Sanuk D

I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else.

It takes an hour in the mornings.  No matter what I tell myself, it takes an hour.  That means if I wake up or — more to the point — get up 30 minutes late on a Saturday, I will be 30 minutes late getting out for my run.  There is no getting up 30 minutes late and being ready in 30 minutes.  Part of me rebels at the very idea that I could be late for anything at 6:00 on a Saturday morning.  So I drag my feet, and it takes an hour.

Once I got going, of course, everything was fine.  My new shoes are like the old shoes were when they were new, which is to say they felt like they should feel but the thrill of new shoes is gone.  Sort of like … well, never mind.  So anyway, I was out the door and down the road for a minute or two before I realized that I had forgotten to start my watch.  No biggie.  The point of the watch is to keep me honest, not to torture me with times to meet.  Just so long as I am not slacking.

I followed my usual long run route as the sun began to rise, an orange disk in a silver sky.  It seemed only able to define it’s own presence.  The surrounding sky and the river below held the sense of night, only illuminated.  I ran through Groovemont and out towards the quarry making spectacular time until the delayed start got figured in.  At the Tabernacle, where it seems my Great Uncle once preached, I turned right instead of going straight.  Descending through a graveyard, I dipped and then rose to pass the retirement home on one side and the rehab on the other.

The rehabituates appeared to want my attention, to which they are welcome if they truly want to stay sober.  I suspect they want to yell at a runner because what else to they have to do to liven up the morning.  I did not stop.  Instead, I made it to another bone yard, this one dedicated to our fallen vets.  It’s a nice spot, and a good turn around.  Again past the retirees and parolees, most of whom had gone inside, and up through the church yard to the Tabernacle.

As I headed home, Ra’s power began to effect the air but only in pockets.  I would run through spots as wet and warm as a lung only to emerge into the nocturnal cool again.  This battle will continue for weeks, but the cool will prevail.  I believe the worst of the heat to be over, and I am grateful not to have sat this summer out.  Most years, I reach this stage having squandered the summer in lackadaisical efforts at training.  I have reached this fall with a good number of miles in the bank.  Today’s run was a draft on that account that will not bounce.

So, yesterday it seemed like such a good idea.  I was all giddy with the possibilities, and I went with it.  You know how this story goes, don’t you?  Morning regrets.  Walks of shame.  Maybe a typical Thursday for @michaelfmuller, but I continue to grasp at gossamer threads of dignity.  Why, then, did I go ahead and sign up for another marathon?  Didn’t I do my marathon for the year?  Yes, but having trained for one in the first half of the year means I still have time for another round of training.  I feel so ashamed.  What to do other than begin the training plan again.

“So what, exactly, is the plan Sanuk D?” you may be thinking to yourself.  Good question.  The first time I did a marathon I used a plan laid out by the venerable Hal Higdon.   Venerable because he is old, not because he is an Archdeacon.  I am not an Archdeacon, but I do like to take the Sabbath off from running.  So I stuck close to the plan except I ran a long run on Saturday instead of Sunday.   It was very good because I had never run a marathon, and I had no idea what to do and here was this thing that said “here, do this!”  So I did that and it worked out, mostly because I had some confidence in the plan.

So, the next couple of marathons I sort of did the Higdon plan, meaning that I did the long runs and sort of did the runs during the week.  This approach was not quite as successful.   In fact, the marathons — especially the second one — sucked.  Running marathons is not really healthy, I don’t think.  I mean, it’s healthier than not exercising, but it does do damage to the body.  The point of the experience ought to be something other than health.  Like fun. For me, runs around the 16 mile length are fun.  Lots of +20 mile runs are not fun.   Weeks that have a lot of < 5 mile runs bum me out too.  I get moody.

So, this last time I did a modified modified Higdon plan.   I ran 30 – 35 miles most work weeks and spread that out fairly evenly across the days. 6 weeks or so out, I ramped that up to around 35-40 miles for a few weeks.  On Saturdays, I ran increasingly longer runs working up to a 20 miler 3 weeks out.   My longest week was somewhere around 55 miles.  After that, I ran an 18 miler and a 16 miler and went back down to about 25-30 miles during the week.   The week before the marathon I ran about 20 miles total.  That’s all approximate.

So basically, the idea of building up mileage and then tapering seems to work, except that I have a relatively slow metabolism.  I need to give myself plenty of time to ramp up and not taper off too far.  Plus, this is supposed to be fun, right?  Ok, it’s a bad way to have fun but still.   I want to run enough for what is good for me mentally and what will allow me to have some fun when I go out.  I have heard that the Hanson Brothers have a plan that is essentially longer runs during the week and a shorter long run.  Whatever.  Running around like a loon sounds good to me as long as the total miles per week add up.  Given how the most recent race turned out, I’m willing to give this a shot again.

There was once a television commercial about a guy who was trying to dry his pants using the radio antenna on his car as a clothes line.  I do not recall what product was being advertised, which may say something about the value of cheeky ads.  What I do recall is that he wound up at his soon-to-be in-laws’ home with no pants.  In a similarly inspired yet demented move, I am hoping to arrive at the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games sans pantaloons on Saturday morning sometime around 10:30.  This feat may be the most inspired stunt I have ever pulled off, or it may be the dumbest idea in since Phidippides decided not to wait for the train.

Coming off last year’s Flying Monkey Marathon, I was both thrilled and disappointed.  Thrilled that I was not violently ill but actually recovering quite nicely.  Disappointed that my performance during the race was not what I had hoped (or that I did not manage my time around the race so as to spend more of it with my sister.)  The problem with the race lay, I believe, in my being too aggressive on the early hills.  Hard to judge, given that I was not wearing a watch that day.  Wherein lies another lesson.

So somewhere in the preparation or aftermath of the Monkey, I devised myself a plan that should be the envy of any man.  I would redeem myself in the mountains by taking on the Grandfather Mountain Marathon.  Idiots who sign up for this Samsonite of hurt get to run from Kidd Brewer Stadium in Boone to McRae Meadows on Grandfather Mountain.  The thing is that the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games are going on at McRae Meadows.  The games apparently involve other running events because there is a track at the Meadows.  So marathoners finish on the track, at the Games, in front of like 15,000 people.  And bagpipes.

So I know what you are thinking.  There is only one way to do a marathon like this, right?  Right: in a kilt.  Any guy can strap on a skirt, drink some mead, throw a pole, and call himself Scottish, but only an insane few would dare put on the kilt to run all the way from Marathon to Athens except with something like 2,000 feet of elevation gain.  Sorry, Dr. Phil, I can’t answer your question.  I have no idea what I was thinking.  Except that I was in need of a kilt.

Which are often made of wool, which is hot, and which theoretically should come to about mid-knee, which is annoying.  The solution to these problems could be found where all problems for skirt-wearing men are solved: The Internet!  I Binged the Google to find Angus and his Sport Kilts.  (If you are going to buy a kilt, you should buy it from a guy named Angus, should you not?)  While one could purchase a man kilt and trim it up a bit, the advice I found on the internets suggested buying a lady’s kilt which comes in a slightly shorter size to begin with — all other features being the same.  To say that my Sweet Lady was bemused at my request for this as a Brumalia gift is a generous description of her skepticism.

My full vision, however, had yet to be revealed.  It would be several weeks before the temperatures outside warmed enough for a trial run, so to speak, of the kilt.  When it did happen, the conditions were so wet and nasty that it was easy to imagine myself traversing the Hieland moors with a not-so-racist Mel Gibson.  In other words, the kilt was perfect.  What I needed then was conditioning.  If I were to run the GMM, it would be my fifth, but it would be the first that I had trained for in the spring.

Initially, I thought I would run everyday.  Starting a streak seemed appropriate to the madness of this whole exercise.  The madness was stopped almost as soon as it started, however, when I came down with what the urgent care doctor insisted was a social disease but which later turned out to be either kidney stones or lady problems.  I’m choosing kidney stones.  Streak over, time for more reasonable training to begin.  Like routine days of 6 + miles and long runs of 16 miles or more on the weekends.

To my pre-runner, dilettante bohemian self, this does not sound reasonable at all.  Camel Lights, little chocolate donuts, and John Coltrane sound reasonable.  I can still go for the Coltrane.  And the occasional little chocolate donut.  I can also go for the higher miles.  The trick for me is to build a bit more slowly and not taper quite so much.  Some runners will ramp up the mileage and the lay off for a couple of weeks immediately prior to a big race.  They are like Ferraris or Lance Armstrong: nimble, quick, and over the candlestick. I am more of a Jan Ullrich (without the drugs or Porches.)  I tend to get going in one direction physiologically speaking and sort of stay in that direction for a while.

So instead of ramping up and tapering, I have been building a pretty strong base and then dialing it back a bit.  My longest run, about three weeks ago, was around 21 miles.  During the work week through that period, I was running about 7 miles a day.  You’d think I would be skinnier by now.  In any event, while tiring, the 50 + mile weeks felt good.  Subsequently, I have done 18 and 16 mile long runs, keeping my week day mileage between 30 and 35 miles for a total of 40 to 45 in those weeks.  This week’s runs have gotten progressively shorter such that I will run 3 miles tomorrow morning for a total of around 25 miles so far this week.  In comparison to previous tapers, my legs seem to have more “spring” in them yet I do seem to have recovered from many of the aches and pains that continuous high mileage is destined to deliver.

I have also been spared the serious dip in confidence that has come with previous tapers.  Not that I’m again taking the hills for granted, but more the opposite.  I won’t have to prove to myself over the first several miles that I can do this.  I can start relaxed and not overextend myself in the early part of the run.  Which is important because I want to look decent at the finish.  After all, the whole kilt thing kind of puts me out there to begin with.  I hope that I will hear the cheers of appreciation at the finish, not the jeers of mockery.  You will be able to judge for yourself, as another feat of sibling bonding may be accomplished when my brother serves as official Sanuk D photographer for this race.  It may be Sunday before you hear from me again, so please pray, preform a ritual, do a scientific experiment, or whatever your thing is for me on Saturday morning.  It’s supposed to stop being hot then, right?

So I follow this dude on Twitter. Probably because he followed me first. I don’t know why he followed me, but I try not to think about this kind of thing. His posts would come up and I would sort of not read them at all until I noticed that he was posting things about the Valley of the Harpeth. Weird, right, because I grew up there and he lives there now and we don’t know each other or why we are following each other. He was complaining about the huge new Comisaría de policía and I’m all like “What did you expect when you moved there, buddy?” But I didn’t say that out loud not only because no one says anything out loud on Twitter but also because who cares so much.

But I pay more attention to his Tweets now because he is tweetering from the land which nursed my as a youth and which is how I came to hear that it has been raining a little bit as of late on the edge of the Highland Rim.  Something like half of a normal year’s rainfall has deluged the Music City over the last couple of days.  It’s a little strange to not hear about this in, like, the news.  I know there are a couple of other things going on but, to quote VPOTUS, “This is a big f’ing deal.”  Kind of like that ice storm that tore through Oklahoma this winter.  Wait, what?  You don’t remember that either?  I guess we are not getting ALL the news ALL the time, although I hear that Larry King is getting another divorce!

Some things about the flooding in the Valley of the Cumberland are every bit as surreal as the stories surrounding Larry King’s, um, familial whatever.  For instance, there is a section of the Opryland Hotel which is supposed to resemble New Orleans.  They call it “The Delta.”  Every time I have been in there, I begin to understand what life in a terrarium must be like for those pitiful toads.  I hop around on this facsimile of the Big Easy just praying to God that the brat doesn’t tap the glass again.  Don’t. Tap. The Glass.  Like Uncle Nabob in the open casket, it looks so lifelike.  Now the similarities are complete, what with the flooding of Opryland’s Delta:

Only there are no looters getting shot for stealing pampers and beer from a Stop ‘n’ Go.  Somebody get Gaylord on the horn.  I have an idea.

What’s not so cool is that there are real people suffering real damage as a result of this thing.  Faithful readers will not doubt recall that last fall, I participated in the Greatest Marathon Ever aka (also know as) the Harpeth Hills Flying Monkey Marathon. This marathon is great because it sucks.  There is like 3,500 feet of elevation change with the biggest climb coming at mile 19 (ie: where you hit the wall.)  This marathon is greater because the Monkey Man organizes it and really cares that people enjoy themselves as they suffer terrific pain for now reason on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.  In a world with far too many running schmucks, the Monkey Man is a mensch.  (So he’s mashugana about this running thing, is that so bad?)  So it is a real bummer to see his home inundated with the remains of the hill which used to be uphill from it.

There are discussions in the works about the best way to lend the Monkey Man a hand.  Or perhaps drop a dime if lending a hand is distance prohibitive.  If something organized gets rolling, I’ll post some details here.  In the meantime, keep the Monkey Man aka (see note above) Trent and his family in your prayers or thoughts or whatever atheists do.  Thems good people.

For days, the predicted weather has been gloom and doom, and I was determined to run long and prosper on Saturday no matter what Zeus was unleashing.  Almost no matter.  I will not run in lightening, but not so heavy rain is fine.  In order to re-enforce my badassness, I planned to wear the Monkey shirt and a black pair of running pants so that the full effect would be somewhat Sith-like, or maybe like Luke at the end of “The Empire Strikes Back.”  Either way, you would know I was tough because I would be out there in the nasty weather running in very slimming black.

So you can imagine my surprise and disappointment when the rosy fingers of dawn spread across cerulean skies.  The temperature was a few degrees below where I thought it would be, throwing doubt into my wardrobe plans.  Did Luke change his wardrobe even though he knew it would be cold hanging from the bottom of Cloud City? No. Did Darth Vader ever change his clothes under any circumstances? No.  Ok then, I’m going.

Since Tallulah had a school make up day today, I dropped her off and headed for the W both to park and later to shower.  Having lost the bravado of running in the rain, I decided to make up for it with a return to the site of last fall’s hill of horror’s, the Citizen-Times half marathon course.  I picked my way through Altamont’s version of the Garden District in New Orleans, and wound through the UNC Altamont campus.  After about 5 miles, my route fell on to the half marathon route as it curves beside Beaver Lake.

At this point, it would be refreshing to add some details about the lake’s glassy surface or the rustling of the breeze through the stately hemlocks, but the steely gray skies and the muddy run-off from the week’s rains did not paint such a tableau.  Instead there was running to be done, up to the top of old Burnsville Hill.  My original thought had been to practice the ascent of Lookout Road, but it was now apparent that today’s lesson would be about going down hills too.  Descending is hard on the thighs, and I don’t like it; however, the muffin top removal project seems to have an added side benefit of improving the going downhill experience.

As Lennon and McCartney taught us, “when you get to the bottom you go back to the top,” and no sooner had I recovered from the descent than I began to climb Lookout.  Aside from being long, and at times steep, the biggest problem with this hill is that it has numerous false summits.  The last one really requires the hermeneutics of Rabbi Kushner to grasp why it mocks the runner in the way it does.  Nevertheless, it was good to revisit the mountain before the next halfie because hermeneutical discourse is not suited to race day.

Such reflections are better pursued on a day like today, with a nice long run under one’s belt.  Being in posession of such a belt, I reflected that today’s route was good preparation for the Monkey, what with the hills I ran today.  Alas, 522 feet of climbing are not nothing, but the Monkey eats those up in the first five miles.  A quick review of the Monkey course spells it out in startling detail: 3,328 feet of total elevation gain.  That doesn’t even include going down hill.  Only an idiot would sign up for that.