Marathons

“I think I have the speed now,” I mused to a friend a few days before the 2007 St. George Marathon. “It remains to be seen if I have the endurance.”

Six days prior to the event, I did my first race in over two months — the Trailblazer 10k. In that 10-kilometer run, I was speedy enough to finish seventh overall and even win an age-group award — my first in any race where more than a couple hundred people were running. But 6.2 miles is a long ways from 26.2. The question was: Could I keep up a fast-enough pace for the last 20 miles? Continue reading »

“I am really interested to see how he does,” I said at the Eldora Park 8k race to Nick, who had just told me that Lance Armstrong aspired to run his first marathon in under 3 hours in New York today. “After all, I come from a cycling background too, and it was a real shock to discover just how difficult running a marathon actually is.”

Well, Lance did it: 2:59:36! Absolutely amazing considering that this was his first marathon and he did not even do a single training run longer than 16 miles. However, it did not come without pain. Continue reading »

Within my lifetime I would like to have run marathons in all 50 states in the U.S. So far I have done 13. Just 37 more to go! I figure, if I can continue doing a new state each year, I will have accomplished this by age 70… Continue reading »

Every once in a while, it seems, things don’t turn out the way one had expected.

No, I’m not talking about Iraq, although for the French-bashing war-mongers in D.C., that may hold true. Nor am I alluding to the Pittsburgh Steeler’s Cinderella march through the playoffs last year, even though that was a great victory!

Instead, I am referring to my training in the critical weeks before the 2006 Chicago Marathon. I was in California and desperately needed to get in a run (or two) lengthier than my long jaunt of 19 miles in Fort Collins. Twenty-four miles would have been good. However, as it turned out, my attempts to run in the San Francisco Bay Area proved to be disastrous as chronicled in this blog entry. Indeed, about the only good run I did out there was a wonderfully wooded run through the trails of Woodside with Alyssa the Sunday before the big race. Continue reading »

When I signed up for it on March 1st, the Pikes Peak Marathon seemed like as good of an idea to me as, say, the invention of the flushing toilet — as it probably was to the other 1000 folks who exuberantly charged $90 to their credit cards within the first 24 hours of online registration. After all, what could be more fun than running 26.2 miles up and down a mountain so high (14,000′) that trees cannot subsist in its oxygen-deprived environment, with lung-busting steepness and ankle-rolling singletrack replete with ruts and boulders?

“I dunno, golf?” you may sardonically reply. If you did, guess what — you might be correct! Or at least that is what I was thinking as gasped for air still one mile from the top and not even halfway through the race yet, shuffling my feet with the energy level of a 96-year-old man being helped through a convalescent hospital in his wheelchair. Continue reading »