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That winter, I stayed in good shape but was largely non-competitive. It had been a tough year, what with the injury, and my friends were increasingly interested in finishing something they called a "thee-sis" or something?
Wait, is that what I'm supposed to be doing? I had been in grad school for 3 ½ years already, and my advisor was asking about my closeout scenario. He wanted me done around Year 5, which looked plausible given the work to date. (As a cycling friend told me around that time, "Based on race results, I'd guess 8 years." No spoilers, but he was right.) One February night [ed: most nights], several friends [ed: and a professor] and I went to a bar [ed: several bars]. Near the end of the evening, after our crowd had thinned, one of those friends struck up a convo with an interestingly-dressed guy sporting a colorful, poofy scarf. Scarf Man's cluster of acquaintances included an attractive young lady, which is what I might normally have noticed. Instead I noticed how much the room was spinning and how terribly I needed to relieve myself. Somehow my horribly drunken state didn't show enough to scare her off. She came to a department happy hour shortly thereafter, and we started dating a few months later. Around that time, the traditional bike race happened near Rochester to open the season. I was a Cat 3, riding like a madman and ready to do some damage. The Cat 3 pace was far more aggressive, but I was prepared for it. Nobody attacked without being chased down. Including me. We stayed as a pack through the race, and as usual I tried to make a break before the end, with about 2 miles left. Two others came with me, and we pulled across the next mile, but the pack chased us down, and I finished in a generic place in the middle of the pack, completely destroyed. I did our early-season official race as a Cat 3 as well but didn’t feel particularly strong. I performed unremarkably, and probably would have as a Cat 4 as well. Three days later, I showed up for the traditional Tuesday gathering and rode hard, my frame creaking the entire way. At the finish line, I took a look at what seemed the source of the noise and saw a crack in the frame near the cranks. Glenn had sold me that bike 3 years earlier, and the warranty was still valid; alas, his shop no longer sold Cervelo, so I had to go to Rochester to get it replaced. While my bike was out being replaced (Cervelo customer service was great for this), I borrowed my friend’s wife’s bike for those Tuesday and Thursday events. Two weeks on, I was late to the Tuesday race, and I latched onto the back as it rolled out of the meeting place. But my legs just weren’t in it. I was having trouble keeping up. I wasn’t sure where this tiredness came from, but it was probably excessive run training and too little bike training. I didn’t have the push to stay with the pack and was dropped off the lead group. I rode on my own that beautiful April day, chugging up hills and into valleys, across flats and around a course of my own making. And at the top of one of those hills, I looked down at a steep descent, clean except for a driveway on the right. I swerved a little left as I approached, figuring this would give me some space in case of an emerging car. The thing about vision is that it’s hard to focus on more than one thing at a time. And when you’re looking right, you don’t see things coming from the left. Like dogs. Dogs that want to be run over. Dogs that are also heavy enough to stop a speeding bike. So a dog and I performed an unscheduled stress test on the fork of a bike that was not my own. The fork failed. And then the road performed an equally unscheduled stress test on the epidermis on my back. My epidermis also failed. A neighbor called an ambulance, and after I'd been loaded in, I had the paramedics phone the woman from the bar -- with whom I had a date that evening -- to let her know I would sadly be forced to cancel. I was brought to the hospital to be tended to by the wife of a professor in my department. Small world, Ithaca. And that ended my summer of riding. It took over a month to recover -- all of May down the drain -- and when I got back my legs just weren’t the same. I didn’t have kick, I didn’t have aggressiveness, I just didn’t have it. I had crashed big twice in less than a year, and in spite of being in generally good shape, I couldn’t bring myself to work toward anything in particular. There was, amongst my friends and well-wishers (who may not have overlapped significantly), the idea of me as a bike racing nut. But if I was a bike racing nut, I had finally cracked, my hardened shell shattered by the unyielding pavement of Tompkins County. Equally importantly, I felt a responsibility to my (ostensible) school work, something I had neglected in riding and running. I cruised into autumn and ran the Triennial Relay for the first -- and so far only -- time in my career. This race takes a team of N runners (I don’t know if there’s a lower bound) and has them run 7 or so stages, 8-15 miles each, on the Finger Lakes Trail. I answered an email on the listserv (where else?) and joined the party, hooking on with a local friend to run for a team led out by a not-local-anymore-but-formerly-local-and-still-quite-good runner. Our team did acceptably, taking 3rd of 14, and I enjoyed the race immensely, despite missing a turn and leading a few other runners into the middle of a foresty dead end. For the next year, I didn’t race at all that I can recall. I went to Tuesday night rides, slowly sliding down the totem pole as I focused more and more on writing my thesis. Weekends were almost all spent in New York City, where the woman from the bar moved after she finished law school. That put a damper in my race prospects, but it made my running life soar. Running in Ithaca was always a trail event; running in NYC was a different beast entirely. I had to shift courses to go with traffic, often ending up at unusual intersections in strange parts of town with little idea how far I had come or would go. I criss-crossed the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges -- at one point all in one run. Running fitness continued apace through ever-longer excursions on pavement and through backwater parks. During the week, back in the open space upstate, I went on long rides with friends or alone. I stopped feeling competitive about any of it. Sure, I could run a half marathon, and pretty quickly at that. Yes, I could ride 50 miles and barely touch my water bottle. Indeed, I could run to Central Park, take a lap (well, maybe a 1/3 lap; Central Park really is huge), and come back to Williamsburg before joining friends on a local pub crawl. I did all these things not because I had something to win, but because I was exhausted from racing so much. It gets to you eventually. The daily preparation is fine, but the weekly routine grinds you down: Identify race; sign up for race; change plans to incorporate race into training; find a way to the course; spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours in the car en route; hang around endlessly waiting for the start; race (which will probably be shorter than 2 hours); return; repeat. And for the race itself, if the weather is bad, because you’ve signed up, you feel an obligation to ride or run anyway. It’s hard to swallow your pride and say, “You know what? When it’s 98 degrees and 90% humidity, I run before dawn or after dusk for good reason. And death by lightning just isn’t in my plan today. It turns out I really don’t feel like being out in a hailstorm for 30 minutes. Also, it’s going to be freezing and windy by the end of this, and I wouldn’t pick today as a day and time for hardcore athletics if I were at home.” But you do it anyway, you start a race at 9 a.m. against your better judgment, put your legs and feet and back and shoulders through hell on sopping wet roads on your way to the next aid station, where you can’t possibly put back enough water to replace what’s been lost in sweat, or you endanger yourself in a rowdy pack, hoping against all hope that you keep your collarbones intact for this ride. You suffer, slowly, inevitably, until you cross the finish line and get a number for a time. And then you relax with other people who have just done the same thing, enjoy some good company and maybe some “free” food and drinks (they’re not free because you’ve just paid for them with your entry fee, but it sure seems that way). You don’t even notice the drive home, because you’re worn out and thinking about the shower that’s 30 minutes to 2 hours away, considering stopping at every restaurant and store along the way just because you can. Wow. I might have just convinced myself that racing is a terrible idea in general. Whatever, brain, go back to thinking about discrete optimization. I admit, I was hypnotized by this process for years. It was almost reflexive, developing from a product of my desire to simple habit. And not a lucrative habit: the few times I won races and collected prize money, it was a small payout; meanwhile, I left a trail of $5-$30 entry fees in my wake. My lost work time was significant, and I felt my peers accelerating away academically. Through the summer of 2006, I either couldn’t afford the habit or wasn’t as interested in it. Or both. I no longer felt racing mattered. All that mattered was that my life was moving along, that I had to figure out where it would end up. So I proposed. It was a lavish event, full of champagne and music and a wonderful setup, totally shocking to my girlfriend, who immediately said “yes” and then tweeted to all her friends and relatives within 6 seconds that she was engaged to the man of her dreams. Or perhaps I simply said one evening, “Marry me?” And she agreed. And the next morning she asked whether I was serious before telling anyone about it. Also, Twitter didn’t exist then, and she may have mistaken her dreams for her waking moments and thought she was agreeing to the man in her dreams and was secretly hoping I’d look at her like she’d just told me a tale of fairies and unicorns when she asked if I was serious. One of those stories is true. That was June. By September, it was clear that our future options were limited if we were both going to pursue our careers. As a result, we chose DC. We rented an apartment in October and were married in November, the same day I interviewed for what would become my first legit professional job. It was a fine exit from New York for both of us, and I don't know about her but I was sure as hell ready to cut out weekly 6-hour drives through Manhattan traffic. Next up: Attack of the Swampmonsters! Mash out. Spin on.
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 “What goes up…” &cetera.
I was up. Severely up. Cat 3 for bike racing, winning local trail races, maintaining a solid week-on-week training schedule. And I was signed up, too, for another triathlon, this one an Olympic distance bruiser that should have been pretty routine. I don’t even remember where it was, just that I wanted to test out my swimming form somewhere nearby and not too challenging. I haven’t looked at these results before, so it’s interested to think about where I stood in that race. The event was Olympic distance, meaning a 1-mile swim (or thereabouts), 40 km bike, and 10 km run. Obviously, I had the bike and run down, and I’d been working on the swim all summer. But swimming in the pool or in a non-competitive lake crossing was one thing; the group start of a triathlon, I knew, was a different beast. I remember going to the race with Lawren, and I remember waiting lakeside for the start. We hung near the back -- his swimming was almost as terrible as mine -- during the lead-up to the race, including during the obligatory announcements by the race coordinator. These were done without aid of a microphone, and included the important instructions to stay slow on the downhill on the bike because there were curves and they hadn’t been swept of gravel. I missed that part. Just before the gun, I positioned myself near the middle of the pack. We dove into the water, and I swam furiously through the course, losing minimal ground in the process. Remember that I was in the bottom 1/3 for most of my other races, so this was definitely an improvement. I hopped on the bike and started passing immediately, blowing by people on the flats and across the rollers and up the big climb away from the water. At the major downhill, I took an outside line and smoothly slid by another rider. Coming to the corner, though, my rear wheel lost purchase, and I fishtailed badly, my bike skidding left, right, left, right, before my front wheel had turned enough to throw me over the bars. At close to 25 mph, I hurtled forward, rolled once, and slid to a stop on my back, my bike bounding down the hill another 30 meters or so. Adrenaline pumping now. My thumb was severely displaced, and my knee was a splatter of red pouring blood down my leg. My helmet was destroyed. Shredded bits of my jersey flapped against my back. This was the time, though: pain hadn't registered yet. I dashed down, grabbed my bike, and threw it on the other side of the road where nobody would run into it. Passersby gaped at a bloody mess. Now to the decision. Bleeding profusely from leg and, presumably, my back, I could go up the hill to the aid station I had just passed or down the hill to the next one, which was indeterminately far away. Having “just passed” an aid station when you’re going 25-ish mph means it can be a long walk, but I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and screwed up my courage and verbed various other nouns in the interests of just getting back there. When I arrived, the volunteer was horrified. She obviously didn’t expect to see a mangled body walk up the hill to this station. But there I was. She plied me with some water, and I passed out briefly while sitting on a utility box. I regained consciousness only when the wee dream-like scenario that was playing out in my head -- being at the doctor and having a conversation with someone -- resulted in my head slamming against something, which turned out to be the box itself. An ambulance arrived, and I was whisked to a local hospital, treated for abrasions all over my back, diagnosed with a broken thumb, and given a lot of pain medication. My knee had a hole the size of a 50-cent piece through all the dermal layers, but the internals had somehow survived intact. Even now, I remember my quadriceps femoris, exposed and pale and straight against the pink and red disarray of the surrounding wound. The road rash on my back required daily maintenance and forced me to sleep upright for weeks. My thumb was surgically repaired, and I spent a month with my hand and wrist in a cast. The knee hole healed very slowly as the flesh built up from bottom-to-top and around the edges where the pieces had been sewn back into place. And yet I rode. I remember commuting home down the hill in the cast, each small bump feeling like it might throw me again and re-open the newly-scarred or as-yet-unhealed tissue. What manner of madeness compelled me to this course? I was 25 at the time, and every passing day felt like a prime day lost. So I tried to stay in racing condition. This meant riding the trainer and getting back to the daily running routine. Once all the healing was done and summer slipped into autumn's rearview mirror, I was only barely less well-off than before the crash. There was one race left: the first race course I’d ever done as a cyclist. A few friends joined me this time, and told them what I remembered from years earlier about the Apple Fest: it’s got a couple major climbs. I started cautiously with the pack through the rollers, but on one of those major climbs -- one of the 5 or 6 or 8 -- I embraced that old cycling aggression and pulled away from the field. Riding out front with a group of a half dozen or so, we stayed away, then strung out across the road over the final 8 miles. I remember the effort of the last two miles, an explosive emptying of long-unused legs anxious to show their capability. I won. My friends, needless to say, did not appreciate my advice about the race complexion. Then again, I honestly didn’t remember the course being full of climbing. This was the unfortunately happy end of what could have been a remarkable season, and though it gave me satisfaction to close with a victory, it was unclear just how much I had left. I packed away my warm-weather kit and hunkered down for winter. Next up: Interpersonal Inclinations and Competitive Chaos Mash out. Spin on. The bike racing schedule was, of course, relatively fixed year-to-year. The season started in Rochester, Ithaca, and Binghamton, then went to Auburn and Syracuse before the mid-summer “break”. Between Syracuse and the season-ending races was a vast gulf with one or two races and a whole lot of not much else. That’s where my running took over, and where I felt most comfortable. Before the season-opener up by Rochester, one of the other local riders had mentioned that he was going to do early races (meaning the local, unofficial races) in a lower gear than he might otherwise to practice high-cadence riding. That was my problem as well, so when the Rochester race rolled around, I told myself that I would keep in the small ring unless it was absolutely necessary. So it was in my 42" small ring that I rode off the front of the field and dangled for 4 or so laps, feeling great. In the last lap, a half dozen riders caught me, and I settled in for a quarter lap before breaking again. They must have thought I was nuts, but it was all somewhat strategic: I didn’t win sprints, so riding away was what I had. The pack chased me down again, and I accepted something like 10th or 15th (no results seem to exist online). At the Binghamton Circuit Race a week later, I got my team effort on, and a couple of us combined to get a good placement for one of the team members. I finished 8th overall, which was nice, but as usual the criterium format did not favor my mashing power. At our local race the following week, I went over sideways on the first climb when the crowd in front of me slowed nearly to a stop; I quickly hopped back on my bike and rode to the front, where four or five of us broke away and crushed the rest of the field. A week later, again near Rochester, I have no recollection of how things played out, but I apparently finished 3rd. A week after that was the Owasco Stage Race, two events at the time (there’s now a time trial, but I don’t think there was back then). I knew I was going to ride just one of them: there was a run that Sunday that I really wanted to do, and riding a criterium didn’t sound like a great use of my talents. A teammate, Andrew, was also looking for his Category 3 upgrade, and we’d been riding together quite a bit. The course started on a relatively long descent, turned a corner, and went up a short climb worth a few King of the Mountain (KOM) points toward the stage race win. My teammate was 3rd or 4th, with me on his wheel, as some of the other riders hammered out the climb. Near the top, I pulled in front of him, and he slid in, then blasted by me at the top of the ride to take 3rd (and a KOM point).
The weekend arrived. I knew Category 3 was at my fingertips, and I showed up in Syracuse ready to go and feeling like a mediocre racehorse. I mean, yeah, it was amateur, but I had done a lot in Owasco and wanted to show I could do even more here.
The course was two laps of 30 miles. We spent the first 15 miles together, then watched as a few of the riders took off at the top of one of the hills. One of them was Jason, whom I had spent quite a bit of time riding with and talking to during our Cat 4 careers, and I knew he was a quietly strong rider who could pull the trio away if he had a little help. The pack seemed lackadaisical about the prospect of racing for 4th, but I was a little more determined. I kept finding myself near the front and pushing the pace a little more before drifting into the pack and watching our pace fall again. Nobody was working together. We caught one of the breakaway riders about 5 miles after they broke, then caught another 5 miles later. The only holdout now was Jason, and with the two breakers back in our midst, there seemed to be a little more urgency in the group. Finally, we caught sight of the leader and let him dangle out there for a while, just 20 or 30 seconds ahead of the pack, as we cruised through the 35th mile. At last, he gave up, and we were all in the running for first. Remember how I mentioned not being a sprinter? I didn’t want this to devolve into a crushing sprint finish that I knew would put me top-10 but probably not in the top 3. It was time to talk deals, and Jason was a good guy to talk with. We cruised in the pack, fending off occasional attacks from other riders. Sitting comfortably in 4th or 5th position with 20 miles left, I rolled up next to him. “I thought you were going to stay away,” I told him, knowing he would know that I didn’t think that at all. He smiled. “I’m sure you did.” “Maybe you just went a little early. Now seems more like it.” I let the comment sink in, then attacked softly to get to the lead position, and attacked hard to break the group. We were on a flat near the base of a rise, and I didn’t even think about it. Jason broke with a couple other riders behind me, but we had shattered the peloton. I blazed up the rise, then hammered across the next flat, down the next hill, and ripped up the following climb, building a solid 30-second gap in about 5 miles. I continued to press the pace up the mid-course major climb, and the lead car’s spotter yelled out my 45-second lead as I crested the rise. That second-place rider was Jason; the pack was another 45 seconds behind. I ducked into a TT position and crushed the rest of the course. Now used to my weekly 10-mile assault ride on Thursday, I figured this could be done in something like 25 minutes, since it was a slightly downhill ride until the finishing climb. When I rode into that hill, I could see the pack far behind and could spot the trailing two or three riders several hundred meters back. I stood on my pedals, pressed up the climb, and crossed the line comfortably in 1st place. The following day was the criterium. I had never been good at these, and Jason and I discussed our strategies for the race. I told him there was no way I could win in the pack, because I’m simply not a sprinter. “So what do you plan on doing?” he asked. “Not a sprint,” I told him. We were riding for different teams but speaking a common language here. At the race start, the announcer pointed out my number as the race leader, presumably figuring that everyone would key in and shut down whatever I might try to do. Lap 1 of 20 went through without incident, but on Lap 2, I decided it was time to move. On the backside descent, I pushed up from the middle of the pack around the outside; passing Jason’s position, he latched onto my wheel, and we blasted off the front like we were shot from a cannon. We didn’t talk, just rode hard and rode away. For a half dozen laps, our lead grew, until we were over a minute ahead -- the pack on the back half of the course while we were crossing the line. It went like that for 45 minutes, and when the last lap bell rang, we took it very seriously. We pacelined the lap, swapping leads every 5 seconds or so, until the final 400 meters. I was in the lead, and I stood up to give one last effort to drop him. He stayed with, and 100 meters from the finish, he started a smooth and easy sprint to take the prize. I crossed in 2nd, and we rode a cool-down while the race finished up. I upgraded the following week. Ah, but this is a running book! What am I doing talking about all these cycling exploits? A couple weeks later, I signed up for the Jordan Alpine Classic, a race whose course did not necessarily justify the “alpine” monicker, unless you consider “alpine” to refer to anything that traverses a region in which the fauna might be found in an alpine setting, in which case said definition allows any user to say anything is “alpine” without fear of being called incorrect. A local racer, whose name I don’t remember but who did attend enough events that I recognized him, showed up wearing a kilt and no shirt. I, as is my friendly nature, ribbed him about his attire, and his response was radically different from what I expected: he popped his trunk and offered me a kilt for the race. Yes! Yes yes yes! A thousand times yes! Okay, maybe not that exciting. I threw my shorts in my car, pulled on the kilt, and proceeded to win the race. Somewhere out there is a video of my Jordan Alpine Classic race win in a kilt, but it seems to have been removed from the internet, at least in any searchable form. Be that as it may, this 8k-ish race gave me a wonderful glimpse into a new world of running. Alas, I do not own a kilt, so the lesson of the win has been lost to time. Next up: Falling down. Mash out. Spin on. Here in the Northeast, where deciduous trees dominate, winter is a time when the full foliage of summer is starkly absent; everything seems harder, more brutalist. And then there's fall - the flightless bird of seasons, ill-fittingly wavering between frigid, damp overcast and vibrant, blustry sunshine. I won't pretend to delight in fall's foulest weather, as though squalls and frosted mornings cleanse the overheated runner's soul or let the trail aficionado embrace yin-like calm in the face of this karmic weather yang(er). But it offers a transition unlike any other in our training regimes. I notice it most in that flattening fitness feeling, when my running legs switch from Need To Move to Functionally Underwhelming. The soreness of a 6-month training plan catches up rapidly, and I find myself wondering each day whether a run is really the best use of my precious time and energy.  Almost uniformly it is. Unfortunate for these prevarications, then, that it's necessarily accompanied by layers of running clothes, each of which must be thoroughly thermally adjustable. Arm warmers, of course, and gloves, then a thin cap, a neck warmer, a zippered wind- and water-resistant vest, and zippered (cycling) tights. Individually, each can be vented or packed away once I'm fully warm or in the sun, or quickly tugged back on for traversing particularly cold valleys or stopping to smell the rotting leaves; as a group, they add 5 minutes to the run prep, enough time to make me wonder about my weird obsession with trails while I wait for the 6:45 sunrise. But there really is nothing comparable to harvest-time trails. Each year the detritus of fallen leaves and blown-down sticks crescendos in a mesh of layers thick enough to obscure ankle-breakers and mud pits and small ponds. To aid in the runner's adventure, all the markings of the trail/not-trail barrier are punctured: where summer's overgrown branches hung over a noticeable path, barren sticks now jut at odd angles, yielding as little information as possible; and where winter's repeated foot traffic will imprint snow with a dominant route, freshly dropped leaves hold no such memory, such that at any time, an alternate direction might appear as good and leaf-covered as the prescribed one. Of course I continue to run. Autumn excursions are less carefree than in summer, to be sure, and in many ways I find them more dangerous than in winter, when the bitter cold and snowy or slushy surface are all the warning signs you could ask for. I know deep down that, like the 20 or so years before this, I'll embrace the transition into winter running sometime around the beginning of December. I will accept that those formerly fast-paced daily 10ks will scale back by 20% either in speed or distance; that my long runs won't go quite as long; that I'll spend more time cross-training indoors. In fall, though, each of these is a hard sell. This morning, in the clearing next to the forest edge on my local trail, I was keenly aware of the soft touch of autumn sun that whispered against my bare wrists and cheeks. I will enjoy this last stretch of vestigal summer, knowing all too well the inevitability of the bone-deep chill that lies in wait.  One of the many beautiful views I specifically did not have from a Black Forest hillside. Ithaca in winter is both beautiful and maddening. A general cold creeps into the air sometime in October, followed by a first sticking snow in mid- to late-November. After one or two brief periods of post-fall (relative) warmth through the end of that month, a series of snowfalls -- usually no more than a few inches at a time -- is broken up only by frigid nights and cold days. Waterfalls freeze and icicles turn the gorges into gaping, predatory maws. Forests are coated in powder that will persist into spring, by which time the gentle fluff will be a mass that seems determined to stay through summer. Little-used roads thaw, freeze, thaw, and freeze again, an endless parade of damage wrought to the pavement from within.
Running, it should be apparent, becomes a challenge. The valley holds limited appeal, but its flanking hills are slick with ice and snow. And the treacherous roadways push cars to less dangerous approaches, raising the ire of frustrated drivers at the expense of safety for everyone else on the roads. Trails were essentially off-limits, piled with snow of varying depths and marked with blazes that, while apparent during summer, are nearly impossible to find in the bleak, gray uniformity. But I did the runs anyway, with shoes or snowshoes. Cycling becomes even more difficult: the ride up the steep hill brings immediate heat to the core, but limbs dangle in the frozen wilds and cry out for attention. Most of my rides were capped by 10 minutes in the bathroom with my hands and feet immersed in warm water, hoping that they would come back to life. They always did, but I don’t wish the stabbing pain of their reawakening on anyone. Distance riding exacerbated the problem, as well as fighting darkness and the attendant vehicular dangers. But I did these rides anyway, extremeties bundled to look like wiffle ball bats affixed to my slender frame. Since I hadn’t raced much recently, this would be the winter of snowshoe, the time when I would enjoy the snow as much as possible in spite of my limited winter sport experience. I started taking second runs in the evenings while wearing snowshoes, doing a few miles at a time just to practice the motion. I enjoyed it immensely, especially on frigid, clear nights: the crystalline air, the pleasing crunch of snow underfoot, the quiet calm of a snowbound cemetery at 10 p.m. The experience was soothing and inspiring. I also rode my trainer to keep in biking shape -- much to the chagrin of my downstairs neighbor, who happened to be the landlord. I had to tailor my times to be sure he was absent when I rode, but I managed to maintain a base. What all this meant, of course, was that I was getting in better shape during the winter than I had been at the end of summer. A diversion: Professionals (read: not me) advocate an extended break over the winter wherein the runner allows muscles destroyed over the other 9 or 10 months to recover. During this period, the runner should pursue core athletics, like weight lifting or light indoor cycling or whatever might give you some feeling of “doing something” without continuing the assault on key muscles. Duly noted. Now let's close 2003 and open 2004 by ignoring that. Running? Check! Biking? Check! In fact, I did more running. Sure, my cycling load went down, but that was mostly by necessity, since it’s pretty much impossible to put in 2.5-hour rides safely after work when darkness falls within a half hour of the end of work. I also swam more, since the pool was open year-round. Oh, and did I mention the indoor track sessions? Running 8 laps per mile is crappy, but running 4 miles outdoors and 16 laps inside isn’t nearly as bad. That winter, I visited a friend in Germany for two weeks, crashing at his apartment with anywhere from 0 to 4 others and taking weekend trips around the country’s southlands. I don’t know how he felt about me hanging out for so long, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience -- mostly because of the chance to re-connect with people from undergrad in the evenings while running my sorry ass off each morning. A few days into the visit, I found a space that lies somewhere in the ill-used experiential octant of “absurdly painful”, “exhilarating”, and “pleasantly satisfying”. I left my friend’s apartment around 7 a.m. with the goal of running some of the marked trails up the hill to a place called Schau-Ins-Land, a ski top which promised a tram down to the road, from whence I would catch the bus back into town. Morning dawned chilly but not cold, so I donned a light jacket but not a hat or gloves. On the first plateau behind the Max Planck Institute, I encountered not the 3 marked trails I was expecting, but a vast array of intersecting and almost entirely unmarked routes. I picked a direction based on the map (go right!), then came upon an intersection with a sign that suggested I was on a trail I didn’t want. Dipping slightly down the hill to recover the actual trail -- which I managed to find pretty easily -- I continued along the plateau and up into the foothills. The expected climb would be a few thousand feet, and at this point that didn’t seem like much. I pounded through the foothills along the path, every once in a while passing an obvious intersection. I tried to ignore these intersections, but something nagged at me every time: what if I was picking wrong? The trail exited the forest and ran along the east side of a hill, then into a logging area, then onto a small road. At which point there seemed no way forward but on the road, a route I discounted because it clearly went downhill quite significantly. (This was a time before ubiquitous GPS phones, so I was running blind here.) Knowing I had been out for about an hour at this point, it wouldn’t be a problem to just go back, toast this near-2-hour trip with a fresh beer, and enjoy the afternoon. I turned around, disappointed to have fallen short of my goal. But lo! what luck! A half mile back, I encountered the first person I’d seen on the path, a middle aged woman walking her dog. This close to the trail’s departure point from the road, she seemed a likely information source. Mustering my directional German, I got the scoop: the trail actually spurred off the road, just past a fallen log on the right hand side. Straight on and straight up. I told myself it could be no more than a few miles before Schau-Ins-Land and dashed back to the entry, which was right where the woman said it would be. The straight vertical at the bottom turned into a series of extended switchbacks, maybe a few hundred meters each, with a steeper climb at either end. I ascended into a cloud and felt the thickening dampness on my uncovered hands and ears. The air cooled: chilly but not cold became a little cold became a Pacific Northwest mid-winter's day. The trail was slick with rainfall, the wind harsh at one end of the switchbacks that towered over the valley below. The view, though -- ah, the view! How can I describe the beauty? Imagine the expansive vistas of Yellowstone, or the sweeping sights from atop the high peaks of the Sierra Nevadas, or the brilliant hues of autumn gazing down the White Mountains! Sublime! And exactly unlike mine, which was a scrubby forest terminating suddenly in a featureless, white void. Pine forest. Fog. When the snow began to fall, my mind turned itself around, and I passed the point of desiring the destination to find myself at the point of desiring the end. I had been out for 2 hours now, and all of my little piggies had long since burned their last piece of coal and begged for warmth. So it was that what was probably about 12 miles into my expected 13-mile run (and actually closer to 14 miles of total ground covered), I turned around for home, simply incapable of going any farther up the foreboding path. The descent back to the logging road was speedy, and 20 minutes later I was ducking back into the forest where my ephemeral local navigator had appeared. But it was an hour from this point to home, an hour I wasn’t sure would be plausible. Each step felt both relieving and terrible, that sickening agony of having abused oneself beyond reasonable recovery, knowing simultaneously that the end was nearer and the air was warmer but also that the end was not particularly near and the air was not particularly warm. Dashing back through the clear cut, the wind blasted my still-damp and well-chilled body, and I wondered if I would ever be warm again. (As we’ll see, this is a theme for me in long runs. Maybe I should just accept that eventually I will most likely be warm again.) And now I was back into the trails, and now I was about to find my second Al on my Beckettsian journey: an ex-military runner out for the morning, his English as terrible as my Polish. My German, though, is passable, perhaps up to the level of “intermediate proficiency”, particularly if the audience isn’t expecting perfection. And having been out for 2.5 hours, soaked in sweat and rain, I somehow retained enough to have a cogent 45-minute conversation with a man whose name I never caught. He was -- and I say this only mildly hyperbolically -- my mental salvation. We descended like a pair of old running buddies, him in front taking all reasoning requirements away from my incapable mind. Down we went until we emerged behind the Max Planck Institute once again. I bid tak and adieu (however you say that in German) to this temporary companion, made my way through the church lot and down back roads, past the bar I had been at until 1 a.m. that morning, across the tracks, and, knowing there was little to eat at the apartment, straight to the grocery store. Fruit first, a loaf of bread, a jar of jam, and as many beers as I felt I could afford with the remainder of my 20 Euro -- the cash I had pocketed as tram and bus fare. People watched this beaten man walk the store. I must look terrible, I thought, but I’m hungry and will never leave the apartment once I get there. I brought the goods to the front, where the cashier sized me up, said something I didn’t understand. I stared at her. She repeated, and a look of pity spread across her face: she took my bananas, brought them back to the fruit section, weighed them for a price tag, then took both back to the register. “Klar?” she asked, and gave me a look that suggested she found the situation at least a reasonable diversion from an otherwise uninspiring day. I laughed at the absurdity, and the line that was forming behind me seemed unfazed by the entire fiasco. I was too tired and cold to care. The apartment was like a cozy blanket, and I knew a shower was in order. I stumbled inside while mashing a banana into my mouth, barely able to chew. The shower was upstairs, and I could hardly move my legs. And it was now, almost 4 hours after the run started, as I gingerly prepared to take off my jacket, that I first looked down. Here was the source of such bemused looks from passers-by, those smirks and stares: two enormous stains of blood streaked down from my nipples. I had bled through the undershirt, through the running shirt, through the jacket, to make symmetric spears of crimson. The shower was probably drawn out, and my subsequent nap went for hours. I ate a loaf of bread slathered in black currant jam. I felt exhausted, wrecked, humbled, and overjoyed. A week later -- after running every intervening day -- I found myself outside Munich, staying with a cousin of my friend. One morning I left the apartment with a 10 Euro note and an agenda: run about 10k, stop at the bakery, get back to the apartment with fresh patisserie before anyone woke up. I dutifully killed the kilometerage, then popped into the baeckerei to buy some wholly unhealthy bread products for 5. I picked out 6 items, tallying the costs mentally, but missed a 1 somewhere; when the total came up, it was 10.80. The woman behind the counter looked at my 10 Euro, looked at me, looked at the 10 Euro. I picked a croissant. “I don’t need that one. Just take it off so the 10 will cover the cost.” “Once I ring it up, I don’t know how to un-ring it. Can you get the money and come back?” she asked. I shrugged. “It’s 10 minutes round trip, and I’m leaving today, or I’d drop it by later on.” There was a pause while we looked at each other. Then the woman reached across the counter and dug her hand into the tip jar. She pulled out a few coins, stuck them in the register with the 10 Euro, and smiled. “You can pay me back next time you’re in town,” she smiled. My European adventures ended with stints in Brussels, the Netherlands, and finally (again) in Germany. I returned home and resumed snowshoeing, enjoying the cold of Ithaca that doesn’t sneak up on you. At the end of January, I ran a snowshoe race. My one and only snowshoe race, unfortunately, as (a) snowshoe races pretty much didn’t exist at that point and (b) my time in Ithaca was soon to come to a close. The race was 7.6 miles over forest terrain, and I decided at the outset that snowshoeing at the front was a bad plan -- you don’t want to break trail for everyone -- but passing would also be practically impossible. It was necessary, then, to stake out a spot near the front and work to maintain that position. I did so admirably, holding 3rd through most of the race and falling to 4th when Rebecca decided she had made a mistake in following me. As happy as I then was with snowshoe racing, winter wound down swiftly. I had kept in pretty good shape and was eager to get back out there for another season of kicking ass and maybe taking a name or two but mostly just making up more nicknames. Mash out. Spin on. There seems to be a 3-week gap wherein I did not compete in any races. It’s possible that I raced in some sort of not-locally-sponsored run that I can’t remember, but I doubt it. Instead, near the end of May, I got a sore throat and started feeling really worn down, but decided to go to Syracuse for a full race weekend anyway. Let’s check in on how that went, shall we? [Scrolls back through race report.] Oh, my back cramped up and I finished 19th in the road race. Then during the criterium the next day, we collectively almost ran over a 4-year old before I dropped out with a mechanical. I had definitely blocked out that near-miss of a child. After feeling like a phlegmatic slug for the rest of the week, I returned to my doctor. It took about 3 seconds for him to diagnose me with mono. (He also suggested that I get rabies shots. I mean, unrelated of course, and a story for another day perhaps.) Three more weeks of quality workouts were wiped out in a snap, as my body suffered through an illness whose defining characteristic is fatigue. In mid-July, I finally felt up to a foot race. It was July 20, and I signed up for the 8.9-mile Forest Frolic. I had no illusions about winning; seems likely I had illusions about finishing top-10. Frankly, my conditioning - also known as "fighting one of the most common infections among 18-to-24 year olds in the developed world" - wasn’t ideal for running. But I wanted to do something that wasn’t bike racing and pounding out a baker's dozen kilometers on foot met that criterion. It’s not that cycling wasn’t fulfilling. It’s just that cycling had taken over my weekends. You may not realize it, but even we neigh-immortal athletes burn out. It certainly didn't help that I doubted keeping pace with weekend races plus Tuesday (unofficial) races plus Thursday time trials after not doing anything for several weeks. The Forest Frolic disabused me of my running notions. I finished 15th in 1:11 and change. This in a relatively easy run, except for the hill about a mile from the end. Based on prior results I should have been able to do much better. On the other hand, mono! I felt fine with my performance.  "What with all this bad running, I might as well do bad swimming!" I seem to have told myself.
A triathlon club had formed in Ithaca, and one of the members graciously let us use her lake-bordering house as the launch for a cross-lake swim. Bad swimming sure, but this was more my style: no 25-meter breakups that required you either know how to flip-turn or waste time relative to everyone else. Just pure swimming, subject to all the good and bad parts of the lake. The total crossing is around a mile, maybe more given that none of us went entirely straight, and most of us would swim one way and kayak the other, swapping off on the opposite shore. Even though I had a good training gig coming off the whole sick-in-bed business, I didn’t do much more racing that year. In Albany, I crashed out during the road race, taking a corner too fast and going over the bars. No major damage, just some scrapes and bruises that kept me slow and sore for a week, and it would be my only race-ending fall during a pure cycling event. (I had more significant problems in a triathlon the next year, but we’ll get to that.) [Insert terrible "tri again!" pun here.] The rest of the month was spent building up to the Lake Anna half ironman triathlon south of DC, which I thought of as a test race. I'd recovered confidence from the knee injury of the previous year, then lost critical training time in the middle of summer to illness, then come back for a few weeks only to get hurt on the bike. It hadn’t been particularly helpful. The good news? My swim was <i>much</i> improved. Like holy hell. Bad news No 1: My bike performance felt slow. Actually, at 2:34, it was similar to the previous year, which means it probably felt slow because I’d been used to riding in packs and dragging across flats at 45 kph on a regular basis. Bad news No 2: My running legs failed. I wanted to settle into an 8-minute pace early on, but it was probably closer to 7:30. My legs started to fry quickly. Lap 1 ended on a slow note, then some people passed me, then it all fell apart. Pain radiated through my knee, and I had images of the previous year. Would I spend another two months out of running again? Was it worth the cost? I limped on for a half mile, a mile, through Mile 9, then threw in the towel. The epiphany was incredible. <i>It wasn't worth it!</i> The competition was amateur, casual, and I loved running and biking. Not having either was a crushing thought. I'd done 90% of a half ironman; the other 10% was performative self-destruction. It was the right call. Even with a dreary end-of-season showing, I had amassed 13 total points towards an upgrade in competitive cycling and sent a sponsored letter to US Cycling Federation to officially move up to Category 4. In that letter, I told the regional coordinator: <i>At this point, I see no reason to be classified as Category 5 when I am stronger, faster, and -- at least in racing -- smarter than at the same time one year ago. The level of my abilities will not change regardless of my classification under the USCF scheme, but I would prefer to compete with riders who will challenge me to excel rather than encourage me to slow down. This will not happen if I continue to have a Category 5 rating.</i> My application was quickly approved. A month later, I scheduled what I call the “Not Quite Sane Event”: ride 25 miles to an isolated Finger Lakes Trail entrance, run on the trail (half marathon-ish), and ride home. Putting it out there made me happy. Maybe in celebration, I closed out the bar the night before, stayed for an after-party, and got up just in time to find that nobody would join me. My NQS for 2003 was, it should go without saying, not a high-energy event. But I did get to watch a woman train sheep dogs 12 miles into the run and hitched a lucky ride home with a very confused family. Right after that was the Danby Down & Dirty. And I was back! The 10k race went off well, and I breezed through it in just over 46 minutes, good for 4th. My season ended stronger and happier. I might not be “back to form”, but these things take time! Next up: Winter shoes! Mash out. Spin on.  Wakefield Park features dozens of connected trail miles abutting I-495.  The sun rises over the mouth of the River Liffey at the end of a Dublin urban trail. I'm standing on a patch of dirt high atop a hill rarely visited by people. A creek bends gently around its base into an inviting stand of trees to one side. Birds circle overhead, squirrels dart in and out of the brush. The blue sky above is cloudless, beautiful. Then there's the stuff in between. Power lines run from the substation in the valley to the metal tower that dominates the hilltop; Interstate 495 curves away in the distance, trucks and cars merging noisily into a slowdown on the other side of the beige "sound wall" that's entirely below me; maintenance vehicles and building debris pepper the broad, bare patch that sits at the convergence of a gravel-strewn concrete slab and a double-track access road just across the creek. This is my urban home turf. It's a strip of parkland less that two miles long and maybe a few thousand feet wide that holds more than a dozen miles of trail swerving between and over creeks, through slender forests, and across overgrown fields. These paths also loop around the high-voltage towers, trace the edges of parking lots, and cross the paved road. Most of the trail is out of sight of the main park attractions -- baseball diamonds, tennis courts, a skate park, a rec center. It's a relatively calm respite, all things considered, and near enough to my house that I run these trails several times a week. I wear them like a favorite shirt. Urban trail vistas don't appear on the cover of Trail Runner Magazine. They rarely grace the homepage of iRunFar. They are not how you advertise to dirt fiends or sell adventure. And I get it -- I really do! They're often a little ugly, usually just queer bends or folds in the development strata repurposed for a small but insistent crowd. In that way, though, they're perfect for trail training. I first scuffed up my soles on secluded forest paths in upstate New York, where the Finger Lakes Trail forms the backbone of a network that rarely approaches civilization. These natural playgrounds are amazing, thrilling, sometimes breathtaking. They're a delightful daily habitat. But here in DC such complete seclusion is unrealizable. Instead, tiny strands of urban dirt are tightly packed into city reality: the unnoticed dips and rises between poured concrete, the ignored back woods abutting railroad storage lots, and the unprofitably valuable flood land below million-dollar developments. Subtle brushstrokes of trail can nestle in almost any awkward notch or nook. They cross verges or duck under clover leaf ramps or wind and twist through mini-biomes before spitting a runner out on a busy road or forgotten junk pile. Sometimes they're a splash of relief, like the short dirt path that follows the 3/4 of a mile of creek bank between two highway connectors in my neighborhood. Other times they're miles long, like the Fort Circle Parks Hiker/Biker Trail that slashes through southeast DC by joining ribbons of greenery, some of which were (and probably still are) segregationist barriers; just watch out during the morning commute, when impatient drivers stack up at the road crossings. Still others are downright extensive. The Potomac River trail system offers all manner of urban views heading along the Virginia side of the river, immediately moving under and over junctions of multi-lane highways, then following the contours between these heavily trafficked roads and the wealthy users who usually want to forget them; you can carry up the Potomac here and out of the urban landscape or dip south into the dense suburbs of Northern Virginia, finally (after 20-ish miles and about 3 blocks on pavement) settling into a corner of development in Falls Church behind the bus depot, Metro rail storage facility, and on-ramp from a major highway onto the interstate. If that final locale sounds less than charming, consider the approach: cross a main commuter cut-through road, tiptoe across planks and stones set into a muddy creek overflow, head a few hundred yards south, and duck under an interstate thickly undercoated in graffiti; follow the trail for a mile or so along the concrete river drainage that runs 50 feet behind houses on either side; clamber into this drainage for the one property owner who has (illegally, perhaps) claimed the lot all the way to the concrete; then traverse the 4-foot-wide, rooty ledge behind chain-link fences until the trail widens and finally turns to poured blacktop near the back side of a school maintenance building. Just because it's ugly doesn't mean it's not there. And after a decade of these kinds of trails, I've found a charm to their gritty determination to exist against what seem overwhelming odds. On vacation in new cities, I seek out these unique urban venues. One day in Chicago, I hopped off the L at a commuter stop, crossed a cemetery, and vanished into the forest at the foot of a bridge off a city street. I did a 15-mile out-and-back toward the airport, almost always on a soft, muddy path within sight of a half dozen houses. There were wrong turns on mudflats and creek branches. There were alternate routes along soggy, stagnant mounds. There were road crossings and railroad crossings and short but discomfiting stretches along pedestrian-unfriendly shoulders. And there were places where the trail seemed to shatter into a dozen deer paths or fall prey to the underbrush. When I got back to the train, a longtime resident stared wide-eyed at my mud-caked limbs; he had no idea what lay in his backyard. In other cities, these urban trails are perhaps neater but no less fascinating. Like Dublin, where I ran north from our city-center digs and squeezed between a bollard and a chain link fence onto several miles of straightforward dirt path along the river to its outlet; I won a beautiful sunrise and even found a bizarre statue to watch it with. The next day I spent 40 minutes running through and across the extensive trail networks of Phoenix Park, ending the event by nearly entering someone's back gate. (She helpfully pointed to the sign that read "This is not a park." I rather believe I'm not the first then perhaps.) Even in dense cities where many urban "trails" are no more than a block or two without pavement, longer options are usually within range of public transit. Central Paris features a semi-paved path along the Siene as well as a couple very large parks (Jardin du Luxembourg and Jardin des Plantes) that include dirt, but the more wide-ranging will find Bois de Boulogne or Bois de Vincennes. New York City's Riverside Park is the city's longest contiguous park, but it's paved; stringing together Central Park's trails, Morningside Pond, and St Nicholas Park offers a more diverse dirty urban experience -- or the slightly less time-strapped can take the Subway to the cloisters and pack down the extensive network of trails on Manhattan's north end. You'll find little in central Boston, but the T will take you to Oak Grove and the reservoirs near Spot Pond, a vast city-ringed greenery bisected by I-93. Most cities have their own, built in the urban null space where expansion couldn't or wouldn't accept human homes. These voids are being reclaimed around the world by both runners and mountain bikers ready to escape the sidewalks and roads without spending hours in transit. They're a boon to trail hounds living in urban enclaves as well as those just visiting. Whether you're making tracks through other cities or living your own metropolitan life, interesting trails are probably closer than you think. Instead of taking that hour drive to the perfect trail or heading to the latest pop-outdoor town, maybe it's time to seek out your own urban home turf. Mash out. Spin on.  Greenbelt Park, with trails overlooking the beautiful entrance ramp from 193 onto the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.  The age of 23. Young, unbridled, unattached, low responsibility, near-peak athleticism. Social events to attend to, food and alcohol to consume, attractive people to pursue.
I made it to 2003 on the tail end of my marathon injury, ready to get into whatever the next events were. I had tasted bike racing, and I liked it. I had tasted trail racing, and I loved it. I had tasted triathloning, and I enjoyed it, but I mostly enjoyed it as the collaboration of running and biking. Since I couldn’t run, I now decided to spend more time at the pool and learn how to swim at least a tad more efficiently. With the help of the lifeguard, I learned to use my arms almost correctly and actually kick rather than looking like I was always on the verge of drowning. The near-drowning look was so not in vogue. It went well, to a certain extent. Pool junkies will stay there for hours on end, practicing their strokes and perfecting their form and ripping off 30- or 35-second laps. Their flip-turns are nuanced and smooth and exude understanding of their body position as they approach the wall. I could stay in the pool for maybe an hour before the smell and mild feeling of failure finally pressed me out. I couldn’t flip-turn worth a damn, and my lap times went from about a minute to just under 50 seconds -- surely a vast improvement, maybe good for 8 minutes in a half ironman, and nothing to write home about. But apparently something to write to you about, just so you know where you fall on the spectrum. Now that my alligator legs were gone, it was time to start running again. One day I just decided my creaky old knee should be fine, and I set out on the standard route. Sure enough, the knee had repaired itself. I was free! My spirits lifted immediately, and my swimming exposure fell to its more natural place in the background. In the interests of limiting my injury exposure risk, I also took up snowshoeing. There was ample snow on the ground -- especially on the old mountain bike trails and running trails -- and with even my standard running route somewhat difficult (there’s a golf course and a footbridge; snow, slush, and ice just built up there), I needed some other activity to feel like I was actually doing something, rather than bulking up in all the wrong ways. Unfortunately, all that time off and the tentative restart to running took a toll on my prior athleticism. The months of winter passed, and by the end I knew distinctly that I was a shell of my former self. Sometime in March '04, I decided to schedule another triathlon, this one a summer half ironman down near DC where my brother lived. It was the Lake Anna Triathlon, quite a distance south of DC, but at the time I didn't know the lay of the Virginia land and figured it was close enough. This would be the year of cycling, though, where I would turn to riding competitively and round out my fitness. Near the end of March the weather turned occasionally warm, and I rode the TT course on my own. It was wet with snowmelt, but the decent weather made for a serviceable ride. It was also earlier in the season than most years, so I raced only the descending darkness of early Spring. The cycling season was fast approaching, and I found myself in solid velocipedestrian shape. It wasn’t the amazing peak shape I had been the previous year, but it was enough to consider racing. I had also officially joined the local racing team. And I had also officially written down a training plan leading up to my early-September “goal race” triathlon. Anticipation of the summer was building, and I giddily jumped in with two wheels. First up: The GVCC Classic in Rochester, NY, at the beginning of April. This was one of my favorite race reports, so I’ve reproduced parts of it here, with analysis: Cold. Bloody cold. Fingers, toes, arms, legs, all cold, even after warm-up. It couldn't have been more than 45 F; I was tired from driving up with Evan [name redacted] that morning, but the Cookies [the local team was called "Chris' Cookies" after the company in New York City that was founded by a former Ithaca cyclist] skin suit felt good. The field was obviously fairly large -- maybe 50 to start -- but all I knew was that it was cold. Stuffed in between riders at the mass start, tailing the pace car, the strategy was to avoid the wind only to keep my body warm. Approaching the first hill, we were together, then expanded to fill the length of it. I remember this start. I remember that numbness. I don’t know how, but I remember that feeling all these years later. A lot of people were attacking, but nobody realistically. We rolled up the last short rise and through the finish line once: "6 laps to go" -- 6 miles each. A break at each corner, more heat, no pain yet. Now drafting was only about efficiency, not temperature control, but the unpredictable wind could leave you cringing from its bite at any moment. Around the course, I chased a breaker, thought we might work, but he was just faking -- he didn't have the strength to go it alone except on the hills. And Lap 2 was in the bag. This course isn’t that long, and I would do the race a couple other times over the years. These kinds of faux attacks are common in the cycling community, and as a newbie, I chased a lot of them. Such a rookie mistake. Since that's what the next couple paragraphs were about, I'll skip to the end: Around to Lap 6, the pack was still cohesive, a single unit working against itself. Our pace was slow but consistent as we came up to the first small hill. I was near the back, but it was a clear shot to the front, and I couldn't let things go any longer. Another rider had been busting out on that hill all morning, and I wanted to be on his wheel, let him propel me over the back side for a burst. It was a sprint to get to him, but he broke right on time, and three of us were at the front. Around the next corner, finding little help with the others, the pack came up like a tidal wave, a dozen riders passing me in a swarm. Late in the race is usually where it starts. So really this is more like the start of the race part of a bike race. A rider from CNYC mentioned he wished the pack would break, and I smiled at him. "Why not now?" I said, and the sprint was on. All I could hear rounding the corner was my own heartbeat and the whirring of my wheels over the pavement. Halfway up, I hazarded a glance, saw the pack stringing out as my lungs wheezed their objection. Over the hill, pounding down like the approach to White Church [a local road renowned to community racers], up the second rise alone with nothing but wind and the Theme from Rocky ringing distantly (thanks to a spectator) in my ears. Through the rollers, the final major hill looked daunting, but there was no one on my wheel, no one within 100 meters. At the top, I looked again and saw the fracture in the main group: at least two packs had formed, maybe 15 to 20 riders in each, still riding without any clear direction. The front was mine as long as I could bear it. Again, a rookie mistake: I was taking the lead. I consistently cracked riders in these early races, but rarely did I dust enough of the field to make an actual push at the win. On the other hand, I was used to having a really high heartrate and working myself into the depths of exhaustion for 20 minutes at a time, which meant I could break away, wreck many of the riders, sit at the front for a time, and rejoin the lead group with essentially no consequence. Which is what I did in this case. Into the final lap, the speed had gone up and the spectators became a little more apparent. Up to the first hill, I stayed low and passed the front, then watched another rider hammer by on the down side. My approximation of the Twinkieboy Tuck [a tuck that's aggressively deep into the bike frame, named for a local racer who used it to significant benefit] kept me close, but he stayed in front around the bend, up to the big hill. Then he started to bonk, and I broke by, slowed down more than I hoped, and got taken by another two riders. We topped the rise like a rubber band, our positions inverting into the valley and inverting again as we ripped apart the next hill. We didn't worry about the pack again. Four of us, off the front, hammering through the final 3 miles. It was a strange jockey for position, as one of our members was barely able to hang on. He was stuck to the back, it seemed, by sheer force of will; the other two -- the Masters leader and a Placid Planeteer -- set up a slight line, and we rotated through to pull away. Around the last corner, I was second from the outside of the lane, waiting for someone to make a break. The Masters rider shrugged, then went, cranking hard from the base of the hill. I tucked in behind, let him pull me 2/3 of the way, and blasted by. Now into the 200-meter flat stretch before the line, I knew that was the wrong thing to do. My legs were exhausted, and I looked to my right to see the Placid Planet blue. "I'm taking second," I said (possibly aloud), and the blue became a streak that didn't resolve itself into a cyclist until he crossed the line in front of me. Oh, and I took second. So that was my first major bike race: finishing 2nd in a low-category, local race with probably 50-ish riders. I loved it! There was, of course, the danger of crashing, which is always present in these races, but I felt confident that such crashes were just a cost of doing business. So I let that roll off me. A week later, we held our local race (Jersey Hill), and I finished 3rd. A week after that, it was Binghamton (poor showing, I’m sure -- the course is a criterium-style course that I never did well at, except when they added a hill climb a few years later; that was totally my bag). Nobody bought that I should be a Cat 5 rider at that point, so I moved up to Cat 4 for another local race, Hollenbeck’s, the following week. It was an open secret that I wrote about in my race report. Looking back on those reports, I’m impressed at the number of repeat performers there were, people I knew only by their jerseys. These are people I called “Spokepost” or “Placid Planet” or “Multi-Laser”, only some of whose names I would fill in but for the time being were just other riders who showed up at races, put in their time, and disappeared into the wilderness (as far as I was concerned). Doubtless they felt the same about my Cervelo-riding ass. I sometimes imagine their race reports calling me "Cervelo Boy" or "Cookies Monster" or something. I could find out, but that might spoil a little of my childhood. Mash out. Spin on.  I rocketed from the starting gate with a 6:30-ish pace, blitzing through miles the way I’d done in training. Remember that my triathlon time -- after having ridden for 2.5 hours -- was just shy of 1:24, or 6:30 miles, so something like that seemed like a workable pace for a run twice as long. I felt comfortable and confident striding through miles 1-10. I found people to talk with. I cruised, didn’t think about what was going to happen later in the race. I ran through Mile 15. I ran through Mile 19.
The curious thing about the pursuit of running is that, even for a dedicated athlete, after dozens of years, the span of distances one has not run is still infinite, whereas the distances one has run is always finite. (And yes, I do realize the obvious truth of that statement in a mathematical sense, but take it in the plain-language way this deep insight is intended to be read.) So it was at Mile 19 that I crossed the an imaginary line into the vast space of distances I had never run before. And -- because I hate the term “hit the wall” passionately -- I quickly built on that achievement by stepping into the muddy bog of Mile 20. And the expanding swamp of 21, then the Okefenokee-esque 22, followed by a 23 that may or may not have included Fire Swamp quicksand. I slogged through those miles by walking 25-50 meters at each mile marker, massaging my legs, then carrying on at a (relatively) slow 8:30 (or so) pace. So I basically ran 19 6:30s, followed by 4 9:00s. Those 4 miserable death miles added 10 total minutes. Shortly after Mile 24, the end seemed within sight. My mind suddenly and swiftly overpowered the weighty stumps, sloughed off a quartet of accumulated mileage cake, and rolled my pace back up to about 7:00. I must admit that when I rounded that final corner and saw the clock, I was a little disappointed. The Wineglass Marathon ends with a bridge followed by a short straightaway near the Corning Museum of Glass. That turn happens right around the 26-mile mark, and when I made it, the clock had just ticked over 3 hours. I watched it wind up as I emptied my tank across the bridge and finally made the finish. Unlike many runners, I couldn’t have told you -- until just now, when I looked it up -- what my final time was. I’ve had it in my head that it was “about 3:03”, which is, indeed, what it was “about” -- 3:02:40. But there’s no way I’ll remember that, because frankly, Wineglass was just another ridiculously long event that took place in 2002. Qualifying times that year were something like 3:10 or 3:08 (again, I don’t remember...it wasn’t important to me at the time), so I’d soundly managed it. Rebecca finished 20 minutes later. What I do remember post-race was getting an excellent massage and being asked repeatedly if I was going to run Boston. I didn’t know when Boston was. My stock answer was a resounding, “Maybe.” My legs were sore and stiff, but I didn’t expect any long-term damage; this kind of thing was just a weekend jaunt. Three days later, I went out for a short run with some friends at a very low pace on a trail. Within a mile, my knee burned like the center of the sun, and pain shot in every direction. I nearly collapsed. A day after that, another run attempt, and I was similarly debilitated, this time after only a few hundred meters. Two days later, I couldn’t even start a run without feeling like my kneecap was grinding itself into osteotic dust. When I visited my doctor, he suggested I simply stay off it. For two months, I thought of running. I sat in my apartment watching autumn turn to winter and imagining the feeling of pavement and trails underfoot. I vowed to come back for more the next year. And I would. Even so, to this day, Wineglass remains my only timed marathon. Mash out. Spin on. I distinctly remember stopping at Tim Horton’s on the way home and eating a giant bucket of donut holes as I blazed through upstate New York in the afternoon heat. Today, I might stop at a brewery or two along the way, but back then such amenities were not as ubiquitous as they now are.
The next day, I went for a very short run just to stretch my now-weary legs. On Monday, I probably did the same, even as stiffness set in. The race had been spectacular, more than I really hoped beforehand. But I started that week with a major problem: I had trained through the summer for a specific event, and now that event was in the past. Which left me with two options: (1) Stop or slow down, which probably would have been good for my body but driven me nuts; or (2) keep going. Obviously, I kept going. You know, after taking a very short break to let my body recover a bit. For one, there were all those Tuesday races to attend. I’d taken Tuesdays off for so long, I wanted to see what this race day was all about. And then there were weekly running group runs that I had ignored because they never fit into my schedule. So much to do, so little time! The fabled Pink Slipper race -- the ultimate or possibly penultimate Tuesday race of the season, owing to the declining daylight of September -- happened a week later. For the first (and last) time in 2002, I rode in a Tuesday race. And I acquitted myself pretty well, finishing in a decent position near the front of the group. I had crossed an important threshold, moving into the new and amazing world of competitive cycling. And it would come back to haunt me. A week after that, I rode in the Apple Fest Race almost 2 hours away. This was the race that I would eventually tell a friend had “only three real hills”, because that’s all I remembered from this first foray; turns out it’s a pretty rolling course, and I had become so immune to hills that anything short of a 300-foot climb just didn’t seem like a “hill”. I finished that race somewhere around 5th. There were no more bike races that year -- maybe a time trial or two before the evening light turned into evening darkness and the pavement turned to reflecting the blood orange colors of changing leaves. But there was one more competitive run to polish off, and it was a big one, one I didn’t expect when I started the summer venture -- or even shortly after it: the Wineglass Marathon in Corning. The opportunity came about abruptly about two weeks after my triathlon. I went to the Ithaca 5 & 10 to do the 10-mile (road) race, my first at that distance that was really official. Everybody insisted I should push for 60 minutes, so I asked around at the race start to find the right pacer. One of the runners was the coach at a nearby high school, and he had set himself at 6:02 miles to start, also with hopes of breaking the hour mark. When he took a dive a mile into the run, I helped him up, and we stayed together through Mile 9, when he looked a little gassed and we were not likely to make the magic time. “You go ahead,” he told me. “I think you can catch that guy up there.” That guy turned out to be Boris, who strode away like I was standing still even when I upped my pace. He caught the 3rd-place runner, and I fell in about 10 seconds behind him in 5th place at 1:00:52. After the race, I got into a discussion with Rebecca, one of the regulars, who noted she was doing Wineglass on October 6, just a few weeks off. I hadn’t heard of this relatively local marathon and had never considered doing one -- it’s not a secret that 26.2 miles is a lot of distance to put on the legs at once -- but it sounded interesting. A few day later, an email from Rebecca showed up on the listserv. Her fellow traveller in the Wineglass event was unable to attend, and she was looking for a replacement. I thought about it for about 3 seconds. Back in Minnesota, when I’d gone on that long run with a friend at his house -- a run that felt like hell after 10 miles -- he had been training for a marathon. That was a marathon he eventually ran. I was almost as good as him in that run, without specifically training for it, and I was in such good shape now that I could rip off 25 km runs pretty much effortlessly. It should be easy to take on the full distance, even if it meant being a little destructive to the old legs. I quickly responded, and a plan was hatched: I would pay half the entry fee plus gas, she would drive, and we’d go down there together. Just to step back here, I will note that for most people, running a marathon is not something done casually. Sure, there are those who can stumble 20 miles out their door every morning and serially run marathons, but for most runners, the first marathon is supposed to be an achievement. It’s the culmination of a lot of hard work and specific training and target times and so on and so forth. It evokes images of daily workouts, sweeping changes in lifestyle, overcoming hardships, battling the twin demons of physical and mental fatigue, nervous moments before the big race, dedicated attention to the details of nipple balm and clothing choice and mile times for negative splits, and radiant pride on receiving the finisher’s medal. For me, signing up to run that first marathon was a split-second decision made no more than 3 weeks before the event. It was the culmination of a two-sentence email. I had been changing my lifestyle for 8 years at this point. I had battled the twin demons and soundly defeated them. And when I showed up on race day, I was probably the only person there who didn’t know it was a Boston Qualifying event, nor did I know what that meant. (Being a West Coaster who didn’t grow up with a running background, I didn’t consider that the Boston Marathon was some sort of special event that needed to be qualified for.) I didn’t know what pace I would set, and just as importantly, I didn’t care -- this was just like any other race, where I would go out at my pace and do my thing and finish. |
AuthorSome runner person. Also perhaps a cyclist & brewing type. But for your purposes, a runner person. Archives
August 2019
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