2014 Traprock 50K

With the weather calling for showers all week, Saturday, April 19th defied expectations and dawned bright and beautiful for the 5th annual Traprock 50K. For the four or five months leading up to the race, I'd been tremendously excited. I last ran this race in 2011 and loved it, but I've been steadily injured and/or overtrained ever since. My new job coaching swimming has happily forced me into a much more sane running schedule. No more two-hour evening runs on top of long morning runs, no more insane weekly mileage. I swim more, run less, and almost never run at night. Lo! these past six months, I have (banging head against desk here) been injury free.

Traprock is a perfect early season race for me. The starting line is just over an hour from my house. The terrain is wonderfully challenging, rugged and steep (Simsbury, Connecticut! Who would believe it?). And the relentlessness of the rocks and roots keep me rolling along at a 12-14 minute per mile pace, which is perfect at this point in my minimal training.

Sounds like I wasn't even running, doesn't it? Sounds like I was out there puffing through a brisk Sunday stroll. Suffice it to say, this is a tough course. (Or as they say around here, tuff coss.) And of course I'm getting older. Turns out I was operating that day with an unprecendeted, peri-menopausal (I'll spare you the details), near-calamitous lack of iron in my blood. And I was coming own with a cold.

This race consists of three 10-11 mile loops through Penwood State Forest. Despite what follows, I absolutely love this course. The first four miles are, to my mind, the most challenging. The hills are steep and the footing dicey. Granted, we're not in the mountains here, far from them unfortunately, so the climbs are relatively short, but crazy, hands-on-knees, I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can steep. Up and down; up and down. For a runner of my hill climbing caliber (poor, I live in a flat place) it was difficult to get into a rhythm. There are no long, runnable sections. Peace must be made, especially on the first loop, with the somewhat deflating notion of walking big stretches of trail. The first four miles went something like this: walk up; get out of breath; jog a bit at the top; start running down; stop and pick your way carefully down deadly, rocky cliff face; jog a bit; repeat, repeat, repeat......

The runner (in this case, me) then emerges on what had been described to me as a carriage road. Goddamn. I pity the hapless passenger forced to travel this rucked and rutted path in anything less than a full suspension tank. Believe me when I say no carriage has ever passed over this road and survived. The trail is strewn with every size and shape of rock known to man, all tossed willy-nilly from the hand of some dreadful, Ice Age god. And to make matters even more challenging, the whole business is laquered with several layers of decomposing leaves. Just to keep you guessing.

And it's all uphill. At least as I remember it now: all uphill. The grade is runnable. Or at least trot-able. I trotted. Some walked. I'm sure the frontrunners ran lickety split from bottom to top.

After a couple of miles, this satanic carriage road dumps you onto a lovely stretch of single track. This is my favorite part of the course. The trail follows a ridge looking out toward the wilds of Northern Connecticut, occasionally dipping down to cross a friendly stream over a bucolic wooden bridge. The view from the ridge, on this particular day (sunny, 50-60 degrees, wind, no leaves to block your line of sight) went on for miles. I could have run on this stuff all day.

The penultimate  section of the loop was described to me as a paved road. Yes, there was pavement, so I suppose this road meets the minimum definition of paved. There was cement involved. But it was all over the place. This paved road was almost scarier than it's evil couisn, the carriage road. It was raised down the middle by a couple of feet, and the pavement fell away in chunks to either side, heaved by the countless frosts of many bygone winters. I stumbled and stubbed more on this section than anywhere else on the loop.

The last mile or two re-runs the first mile or two in the opposite direction. You can see the runners ahead of you striking out on their 2nd or 3rd loops while you struggle up, down, up, down back to the start/finish. The crowds down there make it all worthwhile. They announce your name and hometown and send you back around with a big hooray. It's just the sort of boost you need as you haul your tired self back up that first lung-busting hill.

My race started very slowly. My legs felt inexplicably heavy throughout the whole first loop. I couldn't really catch my breath (lack of iron?), and my legs burned on even the slightest uphill, let alone the big, steep climbs. I didn't have any spring for the downhills either. All in all, that first loop was a sluggish, lackluster effort.

The second loop went much better. I was breathing easier, though blowing my nose constantly into the soggy Buff headband I had twisted around my wrist for that purpose. My legs finally lightened up, and I felt like I could jog some of the hills I had walked during the first loop. I guess you know you're destined to be an ultra runner when it takes you 11 hilly miles to warm up. I passed several people on this loop, which was a nice psychological hit after having half the field blow by me on the first loop.

Toward the middle of the second loop, I felt all of my downhill muscles starting to quiver. (Indeed, they're still sore today, four days later.) I stumbled badly on the beautiful singletrack section (it's always those harmless bits of trail...), just catching myself before carooming face first into a boulder the size of a minivan. It was after this near-fatality that the little voices started up in my head:

                               Drop out after this loop.

                                            You've been out here long enough.

                                                       You're not trained for these hills.

                   You're perimenopausal; catastrophically low on iron.

                            All these other runners have so much more iron than you do.

                                Don't get injured on the first race of the season.

                                                              Your hormones!!

                                          You could do PErmaNEnT DaMAge!

I hate those voices. I did my best to ignore them. I focused on the positive: beautiful day, out here by myself in nature, people cheering for me (how often does that happen?), not dead last. And then as I picked my way down the "paved" section, the winners started passing me. These guys were finishing their third loop, and here I was grommetting my way through the second.

                      Oh, Jesus Christ, call it a day already.
                                                
                                   Jig's up, baby. You'll never finish at this rate.

                                       You'll keep all these nice volunteers from their warm dinners.

                                                                      STOP!!!!!

Photo by Bob S'Muncle: a little fuzzy, but the only photo I have.

It cannot be entirely accidental that the final yards of this course are all downhill. Those last glorious leaps (or whatever) back down to the start/finish tend to wipe the memory clean. After finishing my second loop, I grabbed a couple of chocolate Gu's from my drop bag and without giving it a second thought, trudged right back up that goddamn hill for the third and final loop.

No more voices. No turning back now.

My only goal at this point was to finish before dark and stay on my freaking feet. It was so hard to pick them up high enough to clear the rocks and roots. So difficult; yet so necessary. I don't remember much about that third lap I was concentrating so hard on staying vertical. All of the aid station people were super nice to me. I could tell I wasn't making much sense from the kind, cock-headed expressions I was getting from most of them. I had a nice stroll down the "pavement" section with my friend, Joe, who was working the last aid station. I remember that. And I remember standing for a couple of seconds at the top of the last hill of the course, gazing down through the grey tree skeletons to the lake and the finish line below, listening to the cheers, just drinking in the enormity of the whole thing.

There are many people to thank for this wonderful day. To the race founders and directors Steve and Kevin: thanks for this amazing course and for all the weeks and months of work that went into this race. It could not have gone better for me. To Jim C: thanks for sharing some miles and talking books with me. That did me a world of good on that difficult first lap. To Joe L: thanks for the water and the walk and the happy smile every couple of hours. To all the volunteers: you were amazing. And to Jerry T and Kerry A: thanks for timing the race and for all the encouragement.

My finish time was something like 7:26, which was half an hour slower than three years ago. It sounds freakishly slow to me now, but it's all I had in me for that course on that day.

This race is now part of a larger Connecticut trail racing circuit called the Blue Blaze Trail Running Series started by Scott and Deb Livingston. It looks like a great group of races, all different lengths and degrees of difficulty all over the state.

I had a great day out of the trails. I sincerely hope to be back next year (maybe with a few practice loops under my belt for 2015......).

My summer of tempered enthusiasm

I'm starting to notice a pattern in the careers of many (though certainly not all) ultra-runners, the famous and infamous as well as the mid- to back-of-the-packers. You discover the sport through a friend or blog or magazine article, run your first 50K, and fall instantly in love. You are, for most intents and purposes, a fairly laid back person with a seldom revealed, more intense dimension to your personality that points toward borderline ridiculous tests of endurance and strength. You tend perhaps to be the kind of person who "drives straight through" or "pushes on past" or "takes one last run" long after everyone else, all the normal people, have checked into a motel for the night or sought medical care or headed in for a hot toddy at the lodge. Suddenly in the midst of that first 50K, you find yourself unexpectedly surrounded by people like yourself. How unusual! Of course, you love these people. You bond. You want more of this.

So you train and you train and you race and you train. The world makes perfect sense to you now. You have a real "excuse" to go out and run as many miles as you want. You're training! You have 50 and 100 mile races in your future. These distances do not phase you. All of your new friends are running like this. All of your old friends think you're either superhuman or completely bonkers. You, however, are quite certain you have found your calling.

Things go along like this for a period of time. Maybe months, more likely years. For a lucky few, even decades. And then, inevitably (?) your body starts to rebel. Things don't work as well as they should. Body parts ache more than even you consider normal. You find yourself having to take breaks from running and this makes you sad. You have to think about backing off, about finding other outlets for all of that time and energy spent (gloriously spent!) running.

You must, in other words, temper your enthusiasm.

I haven't run an ultra since last October, almost a year ago. My foot and knee went south and remain doggedly un-well. I can run, but I don't dare take on 50 or 100 miles. I don't want to mess myself up for years and years. I do intend to get back to ultras, hopefully next year, but with a new sense of boundary and proportion. (I say that now; talk to me again in a year.)

So this summer I have, mostly through dire psychological necessity, tried to take on other challenges. My foot and knee do fairly well on flat ground, so I have focused a bit more on speed over the past few months. Track workouts, tempo runs, even some barefoot runs on the grass, you know, all of the stuff the real mountain runners shun entirely. And I like it. I like running fast on a track. It's a different kind of challenge, more intense and sharp, over quickly, but my-o-my. My kids are in on it as well. Inspired by the Olympics, they literally beg me to take them to the track every day. They're 7, 9 and 11, those magical years when you believe it entirely probable that you too will someday stand on the podium and hear your national anthem. They have clipboards and charts for their times. And they keep me on my toes. I'm not fast. But they are.

I have also re-discovered biking this summer. I've reconnected with some of my old biking friends from my pre-kid triathlon days. I like it. Even the hill repeats. I love moving quickly over bigger distances. Nothing hurts on the bike. Never mind that I more or less suck at it. It was always my weak link in the triathlon. My eleven year old daughter dusts me on her hybrid (me on my expensive road bike). But the rhythm and feel of the bike is somewhat addictive. I may get into it more seriously next year. I started too late this year. The bike season in New England is pretty short.

Mostly I have been swimming. I swam just about every day in the spring and early summer, 4000-5000 yards at a shot. My shoulder got a little cranky toward the middle of July, but I was able to work through it with the help of Bobby the Chiropractor Extraordinaire. He does something to it once a week that hurts like torture, like I will tell him anything he wants to know, government secrets, whatever, gladly, just to get him to stop. And then afterwards the shoulder feels amazing and my goodwill and natural reserve are restored.

In the spirit of the aforementioned "dimension" of the ultra-personality, I went ahead and signed up for a long open water swim race. 4.75 miles, sort of a 50K of open water events,  in the mighty depths of Lake Willoughby in the NEK (as I learned they call the Northeast Kingdom up there in VT).

More on that next post......

2012 Mystic Triathlon: Give me a decade and I'll tri anything

Okay well, since I’ve been swimming so much, and since swimming necessitates that I go to the local YMCA every morning, and since that local YMCA puts on a friendly little triathlon every year, and since so many people asked me if I was doing it, I finally bit the goddamn bullet, and Thursday morning, three days before the actual event, I signed up.

I am so glad I did. I had a blast swimming, biking and running my way around my hometown. The last time I did this race, my now-11-year-old daughter Nell was just eight weeks old. That was back when I was regularly racing triathlons. I was in a bit of a postpartum funk at the time and needed an event on the horizon to (sort of) train for, and the Mystic Triathlon came through with flying colors. I did the race, regained my sense of self, and went on to have two more kids.

That was eleven years ago. When I had babies in the house it became highly inconvenient to train for triathlons. It was much easier to put the babies in the stroller and run. And then I discovered ultra running, got hooked on the trails, and pretty much forgot about biking and swimming for a decade.

So here I am, eleven years older, slowly starting to get my running back together after a long winter of injuries, and sitting pretty with several months of solid swim training under my belt. Never mind that I had only biked once this spring, back in April, maybe 30 miles. I took a bunch of spin classes over the winter. Surely that’s good for something.

The swim portion of the race starts from the little beach behind the Y in brackish water close to the place where the Mystic River dumps into Long Island Sound. There were three waves of starts, three minutes apart, and all women were placed in the third wave, right behind the Over-40 Men. The water was chilly with a little chop, perfect for fast swimming. I took off as quickly as I could to get out in front of the pack, and then stayed there. I swam for all I was worth, gasping for air the whole time. I caught the back of the Over-40 pack before the first buoy and spent the rest of the swim like Miss PacMan, dodging in and out of big, blobby men in black rubber suits.

Coming out of the water and seeing Ben cheering made me smile and I didn't stop smiling all day. My friend John Conlon, Hawaii Ironman, died last year. This is his wetsuit. I was so happy to have it.

Learning that I am first woman out of the water.

When I got out of the water I was well and truly shocked to hear that I was the first woman. That gave me a little boost. My husband and kids were there cheering, which was the sweetest thing in the world.

And I then proceeded to have something like the third slowest transition all day onto the bike. Wrestle off wetsuit, doot de doo, sit down, put on shoes, la dee da, helmet, glasses, WOOPS, shirt before helmet, tra la tra la, hop on the bike and off we go.

Feeble attempt to put on bike shoes while standing up. (My friend Mary in purple back there was on a team and passed me so fast on the bike it made my head spin. I swear I detected a Doppler effect -- wooooosh!)

Screw it. I'm sitting down.

Finally got myself together. Number's a little askew, but here we go...

My kids and their friends cheering me on. Yay!

 
Immediately half the race passed me on the bike. I am the slowest biker in the world. Even when I used to seriously train for triathlons, my biking sucked. Some sort of brain body disconnect. I don’t think I have the ass for it, really. Any advice is greatly appreciated. I was biking so hard I could barely breathe and people were passing me like I was standing still. Huffety huffety huff huff.

Oh, and plus, I really had to pee. I must have swallowed a quart of salt water and it urgently needed to exit my body. The idea of getting off the bike was terrible. All that time lost already on this godforsaken bike. Getting off, peeing, and getting back on was unthinkable. So I did what Lance Armstrong would do. Why not? I waited for a woodsy stretch of road, checked to make sure there was no one coming up behind me (minor miracle that there wasn’t), kind of hung my butt off the back of the seat, yanked my shorts over to the side, and tried to pee. Except I couldn’t go. The pee wouldn’t release. Go, go, go, I kept telling myself. Go! Dammit, go! And then, finally, I went. All over the seat, my shorts, legs, everything. Aw, jeeeez.

Better on the bike than on the run, I told myself, and biked on, no one else the wiser.

Here I come back from my dismal bike leg. (Just don't think about all that you know what under there....)

Of course I didn’t practice any bike/run transitions (known as BRICKS in the triathlon world), so my legs felt simultaneously weighty and rubbery the minute I started to run. Kind of like running on two lardy Jello sticks, you know. The first mile was brutal. And then I kind of loosened up and picked up the pace. But not too much. As soon as I tried to go any faster than the minimally quick pace I was maintaining, I immediately started coughing like an asthmatic. I dearly wanted to catch the woman in front of me, and my legs were game, and I had been steadily gaining on her for the whole run, but I just couldn’t crank it into that next gear. My lungs would not allow it. I would have landed splat on the sidewalk, quivering, gasping and blue.

Chi Running paying off.

Again, my fabulous cheering section.

Bringing it home.

But still, the run was pretty good. I had gone as hard as I could for the whole race, and I finished totally exhausted, hugging my kids and smiling. The next day I was more tired than I can remember being in a long time. Funny what an hour and a half of hard, steady exertion can do to a person. Maybe I’ll do another triathlon this summer. I absolutely loved it.

But I’ll have to do a little more biking first…..

Stats:

0.5 mile swim (which I now hear was actually 1000 meters: 14:11 (1st woman, 3rd overall)

14 mile bike: 48:00 (90^th overall, please)

5K run: 21:53 (42^nd overall)

Time: 1:24:53 (45^th / 169 overall, 7^th woman, 2^nd 40-49 age group (bling!))

And thank you to the Mystic YMCA, all the volunteers, all the people out cheering, and my darling husband Brian for taking these photos.

Just love these guys. I'm so glad they were there. (And they want to race next year!)

So I guess you could sort of say I've started running again

After my last post whining my way through long injury, making dire deals to run less, run smarter, run better when(ever) I was able to run again, I have started running again more or less, though many fewer miles and hours than I used to, and I am very happy about it. I am running smarter (I think), definitely less, and I'm enjoying it. I'm trying to keep it to 3 times per week, although as I often find myself in the company of children, when a live adult calls and asks me to go for a run I rarely turn them down even if it makes four or even five runs in a week. I don't do well in sit-down-and-chat situations, so running is basically my social life. I can talk and run all day long. Sitting and talking starts to make my head buzz after 20 minutes. I don't know why.

Right now I'm trying to do a tempo run and track run and a long run every week. I am mostly following Bill Pierce's marathon training program in Run Less, Run Faster. I did my first track workout this morning, 3 miles with a quarter mile jog in between, 7:45, 7:30 and 7:15. Not really smoking fast considering I ran a 22-minute 5K just last October, but this will do as a good jumping off place for the rest of the summer.

My foot and knee are still sore, but screw 'em, I'm still running. They aren't getting any worse, and each week they do get better. They no longer hurt just walking around. They hurt when I first start running, then calm down. I am sitting here right now with my feet in an ice bath and my knee wrapped in an ice pack, and so goes my day. Every day. I'm seeing a chiropractor on Friday afternoons, my old friend Bobby, who is happy to do whatever I want him to. We are experimenting with the Graston technique and ART (active release technique). It seems to be working. I had to miss one week and I totally felt a difference, in the reverse direction. So....

I don't have any races on the horizon. I'm hoping to be back to the ultras by fall, but we'll see. No reason to rush, I guess.

My life these days revolves more around swimming. I swim most mornings for 90 minutes, anywhere from 4500 - 5500 yards. I am now a regular among the 5 a.m. swimmers, a group I used to fear mightily. They are lovely people. I have a waterproof workout book with more than 100 workouts. I am happy as a clam. It would be cool if I could find a serious masters swim group (the master's group at the Y where I swim is remedial at best: I need more). I watch my daughter's team in the evenings, listen to the coach, and try to incorporate some of her wisdom into my workouts.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am signed up to swim a 6 mile open water swim race in Vermont in July. I have been out in the open water a couple of times this year. I have to do a 4-mile swim (honor system) before I'm allowed to compete in the 6 miler. Maybe next weekend....

My friend Muireann is renting a house on Mason's Island here in Mystic, so I have done a couple of open water swims from her dock. The water is cold, but the wetsuit keeps me warm. I'm hoping to race without a wetsuit, so I'm going to have to toughen up and take the darn thing off one of these fine days.

Little head; little me

I sort of look like a sharpei here. The ever loosening skin of middle age.

Half an hour in cold water. Not too bad.

And on a totally separate note, I have started reading David Foster Wallace's book The Infinite Jest. Jonathan Franzen, in his book of essays Farther Away, cites this as his friend Dave's best book. And it is indeed a wonder. It's whip smart, somewhat difficult to follow, and dead on in so many ways. He talks a lot about competitive tennis, but much of what he says is easily transferred to running (or, for that matter, swimming). Anyone read it? I'm only about a quarter of the way through. I'm taking bets on whether I finish it.

"The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on the court, to be met,  fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: grow as a serious (player), with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It's tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again."
DFW, The Infinite Jest, p. 84

Patience: A rambling love story

I woke up on a recent Thursday morning with the old creeping ache deep in my shoulder sending tendrils down the long boneshaft of my arm and I knew I’d done it again. What is the matter with me?

Is it because I made that joke, months ago now, surely long forgotten by the demon who controls these things? I had just come home from a long swim. I could no longer run (my drug of choice) because I’d wrecked my left foot and right knee months before, overused into long injury. I hadn’t raced since October; it was now January. I told my husband (who else to tell?) how many yards I’d swum that morning between 5 and 6:30 a.m., well before the kids get up, well before he has to leave for work. I’d swum 4300 yards, much of it butterfly and backstroke (breaststroke hurts the knee). I felt somewhat strong, felt my life unexpectedly knitting together from the raveled fragments of my “I-can’t-run” alter ego, a fierce and fiery thing that lives in the pit of my stomach, must be fed often and well.

“Great,” my everloving husband replied to my boastful compilation of yardage. “You’ll swim your way to a shoulder injury next.”

“OH, give me a shoulder injury, please!” I said, blithely ignoring the cursed voice down in the pit, the one now secretly tumbling to life, moaning down there, “AHHhhhhhhh.”

“At least with a shoulder injury I could run,” I said.

But that was so long ago. That was before I became somewhat addicted to swimming, had made temporary peace with the not-running thing, had in fact signed up for a 6-mile open water swim race now looming just three months away. Can’t run. Can’t swim.

What’s to become of me?

There are people, many people, indeed most people based on the live responses I’ve been getting, who would revel in this idea of enforced rest. A vacation! Put your feet up! Read a book! Not for me.

But why?

That’s the million dollar question. People blessed with the gift of insight may well have answered this question for themselves long ago. I see them out there sweating up and down the roads day after day, running, biking. What’s chasing them? Who? Do they know? They must know.

These thoughts come up only when I’m injured, out of the game. There is a pattern, a somewhat inherent logic. I see it now. I’m 45 years old and I finally see the pattern. Run, run more, run too much, injure, repeat. But how I got here and why I stay here, that I cannot figure out.

I don’t think much about running at all when I’m actually running. Out there on the road or trail, I think about everything else. It’s a little mental vacation. I sit back and watch my thoughts go by. It’s the only time I really do that, and I think it’s a bigger part of my life than I realize.

When I’m not running, I’m obsessed. All I think about is running. When will I run again? How far? Which route? Hills? Speed? With whom? Alone? Mostly I run alone, but I love my running friends. They get me like no one else does. All of this makes perfect sense to them.

Most days, uninjured days, let’s for the sake of argument call them normal days, I get up at 3:45 a.m., having gone to bed around 10 the night before. Sometimes I sleep right through, but here in this perimenopausal stage of life there’s no guarantee of that. Sleep is no longer automatic. Nothing is. I make coffee in my French press, half or quarter caffeinated depending on the sleep situation. I fill the press about a third full of boiling water from the kettle, heat about a third cup of soymilk in the microwave, and then combine. I add a bit of honey or brown sugar or Agave nectar, maybe even white sugar if it’s all we have. None of this is precise. It’s drug making, not hard science. I know hard science because I failed at it. But I make one hell of a cup of coffee.

Then I sit in a chair, precisely the same chair every morning, eat a Vann’s Gluten Free Waffle, and try to write for an hour. It’s the only time of day I can actually think. Facebook and email beckon like the devils they are, and I do my best to resist. Often Facebook and email win. But when they don’t and I actually get something written, which is rare enough, I feel like I’ve done the right thing.

And then I run, or more recently, swim. I go for about an hour and a half. Hard. On weekends I run for hours. I start early and run all morning. The races I sign up for usually top out at 50 miles, but I have done 100. There is no methodology to this training system. There are no schedules, no particular goals, no cycles, no easy weeks, and very few days off. I have no data. I don’t know how far I run in a week, how far I swim (that 4300 yard figure I mentioned earlier was guessing), how many calories I burn, how much total elevation I gain, none of that. I don’t keep track. I usually do weights or a second run or spin class later in the evening during the kids’ swim practice at the Y.

I have the great gift of an hour and an half most evenings to do whatever I want and I choose to do a second run or lift weights or spin class. I choose one of these three every time. Why? Why do I wonder why my body isn’t holding up? Why does this baffle me so much?

I guess I actually don’t see the pattern. Not really. Maybe in retrospect. There is, it seems, a running sized hole in my head.

But these days right now are not “normal” days. I am injured. I am not in constant, tormenting pain, but I don’t want to get there. So I have stopped running. I am taking a month or two off. (I AM TAKING A MONTH OR TWO OFF.) And because my shoulder is sore because I signed up for this swim race and then immediately went out and swam 5 miles out of the clear blue sky, without any sort of proper build up, and then did not rest but continued to swim for the rest of the week as if nothing untoward had happened, I am no longer swimming either. Not for at least a week. Lucky for me, I have Lyme’s disease concurrent with all of this. So perhaps this week or two off will not kill me.

There is the question of time, of course. If I can’t run and can’t swim, temporarily let’s keep in mind, what do I do with this huge swath of suddenly open time? Sleep? Nah. I’ll sleep when I’m dead, right. Read? All the bearded Russians at long fucking last? Doestoevsky? Chekov? I loved listening to Tolstoy on my long runs last winter, back when I was running way too much, but couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Magic Mountain?

I chose Magic Mountain. This was back in January. I was just coming off a long Virginia Woolf binge and I thought Hesse might be the antidote. Sort of the opposite of Virginia Woolf. I had pertussis at the time, so I bundled up in my Patagonia down jacket, thrillingly purchased during last fall’s half off sale, and sat myself in a plastic Adirondack chair on the deck we built last summer to read Herman Hesse’s classic tale of not-much-going-on-in-the-tuberculosis-sanitorium-high-in-the-Alps. It seemed so appropriate. I’d started the book at least twice before, but never gotten past the first third. This time I made it half way before giving up, derailed by Haruki Murakami and Cheryl Strayed. I read 1000 pages of 1Q84 in less than three weeks, and then zoomed through Wild in under three days. I want to hike the PCT! I want to go to Japan!

I am invincible!

I am not invincible. Clearly. But why do I fail to grasp that again and again. Is it a failure to properly grow up? To acknowledge one’s age? Why do I even need to feel invincible? Why does anyone? Outside of all the ridiculously arduous and long events and races I sign up for (which fill up fast, by the way, indicating that I am not alone here), what in god’s name do I think I’m training for? The Trueheart Badass Motherfucker Award?

I have always said that I would have made an exceptional pioneer. Outside all day in all weathers chopping wood and chasing down chickens, a passel of well behaved, oh so helpful children chipping in, trailing behind. A twenty-five mile trip to the general store? Laughable. I’d be back before sundown. On foot no less. In fifteen inches of snow.

Or maybe not. I’d have been dead at 23 without modern medicine. Felled by a burst appendix. Mine was gangrene by the time they took it out. I’d had stomach pains for years. Badass Motherfucker, I’m telling you.

But I’m not a pioneer, obviously. I live in an era of high luxury. We all do. You have to make a conscious effort to get outside these days. Everyday life includes almost no exercise, though here at our house we do chop and burn wood. I’ll say that for us. But again, this is a choice. There’s plenty of oil in the furnace to heat the house. At least for now.

I was adopted at the age of 10 weeks into a largely sedentary family. I swam on teams and was running 10K’s by the age of 11. No one understood any of this, but they did their damdest to support me. My father, bless him, drove my friend Joanne and me hither and yon to adult road races he’d found for us in the paper. He’d follow the course as best he could, often through the busy streets of Boston, on an old upright bike he’d salvaged from the town dump. Not much for cheering, he’d clap for us as we trotted by. “You look great,” he’d say, barely audible, his voice lumpy and breaking. I know there must have been tears in his eyes. Other people screamed louder, encouraged by children on the course, but they didn’t know us. “Go, boys!” they’d scream at the top of their lungs.

“We’re girls!”

My own daughter has some of this, as do her brothers, but not as much. At the age of ten she swims for two hours every night with the teenagers on her swim team and will not be talked out of even one night off. I cannot tell you how happy and relieved this makes me. Perhaps it’s all genetic, simple as that. I have been programmed in my DNA to want to get up at 3:45 to run or swim or whatever I choose to do to wear myself out on any given day. I’m not really fighting demons; I’m doing what I am supposed to do, channeling thousands of generations of hunter-gatherers, people on the move, survivors.

But my original question stands. Why do I always seem to take it too far? Why do I beat myself up over and over until I’m injured? Sabotaged? And then why do I get so frustrated when I can’t run? What’ so wrong with taking a goddamn rest?

Again, I rarely ask these questions when all cylinders are firing. I simply go about my business, hard wired evidently to the endorphin rush. It’s only when the system breaks down that the more considering, philosophical part of my brain takes over.

There are the obvious answers. Lead most among so many endurance junkies are body image issues. Let’s say it plainly: I don’t want to get fat. But nobody does. I cannot imagine anyone in this society at this particular time in history actually setting out to get fat. It just happens. It’s incredibly easy to do. And yet, I have never been and likely will never be, bony and thin. No one would ever come up to me on the street and offer me a sandwich. No one could reasonably call me too thin. “Too thin,” short of unnatural starvation, is not my body type. Fit, yes. Skinny, no. I have a glacial, diabolically slow metabolism. I will always be average size. Size 8, or sometimes with these new deflated sizes, size 6. Big boned, say what you will. I am not terribly thin. If that’s the goal, it ain’t working.

So, there must be something more going on here.

I simply like to run, to swim, to wear myself out. Could it be as simple as that? I don’t know. I like to do a lot of things and I don’t knock myself out making time for them, don’t miss them like crazy when they’re gone. Do I? I like to read, write, cook, work in the garden. But given the choice I’d run before any of these things. Running falls behind parenting on my list. Just about everything does. My kids are at lovely ages, 7, 9 and 11. We spend our days together, viscerally attached (we homeschool). They come sit on my bed in the evenings when I’m trying to read, trying to get some sleep, just to chat. I watch their faces as they tell me stuff and I am totally absorbed. It’s like I’m enchanted by these beautiful faces and all the unexpected things they’re telling me.

Okay, I’ll take my children over running. My husband, too. Toss him in the mix. My friends. But which friends? Do I have to choose? I choose not to choose.

That said, running makes me a better parent, better spouse, better friend. I’m sure of that. Especially when the kids were little and so much more demanding of time and attention. I’m and introvert, for chrissake. I need a little space. Recharge the battery, so to speak. But how much recharging does a person really need? An hour a day? Two? Three?

I have almost forgotten what it’s like to run for hours, it’s been so long. Running for hours today would mean undoing months of not-running. Months of so called healing. I can manage five miles a couple of days a week right now, and I have to make that feel like enough. This too is a challenge. Recovery is long and slow requiring the kind of patience I wish I had. And it’s so easy to misstep. The aches and pains sneak up on you mid-run, a little at a time, like a frog put in cold water set slowly to boil. The little twinges you ignore. The steady strain you explain away. (It’s the healing process! I’m releasing all the bad stuff!) And by the time you finally turn for home you don’t even notice that you’re limping a little bit, that you’ve gone and done it again and it will be another two weeks before you run again, all that time and patience undone in a single afternoon. It’s enough to freaking kill a person.

You find yourself saying things like, “If I could just run 5 miles every day, nothing more, I’d be satisfied.” But it isn’t true! That’s just the voice of desperation talking. You’re greedy, plain and simple. 5 miles a day simply ain’t gonna cut it. No one trains to run 50 or 100 miles on 5 miles a day. Insane to even consider it.

So I’m working on patience. I’m training myself to be patient, which is in itself an excellent exercise. It’s all I can do. It has to be enough.

(Ah, so easy to end like that. So tidy. If only life were this true.)

As I continue to evolve.....

Or perhaps the word is de-volve. According to Danny Dreyer's Chi Running book, I am supposed to be trying to recapture the joyful and effortless manner in which I ran as a child. I was a child well before the era of omnipresent video technology, so I'll just have to take Danny's word for it that the younger, lither, more innocent version of me did indeed run with perfect posture and perfect lean, striking lightly on the earth with perfect midfoot strides.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I am now at the point in my heel-to-midfoot/forefoot stride transition that heel striking finally feels awkward and wrong. And it makes a certain amount of sense. Every time you hit with your heel it's like putting on the brakes. Very jarring to the body. After a couple of months of running 12-16 minute miles, actively trying to make the switch, I think the new muscles are starting to fire and the old muscles are quieting down. My knee and foot pain are fading. I just have to be careful not to do too much too soon. It's so tempting to go out and run for three hours just because I can. For the first time in my life, I am trying (trying!) to be smart about running. I'm down to like a 10-minute mile.

I have spent a small fortune on running books. Of course I have and love Danny Dreyer's Chi Running, as well as Danny Abshire's Natural Running and Dr. Nicolas Romanov's Pose Method of Running. I order them, I get excited, they come in the mail, I leaf through them for a few days, and then they sit on the kitchen table for weeks languishing unread, collecting glops of ketchup and syrup until they are stuck permanently to the fickle tablecloth of old New Yorkers and Running Times and Utne Readers and math workbooks.

Chi Running



Pose Running



I don't think any of these running gurus would watch me run and call me one of their own. I'd love to take a class with one of these guys and really have them look at my stride. It's hard to coach yourself. I'm sure I'm doing lots of stuff "wrong." I kind of pick and choose details from all of these books and add them slapdash into my catalogue of things to think about while I'm running. I have lots of Ah-Ha! moments as I'm trolling along (ie, don't lift your knees, lift your ankles, stuff like that). There's no question, this is a slow transition. A long strange trip indeed.

I get so little time to read, and I'm right in the middle of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain as well as everything ever written by Julie Hecht (strange bedfellows there), these poor running books simply cannot compete. Chi Running is the only one I have actually read cover to cover, and plan to re-read now that I have been practicing this method for a while. This was an excellent book to get me started.

I think the Pose Running book will be next. Flipping through, I see that he has lots of exercises aimed at hips and hamstrings. I have hamstrings for the first time in my life, and they are definitely my weak link. As soon as my hamstrings get tired of lifting my foot straight up behind me (rather than out in front of me), I'm toast. I can handle the strain for 2 hours tops. I need to get started on Dr. Romanov's exercises.

Tomorrow.....

It feels so good to be running again. It really is a gift. My husband Brian and I had our annual weekend trip to New York last month in which we walked all around the city eating out of diners and grocery stores for two days. I had a heavenly run early Sunday morning up the Hudson River and into Riverside Park, and back through Upper West Side. I really did feel like I was gliding along, slipping effortlessly past the super-wealthy dog walkers and uber-stylish churchgoers. With my new upright posture and nifty little hamstrings, I almost fit right in.

I'm still swimming more than I'm running. Swimming has been good to me this winter. I am now on friendly terms with all of the 5 a.m. swimmers. Early morning people are funny. We all park in the same spot every morning, take the same locker, then beeline to the same lane day after day. A young upstart newcomer beat me to Lane 5 yesterday morning and I admit I was shaken. Isn't it obvious from looking at me that I am the Lane 5 swimmer?! Things are different in Lane 3. It feels too close to the lifeguard. As soon as that girl left Lane 5, I scooted right over. I'll have to keep my eye on her from now on.

I made the difficult but necessary decision to drop out of both spring/summer races I had signed up for back in December. The VT 100 was first to go, as it became increasingly obvious that there was no way I'd be up to any kind of training mileage by mid-March. And then a month later I dropped out of the Wapack 50, which is a strenuous race run in May. I need to take the time to rebuild and regroup. I'm hoping to run some shorter trail races this summer, especially the Grand Tree series, and maybe hit a few of small, local ultras in the fall. The new Ghost Run in October especially beckons: nice folks, multi-distance, cheap, and you do not have to sign up months ahead of time.

Here's hoping!!

It's all about the Chi

I'm about a week into my ChiRunning adventure and I'm liking it very much. It seems to be all I talk about these days: posture, mid-foot strike, swivel hips. I'm preaching the gospel of Chi! (Actually, I'm just thrilled to be running again on a regular, if painfully slow, basis.) After 45 years of running on my heels, I feel sort of reborn. A mid-life re-birth of running.

The basic idea of ChiRunning, meticulously detailed in Danny Dreyer's book and oft repeated by yours truly in and around Mystic, CT is this: stand up straight with a long neck and neutral pelvis (held in check by your lower abdominals), lean slightly from your ankles keeping your "column" nice and straight (huge challenge for me), let your feet and legs relax (again, almost foreign) and break your fall with a soft midfoot stride. The idea is to let gravity do the work. The midfoot stride eliminates the "braking" process of the heel strike. You simply lift your foot and put it back down a little further down the road. Effortless! Simple!

The book has ten lessons to work through before you start adding distance or speed. A major tenant of the ChiRunning philosophy (not a cult, not a cult) is the idea of Gradual Progress. Because of my injuries, Gradual Progress is just what I need. Because of my obsessive running personality, Gradual Progress is difficult for me to embrace. You see the problem. I'm working on it.

I have spent almost a week on Lesson 1: Posture. My posture is terrible. I'm well on my way to becoming a bent over old lady. So this is good for me. Holding myself up straight takes a tremendous amount of concentration. It's borderline frightening how many times each minute I have to remind myself to pull my pelvis straight and lengthen my neck. And as soon as I do that, I start to heel strike again, then I forget to relax my lower legs, and by the time I've fixed my feet, my butt is sticking out well behind me. Pull the pelvis back in. Woops! the feet. Long neck. Heel strike. No!! Midfoot. Butt back under.......etc, etc.

After 45 minutes of this at something like a 12 minute pace, I'm exhausted.

But I am making progress. Each run feel a little teeny bit more natural. My foot and knee don't hurt at all while I'm "running." Every once in a while, for very small intervals, I get that effortless feeling, like my legs are just along for the ride, that Danny Dreyer promises me will in time become more of the norm. Though even he admits that he still has to think about this stuff while he's running.

It's a practice. Like yoga or something. Almost a meditation. I like it.

There's one exercise in the book you can do with a friend. Stand in your regular, everyday posture and have a friend pull down on your shoulders from behind. If your everyday posture is anything like mine, you'll slump like a ragdoll. Then get into proper ChiRunning posture (long neck, straight pelvis, neutral feet), and when your friend tries to pull you down you'll stand solid as a statue. It really works! I have been doing it to people at the gym, Other Mothers at birthday parties, friends and family. It's all I can do not to stop people in the grocery store and teach them how to stand properly.

I like how all of this fits into my everyday life. I practice my posture all day long. I run in place a little bit to try to figure out the ins and outs of the "lean," which still somewhat eludes me. I try to walk like a supermodel to get the swivel hips part of the run down. (Your supposed to swing your hips from the middle of your back to alleviate pressure on your hip flexors). I'm quite a sight to see, you can imagine.

I still can't tell if this is just a chapter in my running life, or if this will define the rest of my career. For now, it doesn't matter. I'm outside again, sort of running pain free, and I'm excited about it. Can't ask for anything more than that.

I feel like a prancing doofus

Brian's outside in his socks watching me run circles in the street until he's too dizzy to do it anymore.

"Back straight!"

"Back straight!"

"You're sticking your neck out too far."

"Back straight!"

"Look down."

It's my very first time Chi running and there's way too much to think about. But it's kind of fun. I'm running poker slow, mincing really, keeping my neck straight, hitting the ground with my mid-foot, peeling my feet up from the heel and kicking them out behind me, relaxing my ankles, woo hoo! Bye, bye Brian, there's no stopping now, I'm taking her for a spin around the block!

I have been reading Danny Dreyer's book ChiRunning for a couple of days. The number of people recommending this book to me reached a critical mass last month, so I interlibrary loaned it, and it finally came in. Looks like this one's a keeper. I've ordered my own copy from Amazon, should come tomorrow.



Brian is a good guy to help me with my Chi Running. He more or less runs this way naturally. He's a physics guy. Why fight gravity? Especially if you spend half your waking life thinking about it. The idea is to make your body a straight line, lean forward slightly, and fall into your stride. Makes a certain amount of sense. Especially if you're married to Brian.

So I'm giving it a whirl. As I (what do I call this?) trot, skimp, measle-weasle my way around the block I start to see people I know. Neighbors. My neck is high and straight, my feet slap the road, and my chest is way out in front of me. It's right about here that I start to feel like a prancing doofus.

But no one notices.

"Hi, Pam! Beautiful afternoon. Good to see you running!"

They all say stuff like that. I stop to chat with one neighbor who is thinking about getting a rescue dog. "Don't let me slow you down," she says.

Are you freaking kidding me? Any slower I'd be drilling through the pavement.

The thing is, when I run like this, nothing hurts. My foot feels fine. My knee feels fine. When I start to slump back into my old neanderthal running posture, the knee starts to hurt. For the first time this winter I am somewhat grateful for the bum knee. It's keeping me honest. It's letting the chi flow free!

Starting tomorrow I am going to begin with Lesson 1 and work my way through Chapter 5 of the book, "How to Learn Chi Running." DD very helpfully lays out a simple and gradual plan to get you running like a Chi master. It doesn't matter how long it takes. He is very kind.

I like this book because there's very little fluff. The text is useful and dense. He really breaks it down for you, and gives incredibly helpful analogies and body feel tests. I don't, as I do with so many sketchily written running books, feel the urge to hurl it across the room. It's well written, concise, and totally helpful. I don't find myself skipping paragraphs or chapters. I'm right with him.

Tomorrow I'll try ChiRunning for an hour. If I can concentrate for that long......

90 mins of quiet

It's 5:45 on a Saturday night, but it feels more like 10. I swam for an hour and a half this morning, a lifetime ago. I spent the day at my kids' swim meet, in a hot, crowded, echoey pool ushering 8-year old girls to their many and varied events. I have been loudly upbeat and encouraging all day. I have smiled and high-fived and accepted several soaking wet hugs. It was a great meet.

But I have to turn around and do it all over again tomorrow. We have to be on the road to New Haven by 6:30 a.m., the three kids and me.

I must run. I will not get through tomorrow's meet with sanity intact if I don't have something besides Game Night and sleep to break up the relentless swim meets. So Brian plays games with the kids (Dominion -- our family fave) and I head out for a headlamp run.

O, glorious night. I love running in the dark.

My right knee (tendinitis) and my left foot (plantar fasciitis) are still a bit wonky. I have Super Feet insoles in my Kinvaras for a little arch support (goddamn high arches), and a Chopat strap on my knee. I have stretched (never stretch). I may as well be 80, bionic, but I'm heeble-hobblin' out the door.

I am not comfortable running in the woods by myself at night, so this is a road run. I'm lucky to have a gorgeous stretch of road, River Road along the Mystic River, easily accessible from the house. A mile and a half to River Road, 6 miles out and back, a mile and a half home. That's the plan.

The River is lovely. I'm used to running this route early in the morning with the sun coming up across the water. This is different. Darker. The highway is much louder in the distance. There are even a few cars on River Road. You rarely get a car at 5 in the morning.

I stop to stretch my foot against a telephone pole. It hurts a little. My knee feels pretty good. Being injured is surreal. Things hurt; they don't hurt; they hurt again. There's no rhyme or reason. Run through it. Stop. Keep running. Walk a bit. Stretch. Run. Ignore. Run.

You never know if you're getting better or fucking everything up. Run through it. Rest. Cross train. Run. Whatever.

My brain is all over the place. One minute I'm all healed up running the Vermont 100 this summer. The next I'm writing to the race director relinquishing my spot. Forget Vermont. Get healthy. This could be a building year. I'll run the Grand Tree series, short trail races. No, I'll be fine. I'll PR Vermont. Freaking Vermont.

I want to run fast. Back in October I ran a 5K in 21:02. That's less than a 7 minute mile. 6:48 or something like that. Are those days over forever? I'm barely holding a 10 minute mile here.

Maybe I could find a cool open water swimming event. Swim around Key West. I know a couple of people going down to do that. 6 miles around Key West. Who's in? Who's paying?? Maybe swim the Hudson River. Oil slick swimming. I'm swimming like a maniac these days. It's exhausting. But good exhausting.

The river is smooth, wide and very black. I hear but cannot see flocks of geese. Clearly they see me. Honk, honk. Good evening!

Home, ice, compression pants (Gretchen!). It's an oatmeal for dinner kind of a night. Some nights are like that.

So ... what else have you been doing, Pam?

That's a good question. With absolutely no running in my life for almost two months, what have I been doing with myself? I feel like I have been through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grieving in miniature.

1. Denial. Well, of course. Deep, long seated denial was what got me into this mess in the first place. "Oh, my foot feels okay. My knee is basically sound. Those little twinges will go away." Don't I read other people's blogs all the time, and don't those blogs all say stuff like this?: "It felt like every bone in my left leg was shattered from hip to toe, and then five miles into the race I threw up a couple of times which seemed to loosen everything up and I went on to win that race and every other race I ever entered for the rest of my life." I was pretty sure something along those lines was going to happen to me.

2. Anger. I'm not sure I ever got angry in the sense of throwing things around the room and screaming at people. Let's just say I went through a period of annoyance. I was annoyed at myself for allowing these little injuries to build up ("If I'd just taken a week off after that last 50K I'd be running today," etc). That annoyance has now solidified into resolve. I will net get myself into this injury boat again. I will not. (I say this every time. We'll see....)

3. Bargaining. OK, foot, if I promise to swim for a week then you will let me start running next week. Back out there, foot. You and me. Pounding the pavement just like we were always meant to do (ad infinitum....)

4. Depression. This got kind of bad just before Christmas. This is all I'm going to say about that: I'm better now. Way better. Praise be.

5. Acceptance. This might be where I am right now. Not in the sense that I accept that I am getting older and I will always be injured and I will always miss running. More in the sense that I am getting older and I need to change the way I run. Run less, incorporate more cross training and strength training, not get carried away by big miles, and take days off. I may need constant reminders on this. In fact, I'll definitely need constant reminders.

Thanks to Meghan and Gretchen and TahoeRunGirl for the words of kindness on my last post. It feels so good to be understood. I'll look up Chi Running. A local running friend just mentioned that book last week. Time to act.

Lacking running, lo these weeks and months, other things in my life have kind of taken a step forward. Like I said in my last post, I have been swimming. Quite a bit. (Hello upper body strength!) I was cruising through a 400 yd backstroke Saturday morning when our local Gym Guy (every gym has one of there guys -- he's about 50, always at the gym, always flirting with the young lifeguards and desk people) jumped in to share my lane. "Hi, GG," I said. "Hey, Pam. Pam! Wow! You have a beautiful backstroke. Very smooth. When I jumped in here I thought you were one of the new college lifeguards they just hired." I kind of pulled a face and he laughed. He put up both hands and said, "That's all I'm going to say."

So. You take your affirmation where you can get it.

My usual physical therapist got deployed to Afganistan for 9 months (godspeed, Bill) so I have started with a new PT named Rick. I like him. He is working more specifically with my posture and quad strength. Myokinematic Posture Re-Positioning. We are doing lots of hip and glute exercises (my glutes are not "engaged"), and I'm starting to feel a difference in the way I walk and the way I kick in the pool. Buns of steel for summer!

I'd like to say I have been writing more with my free time, but I'm probably writing less. Swimming takes more time than running. To swim for 90 or 100 minutes I have to leave the house at 4:50 (it's 4:27 right now) in order to be back by 7:00 when my husband leaves for work. But I have been thinking about writing quite a bit. I'm delving into fiction, which, after 7 years of writing a weekly personal essay column, is quite a switch. It's almost like I have to give myself permission to make stuff up. And it's crazy the stuff that comes out. Crazy!

I'm reading Virginia Woolf: the novels, the biographies, the diaries. What a life! I recently had a bit of a Helene Hanff moment. I found a great deal on a gently used set of The Complete Diaries online. The day they arrived in the mail, individually wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, was a monumental day for me. I carefully unwrapped the first volume and turned to my daughter Nell with a huge smile on my face: "Nell! Don't you want to unwrap one? Share the joy!!??"

"Um, Mom..... I don't think that's possible."

Well, now. I think Nell is developing her father's sense of humor.

And we're having a great homeschooling year. My kids are at the perfect homeschooling ages: almost 7, 9 and 10. We're hopping around through the Middle Ages, the American Revolution, Helen Keller, fractions, Charlotte's Web, all the good stuff. It's cool to go through all of this again as an adult. You forget how much you've forgotten. You know?

I'm happy and hesitant to say that I am slowly dipping my toes back into the Big Lake. I have started running again. Just a little. I actually started last week, but then got derailed by a huge upper respitory infection (it's always something). The antibiotics have kicked in. I'm swimming this morning and back out on the roads tomorrow.

Wish me luck!

Looking back on 2011, forward to 2012

Everyone tells you this, but you don't really believe it until you yourself come face to face with your own aging tendons and muscles and bones: It sucks to get old.

I think I have finally come to a place in my life and in my running (or, more to the point, lack thereof) that I must acknowledge my age. I'm 44, and it's time to change a few things. Gone are the days when I can simply head out the door with no real plan and run until I can't run anymore. Day after day, week after week. The thing I have always loved about running is it's simplicity. I have never given any thought to specific training, goal planning, actual workouts. Running for me has always been 85% mental, but mental in sort of a negative capacity. Time to switch off the thinking brain and tune into the wild mind.

This is my brain on everyday life;




this is my brain on 30 miles of beautiful trail.



This year has been a terrible running year. I was sick most of the summer with Lyme's Disease, which recurred in late September for another less intense month long bout. And every time I returned to running I'd injure something. Always soft tissue; always overuse.

I won't go into the heartbreaking recoveries followed by immediate re-injury. How many times will I spend weeks rehabbing, only to go out and run too much too soon before I realize that I'm not eighteen years old, that my 44-year-old body needs time to heal. Currently I am nursing tendinitis in my left foot and in my right knee. I have run about ten miles during the month of December, none of those miles productive, most of them landing me right back at the PT (where, incidentally, I return early Tuesday morning to begin yet another round of foot and knee rehab).

Dear or dear, I sound like a pissy old crank. Like one of those self-absorbed old ladies who pins you to the wall at the deli counter in the grocery store and exhaustively lists all of her aliments and medications while your kids run wild in the bakery aisle. No one wants to hear about it!

So. Onward and upward.

You will be please to hear that I have not been sitting on my keester all these quiet months. I have been swimming. I have re-discovered swimming! There is no competitive swimming program for adults at the pool I belong to, so I have been downloading workouts from the internet and gradually moving up to about 4500 yards a day, all four strokes, maybe four times a week. It feels great to be back in swimming shape, and I look forward to getting to the pool at 5 o'clock in the morning almost as much as I used to look forward to my early morning runs.

Almost.

I do miss running. Viscerally miss running. Miss being outside. It's starting to feel like something I used to do.

I have also been working out in the weight room and taking the occasional spin class. I sit in the back of the spin class because I can't stand up on the bike, which you usually do for more than half of the class. Standing hurts my knee. So I sit in the back with a couple of other degenerate (degenerating) 40-somethings and we laugh about Advil and injuries and getting on. I like the spinning because it features short bursts of intensity and speed, both of which have been missing in my running workouts for decades.

I'm hoping this will change in 2012. I have two New Year's resolutions this year (which is odd -- I never make New Year's resolutions. Or maybe I've never had to). Number One: run less, run smart, cross train more. Number Two: number two has nothing to do with running. I have started to try to write a story (or something) and I'd like to finish it (or at least make a decent start) in 2012.

I read Rachel Toor's piece in last month's Running Times about training with Bill Pierce, co-author of Run Less, Run Faster. I bought the book and plan to use it when I do return to running. He lays out specific training schedules based on a three-day running week (one track workout, one tempo run, one long run close to race pace), supplemented by three days of cross training and weights. He does not address ultrarunning at all, and one gets the impression that he disapproves. Whatever. My plan is to do the marathon training program starting in February (I'll be running by then, RIGHT?), and tweak the long run, maybe add a few more long runs.

If anyone out there has used his training programs for ultra training, please let me know. I'm wide open to suggestions.

The other thing I have been doing in my free, non-running time is working on getting leaner. I have always carried 5-10 extra pounds (extra from a runner's perspective rather than a normal person's perspective). When I was younger and everything was high and dry these "extra" pounds sat well on my frame. But three pregnancies have irredeemably changed my body shape, and those few pounds were no longer doing anything for me, aesthetically or otherwise. Time to enter the second half of my life a little lighter, a little tighter.

I cherry picked chapters from a couple of books (Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes by Monique Ryan and Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald), tweaked my eating habits a bit, and lost most of the extra flab in a couple of months. In a nutshell, I now eat small meals throughout the day, ideally (but often not actually) timed to most benefit performance and recovery. I never get really hungry, never feel horribly full. My stomach has not felt this good in years. Small meals every few hours! A revelation.

The only race on my docket at this point is the Vermont 100 in July. My husband Brian has agreed to pace me for the last 30 miles, and my running friend Bob says he will crew. So all I have to do is get healthy, stay healthy and train smartly. Here's hoping!!

Happy New Year!

TARC Fall Classic

You gotta love TARC, a.k.a. the Trail Animals Run Club, a group of trail runners (I'm not sure if they are exclusively ultra runners) up around Boston. They are finally bringing more races to our area. And these are just my kind of races: low key, low entry fee, no schwag, and everybody contributes to the aid station tables. They are more like Fat Ass races than big, produced ultras, commonly run in loops with a single aid station at the start/finish.

This is the first year of their series, and they put on several great races spanning May to December. I ran the Summer Classic 12-Hour back in August and loved it. Last weekend was the Fall Classic.

This was a 50K comprised of 5, 10K loops. There were also 10K, half marathon, and marathon options. All in all, I'd say there were probably 100 or 150 people at the start. It was chilly in the morning but promised to get up to 80 later in the afternoon, unseasonable for mid-October in Massachusetts. After much hemming and hawing, I started out in shorts and a short-sleeve top with a sweatshirt over it all, which I promptly regretted and ditched after the first loop.

I ran the first three loops with Dan, whom I had met briefly at the Summer Classic. I have been a fan of Dan's blog for years, so it was nice to finally run together in person. The first loop, the getting-to-know-you loop, was fun. I love discovering new trails. This was definitely a suburban trail. We ran through a schoolyard, up a power line trail, past people's backyards, and then out to the highway. The trail literally ran mere feet from, and slightly below, the screaming traffic on I95, the major east coast interstate connecting Maine to Florida. I could have reached up and touched the far edge of the breakdown lane. Dan and I pretended the traffic noise was a flooding mountain stream. One continuous roaring waterfall.

Stay on the road up there, babies. Stay on the road.

After following the highway for about a mile, the trail cut in and up. This course was surprisingly hilly and slow. Lots of ups and downs, lost of twisty turns. We then encountered a labyrinth. This part of the trail must have been a moto-cross course for bikes. We ran back and forth around switchback turns, up and down dirt half-pipes, with other runners vrooming at us then veering one way or another at the last second. It was like a video game. We probably covered almost a mile within just 100 square yards. It was dizzying and weird.

The trail then went through an old dump site complete with a bulldozed berm which we skirted across. We pretended the berm was a high mountain ridge. We were cracking ourselves up. Such funny runners!

We ran through some nice single track, through a high meadow, and then boom!, we were back on the powerline trail, back through the schoolyard, and back to the start.

The second loop went much more quickly. We picked up with another TARC runner, Rob, for a while, also a blogger, and we were passed by Emily Trespas, who was running the half marathon, testing out her injured hip. These three all knew each other pretty well, so I just ran along and mostly listened to the chatter. I just love ultra runners.

I guess I should mention that here on the second loop (the SECOND loop!) we were lapped by the first place runner, Adam, in the Old Dump section. I had met Adam a couple of years ago carrying a twenty pound rock along the Pittsfield Peaks 53M course (anyone who carried the rock for the last miles of the race would win something like $200, and evidently Adam needed the rent money). He is young and wicked fast. He went by so fast I didn't even recognize his smiling face.

We didn't let it get to us. We shook it off. We're slow. So what!

Dan and I stuck together for the third loop. By this time we were in a pretty good rhythm. I let Dan lead as much as possible, because whenever he was behind me, he kept tripping. What were you looking at back there, Dan??! I was still feeling okay, but not great. Just like at Pisgah a few weeks before, I could tell that this was not going to be my day. My stomach was upset from the get-go, and I started to get a headache on the third loop. The day was heating up. I was taking in plenty of water and eating lots of Honey Stingers as well as salted potatoes (my fave) at the aid station. But my energy was definitely on the wane.

Toward the end of the third loop we ran into Emily running the other way, getting in a few extra miles after finishing the half marathon. She turned around a ran with us, and that got us going. New blood in the group.

Dan dropped after the third loop. His IT band was acting up, and he didn't want to get into trouble with another long lay-off. I contemplated taking my iPod with me for the fourth loop, but decided I'd save it for the 5th, which turned out to be the drive home.

About half a mile into the 4th loop, I met up with a very mellow dude, feeling groovy, running in what looked like slippers. "These loops are just flying by," he told me.

"I guess," I said, slugging along the powerline hill, not feeling very well at all.

"It's so freaky. I'm just feeling my breath and moving along. Man, these loops are just flying by." And with that I started walking and he was gone.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, running along in almost-misery, I started catching a whiff of something in the air. Something that I would not necessarily associate with trail running. Something I would associate more with college dorm rooms and Grateful Dead shows. No! No way!

Yup, sure enough, I came around the corner and was met full in the face by a cloud of pot smoke. Pwwwwwwaaaa. My groovy friend and another guy, an old guy, were passing a meaty spliff back and forth on the trail, sending all the second hand smoke my way. There was no one else in sight.

"Dude, that right there is a freaking huge, ig.....ig.....ig.....ig....igneous rock! Bwaaaa haaa haaa haaaa!" They were killing each other.

What to do? What to do? I'm no prude, but I was not feeling up to running with these two stoned guys. Unfortunately they were running exactly my pace. So I picked it up for a while and dropped them. And then I started to feel really bad. My head was pounding. My stomach ached terribly. I just felt weak.

I have been tired in ultras before. But the quality of that tired feeling, so similar to how I had felt at Pisgah, was something new. I just wanted to stop and lie down by the side of the trail. The world was swimming around me. (And no, it wasn't a contact high....) This was not right.

I finished the lap with lots of walking toward the end, and dropped out. I didn't want to do the death march for the last lap. After sitting in a chair for 20 minutes sipping ice water I summoned the energy to walk a mile to at least finish the marathon.

Back at the finish line the only thing that looked remotely appealing at the aid station table were the corn chips. I sat down with Emily, who was still there cheering people in, and through mouthfuls of corn chips I told her about the guys getting high on the trail.

"Oh, yeah," she said. "That's So-and-S0. He always gets high in these races."

Huh?

Emily stopped and looked at me, took in the scene. "Looks like you have the munchies."

Hee hee. I freaking love ultra runners.

I called the doctor Tuesday and he advised me to get another Lyme test. I had been exhausted in the weeks leading up to the race, and to fall apart twice in a row after just 20 miles is not typical for me.

The test came back positive. I'm back on the Doxy for another 30 days. I'm hoping to be back in good form for Stone Cat 50 in November. Wish me luck!