50 Miles from Home

I signed up for the Stone Cat 50 Miler back in June of this year and then spent the next 5 months trying to wrap my mind around it. Being nearly twice as long as any official race I’d ever done, I was both excited and overwhelmed by the sheer “bigness” of it. So many questions bounced around my brain as I formulated my plan of attack. How should I train? What pace should I run? What shoes should I wear? How long will it take? What should I eat? And, the biggest question of all: What exactly happens beyond that mystical 26.2 mile mark?

Well, now that I’ve done it, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. 
Running 50 miles really isn’t all that hard!

Perfect 10’s

10 miles is probably my favorite distance to race. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because I’ve had some good experiences in the past. Whether it be at the Foxboro Old Fashioned 10m (a traditional Boston tune-up for me), or at the now defunct Run for the Border 10m (where I set a tailwind-aided, never to be duplicated, dream-like PR) I generally seem to do well with this distance. Of course, for every “rule” there is the “exception” and my 10m exception would have to be the Yankee Homecoming race. I NEVER do well there. Too crowded, too hot & too late in the day!

   

Another reason I like the 10m distance is that it’s long enough that the pace required to maintain even splits throughout is just slow enough to allow me to breathe fairly easily – unlike a 5k or 10k. But, the entire race takes just over an hour which is short enough so that my legs don’t start to feel like concrete cylinders – unlike a Half Marathon. I’m sure there’s some physiology that explains this phenomenon, but for now, I’m content in knowing that, for some reason, the 10 miler is my “sweet spot”.

This month, I ran two very different ten mile races, on two separate continents and both were perfect in their own special way.

Executive Summary

August and September were pretty busy months around the Wade household. Between the end-of-summer vacationing, sending two kids off to college (one to London), sending one kid off to first grade, not to mention dealing with a precocious 2-year old who’s very much enjoying pushing his parent’s buttons at the moment, there wasn’t much time (or desire) to write. There was, of course, time to race. There’s always time to race ...

Below is a quick recap of the races I’ve done since last I wrote:

Appalachian Dreams - Part I

15 years ago I became keenly interested in the Appalachian Trail. The Appalachian Trail (or the AT as it’s commonly known) is a hiking trail marked with white blazes in the eastern United States and it extends 2,184 miles between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. I had only been hiking for a few months and had just recently begun running. But of course, like anything else I’m interested in, I became obsessed with it and devoured all the pertinent info about it I could find. In this case, that began with a trail map that I bought which extended from the floor to the ceiling of my dining room!

Every year thousands of thru-hikers (or people hiking the entire trail at one time) start from one end of the AT (usually Springer) and make their way to the other end. Only about 1 in 4 makes it the whole way on their first attempt. Some take as many as 8 months to complete the journey while others complete it in as little as 3. The un-official record for the fastest “supported thru-hike” (or, a hike with a little help from your friends) is 47 days by Andy Thompson in 2005. That’s more than 46 miles a day! The “unsupported” record is 60 days by Ward Leonard back in 1990. An equally impressive travel rate of 36 miles per day!

Appalachian Dreams - Part II

Cascade Brook

By the time my Lonesome Lake dinner ended so had the rain. I ambled down the Cascade Brook Trail on my way to the notch. I got mixed up a couple times on which way to go because everything along the river looked like a trail. It was stunning how much of this area still showed signs of the devastation from Hurricane Irene. Even one year later, the rocks and dirt lining the brook looked like they’d been scoured clean by a torrential flood. One section was missing a bridge that had simply been wiped out by the fast flowing wave of debris. Still amazed by the awesome power of nature I reached the base of Mt. Liberty - my final climb of the day.

The front that had moved through had brought noticeably cooler temps. I was grateful for this on my last, brutal, 2 1/2 mile climb out of Franconia Notch to the Liberty Springs tentsite. The seemingly never ending trail eventually did and I pulled into my final pit-stop at about 6:30 pm. 12 ½ hours after I started. Not bad for a 27 mile hike! I found an open tent platform, changed out of my wet hiking gear and set about putting up my hammock. It went up surprisingly fast and even more surprisingly didn’t come crashing down when I climbed into it. I ate a couple pumpkin cookies that I bought at the hut, drank my recovery shake and settled in for the night. A very LONG night!

Appalachian Dreams - Part III

Eisenhower, Monroe & Washington beyond laid themselves out before me like a promise. And, the 360 degree, 100+ mile visibility of the surrounding Valleys allowed me to see just how far I’d come in my quest to make that promise a reality. The trail stretched out across the ridge like only Able Crawford could have imagined. With some 12 miles to go, and countless views to devour, “before I sleep” I hopped, skipped & jumped back onto the trail and made my way to my next destination - Lake of the Clouds.

Lake of the Clouds

The excitement of being part of the Alpine Zone “playground” gave a real boost to my confidence (and my pace). As a result, I pulled into Lake of the Clouds Hut only about an hour after coming over the top of Pierce. I grabbed a Powerbar, some lemonade (as the day was starting to heat up) and re-filled my hydration pack before heading back out to tackle the “Ole Rockpile”. I’ve been to the top of Washington probably a dozen times, but this proved to be the best day yet for a summit attempt. Unfortunately about a thousand people, or so it seemed, had the same thoughts!

Bear Brook Trail Marathon

I’ll be honest, the first time I heard about the BearBrook Marathon & Ultra at Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, NH I thought to myself, “A 26.7 mile race, on those brutal trails in the middle of the summer and height of the deerfly season?! No F’n way! Who’d be crazy enough to sign up for that?!”  Well, as it turns out – me!

In my never-ending pursuit to become a stronger runner (or injure myself beyond repair) I put my name in the BBM hat just three days before the race. Hmmm. Deciding to run a marathon at the last-minute with no specific training, build-up or taper. Where have I heard that one before? Anyway, at $26.70 the price was certainly right and I figured it would be a good way to get a long trail run in (with support) as I work my way up to the 50-Miler in the Fall.

The Ultra-met Challenge

I’m not sure why, but lately I’ve been much more interested in running long than running fast. Maybe it’s because, as I age, I’m finding it near impossible to come close to my previous race PR’s - despite the fact that it feels like I’m training harder than ever! Maybe it’s because I seem to keep breaking down when I try to run too fast. Or, maybe it’s because there’s just something inside me that likes to see just how far I can go!

Progress Report

Seeing as though we’re almost exactly half-way through the calendar year I thought I’d take a look back to see how I’m doing on my Running Goals for 2012.

Training Goals:

Stay injury free for the duration of 2012.
Grade: C+ Only one semi-injury and the 3-week duration was fairly manageable. Still, I’d really like my hamstring problems to be behind me once and for all.

Get my weight below 180 (184 currently) and keep it there for the year.
Grade: B-  Got to 180, stayed there for 2 weeks, now back up to 184.
It would be a lot easier if the cookies, chips and ice cream didn’t call me by name!

Add more (and varied) cross training exercises to my training routine.
Grade: B+  Been swimming, biking, trail running and have even spent some time at the gym. Shocker!

Learn to swim. Not just treading water, but proper swimming technique.
Grade: A-  Took a class. Began slowly but have really improved as I’ve started to figure some things out. I really enjoy it and I'm looking forward to my first open-water swim later this summer.

Summary: For the most part I've been pretty happy with my training so far this year. I'm averaging more miles per week than I ever have in my 15 years of training. And with the biking and swimming it's been a very good mix of workouts. Certainly not bored.

Stepping Back

Rock Bottom. Ground Zero. Nadir. All-Time Low. These are not words that one would wish to use to describe the results of a recent important race or, in this case, a series of recent important races. But, that’s exactly the sort of lingual ballpark I find myself in after my current string of personal worst performances capped off by this weekend’s USATF-NE 10k Championships in Newton, Mass.

Tourist Season

"I am a Passenger"

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After last year’s “Lost Season”, 2012 was to be my big comeback. I planned it out. I did all the phyiso work. I ramped up my mileage carefully over the winter. I cross-trained like a mad man. I built a pretty strong base. I threw in some hill & tempo work. And I even added some track intervals recently to sharpen my speed. But, despite all my hard/smart work, my spring racing season has been nothing short of a bust.

I’ve signed up for, and run, a bunch of big races with top-notch runners to help push me to achieve the success that I was hoping for. But instead of stringing together a handful of PR’s it’s been one PW after another. For some reason, I just can’t seem to get on track and these races (and racers) have passed me by like I’m standing still. Just sitting by the side of the road watching the world go by and helpless to do anything about it. Honestly, it’s been more of a tourist season than a racing season.

Double Trouble

I ran two races in consecutive weekends (one almost exactly twice as long as the other) but both with nearly the same result - The Bedford Rotary 12k & The Pineland Farms 25k.  Two races, so different in character yet so similar in feel that it was almost like they were the same event.  This blurred together race - let’s call it “Bedland” (or better yet “Pineford”) - was the start of what I hoped would be a late spring/early summer string of success, building upon the quality training that I’ve been doing recently.  Unfortunately (I seem to use that word a lot these days) this was not the case.