bulix.org / life snippets

I've only been running for a little more than two years, so saying that I run the Santa Cruz half-marathon every year might sound like I'm overstating things. Nevertheless, this year was my third time running this beautiful race and as it turns out, also the third time this race made me go back home with a new personal record for the distance.

I have never run the Big Sur International Marathon, so as far as ocean-side races goes, the course of the Santa Cruz half-marathon is the most gorgeous I've had the pleasure to run on and easily taking the crown from the Keiser Permanente half-marathon. Starting from the beachfront, the course quickly goes up onto West Cliff Dr and keeps going west until the Old Dairy Gulch. There, it loops around on the cliffs and finally comes back to the start with its famous beach finish.

Coming off a very strong running month in March with my highest ever mileage, I was feeling good about the race. The weather forecast was good, with fresh temperatures and a bit of morning cloud cover. Having ran 1:29' at Keiser a few weeks before, my strategy was to stick with Bernardo, our 1:30' pacer and play the end of the race by feel. After warming up, I joined the pace group behind the starting arch; I once again chose to go light, no shirt or camelback. Just me, my shoes and my Garmin, ready to eat up the miles.

With the warm-up, getting into pace was easy. We had about a dozen people trucking along and we quickly settled around a 6'45"/mi pace. Shortly after the start I realized that I didn't hydrate at all since the night before and that I forgot to bring a gel. My worries were soon dismissed as we passed the mile 3 aid-station where I had a gulp of water a snatched a gel to keep for later. Before we knew it we were on the bike path alongside highway 1, dealing with the few hills of the course -- the real challenge of this otherwise (mostly) flat race.

Our little group felt strong and I could tell we were all experienced runners, implicitly taking turns leading the pack alongside Bernardo in this more exposed section of the race, providing cover to the rest of the group. I was starting to feel the pace in my legs, but my breathing and heart rate were steady and composed. We were quickly back through the farm and back up the hills of the bike path. The group slowed down and I found myself alone ahead, trying to control my pace and be smart about the hills. We were clearly ahead of pace already so I took it easy and let the group catch me back.

After the hills we passed again through the Natural Bridges Dr aid station, which was my cue to eat up my gel and grab another sip of fresh water, getting ready to take on the last 3 miles and change to the finish line. Our group had thinned out a bit, but a few of us were still going strong. As we reached West Cliff Dr, one of the girls in our group started picking up the pace. The game was on. I followed and we ran together as we progressively sped up.

I could tell she was starting to struggle through the final miles, especially at the increased speed. Me, I was feeling better than ever, happy to let my legs stretch out in 6'30"/mi territory. I encouraged her to stick with me and hang on, but she progressively fell behind. Her friend, who was in our group too, took off later but faster and caught us about a mile from the finish.

It was time for me to convert this steady, 12+ mile effort into the running equivalent of a Hail Mary. Half a mile to the finish I switched gears, now under 6'/mi and speeding up as the course comes back downhill to the beachfront. I negotiated the 90-degree turn towards the beach and completed my sprint through the finish line.

With a finishing chip time of 1:26'38", I took out almost 3 minutes from my previous PR, which I attribute to smart pacing, the strength of the group and a conservative miles 8-10 segment to correctly prepare for a well executed and progressive push in the last few miles. Not to mention stunning scenery that does a really good job of taking your mind of running!

⊕

• Distance:  mi
—
• Duration: 
—
• Pace: /mi
—
• Avg HR:  bpm
—
• Elevation: + ft, - ft (net:  ft)

There I am, letting this blog rot once more. I'm really not good at this writing this. Every time I try to think of something to write about, I fell like it's been done before, or that I cannot possible provide insights that someone, somewhere on the Internet hasn't already written about -- quite possibly in a much better way than I do. But I guess writing is like running (and everything else!): it requires both practice and failure.

Last month I wrote about my experience at the Keiser Permanente Half-Marathon in San Francisco, confirming that I was on the right side of the injury curve and successfully recovering. As I said then, patience was key, and this is also why you haven't seen much here: I was simply going through February, training regularly and dealing with the rest of what we here in California call "winter".

And as such, February was a good training month. My total mileage wasn't very impressive as I missed opportunities for long runs to go snowboarding (and hurt myself doing so, but that's another story): only about 91 miles. The upside of this is that it gave my body a month of very regular and calm training to keep strengthening my knee more and launch me into March is full-attack mode.

An example of that is this awesome 20-miler run I did last week-end with friends from the Running Addicts group, with the target of finishing at, or faster, than marathon pace. I was very pleased to see the results of my patient and careful training in February where I had no problems putting down several 6'4x" miles at the end of a long run like this.

After a full month of training and re-increasing distance without any incidents or issues, and with my snowboarding-induced rib injury now healed, I can finally say that I'm "back", recovered and ready to look at what I can achieve in 2013. I am slowly building up my race calendar for the year. It's not as exciting or as full as last year, but I'm looking more at quality rather than quantity for this year -- which was always the plan when I laid out my calendar for 2012.

So far, I have on my radar (or am already registered for):

• CTR Canyon Meadow trail half-marathon, March 24th. My return to the trails with an easy half-marathon, only about 1,500ft of elevation change and the second half being mostly downhill. It should be a blast through the redwoods!
• FirstWave Santa Cruz half-marathon, April 7th. This is a course I love and know very well, with breathtaking scenery. A course for unexpected PRs.
• Brazen Racing Western Pacific half-marathon, May 4th (pacing). My return to pacing this year with the now familiar course of the Western Pacific at Quarry Lakes in the East Bay. A flat course on which I'll be pacing for 1:35.
• June is still up in the air, I'm hesitating between racing the San Francisco Marathon or defend my title at the CTR San Lorenzo River trail marathon. Both are very fun races but they are only one week apart; and if I've learned anything it's that running marathons at a week's interval has a high risk of injury!
• In July I'll be fast-packing the John Muir Trail, maybe I'll have time for a race towards the end of the month, I'm keeping my options open for now.
• CTR Cinderella trail marathon, August 18th. This one is becoming a birthday weekend tradition!
• Sydney Marathon, September 22th. First destination race for the year. Not necessarily the best weather to travel to Australia, but it should be fun nonetheless! I'm still not sure if I'll stay in Australia, or go to New Zealand's south island after the race.
• Morgan Hill Marathon, October 20th. This one is also now a tradition, and the slightly hilly course is a good benchmark of what I can do later in the season.
• Silicon Valley Turkey Trot 10k, Thanksgiving day. Another tradition, the one race you can't miss in the south bay!
• Seattle Marathon, December 1st.

Interestingly, I am looking forward just as much to the training for these races as I am to the races themselves. Having friends to run with, several times a week, through tempo runs, interval training or weekend long runs is a huge part of why I run in the first place.

In any case, if you happen to be running one of these races, don't hesitate to send me a note and/or join for a few training runs!

⊕

• Distance:  mi
—
• Duration: 
—
• Pace: /mi
—
• Avg HR:  bpm
—
• Elevation: + ft, - ft (net:  ft)

One of the hardest things to deal with when recovering from an injury is lost confidence. I hinted at this issue in a previous post and it proved true every time I even started thinking about running. Will my knee hurt? Will it hold? How long can I go without hurting myself more? Will running one more mile, or running a few tens of seconds faster per mile hurt my recovery?

Doubt sets in much faster than trust. Everything bit of confidence that is hard earned through hours on the trails and weeks of training vanishes in minutes when pain comes. In a way I hard a hard time putting words on, this makes me realize how important running has become in my life, for better and for worse.

In January I slowly and progressively started running again. I can't really use the world "training" yet, but I've been putting myself out there, testing the knee, the pain at times, but also my self-control and my restraint. I was able to gradually strengthen the knee again and increase my mileage, from zero to a few miles per week, to a dozen miles per week and now to slightly over twenty miles.

I'm still weeks away from my former training level, where I could go on a 8-mile tempo on a whim, just to brush off some anger or some stress, or run 17 miles to work on a week day, because it felt awesome. But last week-end I passed a milestone in my recovery: I raced.

Running the Keiser Permanente half marathon was a way for me to get a data point on the progress of my recovery. I registered while being injured and running virtually zero miles, going there with no expectations and wherever I would have been on the road back to regular training. Maybe it was the low expectations, maybe it was due to the several weeks of careful recovery, but everything went better than expected.

My initial plan was to run a conservative race, locking myself at my previous marathon pace - 7'15"/mi - and enjoy the scenery. Unfortunately there was two major flaws in this plan: first, the scenery at the KP half isn't actually that great. The Golden Gate park, although rather large, is just a park that I happen to know quite well nowadays; and the Great Highway in front of the Pacific ocean is a nice sight for the first 100 yards and then you just don't pay attention to it anymore. Second - and I really should know better about this one by now - a race means I had a bib strapped to my chest, which apparently renders me incapable of taking it easy.

The result is a 89'22" half-marathon, only ten seconds off my personal record on the distance. Ten seconds (and more) that I know were in me during that race, in particular at the end, had I not been running alone. But at this point my finishing time is not the victory I bring back from this race. What I bring back is the certainty that through injury and reduced training my fitness is still there and that my spirit is stronger than ever.

I find it interesting that two years ago it was that particular race, the KP half, that triggered in me this passion for running. This same race that last Sunday gave me a good chunk of that lost confidence back. Confidence in my knee, in my recovery process, in my running and of course in myself.

Patience is still key at this point though. Rushing back into a hard training schedule and more races would be foolish. But I now know that I haven't lost my edge a bit and that whenever I do, I will come out of this stronger (and wiser) than before.

⊕

• Distance:  mi
—
• Duration: 
—
• Pace: /mi
—
• Avg HR:  bpm
—
• Elevation: + ft, - ft (net:  ft)

After last week's successful test runs on the treadmill, I decided to get back out there and get some fresh air. A cold, dark morning it sure was. I met Albert and Joseph on the Stevens Creek trail around 6am and after some stretching we set off on our usual Tuesday morning route.

Getting back to running after an injury is a complex process. It requires patience, discipline and to listen to your body. Unfortunately, sometimes to the point of being paranoid about every little thing you feel where you were injured! I probably spent most of my time this morning wondering if what I felt in my knee was pain, discomfort, or "normal operation".

Going into this run I honestly had no idea how far I could go. Thankfully I had a few places I knew I could stop or turn around to cut it short at reasonable distance intervals. The first point came and passed without pain. A little while later, the second point came and passed too. It looked like the knee was holding! Resisting the urge to pick up the pace, we stayed gently in the low 8'/mi, and wrapped the run in a bit under an hour.

This marks my first, pain-free, non-ridiculous run attempt in five weeks. It will take time, but I'll be back.

⊕

• Distance:  mi
—
• Duration: 
—
• Pace: /mi
—
• Avg HR:  bpm
—
• Elevation: + ft, - ft (net:  ft)

After two very solid years of running, it had to happen: injury. Last December I started feeling sharp pain when bending my left knee after running the CTR Coyote Ridge trail marathon. The nature of the injury still remains to be identified (I will be consulting soon to figure it out, my vote being on ITBS), but for the time being I've had to put a halt to my running routine and let it heal as much as I can.

What I've learned after a month being away from the trails is that the psychological impact is much greater than whatever damage the stupid idea of running a particularly hard trail marathon 6 days after a PR at CIM did to my left leg. People say running is a drug. Going with metaphor, injury is withdrawal.

A good proportion of my friends here in US I met through running clubs and they are all very active runners or triathletes. This also means that most of my social activities are focused around running. Or drinking, but usually talking about running. I used to only be to talk about computer geek things, no I also talk about running geek things. I pity my non-geek, non-running friends, really.

The direct result of not being able to run is that I don't get to see most of my friends anymore. It's given me time to do things I hadn't done in a while (work on this blog, read or play video games) but I miss staying in touch and catching up with everybody. And no, Facebook doesn't count.

Facebook actually makes it worse. Facebook drives jealousy. I see all my friends posting pictures of their runs and races, talking about their results, their upcoming races and all I take away from that is the ever greater realization that I cannot do any of this anymore, hopefully only temporarily.

Not running also has a negative effect on my sleep schedule. Once your body gets used to getting a certain amount of exercise each day, your metabolism and your energy levels go up. Stop running and you are left, every day, with extra energy you haven't consumed that makes you stay up late at night and wake up tired in the morning. My only hope on this is that I'll be able to get back to my early run routine fairly quickly to get things back on track.

Running also happened to be, for me, an excellent way to clear my head. Time, several hours each week, during which I think of something else than work and life problems and instead just enjoy being out there, on the trails, enjoying my hard-earned endorphins. Takes this away, and the weight of the world immediately comes back on your shoulders.

The worst feeling is that of lost confidence. Confidence in your body, in your training, in your abilities and in my case confidence in my knee. I feel like I will now always have this hint of doubt at the back of my mind that my knee is going to give and ruin my training run, or worse, my race.

What bothers me the most is the knowledge that I will never be able to say "today, I know I'm healed and this is like it never happened". An injury is not like a bug in software that you can fix with confidence that it will not happen again.

All of these are, I know, perfectly normal reactions. Some of them I know will stop or fade away rapidly once I'm healed and back to my regular training routine. Others might take longer to work on.

In 2011 running became a big and important part of my life. Knowing this, it's easy to understand why most of my 2012 new year resolutions were focused around running. The two most important ones were to run one marathon per month and to complete an ultra-marathon.

In the strictest sense, I failed both of them. But I'd much rather miss a stretch goal and understand why than succeed on a more reasonable target and wonder if I could have done better.

Entering 2012, I had only run one marathon. When I said I wanted to run one marathon per month, everyone around me immediately bumped me from being a crazy runner friend to being clinically insane. I'm glad they don't know (yet) the races I want to run in a couple of years!

One of the goals of running this many marathons was to nail all the things that go around running 26.2 miles: strategy, nutrition, hydration, gear, mental preparation, etc. Through the 9 marathons I ran in 2012 -- 4 on roads, 5 on trails -- I've experienced almost as many different race conditions and terrains, from rocky trails to steep hills, rivers (!) or everlasting roads, and pretty much all types of weather and temperatures you can imagine (except snow, but I'm looking forward to that day!).

All this experience really paid off at MHM and CIM in the fall were my strategy was pretty much perfect, leaving me free to focus on running; the result was a 3:13' finish time in both races. But more important than my performance is a newfound depth in how much I was able to "read" and analyze from these races. Because all the non-running things were never issues during the race, and all that remained front and center was my running.

Completing an ultra-marathon was the logical follow-up to all these full marathons. I wasn't exactly sure at the time which race I would enter or which distance I wanted to attempt. Because of that, I chosed to register for CTR's New Year Eve Day, a time-based endurance challenge, in the 6-hour category. The plan was to run 50k, and then see where I'd be able to go from there.

Unfortunately, I injured my knee running CTR's Coyote Ridge trail marathon earlier in December, which changed my plans quite a bit. I forced myself to walk the endurance challenge, in which I still managed to go 26.5 miles in the 6-hour period. For an injured walker, I could have done worse! Ironically, the Coyote Ridge marathon was longer than expected at 27.5 miles, making in a baby-ultra-marathon and leaving me wondering if it counts towards my new year resolution or not...

1300+ miles and 17 races later, 2012 was a really good year for running. Very different 2011, but I feel the beginning of something greater/crazier still, for one thing remains certain: I love running.

For a while now I've been meaning to reboot my blog. Not that I now have more interesting things to say, but it was time to move away from Zwe after almost ten years! Many times I've looked at existing publishing platforms, played with each of them a bit but none really fit the minimalistic approach I wanted to take.

One thing was sure: I wanted the contents of the blog to be kept in Git. Soon after I realized that the commit history itself was a great place for this: a dated, ordered stream of entries I could easily add to using my favorite editor, manipulate and push to publish. All I needed was a bit of magic around it to pass it through a small template and get an HTML output.

The result is Triton: a 50-line Python script that uses GitPython and Jinja2 to create what you see here. It has virtually no features for the moment, but it does the job of putting my ramblings out there.