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Pittsburgh Marathon 2011: Keystone Capers!
(18 May 2011 at 21:18) |
We did it! You guys know that when I'm not trying to run for time, I like to make things harder for myself by running in costume (shark, hazmat) or carrying a cake. This year was the best/worst yet. Ryan ran as a Keystone Cop chasing me, escaped prisoner, all 26.2 miles. We looked like this:  Photo is from the Post-Gazette. This costume was pretty hard because it was full-body Xtra-Chafe™ polyester, with a hat, all of which really lock in the moisture, and that stupid mask that was too small for my face and was usually getting in the way of my eyes. But the real barrel of monkeys was that I was wearing handcuffs, leg irons, and a heavy chain between them. This was, you know, not good for the mechanism.
It took us about 5h30m to finish, which is at least two hours longer than it would have if I was just running. Going into this one I wasn't even confident I was going to be able to finish. In some ways I was hoping that it would be too hard, so that I would be appropriately testing my limits. And indeed as we reached about 4 miles I was worried, because it was getting painful pretty quickly. The running itself was not a problem at all; we were doing like eleven minute miles at first, which I think is probably close to the fastest possible pace with leg irons on—you just can't go fast with such a short stride. So maybe I set a pretty good world record in marathon shuffling. But after a few miles I could tell that the leg cuffs were going to be a real problem, because they were starting to dig into my ankles. Around ten miles they had badly broken through the skin and I was worried that at this trajectory, not even half way through, it would later get too painful to stand. We did a little walking, but this didn't help with the main problem because I still had the leg cuffs on and they were just as abrasive when walking. I found a few ways to adjust the cuffs, pausing every few miles to adjust, that would at least reduce the amount of sweat salt and street grit that the cuffs were grinding into the wounds, which helped. The cuff cuts were not a surprise, but an unexpected growing problem was that the belly chain was doing this periodic superposition-of-waves flappin' around, and every 6 strides or so it would smack me in the back of my left calf, or on my right knee where I already had a knee-being-scraped-previously injury and bust open that scab, but the calf was way worse, because it got really bruised and raw and every time that happened it was like smacking a sensitive tooth with a snapping little miniature rubber band.
Ryan was offering to get some tape from the aid station to tape up my ankles, but I didn't want to cheat unless it was bad enough to quit otherwise. And as we got towards 20 miles, it was getting worse but not at an alarming trajectory like before, so I decided I could stick through it. There were other weird problems like, since I was using this very short and awkwardly duck-footed stride to manage the chain (and my ankles could only get a very limited distance apart), I was only using a small set of muscles, and not ones that I usually use for running, because these were the shufflin' muscles. So those got pretty fatigued, and I was feeling kind of sick from who knows what, but I was mostly able to focus on the ankles. Here are some pictures of the aftermath. I put them behind links so you don't have to see them if you're just like, casually browsing the web.
Bloody shoe — These socks are white, by the way.
Wounded ankle — Two abrasions. Don't really know why my heel got stained black, but it washed out.
Bruised calf — I really don't bruise easily, either.
Days later, my ankles are still bleeding frequently, and it's still kinda hard to walk.
This was Ryan's first time running this far. His costume was basically as bad as mine except without the shackles, and he often gets really hot when he runs, so it was good that it was not sunny until mile 22. I gave him my only handcuff key so that I would not be tempted to leave him (or let him leave me), and so he would not be tempted to run off. Since he was behind me I didn't get to see how he was doing, but he seemed pretty strong—we were going pretty slowly but 26 miles is no joke at any speed, so a nice first showing. Here's a puzzler: Ryan started behind me and finished behind me, but finished one place ahead of me. How is that possible? (The following isn't true but a simplifying assumption: Let's say he was exactly the same distance behind me for the entire race.)
Okay, fun stuff: We got loads of good feedback. Usually what would happen with other runners is that they would start passing us, seeing Ryan's costume and start LOLing, and then see my costume and start ROFLing, and start to say something to us like oh my god those costumes are awesomeeeee but as they were saying something, would see my shackles in mid sentence and it would be sort of like ... costumes are aweee—uhhhhh what the hell??. I got to practice my comebacks when comments were repeated multiple times. Q. Are you running the full marathon? A. Yeah, of course. Who runs half a marathon?! (There is a concurrent half marathon with like 10,000 runners, including some people who asked me this.) Or alternate A. Yeah, it's only like one mile, right? Another frequently asked Q. Does that make it hard to run? A. No, it's actually easier, because it's like an ankle massage. Q. asked by kids running along side me on the sidewalk: What did you go to jail for? A. (very seriously) Running on the sidewalk. (kids slink away). At the water stations I would have some water or Gatorade, but I couldn't actually bring the water up to my lips because of the chain, so I would have to kind of crouch and drink it hunchback style. Ryan would tell them not to give me water, or be like, okay, just ONE more. He'd grab my collar as I slowed to drink, but then after the water station I would bust away cackling, and he would shout "Oh no!". He often tried to solicit help from the policemen stationed all along the race, especially from the ones that were looking really serious. We got some good chuckles, including some of them taking photos. You can find some on Twitter no doubt. Some other people were inspired to run harder, e.g. in this article:
My lungs were burning and my calves were cramping, but my brain was screaming: If I can't pass a dude in a stupid costume with chains around his ankles, I might as well lie down right now.
My favorite racetime pastime is dancing in front of the musicians that are playing about every mile. They are surprised enough to see a costumed prisoner in chains, but when I bust out some moves or air guitar (severely constrained because of the chains), and Ryan either synchronizes with me or starts batoning his hand impatiently, shaking his head no, we can often get them to laugh so much that they screw up their song, which is victory. One band as we were entering Shadyside saw us coming and played a song (you'd recognize it, but I don't know the name), maybe from like Nutcracker Suite, which is often used for chase/nefarious scenes in Looney Tunes. We did an extra long synchronized dance. I loved this so much, thanks guys.
There's lots more to talk about but this blog post is way late and getting pretty long. This was definitely my most memorable marathon costume so far, though we already have ideas for next year that may beat it in both flagellation and congregation. For the record, I didn't do as much manual making of the costume as last year—the prison rags are from a costume shop. I hemmed them from "one size fits all" to "this size fits Tom", and I made a reproduction of my race bib (ironed onto an old yellowing t-shirt and sewn to the shirt) to make it look like it was my prison ID number. And, of course, I braved the world of online handcuff shopping, which consists only of law enforcement shops and sex shops, which I had a hard time telling which made me more uncomfortable, and then I accidentally sent the cuffs to my parents' house. I'll wrap with the prospectus:
I'm interested in any other sightings you guys have! | |
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Pittsburgh Marathon 2010: Project SHARKWEEK
(02 May 2010 at 17:57) |
YES. You guys know I like to run races in costume, or carrying something, or otherwise making it conspicuously difficult. Well, when I signed up for this year's Pittsburgh Marathon they allowed us to pick a 9-character personalized vanity bib, and since the first thing that came to me was SHARKWEEK, I did today's marathon in a shark costume. At first, it was just a dream, with this as the prospectus:
Pinch to zoom
Erika, a costume whiz, helped me get started planning it out and correcting my grievous anatomical mistakes, but then I slacked off for ages not working on it, until I bought a sewing machine and then put together the costume starting Friday night on my own. It's highly overengineered, with an adhesiveless design, inner wireframe made of coat hangers, and tailored felt with reinforced stitching. I discovered that pretty much every part of a shark's body is shaped like a coat hanger:
It was a good long day of remembering how to sew and which unfortunately lasted longer than I wanted it to. I decided to punt on the gills, which were unanatomically located anyway, but otherwise it pretty much came out as I had hoped. Here's shark-face:
I was worried about this race, though. Weather reports predicted temperatures up at 80°F at some point, plus thunderstorms. That'd be bad for just running regularly, but one of this costume's main difficulties is how it seals in the flavors and spices. I wanted it to be hard but not heat-stroke hard. And then I had unwisely stayed up until 12:30am finishing the costume, and also I couldn't fall asleep until 2 or 3am because of Pitt's graduation party noise, heat, allergies, and excess energy from tapering. Despite the 3 hours of sleep, and not being able to find my bicycle pump, I biked downtown with the costume on and with a flat tire (the biking is where I first discovered how obstructive wearing a tail can be, particularly when it gets caught in the wheels), tried to find my friends running (couldn't) and then started towards the back of the pack. Part of the idea of this costume was the mental image (hopefully communicated to some) of a shark (me) attacking a swimming (running) throng of people (people) at the beach (marathon course) trying to get to shore (finish line), eating all the ones who weren't fast enough.
It turned out that despite all the looming potential disasters, it really went quite well. Temperature was mercifully in the 60s. The costume was hot, for sure, towards the end of the race forcing me to walk off problems that I knew weren't just exhaustion (e.g., headache) but it was way better than it could have been and I managed to run the first 18ish miles only stopping for water, and only some modest walking in the last 8. The costume was heavy and soaked up water when it rained on us for most of the race, but honestly the water there wasn't as bad as it was in my shoes. Although the head would stay on pretty well if I was just walking or biking, when running it would bounce too much (bad design). I therefore had to spend the whole race holding it on, usually with an internal handle under my chin. The coathanger shoulder-"rests" dug into my shoulders the whole time and left some pretty grody bruises, but given all the other sharp pieces and metal burrs it's a miracle I didn't come away with some real serious abrasions or stabbed as the thing collapsed around me (it held up almost perfectly). The tail was an unexpected difficulty: As soon as I actually started running I realized that I was kicking it and probably would be for the whole race. So I used a shorter than usual stride, but still it was pretty tripoverable and I was hitting it or worse with every step. That's fine, think about what a shark with feet must feel like! My official time was a garbage 4h29m49s, which is about a 10 minute mile, more than an hour slower than my non-costume first marathon.
The costume itself went over extremely well. The Tribune-Review says, Marathons usually bring out their share of off-the-wall running apparel, from tuxedos and wedding gowns to Elvis impersonators, but there were relatively few that engaged in the offbeat this year. One of the few was someone who donned a shark's head and dorsal fin for the occasion. Still Pittsburgh runners have not picked up on the fun of costume-running. Other than all the trouble, it's the best: The whole race other runners are running up to say hi or you overhear them saying to a friend, "I just got passed by a shark!" The crowd who is sitting there in the rain waiting for their one family member or because they can't go anywhere because the roads are shut down, they completely love it, so you get people from all backgrounds laughing and clapping and shouting, GO SHARK MAN!!!, and the water station volunteers who are doing labor in the rain for nuthin' in return always perk up, and little kids trying to figure out what is going on with that dude but with that little kid smile where they know something's funny but don't totally get it. Two people recognized me as the guy from birthday cake running. At some point a woman comes up to me who had been running at a mutual pace for a while and says, "You have made so many people smile today."
(BTW Thanks to Gabe and Someone on Twitter for the pics. I can't photograph myself while running yet.)
One of my favorite groups to make smile is the live bands or musical cheering organizations like the dance music cheerleaders. In this race I slowed down in front of every such group (probably about 15 of them) and did an interpretive dance to their music. This was so fun. I got several of the singers to mess up their singing from laughing, and some bands made musical or lyrical reference to the shark (like the cover band that lamented having just played "Fins" right before I got there), and the cheerleaders were flipping out, chanting, "go shark! go shark!" and pumping their fists. The best was when a school band saw me coming and quickly arranged a full marching-band version of the Jaws theme—not kidding, this was completely amazing—and I did the hunched over swimming lurch by them.
Most people only see the shark for a few seconds, so it's interesting to get a catalogue of thousands of people's first reaction. I was surprised that Land Shark was the most common thing shouted, since that skit is pretty old now. It's not like every shark costume is depicting land shark just because it's on land. If I were dressed as the International Space Station, would they say "Land-ISS!"? No. Also popular: Sharky (don't know if this is some specific cartoon character but it was too common to not be), Shark Man, Shark Boy (at least one referring to the Rodriguez film), Sharkweek (reading the bib), and in single digits: dolphin (?), whale (?), alligator (??). I get the benefit of hearing the quips so many times over the four hours that I can develop and refine comebacks. Like at the water stations, if someone takes the last cup of water right ahead of me, "Save some for the fishes!" or when biking back home against the runners who hadn't finished yet, and someone goes "26.2 miles is not enough, now you're going biking?", I say, "Yeah, it's a triathlon. The swimming part is easy." | |
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30th birthday: Cake Quest
(28 Sep 2009 at 00:21) |
Sunday I turned 30, as in years. The celebration started Friday when we had a great combo-party (Brianne's birthday on Saturday) in my space age bachelor pad. I hardly ever host parties in my place so I was a little nervous. It turned out almost ideally; like maybe 50 people and never got out of hand. I have one room, now known as the Observatory, which is basically empty since my brother moved to Boston, and so that room just now has a secondary colony of San Pellegrino bottles (kind of ran out of space in my own room), my answering machine (full, useless) and two seats for "Observing" these objects, like a minimalist art project. (This was great. The San Pellegrino collection really drives some people nuts and other people happily make new interactive art with it.) On Nels's suggestion we made the Observatory a bit more partied up for the party, using the projector to show Robot Jox, a classic Robots Gone Wild cold-war-forever piece. No real sound setup in there, but I could only find Spanish subtitles, so I Google-Translated those back into English, so the whole movie was subtitled in this broken doubly-translated language which was especially delightful if you also listened closely enough to the computer speakers for the original EN audio, until the text inexplicably transforms into Spanish because Google Translate gives up once it gets a certain ways into a document that you upload, cuz I guess it gets tired and is like ahem you finish this. But only a few people in there at a time because of the two seats. Most people party 4 regular in the games room, or Gallery, or murder Prof. Plum in the Kitchen with the candlestick.
The highlight for me was the Great Race, a 10K which I run every year. This year it was on Sunday morning, my birthday. Last year I ran it real hard which qualified me as a seeded runner this time, but I'm not in as good shape and anyway have retired from running 10K for speed. So I decided it's costumes. I have pretty complex requirements for a race costume. It has to be pretty conspicuous, so people spot it. It has to not get in anyone's way or be race-ejectingly illegal, because I don't want to interfere (except maybe mentally) with anybody who's taking the race seriously. It has to clearly impede my ability to run, but should also be actually harder than you'd first think. This time I also wanted a birthday theme. I mulled a bunch of ideas with friends (bunch of helium balloons was a frontrunner for a while) and eventually settled on Ryan's idea to run with a birthday cake. So I got a half-sheet cake and decorated it, and ran the whole six miles carrying it:
I can put on a smile for the camera but it didn't feel that good in the arms. It is pretty weird to run a race and for that to be the primary focus of pain. Harder than the H1N1 marathon costume, I'd say, though a much much shorter race. But running with a costume is basically always worth it. For the people you run by (observers or if you start in the back, folks you pass) the costume is new and funny, so the whole race people are laughing or making comments and in this case wishing or singing happy birthday. They love that shit because they're either waiting in the rain for the one person they know in the race to pass, which is otherwise totally monotonous, or they're hurting from running in the race and want to be distracted. And I love overhearing or having other people overhear, "You got beat by the guy carrying the cake?!" Oh yeah so it was raining, and this made the cake very wet, and the cardboard it was on start to have deteriorating conditions and buckle, so this was a disadvantage for ways one could carry it because it needed Total Underbody Support. Eventually there were only like two asymmetric (dual) ways and one symmetric way to hold the cake and I'd cycle between them every 15 seconds as my arms and back were burning up. I made it downtown with the cake about as intact as it could be, which isn't saying much:
 9-27-79 NEVER FORGET
Even my birthday hat has melted. News like spectacles, so some people interviewed me. The best coverage was on KDKA (near the end, though the anchor foreshadows). There's some interviewing of me in the otherwise extremely boring (like it's mostly just video of people standing around?) WPXI Web Exclusive. See 1:55 and 3:30.
Lots of friends helped make this the best birthday weekend ever with their party-going and fun-loving and organizing and driving me to-and-fro since my license expired and I have another flat tire, and the cake eating and wearing hats in the race and writing on me and watching Steelers and not giving me presents that make me feel uncomfortably materialistic and rearranging the art bottles and taking photos and everything. Thanks!!! :) | |
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Erie and Zurich
(26 Jul 2009 at 17:52) |
Last weekend we did the Erie Something-or-other Half Marathon on Presque Isle, which is in the Lake Erie. It was visiting undergrad researcher Jamie's idea. I was gonna drive (~2.5 hours) to this thing, but then for weeks and months my car is accumulating new noises and the old new noises never go away: e.g. there's the shshh-shshh synchronized with the rotation of the wheels that I think progresses from left to right and that attracts the attention of pedestrians, plus the always sound of zzzzzzzzzzz or ssssssssss or maybe žžžžžžžžžž, depending on your accent. Plus now the deep insides-looseness on some streets. The CD player only displays space-gibberish and cannot eject and plays the one now permanently engaged mix CD at slightly too-high volume. There are lots of problems unrelated to noises, too. The repairs demanded clearly exceed its total value, even considering nostalgia. So now I am pretty much committed to only driving this car in places where were it to literally fall apart in motion, I would be basically okay with that. This does not include any portion of I-79 nor Erie, PA. Then Dan and Katrina are gonna come too so yay, I can avoid driving (which I hate doing anyway) the deathmobile. But morning of the trip their car is today leaking oil I guess for similar psychosomatic reasons. So we'll rent, but all of the rental places just closed because it's Saturday, except for the ones at the airport. So we packed our running shoes and took the airport shuttle to the airport and rented and drove up to Erie and stayed in a motel which has a 1.5 star rating (with 33 highly negative reviews, e.g. "WORSE HOTEL EVER" If the room was free I would never return) but based on TF–IDF signals (particularly the uncommon frequency of describing it as "the worse hotel") I concluded that this was mostly the work of Spam-sabotage ratings, maybe by local alternative hotels or maybe just by Google maps terrorists. When we got there it was totally fine, I mean not great and sure I had to wear my industrial-grade hearing protection to fall asleep with the sirens and such, but those were just on the way by the motel on the way to other places with actual crimes. It was nothing compared to the place near Columbus with the bulletproof glass at reception and the meth party by the ice machine ("this place can get kinda off the hook at night"). I mean, this place had a lobby, decorative, non-functioning pool, and decorative, non-functioning exercise room. So that was fine. We tried to go get some diner food because we're all vegetarians with different pre-race food rituals, and we wanted so badly to go to this place but it was closed: Dinor?? How is it possible to make a mistake like this? I may just not understand some deeply-construed pun, since an awful lot of stuff in that city is named with various puns on "Erie," like for example Erie Brewing Co.'s brewpub is called "The Brewerie". It was one block from our hotel and one of my pre-race food rituals is to have a bit of beer the night before, and I do like their "Railbender" ale on draft, so we took a gander. It felt more like a hotel bar than a brewpub, but the beer was pretty good and the waitress nicely lent me her sharpie so that I could prepare my costume for the race, which was to write "MY COSTUME IS GREAT HI" on my chest skin with the marker, in the bathroom which I could only accomplish with the full-length mirror so that was kind of weird for the other people in the bathroom, I sussed out from their faces.
This was Dan and Katrina's first M/2 so of course we left them in the dust. (But congratulations to both for finishing in admirable times; 13 miles is no joke!) Jamie wanted to qualify for Elite Status for the Chicago Marathon or something, and I (thought I) was not really trained enough to beat my previous best time so I volunteered to pace her. We ran the first 7 miles at the goal pace of 7m30s but then started to slow a bit, and she was starting to give me some sob story about passing out and I tried giving her various guts pep talks but she kept encouraging me to endustinate her too so I endusted for the last 5 or so miles at more like a 6m30s pace. I was surprised how decent that felt given the shape I thought I was in, though it could easily have been mostly because of the leisurely start. I finished in 1h37m35s, a lot slower than my previous best of 1h27m48s, but a lot more easily accomplished. I'm therefore downwardly adjusting my lifetime goal for the Half Marathon to 1h23m00s. This might be the race to do it in; there's wind but it claims that it "is quite possibly" the flattest in the world.
Now Listening to via usually-good podcast: 2009 Bob Mould. I cannot believe this is the same guy from Hüsker Dü. How embarrassing.
Speaking of umlauts, I also went to Zürich. Even in the place itself umlauts or not is only like 50-50, so I hereby stop spelling it that way. It was mostly a working trip, so not a lot of stories to recount. On the way there I had a long layover to insulate against nearly certain EWR bullshit (indeed, the connection delivered on its 70% chance 1+ hour delay) so I had some beer in one of the gouge bars and ended up talking to this professional car performance-modding guy. It is a special traveling joy of mine to fake credentials in fleeting interactions: e.g. false name left with the maître d', carrying out transactions in languages I don't at all or barely speak without being sussed as an American (I lose if the person switches to English, for example, especially in the first Hello). Actually come to think of it that was how I first became vegetarian: I used to pretend to be vegetarian in some restaurants, and I think Jake started accusing me of being a vegetarian fraud, so I had to show him. Anyway I get into a conversation with this guy and now I'm pretending to be sort of knowledgeable about cars, using mainly fleeting facts from my brother's Motor Trend etc. magazines that I sometimes read in the toilet. I think I successfully fraudulized him, in fact, I'm sure that he would have been negatively astounded to find out that I actually drive (meaning own) a 1996 Mercury Villager minivan with aforementioned noise and non-noise problems that I bought on eBay for $2500. So success. I probably should have used the opportunity to get some tips on inexpensively and ironically replacing my car, like: Is it possible to performance-mod a golf cart? (Or Go- Go- Power-Wheels?)
On the plane my rowmate was from Erie where I had just been yesterday, and he was happy that anybody ever went to Erie, so we were friends without any Zeliging. A few hours later in the middle of the "night" he starts acting weird, like he's taking magazines from the seat pocket and handing them to me one by one, which I take them because we're Erie friends and wait for him to explain WTF, then he starts making indescribable and nonproductive motions, and also obviously rude incursions into my seat volume, at which I realize that he is plane-sleepwalking. Eventually he gets up and starts moving around the cabin, which I don't know if it was because he was actually awake or just more somnambulatory, and anyway I wasn't sure if I was supposed to wake my friend or let him continue to sleep, because it is pretty hard to sleep on planes.
Each person or group in the line of visitors, some distant tourists and some more local, laughs and/or rolls eyes as the group in front can't figure out how to operate the computermachine that gives you train tickets and eventually gives up, including me, and of course it turns out the reason is that it is actually broken (but no DEFEKT sign), leading you on until the very end where it silently refuses any kind of payment. I try to explain nonverbally to the people behind me but they don't understand or don't believe me; the machine at the other side works as expected.
While I was in town I didn't have internet so I was reading a book on recommendation, called If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. I do pass on this recommendation to you. It's actually remarkably similar to what I was trying to do with Name of Author by Title of Book except that If on a... was written the year I was born, and Calvino is much more competent, and the book probably took more than a month to write. I don't want to spoil it, but there are various parts of the book that are written in the 2nd person, which eerily matched up with things that were actually happening to me during the trip. Like I'd turn the page and it'd be all "Now your plane is landing." and in fact my real life plane is landing!? So, a good book, and especially good for the trip.
I can also recommend two other things in Zurich; these I didn't bring with me. The first is a run up to the tip of Uetliberg, the tallest mountain in running distance from Zurich's city center. The run is pretty challenging if you take the direct route, because it starts out hilly and just keeps getting hillier. If you're at the top on a clear day there's a radio tower with steps up it (no tolls or any bullshit like that) to a platform from which you can see like jillions of miles (except there, they are kilometers) in all directions. I see some interesting looking clouds on the horizon and then realize those are snowcapped mountains; the Alps. Uetliberg is no The Alps but for a few hours foot excursion it's pretty great. I hear that the tower is Zurich's #1 suicide spot, FYI.
The other recommendation is Hiltl, Europe's oldest vegetarian restaurant. Finding vegetarian food at all in most countries in Europe is an achievement, but this place has been operating for 111 years (!). Food's good, expensive, but I didn't feel out of place in my plaid shorts and t-shirt because they also have their Twitter feed projected on the wall. The world's an increasingly strange place; rather: it's strange to be growing into adulthood and finding that the world is increasingly built for me or people like me.
This post is clearly long enough, but one more tale: We were out drinking all night and on the way back to my hotel, a guy approaches me who is obviously also drunj, and my accent radar says he is Eastern European. He seems afraid of me which is funny because first of all I am not a threatening guy I think in a nice part of town with my MP3 player and general smirk, but also because if you're afraid of someone you don't usually go up and ask that person in a worried way, "Have you ever heard... " (he struggles for the words) "... of an attacker?" An attacker, I ask? "Someone who kills me?" I smile but he looks genuinely concerned. I say: "No, I think you're safe." He is so relieved to hear this, and then we shake hands and become drunj 2am unattacked friends and say good-bye. | |
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Rachel Carson Trail Challenge report
(21 Jun 2009 at 10:20) |
Yes!terday Cortney (visiting from DC) and I completed the 2009 Rachel Carson Challenge again. Rachel Carson was a smart science lady who I think invented DDT. This is advertised as a "34 mile" "hike" on the "brutal" Rachel Carson "trail". The function of my quotation marks is manifold: First, they are literal quotations from the Challenge site, now properly attributed. Second, scare quotes on 34 miles; it is actually at least 36 miles, and for us measured at 37.7 because we got a bit of coffee and stopped at the checkpoint where you have to go off the trail a bit. (Actually, maybe as much as 41; see below.) For "hike" also envision my finger-based air typography; for sure there is a lot of walking but also a lot of downhill gravel-skiing, multi-pitch mud climbing, and fell running. That's because the "trail" (again I am scratching the backs of four very small floating people) is sometimes literally a walk in the park, but also sometimes a stroll on the highway, or a schlep in the clay, or a 100ft drop over the course of 200ft of trail, immediately followed by the reverse. Some parts sometimes it's like someone took a microminiature unsharp push-mower to the Poison Ivy Kingdom and mowed a little line merely to mark where you should go.
It's good stuff. The event is not cardiovascularly hard like a long run. It is pretty leisurely and you are constantly held up by people in front of you on the trail anyway. (Some professional self-flagellators do run it. The course record is something like 6h12m, which pace would be a very slow marathon of 4h48m!) The hard part for me is just stress on the body. Blisters and chafing and other surface ailments are a given, and you just tough that out, but all the stepping on uneven ground really activates my old and new deeply internal foot and knee injuries. At the end you can barely walk and then naturally the course comes within .2 miles of the finish line but you actually have 2 miles left, oh and now you're done but j/k lol because this year they moved the finish line another third of a mile back so they can have more space for the cookout. The real metric aside from the length is the hilliness. It is preposterous. It's hard to give a really indisputable measurement for the hilliness (Even Mandelbrot, a smart science guy who I think invented the movies Jurassic Park and The Butterfly Effect, wonders How Long Is the Coast of Britain?), but a conservative estimate is our smoothed GPS trail collated with USGS data, giving 18,009 ft of total elevation change. That's 3.4 miles up and down. (I think it would be fair to describe it as more than that, since many of the important trail features surely exceed the resolution of USGS.) For comparison, the San Francisco marathon measured the same way was "just" +/- 2,000 ft. (Actually I wonder if there is any IOC standard about how you factor elevation change into the "length" of a road race? I struggle with this in my Pac Tom project overintellectualization/cartographic obsessiveness: Should I measure distance between GPS coordinates as great circle distances on the ideal sea-level earth pear? Or as points in three dimensional space? The latter seems fair but not consistent with how people seem to do it. Even distances on a "flat" surface at 1,000ft are longer per degree than at sea level, because you're really running on an arc, not a line.) Anyway point is maybe this challenge should be nominally 40+ miles. Misleadingly scaled graphic: 
It could easily have been much worse. We just had a rainfall-record-setting, inch-sized hail dropping, 4-lightning-strikes per second, car-washing-away, office-closing storm in Pittsburgh two days ago, with forecasts of strong thunderstorms throughout the weekend. This kind of news is in some ways secretly welcomed by professional self-flagellators, even not just because it removed some of the plastic people from CMU's most sore eyesore, but because it might create one of those lifelong memorable suffering trenchfoot scenarios. I wore just a bathing suit, hiking boots, and backpack. It started thunderstorming as we feared/hoped on the drive out there, at 5am, and a few brief times during the hike, but most of the time it was actually sunny. Here is a representative picture of me photographing myself while Cortney is taping up her toenail casualty:
See? That ain't so bad. There was lotsa mud leftovers but some people pay hundreds of dollars for mud baths, after all. | |
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Pittsburgh Marathon: Tell me that guy's not from the CDC
(03 May 2009 at 22:42) |
So today I ran the Pittsburgh Marathon, I lovely jaunt through Pittsburgh's many distinct neighborhoods. My time was pants. Embarrassing, really, at 4h13m17s. I say that because my first marathon last year I did in a respectable 3h23m04s. But I knew this would happen: I had lost a month and a half of training because of a mysterious back injury, and then when I got mysteriously better I immediately overtrained myself into some kind of other illness, and so I was totally out of shape for this event. Since I knew I was not going to have a shot at beating my personal best, and who wants to try hard and put in a mediocre-bad non-best time, I decided yesterday that I would run in costume. Costumes are a kind of marathon tradition, though there were hardly any other costumes in Pittsburgh this year, surprisingly. I only have pretty much one costume making strategy, which is to use a full-body Tyvek jumpsuit with something written on it and maybe some kind of props. This time it was a timely reference. I wore it as a hazmat suit, and picked up a respirator at the hardware store too (all sold out at the drugstore, somewhat alarmingly), then emblazoned it with "CDC — INFLUENZA UNIT" and on the back "H1N1 INFLUENZA-A 2009". This was the first time I ever wore a costume in a race but I really liked it. Lots of cheering people (or others in the race) got it, and it is really fun to hear them mention it or pick up the cheer volume/directedness as you go by, since 4 hours is a pretty long and potentially boring period without stimulus. 1/3 of people approximately thought it was just doctor scrubs, which I can understand because med students are in the habit of around here wearing their scrubs to the coffeeshop or the Shadyside X gym or whatever, I think as a way to attract mates. (Obviously they do not make good workout clothes nor would it be any particular hardship to change.) But if the costume was scrubs it would be dumb to write CDC INFLUENZA UNIT H1N1 all over it. At least one other comment suggested the interpretation that I was an escaped prisoner, which I think is funny, especially the idea that I might have escaped and run 26 miles only to end up right where I started, back at the penitentiary. The downsides of this costume are multitudinous: e.g. the respirator made it basically impossible to breathe. I wore it for the first mile and a half but it was like sucking bigtime wind, whereas the first few miles are usually super easy. So most of the race I had that around my chin and maybe covering my mouth but breathing from the nose, except that I'd put the hood and mask on again when I sussed that a cheering and photography gauntlet was coming up—even though then it was soaked in sweat and gatorade so I'd be inhaling that moistness—because it definitely increased the cheering factor. Here's what it looks like with all options enabled:
 (Thx to Nels for this photo.)
Downside #2 is majorer: Fact: That suit is basically waterproof to protect the skin or underclothes, so it just stores up sweat drops and heat to make a sort of stinko jacuzzi inside. After a few miles I took off the clothes I had underneath, which helped a bit, and I also ran for a bit with the top down bare-chest just me holding it like an oversized jacuzzi diaper, but then I thought if I'm going to do a costume marathon I should really wear a costume the whole time. Anyway, this did not help my speed but it would have been shit anyway.
Why did I suxx so much? The costume was some trouble but the lack of training was the biggest component. This was a good lesson. I felt much worse running this than I did putting in a very much better time in SF. Training works. I also thought this course was pretty hard. You can't really tell it from the elevation chart, but lots of it is these rolling up- and down-hills. The three-mile continuous climb comes at pretty much the worst time, and it was responsible for offing me and a few friends. The weather started out and ended perfect but there was some water on the road from a storm yesterday and it drizzled a bit more, and by mile 16ish my shoes were soaked with juice, which actually really sucks because it makes the shoes a lot heavier and harder to move and blister-raisins up your feet in an uncomfortable way. I also got some bigtime muscle cramps, I don't know why. The 4-mile bike trip to and fro probably did not help.
Big ups to the folks from the CMU running club, most of which were doing their first marathons and many of which put me to shame. Thanks a lot to all the friends that showed neighborhood pride by coming out to cheer (sometimes in multiple locations!).
Speaking of bigtime, I made the KDKA news. Check out the rousing story Supporters Cheer On Marathon Runners for my one-second appearance at about 1:43. They don't even explain or mention my costume, so I guess they must have just thought I give a mean high-five, which is true. | |
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39m33s or ⊥!
(28 Sep 2008 at 14:25) |
Phew! That was freakin' brutal. But I did it: I got under 40 minutes (this time safely under at an official 39m33s) in this mostly-downhill 10K (6.21 miles). I prepared and trained a lot for this race (maybe not as much as the marathon, but still I took it pretty seriously) and yesterday was my first 29th birthday so I didn't really behave myself on Friday night, but I'm really glad I got my goal time so I can retire from the 10K distance. I hate that distance. Super long distances are painful, but not because I run at an uncomfortable pace, just that I do it for hours. I like that better. 5K is fine because you suffer bad but it's over in 20 minutes. 10K I feel like I am pushing just as hard (indeed my 5K split in this race was my fastest ever 5K and my time was less than twice my Run Around The Square time), just for twice as long. Pukey. The whole long uphill parts on 5th Avenue and Boulevard of the Allies I was continuously doing that giving up game, like literally visualizing myself pulling over to stop at a specific spot coming up twenty yards down the road, really succumbing to it, but then when I get to that point declining (it's really more like forgetting than declining). I don't know how to explain this, really. Anyway, it was definitely my hardest race. I'll run it again, but I currently don't feel any need to improve or match this time.
I don't have any race plans in the near future (basically, I'm heading back to full-time Pac Tommery) so you won't have to see this template for a while, but I must: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED
Official 10K under 40 minutes | |
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Runnin' with the Devil
(06 Sep 2008 at 14:40) |
Music, running, music, running. That's all there is to do on Tom 7 Radar these days. I even have a music post queued up next. Oh, actually, I have a non-music and non-running post queued up too, phew.
But here's the thing: 'tis the season. So I got up at 4:45am and took public transportation to the IKEA Half Marathon in Robinson, which starts in a shopping center. No kidding. After a big downhill for the first 3/4 mile (which IMO they should get rid of, since I think it cheapens the race) it's a loop out and back on the Montour Trail, which is pretty nice. It is reminiscent of the Farmington Canal in New Haven county. These running stories are tedious but I wanted to share two things. First is I registered in the morning right before the race and smirked when I saw my bib at the top of the pile:
Yeah, really 666. I mean, it's even in bright-ass red. I got some good comments on this one. The other thing is that even though I wasn't taking this race very seriously (in terms of preparation; I definitely ran it hard) I ended up achieving another personal goal, which was to run a half-marathon under 1h30m. I'm not sure exactly what my official time was, but I timed myself at 1h27m48s, which works out to a pace of about 6m45s per mile. It's a small race too (something like 700 runners) so I also got 3rd place in my age group with that time, though I don't know what that age group is (for all I know it could be exactly-28-year-olds). So anyway,
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED
Half Marathon under 1h30m | |
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Run around the Square, 2008
(23 Aug 2008 at 11:59) |
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED
Official 5K time under 20:00
Phew. This race was a lot hillier (meaning up-hillier) than I thought it was going to be, but I did it, finishing in 19m54s, which is a pace of 6m24.3s per mile. Lots of people were telling me it should be easy for me to break 20 minutes, but it wasn't. I think I'm just not built for middle-distance.
Mistakes: Well, I didn't prepare for this as well as the marathon. I didn't eat as well the last couple of weeks, and I ate way too much pasta last night (anyway carbo-loading doesn't really do anything for this kind of race; it should have been about eating something that wouldn't upset my stomach) and drank too much coffee and not enough water in the morning. The biggest mistake was probably rushing off at the beginning of the race with the front of the pack. These people were running like a 5m15s/mile pace, which is way faster than I need to crack 20 minutes, and that tired me out. After finishing the first mile in 5m41s, the race started to get uphill. I was surprised because I naively thought that since it started up in Regent Square and ended down in the park, it would be all downhill. So on mile 2 I was feeling really crappy, like I needed to give up. (Thinking about giving up is a sure-fire way to crapify your race. Every time it happens you might as well knock 10 seconds off the final time.) And then I started feeling like I should conserve my energy because there was this relentless uphill, and I didn't want to die later. (Recall I was thinking that my first mile was stupidly fast, by this point already.) That second mile was a pace of 7m14s, which is pants. The third mistake is that the third mile is almost all downhill, especially the tail end, and I should have flat-out booked it in that section. Instead I was still worried about conserving my energy. Really all of these big mistakes can be traced back to not knowing the course before running it. Dumb. At least I won't have that problem in the Great Race. Of course all of that stuff accounts for maybe 10–15 seconds at most, so no big deal. I'd certainly be kicking myself more if I had come in just over 20 instead of just under.
Correct: Red Laces are still rocking it, but that was sort of an obvious choice because this race is mostly on gravel and not long so feet/knee shock is not an issue. The parts that were on Pittsburgh/Swissvale's brick and cobblestone roads I wisely ran up on the sidewalk. The sidewalk is treacherous too, but not as bad as the stones. I wore only shorts and shoes, GPS watch and car key. No water stops. The biggest victory was a mental one. Even though I was mentally giving up a few times, even in essence composing the alternative version of this blog post where I am talking mostly about mistakes and excuses for why I didn't meet my goal, in the last year or so I've learned a super important race principle. This will sound obvious. I often go into these races thinking, okay Tom, today is the day and this race I am going to really push myself and try to do X (where X is e.g. break 20 minutes). Then some distance into the race I am feeling garbagey and this makes me think, drat, today is not the day. I'm not up to it today. I made some kind of mistake. And the principle is just: The reason I feel garbagey is that I am pushing hard, and that's what it feels like, and to try hard is to feel this way, no matter the day. (This incidentally is how I know I didn't push hard enough in the marathon, which is that I didn't feel that way until mile 25 or something at which point it was basically over anyway.) So the success is the several times I felt like I should slow down because I'm not going to make my goal anyway, not slowing down, or not slowing down as much as I'm prone to at least. Also then there was beer and friends at the end and that was nice.
Next goal is to break 40 minutes in the Pittsburgh Great Race, which is twice the distance, but I think the course is easier. I am more serious about that, but that just means the personal stakes are higher. Think how many Gamer Points I'll have before year's end?? | |
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Marathon managed!
(03 Aug 2008 at 15:56) |
Oh, red laces! You did not let me down.
So, this morning I got up at 4:30, made coffee, and biked 3 miles to downtown on a funny folding bike (courtesy Jake) to run the San Francisco marathon. This was my first marathon. I've been "training" for it for about 2 months, which for me means running a hard 4 hilly miles every day, or a semi-gentle longer (10–15-ish) one on the weekend. I was also trying to watch my calorie intake, which is much harder than running every day, it turns out. Anyway training is boring and over. Let's not talk about that. I was a little worried about running in this race because I had never run that far before (the previous farthest was a very painful 22 miles with a number of pain-increasing circumstances), and I was worried that it would be really physically hard (particulary as respects "The Wall"). I was even more worried about injury, particularly to my right knee which has a chronic pain issue at distance and had been acting up this past week. (I think that I get these pains psychosomatically to some degree when I know I'm about to do something intense, like I actually think my body is inventing pain to try to discourage me from doing it because it usually goes away after I tell it Shut Up and run for a few miles.) Even though I did a half-marathon in like 1:40 or so, and I'm much better than I was then, I had my expectations set pretty low (it turns out, stupidly low) for this race: I said to myself and those who asked that I would be happy with 3h45m and disappointed if I didn't come in under 4 hours. My sights were stupidly low because I finished in 3h23m04s, which is approximately the 90–95th percentile (depending who you count)! And I definitely could have done better. Here's what happened. I was a little late to the start line because the biking was slower than I thought and the chaining of the bike was a more complex knotting and folding problem than I thought, and the lines for the porto-potties were a lot longer and slower than I thought, so I ended up starting with the 4h–4h15m wave, which is even a slower pace than I thought I wanted, and is definitely a lot slower than I now know I want. And that's fine because it's actually pretty fun and encouraging to be passing people the whole time, and you get better cheering when you do so, as long as there is enough room to be passing people safely and non-obnoxiously. And so I was carefully running a 7:55/mi pace which felt sluggish but I thought it was the right thing because I didn't want to feel shitty later when I got to the last 10 miles. Then we got to the Golden Gate Bridge. This is almost certainly the most beautiful part of the course. They blocked off two traffic lanes for us; one out and one back. But the lanes are pretty narrow and there was no out-of-band sidewalk option, so I kept getting stuck behind some people who were running side-by-side and I couldn't get around them, not even if I was signaling and dashing to the other side of the lane, because over there were some other more people bunched up. I can't even blame them because they were all moseying along at the same pace that was appropriate for the wave they started in because they are more punctual than me. But this was really fucking annoying because 7:55 felt slow already and 9:15 or whatever was really slow. So when I finally finished this bridge part, which is about mile 11, and I was not feeling basically any fatigue and I was feeling this annoyance of not having been able to go as fast as I had wanted, and finally there was room to run around people, I really opened it up and that felt great. My knee was hurting and then later my foot, but I ignored it and it eventually went away. I ran the rest of the race at what I would guess was an average pace of 7:00 or so. I could have pushed harder there, but it didn't feel sluggish at least and I was still a bit worried about body changes at mile 20ish, so I was content to continue and get a much better time than I had thought. I'm honestly a little disappointed that it wasn't harder. It didn't feel bad or hard at all until mile 22, even, and then I only had to check my watch to push a little to keep up the 7:00 pace. Only at mile 24.5 did I turn to someone else and go, "This sucks!" and at that point you can hardly complain. So I am certainly happy with my time and I'm definitely happy with being able to run continuously (ok, with one bathroom break) for that long although I feel a bit like a chump for underestimating myself. If I had just pushed a smidge harder from the beginning I could have almost certainly qualified for Boston (3h10m), which I had previously thought was like a life-long goal of mine but now I think I should just do the next time I make marathon.
Here are some things that worked out well: The bike was a good way to get down there. At 5:20 there is nobody on the road. I didn't have to deal with any parking nonsense. Arriving in SF yesterday with EDT jet lag made it much easier to get up at 4:30. I "carbo loaded" on Friday and Saturday and this seems to have worked? On Saturday with dinner I had 3 beers of light strength. This is a personal racing trick. They contain carbs too, and make it easier to relax and get a good night's sleep, as long as you don't get dehydrated. I think I did the right thing drinking at the water stations and having power-gel at mile 18 because I didn't have any wall problems that I could detect. Red Laces worked out great. Thank you blog-readers for putting me at ease about this choice. I was scared at mile 8 when the knee pain came, but it went away. I also have this chronic under-nail blister that I think is going to result in one of my toenails falling off (gross) but I don't think that is a shoe issue but a weird toe angles issue. The clothes were right. This was a concern for me because San Francisco has such weirdo temperatures and micro-climates. I wore shorts, a t-shirt, a long-sleeve shirt, and a hat. In the early morning and on the bridge the long-sleeves were good. Then I ditched that layer and ran the next 8 miles with the t-shirt, then I ditched the t-shirt and ran the rest in just the shorts. I held onto the hat, because it is light and it's something to wipe up sweat with. Not carrying stuff (including clothes on your body) does make a noticeable difference. I could have ditched earlier, but I'm glad I had the long sleeves for the bridge. I ran hard on the downhills. This is a good place to make up time, and it is especially fun because you get good cheers when you are conspicuously pushing hard. I think the concern is acute injury, but I have a lot of practice from Pittsburgh hills.
Here are some mistakes: As mentioned, the worst thing was being super wrong about the pace I'd be able to keep up. Embarrassing. Even if I had known the actual time to qualify for Boston (I thought it was 3h30m) I could have pushed harder in the second half and probably gotten it, once I realized. Well, there are lots of marathons. I will try again. In training, I should have started calorie restriction later, since I was at my minimum weight last weekend, not this one. And that process is not fun. I wrote a crazy-long and boring blog post about it. Seriously, a lot of people have been telling me that they want to hear "all about it", etc., so I hope those people are happy, and regular readers who like to read about interesting things and projects are simply not reading this far. I knew that I was planning on ditching both shirts, so I definitely should have left a backup shirt with the bike. That was dumb. It is cold when you are not running. They had these mylar blankets that they were giving out as some kind of weird robot/superhero swag, so what I did was to tie that around my naked upper body and then punch holes through it for my arms, which looked absolutely ridiculous. Biking down was a great warmup, but the bike trip back uphill in the cold and looking ridiculous after running that far actually rather sucked. It was a little disturbing how few comments/looks I got, which I guess speaks to San Francisco's level of weird-tolerance in general.
Finally, some observations: San Francisco is famously hilly, of course (though not as hilly as Pittsburgh, in my opinion). The marathon route is amusingly flat, however. The biggest hill is the one going up to the Golden Gate Bridge, which isn't really that bad. Like when I was running in Portland, I definitely noticed the locals (at least I assume they were predominantly locals) suffering substantially on hills. I just thought this was funny in Portland, but I was disappointed with the San Franciscans, who I feel should be representin' the local terrain. The Pittsburgh marathon, which is coming back in 2009 and does not go out of its way to be flat despite the naturally hilly terrain, will be interesting for this reason. In my opinion we should actually craft the course to be maximally brutal, which, coupled with Pittsburgh's unpredictable weather and poor air quality, could help us get a reputation as one of the most abusive US marathons. Because we ought to excel along at least one dimension, right? I like trains a lot. It is weird and I don't understand why I saw so many people running on the sidewalk in the opposite direction of the marathon. What are they doing? It is weird and scary when I see someone running like this:  Scary not just because I don't have my regular drawing tools with me and so I have to draw this awkward animation on this crappy mac trackpad, but scary because I think if I ran 400m with this kicking the heels out to the side style—let alone 26.2 miles!—I would ruin my knees forever. I saw at least 4 women running this way. I think that they have bad friends.
OK: I apologize for this post. Do not unsubscribe. I promise the next will either be short, or be about an interesting project, or written in an amusing style. Right now I am too wiped out to do any of those. | |
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