The Other Dogs

Then, there are the other dogs you encounter while running. Not the ones who chase you, snarling and chomping. The dogs who chase you are usually yard defenders; they chase you because they’ve incorporated the road into their territory. And their owners have allowed them to do so. Shame on the owners!

I was running out a quiet, rural road today and met one of the other dogs. She was running menacingly around the corner of her owner’s house and toward the road. I slowed down, expecting a confrontation. But then I saw that her tail was wagging and her floppy ears were nearly horizontal. She was curious and excited, but not aggressive.

I don’t know what kind of dog she was. She was smaller than my own dog, Rosie (pictured above), but most dogs are smaller than Rosie. She began to trot alongside me.

Twice, I made an effort to chase her back into her own yard. She didn’t buy my pretense of hostility. Honestly, I enjoyed the company for a while. Rosie has had some problems with arthritis lately and hasn’t been able to run with me. It felt a little like I was cheating on Rosie, but I can’t deny that I enjoyed it. With Rosie’s gimpiness, I’ve missed having a canine training partner.

We ran together for a couple of miles. I hope she made it home. Truthfully, I’m a little worried about her. I’m more at a loss how to keep a friendly dog from following me than I am about how to keep a mean dog from chasing me. Every time it happens, I worry that the dog will get turned around and get lost. Yes, I enjoyed the company, but I would prefer that people not let their dogs run amuck.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered friendly canines who have taken it upon themselves to run with me. If the choice is between a playful but somewhat annoying dog and a vicious one, I’ll take the annoying one any day. But even a friendly dog can be dangerous; she could injure a runner by tripping her or injure a cyclist by causing him to have an accident. Plus, she could get injured herself in the process!

The overly friendly dog has much in common with the vicious dog. Both need what Caesar Milan (one of my heroes) calls a calm, assertive pack leader. My companion on today’s run so craved pack leadership from a human that she perked up and went along with the first human she saw. So there’s the lesson for today: Take your dog for a walk or run. It’ll be good for both of you.

Dance Marathon 5K: Dancing the Knight Away

You know you’re getting old when you’re running in a race and someone offers encouragement that includes the word sir. And it happened to me twice during Sunday’s Dance Marathon 5K on the campus of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

“Looking good, sir!” That one came from a young woman who happened to be standing around the entrance of the library as we passed by. She appeared to be a traditionally-aged college student. I wasn’t too distressed to hear someone of such tender years call me sir. But even so … sir?? The second one, though, was from the lips of a woman not much younger than me, possibly a faculty member who happened to be strolling along the course: “Way to go, sir! You’re almost there!” First off, I was not “almost there.” And second, sir indeed! What, do I look like a knight or something?

Then, there were the two frat guys I had to weave around. One of them says something equally inane, but without the sir: “Good job, man!” Now, that’s more like it! So, there’s a model for the current shiny generation: If you want to respect your elders, don’t call us “sir”; that just makes us feel old. Next time you see an old guy running in a race, try yelling something like: “Don’t have a heart attack, grandpa!” Personally, I’d like that much better than being called “sir.”

Anyway, this was an interesting little race on a drippy Sunday afternoon. Racing through the sorts of crowds one typically finds milling about on a major university campus on a Sunday afternoon - and with a field of probably fewer than 50 runners - was pretty cool in a surreal sort of way … “sir” notwithstanding.

They could have used an extra volunteer or two to direct runners at a key point about the halfway mark, or at least more visible course markings. As it was, the leaders missed a left turn and ended up running maybe an extra quarter-mile around the back of the greenhouses at U.T.’s agricultural school. The rest of us followed them. But since everyone in front of me also ran the extra distance, I’m okay with having run it myself. And the volunteers on hand all did a fine job with their tasks.

As I warmed up before the race, I didn’t see too many other old fellows who might be mistaken for sirs. I noticed one guy a bit older than me. He had the lean and hungry look of a hardcore, serious road racer - the kind of guy who would run barefoot over broken glass to win his AG. I figured he’d beat me, and he did. I repeatedly traded places with him for most of the first mile. Then, he caught me sleeping as we crossed the bridge to the agricultural campus and surged ahead of me by 20 meters or so. After that, I couldn’t reel him in to save my life. He’d get the overall masters’ and I’d finish about ten seconds behind him to win the M40 AG. Too bad: I could have used that gift certificate from a local running store for a new pair of winter tights! Had I known what was at stake, maybe I could have pushed a little harder.

My time was 23:27 according to my watch, but I think it may end up a couple or three seconds slower than that in the official results. The goal here was just to run a solid race on a certified course. And that I did. Yes, sir!

New Shoes, New Shirt, New Route, New Attitude

I got brand new shoes yesterday. Except for the color, they’re identical to my “old” ones, which now have close to 500 miles on them. Getting 500 miles out of a pair of shoes is pretty remarkable for me, so maybe with the Asics GT-2140 I’ve found my basic workhorse road trainer. Honestly, I haven’t owned a pair of basic training flats I really liked since Nike stopped making the old pre-“Air” waffle trainer with the polyfoam cushioning. That was a long, long time ago. But the Asics shoes are … acceptable. At least, they’ll be acceptable until Asics starts monkeying around with them … as they inevitably will.

After the stop at Fleet Feet Sports in Kingsport for the shoes, Sue and I visited Dick’s. I found a bright orange Reebok singlet on the clearance rack for $14. It’s also … acceptable. It is hard to find singlets or shorts these days that are cut the way I like for singlets and shorts to be cut. Manufacturers make singlets too clingy and shorts too long for my taste. But this Reebok singlet is comfortable. I wish I could find one in green, but the orange one is acceptable.

With my new shoes and my new singlet, I went running this morning on a new route. I parked my car near the Raven Rock Golf Course in Jenkins and took a trot through the new industrial park, past an empty shell building and a couple or three working businesses. One of the plants had a few cars parked out front, so I guess they’re working on Sundays; that’s a good sign for the local economy.

The industrial park is on a vast expanse of land that has been leveled by strip mining, and there’s a crisscrossing network of old mine roads through it that is known locally as The Spider Web. The main road through the industrial park is simply an old mine road that has been graded and paved. (Public relations guys with the mining industry sometimes say with a straight face that strip mining is a good thing because it creates level areas like this one that can be developed. No foolin’! And some people actually buy that line!)

At the end of the paved road, I followed one of the old mine roads out to the edge of the woods, then returned to my car the way I came. According to the route mapping tool on the Dailymile website, this is a run of almost exactly 4 miles – just what the training plan called for today. The Spider Web isn’t the prettiest place to run, but on a Sunday it is quiet and pleasant. It’s acceptable.

My pace was a little faster than someone of my ability level should be running for “easy pace” while training for a marathon. But my pace, too, was acceptable. And so with my acceptable gear, my acceptable route, my acceptable training plan, and my acceptable level of patience for plodding along at what is an absurdly slow pace (even for me!), I’ve decided to stop complaining and just run.

2010: The new, improved BIG GOAL!

With 2009 winding down, it's time for my annual assessment of how I've done on the BIG GOAL for the year and to come up with the BIG GOAL for the following year. The short answer to the "how I did" question is: Not too badly. Mainly, I wanted to run 62.5% WMA grades at every distance I race frequently between 800m to 10K, and perhaps to get a few 65% WMAs. Plus, I thought it might be nice to run a couple of 60% WMAs at longer distances.

As you can see by scanning down my list of "masters PRs" at the right, I did pretty well with this. I didn't get around to racing 800m at all, but otherwise I accomplished almost everything I set out to accomplish.

So, maybe I'm setting goals that are too easy. In 2009, I ended up revising a few of those targets. I decided to try a 21-minute 5K (did it!) and a six-minute mile (didn't!). My 2010 BIG GOAL, however, is suitably ambitious for a BIG GOAL! Here it is:

This is the year I’m going to do it. I’m going to run the age-graded equivalents of all my lifetime PRs (at least the ones I can verify from old training diaries and race results) from 1 mile to the marathon. That translates into the following: And so, today I started training for the softest of those six major target times, the one for the marathon. My training plan for getting in shape to run that 4:33:56 is an odd hybrid of Higdon and Daniels. It's so simple and unoriginal that I can't even call it a new incarnation of the Characteristically Convoluted Training Plan (CCTP). Instead, I'll call it the Absurdly Mindless Training Plan (AMTP). But I think it will work. And maybe with a little luck, the Virginia Creeper Marathon can give me that rarest of prizes for a fellow my age: A new lifetime PR!

PS: To see the Absurdly Mindless Training Plan in all its heathen glory, click here!

Cut (class) And Run

I’m not proud of it. Or maybe I am proud of it, as a matter of fact. At minimum, I am less ashamed of it than I should be. I ought to say that it was a class I’m taking, not a class I’m teaching. To be precise, it was Biology 137, human anatomy and physiology. The plan had been to go running after class, but I ended up running during class. I've made a point of going to every meeting of the two classes I'm taking this fall - barring the absolute necessity of being absent. If for no other reason, I wanted to model good behavior for the "real" students in the classes. But here's the thing: A role model I ain't.

In the morning, I was tied up with paid employment at home. I graded some papers, answered a whole slew of student e-mails, and checked discussion forums in the online courses I’m teaching this term. But it was planning for next semester’s SOC 101 course that made me lose track of time.

For several years now, I’ve had students in SOC 101 finish the course with Elijah Anderson’s book Code of the Street. It’s a fine work that addresses a host of very interesting sociological questions. But it is ten years old now – an eternity in the social sciences – and so I’ve been looking for something more recent to replace it. There’s a very interesting sociological analysis of youth sports in the United States by Michael Messner. I think it might appeal to my mostly nontraditional students, most of whom are parents with kids who participate in youth sports. I’m concerned that it might bore other students, though. There are other possibilities for a book to replace Anderson. The main thing is simply to give students practice in following the argument of a book-length sociological study, figure out how it fits into the landscape of sociological theory we’ve learned about in SOC 101, see how it employs some of the methods we’ve discussed, note how it applies some of the concepts we’ve learned, etc. If the book that does all that happens to be about something most students find interesting, that’s an added plus. But I must decide soon, because book orders for spring were due a week ago!

So, I’m in the middle of thinking about all of this when I glance at the clock. I have only 20 minutes to get my arse to Whitesburg!! Madly, I dash about trying to get my things together so that I can get to class and then go for a run on the Pine Mountain Trail. I might have made it, except that I get into my car and see that the fuel gauge is a mere millimeter to the right of E. Our local gas station has not yet upgraded to those new-fangled pumps where you can pay with your debit card without going inside, and so I have to stand in line behind two people buying scratch-off lottery tickets. They buy several of them one at a time and scratch them at the counter until they get one that pays $5. They’ve almost broken even, but I now have less than five minutes to make the 20 minute drive to Whitesburg.

The decision comes half-consciously upon me while sitting in my car at an intersection. I can turn left and go to the Pine Mountain Trail to run. Or, I can turn right and go to Whitesburg and probably miss the first half-hour of a class that is scheduled to meet for two hours but seldom meets for the entirety of one hour. (Am I the only instructor left in the universe who meets classes for the full time allotted?) By the time I could get to Whitesburg, I would probably be present for all of 15 minutes of class time. I turn left.

My run was very nice. It was a great, crisp afternoon. The fall colors are close to their peak. To be honest, I don’t regret missing my anatomy class in the least. And the next time I’m tempted to scold my own students for missing class on a pretty fall afternoon, I hope that I will remember today.

No Plan. No Goal. Just Running.

If you run, then you’re a runner. Right? If so, then I’m still a runner. I’ve been doing some running lately. Why, just a couple of hours ago I took a clockwise turn around Fish Pond Lake. From the parking area near the switchback, that’s about 2.8 miles. It felt okay. The autumn colors were pretty. The cool air was pleasant. I haven’t run as much as I would have liked lately, but I have run.

What I haven’t done is train. Running is not the same thing as training. Training involves a very specific goal and a clear plan for getting to that goal. At the moment, I have neither. No plan. No goal. I’m just running.

There is the Virginia Creeper Marathon, of course. It feels mega-weird to be signed up for a race that’s so far in the future. And yet, it’s not so far in the future. Several friends are also signed up for that race, and many of them have asked about my training for it. I’ve said to lots of people: “Um, well, I haven’t really started training for it yet.” I have 161 days, or 23 weeks. That seems like an eternity, but in the world of the marathon, I guess that’s not such a long time.

Marathoners have a level of patience that I cannot aspire to in my wildest dreams, though. I’m not looking forward to all the LSD I’ll have to put in over the long winter. You can expect my training for VCM to be as minimal as I can possibly make it. I just want to go run the doggoned thing, even if it takes all day. Since I suck at the marathon anyway, I’m not going to bust my rear end trying to train for a fast time.

Meanwhile, I’m one race short of the requirement for a Phidippides Award from the USATF. To qualify for the “silver” level, I need to do one more race on a certified road course before the end of the year. But there’s no real goal there, either. The Phidippides Award is blind to actual performance. I’ll fit in another USATF-certified race sometime in November or December. Maybe. After that, I’ll have to lay off the racing for a while as I train for the marathon.

So with the marathon looming in the spring – and with the necessity of recovering after it is over – the next race that I actually look forward to (and at which I might be able to turn in a performance I’ll be proud of!) probably won’t be until June or July of 2010. While 23 weeks isn’t that long in marathon training, I can do basically nothing at all that will substantially better my performance at the mile or the 5K in nine months time. Hence, I’m just running. No plan. No goal.

I would very much like to say that running without a goal or a plan is freeing and liberating. But honestly, it’s just plain hard. On days when the contingencies of work and life cut into the time I have for running, I find myself just nixing the running. I tell myself (accurately!) that most people only need about 20 to 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three or four times per week to maintain a reasonable level of fitness. I’m getting that and then some. I do enjoy running, but I also miss training.

Rhythm and Roots 5K: I didn't suck!

To get anywhere, you have to know where you are. And that’s what I hoped to accomplish today, just to find out where my fitness level is. I’ve had no pain anywhere for a few weeks, so the sundry injuries seem to be okay. No one can figure out what’s causing the iron deficiency, but my last blood test showed it to be no worse. Otherwise, I’ve been pronounced remarkably healthy by two board certified physicians. Aside from the fact that I’ve averaged less than 15 miles per week of running for the past month and a half, I should be okay to go out and push it through a fast 5K.

But fast is relative, isn’t it? Your easy day may be my 5K PR, or vice-versa. And what was slow two months ago may feel pretty fast today. Or vice-versa. When you haven’t raced in a while, it’s hard to know even how to pace the first 200 meters of a 5K, let alone the whole race. So, I thought I’d start very cautiously and see how I felt after the first mile. In my hiatus from racing, I’ve lost all sense of pace.

That’s why I’d like to thank Kerry. At my last race, a fellow named Kerry out-kicked me in the last 600 meters of the 10K to finish just ahead of me in the overall and in the M40 AG. We’ve since interacted on the Dailymile website, and I’ve been following his training as he’s been doing some quality speedwork and solid long runs. Today, he said “Hi, John” as he breezed past me in the first hundred meters or so of the race.

At that moment, I was lollygagging along without any particular plan. When I saw Kerry, I took the whim to fall into his wake and see if I could keep up with him. Bottom line: I pretty much did. He ran a very smart, evenly paced race, which I learned later was a PR for him. And he unwittingly cut a clear path through the crowd for me on the first mile or so. So with Kerry’s pacing help, I ended up with a 22:29 (according to my watch). Unofficially, that’s a WMA grade of 62.58%. That doesn’t suck. I’m still waiting for the official results to see the “real” time and how I finished.

To the extent that you can dignify 15 miles per week with the term “maintenance miles”, that’s what I’ve been doing. A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to adjust the Jack Daniels-recommended paces I try to run in training according to my last race (a 49:32 10K), and I’ve actually made more progress since doing so. I even ran a tame little set of 4x800m this past Tuesday at about 3:42 each. Today’s race gives me the information I need to plan my training more intelligently. For example, I’ll know to do my next set of 800s at about 3:30 each, or maybe 1000s at 4:23. I think I’m gonna alternate weekly Vo2 max workouts with tempo runs or fartlek while I’m gradually rebuilding my mileage base.

What I need now, of course, is a next race to target. How about another assessment in a couple of weeks, maybe at the Breaks Cross Country or the Wise Fall Fling 5K? Or both? Just takin’ it one race at a time …