Friday was an outdoor run by the Hudson River - a five-miler, the first real long run outside and a chance to test the treadmill's accuracy. Result? Treadmills lie to you every step of the way.
(I believe that it has something to do with the innate mechanisms governing the machine itself, but that's another blog post.)
Friday turned out to be a great running day - weather-wise, we had just survived a large snowfall and the streets had enough time to become salted and cleared (thank you Bloomberg) - but only just enough. The streetlight intersections had three-foot tall piles of grey-spotted snow piled up between the crosswalk joints, so that you had to either leap over the curb to cross the street, or carefully tip-toe your way through some seriously icy sludge and over to the other side before a little orange hand signaled the return of raging traffic (traffic which presented another adventure called "Drive-By Snow Splattering").
Shannon and I started out running from the lower West Side with the turn-around point destination being 46th Street, where the Intrepid resides. Though it was cold, we warmed up pretty quickly and managed to chat the whole way. This supposed "easy" run day felt comfortable - I felt like we were running perhaps a 16:00-min mile pace, considering how it felt to be on the treadmill the past two weeks at a 12:00-min mile pace. The scenery was interesting - winter running definitely provides some experiences one cannot imagine encountering in any other climate. The sight of the frozen river was one pleasant surprise; the sight of a half-naked fellow runner was another shocking surprise. Let it be said: distance runners who train in the winter are either crazy, bad-ass, or have a serious addiction.
While the outdoor run was refreshing, it did compare to the treadmill on one particular point - the mental grit moments. Reaching the halfway mark, I was glad to have Shannon with me as we traded stories about what to do when you hit a block of mental sludge on the automatic indoor road. We experimented with a few techniques right then and there, like acuity skills (high knees, grapevines, running backwards), re-focusing form (propelling from the arms or from specific leg parts), and motivational visualization (crackheads are chasing you, or perhaps there's an eligible-looking bachelor ahead of you). Before we knew it, we had arrived back at our starting point, and in a mere hour and 3 minutes.
Now, you can imagine our surprise when we sat down to log the results and discovered that we had been averaging a 12:45-min mile. The surprise came not only from the fact the run had literally felt slow, but the realization that the treadmill had been training us at a deceiving pace, albeit effective.
Earlier, Shannon had asked me what the value of doing an outside run was, and while I couldn't clearly articulate why we should be braving the weather, I didn't need to explain it by the time we finished.
It was clear to both of us that we have to keep an eye out for lying machines from here on out.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Treadmill Tolerance
First week down, ten to go. I neglected to mention the race I'll be running is in April, it's in New York (Flushing Queens to be exact), and it's simply named "13.1 New York".
This week marked my return to the Big Apple, a return to East Coast winter weather, and a return to the musings one is prone to on a run longer than 30 minutes. Leaving California also marked the imminent doom of being stuck to a treadmill for the next 10 weeks. I had been ruminating over how and when I'd be able to get out of the gym and onto the pavement, and while my heart was willing, the ungodly cold froze my intentions the instant I stepped off the plane at JFK. Hence, Thursday and Saturday were spent staring at a shaded window and a blank TV. (There will be no television available on race day, so why rob myself of the opportunity to develop mental stamina now?)
Now, 26 minutes is fairly easy to sustain in one place. But after 45 minutes on the treadmill on Saturday sans music or scenery, with one mile left to go, I strained to keep my mind off any and every little discomfort available to my consciousness. I scanned to my right and left, skimmed over the dark silent TV, the lowered blinds, and a poster of the human anatomy entitled "Machine and Muscle Guide". Muscle guide, yes. Machine? I pondered this for a moment, as the poster had no technical instructions involved, but did bring up an oft-overlooked idea - we are human machines. Everything working in conjunction with an adjacent item of musculature to propel and retract. I suddenly realized why treadmilling irked me so much. Here I was: a "machine", running on top of a running machine, while staring up at a blank machine and checking the time pass on yet another machine, surrounded by fifteen other machines, going nowhere. Talk about grounds for an existential crisis.
Running outside, or any where for that matter - where I can see the propulsion of my feet as the scenery passes me by, where I can feel the thudding of my heart and taste the exhalation of my breath in the chilly climate, this experience reminds me that I am more than a machine...I'm a human phenomenon. And a natural one at that - not a machine, not something manufactured to produce a routine event over and over again in the same movement ad infinitum, but a living, breathing, celebration of movement.
The main reason I love running, I discovered, was the celebration involved in the event. Celebration of capability and of capacity, celebration of a natural phenomenon.
Running in place like a cog on a wheel hardly classifies as a celebration. Yet, there I was, running parallel to the irony beneath my feet, and I had three-quarters of a mile to go.
So I decided to celebrate.
I started with my left leg. I concentrated on celebrating its very own capability to swing back and forth, and tread...and tread some more. I repeated the celebration with my right leg. Then with my arms, and finally with my heart. The breathing, the pulsing, the movement - all of it caught my attention for just long enough. The only thing that did not want to celebrate with me was my mind, which was still trying to bring my attention to the ache in my lungs and the fact that I was obviously going crazy.
And then the machine beneath me stopped.
And I clapped my hands and let out a small whoop of joy.
And today I went outside to run, regardless of the cold. Sure, it was -8 degrees F with the wind chill. Sure, I could barely feel my legs. But it was glorious, it was celebratory, and you can be sure I had a smile frozen on my face the whole time.
This week marked my return to the Big Apple, a return to East Coast winter weather, and a return to the musings one is prone to on a run longer than 30 minutes. Leaving California also marked the imminent doom of being stuck to a treadmill for the next 10 weeks. I had been ruminating over how and when I'd be able to get out of the gym and onto the pavement, and while my heart was willing, the ungodly cold froze my intentions the instant I stepped off the plane at JFK. Hence, Thursday and Saturday were spent staring at a shaded window and a blank TV. (There will be no television available on race day, so why rob myself of the opportunity to develop mental stamina now?)
Now, 26 minutes is fairly easy to sustain in one place. But after 45 minutes on the treadmill on Saturday sans music or scenery, with one mile left to go, I strained to keep my mind off any and every little discomfort available to my consciousness. I scanned to my right and left, skimmed over the dark silent TV, the lowered blinds, and a poster of the human anatomy entitled "Machine and Muscle Guide". Muscle guide, yes. Machine? I pondered this for a moment, as the poster had no technical instructions involved, but did bring up an oft-overlooked idea - we are human machines. Everything working in conjunction with an adjacent item of musculature to propel and retract. I suddenly realized why treadmilling irked me so much. Here I was: a "machine", running on top of a running machine, while staring up at a blank machine and checking the time pass on yet another machine, surrounded by fifteen other machines, going nowhere. Talk about grounds for an existential crisis.
Running outside, or any where for that matter - where I can see the propulsion of my feet as the scenery passes me by, where I can feel the thudding of my heart and taste the exhalation of my breath in the chilly climate, this experience reminds me that I am more than a machine...I'm a human phenomenon. And a natural one at that - not a machine, not something manufactured to produce a routine event over and over again in the same movement ad infinitum, but a living, breathing, celebration of movement.
The main reason I love running, I discovered, was the celebration involved in the event. Celebration of capability and of capacity, celebration of a natural phenomenon.
Running in place like a cog on a wheel hardly classifies as a celebration. Yet, there I was, running parallel to the irony beneath my feet, and I had three-quarters of a mile to go.
So I decided to celebrate.
I started with my left leg. I concentrated on celebrating its very own capability to swing back and forth, and tread...and tread some more. I repeated the celebration with my right leg. Then with my arms, and finally with my heart. The breathing, the pulsing, the movement - all of it caught my attention for just long enough. The only thing that did not want to celebrate with me was my mind, which was still trying to bring my attention to the ache in my lungs and the fact that I was obviously going crazy.
And then the machine beneath me stopped.
And I clapped my hands and let out a small whoop of joy.
And today I went outside to run, regardless of the cold. Sure, it was -8 degrees F with the wind chill. Sure, I could barely feel my legs. But it was glorious, it was celebratory, and you can be sure I had a smile frozen on my face the whole time.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
One...and a Half
Hello Marathon Fans!
It's that time again. My running clock has woken from hibernation and is ready to take on another epic race. Given the constraints of weather (New York winter) and timing (last semester of the MFA degree), I've opted for a 13.1 race. Just enough mileage to get that mild ego boost from begin able to say I've run one marathon...and a half. Yes, it's crossed my mind that I could continue training beyond the race day for a full, but time will tell what the fates have in store for my legs this season.
I've been excited to get back to training, reading up on the knowledge I used to have about running techniques, proper injury prevention, and even some nutritional tips. I've mapped out an 11-week schedule that should be pretty easy to maintain between and after classes, although I anticipate some long sessions on a treadmill here and there.
Today was the first training session, and as the fates would have it, the dog accompanied me for all of 2 miles. The dog (who has recently built up more mileage in one year than I have in the past three years) proved to be an effective pacer: since we ran in a new part of town, he led the way, in excitement over all the new smells and potential potty spots. While I was trying to maintain a 12-min mile, his nose was keeping a 10-min mile. I noticed the familiar ache in my lungs during the last .4 miles, which reminded me that the runs get longer, but never easier; the burn will be there if I'm consistently training hard. The flip side is the mental grit that comes from working through the mild discomfort...another benefit of training that comes with the mileage. I can't wait until I can once again run more than 2 miles without feeling like I've just been "hanging on for the ride."
And although the dog will not be accompanying me again on a run (at least not for some time), I will say that nothing inspires mental toughness like having to pick up dog poop mid-stride.
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