ugggghhhh, had a horrific week of training...bleccchhh
but in the vain of 'the older we get, the faster we were' I instead share a mini-memoir of days which I wrote while watching a whole lotta NFL earlier this afternoon:
400 x 400 with zero recovery? What are you, nuts???
Ever since I was maybe age 15, I thought that the concept of running 100 miles was just so unfathomably mind-bending. In my early thirties, as I hadn't run at PR level in more than 10 years, I did what all runners eventually do...you move up. Most of the time that means moving up from the 800 to 1500, or maybe from the mile to the 5,000...even perhaps from 10,000 to the marathon. As the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the single most influential book in my life as a young boy, it was only 'natural' that I'd move up from the 26.2 mile event to the (gulp) hundred miler. But I wasn't going for any of that goofy trail stuff with canyons and mountains and crap, oh no. I wanted it to be accurate and precise with splits and lanes etc... and in the laboratory-like setting of the one quarter mile track.
I'm not sure exactly how or when I got this obviously knuckleheaded notion...perhaps there had been some tequila involved. But, at any rate, I started going down to my local high school oval (a hard packed and perfectly groomed clay number at Tamalpais HS in Mill Valley, CA) and running first a three hour run. Two weeks later I did a dizzying four hours and a week after that I lapped that bad boy for 40 miles...measured by one of those shiny silver hand held counters...because I couldn't find my abacus. After that 'experience' I declared myself "ready"
So, the latest issue of UltraRunning Magazine which I subscribed to (but of course read just casually, and only then after having digested the entirety of the most recent Track & Field News from cover to cover) listed the Redwood Empire 24 Hours Track Race which would be taking place in just another two weeks time. But you had to bring your own lap counters who would be required to record the cumulative time of each and every circuit run...if they missed a lap, c'est la vie, you had to run another. So, I hornswaggled my pal Hollis W. Lenderking lll to be my official lap counter and promised to pay him afterwards in all of the Mexican food he could eat (and an equivalent amount in margaritas...but of course).
That March 1991 race day arrives, and I wake up in my little apartment atop San Francisco's famed Hayes Street Hill to the sound of rain. I mean it was dumping down buckets. So, I stuff a few extra layers into my duffle, grab that blue plastic thermos filled with the highest octane java I could muster, and proceed towards the start line, a mere hour's drive north. With windshield wipers slappin' time and KFOG on the FM radio channel, I spent the next sixty minutes convincing myself that it'd clear up by race time. It did not.
Just thirty eight degrees Fahrenheit and 100% humidity greeted the less than 20 oddballs to the Santa Rosa Junior College track. The good news was we weren't going to get lost. The bad news was that lane one resembled the flippin' Susquehanna god damned River.
Gun goes off (actually a blast from a bullhorn) at exactly 8 a.m. ...and MF goes straight into the lead, running seven something pace while lapping the field early and often. My 'ambition' was to run 14 hours. The precipitation hadn't yet lifted, and whilst I was donned in a GoreTex jacket, everything else that I wore was nylon and cotton. Needless to say, I became waterlogged and way too squishy before my lap counter had even raised the 95 (miles) to go card. I was extraordinarily fortunate to have really really generous friends in attendance, who, entirely of their own accord, took the sopping wet apparel that I shed, to the local laundromat that was conveniently situated just 7 or 8 blocks away. By noon o'clock, I was well beyond the marathon mark and still running strong. Passed through 50 miles in 6 hours 49 minutes plus a handful of spare change. Aside from a few blisters and chafed thighs, I was still more or less in one piece.
This personal 'Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' was largely an attempt to understand how a brain, more specifically, my very own cerebellum, might react to extraordinary stress. In my estimation, the only way to comprehend such, would be to place one's self right smack into such a predicament. Somewhere around 65 miles in, I was afforded the opportunity to begin peeling that onion. It became evident that my goal time was a thing of the past and with it, so was a ton of motivation and purpose. I opted to persevere solely to hear the self-talk that one would never have had the opportunity to witness unless exposed to such circumstances. The good angel on my left shoulder argued continuously with the cancerous cherub on my right. I not so vividly recall being beyond the 80 mile mark at well past dusk and just laughing out loud for nearly an entire lap...at a notion that was something along the lines of "...and you know that this is all entirely voluntary, right??".
Approaching ninety miles and with 'just' 40 revolutions remaining, I could feel the blood pooling in my right Nike Air Skyon. What had been a pristine white shoe when I left my SF bachelor pad at zero dark thirty, was now crimson red. When I glanced down to validate that which I had suspected, my first reaction was "SO cool".
About an hour before midnight, at a point in which I was WAY over drinking any more of that lemon lime flavored Cytomax iccck, a friend teasingly offered me a sip of their brandy-laden hot coffee...not only did I agree to a taste, I refused to give that cup back...instead, it accompanied me until it had been fully consumed...perhaps just three quarters of a mile thereafter (true story). At 94 1/4 miles, I could feel the entire big toe nail on my right foot finally slide off and into my blood soaked sock. I laughed at the absurdity of it all and said to myself "self, you've only got five miles left to run...HA!"
At a little before 1 a.m. I found myself on the gun lap. Oh, and you shoulda' seen me kick. 16 hours and 42 minutes after starting my hamster exercise, I was all of a sudden no longer obligated to make another left hand turn. And how utterly righteous was that?
Moral of the story: Next time I even vaguely consider such a hair-brained feat, please please please just issue me a one way ticket to the nearest sanitarium. For that I shall be forever indebted.
PS I would not race again for nearly two months afterwards...and when I did, it was an All Comer's Meet 800 meters...lesson learned
