iJamming.net

I’m glad to say that my concentrated efforts to stay on the Onteora School Board paid off; Laurie Osmond and myself were re-elected yesterday. Read all about it here :

And now, back to some of my own work.

This is the main reason I’ve been quiet at iJamming! of late.

Our ad on WDST: Fletcher Osmond 2012

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“Any well-prepared Boston runner expecting New England weather (in other words, not necessarily predictable conditions) has accepted the possibility that their run in Boston might be warmer than they would prefer.”

The above paragraph, somewhat buried on page 122 of the massive (advertiser subsidized) official program of the 2012 Boston Marathon, will go down in history as one of the 116-year old race’s great understatements. The possibility? That the run might be warmer? Than we would prefer? As the April 16 date for this year’s Boston Marathon got closer, we runners went from mild concern to genuine panic. A warm front that initially teased an over-seasonal 60-something temperature turned into a reliable threat of mid-70s, and then, just a few days before the Marathon, at the point that predictions come closer to certainties, of race day temperatures peaking in the high 80 Farenheits, or 30 Centigrade. The reality of running a Spring marathon in the kind of mid-summer conditions that not even the Kenyans would readily volunteer for, became all the more bizarre as we saw that this heat-wave was due to last all of one day. Running on the Sunday or Tuesday, either side of the Patriots Day holiday  in Massachusetts and Maine, might have been “warmer” than we would prefer. Running on the Monday was going to be like a furnace.

How serious were these conditions? Well, three days before the Marathon, the Boston Athletic Association started sending out heat advisories and tactical advisories on how to handle the weather. Then, two days before the race, I got an e-mail from the organizers suggesting that most of us not run. Not run? Hang on there people. I have to qualify for the Boston Marathon. It’s not easy. Having qualified, I then have to shell out for it. That’s not cheap. Having shelled out for it, I then have to train. That’s every Saturday morning (often into Saturday afternoon) of my entire winter, powder days be damned. And you’re suggesting I don’t run? Do you think I’m crazy?

Well, yes, I probably am, given that I ignored the recommendation, as did 84% of other runners. Actually, I did consider taking the Boston Marathon up on its offer to “defer” my entry. Long enough to read the fine print, which stated I still had to come to Boston and pick up my bib, that I wouldn’t get my money back, and that I would have to pay again next year. That sounded less like a true “deferment” than the Boston Athletic Association rightly practicing some self-indemnity against possible deaths on the highway. But it was a serious enough threat to deter approximately 4,000 of the 27,000 runners, most of whom would have been slower runners who knew that the longer they were out on the course, the harder it would be to survive, and the even longer it would take as a result. For those of us who hoped for comparatively fast times and to be out of the sun before it could kill us, we were still faced with an incredibly tough decision: what pace should we run? The Marathon rightly warned us not to aim for Personal Records, to adopt a slower pace than usual, to hydrate but not over hydrate, to walk significant parts of the race, and to watch out for warning signs of heat stroke; the one thing they could not tell us what speed we should adopt. That was, clearly, a personal decision.

Most of the runners I spoke to at the Athlete’s Village in Hopkinton, where it felt like a mid-summers beach day even at 9 in the morning, just said that they were going to “wing it” and hope for the best, not quite the last-minute tactics any of us really wanted to employ. For my part, I had trained exceptionally hard and very well for this race. I’d run a half marathon or more almost every week since New Year’s Day. Four weeks before the race, I’d clocked 25 miles. Three weeks before, I’d broken 1:30 for the first time in a half-marathon – on hills, in another country. Until the weather forecast had shattered my dreams, I’d anticipated a PR for sure, with a 3:15 time as a distinct possibility. The best tactic I could come up with at the start line was to figure on an 8-minute mile pace, which would put me at a 1:45 first half, and then see how it went from there. If I felt great and could push it up to a 1:40 second half and 3:15 overall, I would have an official qualifying time for next year’s Boston. If I didn’t feel good, I would take my foot off the proverbial gas and hope to get through it without incident.

When the gun went off for my second wave, at 10:20am, I felt good. Perhaps too good. Well trained and with a good night’s sleep behind me (I had stayed in a cheaper hotel closer to the start line, and enjoyed peace and quiet that I had lacked two years earlier in the city centre), and hopefully well enough stocked up with carbs and protein and sodium (though not, in retrospect, with water itself), I settled into the same pace as those around me, all of whom had qualified with the same marathon time, all of whom inadvertently seemed to set off at exactly that pace, and just about all of whom, I suspect, came to regret it. My first mile logged 7:52. My second, third and fourth came down to a 7:45 average. Admittedly, these were downhill miles, but I couldn’t help thinking they were too brisk. By the time I hit ten miles, I was almost two minutes ahead of my intended goal.

One of the Marathon’s funnier moments occurred in those early miles, when we ran down a shopping street with shade on one narrow patch on the southern side and the entire marathon course shifted to that side of the street and squeezed together to get out of the sun! Otherwise, it was an open course with a relatively late start and an accordingly high sun. By mid-day it was into the 80s. And it kept climbing.

Looking good before the race.

I knew I had made a mistake with my initial pace when, around mile 11 or 12, I caught up with my friend Pat Lopiano, with whom I ran many a long training run over the winter. Pat is faster than me. He certainly has more marathon experience than me. (It’s not just that he’s older, it’s that he’s been running for ever.) He was also in a corral ahead of me, which meant that he had started almost a minute ahead of me, and yet here I was in the process of overtaking him. That didn’t seem right. I dropped my pace slightly to run alongside him, and he confessed that he had started far too fast himself, at a 7:40 pace, but had pulled back within three or four miles, and was now trying to slow down further. His legs, he said, were feeling the effects of the heat; he had noticed people walking already. He was, frankly, concerned.

So was I. But for different reasons. We were just about to hit the Scream Tunnel of Wellesley girls, and Pat may not had permission (or indeed, interest) in getting himself some love, but I most certainly did. At Boston two years earlier, the girls of Wellesley had provided the pick-me-up to score a negative split and near enough a sprint to the finish. Hopefully, this year they would have the same effect.

My heart was into it. My body though, was not. I paused to peck a few of those with the cheekiest signs – “Kiss me, I’m British,” “Kiss me, I won’t tell my boyfriend” (“and I won’t tell my wife,” I assured her), “Kiss me I’m graduating” – and I was jovial with all of them. But I wasn’t with it the way I would like to have been. I was hot now, seriously hot, and not in the sexy way we 47-year old men would like to presume we come across to co-eds. I’d taken as much water as I thought necessary, had loaded myself with seven Succeed (sodium) caps in one pocket and as many potassium pills in another, and was working my way through them quicker than I’d planned. I’d acquired some orange slices along the way from kind specatators. But none of it seemed to be having an effect. As I emerged from the Scream Tunnel, I expected to feel invigorated, as I had two years ago; instead, I felt shattered. My halfway split was 1:44 and change, a tad faster than the 1:45 I’d hoped for, but my pace had already slowed from that initial 7:45 to 8:30. It was evident that it was going to get slower still. The idea of a negative split – a faster second half – was out the window. I realized that it would be a matter of just getting through it in one piece, if I could.

It’s worth running for this reason alone.

This might be the time to praise the race organizers. Reading the news reports the night before, I believe the Medical or Race Director had said something very close to the line that “We are probably the best equipped race in the world to deal with conditions like this.” He was right. With 116 years of experience, the Boston Marathon knows what it’s up against. It had rented misting stations for us to run through; it hired 30 extra doctors; it brought medics up from the early miles as soon as they were done with; it had the Fire Department open up hydrants on the second half of the course; it had a Medical Tent just over the peak of Heartbreak Hill (of course you had to climb up the hill first!), and the Volunteers at the Aid Stations seemed to be working just as hard as we were. (Thanks so much, all of you!) The spectators too, are an experienced bunch and rose equally to the occasion; because Boston runs through residential areas, there was rarely, if ever, a mile without people offering water, ice, orange slices, wet paper towels, bananas, or a hosing down with a garden sprinkler.

And of course, there was rarely a moment where people weren’t cheering us on. In particular, they all seemed to be cheering ME on. When I had realized that I needed a tank-top for this occasion (I normally run in a tee), my only option was the same one I’d run my first marathon in, back in NY, ten years ago, back when it was such a big deal that we put my name across it. Almost from the first mile, people called out to me. As I got further and further through the course, and the crowd got noticeably more wild (and possibly more drunk, Boston being a drinking city if ever such a thing existed), they took to chanting it. Most of them were young, female and cute. When I was 19, I thought I was going to be a rock star, but this was about the closest I’ve ever got to having that kind of adulation, and however fleeting and light-hearted it may have been, it meant the world to me. It reminded me that while this race had turned into a survival course, it was still there to be enjoyed. Remember, don’t run if you can’t have fun!

Having recognized the effects of the dry heat and the inherent limitations of my body under such circumstances. I made a decision to stop at mile 15 and walk through the aid station – for a minute or so, much as one of my health advisory e-mails had suggested I do from the beginning of the race. And once I did, I knew I would be doing so several more times. But it didn’t seem to matter. I was determined at this point not to push it so hard that I couldn’t enjoy myself – especially as I saw people not just walking on the sidewalks, but collapsed on the sidewalks. I was determined to finish this on my own feet, and with a smile on my face.

The good news was that my hill training stood me in good stead. I attacked all three of the Newton hills with vim and vigor, and not just because I paused to take gels before two of them. Jogging up Heartbreak Hill, even as others overtook me, amidst that absolute wall of noise, a college student, just about the visual personification of a jock, yelled out “Tony, you’re awesome.” It made my day. Thanks, dude, for sharing the love. I almost stopped to take a beer.

The hardest aspect of the heat in Boston was that it was dry. Me, I’m used to humidity; you can often swim through the Catskills air. This weather, though, was astonishing. We didn’t sweat; our bodily fluids just evaporated instead. In the later miles, I would pour water over my head at an aid station, have a volunteer pour it down my back, soaking my shirt in the process, and within half a mile I would be dry as a bone. I’d take advantage of someone’s garden hose, douse myself completely and then need to do the same thing again just a few hundred yards later. I do have just some experience with these conditions, at Burning Man in the Nevada Desert, where afternoons in similar heat and dryness are typically spent in the shade and those who don’t realize their thirst until it’s too late often end up on an IV. This, it occurred to me somewhere during the race, was the equivalent of running a marathon in the Burning Man mid-day sun.

Yep, I ran in these. My third Marathon doing so, and the second time at Boston.

The last few miles, after coasting down the back of Heartbreak Hill trying my best to conserve energy were, to be frank about it, a bitch. I was running in Vibrams, and my feet were getting sore from the hot pavement underneath.  (Though when I saw a barefoot runner doing much the same pace as me, around mile 23 and 24, I knew not to complain.) My muscles were drying up. Not cramping, thank God, as they seemed to for so many other people, but they just weren’t capable of more than a mile at a time without walking for a minute. Two years earlier, I had cruised these last few miles, a big fat grin on my face; now I was doing my best not to turn my fixed smile into a grimace.

“Come on Tony, you can do it,” roared spectators as I walked through yet another aid station, checking my watch to consciously take a full minute in the process. “I know I can,” I wanted to respond. “In fact I know exactly what I’m doing. Do you want to swap places and see if YOU can run your 24^th mile.” Instead, I waved and gave them the thumbs up. I appreciated the encouragement, however ill informed.

At the Heartbreak Hill medical tent,  I had seen someone on a stretcher, in a very bad way, being loaded onto an ambulance. I realize that that makes it sound like a war zone but it wasn’t, actually; I was just as aware of people overtaking me. When I looked around at other runners’ bib numbers, there appeared to no particular pattern to any of it; there were plenty of people from the first wave, the so-called elite of the elite, barely moving forwards; there were also those who would have set off long after me now passing me. Later, after finishing the race, I looked up a bunch of random bib numbers out of interest; the vast majority of those with fast qualifying times and low bib numbers that put them at the front of the first wave appeared to have an incredibly bad second half-marathon, having shot off at impossibly optimistic paces. Those who were held further back in the field by the sheer mass of bodies appeared to have benefited from that slower initial pace. But nobody, not anybody out of the 100 or so people I looked up for the fun of it, ran a negative split (i.e. a faster second half). The best training in the world could not prepare you for this.

And this is how my feet looked afterwards! Could have been worse.

And there are unknown hypotheticals at hand. For all that I was frustrated at slowing down, I didn’t know how much slower yet I might have gotten had I not been in (excuse the immodesty) such good shape and so well trained. Similarly, though my brain was now saying that had I set out slower than an 8-minute pace, I might have been able to end up at something closer to an 8-minute pace, I have no actual proof of such. If I’d set out slower, I might have finished slower. Ultimately, compared to the split times of other runners, who went from initial 20-minute 5ks to eventual 40-minute 5ks, my time was relatively even. Only the last of my 5ks was longer than 30 minutes. It certainly could have been worse.

I took one final walk as we went under the tunnel that leads up to Boylston Street. I figured nobody would see me doing so. “Come on Tony, you can do it,” roared a by-stander. I gave the thumbs up sign again. I shuffled back into pace. As we hit the one mile to go mark, I lapped my stopwatch one more time. It would be interesting to see what I was capable of.

I managed that last mile in just under ten minutes. And I did cross the finish line with a smile on my face, my fists in the air. My net time was 3:49:05, by a strange coincidence the exact same time, to the second, of my third New York marathon, in 2004. (Every one of my five marathons since then has been notably faster, which brings the weather of April 16 2012 back into sharp relief.) As I was handed a bottle of water and congratulations, I realized that I really could hardly walk. I looked up and my vision went white, the objects in front of me fading as if in a movie. This was heat stroke, for sure. I wobbled, thought about fainting, and then realized how incredibly over-dramatic that would seem and decided to save myself the embarrassment. I wobbled some more instead and then started walking, gingerly, past the line of runners-in-wheelchairs (NOT to be confused with wheelchair contestants) waiting to be pushed into the medical tent. I wasn’t sure that I was okay, but I wasn’t certain I needed help.  I was handed various crap food items: Gatorade Recovery with milk in it; Power Bar Recovery with milk in it; a bun with bloody milk in it. Alright so maybe I’m in the minority as a vegan, but since when did a Gatorade drink or a bun need milk ingredients?

After collecting my (heavy) bag from the baggage bus, I joined a crowd of exhausted runners sprawled on the road and pavement just by the meeting area. I swapped my war story with the woman next to me, which may have been the wrong move; she was disappointed because she had finished a minute off her time at last year’s Boston, which meant she was a minute off her PR. She looked fantastic, rosy and happy. I didn’t ask her actual race time; I couldn’t deal with the thought that anyone could run at the same speed as last year’s record fast course. I took a picture of my feet and my face instead; at least I could see the funny side of it. It was slightly overcast here in the middle of Boston, and there was a hot breeze coming from somewhere; the conditions didn’t seem quite so excessive now that we had stopped running  – but when I looked at the expressions on those around me, it was clear. Yes, it had been excessive.

And this is how my face looked afterwards! Could have looked better….

Half an hour later, having had to suddenly stop on the sidewalk to get half a clif bar down me, I eventually found the bus back to the start line. As we waited for it to depart, and for the AC to kick in, the effect of the food’s sugar rush on my empty stomach knocked me sideways. I started sweating profusely. I thought I was going to throw up and had to disembark and sit on the sidewalk for a while. I’ve been through this feeling only once before – after my very first marathon (run, oddly enough in near freezing conditions). Again that might say something about the extremity of the conditions. But the feeling passed, and about 30 minutes into the bus ride, as the traffic jammed up due to an accident, I was able to use the bathroom for the right reasons, after which I felt much better and was finally able to think clearly again. It was gone 5pm by the time we got to our car park, over three hours since I’d finished the race, but at least now my equilibrium was back. I threw my stuff in the car, opened up a ginger ale, pulled out a bag of pretzels and set the controls for the heart of the Catskills.

Another three hours and I was home already, mainly because I didn’t have once have to make a pee stop. In fact, I didn’t pee between 10am, before the race, and 8:30pm, more than six hours after it. I reckon I put away about 5 liters of fluid during that time. Do the maths on what I must have lost from my body over those 26.2 miles. It also took me a full week to get my body back up to its regular weight, and believe me, I feasted during that time. I hesitate to realize how depleted of fuel my body must have been that Monday afternoon at the finish line.

It’s strange though: what was by far the hardest (though not the slowest) marathon I have ever under-taken also found me recovering most quickly. Perhaps it was walking through all those aid stations rather than the repetitive stress of consistent running. Maybe it was the sodium and potassium pills. Maybe the training. Maybe the realization upon getting home that I had finished higher up the field in numbers and percentage than two years ago despite running twenty minutes slower, and that the Kenyan winners had been a solid ten minutes off last year’s times themselves. Probably it was all of it. Whatever. A big fry-up was awaiting me in the oven (let’s not get too pedantic here) and I had a 25oz bottle of Ommegang’s Rare VOS lined up in the fridge. My first beer since leaving England six days earlier. You’d think I’d have been drunk on first sip. Somehow it doesn’t work that way. Later, I sweated my way through the night but woke up feeling fit and trim. I’ve stopped trying to figure this stuff out.

The scene near the finish line. Some of us needed to rest a few minutes before we picked ourselves up to walk again.

Perhaps oddly again, I felt as good emotionally about this marathon, despite the slow second half, as any I’ve run. After all, over 4,000 people decided to defer. 1200 who started the race sought medical attention. 900 did not finish, a very high number given the elite status of the Boston marathon. (Fortunately, only one person spent the night in hospital; thanks to the BAA’s organization and the runners’ training, nobody literally killed themselves.) Everyone seemed to have run a positive split (i.e. a slower second half), and it would appear that the vast majority ran the second half considerably slower than my 2hrs and 5 mins. My friend Pat Lopiano ran a very impressive 3:37 (all the more so for being 61 years old), but I would have expected him to finish 13 minutes ahead of me even if we had both run half an hour faster. The same with another friend I had trained with over the Catskills winter; her time, likewise, was about 30 minutes off what she had planned. So at least we were all aligned. I realized then that while the hard work through the winter hadn’t resulted in anything close to the personal record I had anticipated before the heatwave arrived, that it had certainly helped get me over the line in a respectable time. Best of all, when it came to the enjoyment factor, I had had a wonderful time. You can’t win them all. Sometimes, finishing is victory enough.

For all that I enjoy road running, I much prefer running on trails. There’s more variety of surface, which is better for the feet (less repetitive stress), typically a greater change in topography, and usually, at the end of it all, whether reaching the top of a mountain (quite literally), or just completing a lengthy loop or an out-and-back, a greater sense of achievement. When running on roads, one is constantly aware of humanity’s impact on the planet, via traffic, buildings, pylons, and the concrete or tarmac surface under one’s feet. Running on trails, one can escape most of this for the peace and tranquility of nature. When I’m out on a long road run, I feel the constant need to stay alert about my surroundings, but when I’m out on a long trail run, I instead become as one with them. Especially in the Catskill Mountains, where I can often go for a couple of hours without seeing another human, I feel myself return to my animal nature. It’s the most zen of all active sensations.

Such moments, to be fair, are relatively rare: unless you make a complete and total commitment to stay off the roads, and unless you’re willing to invest in running snowshoes and take them onto the (dangerous) ice and snow of the typically lengthy Catskills winter, your trail season is relatively short and typically interspersed with the usual crowd-gathering road races that allow for universal reference points. (By which I mean, a 5k or marathon time can be compared and matched with running friends around the world; my local annual Escarpment Run, up and down half a dozen Catskill mountains, can only be compared with itself.) At my end, training this year for the Boston Marathon meant three solid months of long weekend road runs, during an atypically mild winter when I might have otherwise have been tempted to explore the low-altitude, ice-free trails. By the time I got to Britain in late March, I was positively pining for some off-road adventure.

The map of the 13-mil Beaver Trail. Follow this link to see it for real. And this link for the course instructions.

Fortunately, my mother’s house in Beverley, East Yorks, is at the edge of town, near the Westwood, a famous sprawling pasture, which itself leads to all manner of footpaths that resemble, on the Ordnance Survey maps, a series of complex veins, as compared to the inherently more limited (if infinitely longer) arteries that cut through the Catskill Mountains. It was only when I injured myself 18 months ago, from too much hard-core road running (as my Trail Running book gloats, “The road to injury is paved”), and was using the swimming pool in Beverley instead, that I learned that a distinct Running Trail had been carved out of these veins, due to the trickle of mud-splattered runners making their way into the leisure centre from the conclusion of an annual 5-mile, 10-mile or 13-mile “jaunt” around what is known as the “Beaver Trail.” “Set up by Beverley Athletic Club with sponsorship and support from Adidas and East Riding Council,” read the BAC’s web site, “The aim of the trail is to provide a pleasant running experience featuring a wide variety of surfaces, contrasting scenery, varying 
degrees of gradient and minimal use of roads.” I determined to do the course as soon as I could.

It took a year and a half, but I got my chance the morning after I arrived in Beverley this April, itself just a week after the Hasting Half Marathon. Knowing that my little boy Noel was eager to spend quality time with his granny (and vice-versa), I tumbled out of bed, printed out the map to the Beaver Trail – and, thank Goodness, the full page of detailed course instructions that accompany it – and with just my iPod and a bottle of water for additional company, set about the full 13-mile course. It was an act of good-natured fool-hardiness as most runners would recognize of themselves. After all, my week in London had been typically full on and I was certainly short on sleep. I’d run a half-marathon PR just eight days earlier. Yet at the same time, I knew I was at a peak of pre-marathon fitness, and that if I took my time on the course, my body would hopefully thank me when I got to Boston; it would be, after all, another long run under the belt precisely two weeks before the big one.

My legs, I realized as soon as I headed out from the Leisure Centre starting point, were heavy and tired, as they had been the couple of times the previous week when I’d taken them around the woods and hills of Streatham Common and its accompanying Rookery. (This was more the effects of running fast in Hastings than anything else.) But I’ve learned from experience that if you can push yourself through the difficult days, it’s that much easier to get through the good ones (which are, hopefully, race days when one has accumulated sleep and sustenance). Once I successfully navigated the course instructions to get out of town and recognized the Beaver Trail markers that occasionally (but not quite routinely enough) showed up on footpath entrances and stiles to confirm my course, I eased into the beauty of it all. Every area in the world has its own unique vistas, and this small part of East Yorkshire, which seems relatively flat on the map but is in fact littered with small hills, and which is pock-marked with long-standing, working farms, have their own distinct attraction. That said, I made particular note of the course instruction not to run towards the electrical substation; electrical pylons (and smoke-fluming power stations) are as much a part of the Yorkshire landscape as trees.

I had to stop frequently to check the map, something I don’t typically like doing; for that real zen feeling, you want to be running continually, however gentle the pace. But I only got stuck once, oddly enough right at the point I joined up with the Westwood and the golf course that makes the most of its rolling topography. I was healthily worn out by that point, but being a completist, refused to run down the main road towards my mother’s house and instead detoured to follow the official last mile-plus of the course, which took me across the pasture, past the stunning Beverley Minster, and back to the Leisure Centre. All said and done, I completed it in 2 hrs and 10 minutes, a 10-minute mile pace that seemed quite impressive given the stopping and starting, the number of stiles and footpath entrances, and the inherently slower surface under foot. Sure enough, in the time it took me to walk home, shower, stretch and have a long overdue breakfast – make that lunch – I had developed the familiar post-run glow.

I duly dropped a line to Andy Tate of the Beverley Athletic Club, with whom I’d corresponded on a previous visit, figuring he’d be happy to know that a returning native had followed their course map and instructions and enjoyed the process. He promptly wrote back inviting me to participate in the Brantingham Hill Run on Good Friday morning, just 4 days later, suggesting that “If you like the Beaver Trail you will love this demanding off road route.”

With a tease like that, how could I possibly say no? That I was staying in Manchester on Thursday night, going to see my old pals Orbital at the start of their British tour certainly failed to dissuade me. In fact, a check of the trail run map and the train timetable together revealed that if I could make the 7:30am train out of Manchester, I had but a one-mile drive to the start line at the Yorkshire end, and, British railways providing, would be right on time.

Into the Woods: The Start Line at the Brantingham Hill Race on Good Friday morning, somewhere at the foot of the Yorkshire Wolds.

Fortunately, the railways obliged, and the scene when I arrived in the village of Elloughton, close to Brough train station at the foot of the Yorkshire Wolds just before 10am, was one I’m somewhat familiar with from our Catskills trail races: a cluster of cars, a group of mostly middle-aged people in shorts and vests on a coldish day, a sign-in sheet, someone handing out bibs, and a quick jaunt over a footbridge to a start line. (The race, hosted by the East Hull Harriers, whose web site puts our own Onteora Runners Club to total shame, was free. And, I noticed positively, it lacked for the self-indemnity form that is a necessity at even the most relaxed of American races.) Only after the staring gun and a fun run up through a field on something vaguely approximating a public right of way did someone inform me that the seven mile course was considered famously brutal, consisting as it does of some seven hills.

Hills? Did someone say hills? I eat hills for breakfast! (Which was just as well, as I hadn’t had much else to digest since a couple of glasses of Veuve Clicqout with the Orbital boys somewhere around midnight.) As the group of 50+ runners (a far cry from the Hasting Half’s 3500 competitors, and a reminder that trail running, even when the race has no price of admission, is a self-selective sport) thinned out, I instinctively knew that I was in my comfort zone, that this was the sort of underfoot surface and hilly terrain that I love. Moderate tiredness be damned, this was as energizing as a morning work-out could be.

The East Hull Harriers do a pretty amazing job of archiving their races. This photo from the image bank they assembled from the Brantingham Hill Race. The videos too.

Up we went, and down we went, merrily on our way. There was but one road we ran alongside for a few hundred yards, but it was blessedly devoid of traffic. Most of the race was us against the nature of the beautiful Yorkshire Wolds. The course was indeed extraordinarily tough – less the steady climbing such as at the Hastings Half, but rather a series of short sharp hills that were taxing on the body in both directions – but it was exhilarating from start to finish. Even those who reduced themselves to a power-hike on some of the uphills were evidently enjoying the stress and strain, just as I got a thrill from feeling my heart rate climb with the gradients. I took note of the significant number of people wearing the British “fell running” brand Inov-8s on their feet (myself included) though did not think to ask anyone of a good retail outlet for this cult, high-end footwear manufacturer who produce as many different shoes as there are types of surfaces (and then some). I did manage a couple of conversations, though, the longer of them with someone I joined for the last couple of miles, who was similarly strong at uphills but who, perhaps from familiarity with the course, eventually dropped me on the final downhill and cruised to the finish line 30 seconds ahead of me. As with just about all runners, he was friendly as could be throughout, and seemed almost disappointed to have beaten me.

Myself, I got through the course in a little under an hour, a solid ten minutes behind the winner, but a respectable thirteenth out of 52 finishers, not bad for someone who had woken up after five hours sleep at the other end of the M62. And I didn’t feel like I had pushed myself especially hard to do so. It had been fun – hard work, yes, but fun hard work – from start to finish. Only when I found Andy Tate at the end of the race and got talking in a bit more detail did I learn that this was, in his words, “by far the hardest course in the entire region.” I’d better not tell him about the Escarpment Run then.

For all that the Hastings Half had allowed me to achieve a universally measurable goal on a universally familiar distance (such that my time would have qualified me for the New York Marathon if it had taken place two months earlier), the Brantingham Hill Run, one of a kind as are all trail runs, had allowed me to do what I really enjoy most – get out into nature and all its challenges with a small group of equally hardened, good-natured souls. My thanks to the Beverley Athletic Club for setting me down the path, so to speak, to running it, and to the East Hull Harriers for hosting it. And I look forward to joining you one year on the annual Beaver Trail run, in all its muddy glory.

This coming Monday, April 16, I will be running the Boston Marathon, for the second time (in three years). It’s an honour and a privilege to be doing so, albeit a well-earned one, allowing that Boston, as well as being the world’s oldest marathon (at 116 years and counting), is also the sole elite marathon, the only one that demands of all competitors a qualifying time specific to age and gender. Though there are a handful of back-door entries, the basic rule of Boston is that you don’t get in via money or lottery; you have to qualify, and the standards are stringent. This year, they get even more so: I’ll need to run 3hrs 25mins or faster either at Boston or over the next six months to stand a chance of competing again next year.

In training for that goal, I took an interesting tangent: a 3-week visit to Britain in the month leading up to the race, the point at which one’s training typically peaks and then tapers. My trips “back home” tend to be exhausting, as I run around catching up with friends and family, taking meetings, attending gigs, and finding myself very easily slipping back into a British way of life that, even for those in business, often revolves around social drinking. As such, trying to stay in peak physical shape was bound to be a challenge, which partially explained why I decided to run the Hastings Half Marathon on Sunday March 25.

I love half marathons. They’re not as speed intensive as a 5 or 10k, and they’re not as exhausting as a full marathon. If you can hit the right pace and keep to it, you can get the job done in a reasonable amount of time, register the hard work engaged in doing so, and still go about your business for the rest of the day (and then celebrate your achievement at night). Then again if, like me, your last half-marathon put you just a few seconds the wrong side of the 1hr 30min mark, the prospect of breaking through such a psychological time barrier would likely loom as large on the horizon as the finish line itself. My main concern was whether I would be able to achieve such a goal on my first ever race in the UK. Because, odd as it might seem, I never knowingly (or should I say, willingly!) competed in a British race in the 22 years I lived there before emigrating. Hastings, then, would be a first.

The Hastings course

The choice of race was hardly arbitrary. My best friend and former Apocalypse band mate, Tony Page, himself emigrated from London in the 1990s, to Bexhill-on-Sea, just a few miles west of Hastings, and has long encouraged me to run the race alongside members of his Bexhill Rowing Club. And the timing of the race, 22 days before Boston, was, in theory, perfect. Such a gap is considered ideal to get a final long-distance race under the belt before commencing the “tapering” process. (It’s no coincidence that the New York Road Runners Club arranges for the last of its 5 Borough Half-Marathons to take place three weeks before the New York Marathon.) Hastings offered the chance to apply the training I’d put myself through all winter, including a group run of a half-marathon distance or longer every single weekend morning early January, before then taking my foot off the proverbial pedal and allowing myself to “taper” via a social two-week working holiday in the UK.

The only real problems I saw for myself were, 1): as noted, I was staying with my best friend, and, as best friends do, we have a habit of staying up late and enjoying ourselves. The chance of getting to bed at his place early on Saturday night seemed remote at best. Challenge number 2) was with jetlag; while I’ve frequently cured the transatlantic time change by getting in a good energizing run the day after my arrival, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to get in a respectable half-marathon time just three days after traveling, let alone a Personal Record. I decided therefore to “play it by ear.” If I felt good on the morning, I would go for it; if not, then I would vow to “just have fun.”

Bexhill on a beautiful spring Saturday. The De La Warr Pavilion looms over the English Channel.

The first potential problem was cured by the fact that Tony and his wife had been down with the flu all week – so much so that they nearly recommended I stayed elsewhere to avoid catching the bug. Fortunately, the day I arrived they rebounded, and while this presented its own set of challenges – Tony was keen to celebrate his renewed health with a couple of pub Guinnesses over the Saturday evening Premier League match and some wine over an Italian meal – I found that I was able to meet my typical pre-race abstention half way. I had, in fact, stopped at a couple of lovely Sussex wineries on my way to Hastings (report to follow) and I decided to further relax and enjoy a glass of red wine over a carb-loading dinner at the local Italian restaurant in the evening. My reward was two-fold: my hosts were sufficiently exhausted as to go to bed early (on a Saturday no less!) and I was sufficiently relaxed, and still somewhat jet-lagged, as to manage an astonishing eight and a half hours sleep, even as my bed consisted of nothing more than a mattress on a floor in a study barely big enough to contain it and even though the clocks went forward an hour (for me, for the second time in two weeks, both on the eve of a half-marathon race). I didn’t get up until 8:30am (admittedly 7:30am by body clock), and yet, thanks to proximity, was warming up on the Hastings seafront by 10am for a 10:30 starting gun. I felt rarely fantastic: well rested, fully energized and raring to go. If only every pre-race night’s sleep could be so good.

The weather also helped. I had landed in the UK, three days earlier, at the start of a rare sunny spell that was to last for ten days, uninterrupted by more than a few little fluffy clouds. The irony about Britain is that while grey and wet weather is the norm, and contributes to many of the national characteristics, the rarity of genuine warmth and sunshine is such that when it occurs, people seize it with an exuberant vengeance – helped, no doubt, by just how beautiful everything suddenly looks under a bright blue sky. We woke on race day with the temperatures still hovering just above freezing, but the blue skies and the prospect of increased warmth serving to put us all in the mood for a good morning out. And by all of us, I mean not just the car load that I traveled over with – including one member of the Bexhill Rowing Club who was running for charity, in a bee costume, with speakers attached – but the other 3500 runners who had signed up for what is fast becoming one of Britain’s premier long-distance races.

The elevation of the Hastings Half Marathon. It looks worse than it is. Or maybe not.

I had been warned that the course was hilly. Piffle, I responded, I live in the Catskills; I eat hills for breakfast. Even a look at the race course’s topography – a steep climb, a brief plateau and a steep drop – seemed to have been gerry-mandered on the web site to look worse than it was. The few hundred feet of climbing, after all, paled in comparison to the couple of thousand feet that we frequently take on in our mountain and spring trail runs. But our mountain runs are taken at a much slower pace. Which meant that my friends were right. The course was hilly. It set out from the waterfront and started climbing. And continued climbing. And for all the occasional downhill roll, it then kept climbing some more, with miles 3 to 5 involving a relentless onslaught up Queensway towards the Ridge. I should have remembered as much; I used to spend many weekends in Hastings with my school friend and band mate Jeff Carrigan, whose family had a weekend place at the “top” of town, from where the jaunt to the seafront on a weekend morning was always that much easier that the long slog home at night. Trying to maintain some sort of sub 7-minute mile average while following a long line of runners and facing an equally long hill ahead of me proved no easy task. The fact that, by the time we crested the hill, the pubs were open and grown men who could have afforded to lose a few pounds themselves were taunting us on by waving full pints of beer in our faces didn’t necessarily make it easier.

Then again, I do live in the Catskills. Hills are hard work, but they rarely defeat me. On the latter half of the uphill climb, I began dropping some of my fellow runners. And when we finally crested, and my heart rate was still mellow, I knew that I had a strong second half ahead. Though it was murder trying to judge my overall pace based on such an uneven course, I suspected that if having climbed the hills at a 7:30 pace, I ought to regain my necessary sub 7:00 average once Newton’s Law took effect. In fact, my biggest concern for the last few miles, and it was a highly legitimate one, was the toll that the steep downhills would take on my knees and my shins.

Fortunately, there was just enough of a break in the downhill portion to avoid the risk of injury. The race would descend steeply, but then turn a corner in to a side shopping street and climb again for a minute or so, and while the process was taxing on the runner’s psychology, it was good for the body. Somewhere around mile 9, I was overtaken by the second of the males I had driven over with: a 30-something triathlete who would have been ahead of me from the start line but for the fact that he’s a new parent and short on training (and sleep). I let him go, figuring he had the best of me, but caught up with him once the race flattened out on the seafront around mile 11. By that point, I figured that if I could just keep on my current pace, I had the 90-minute benchmark in my grasp, and as I came alongside him, suggested that we stay together through the finish. He agreed. It proved a good call, as coming onto the flat after a steep downhill had the effect of making us feel like we were running uphill again, and the fact that we had a solid two miles ahead of us, that we were going almost flat out to beat the clock, and that the sun was now that much higher in the sky and the temperature accordingly warmer, made those last 14 minutes especially daunting.

Bexhill College put together this video of the Hastings Half. Since first putting this online, my 7-yr old has spotted me running the beachfront at 18 seconds in. More videos of the race can be found here.

But we did it. We crossed the line together at the 1:29:42 mark; my chip time was a comfortable 1:29.25. That was a 6 minute 50 second per mile average, though the topography of the course saw my speeds range from 7:33 (the steep uphill fourth mile) down to 6:17 (on the correspondingly steep downhill 11th mile). Either way, on my first ever race in the UK, I had scored a PR (or PB as they call it Britain), passing a benchmark I really would not have considered possible even just a couple of years ago. Had I banked such a time just 60 days earlier, I’d have qualified through the back door for this year’s New York Marathon. (Sure enough, they too have cut the qualifying time for next year; looks like I’m not the only one getting faster.)

As much as anything, I had had a great time out. The atmosphere in Hastings that morning – helped, admittedly, by the weather – was festive as could be. Every runner and spectator alike seemed to be in a fantastic mood. The race was extremely well organized, with copious water stops, a gel stop, and lots of music on the course, ranging from bands and bagpipes to someone DJing loudly in their back garden; the finish line supplied us with plenty water, and Clif Bars (which I live on) were out there promoting their goods with enough bite-size morsels to fully replenish me. This turned out to be necessary as I lost my running partner immediately and somehow missed the bumble bee coming across the finish line as well. It was an hour and a half before we all hooked up again, enough time for the pantomime horse – operated by two other members of the Bexhill Rowing Club (can you imagine being the back legs of a pantomime horse for three hours of slow running on hills?) – along with the knight in armour and various other fancy dress costumes to finish the race.

As I wrote last time I printed this picture: I can’t print this picture often enough. One of the best bitters in Britain.

A couple of hours later, after an enormous PBJ sandwich, a shower and a brief lie-down to accommodate the inevitable stomach cramps that come from so much exertion on a hilly course, I found myself with Tony and his wife, sitting outside at the Waterfront Club in Bexhill, the sky a brilliant blue for once, the English Channel doings its level best to match, and a pint of locally brewed Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter in hand. Beer never tastes as good as when you’ve earned it, and beer rarely tastes as good as Harvey’s: not for nothing was it voted Best Bitter of Britain at CAMRA’s Great British Beers Festival in 2005 and 2006. The evening duly progressed through a visit to the Rowing Club bar itself, and a home-made curry over a bottle of fine English sparkling wine that I had picked up the previous day. Tony’s record player may well have been called into action, the Apocalypse scrapbooks brought out, an unmarked bottle of red liquid uncorked and duly poured away as vinegar, and a belated Christmas bottle of spirits called up in its place. It would be denial to pretend it wasn’t all enjoyed – and, at my end for sure, well-earned. And best of all, I had done something I almost never do in the UK: I had refused to schedule the next day, a Monday. I knew now that the weather would be yet more glorious and that I would therefore be spending it in Brighton, on what unions label a “personal day.” It was, at this point, hard to argue with anything; in such all too rarely ideal circumstances, England is golden. And Boston, still a full three weeks away, was looking that much more inviting.

Brighton Beach on a beautiful spring Monday. In March. At Mid-day.