Where did March go?

Not to mention April. I am, as usual for this time of year, weeks behind in my work. But I'm now so far behind it seems pointless even to try to catch up.

When I last wrote I was about to do my first race of 2012--the ever-challenging February 10-miler near my house. My goal this year was not to completely shut down for the last (mostly uphill) mile. I'm not sure I accomplished that, but I did accomplish my less-publicized goal of not looking like I was about to pass out in the race pic:

To be honest, I think I made that goal only because the photographer was stationed a) earlier in the race than in previous years, and b) on a downhill portion.

I executed my usual plan of holding back the first 5 miles, then going for broke. I lost my friend Linda somewhere around mile 3, when I slowed down to drink water. I was on a mission to catch up with her when this picture was taken (somewhere around mile 6). Linda later described the middle portion of my race as "opening up a can of whup-ass," which is pretty accurate, only it doesn't specify that the ass I whupped was mostly my own. She came with me when I passed her, and I led us through a couple really quick miles. I managed a 7:07 between miles 7 and 8, and it's not even a downhill. And then I hit the final hills, and my legs completely abandoned me, while I watched Linda cruise off to her best finish ever. (She actually turned around at one point to wait for me on the hill, because Linda is pathologically nice, but I think she came to her senses when she saw how bad I looked.)

A couple weeks later I did the enormous local St. Patrick's Day 10K. I prepared meticulously:

I rode down to the race with 3 of my friends, all pictured here pre-race: Martha (Coach), Dena and Lisa:

We were doing our best to be decked out for St. Patrick's Day, because this race is an odd combination of elite 10K race and drunken spectatorfest, so you want to appease the spectators by dressing appropriately.

I have never run well here--one year it was hot, one year I was just lame, one year I don't really remember what happened. Dena, Lisa and I got stuck way the hell back at the start, somewhere behind the 9-minute pace sign, because they wouldn't let you into the corral (20 minutes before the start) except at the back of the race. I love this race, but they really need to check in with some other big New England races to figure out how to let people line up appropriately. My theory is that anyone who legitimately belongs anywhere near or in front of a 7-minute pace sign is going to be out warming up until the last minute, so we need a side entry into the corral. But we just chilled, and luckily so did everyone behind us. After the start Lisa and I spent about a mile working our way through people running way slower than we were, but I think this helped me in the end, because I couldn't go out too fast. And the good part was that for the entire race, we passed people. Like thousands of them.

My plan was to try to be a bit more aggressive on the roughly 4 miles of uphill at the start, and I was. I still had some legs in me for the screaming downhill after mile 4, and I did it in about 6:10. And then the key was the final mile--it is up and down, and Lisa and I went back and forth here (as we had the whole race, actually), which kept me moving faster than I might have if left to my own, pain-avoiding devices. We ran from mile 5 to 6 in about 6:46, and then Lisa dusted me in the last 0.2, while I tried hard to avoid throwing up from the smell of grilling hamburgers. I finished in 45:32, which for me on a hilly course is great this time of year. And then it took us about an hour to find Dena and Martha. After Martha collected her prize for winning the master's race, we refueled with an array of healthy food choices:

The thing is, since everyone around us was refueling with beer, fried dough and $5 margaritas, a little sodiumfest from McDonald's really didn't seem that bad. I am especially proud of getting Martha to drink her first ever Shamrock Shake, immortalized here.

The other exciting news from March is that I had a conference in San Diego, where I skipped most of one morning's worth of talks to swim here:

Since then I have been training with a particular focus on the bike, since in less than two weeks I am doing a race with a 40 mile bike leg. Which seemed like a great idea back in the winter, when I signed up. And it actually seems OK again, now that I've been out for a couple long rides on the cow bike and have gotten used to it again. We had a lovely spell of weather, now vanished, during which I had one particularly blissful 40+ mile ride. My friend Nancy did the first 15 with me, then peeled off into the distance:

An hour or so later I stopped at a scenic overlook to take this picture of the Connecticut River with Mt Sugarloaf in the background:

And even later I stopped one more time (really, I did ride hard in between all this) to take a picture of my favorite herd of cows, the Belted Galloways, aka "Belties":

After this ride I did a short, easy run off the bike, just to make sure this was even feasible. On my whole ride I had no problem with traffic--the few cars and trucks I saw gave me a wide berth, let me pull out to make left turns, and generally behaved like the good Western Ma people we all are. And then during my run, someone from a passing car pelted me with a half-chewed strawberry. It left a red welt on my arm. That was so uncool.

In other biking news, I've done two of my club's time trials already (which I think is as many as I did all last season), and last weekend I headed out in cold and windy weather to do my longest ride ev-ah. I didn't take any pictures, because I was too busy suffering through an endless headwind, plus I was grumpy that I had to go back to booties and tights after that one blissful week of riding in shirtsleeves. 

At some point in here Easter happened as well, which resulted in some very cute eggs that we mostly never ate, because none of us really like hard boiled eggs.

 And of course the other monumental event in March was a mother/daughter pilgrimage to this:

Not only did I love this series and hence the movie as well, but I find it offers me a useful perspective on things like attempting a triathlon with a 40-mile bike leg, which doesn't seem bad at all when compared to the Hunger Games. May the odds be ever in my favor.

Mixing it up

I love routine. Every morning I drink my orange juice out of the same cow glass. We only have one, and it's mine--a friend gave it to me in grad school. Technically, you're supposed to drink milk in it, but I like to cheer myself up in the morning with the cow glass, and I don't want to drink milk then.

This week I dropped the cow glass and it shattered. I drank orange juice out of a regular glass the next morning, and it wasn't the same. Then a package came yesterday, and in it were some of these, bought (and express-shipped) by my awesome husband:

It is a little alarming how much this improved my mood. The 6-yr-old was alternating between barfing all over the living room carpet and keeping us up with fever-induced night terrors, and I was all happy about my new cow glasses. (He's better today, also.)

I do not love routine in my training. If I do the same workout too many times, I have nothing to think about except how I'm doing compared to last time, and I don't find these thoughts to be helpful. It's also pretty clear that the body adjusts to routine, so if I want to improve, I need to mix it up a bit. So mixing it up has been the theme of my winter training so far.

First big change: I've been riding outside a lot this winter--almost every week. Thanks, lame-a** winter! I've riddensome with friends, including a lot with Linda

and some by myself.

I've always secretly wanted to get my VO2 max tested but have been kind of scared to do so, but this winter I was pushed to do it because a friend of mine needed subjects for her dissertation study. Turns out the VO2 test was a cakewalk compared to the actual study. Here I am suffering on one of my two study rides (each of which was followed by 5K hard on a treadmill while a vampire someone took blood from my hand every 1K while I kept running).

If you think I look sweaty and miserable, it's because I was. This was before the bike started to feel unbearably hard, at which point all I could really think of (and talk about) was how much I hated my friend and her study. In fact, for a moment I panicked and thought that maybe this was one of those "fake" studies, and really what she was looking at was how much subjects complained and how much that impacted their performance. But really, in hindsight, it wasn't that bad. Here is my friend (the shorter one) along with her vampire assistant:

I know they don't look cruel, but don't be fooled.

And my VO2 is higher than I expected, so now I'm wondering why I'm not faster. Maybe this knowledge will expand the limits I inadvertently place on myself. Or maybe when I get it retested at another lab (because now I'm kind of a VO2 slut and am doing it wherever I can), I'll find out their instrument was miscalibrated.

I'm mixing it up in the pool by increasing volume slightly over last year and swimming most times with Linda, instead of by myself. Swimming with someone else is huge--it is pushing me to go faster than I normally would, and it is so much more fun. My coach has thrown in a few baby IM sets, and I can actually swim 25 yards of "butterfly" (I use that term loosely) without the lifeguard springing to her feet for an imminent rescue. But seriously, I took over 25 seconds of my 500 yard TT time from last year this time, so I think all this swimming stuff is paying off.

To be able to swim longer and also to swim regularly with a buddy, I joined the local Y, instead of swimming for free where I work (but where the hours are severely limited). This also means I can jump in a weekly spin class, which is another new thing for me. If I keep going like this, in another couple months I'll be doing zumba.

I did one run--my first ever (and before my friend made me do it twice for that @#$%^&*! dissertation study)--on a treadmill. This was in Indianapolis in January, when it was 3 below and I had brought only one layer. I made it 20 minutes outside and cried uncle. The treadmill confirmed my suspicion that I do not run on treadmills, but the experience also reminded me that my whole self-righteous and smug "Of course I don't run on a treadmill! I run outside! I'm a real runner!" thing is only because I live in New England, where even during a harsh winter, it's nothing like the midwest.

I still am not ever planning to do a half or full ironman, but I signed up for a "half lite" in May just to mix up my racing a bit, and because I thought it would be good for me. Also because all my friends are doing it.

I took time out of being all Sporty Spice to be like most of my fellow Americans and sit around and watch other people be athletic:

It was exhausting, really. Also loud. And all you people who think Steven Tyler didn't do the national anthem justice, you are just being haters.

First race of the year is coming up this weekend!

About Freaking Time

Round-number time barriers are a little ridiculous, if you think about it. They seldom correspond to a round-number per-mile (or per-kilometer) pace. Unless you're trying to qualify for something requiring a qualifying time, the difference between just-over that goal time and just-under it is a few meaningless seconds. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the difference between just-over and just-under is generally within the margin of error of the overall time. Like if my students tried to make the distinction between the two on an exam, I'd take off a half point for abuse of significant figures.

But rational analysis be damned, because obviously I'm as obsessed as the next runner about these kinds of goals.

I have been trying to break 21 minutes for a 5K ever since I got serious about running again after having kids. OK, to be honest, my real goal is to break 20 minutes, but even an irrational pursuit deserves a dose of rationality, so at some point early on in my endless string of 21:XX races it occurred to me that I should deal with the 21-minute barrier first. I think I've only broken this barrier twice: one 20:29 cross country race in college (which barely qualified as cross country; I don't know if Wesleyan still has the same course, but it was basically a flat road race), and one 20:04 cross country race when I was running for Boston Running Club and ran in the open division of a college invitational on the well-known-to-be-fast course at UMass Dartmouth.

I am not someone who cares enough about barriers to seek out specifically fast courses to deal with them. Actually, that's wrong; I care so much about the barriers that I won't try to cheese my way through them by purposely picking a fast course. I want to own the barrier, not sneak my way past it.

Which brings me to this year's Hot Chocolate Run, a local 5K that is not pancake flat. The last 3 years I have run between 21:00 and 21:20 at this last race of the season, and for the past two years I've focused on this race. I've done killer track workouts, real tapers, you name it, and then I finish just over 21 minutes. This year for a variety of reasons I decided sort of to cool it--I kept training and did speedwork of sorts, but at my request my coach gave me speed workouts off the track. I felt like I needed more endurance work, and I also felt like I could get enough intensity from timed intervals on the road.

My lead-up to this race was not exactly inspiring--my last race felt fine but was slow, as I whinged on about in gory detail here. I have felt exhausted all fall, and by the time December rolled around I was just hoping to hang on through the end of classes. But don't let that fool you: I still thought I could break 21 minutes, and that was still my goal. The thing is, I have been racing 5k's for. . . yikes, for 27 years. Time for a picture; judging from the uniform and the hairstyle, I am pretty sure this one is 26 years ago, not 27:

No, I'm not leading the race--I'm leading the back of the pack.

While all that experience hasn't made me that fast, it has made me a little bit wise. I think I can break 20 minutes--I know I have to be in tip-top shape, and everything has to come together, but I think I can do it. I am pretty sure I can't break 19 minutes, so that's not even something I think about. I'm not delusional, thank you very much. But I also feel very strongly that I am a person who should be able to break 21 minutes if I execute well even from a sub-optimal starting point. In fact, I hate it when my students say "I feel," so let me restate that: I know that I can break 21 minutes on a routine day. Which sounds sort of cocky, given how many times over the last 3 years I have failed to do just that.

But I did. Which is kind of obvious from all the foreshadowing, because this would be a real buzzkill of a post if I ran 21:03 again. I didn't, though; I ran 20:55. And that 5 seconds has kept me feeling happy and chipper all the way into 2012.

Like I said, I felt kind of physically like crap going into the race. But mentally I was in excellent shape. I had actually spent time visualizing the race beforehand--like serious time. I met up with Lisa before the race, and I made her take a picture before we left our cars to go warm up:

It was excellent to have Lisa to warm up with, because she hasn't done a ton of races, so she had all kinds of questions about where and when to do stuff, and that distracted me from my own edgy self. Before we did our final strides, I changed into my brand new racing flats:

These things feel so fast, I think it's possible I owe 4 of those 5 seconds to the shoes. I love them! And yes, they're on a box of grapefruit (artfully posed in our train wreck of a mudroom). I bought those from the basketball team and have been eating at least half a grapefruit per day for the last, I don't know, 8 years. Or 3 weeks. Back to the race: when I left my running shoes under a tree (I left 3 different piles of clothes and shoes at various random spots as I gradually disrobed for the race, which I think utterly horrified Lisa), an older man said to me, "You just changed shoes!" Without missing a beat, I smiled at him and said, "Yes, I am taking this very seriously." Because I was, and I think part of owning your goal, of knowing you can break 21 minutes, is to be honest about it with everyone. Even random strangers who probably just wonder why you left your shoes under a tree.

The race is big enough that you seed yourself by time, so naturally I seeded myself just in front of the 21 minute sign, somewhere near Lisa, near my friend Greg, and near Linda. There were over 2,000 people doing this race (more in the walk), so I just love how easy it was to find all my friends in that melee. The first mile has a short steep uphill and then a longer more gradual one, and I just ran within myself, aiming to go just under 7 but focusing more on being conservative. A lot of people passed me, and I ignored them. I hit the 1 mile mark in about 6:55, and I felt terrific. I picked up the pace a little bit, but with all my pre-race visualization my plan was to really pick it up once we turned this corner somewhere around the 1.5-mile mark. By that time my breathing was getting pretty Darth Vadery, but I still felt awesome. I ran the 2nd mile in 6:39.

And then you hit the last set of uphills, right through the campus where I teach. I had shamelessly lobbied for the students in my intro chem class to come out there and cheer for me, so the whole way up those hills I just told myself, "Get to the top and your students will be there." Vanity is a powerful motivator--I didn't want to look like a slug when I passed them. I worked the flat between the two hills especially hard, and sure enough, as I started up the 2nd hill, I heard a group of students screaming my name. That got me up the rest of the hill, where we turned onto the final stretch--a long flat followed by a long downhill to the finish. All those students have an A in the class, obviously--I'm not even grading their finals. Kidding. But really, I did make them pancakes at our review session during reading period, as they requested.

Last year I lost too much time on the uphills, but I was pretty sure I had done better this year, and then my plan was just to run as hard as I possibly could from the moment I turned the corner. I didn't check the watch at all--I just ran. As I pounded down the last hill I thought about something blogger Ange posted once about the end of a race: how it hurts so freaking much, but you know that slowing down at that point isn't going to make it hurt any less. The faster you run, the faster you get to stop, so I just leaned forward and kept my legs turning over. Here's the oh-so-attractive shot of me within about 200 yards of the end:

I'm in purple on the side. I kept up about 6:40 pace for the last mile plus, even with the big uphill, which was great for me. I didn't stop my watch at the end, but when I saw the clock time was just over 21, I was pretty sure I'd made it in 20:xx.

And then I think I didn't stop smiling for at least a week. This is such an awesome race--it raises money for an organization that helps women and children who have been victims of domestic violence, and it raised $160,000 this year. They give out wonderful coffee mugs, designed by this cartoonist, filled with super-yummy hot chocolate. And this year the race was won by a guy in a banana suit.

Don't let the banana suit fool you--this guy is fast. Actually, there are a ton of fast runners here; I barely cracked the top 200 with my 20:55. They give out awards for the top age- and gender-graded performances, and this is both inspiring and humbling. It's also very suspenseful, which makes everyone want to stay around--I think more race directors should do this. The overall winner this way was a local 57-year-old woman who beat me by over 30 seconds. Some guy in his 60's ran under 18 minutes. My coach got 4th, and Joellen was 6th, rocking a 19:45 from her late 40's. Lisa and I made Joellen join us for a post-race photo:

Lisa set a new 5K PR as well. I'm calling my time a "PRAK," or PR After Kids. And of course about 20 minutes after the race, I was all, "I totally could have gone under 20:30. . . . "