2019 3:20, And Beyond (Read 444 times)

Lauren - Sorry to hear about the suckage, but hey, PR and first week reg for that patriots day run is some compensation.

rovatti - Interesting week. It takes some determination to shift to substantial cross training when you have an injury.

ocramiroeb - Sounds like a plan. Shorter races are fun too, and you can do more of those.

mattw4jc - I agree that the cutoff may be around a minute next time, although we might get surprised again.

rlk - So how did the Bay to Breakers go? Hopefully you got lucky with the rain, as did we in our alternative race. As   for the weather, seriously WTF?

Ilana - Nice place you got there. Running camp? Heck yeah!

Today's race. The Tilden Tough Ten is always held on the same day as the Bay to Breakers but is otherwise somewhat different. It's a kinda-sorta trail race over hilly terrain along a ridge in the hills behind Berkeley. Actually 8 miles of it is on pavement, although the two that are not are pretty badass.

This year after a day and night of pretty  heavy rain, the RD declared that not only was the trail section now dangerous, but it was also inaccessible to vehicles so anyone slipping on the downhills and hurting themselves would be hard to rescue.    
    So the new plan was to run to the end of the pavement (4 miles), back a mile to a turnaround, to the end again, and back for a total of ten miles. Fortunately the number of runners is quite small so this crazy scheme worked quite well. The local cows did their best to make it more trail-y by trashing an aid station overnight and spreading a most excellent mud/water/poop slurry around on some sections of the trail. I had been been dithering over which shoes to wear, so happened to have my road flats with me which grip really well in the wet (unlike some over-hyped shoes I could mention).

I had a good race. I did skid on the slurry, but so did everyone. Did it in 75 minutes and change (Course PR with a big asterisk). One  of the dubious benefits of age is the amount of attrition in my age group due to injuries. For various reasons I am doing fewer miles and staying reasonably healthy, so If I show up and don't blow up I walk away with some sort of award. This race was the RRCA state 10 mile championship this year, so now I have a medal bearing this mouthful: State  Champion - Tilden Tough Ten - Male Senior Grand Master Champion 2019.

tl;dr: I won the 60-69 AG, not some chess match. My car-pool mate RB2 got the female version, so we were nicely symmetrical on the way home.

jim NICE! I'm all about big asterixs these days.

rlk I like the outfit for B2B. Looks like the ran came and went without affecting the race.

Lauren congrats. Sounds like you put it all out there and had a slightly better than me day with the finish result.

keen man...don't say that. 47 seconds is HOPEFULLY enough. I don't want to find out I need to break 3 at CIM to get in to Boston 2021. I'd have to hang out in a different thread and listen to Jmac tell me about how great the JD2Q training is. Probably to the point I do it trying to prove him wrong, and PR. Oh and I like how my niece says "tur-neigh-duh" with her North Carolina accent. "ITS A TUR-NEIGH-DUH!"

my week:

I was a useless POS for the most part. To the point I've decide to just quit drinking all together. I'd rather feel like I did after Mt Charleston and have it be from running than drinking. Oh and I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones. I hear its a good TV show people are getting in to. I need to get back into running this week and doing long Saturday runs. 40 miles should be possible. Maybe some trails. Oh and I hate vehicle electrical work but I want the passenger window of the jeep to roll up. Buying a new motor from Pick N Pull didn't solve the problem.

EDIT: https://www.dispatch.com/news/20190520/22-year-old-ohio-woman-dies-running-cleveland-marathon

This resonates with me. I'm wondering why she didn't just quit knowing how I felt for the last hour or so, and also what went wrong for her. Dew point plus humidity is a 120 which works for training but I feel like there is something else that happened. 22 year old college athlete collapses 1/4 mile from the finish and dies...something went MAJORLY wrong that day other than running a marathon in the heat.

From the article:

Hospital officials told Beacon Journal/Ohio.com news partner News 5 Cleveland that 60 to 70 racers were treated on site for “heat illnesses, dehydration, muscle strain and ortho injuries.”

Weather forecast: 60s with 85% humidity and a dew point of 59.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?edufilter=NULL&v=XqMa8bRFbv0

Lauren- for such a suckfest, that's a great PR, congrats!!! Hope you give it some time to settle in and forget the pain, but remember the PR

Jim- "senior grand master"! I like that! Do you play chess?

Congrats on the race and distinguishing award! Bummer about the rearranged course, but totally warranted.

We too got SOOOO lucky with weather. Holy cow. I got briefly poured on during my warmup down to the start, so my socks were wet the whole day, but then the sky opened up and the day was beautiful. The race was fun (not race effort for me - a centipede is only as fast as its 13th runner) and the reaction to costumes is always awesome. I'll post some photos later. Ah, and ended up saying a few words on NBC >_<

brew- thanks! yeah, i thought about you and how it was a bummer you missed out since it ended up being nice here after all. But I'm sure the journey here still would've been rough adn not worth it. I hear Squaw got a foot of snow on Saturday...

Thanks folks! S'pose a PR is a PR no matter how you slice it, and the BotswanaQ minus five gets you into the 4/20 race no matter how junky and depressed you feel while you're getting it, lol.

Dwave - they were just awfully expensive shoes to jog a marathon in, is all! If I could have gazed into the future to see how my day would go, I'd have saved my coin and just run in one of my trusty long run/workout shoes. I'll get a couple more marathons out of them so I guess it's not really a waste! And I did PR even though my bad race math had me thinking that was out of the question at one point, so wearing the Tracksmith kit wasn't a waste either (usually race in club colors, but was going for PR bonus money with Tracksmith).

Lauren - Nice RR. Which revenge race are you targeting?

DWave - Sorry to have preemptively one-upped you. Solid week, though!

Ace - How's all the trail running treating you? "Only" 2 ticks. yuck.
I'll try to take care of those deer strides for you tomorrow.

The first day with weather that threatened tornadoes passed yesterday. There was a rare pair of sister tornadoes that dropped down in the country ~10 miles from me, but they were baby tornadoes and didn't last long or really do any damage to even crops/livestock. We did get plenty of rain though, along with some hail - no damage to us, thankfully. Some low-lying areas, especially ones near a creek or a lake, flooded and several houses ended up at least partially underwater.

Good workout today on the treadmill as I watched what should be the last of this round of storms pass by.

Thanks folks! CK - Baystate Marathon in Lowell MA on 10/20. Cheap, flat and fast, close to home, not too big or too small! And two loops, so if I go out hard and totally blow up I can DNF after 13 lol.

That's why Erie was so great, somehow seemed even flatter on the second loop.