Quick and Dirty

But NOT D Goal dirty. The streak continues!

A quick check in to say I ran a 3:41 (ish... My Garmin reset itself at mile 18, but I was pretty close to the gun time). Clearly, this is not what I was hoping for. But unlike my claims last night, I'm actually not mad and embarrassed. Disappointed, sure, but mostly surprised. My training, pacing, nutrition, and hydration were all good. But for whatever reason, I got to mile six and felt like I was running on fumes. That is, I assure you, a terrifying feeling with 20 miles to go. I stayed on pace through 13.1, but knew much before that it wasn't a 3:20 day for me. I actually tried to drop out at 14.5 and save my legs for another day because I was so toasted, but the cop I stopped to talk to was the least helpful human alive and was unable to tell me where I might find the nearest med tent with someone to drive me to the finish. "I guess, keep running and you'll find one."

Luckily nothing was medically wrong with me, and I was able to take his advice. Unluckily, I never did find a med tent. So I slogged it out for all 26.2, with likely the most impressive positive splits the world has ever known.

I thought I'd be much more bummed out about a finish fully 21 minutes slower than anticipated, but I also don't know what I would have done differently, and that takes a bit of responsibility and ensuing guilt off my shoulders, fairly or not. The marathon is a fickle thing, and while I didn't necessarily believe it before today, sometimes you just don't have a good day. If 1 marathon in 15 don't go my way, I still have pretty good odds.

And now I'm drinking a beer in my bathing suit by the pool in the Hamptons. My life is not so bad.

Final Thoughts on Fifteen

Greetings from Southampton!



Someone asked me earlier this week how I felt going into tomorrow's race, and I offered a simple "I feel good." And I do. Also I feel a little damp, since one of my most unpleasant taper symptoms is unfathomable night sweats. But mostly, I feel good. And feeling good feels good.

Running and I have had a tough go of it this year, physically and emotionally. There were times when I didn't want to leave my apartment, let alone go for a run. And there were times I wanted nothing more than to sprint and sweat and stomp up Harlem Hill, and instead I spent my time trying not to stomp on Dorito's tail with my surgical boot. Finally, I feel like I'm back at the sweet spot. I don't have any profound thoughts on how or why the pendulum swung so widely for me this year, but I'm grateful it seems to have settled back in the middle.



So then, let's get to it - Race Day Goals:

A Goal: 3:20. This is better than a PR (I only need a 3:23 for that), but this is what I've been targeting all season long. My GMP runs, my tempo runs, my 800s were all build on a 3:20 marathon. It still seems fast as fuck to run 7:37 miles for 26.2 of 'em.

B Goal: Sub 3:27. I ran a 3:27 in Rehoboth last December on half assed training and a long course (not "my Garmin said it was long;" the course was mismeasured), so I'd like to think I can beat it on pretty respectable training and a map that indicates it is actually 26.2 miles this time (true story: I just tried to fact check myself and discovered the map in my packet is of the half marathon course...) Any improvement on my Rehoboth time will also better my corral placement at Boston.

C Goal: Sub 3:45. If things get ugly, I'll use tomorrow's race as a long training run and shoot for 3:45. While it will still be a productive day, I will be mad and embarrassed if it comes to this.

D Goal: Don't shit self. I will be more embarrassed if it comes to this.

And that's all she wrote. Thanks for sticking with me, running with me, and drinking with me, and a special thanks to those of you who consistently do all three. Here's to the next great adventure!

Greetings From Race Week!

And just like that, number 15 is less than a week away.  My training was not perfect, and I'd be lying if I said my taper dreams didn't involve recurring stress fractures (also, one night I dreamt I was going to jail for 4 days for being a passenger in a car driven by someone under the influence, and my chief concern in this dream was how I would manage to reschedule a date without letting my date know I was going to jail.  That was weird..).  But on the whole, I'm feeling pretty confident about Saturday's race.

I meannnnnn, maybe too confident...

I'll be back on Friday with some race day goals and other deep thoughts.  In the interim, I'll be lying awake at night, finding meaning in the lyrics of Miley Cyrus' "We Can't Stop" and being brought to tears by that Melissa Harris-Perry promo where she talks about her dad. Taper mania is neat like that...

Brew Review: Slumbrew Porter Square Porter

Thank god for the Internet, otherwise I would not have known what season it is!  Oh actually it's not fall for another few days, and I'd like to take this moment to reiterate that pumpkin flavored beer is the official drink of Al Queda (trust me; I read a lot of Politico).

Now that we have that out of the way, tonight I bring you a brew review that is topical for a number of reasons (ordinarily these brew reviews are completely arbitrary, FYI. You'll get what I decide to review and you'll like it). Despite the fact that it's not officially Fall, it's actually starting to feel like it here in New York, which is nice considering it was 100 degrees 6 days ago and I basically have my paycheck directly deposited to ConEd from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

True life: I wore long sleeves running this morning!

With the weather cooling off, it's high time we break out the heartier, darker beers: porters and stouts and maybe a good, nutty brown ale or two (let me reiterate: keep your dirty vegetables out of my beer during this and any other season). Enter, the Slumbrew Porter Square Porter.



While I do have a handful of seasonally appropriate beers in my fridge right now, I picked this one specifically for a reason:  Porter Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, which is a suburb of Boston, which is a place that is front of mind for me this week.

I realize that justification was tenuous at best. Nonetheless, in honor of my acceptance into my third Boston Marathon, tonight I cracked open this treat.

I acquired this beer a couple weeks ago in Maine. The little market up the street from our house sells an odd assortment of homemade whoopee pies, gourmet dog treats, and craft beers, and a few selections from Slumbrew caught my eye. Not only was I unfamiliar with the brewery, based in Ipswich, Mass, but several of their beers were noted as having high rankings on Beer Advocate. Since I was flying straight from Maine to LA for work, I asked my parents to bring a few bottles home for me ("I'll pay you back!" My dad expressly pointed out that he's had bottles of wine cheaper than this $6.99 beer. I will let you be the judge about what that says about his status as a oenophile.)

Per the label, the Porter Square Porter is brewed with cocoa powder and conditioned with cacao nibs, and I believe it. As you can see, it pours almost black with a finger's worth of creamy head. The dark chocolate aroma is obvious - sweet but not cloying.

My experience with chocolatey beers has generally been that they fail to strike the balance between sweet and bitter, generally skewing more towards baking chocolate, which, trust me, don't ever eat straight, even if you're drunk and desperate for a bedtime snack... Thankfully, I think the Porter Square Porter really succeeds here; it tastes like cocoa powder (the real deal, not Swiss Miss) in that it is sweet but not fake, and complex. While the finish is roasted and malty, it's distinctly not a burnt coffee flavor. 

Admittedly, porter isn't my favorite type of beer; there's only so much smoked bourbon maple whatsherface I can take before I feel like I'm drinking a novelty and not a beer.  The Slumbrew Porter Square Porter, however, is accessible even for the non-Porter acolytes among us.  Especially as the weather cools down, I can recommend you warm up from the inside out with this beer.

Foiled

You know what they say about even the best laid plans?  Actually, I didn't know what the end of that idiom was and had to google it.  So for your edification, what they say about the best laid plans is:

The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.

 

 

Turning an idiom into reality: nailed it! 

I set off from Maine at 6:30am yesterday and touched down at 4:15pm local time in LA.  With 8pm dinner plans, I was confident I'd get my run in and continue to be on track with my workouts.  If you've ever been to LA, perhaps you can already see the flaw in this logic.

 

I collected my bags and headed to the rental car desk, where I entered my own personal episode of Seinfeld:

 



"You see, you know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to hold the reservation. And that's really the most important part of the reservation: the holding. Anybody can just take them."

Luckily I was able to snag at upgrade because they were out of compacts, and I'll be pimping around LA in a sweeeeeeeeeet Mitsubishi Galant for the weekend.

Finally, I hit the 405 (I'm lying - first I got lost in Inglewood.  If you've heard of a place because it's mentioned in a rap song, you probably don't want to get lost there...) and proceeded the 7 miles to my hotel.  It took almost an hour.  As it turns out, people aren't kidding about LA traffic.  Which is weird, since the highway ("freeway" colloquially... because of course LA people need to have their own special name for a highway...) has 6 lanes in each direction.  How do you pick which lane to be in when there are six?!

The point is, by the time I finally arrived at my hotel, dirty from 13 hours of travel, it was 7pm and I had a dinner at 8pm.  The run was not to be.  This, naturally, left me feeling resentful towards LA, because WHY WOULD IT TAKE 3 HOURS TO GET MY BAG, GET MY CAR, AND DRIVE 7 MILES?  HOW DO PEOPLE LIVE LIKE THIS?!  Luckily, my rage was placated by my hotel, which is not terrible:

I feel like I'm on Spring Break! I should wear a wet t-shirt to work!

So, I missed a workout, despite all of the advanced planning I did to make my workouts happen.  But you know what they say about good intentions?  (This one I did know ahead of time).  The road to hell is paved with them.  I was going to hell anyway, so here's hoping there are water fountains along that road, in which case I'll run there and make up those missed 7 miles after all!  How far is it to hell, anyway?

(I did actually make it to the hotel gym this morning before I had to come into the office.  The hotel gym is an Equinox.  So I'll save "A Love Letter to Equinox" for a separate blog post.)

Mainely Running

Greetings from Vacationland!  That's a not-at-all-apt nickname for this state, since I'm actually not on vacation anymore, but working remotely, and unfortunately not the kind of "working remotely" where you check your email three times and call it a day.  But nonetheless, I am in Maine, and did indeed vacation for 3 full days before I planted myself in a chair at the kitchen table and watched with longing as the rest of my family left me to eat blueberry pancakes. 

Here is how this trip has gone thus far:

Friday: Spend 7.5 hours in the car with my sister and brother-in-law.  The novelty of being reunited with them wears off somewhere around New Haven. 6 subsequent hours spent in silence (just kidding - they're my faves!)

Arrive in Camden (not New Jersey) around 11pm, after having made the tragic discovery that Red's is not still open at 10:15pm.  With lobster rolls not an option, have "dinner" of cupcakes, potato chips, and beers.  Go to sleep.

Saturday: Wake up and run 20 miles.  I have to say, despite my pre-run fueling choices, this was a great run.  I've said many times that Camden is my happy place, so while I'm not usually enthusiastic about my long runs, I was perfectly happy to get this done.  Except for everything after mile 15, which is where I ran through town and found my family eating breakfast (without me) and stopped to make them all tell me what they'd ordered.  That was fairly depressing with 5 miles left to run.



Here's the farm I run by.

Eat things that live in the ocean (but not sea lice) and drink local beers (Geary's).  Do a puzzle.  I hate puzzles, but also hate not doing puzzles, so our time was spent alternately swearing and cheering.

My sister and a lobster roll. I am a purist and eat mine sans mayo.

Sunday: Wake up and run 8 miles.  Play mini golf and beat my brother-in-law, which might be my proudest accomplishment, athletic or otherwise, in my entire life.  Eat more sea creatures and drink more local beers.  Turns out the beers don't help with puzzle completion.

Rockland Harbor

Monday: Wake up to pouring rain.  Go to movies to avoid having to do the puzzle, despite the fact that everyone knows a puzzle is a perfect rainy day activity.  Drink local beers (Shipyard Monkeyfist IPA, Andrew's Pale Ale). Eat alarmingly caloric seafood creations and thank God I'm not lactose intolerant.  Lobster and heavy cream go together like... Doritos, fudge, and ice cream cones.  I am the picture of health.


"Eventually everyone shows up at Cappy's"


Tuesday: No longer on vacation, I drag myself out for another 20 mile run before everyone else wakes up and starts having fun without me.  Return home and open laptop.  Everyone starts having fun without me.

So as you can see, I've mostly (Maine-ly, if you will. I will) been running, followed by eating and drinking with reckless abandon.  As usual, I've had to do further reshuffling of the schedule I mapped out for myself, thanks to weather and work obligations, but I'm on track to hit all my workouts for the two week stretch.  Two 20 milers in four days wasn't ideal, but I feel okay right now (must be the calories are speeding up my recovery). 

As good as it feels to have my long runs out of the way, there's something to be said for finishing that last 20 miler, arms raised above your head in triumph, and declare the taper to have begun.  I finished my last 20 miler and still have 5 days of workouts left this week.  Plus that goddamn puzzle.

1000 pieces.  900 of them are brown.