Getting back to Boston

The hay is now officially in the barn. Dress rehearsal tonight -- put on the race togs, warmed up for two miles, two miles at GMP (or below), warm down for nearly three miles, then decided to do one more set of Hudson hills just because I still felt good. Wound up doing 7.09 in one hour, three seconds. The GMP miles were 7:50 and 7:45. If I could actually do 26.2 at that pace I'd run about 3:25. That ain't gonna happen, but maybe I can sustain 8:01 for 26.2. I'd take that (or take 8:14 for that matter; that would punch my ticket for Hopkinton 2011). But the work is done. Couple of jogs tomorrow and Thursday, drive over Friday, bust tail for 210 minutes Saturday morning.

The taper goes on. Hard to focus much on the race because work is so demanding, but I've been through this before too. Trying to hydrate, get carbs, make sure my electrolytes are adequate, etc.  Tonight a very easy 4 before it got any colder -- 35 with a stiff wind. Ran it in long pants, earwarmers and gloves, and wished I hadn't had the long pants and possible the earwarmers. I think I'll be fine Saturday in what I plan to wear, and I might even ditch the longsleeved tech shirt. Anyway, off to Bryant tomorrow after work. Have to pack and make sure everything's washed and ready tonight.

Easy afternoon jog before departure for Bryant and then Memphis. I'm ready. Man, I hope I'm ready.

This blog started in 2008 with a dream -- that a gray-haired, not particularly athletic 47-year-old from Arkansas could somehow whip his old body into shape, finish a marathon in less than four hours, then maybe, just maybe, manage to qualify for the Holy Grail of marathoning: Boston.

Today, December 5, 2009, I can report, with considerably more justification than a certain grandstanding politician had on an aircraft carrier one day, "Mission accomplished." Spiderpig is going to Boston in 2011.

It wasn't easy. Nothing athletic for me ever has been. In this case, my left hamstring and right gastroc locked up simultaneously at mile 23.5, and for a few seconds, while I was hopping around, I thought this chance was out the window too. But it eased up enough to resume running at a decent pace. Not fast enough to qualify as a 49-year-old for 2010 in a race that's already full, but fast enough for 2011 as a 50-year-old. Finished 269th overall, 226th among men, 40th in AG.

Thanks to Sasha for providing this place to blog, and for some well-timed encouragement last year that made me think maybe I could get to Hopkinton after all. And I've had plenty of other encouragement, from my training partners in Little Rock, my online friends here and on Facebook and runnersworld.com, but mainly from the long-suffering woman who married me in 1984 and has put up with my ill temper, my mistakes, my multiple bouts of unemployment and lately, a two-year obsession with qualifying for a 26-mile race in eastern Massachusetts.

What am I gonna obsess over now? Dunno. I'll find something, I always do. But it won't be getting that BQ. I got that one checked off my list.

Very slow 4.5 tonight. Amazingly, the stuff that hurt during the race Saturday didn't hurt at all. It was other things, mainly the left calf, that hurt.

I have to re-evaluate my priorities now. I've been so obsessed with qualifying for Boston that other things in my life have been pushed aside, and I have to deal with those issues now. I'll still run, but its importance goes way down for a few months.

No running tonight, just some thoughts on what has happened.

I sacrificed a lot to do what I did Saturday. So many hours, so many miles (I estimate nearly 4,800 miles since July 8, 2007, when this process began), so many pairs of shoes and socks and shorts and singlets and bottles of Gatorade and GU and even an extremely unpalatable jar of HEED. So much pasta and oatmeal. Running in the dark and the rain and the snow and the summer heat. Running 16 miles on a treadmill. Running 22 miles in 75-degree weather. All in quest of something that most people don't understand. They can't grasp running a marathon, even if they know it's 26.2 miles. Some of them can't grasp running ONE mile. Not only running that far, but competing, trying to get faster, trying for a goal -- a goal that says I'm not just mediocre, that I'm someone that other runners can respect and even emulate.

It is estimated that 450,000 people in the United States finish a marathon each year. No way to accurately estimate how many of those are one and done, and how many do multiples (like my two per year for the past two years). Obviously, there are way more one and dones, people checking an item off their bucket list, than there are people like Larry Macon, the guy who ran 105 marathons in 2008. Let's say just for the sake of argument that 400,000 people complete marathons. If there are enough people like me, not to mention Larry Macon, that's a little high. If it's almost all one and done, it's a little low.

Of those, 20,000 can qualify for Boston; 5,000 get in by other means, charity entries, local governments, sponsor bibs, special invites. That means, given my unscientific estimate, that 5% of American marathoners are going to run in Boston in a given year. Jim Fortner, who may have done more research on American marathoning than anyone else, estimates that, taking Boston itself out of the equation because of its size and the fact that 80% of the field has already proven itself capable of BQ times, slightly over 10% of American marathon finishes meet BQ standards. (Jim's numbers do not take into account people who did exactly what I have done -- post a time as a 49-year-old that will qualify me for Boston in a year when I move up to the next age group -- so they may be a little low. He believes that in certain divisions, that factor may increase the number of qualifiers by up to 20% -- which would still only increase the BQ rate to 11-12%). His research showed that in 226 US marathons with at least 100 finishers on USATF certified courses (again excluding Boston) over a three-year period, there were an average of 39,000 BQ times per year.

Since some of those are very talented runners who post multiple BQ times, you can extrapolate that probably 10% or less of marathon finishes are BQs. And of those, less than half actually run Boston, because of the foreign runners whose only competition on US soil is on Patriots Day. You start to understand now why Boston sold out so quickly the last two years -- perhaps 40-44,000 BQ times and only 20,000 available spots. High demand, low supply, first come, first serve. My application goes in on the first possible day, I promise you. I am not going to be shut out.

Anyway, through hard work (and perhaps a tiny amount of talent from which I managed to scrape the detritus of years of neglect), I have managed to wedge myself into that 10%, and, if I get in early enough for the first come first serve, one of those coveted 20,000 spots. Stealing a line from the Marines, I am now one of the few and the proud. I am not mediocre. And I think other runners who are aware of what I have done, respect it. I may not be as fast as Ryan Hall or Sammy Wanjiru, or even my sub-3 Facebook friends Leah Thorvilson and Chuck Engle, but I'm a competent, competitive marathoner, in the upper quartile of my age group even in relatively big races like Memphis, and in the upper quintile overall.

My family has also sacrificed for me. I have spent hundreds of hours on the road and the treadmill that I could not spend with them. I regret that my family is unable to share running with me, but due to physical limitations, they cannot participate. I think that, because of running, I have become easier to live with, and my wife has told me that she agrees. Not that I'm EASY to live with, just easiER. And my single-minded focus on this quest has added some stresses for my family as well. I wish in retrospect that I had approached this in a more well-rounded way, but it's too late now. I did what I did, and I have to live with the consequences -- and make amends for them. And that's where I am, moving on from where I am to where I want to be in ways other than getting my time into BQ territory.

I do believe that was the coldest run I ever ran in 49-plus years. Twenty degrees, wind chill of 8. Felt like my cheeks were going to freeze. Good thing I had about everything else bundled up. Ran faster than I wanted (9:04 average) because it was too darn cold to be running slow out there. Legs felt pretty good, considering I'm four days out from a BQ. Or maybe my face hurt worse than my legs.

Legs seem to be coming around nicely. Ran 4.22 tonight at a decent pace and legs didn't hurt at all. They're still a little heavy; I don't think I could go out now, say, and run 13.1 in less than two hours. But the twinges are gone.

Tonight takes me over 2,400 miles for the year. Which makes my yearly totals 2,400 miles, four PRs, two marathons and a BQ (and a partridge in a pear tree!) I should be able to get another 100 miles in the next three weeks without too much difficulty to get more over 2500 for the year. Had I not wasted most of September with illness amd moving, I would have easily topped 2,600 (and might well have overtrained for Memphis, so it probably worked out better this way).

Another nice chilly day for a run. I'm in shorts and a T, another runner was in full sweatsuit, hoodie and all. Legs remain kinda heavy, especially since I had a little more uphill stuff going today than I've had so far this week. Maintained a decent 9:49 pace, nothing too stressful. I got plenty of time to worry about getting fast. Just want to maintain my fitness while I recover.

Not quite sure what to make of tonight's run, Felt on Saturday I was coming down with one of my usual post-marathon URIs, plus it rained some, so skipped that day's run. Sunday didn't feel any better, maybe worse, and again decided discretion was the better idea at this point, only eight days out from a marathon and with nothing looming on the racing front. Again skipped last night, although I felt better. Tonight, decided to go ahead and run.

Went out about 8:45, after dinner with wife and son and catching up on some mail that long since needed to be sorted and dealt with. With wind chill in the teens, and the Garmin not charged up, decided to run by feel and hammer it because it was too cold out there to dawdle. I really thought during the run that I was roughly at Memphis MP; that's what the effort really felt like. So I got back from roughly 6.5 miles in 55 minutes. That's a nice pace, but not MP. I know that the JBH loop is considerably hillier, up and down, than anything I found in Memphis, but still the effort level on flat terrain felt very similar, and the legs really felt pretty good for 10 days out from a 26.2 PR.

I think, URI or not, three days off was probably a pretty good idea to accelerate the recovery from the race. It may allow me to avoid some of the dead-leg stuff I felt last Memphis '08 and after Newport.

Five nice and easy tonight. I was still quite sore this morning from last night's apparently-not-quite-MP run, so there was no thought of pushing anything hard tonight. Weather was quite a bit more comfortable; ditched the gloves and was quite all right in short sleeves and track pants. Coulda ditched the headband too, probably. Probably just gonna do easy runs for the next couple of weeks, with no race in the immediate future. Just maintain base level of fitness until I pick a target 5K or something. I was reading Hudson's chapter on 5K training last night briefly and will peruse it further as a target race is selected.

Taking the night off in favor of early bedtime after a poor night's sleep last night, but will do some further ruminating here.

Big debate on RWOL about Boston 2010 filling up early and what if anything should be done about it. The marathoning snobs tend to push for tougher standards, which makes no sense to me. If there are 40,000 qualifying times in the US each year, but only 20,000 people get into Boston, that tells me that the standards are not a big issue here; there are plenty of people whose times are well below BQ minimums that aren't running. Others want a bigger field, which makes more sense if the logistics are there. My sense, not having run in Boston yet but having read reports and seen the streets in Hopkinton and Ashland firsthand, is that there's not really any place to put extra runners.

Jim Fortner, known on RWOL as Jim2, has done a lot of research on BQ, using data culled from MarathonGuide.com over a three-year period in more than 200 American marathons run on USATF-certified courses with more than 100 finishers. His figures are that in those races, about 10.7% of all finishing times meet BQ standards. However, he does not include people like me, who are still in one age group but have run a qualifying time for the next age group. He thinks this factor may increase the number of qualifiers by 10-20% in certain age groups. But even at that, you're talking 11-12% of all finishes meeting the BAA standards.

Eleven or 12 percent. Not many, and because some fortunate/talented people run multiple BQ times each year, actually may overstate how many people are fast enough to get in. That's why Boston is such a prize to marathoners -- because it's hard to get there. It may have been SLIGHTLY easier for me as a 49-year-old than it would have been as a 30-year-old, but it's still hard. Jim2's research shows that Memphis from 2006-2008 averaged a 14.5% BQ rate for male finishers -- better than many, but still only one out of seven finishers. This year, only 11.2%. Newport's men averaged 26.5% (but that was with the old, unintentionally short course; with the new, 26.2 mile course in 2009, it was 25.4% -- and I was in the other 74.6%). Also, in 2008, 15% of men's finishes in the 45-49 bracket (mine) were fast enough to get in, the highest percentage of any age group below age 65, which undoubtedly reflects that 10-minute jump from the 40-44 qualifying time to the 45-49 time. The 50-54 group, where I will be running in 2011, has a rate of 13.4%.

So, by various BQ-related measurements, I am now in the top quintile of American male marathoners, perhaps higher. I guess what prompted this topic was an old article from Running Times I came across last night. It followed three decent marathoners as they worked to qualify for Boston in, I think, 2006. All three trained very diligently, but only one of the three qualified for Boston. And, in a pre-publication update, although the other two made further progress, neither one had reached their goal. I trained diligently, also had my missteps as the two nonqualifiers in the RT article did, but I got there.

Am I crazy? Running 11 miles, 13 days after a marathon on very little sleep, in a singlet and shorts? Probably. But that's what I did tonight (any typos can be blamed on frozen fingers). Planned to do 5 or so, but legs felt good, it didn't seem TOO cold (yet) so I just kept going,

Legs were quite stiff this morning after last night's 11, so decided to go out in the snowflakes (sparse, but snowflakes none the less) for an easy 4. Put the tights on for the first time this season. Wished Santa had already brought me a balaclava or whatever those face/head coverings are called; the wind and my cheeks do not get along. Anyway, took about 2.5 miles to get the kinks out, so the run achieved its purpose.

Waited out a GI episode before I finally left at 3:15 for my run, and darn near yurped during the run. In spite of that, run went well. Even switched things up to go UP, not down, the two biggest hills in this part of town (well, went up and down one of them), and the last big uphill I semi-pushed. Anyway, did 7.22 in an hour-8. I see no need to really push things for a couple of weeks yet, so that was a perfectly adequate run, and I will continue to seek out hills frequently to get ready for Boston and/or St. George/CIM/whichever downhill marathon I fund.

Despite the nearly uncontrollable urge to come home from work and go to bed (which is still there), went out for a run. This time, 5.3, easy with a slight progression. Averaged 9:16, which is really faster than I thought, so maybe it was more than a slight progression. Not sure I didn't sleep through part of the run, though. At any event, old OCD is determined to get that 2500 by the end of the year.

Decided to push it a little bit tonight. Ran the first 6-plus at well under 9:00 pace, then took it up a notch on the last leg home. Turned out the last .7 was at sub-MP, which brought the overall average down to 8:33. If I can get to where this kind of pace is fairly easy, I'll be in good shape for St. George, Boston or anywhere else. Wasn't quite that easy tonight. I had no trouble maintaining it, but I was working to do it. Sweating pretty good, too, despite temps in probably the upper 40s.

Just for fun, plugged my half-marathon PR, which comes back as my best race result on the VDOT charts, into McMillan's calculator and hit the button. The predicted marathon time that came back was one second off my Memphis time. Then when I plugged in the Memphis time, the half time that came back was exactly what I ran in Conway 14 months ago. It did show that my 5K PR is a little soft, which does not surprise me given that I ran it under summerlike conditions, and that the 10K is a little softer, again no surprise given that I ran THAT in a thunderstorm and had to run some extra distance to dodge huge puddles in the road. But that gives me some targets for the spring and fall. Now I have to decide whether to focus on the shorter races for the spring, or just d general training and run a couple of marys just for fun. Need to decide something quick; the price for LRM goes up on 1/1/10.

Slow and easy tonight, largely just running out frustrations. I knew I had to work Saturday and Sunday, didn't realize that also meant Christmas Eve and Christmas. My fault for not clarifying with the boss. So now I may very well be here by mself, except for the time I'm working. Bah humbug. Anyway, knocked out another 5 and change tonight, getting ever closer to the 2500 mark. I'll average more than 48 miles a week for the year -- over 50 for the weeks I actually ran, since I can think of three-plus weeks skipped due to illness or moving or both.

Dashing through the snow, on a chilly Christmas day, o'er the fields I go, slipping sliding away, Nose like Rudolph's gleamed, dripping all the way, took me 1:43 to run, 10.5 today.

OK, so I'm not a poet and I know it. I still quadrupled (at least) my lifetime mileage of snow/ice running today, after working at the nursing home, cooking Christmas dinner myself and playing snow games with the reluctant cats.

Back out into the snow today for 7.6. Kind of a progression run, not intentionally but just got going faster as the run went on. Got to try out new mid-layer running top with LED light attached semi-permanently to the sleeve, plus reflectors. Also bought a balaclava but didn't try that (yet). Ice had subsided greatly, not entirely gone on the JBH trail but easy enough to go around, so it was a lot less treacherous than last night's run.

Miserable day for a run. Gray, cold, windy, got increasingly so of all of the above as the run went on. Legs didn't feel good. PLanned 12. In spite of all that, did 12 at sub-9 pace. Wouldn't have done that two years ago for sure, maybe not 18 months. I'm tougher now. I'm also withing striking distance of 2500.

Felt like I was coming down with something last night, so took the night off. Didn't feel much if any better today, but with NYD looming, need to get those last few miles to get to 2500. So I did almost 5 tonight before the expected snow hits in a couple of hours. Actually felt better than I thought I would; breathing was OK, although the legs were a little achy as if I had/have the flu. But had no trouble maintaining a respectable recovery-type pace. Now less than 8 miles to the 2500 level.

Felt much better this morning, so I took Tyler to visit his friend Sean this afternoon and went for a run on the River Trail while they were visiting. Felt really weird to be back on that stretch of trail after more than three months' absence. Was able to run a nice negative split -- 9:20 pace on the outward leg, 8:21 on the inward, then a cooldown jog after I got back to the car. Total 10.37. Finished the year at 2502 miles and change, on 302 runs. Another goal checked off.