When I was at the Crim Race yesterday in Flint, I couldn’t help but notice how upbeat everybody was, particularly in the finish area and at the post-race party. Yes, it was just about a perfect day for a race, but beyond that, road races generally seem to bring out the best in everybody, and that fact helps motivate me, and everybody else who works in this race, to devote the countless hours that it takes every year to put together the CCRR.


Especially during the last few weeks leading up to the race, almost all of my “free” time is taken up with race related tasks. I’m occasionally inclined to whine about not having enough time for myself, but then I think about what it was like watching everybody cross the finish line last year. I even got a few hugs from some very happy, but sweaty people, which was just fine with me.


When everything comes together on race day, there’s a general consensus on the part of everybody in our organization that the effort is well worth while. We bring a large number of people into town. They all seem to have fun while improving their fitness. All of us, both participants and organizers, help to raise funds for the Impression 5 Science Center, and just about everybody leaves feeling good about themselves as well as the community they have just visited.


I’ve been involved with the world of running far longer than I want to reveal, so my perspective may be bit biased, but I can’t think of anything that is bad about running, and about races in particular. We’re making great progress on this CCRR race and are looking forward to providing everybody a great running (or walking) experience on September 26.  Hopefully, those of you who will be running or walking are as fired up as we are.


Dick Miles

CCRR Co-Race Director

Today’s blog is essentially a shameless press release. So there you go: I may pass Blogging 101 yet.

This weekend is the Lifetime Fitness Chicago Triathlon, and I’m maxing it out.  I’ll be racing their Triple Challenge, which comprises three triathlons in two days, and that may be the easy part. I’ll spend most of the rest of the weekend signing copies of my book “Trizophrenia: Inside the Minds of a Triathlete” and just about anything else anyone wants signed, short of legal documents and certain body parts.

I’ll also have Frazz materials there to sign (the three collections are sold out, but we might have new ones printed in time for this weekend; it’s a long shot, but I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t learn to believe in long shots), and of course if you already have a Frazz book, bring it in and I’ll be happy to vandalize it.

Here’s my schedule:

Friday, Aug. 27, I’ll be signing and talking from 4:30-5:30 pm at the expo. That’s at the Hilton, on 720 S. Michigan Ave, and I’ll be happily camped out at the Fleet Feet Sports booth. Fleet Feet will have a whole bunch of copies of Trizophrenia for sale.

Saturday morning, I’m off in the first wave of the Fleet Feet (they’re everywhere! They’re also awesome) Supersprint, swimming 375 meters, cycling 16 kilometers and running 2.5K. Then it’s back to the Fleet Feet booth at the expo, where I’m signing again from 2-3 pm.

Sunday morning, I’m off in the first wave of the Lifetime Fitness Sprint (750 meter swim, 22K bike and 5K run) at 6:00 am. At 9:12 am, in the last wave of the amateurs, I start the other Lifetime Fitness race, the Olympic- or international-distance triathlon (1500M, 40K, 10K) and should be done in time to watch the pros start their race at noon.

Between and around races, you can look for me in the Fleet Feet “lounge” tent near the start/finish. They’re very kindly letting me hang out there, which is wonderful. I’ve got a place to keep my gear and call home, and I’ll be easy for you guys to find. I’ll be more than happy to mingle there, too. And their merchandise tent, stocked with plenty of Trizophrenias, will be right next to us.

Please come out and say hi! It will be quite a scene all by itself – it’s the world’s largest triathlon, after all, and it’s downtown Chicago, after all – and I’m really looking forward to seeing you.

I know that I sure didn't last week!!! I was such a slacker last week I only walked 2 miles with the family and that is all I did. The sad part is I was okay with the 2 miles until I went to one of my son's friends birthday party at Impression 5 this weekend and all of the CCRR stuff was right up front. It was at that moment that I realized I might not be getting my dream time of 2:30:00. A 21 min improvement mean actually training and training hard. So I really don't have too much to report this week except I need to get my butt in to gear. Hopefully next week I will have some great news and a less busy life. Hahahaha. :)  (If anyone knows how to have a less busy life with being married, having 2 kids under 6 and a full-time job please let me know.)

Have a great week and get out there and run unlike me.

When I came to Mile 11 I was livid, because in my bleary exhaustion, I asked a volunteer where we were.  He said I was about to see the 12-mile marker.  He was off by a mile.

At Mile 12, I refused water because I knew if I stopped to drink, I wouldn't start again.

At Mile 13, I gave up on my goal of under two hours.  I just wanted to finish, to survive really.

As I approached the finish, I raised my hand to some clapping and couldn't focus on much else.  I crossed the finish line, took 10 steps and collapsed on a patch of grass and dirt.

It was there, at the finish of the 2009 Capital City River Run, that I swore I would never run a half-marathon again.

I lied.  Well, I actually changed my mind.

The reason I changed it was how my body responded to running this year.  To give you a little background, I have been running on a very amateur level for about six years.  I've run a few dozen 5Ks and improved my time in almost every single one, getting down from 29 minutes to 23.  I haven't run competitively much until the last two years where I've run a bunch of 5Ks, a 10K, two 10-mile races and a 10-mile trail run.

After last year's finish, I began this year at the Ronald McDonald Run for the House and ran a personal record and I was trying to take it easy.  It was that race that I learned how important pacing myself at the beginning of a race was.  From then on, I ran easier out of the gate and have not only improved my times, but had so much more energy to finish strong.  It's allowed me to train this year much better than last.  I had some knee pain last year that made long runs difficult.  It's not as bad this year and I enjoy the longer runs of seven, nine, 10 miles.  

It didn't take long for me to realize, I want to run the CCRR again.  And maybe even another half before the year is over!  Last year I ran one 10-mile race leading up to the CCRR and as many four and five-mile runs as my knee could handle.  I finished, like I said, and even accomplished my goal, running in 1:59:15, but struggled mightily.  I'm much more confident this year in my pacing and my overall fitness so I'm shooting for something much better.  I've improved from 1:24 to 1:21 in two 10-mile races and ran the trail run in 1:23, so I think a three-minute improvement is automatic. 

But I want to improve by 10 minutes! 

I think it's a pipe dream, but what the hell, right?  If I can run the CCRR in 1:50, I will do back flips (not right after the race).  If I train a little harder the last few weeks, I think I have a shot, only because I faded so much down the stretch last year, taking about 35 minutes to run the last 3 miles.  If I can have good energy from start to finish, I can do it.

In my next blog I'll talk about how, when I tell you about my training.  Let's just say, when I train, I go to therapy... and I know a lot of you understand that completely.

 

The Woodward Dream Cruise is Detroit’s own Mardi Gras meets American Graffiti meets the Henry Ford Museum meets Auto-Rama. It’s a party, it’s a parade where hot rods and classics stand in for floats, where the scent of exhaust, peeling tires and fading clutches stands in for stale beer and embarrassing cocktails, and where something, I’m not sure what,  stands in for here’s-some-beads-show-us-what-you’ve-got, and given the demographics,  I’m grateful for it.

Priceless classics swap carbon monoxide with backyard hot rods and vintage muscle in all phases of restoration, amid rumbling documentation of every car that anyone ever first drove, first owned, finally owned, first got laid in, still hopes to get laid in or expects to be laid to rest in, punctuated by mostly question marks: sedans and minivans steered by the fascinated and the confused or maybe, for all I know, the nostalgic for the same but much more recent firsts and modest hopes.

They creep and crawl and stop and start up and down Woodward Avenue from 8 Mile Road to the city of Pontiac and back again, past equally endless gawkers in folding chairs moving almost equally fast. The Cruise passes by my new house just like it passes by thousands of others, close enough to hear it if you try, distant enough to ignore it if you want, and inconvenient as hell if you can’t read a map and find an alternate route to where you need to go. People either love it or hate it.

I didn’t make any big plans to check it out, but I was happy to walk over with friends who invited me, and I loved it. The spectacle reminded me, as everything reminds me given half a chance, of my own weird hobby of triathlon.

Even in a trail-intensive, purely afoot race like the CCRR, we athletes, too, can mess up traffic patterns, take over roads, smell a little, and confuse minivan drivers. We take pride in our chassis. We represent a vast range of heritage and model year and an even more vast range of stages of restoration and preparation. We’re all driveable, some of us exquisitely so, some of us optimistically so. And a number of us have to pull to the curb before the event is over.

And somewhere, at some point, some genius made it possible for spectators to enjoy it without expertise. I’d wager that in dream cruises and triathlons, the prevailing question humming through the spectator side of the fencing is, “I wonder how old that one is?” and all they have to do is wait and look at the backside.

Hey, hey, hey. Mind the Mardi Gras comparisons, please. I’m talking about the classic license plate. Most of the cars in the Cruise sport a classic license plate that corresponds to its model year. Triathletes in triathlons sport Sharpie ink. With electronic timing practically ubiquitous in the sport, the race numbers on the biceps are little more than tradition anymore. But as long as the volunteers have the markers out, most races will go ahead and put a much more useful number on racers’ calves: Their age.

I suppose it’s mostly so when you’re passing or being passed, you can tell whether or not it’s affecting your place in your age group. (It’s an interesting feeling to be passed by someone and actually be relieved to see he’s 10 years your senior, or 20, just so long as he’s not getting between you and the podium.) But the real value, I think, is its function as a classic license plate.

“I wonder how old that one is?” Clunkers or plodders, hot rods or hardbodies, it’s not always easy to tell. Distinguishing characteristics can be subtle, and blurred further by devoted efforts to trick things out. I can’t pretend to speak for the car guys, but I can guess they’re a lot like us. When the spectators sneak a peek at the numbers on the bumper, we’re a little pleased. And when they shake their heads, “that can’t be right,” well, we have to admit that’s a little bit of what we showed up for.

The Chicago Triathlon is August 28-29, not April. See what happens when you try and do too much?

I opened the e-mail from Tom, my former official coach and current unofficial coach and full-time friend all along, to read, “Absolutely DO NOT to that speed workout this close to a multiple-triathlon weekend!” I noticed it in my inbox when I turned on the computer to log that speed workout I had just finished that close to a multiple-triathlon weekend. Oopsie.

It worked out fine. I went to Luray, Virginia and signed copies of my book* Friday, finished the international-distance race respectably enough on Saturday, sign more books Saturday afternoon and still manage a 3^rd place in my age group in Sunday’s sprint. Whew. So far, so good. Very good, in fact. What a beautiful race. It would have been worth the trip even with a major meltdown.

Which, we’ve established, was a distinct possibility. But as cool as that weekend was, I was training through it. An unexpectedly complicated spring and summer reshuffled my race priority hierarchy, and now everything is ultimately aimed at a Boston Marathon qualifying attempt at the Detroit Marathon in October.

That's if I don't collapse before then, but maybe that threat is part of why I keep trying to get away with this nonsense. Assuming I'm not going to get it just right - a safe assumption if there ever was one - at least overdoing it is self-limiting. Underdo it, and the big risk is that you'll get used to doing less, and the spiral into senescence begins. I am, of course, wide open to accusations of being full of crap, but I'm used to that, and that's the story I'm sticking with.

And how. My upcoming, April 28-29 Chicago Triathlon weekend has grown. This was supposed to be a fun, shamelessly exploited match-up with Peter Sagal. He’s the host of the NPR show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” a friend, a fellow triathlete and the writer of the foreword to my book. But he went and got hit by a car while he was out training last week and won’t be back in racing form quite that soon. With Peter going to such great lengths to back out of our showdown in the international-distance event, the Chicago Triathlon organizers asked if I might like to race against some other media- and celebrity types in the sprint event. One of those celebrities is Miss Illinois, and if I'm ever going to have half a chance at holding my own in a swimsuit competition with a beauty queen, this is it. So I said, sure, but that I'd love to still do the international-distance race as well. They countered with the suggestion that I might want to add Saturday's supersprint race to those two and do their Triple Challenge, and I think you know how I answered.

One of my commemorative t-shirts from April's Alcatraz and Golden Gate swims has a slogan across the back by Bob Roper, also attributed to Mick Jagger and any number of other people who live life right. It reads, "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing." I wear that shirt a lot. Probably too much. Which is, when you think about it, just right.

*Oh, yeah, the book. I’m supposed to be pushing that. It’s “Trizophrenia: Inside the Minds of a Triathlete,” a look at what makes us – and really not just triathletes, and not even just athletes, but anybody who thinks anything worth doing is worth overdoing – the way we are. I’ll be signing copies before and after the Capital City River Run, too.

Thank goodness that we are getting a small break in the weather!! I don’t know about you but I sure hate to run when it is 90, after only a few miles I am drained. The only time I have to run is in the evening after a long day at work, before dinner and spending time with my family. So to be real I don’t have too much time at all. Making time is very hard for me but I find that if I don’t make time to run I am grumpy and even more tired than after a long run. I am still amazed that after last year CCRR I was so full of energy and even wanting to run a little more. I hit my wall at mile 11 and walked for over a mile before I said screw this and ran the rest of the way in. So maybe I was still on the adrenaline rush of my first ½ marathon but whatever it was I went strong for the rest of the day before I crashed at 9pm and did not wake until my clock went off telling me it was time to get ready for work.  

I was looking at my training log today and let me tell you I am so far behind. L I should be doing at least 12-18 miles a week and the past two week total only 12 miles. Here is the training log that I have been trying to use………

Half-Marathon Training Schedule

Notes about the schedule:

Mondays: Most Mondays are rest days. Rest is critical to your recovery and injury prevention efforts, so don't ignore rest days.

Tuesdays and Thursdays: After your warm up, run at a moderate pace (slightly faster than your long run pace) for the designated mileage. Cool down and stretch after your run.

Wednesdays: Some Wednesdays are designated rest days. Others are cross-training (CT)days, when you should do a cross-training activity (biking, swimming, elliptical trainer, etc.) at easy-to-moderate effort for 30 to 45 minutes.

Fridays: Do a cross-training (CT) activity (biking, swimming, elliptical trainer, etc.) at easy-to-moderate effort for 30 to 45 minutes. If you're feeling very sluggish or sore on Friday, take a rest day. It's important that you're feeling strong for your Saturday long run.

Saturdays: This is the day for your slow long distance run. Run the designated mileage at an easy, conversational pace. Use your breathing as your guide. You should be able to breathe easily and talk in complete sentences comfortably during your run.

Sundays: This is an active recovery day. Your short run should be at a very easy (EZ), comfortable pace, which helps loosen up your muscles.

Hopefully this info will help someone out.  Only 6 more weeks until CCRR!!