i’m starting to wonder if my complete and deeply obsessive running habit is covering up for something else that isn’t going so great. i mean, i love running. i crave it. but i think i love and crave it like an addict craves their drug of choice. i consider myself lucky to have found something that i like so much. but i can’t help but feel that because i can put 100% of my focus into running that i’m totally avoiding all the other stuff and hoping that it’ll fix itself. wish the other stuff luck, because i doubt it’s getting attention anytime soon. at least while i’m injury-free. knock wood.

this past weekend, i ran the shit out of the lasse viren 20k. i ran it fast and put in a new pr in the (almost) half-marathon category. i ran so hard that i think i blew out my bronchial muscles (if they exist). i’ve never heard of that before, but i think it can happen when you redline from start to finish. anyone?

the lasse viren 20k isn’t a big race, but it brings a pretty fast field. it’s about eight miles worth of fire roads and 4 miles of asphalt; a decent hill in the middle and pace-threatening/leg-breaking dips throughout. i stayed with the same three or four guys after the people who went out too fast faded away. the scenery seemed nice, though i didn’t see much of it because i was 100% focused on the people in front of me, wondering if i could pull some of them back. this shit is all business.

the hills were hard and i put in some work, trying to shed some people. i did, but they pushed the pace on the downhills, not leaving any time for recovery. the last six miles, though flat or downhill, were as hard as the first six. dudes were pushing hard. at mile eight, i was close to giving up, but then someone else popped and i knew that i couldn’t be that guy.

i passed two guys between miles eight and nine. at mile 10 it got a little easier because i could picture the last two miles of any run back to my house. i settled in and realized that i would be able to hold it, but the guy i was running with found another gear and pulled away. he wound up beating me by 20 seconds. what’s amazing is that he’s 20 years older than i am. dude is in awesome shape.

i love running, but it’s hard to write about it in any kind of meaningful way.

stats
race distance: 12.43m
clock time: 1:21:16
pace: 6:32 min/mile
i came in: 15th

though you can’t add mileage and have it be a meaningful stat, if this were a half marathon (13.1m), i would have run: 1:25ish (pr by 3min). and it’s really hard to think that a 3:05 marathon isn’t within my grasp if i had any kind of intelligence about training.

today was probably the longest run i’ll do before that 20k — 15.5m with lots of hills. i mean, i’ll probably do a few there-and-back runs to/from work between now and the race but those commute runs are more double workouts than they are long runs. i am ready…

or ready for a 20k in western washington. i am not ready for a 20k in 90°-and-on-fire southern california. i’m just not. the average temperature when i run up here has probably been 45°, exactly half what i could potentially be running in down there. nuts, right? i mean, if it dips to the 60s by race day, i’m going to beat that fucking mountain to death. if it’s 90, or even 80, the reverse could be true.

theory on why this morning’s run was so incredibly good (i suspect i could have done an additional five miles without too much effort): not overtraining during the week (kept it to 30miles over three days and biked the other two), eating really well yesterday (12 bananas, two papayas, and one giant lettuce/fruit salad), and getting eight hours of sleep last night. eat right, get lots of rest. can it really be that simple?

downside of a pineapple express: there’s a shit-ton of rain, the ocean swell comes from the south and makes the waves incredibly large and sloppy and bad for surfing.

upside of a pineapple express: it warms up the air to a balmy 60° and if i find a mango or a papaya to eat for lunch, i can pretend that i’m living somewhere tropical.

i hammered an 11mile run this morning. while hammering, i saw a guy wearing a members only jacket, smoking a cigarette, mowing his lawn, in a downpour. tough! also, he wasn’t just letting the grass spray everywhere, he was actually bagging it. i couldn’t figure him out, and the look he gave me didn’t say ‘come ask me follow-up questions to your weirdo thoughts about my retro clothing choices/smoking habits/lawn-mowing preferences’.

then i came home and made some crazy awesome raw dessert food, chopped up and devoured a giant salad, was interviewed for the german edition of the financial times (due out in the next month), and bought a used longboard (pictured below). the surfboard will also help me to pretend that i’m living somewhere tropical, at least until i get to the water next weekend and it’s only 54°.

i’m watching the live feed of the nyc marathon. nbc is really trying to make the marathon a tv-friendly sport. it isn’t. and al trautwig (my least-favorite commentator now that john tesh retired? is dead?). they’re cutting it like it was an mtv video. the olympic footage was so much smoother, limited to overhead and side shots. the olympics also have the benefit of separate men’s and women’s races, so they didn’t have to do this lame split-screen shit. also, for the olympics, there were fewer than seven people commenting at one time. they could take a lesson from the tour de france about what it is to comment over a longish event — 1 or 2 guys in the booth, one of them older than george burns and both of them talking about the drinking they’re going to do after the race.

i ran 70 miles this week, and i’m not sure if i’m undertraining for a marathon i have no plans to run or overtraining for a half-marathon that i’m doing in five weeks. so yeah, the quantity of miles is too many and the quality miles too few. it maybe seems like a stupid move, but i am so 100% addicted to long miles right now that i’m powerless against it until the mileage taper starts in a week. this week: fewer total miles, more faster miles. 7ish per day instead of 14ish.

and nbc, stop it with the lame music that is only tangentially related to running. the eagles? jesus, dude. that sucks.

yesterday, i ran up this:

(photo by shari — found on flickr)

and toed a rock within the first mile, resulting in this:

and this, right above my hip bone:

it’s always seems to be catholics (and ex-catholics in this case) who wind up with a wound of christ. shit like that never happens to presbyterians or lutherans.

i ran to work today. and then back home eight hours later. 14 miles. i think this is going to be the pattern when days get short and i can’t both bike and run on the same day, re: too much evening dark.

running in the evening dark is kind of a bummer. morning dark is fine, because no one is awake and i have the entire earth to myself. evening dark sucks because people are driving home from work, which always puts them in a bad mood because they’re going somewhere they don’t want to be coming from somewhere they didn’t want to go to in the first place, sitting in something that they thought they wanted but not in the scenario they’re currently in, which is sitting in heavy traffic feeling like a total asshole. i see their faces. they do in fact feel like assholes. oh, and it makes them shitty drivers, which makes for a bad run in the dark.

where was i going with this before the judgment started? oh right. i was running home tonight and i saw all the uw freshmen starting to move into the dorms and holy cats how are they old enough to go to college? they look like babies with too-big backpacks. if my math and sexual timeline are right, i am officially old enough to have fathered a college freshman, which means that i am officially old.

i had a pretty good weekend of running. 18 uneventful miles yesterday, with a short break in the middle for wild blackberries and hazelnuts (i got a tip from some people on the bike path that there were hazelnut trees everywhere, and they were right); 7.5 miles today through ravenna park and around green lake.

today there were two seattle rarities bookending the park — a passel of mennonites to the east and a solo sharp-shinned hawk chasing crows to the west. and i wish i had some pithy way to connect those two things, but i don’t. i was just happy to see them all this morning.

lately, it seems that i’ve been on a mission to avoid ambiguous human interactions. i probably should have realized this when i stopped taking the bus last winter or the elevator a few weeks ago. i thought i was being anti-social, but that’s not quite it. it’s the don’t-quite-know-what-to-do judgment calls that i can do without (give up a seat? say hi? i don’t think i have the emotional bandwidth for this kind of shit). other people maybe have this issue too, i think. only they deal with it by burying themselves in sunglasses, a book, and an ipod in the way back corner of the bus and when they get to work they stare straight down when walking the halls.

anyway, i realized today that the last piece of the puzzle was to avoid eye contact while running (or anywhere else, but tonight’s challenge was to try to do it while running). mostly it’s the i-say-hi-they-say-nothing-i-feel-compelled-to-flip-them-off thing that tends to make me crabby. so now i don’t acknowledge that anyone else is alive by keeping my eyes low. i am stupid with the eye contact, btw. so this is no small feat.

my plan was going swimmingly until i was about 3/4 of the way around green lake when it 100% failed. i was keeping my eyes on the running path to make sure that i didn’t run over any small dogs when someone who i reckoned to be a chronic inebriate of some variety dropped her shorts to her knees and showed me her cooch.

two things:
1. hard livin’ tonight at green lake.
2. i need a plan b to avoid the awkward social stuff, plan a didn’t quite work out.

- woke up, felt urge to puke
- went into bathroom, realized bathroom was gross
- held in vomit while cleaning toilet
- toilet cleaned, vomit released
- ate bananas in attempt to settle stomach
- felt a little better
- ran 18.7 miles (wished i did 20)
- ran ice-cold water in the tub
- made giant fruit salad
- sat in ice-cold bath while eating giant fruit salad
- looked around, wished that i cleaned tub, too

while i’m face-up on the table, i usually stare at the ceiling as they’re putting needles into and taking needles out of me. today i looked down while the needles were on their way out and i’m not sure that i should have because good. lord. jesus. the ones in my i.t. band were sunk about two inches deep.

in a mild panic, i looked up at the acupuncturist and said, ‘dude, please tell me that the needle in my forehead isn’t in that far.’ he said it wasn’t. i don’t know if he was lying.

against naturopath’s orders, i ran 3.2 miles today. they weren’t fast, but they were pain-free. and now comes the stretching and the heat/ice. and then the beet juice. i’m so psyched. pain-free! i’m pretty sure that i’m not cured yet, but i’m definitely on my way.

i got stuck and cupped today. my knee hurt beforehand but after it felt amazing. if they didn’t tell me to wait another week (two more treatments) before running, i’m pretty sure i’d be running both days this weekend. those naturopaths and student naturopaths at the bastyr clinic are super-good.

the acupuncture had much less ache than last time, which i think is supposed to be good. the cupping was another story. i’d never been cupped before. it kind of hurt. i guess the story is that it sucks all the stagnant blocking blood out of where it isn’t supposed to be and up toward the skin where it can easily be washed away. i’m drinking a lot of water.

this is what it looks like eight hours later. the bruising is gonna be around for a few days, i reckon.

today was my first acupuncture appointment for this knee issue. i’m not exactly sure what the needle they put in the middle of my forehead was for. maybe they’re treating something else, too? i don’t know how this works. the needles in my hands were fine. ears hurt. the ones where they think the source of the problem is (a few inches north of my left ankle)? good. lord. jesus. when he put his finger where he was going to put the pin, i knew it was going to hurt. and hurt it did, like a really intense dull ache. though it also felt immobile. it didn’t feel like a leg anymore; it felt like wood with a nail in it.

in addition to the flax oil, vegan glucosamine (regular is made from shellfish), weekly cold-laser treatments, extra post-yoga stretching, hot/cold compresses, and rest, i’ll be adding twice-weekly acupuncture.

on the drive home, i noticed that i didn’t have any pain when shifting gears. is it possible that all of this is happening because of the clutch pedal in my car? i’m going to feel really lame if it is.

hoping to keep some of my scottish bike fitness, i got up a little earlier than usual this morning to do a longer ride on my way to work. i had that self-satisfied up-early-and-exercising feeling, which started dissipating when it started raining and then was completely obliterated when i double-flatted within a mile. both tires. one was a very slow leak and the other was leaking quickly. i turned around and went home so that i could run to work instead (i was too late for the bus).

i have a new running style that doesn’t hurt my knee quite as much but it still hurts some. and it’s ugly, oh man is it ever ugly: limpy, left leg a little off to the side. it’s not sustainable. i’m seeing a naturopath about it tomorrow.

to recap: flats, rain, running pain.

and then something happened that made me forget all of it. about a block from work, an old broken asian dude looked me in the eye, gave me a gap-toothed grin, and then whipped out his junk and pissed all over a pole outside of the big asian supermarket in front of a crowd of people.

i missed running so much. it’s not just the endorphins, it’s also the waking dream feeling of flying through shit like that. while you can still see the guy pissing when you’re on the bus, you don’t get to really connect with him.