This is Livin’

Ah, the decadence of Sunday mornings.  Sleeping in until 5:45; a 16 mile trail run over hilly terrain; earning that plate of two fried eggs over sweet potato hash browns.  What more could a guy ask for?

When I left the house for my run, the temperature was 37 degrees, near the lower limit of shorts weather for me.  The temperature would climb to about 50 degrees before the end of my run a little over two hours later.  Along the way I spied a cute family - buck, doe and fawn - who were observing me from a draw near the path in the Backcountry Wilderness Area. 

I am a late adopter when it comes to gadgets, preferring to wait until the technology has proven itself and the second or third revision is on sale.  But there are a few pieces of technology I enjoy.  One is my Garmin Forerunner 205. 

I have owned a Forerunner 205 for about seven years.  I am on my second 205, having exchanged my original one for a refurbished unit when it stopped working.  I do not use all of the features on it, which is why I have not upgrade to fancier units. 

Garmin offers computer based software that allows the hyper anally-retentive athlete to micro-analyze their workouts.  I don’t have time for that.  I have an account with Strava, which offers many of the same features with a nicer interface.  Here is the map and elevation of this morning’s run.  You see that I haven’t figured out how to change the units to miles. 

I love listening to music while I workout and I have two devices that allow me to do so.  When I swim, I listen to tunes on a SwiMP3, which is a waterproof MP3 player.  The sound waves travel through bone conduction.  Because water is about 1,000 times denser than air, it almost feels like you are “swimming in the music”.

When I run, I listen to music on my iPod Shuffle.  It is so small; a good sized dog could swallow it whole.  Fortunately my cats are only capable of licking the unit, but Charlie has chewed through a pair of ear buds.  I can’t help but wonder if Apple embeds subliminal messages that play through their devices, because I have found myself shopping for black mock turtlenecks. 

The Forerunner and the Shuffle are nice gadgets, but they don’t move my legs.  I have to provide the locomotion.  An honest sweat in the cool air is its own reward.  While my body is fast yielding to the wasting hands of time, I can still enjoy a long run on a perfect fall morning.

A tale of two runs

On a recent road trip to California to visit my oldest daughter at college and explore some colleges for my younger daughter, we spent time in Las Vegas, Anaheim, Pasadena and Cedar City, UT.  En route to California we spent the night in Primm, Nevada.  I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad run, but the eight miles I logged in Primm come close. 

Primm straddles Interstate 15 where it crosses the state border between California and Nevada.  It is named after the original developer of the town, the casino owner Ernest Jay Primm.  We stayed at Whisky Pete’s, so named for the bootlegger Pete MacIntyre.  Three and a half laps around the town gave me eight miles total.  The route was completely flat.  The remarkable thing about the run was the illumination of the neon lights made my early morning run seen like it was mid-day. 

And on we went to Anaheim.  2.5 miles east of the intersection of Harbor and Katella in Anaheim, CA lies a ¼ mile swath of waste land that cuts north and east through LA.  About thirty feet below street level flows the Santa Ana River.  Adjacent to the river is a soft, wide dirt path that parallels the river.  There is an on-ramp to the path located just past the entrance to the Honda Center, where the Mighty Ducks play.  That arena and Angels Stadium which sits a about a half mile away, across Katella, are built upon land reclaimed from that ditch.  I ran seven miles on that path before returning to get ready for a day with the family in The Magic Kingdom. 

This was an unexpected gem of a run, not what you would expect to find in the highly developed satellite of Los Angeles.  Every 20 yards birdhouses perch atop the barbed wire fence posts and the chirps of birds could be heard over the drone of traffic, ever-present, even at 6:00 on a Sunday morning. 

The murmur and splash of the river could be heard as it flowed over rocks.  I have swum in those waters at the mouth of the Santa Ana River, several miles downriver, where it empties into the Pacific Ocean between Newport Beach and Huntington Beach. 

While in the Greater LA area I swam with my old friends of the Fullerton Aquatics Sports Team at the Janet Evans Pool.  I met some new friends at SOCAL Aquatics in Tustin.  I also got a chance to see the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. 

During today’s long run in Cherry Creek State Park, which doubled as a tempo run for me, the topic of the difficulty of running a sub three hour marathon came up.  I have been fortunate to have run three marathons in under three hours and still feel like an interloper in that crowd.  Modesty and decorum necessitate the trite expression “I had a good day.”  While that is a fact, the full truth is a good performance comes after months of focused, dedicated preparation.  A good day, or a questionable course, gives you a few minutes.  A bad day could cost you 20 minutes. 

Do a couple of minutes on either side of the three hour mark change the way you perceive your abilities?  Do you let it dictate your worth as an athlete?  What do the prairie dogs think about as we run past?

Answers to these rhetorical questions tumbled around my mind as I labored through 14 miles at 7:45 / mile pace.  Based on the way I felt, it seemed inconceivable that I was able to run 26.2 miles at any pace, and certainly not at 6:44 / mile which I did at this year’s Colfax Marathon.

In other news, congratulations to the University of Colorado Men’s Team for winning the PAC 12 Cross Country Championships, which were held yesterday in Louisville. 

I registered for next year’s Platte River ½ marathon, so now I have five months to get ready to defend my masters title.