What ever it takes!

40 minutes on the elliptical, my legs were a little sore today from Saturday and I have to go sit on a plane for 20 hours today so I wanted to give my legs a break.  I miss an entire day flying to China so I'll actually mis 3 full days of running, which is probably fine.

They were doing bone density tests at the gym today, mine came back at 1.41, have no idea 1.41 what but they said that was really good for an old guy like me.  A healthy 25 year old should be a 0.0.

2 weeks to Boston.  Who is ready???  Hope the weather can hold out, I'll take rain, wind, and cold over hot any day of the week.

Got into China last night at 11:30, to the hotel by 1:00am.  I slept OK but woke up at 6:00 am anyway so I decided to go run.  I was going to take the day off but thought running would be better for jetlag than laying wide awake in bed.  

I seriously used to  hate coming to China just because there was no place to run but last year I found Forest Park just 1 mile from the hotel and now this is one of my favorite places to run.  It's an extremely well marked, 3K, 5K, or 10 K loop all on red rubbery track service around a, well foresty park.  The terrain reminds me of Central Park, maybe a few less hills but pretty rolly, and truthfully it's prettier than Central Park and way less people.  I can't believe it took me 4 years to find it.  Anyway, ran to the park, ran the 10K loop The full loop actually ends up being 6.5 and then back.  We are now planning a site seeing day since our shipment wont arrive until tomorrow.  We are going to the Great Wall, and Forbidden city.  I'm here with 3 people that have never been here before so it should be fun.

Yesterday I did a good 3 hours worth of Xtraining on the worlds first stair stepper (The Great Wall of China) that thing will give even the most in shape person a run for their money.  I would really like to go there with someone in really good shape one day though, I'm always there with my out of shape co-workers who complain the whole time, it would be really fun to just go for an entire day and see how far you could go.

So today I felt really good, I think the stair stepping really stretched out my hamstring nicely.  I had to get an early start at work so I started at 5:30, just ran around the Olympic venue until the Forest Park opened at 6:00, then I ran the 5K loop and back to the hotel.

Planned elliptical trainer workout in the hotel gym this morning, I pushed really hard to keep my HR at slow marathon pace the entire hour it was very uncomfortable and I was very sweaty but it felt good, and I feel like I got a good workout without aggravating any of my injuries.

I'm never quite sure if I totally get ripped off on my birthday each year, or if I get a 38 hour birthday.  When I woke up this morning my phone said April 6th, which is my birthday, but my wife and family refuse to acknowledge it's my birthday cause it's still the 5th at home, and by the time it's the 6th at home I'm already asleep and somehow missed the whole thing, and then about 4:00am my phone starts ringing off the hook with people calling me to wish me happy birthday, plus I just have to work all day anyway.  So I'm going with ripped off.

Years ago when Walter ran 40 miles on his 40th birthday I said that's what I was going to do it too.  Well, obviously that would be stupid since Boston is a week away, and I had to work anyway.  So another goal blown.  Anyway, beautiful day today, a wind storm blew all the smog out of Beijing last night and this morning was the clearest day I have ever seen here.  Cool temps, I could see the moon, and the sunrise was amazing.  So a really nice birthday run anyway.

I've been doing conferences for Intel about 6 years now, and every time people say "you should run with Joe" I've e-mailed 'Joe' before but we never hooked up and actually ran.  Well, on Saturday I met Joe for the first time and we decided to meet for a run this morning. Joe English is his full name and he's a pretty good runner, he even has an online training site running-advice.com  just going off marathon times we figured we were pretty equivilent runners, although he has a lot more experience than me. 

He's in the nice hotel, instead of the Vendor hotel where I stay so I met him at his at 6:00, we ran to the park.  We got to the park and he said "lets do some speed work" Umm!  OK, really who goes running with someone they just barely met and says lets do speed work?  He wanted to do 2 sets of the 3K course, I told him I didn't really want to go faster than 6:00 pace, he said that was OK for the first lap and took off, I stayed with him but at the .5K mark I looked down and my Garmin said 5:22 pace, I said, or we could do 5:20 pace if you want.  He slowed down to around 5:50, I stayed with him until 2K then he slowly got away.  He waited for me, maybe 30 seconds at the finish line, we jogged to the start again and he said he was going to do the next loop faster, I told him he'd be going alone :)  I went out at about 6:00 pace, stayed there until my foot started hurting and then slowed to 6:40 pace to finish.  It was really fun to find someone to run with, hopefully he doesn't do speed work everyday, I think it was probably good for me to do a shorter run with speed this week, I would have just ran easy all week if someone wasn't pushing me.

Go figure, I stop running as much and I start getting more injured.  The heel of my right foot was really bothering me all night and this morning, so I just did the elliptical for 30 minutes.  I'm done with China and want to go home, it's going to be hard to get on a plane to go to Boston.

I've been very lucky this trip with beautiful weather, normally is smoggy and gross the whole time but it was been great this week.  We had an early start so I had to get out at 5:00am to go run, it's already starting to get light here at 5:00 awesome, they must not do daylight savings time. My hamstring is almost a none issue but my stupid heel really started bothering me out of now where.  It took about a mile to get going but I felt really good and refreshed after that, and now my heel even feels better than before the run.

Last day in China, conference is done today and I fly home first thing tomorrow morning.  Easy loop around forest park, the foot felt better but still hurts.

Can't wait to go home.

It's official, I'm insane.  I agreed to help put on the 1st annual Traverse Mountain 5K.  The Principals crazy idea to have all 899 students run a 5K.  I started the planning last October, put the website together, had an online registration form and everything.  Unfortunately I was the only one thinking that far ahead, everyone else started their planning about 3 weeks ago.  Anyway, I really don't want to go into a long story, I flew back from China this morning, rushed home from the airport, went an marked the course with Allie and Carina,  I had allie pace the Kindergarten and 1st Graders, Carina paced the 2nd and 3rd Graders and I paced the 4th, 5th, and 6th grader.  2 4th graders had the best overall times at around 23:30 with me.  Carina had a 3rd grader come in at 23:50.  Don't know what's wrong with those lazy 5th and 6th Graders.

The race went very well considering how hard it is to just organize 3 kids, let alone 900.  I only got yelled at by a couple of parents who think their kids should have won.

Now I head off to Boston tomorrow morning,  I really don't think I'm setting myself up well for a good race on Monday.

5 nice miles on the trail before flying to Boston. Now I'm hanging out with a bunch of guys who are way faster than me.

Sad, Sad, day. What the H311 is wrong with people. A little disappointed with how the race went for me, but I was disappointed weeks ago so no big deal. Kind of a rough day for a lot of us, not sure why cause conditions were perfect.

Writing a race report seems a little insignificant but I realized that this is my personal record of my experience and some day I will probably like to come back and read it.  After my flight home today I'm a little more emotional than even yesterday, the Boston Airport was a little crazy, policemen questioning everyone who might have seen something or had pictures they could send in, lots of people asking me my experience.  I felt a little awkward cause my experience was about the same as all of you, all my information came from watching TV since I had already made it back to the house when it happened.  I was actually on the phone with Scott Keate trying to figure out how to get into the house, he was on the bus coming home and all of a sudden he said "I think a bomb just went off" I said, "well I better let you go then." I spent the next hour and a half sitting on the front steps of the house locked out wondering what the heck was going on.

OK, now to my report.

This is the part where I make all of my excuses.  As I've stated in numerous posts for some reason my training wasn't working out so well, I was going through all the motions but something was missing, various injuries may have been to blame, travel may have taken it's toll but for some reason I just never really got it all together like I had wanted.  My hamstring plagued most of my 12 week schedule, it was tolerable but I just wasn't able to ever feel confident in my workouts, then 2 weeks before the race I figured my hamstring would finally have a chance to recover during taper and out of nowhere my heel started hurting for no reason.  I logged 60 miles total for my 2 week taper, which I think was the right thing to do, I actually felt pretty prepared.  In China my heel was acting up again so when I got home I purchased some cushy inserts for my shoes which seemed to help a lot, so Saturday when I finally got to Boston I felt like things were looking good.  Despite being Jet laged and just overall tired from travel I felt very good, and thought I had my heel and hamstring problems worked out.  Sunday night I couldn't sleep at all, Jet lag or nerves I'm not sure but I was up all night, not only that, between midnight and the marathon start I counted going to the bathroom 15 times,  I was really worried about de-hydration but every time I took a drink I was in the bathroom 5 minutes later.  Very strange I've never had that problem before. 

Anyway, we all woke up early, missed the first bus downtown by 10 seconds because none of us felt like running after it :) so we waited out in the cold 40 minutes for the next one.  Got to the marathon buses still on time and took a very long ride to the start line.  Weather was perfect, cool, a little sun but mostly cloudy and a slight breeze.  My dreams come true, I felt good (except the 7 trips to the porta potty at the start).  We all waited together until it was time to ditch the drop bags and start walking to the start line, I lost everyone then cause my drop bus was in the 4000's theirs were in the 100's so I walked to the start alone. 

I was pretty sure 26.2 miles was going to eventually reveal one or all of my injuries but I wasn't sure when and I wasn't sure which, so my plan was simple.  No plan, no pace goal, no time goal.  I said 2:50's would be nice but I realized that if my hamstring cramped up 3:30 wasn't out of the question.  So I just found my spot at the front of corral 5 and decided to just go with it, passing 4000 people would be impossible anyway.   And then we were off, very slow at first, took 3 minutes to cross the start line and then we were still walking a 100 yards or so after the start but eventually we started going.  Immediately I found out which injury was going to come out first, the initial downhill was killing my heel, pins and needles shot up my let every right step.  I told myself I only had to deal with it for 13 miles cause I was only running on that leg 1/2 the time :) I tried to ignore it and make sure it didn't affect my stride too much.  I just stayed with the same group, pretty much everyone there qualified with a 3:05 and was shooting for sub 3:00 we eventually locked into 6:45 pace and that suited me just fine.  I quickly realized that if you start with the 3:05 group mentally it would be hard to run anything other than a 3:05 cause by the time it opens up enough that you could start passing people your pretty content to just stay there, it would take a lot of mental determination to break away and start passing people I think.

Despite the pain, I found super power in all the little kids and giving them high fives, I'm not sure why I like it so much, I'm not sure why they like it so much but giving high fives gives incredible strength, every time I started to slow down I'd just focus on the crowds and for an instant the pain would go away.  The people of Boston are amazing, why is this the only Marathon in the World with so much local support? those people love the marathon, it's really an amazing experience.  I can still here the echo of the aid station volunteers yelling "gaderade, whada" I love the accent.  Ya gotta say it with the accent to really appreciate it.  Anyway, by the time I made it to Welsley College (that was crazy) I really hurt, those girls got me through that section but after that I had to make a decision.  Continue torturing myself, or just try and get all I could out of Boston.  If you look at my splits you'd say "classic bonk"  1:29 first half 1:38 second "bonk" well, I'll tell you, it wasn't, I never actually bonked, in fact I'm pretty sure my HR never went above 165bpm.  I simply just made a conscious decision at the 1/2 way point that my only goal was not to leave Boston with a bad taste in my mouth and never want to come back again, so I purposely slowed down to relieve some of my foot pain, it still hurt, but it was manageable and for the rest of the race I just enjoyed the people, read the signs, high fived as many kids as I could find and tried to enjoy it.  The hills did get to me a little bit, heart break was slow going but not a big deal but I made it, I experienced the Boston marathon which is what I have wanted for me 40th birthday for 4 years now, so I'm very happy.  I have other races I can try and run faster but for now I'm pleased with the out come. I had a great time, made some really good new friends and I just really want to thank Scott, Dan, Reed, Brandon, Craig, Paul, and Ryan for a great time.  I'm sorry the whole thing was shadowed by tragedy but it really is an experience I will never forget, or regret.

First run I've done since Boston, actually felt really good, my foot still hurts and my hamstring is a bit tight but pretty nice to run again.

30 mile bike ride around West Lehi, along Redwood to Bluffdale and back on the windy frontage road.

4 miles on the hotel treadmill in Vegas.

45 minutes on the elliptical trainer in the hotel Gym.  Very busy but fun day yesterday, Sportstacking Competition followed by swimming and then Blueman group.

5 miles around the Eagle Summit track with Tara.