Running Angry

I've apparently become what some might call the fifth Beatle of RUS. The forgotten one. I mean, Kristine and Miri are world famous now after appearing in Fitness magazine. I'm not jealous or anything. It was a great article and certainly brought needed attention to our group and the charities we support. But I didn't get mentioned at all in the article. I know, I know, it's a women's fitness magazine and I'm not, well, a woman. Still, they could have said something like "we'd be lost without Mark's inspiration!" It wouldn't be true, of couse, but c'mon girls, humor me next time! ;-)

Anyways, I spent the past month or so recovering from the Cincy marathon. Damn hills did a number on my calves and one of my knees. Recovering meant lots of beer and whatever unhealthy foods I was in the mood to eat. Afterall, one of the benefits of running is that I can eat and drink pretty much whatever I want. (I should also give a big thank you to my parents for the good genetics because my cholesterol is still off the charts good.) But I can't be couch potato forever, so last week I started training again for some races I'm doing later this year.

Aug 14 - An Ironman 70.3 triathlon in Benton Harbor, MI. 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, 13.1 mile run. Then two weeks later....

Aug 27-28 - The Hood to Coast Relay in Oregon. The mother of all relay races. 197 miles. Then six weeks later....

Oct 9 - The Chicago Marathon.

The kicker and the thing that surely will make training this summer totally stink is I'm going to try to run fast enough at the Chicago Marathon to qualify for the Boston Marathon. I've always thought the organizers of the Boston Marathon purposely set the qualifying times to be just out of my reach. Ten or so years ago I ran some marathon times that were within a couple of minutes of qualifying for Boston, but alas, I was never quite fast enough at the end of the races. (I did run Boston in 2001 using a friend's name and qualifying time, with his blessing, but it wasn't the same. It was also likely illegal, but let's not focus on that technicality.) As I've gotten older, my Boston qualifying time has gotten higher, but inexplicably, I've gotten slower. I don't know how or when it happened, but I'm just slower. To qualify for Boston these days, I've got to run a 3:30 which is an 8 minute per mile pace. I used to be able to run 8 minute miles all day. That was a slow jog back then. I can still run 8 minute miles well enough, but 26 of them in a row....That's the hard part.

Running faster means doing speed training, and speed training, well, it hurts! My heart and lungs feel like they are on fire and my legs get wobbly. And that's after running just a few 1/4 or 1/2 mile sprints and there's still seven or eight sprints to go. My so-called "speed coach" (who's just my buddy Dave in NYC) says that to maintain my pace at the end of the marathon when I'm tired means I've got to get stronger too. So this year I'll be doing sets of squats, lunges and burpees in between sprints. Doesn't sound fun. Dave says it will train me to run angry. I'm not sure what that means exactly. I suspect I'm mostly going to be angry when I'm training because I won't be relaxing on the couch with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other.

Peace out!