For Whom the Dogs Bark

27F, 86% humidity, wind E 3 mph.  This heavy air makes the cold bone deep, but I put on layers and it was pretty comfortable after a while.  Ran 2 miles warmup, then 6 at GMP, just slightly below 8:00 pace overall, most miles were within 2 or 3 seconds of that, but it was a little harder than it should have been.  Overall I ran 8.08 miles in 1:07:15, average pace 8:20 per mile, flat shoes and no heart rate monitor.  I'll put it back on tomorrow, but didn't even want to try today at these temperatures. 

Of course, since there is a race this week, I seem to be coming down with a cold.  Yesterday in church my granddaughter was feeding me Cheerios, one after the other, stuffing them all the way in.  I assumed that I have more antibodies than she does, but I might be wrong.  Woke up this morning with a slightly stuffy nose, and my ears pop on the elevator at work.  I am popping Airbornes, but I think I waited too long.

47F, 89% humidity, wind E 7 mph.  Very nice running weather.  Warmed up 2 miles then ran 5 at GMP minus 30 seconds:  7:47 (154), 7:23 (159), 7:21 (163), 7:30 (166) and 7:28 (166).  Average pace for threshold miles was 7:30, the goal is to make MP miles seem more manageable this weekend -- I think my heart rate stayed pretty much under control.  Overall I ran 7.09 miles in 58:19, average 8:13 per mile, flat shoes.  I was done by 5:45 and into work by 7:00, things are really busy.  Good news is I don't think my cold is getting any worse.  With any luck it will be gone by Saturday.  Saturday's weather forecast is 61/34, which is perfect if it holds.  Problem is there are a couple of warm days between now and then, and warm fronts tend to stall over Houston.

I will plan to run 6 miles tomorrow (2 @ GMP), take Thursday off, finish with 3 or 4 warmup miles on Friday, then yet another marathon on Saturday morning to start the new year.  This is basically the taper strategy I used last time with good results, so trying it again and hoping for good weather.

62F, 78% humidity, wind SSE 8 mph.  Warm and slightly muggy out there, but not summer-warm.  Kind of nice actually.  I ran 2 slow miles, 2 GMP miles (8:01 (148) and 7:51 (152, maximum heart rate 155)), then 2 more slow miles.  Total run was 6.04 miles in 55:34, average pace 9:12 per mile.  Happy that my heart rate stayed low for two miles at least.  Got some sort of low-grade bug moving through my system and a couple of people at my house are out for the count with a high-grade bug, so everything is up in the air for this weekend.  Weather forecast is holding, though.  Tomorrow is 76/63, which would be a disaster.  Friday is 72/44, not ideal but acceptable; and Saturday is 61/33, which would be pretty much perfect.  The warm weather is here right on schedule, so maybe it will leave on schedule, like a well-mannered guest.

67F, 93% humidity, wind SSE 6 mph.  Nice weather for a short soft run, really bad harbinger for tomorrow's race.  I ran 4.09 miles in 40:51, average pace 9:58 per mile, low heart rate and flat shoes.

Oh yeah, there is a race tomorrow.  Here is the deal:  I woke up yesterday morning with a very raw throat and it isn't much different today -- almost feels like strep.  Plus I have that constant hungry feeling I get when this happens, so I know it is the real deal.  I have run two other marathons with flu-like symptoms, my first and my sixth, and they were both, shall we say, less than ideal.  The logical thing would be to pull out or switch to the half but I'll probably end up running it as planned, I am kind of stubborn that way.  I felt fine for this morning's easy run but woozy afterward.  Plus, just as I feared, the cold front is way late.  Current low for tomorrow morning is now set at 45F, but I am guessing 50F, quite a difference from the 33F that was forecast only two days ago.  If it is 50F at the start, it will be 65F or higher by the end.  Almost worse would be if the cold front is moving in during the race, because winds up to 20mph are expected, which could make shambles out of any PR effort.  Whine, whine, whine, I'll just go run it.

Today's miles were my last of the year, pretty good year considering quite a bit of downtime in the first half.  I got three marathon PRs this year.  I also started running shorter races and found out I score higher age-group wise in shorter races than in the marathon.  I dropped my best low heart rate pace from 11:27 to 9:41.  I lost another 15 pounds.  And I have met so many fun and high-quality people on this blog that I just shake my head in amazement when I think about it.  Most importantly, I had lots of good times running with family and friends in training and in races, and I have watched several people in my life take up running.  This change in lifestyle has been very good to me, even if I never get another PR, which is not the plan.

51F at start, 61F at end, 22% humidity (lowest I have ever seen in Houston), wind N 8 to 22 mph, beautiful day for running unless you are trying to run a marathon, then you have to give it a B+, the low humidity probably saved the day.  Today was the Texas Marathon, a small 400+ marathon in the Houston community of Kingwood that takes 4 laps around a community jogging trail, basically an out and back with a loop at the far end, so all day you are seeing other runners for both the half and the full.  I ran my first marathon here exactly two years ago today, then ran it again last year and got a big PR, so this one has a spot in my heart, it is the only one I have run more than once.  Last year I got a big PR.  Today I got a small PR, but I’m happy with it.  Here is how it happened:

When I woke up this morning I still felt pretty lousy from the flu-like symptoms I have had all week.  In the early hours I could still feel the fever.  I almost bailed but didn’t, decided that part of running is to take your races as they come.  After I got moving around a little bit I felt better anyway, so I got in the car and drove to Kingwood.  Got there way early and just sat around second-guessing my decision, but when everybody is lining up you just line up.  The plan was to try to mimic the Richmond heart rate pattern:  < 160 for the first 10 miles, 160-165 for the next 5, < 170 until mile 20, then whatever I can do after that.  Whatever speed that translates to, so be it.  This turned out to be a good strategy, took a lot of the stress out of a less than ideal situation.  Here are my splits (no good skin connection for the first three miles, so no reliable heart rate read-outs until mile 4):

First 5:  8:07, 8:09, 8:01, 8:22 (158) and 8:31 (159).  As soon as I got a good heart rate reading I could see that I was going too fast.  I felt great and didn’t want to slow down and watch my 3:30 goal slip away, but I knew that if I was 100% I would have a lower heart rate at these speeds and that I was in no position to gamble like I did at Richmond, so I slowed down and let the miles come in wherever they happened to fall.

Second 5:  8:29 (160), 8:31 (159), 8:25 (158), 8:33 (158) and 8:40 (160).  So just like Richmond, the old ticker held steady through these miles and set me up for a decent second half.

Third 5:  8:35 (162), 8:41 (160), 8:34 (164), 8:32 (162) and 8:16 (164).  I intentionally sped up here, using up some energy I had left in the bank in the early miles, but didn’t really go that fast.

Fourth 5:  8:19 (165), 8:22 (168), 8:24 (168), 8:26 (170) and 8:12 (171).  At mile 16.5 I was taking my last shot of EFS and caught my shoe on a sidewalk lip.  Down I went for the third time in a month.  I am getting good at this, I rolled to my left onto the lawn and managed to not stick my arms out.  Still got a nasty scrape on my knee that drove my younger granddaughter nuts.

Last 10K:  8:08 (172), 8:28 (171), 8:37 (168), 8:37 (167), 9:04 (168) and 8:42 (168).  There were no high heart rates at the end like Richmond, just didn’t have the strength today.  Plus a weird thing happened at about mile 22.  I was coming in for water, yelling for it from about 50 feet away, stepped up and took it, then a fairly heavy woman coming the opposite direction, staring at me, veered right into my face for a spectacular head-on, helmet-to-helmet collision.  I won despite giving up 30 pounds, but how does this happen?  I think these are the same people that drive 45 mph in the left lane.  Some of my friends in the biological specialties need to isolate this gene so we can eliminate it from the pool.

I finished in 3:39:27, 39th place overall.  Half marathon split was 1:49:37, second half 1:49:50, almost dead even.  A little more than 2 minutes better than Richmond, but the course is about 0.2 short I think, so my overall pace appears to have been almost identical.  Several other people said the same thing.  How is it that there is so much variation in certified courses?  I think there were about 400 running the marathon, but not sure.  It usually takes this race a while to post results, and they don’t do age group or anything like that.  But my son went and got the results for me, so I think they are official.  Anyway, it felt really good to finish and get a PR under the circumstances.  My daughter ran the half in 1:48:38, 8:17 per mile, so she ran faster than me, and got 32nd overall, very proud of her and her rapid progress.

I got compression socks this week and had my family put them on after the race, but I still had some cramping and so was stuck on the lawn for a while.  Pretty soon this guy comes up and starts talking to me, asks me if I ran the marathon and what did I think.  I non-committally said it’s a long ways.  Then he asks if I am part of the local running club and I said no, I drove over from the other side of town.  Then he says he wants to talk to the local club about nutrition, anybody who would eat a pepperoni pizza (I had just had three pieces) after running a marathon has their head up . . . .  whoa, got a live one here.  Turns out he is a multi-level marketer for a prominent vitamin company whose product is so good it cures cancer, diabetes and heart conditions, in addition to actually making you younger.  There I was, stuck on the lawn waiting for the calf cramps to subside, the ultimate captive audience.  Got out of there pronto with the help of the compression socks and without buying anything.

One last thing.  This is the "Texas Marathon", and as you may know, everything is bigger in Texas.  Here we are holding our finisher medals:

Solid brass, about 5 pounds apiece.