New Gear Makes Me Feel Good

I guess now's as good a time as any to publish a shoe post. I'm in fairly significant pain this week from my 11 miler on Sunday (got a minor sunburn too), so I stopped by my local running store last night on the way home from work to get some new tires for my mega-wheels...ahem...feet.

These are the first "running shoes" I ever bought. The Saucony Omni Pro Grid 6. This was a great shoe. It was sturdy, it was relatively lightweight, and it was stabilizing for a clydesdale like me. I ran on this shoe for far more miles than I should have, and it held up nicely. It was also my marathon shoe in 2009, so it holds a special place in my heart. In fact, it is now my lawn mowing shoe, as I just didn't want to get rid of them... Once I had squeezed the life out of the above, I upgraded to the Saucony Omni 7. Yeah, I'm a creature of habit.

After the Omni 7 came the (you guessed it) Omni 8. There was a fairly significant re-engineering that went into version 8.0, so the guy at Fleet Feet in Chicago insisted I try them on and do a half mile on the treadmill to make sure I was still convinced I liked the "Omni series." It took about a quarter mile to realize it was the same shoe, only lighter. I was sold pretty quickly. In fact, I bought 2 straight pairs of the Omni 8, since they still had some in my size (10.5), even though the Omni 9 had been introduced already. I also scored them on sale for that same reason. It was the 2 pairs of Omni 8's that carried me through my 1000 mile year in 2010.

Which brings us to last Sunday. Any "Expert" will tell you that you should change out running shoes every 300 to 500 miles. I'm a believer that an "expert" is usually trying to sell you something; in this case, shoes. I can usually do about 500 miles on a pair of shoes, but after that, they're pretty much useless. I'm pretty sure there were a good 600 miles on those shoes I used on Sunday. If the color of the webbing and the weight of the dried salt, dirt, and sweat tell us anything, they had seen better days.

So last night on the way home, I stopped in (baby in hand) and picked up the newest member of the family, the Saucony Omni ProGrid 9. I used them today in my 5 miles at the gym, and let me tell ya folks, they're like running on spring-loaded clouds. I had so over-worn the last pair that I pretty much forgot how nice it is to have new gear. Just look at these puppies:

They've re-engineered them again so they are even lighter than the last version, and I'm loving it. I'm so glad I gave in and bought them now so I have another 4 training runs before the Riverbank Run 25k on 5/14 to break them in and get used to them. Maybe now I'll actually finish the race!

Sundays are for Church...

...and final rounds of golf tournaments. And mowing the lawn. And working in the garden. And doing laundry. And for cooking a good dinner.

Sundays are NOT, however, for running 11 miles. We're 2 weeks away from the Fifth Third Riverbank Run (25k) here in GR, and I figured I needed to do a long one this week. I also happened to have a neighbor who was interested in playing golf on Saturday (when I would normally have done my run), so I pushed the run off to Sunday. Bad decision.

Knowing that I had to be at church this morning, I mapped out a 14 mile route home from church and packed a bag. I changed in the car in the parking lot, and off I went through East Grand Rapids, Kentwood, and Cascade. Running mid-day is new for me. I usually do long runs right after waking up in the morning, so having eaten breakfast and being active all morning was a bad way to get going.

Covered 11 miles in 1hr, 50min, which is exactly 10 min/mile. I bailed out on the 14 mile route knowing I didn't have another 3 in me today, and ended up doing this lazy pace for almost 2 hours. The weather was nice, but that's about all that was nice about this run. Oh, well. I'll probably try for another long one next week, but I'll definitely plan on doing it at 6am instead of noon.

Lesson learned.

Holy Smokes- Blazin' in Boston

2:03:02

Wow.

That's the finishing time for this year's Boston Marathon by Kenyan Geoffrey Mutai.

Here's the kicker- it's 57 seconds faster than any marathon EVER, and it's not being considered a record by international racing bodies because of a "strong tailwind."

My take- the guy got screwed. I firmly believe in the expression "don't hate the player, hate the game." It's not his fault he had a tailwind. He got a once-a-century opportunity to kick some major ass in the premiere competition of his profession, and his rightful crown is being withheld due to Mother Nature. That's the same Mother Nature everyone else had to deal with today. Don't kill this guy's buzz just because the conditions were right for an epic day. Sounds to me like an epic fail.

My hat's off to you, Geoffrey Mutai. You ran it. You earned it. You're the best. Enjoy it.

B's Peeves....Jelly Donut Day Edition

I know this is supposed to be a blog about running, but it's my only outlet, so I'm gonna use it to get something off my chest. Here's what's Peeve-ing me today....

Since most of the people who read this blog are my friends and family any way, you all know I lived in Chicago for 9 years and loved every minute of it. That said, I could never figure out what all the fuss was about every year on Fat Tuesday when offices across Chicagoland would explode with Jelly Donuts. Inevitably, there would be a (usually very large) admin assistant with a last name of Kowalski, Wisniewski, or Walczak who would spend the entire day trying to convince me that because they came from a "Polish bakery," they should be called "Paczki," and not just "Jelly Donuts." Baloney.

Look, I'm all for having cultural traditions that center around food. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days of the year. A large part of why I run is so that I can participate in these traditions without looking like a Wisniewski by the end of the season. But if you're going to have jelly donuts on Fat Tuesday every year before you make your minor Lenten Sacrifice, then let's just drop the charade and call them what they are.

I figured that a move to West Michigan [where "if you ain't Dutch, you ain't right,"] would reduce the annual dependence on fried dough balls, but alas, they're all over the office today as well!

So to get to the bottom of this, I consulted The Omnicient Narrator- Google. In this case, Google Images specifically. I first googled "Jelly Donut," and got this image in return:

Next, I googled "Pazcki," and got this image in return:

Notice a similarity? Yup, they're exactly the friggin' same! So from here on out, it's not Fat Tuesday, it's not Mardi Gras, and it's not Paczki Day. It's Jelly Donut Day. End of sermon. Homer Simpson would be proud.

The Few. The Proud.

News out of Chicago today- the 2011 Chicago Marathon has sold out in a record 31 days! Amazing to think that there are 45000 nut-jobs like me who know by February that they'll want to run 26.2 miles 7 months later. This makes me part of the Few - 45,000 is relatively few compared to, say, the population of China, and the Proud - if by "proud," you mean "nut-jobs."



No major news on the local front, I just thought it was amazing that the race is already closed. You'll see in my first (maybe second) post that I said it normally sells out by early April. It's 3/3, and the only way to get in now is to sign up with a charity or find someone on Craigslist looking to profit from a distance running nut-job.

On what it means to be "in training..."

I left my last post explaining that I was doing plenty of running, but I hadn't started "Training." What's the difference? Glad you asked....

Running is an admirable pursuit. People run in all sorts of ways for all sorts of reasons, but when you boil it down, running is a series of workouts. There's no specific purpose in working out, save for fitness maintenance, weight loss, etc. It's easy to get in a workout on any given day, to work out the morning after getting liquored up the night before, etc.

Training is a mindset. Training is a process by which a person runs with a regular frequency and intensity with a specific goal. Our local YMCA runs a "Couch to 5k" training program which helps people take their first steps toward finishing a 5k fun run. That training program is no different from a marathon program- it provides a collection of runs, rests, cross training, nutrition, sleep, and work/life/exercise balance in order to help its participants achieve a goal, whether it's a Personal Record (PR), winning a race, or simply crossing a finish line. And, yes, that was a run-on sentence. It's my blog, I can run-on all I want.

See the difference? When I'm running, I'll gladly go out and get blitzed on Friday night because I can go to the gym on Sunday instead of Saturday. When I'm training, I have a Friday dinner of lean protein and simple carbs (menus are another post), go to bed at 10pm, and hit the trail around 7am after a specific breakfast. In training, it's important to get those runs done on Saturday so I can cross train on Sunday.

So now I'm "in training" for the Riverbank Run. I've got 10.5 weeks until race day, so I'll run 4 times per week at set distances in order to be prepared but not over-trained on 5/14/11. I'll save the actual Hal Higdon training program introduction for another post, but I'm now basically on the T,W,R,Sa schedule with rest on Friday, cross training on Sunday, and strength training on Monday. Lots of updates coming as I progress...

On "Winning:" If I hurry up...I'll be late.

The Fifth Third RiverBank Run 25k here in Grand Rapids is on May 14th, 2011, and I plan to win it. Well, at least I plan to "win" it. I was talking to a friend on the phone one day after a half marathon. He asked me what I had been doing that morning, and the conversation went something like this:

Pete: Hey. What are you up to?
Me: I just finished XYZ Half Marathon.
Pete (unimpressed): Cool. Did you win?
Me: Not exactly.
Pete (disappointed): Oh. Well, let me know when you win one.

And on the conversation went.

Now, as the great blues man Howlin' Wolf once sang, "I was built for comfort, baby. I ain't built for speed." I'm not ever going to win a race in my life. I'll always be just a number in the middle of a pack. But if I can train for a race properly and finish a race properly, then I will have acheived my goal. And when you achieve a goal, doesn't it feel like you've won something? When I crossed the finish line in Chicago in 2009 in 4:29:45, I felt like I had just won the whole dang thing. That's why I'm doing it again, and that's why I'm blogging about it. I want to win it again, and I want to share it with my friends and family in a way I didn't understand 2 years ago.

So the RiverBank Run is GR's biggest race of the year, and I'd like to finish in a time that is close to last year's time of 2:19:21 (or so). That would be a "win." In order to train for races, I usually use Hal Higdon's training plans (another post), which say that you need 12 weeks to properly train for a half marathon. As of tomorrow, I'll have 11 weeks left for the race, and the 25k is a bit longer than a half marathon (15.5miles) anyway, so I probably should have tacked on an extra week.

Long/short- I'm behind on the plan. I'm not necessarily behind on my running, but I'm behind on my training. Big difference, which I'll save for yet another post. Either way:

If I hurry up...I'll be late.