I'm pretty sure if there were a worst Sunday night in the year, the Sunday night after Thanksgiving would be it. You have spent the last four days living a life that was as far from reality as could be. One of the days was spent traveling, one was spent being a fatty, one was spent pepper-spraying other people to save $10 on a video game, and the past two days were really centered around generally being as unproductive as possible. Now Sunday night is staring you in the face and you have to pull yourself out of a four-day bender or food coma (depending on your preferences) and get ready for work the next morning. Yippee-hi-yay.

Luckily, there is an American tradition that provides some solace in a ingesting 4,000 calories in one sitting: the Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot. I have no idea how it started and am too lazy to search the interwebs, but the thought goes that if you spend some time Thanksgiving morning to run a 5K (and burn ~300 calories), you can then justify whatever debauchery you engage in the rest of the day. Lancaster, California, where my fiancee lives, is no different. Sponsored by the local YMCA, this event is as hometown as hometown can get: there were no markings on the course (which resulted in me running much longer than expected), the bibs were two-hole punched index cards, and your time was set by the announcer as you crossed the finish line. But still, at the end of the day, it was actually a lot of fun.

I came into the race with no real expectations. I ran a 60K last weekend, I have a 50K this weekend, and I haven't done any speedwork in months. On top of that, I only traveled with my trail shoes so ended up running in NB MT101s across city streets. However, this is a small-town race, so there is always the hope of something good happening.

As to be expected, there was a mad dash at the start, with dozens of 12-year olds sprinting ahead of me for the first half-mile. Once they became gassed, the lead group became a tall guy who ran in college, two high school xc kids, and myself. The actual runner in the group decided to take off and breeze through a sub 16 min 5K if you take out the fact we all ran somewhere around 3.4 miles. I was still running with the high schoolers around mile three when there's a certain amount of innate pride that kicked in - I just can't let myself be beat by a 17 year old. I felt a little bad about outkicking him in front of his friends, parents, and grandma (I met them all afterwards and they were really nice), but that feeling faded pretty quickly... 

Finished in a very slow 19:20ish, good for 2nd place overall. There was even a local newspaper quote from me but somehow the Antelope Valley Press decided to put all of its articles behind a pay wall (even NYT gives 15 free articles!)
Picked up a pain on the top of my foot, though, which is unfortunate. One week until my last major race of the year!

Remember a few weeks ago when I whined about running a race around Central Park twice? I apparently have a very short memory of pain. Although this trait has served me very well in relationships, it also leads me to situations like yesterday, when I found myself on the 8th of 9 loops around Central Park muttering explicatives every couple of steps.

Let me take a quick step back. I skipped a fall marathon this year to focus on finishing my season with the North Face Endurance Challenge 50K trail race in San Francisco. A week ago, I realized that my longest recent “long run” was somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 miles, which is less than ideal. As with most everything I do, I ended up way overcompensating by signing up for the Knickerbocker 60K (37.3 miles) as a prep run. This is the equivalent to running a 30-mile long run two weeks before a marathon, just like what’s recommend in all of the training plans. Oh, wait, no plans recommend that. Because that would be really, really stupid.

Whoever designed this course must have had limited imagination and knees of steel. The race consists of a quick 1.5 mile out and back followed by nine loops of the 4-mile inner trail in Central Park, all asphalt. Luckily we went clockwise so did not have to run up Cat Hill each loop but that’s about the only positive development. Support consisted of two stations with Gatorade and water stations, with some volunteers handing out bananas and bagels on each lap. Some helpful fans put out some snacks along the side of the road, but I made the mistake of picking up the cup filled with frozen gummy bears. I’m pretty sure I burned through more calories trying to chew them than I gained.

As for the race, much props go out to my friends who ran a few laps with me and kept the boredom to a minimum. Leland (laps 2-6) and Joel (laps 8-9), you guys were unbelievably helpful. There’s not much I can describe about the race, actually. We ran in circles. A lot of circles. With 427! entrants (where do these crazies come from?) you start to lap people pretty quickly and soon lose track of who’s ahead of you and who’s behind. The crowd was surprisingly large for such a long race, with fans holding up such helpful slogans like "Didn't I just see you?" and "Almost there!" I was able to hold a pretty reasonable pace through a marathon (~3:05 with a bathroom break) and then pretty much fell off a cliff.

4-mile lap times:

Lap 1: 28:24
Lap 2: 28:13
Lap 3: 28:13
Lap 4: 27:50
Lap 5: 28:37
Lap 6: 28:37
Lap 7: 30:42
Lap 8: 30:03
Lap 9: 32:35
Lap 10: 32:34

The only real racing happened on the last lap, where myself and the 5th place finisher and I took turns cramping/walking and passing each other. I managed to finish fourth overall in a 4:38:05. If I didn’t manage to injure myself through this experience, I have at least mentally prepped myself for the pain I’ll experience in two weeks. Whoo!

This is also the first time I tracked nutrition. The only problem with nutrition is that I honestly have no idea what I need. Hopefully over time I’ll figure out a formula that works. For this race, I had a bottle of liquid cement (6 scoops of Perpetuem in a water bottle), 4 gels, two tabs of Nuun I ate straight, and two cups of Gatorade Endurance Formula every lap.

The total amount I ingested while running is a bit surprising once I summed it up. Total intake (by hour):
Calories: 1,600 (355)
Protein: 21g (4.6)
Caffeine: 275mg (60)
Sodium: 3,850mg (850)
Potassium: 1,345mg (290)

That’s even more sodium than a bowl of Instant Ramen. Scary. I would have also tested positive for caffeine. Although the NCAA legal limit for caffeine is absurdly low, at 15 micrograms per mL. In laymen’s terms, that means anything more than ~6oz of drip coffee would push you above the limit.

Will give more thought to this at a later date. For now, time to be a lazy fatty for a few days. That’s the true reward for punishing your body like this.

A groundbreaking news of seismic proportions occurred last week within the world of prep triathlete and running nerds. I mean this in total seriousness. It would be as if Big Papi signed with the Yankees during free agency, Kobe joining the Celtics, or Neil Patrick Harris to reveal that he’s straight after all. Oh wait… (72%! who would've thought?)

Lukas Verzbicas, the prep running and triathlon phenom (he ran a sub 4 mile in high school and just won the World Junior Triathlon Championships) decided to leave the University of Oregon track/cross country team two week before their regional meet to pursue triathlon full-time at the US National Training Center in Colorado. The interwebs have been buzzing since around how this was a terrible decision and how he left his team down. On the running forums, people were obviously heartbroken. Surprisingly, many were against this decision on the triathlon forums as well.

This got me thinking – well, why? There is a huge backlash against the NCAA right now for exploiting the health of “revenue generating” athletes (football and basketball). They are risking their future to earn enormous amounts of money for a system, all under the guise of “amateurism”. Charles Pierce explains this much better than I can here. Obviously, running cross country has significantly less risk of a life-threatening injury, but the same argument can apply here as well. If you train under a bad system, coach, or conditions, you can do permanent damage to yourself and your ability to run fast down the road and therefore your future earning potential. 

So point one: Lukas is presented an opportunity at age 18 to go “pro,” to earn a living as an athlete instead of earning nothing as a college-sponsored athlete. Keep in mind that he is still going to be attending college in Colorado, just now that he is not competing for a school he can be paid. Wait, that sounds strangely like… I don’t know, a job? Computer scientists, artists, spoken word performers, Lady Gaga can all get paid to do what they’re good at without losing their scholarships. Why do we single out athletes?

Now to point two: People are angry at Lukas for quitting his team before an important Regionals meet that might determine if the team is heading to Nationals. Lukas leaving is clearly going to hurt his team’s chances, but should cross country or track ever be considered a team sport? I don’t think so. Yes, there is a group of young men who like to wear matching ugly green singlets and short shorts who run together every week. Yes, you can wax poetically about the camaraderie, training support, and inspiration from one member to another, but at the end of the day, each person is running by themselves against everyone else in the race. A true team sport requires significant reliance upon the others on your team during competition for your success.

Obviously football, basketball, baseball, hockey, cricket apply. Tour de France style cycling qualifies. Tennis barely eeks in there, but only through doubles play (round robin a plus). Wrestling? No. Golf? Not unless it’s scramble/best ball. Swimming? Nope. Relays don’t count because you’re not directly helping your teammate during the event. The only way cross country qualifies is if it becomes full-contact and you can block out scrawnier runners from passing as a group. Which, by the way, would make the sport far more fun to watch.

My whole point here is that Lukas shouldn’t be faulted for quitting a team that’s not really a team to begin with, and for pursuing his American right to make a living. Now for him to run 80 miles a week and still gain the freshman 15 in two months? You can make fun of him all you want for that.

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I bet when you saw that I put up a new race report on Tuesday that the race must have occurred over the weekend. But the joke's on you as this race happened over a month ago. Take that, 24-hour news cycle!

Luckily I have the memory of an elephant in addition to the procrastination ability of a college freshman so here goes...

I guess in some way it makes sense. Central Park’s loop is around six miles long. A half marathon is 13.1 miles long. So why don’t we make these lemmings run twice around the park and call it a long-course race!

Only the problem is that I run parts of the loop pretty much every single day, which causes this race to feel like a long, endless slog. Let me explain.

There are three stages of a half-marathon. The first four miles are fun. You feel strong, your adrenaline is still pumping, and there are all of these people around. You will probably go out too fast and pay for it later, but in the moment, you feel unstoppable. Miles 4-8 are what I would call “paying the bills”. You just go through the miles like it’s your job. It shouldn’t hurt yet, but your breathing starts to be labored.

The last 5.2 miles alternate between wanting to drop out, avoiding cramps, and counting 200 paces in your head (which results in approximately half a mile of distraction), over and over again. One of the usual saving graces is that you don’t know what’s coming up ahead. Every little distraction counts.

Back to the race. Now imagine if you are running 13.1 miles on a treadmill but are forced to just stare at the distance counter through the entire time. You can’t put a towel over the numbers and be pleasantly surprised 2 miles later. You can’t put on a TV show. When you run through Central Park hundreds of times you know where every turn happens, how high every hill is, where the horse dropping tend to pile up. During this race, I had no solace in new terrain or visual distractions. It was just the same route I always run, but more painful.

So the same pattern held this race. I started way too fast, stabilized, and went to a dark place. Mile 8 started the decline, continued with a slow mile on the downhill, and it started getting worse and worse until I somehow pulled it together in the end.  It started with a word from my Harriers teammate suggesting that we catch up to the guy in front of us in the middle of mile 11. Somehow that comment woke up something inside of me (or the caffeinated gel shot finally kicked in) and I managed to speed up significantly in the last two miles, passing an Asian guy from North Brooklyn Runners to be the first Asian across the finish line. Yes, I just went there. Even a water girl noticed and gave me a shout-out about that one.

Finished a little behind my PR, but given the difficulty of the course and my lack of speedwork leading up to the race, I was very satisfied with my performance.

Mile splits:
(5:35, 5:54, 5:47, 5:53, 6:06, 5:46, 5:50, 6:10, 5:56, 6:04, 6:07, 5:38, 6:18)