Running: April 2004 Archives

I'm somewhere in the back of the pack in the picture to the right. It's the start of last Saturday's Chubb Trail Endurance Run, the most gruelling course I've ever run. Some people are running the 50K and others are running the 25K. My starting goal was to complete the 25K in 3:00:00, but at mile 12 or so I realized that wouldn't be possible, so my next goal was to finish ahead of the first 50K runner. An attainable goal, you say, but one I barely met, finishing 25K a mere 17 minutes before the winner of the 50K.

The Chubb Trail. Gruelling. A steep, mile downhill toward the Meramec River. Flat river bottom for three miles. Ridges for three miles. A short flat stretch. A mile ascent/descent. And finally heading back through the ridges, across the river bottom, and up the last mile to the finish line.

If I continue these trail runs I need to run on trails. Up to now, my trail running has been limited to races. I would do better, have more endurance, if I ran trails more frequently. Last Saturday, on several occasions, while running up the ridges, I had to stop and bend over to recover before ascending further.

Nonetheless, I'm thinking that next year I'll run the 50K. That would be considered an ultra run, and finishers of ultra runs receive nifty belt buckles.

That's not a pretty sight of me to the right. It's just past the thirteenth mile of last Sunday's Spirit of St. Louis Half Marathon. I've passed the pack of people behind me, and I'm running fast (in my opinion) the last tenth of a mile to pass other runners ahead. My grimmace seems to indicate my tank is running out of gas, and I can't recall whether I ever passed the runners I was chasing.

All of which reminds me of my last post about the running writing pad and the comment left by Dr. B. She suggests using an iPod with add-on recorder to record my thoughts while I'm running. To boot, when/if I'm not thinking, I could listen to my running playlist. Great idea! Only problem is that my iPod, one of the originals, fell victim to iPod's dirty little secret and I'm now trying to decide whether I should send my iPod to Apple for a battery replacement or buy a sleek new one.

In any case, after two days of rest my feet are back on the street. 7 miles Wednesday. 6 miles yesterday. Both were beautiful spring days. Just right for a tank-top.

Wednesday, in Forest Park, another runner came up on me. "Saw you in the race Sunday."

"Passing me?" I asked, as he pulled ahead.

It's moments lke that when I wish I had my running writing pad.

I'm trying to imagine a computer a runner could use to write poems in the middle of a distance race. Couldn't be a lap top. Couldn't be a PDA. It would need to be a hands-free suspended-in-air kind of device. Maybe something with voice recognition. The runner could wear a headset, bluetoothed to an arm-strapped recorder. My TIMEX time-distance measurement is something like that: a GPS, strapped to my shorts, that wirelessly sends speed/distance data to my watch for constant viewing.

I'm thinking about this computer for runners because yesterday was the Spirit of St. Louis Marathon and Half Marathon. Throughout the half marathon race I was having these wonderful poems flash in my head. A great way to get up a hill or beyond a momentary pain is to think poems, some of which, at the moment, seem inspirational but soon fade, like most moments of clarity, once you crest the hill or move beyond the pain. But with the runner's computer--maybe just a voice recorder, though, while running, it's easier to grunt than speak--you could later, quite possibly, see or hear that all your thoughts were garbled anyway.