that Asics is an acronym for anima sana in corpore sano.  The standard tag is mens sana in corpore sano (A sound mind in a sound body), but Msics doesn't quite make it acronym-wise.  I am not enough of a Latinist so say whether anima sana in corpore sano occurs in any classical author. 

If water is the philosopher's drink (Thoreau), and running the philosopher's sport, then Asics may be the philosopher's running shoe.  But the mileage on my Asics Gel-Nimbuses is still too low (8 miles) to say for sure.  So far, they seem very good in terms of stability and cushioning.

A good running maxim: "Trash your shoes before they trash you."  Frugality has its limits.