June 7 - 13

(Chicago 2006: Cold, windy, miserable and perfect. How'd I get so skinny for that race?)

Everyone is an athlete, but some of us are training, and some us are not. -- Dr. George Sheehan

Monday - PM 12 with Klim, Charlie, Klim's buddy from work. Charlie took us on an interesting city route.

Tuesday - 14 (10, 4)

Wednesday - 17 (4, 13) - 6,5,4,3,2,1 plus two times 30 seconds on, off. On grass. Rest was half the time of the interval. Pace was steady for the first half; picked it up for the last three reps.

Thursday - 15 (10 with Dave Fontaine (easy, 75 minutes; 5, gym)

Friday - 15 --- 60 minutes easy, gradually picking up the pace; 30 minutes on; 5 minutes hard; 5 minute easy. Continuous. I doubt I was really going that fast after an hour -- maybe a bit faster than 6 minute pace. I'm pretty tired right now and so particularly mindful of injury, so with workouts like these I want to make sure the progression of everything is very gradual. Generally, I don't run fast workouts alone; I run fast workouts in a group. During a big training week, I need the group, in fact, to run fast. Alone, then, I focus on effort, take no splits, put in the work and try to simply achieve the objective of this secondary workout I've been doing the past month or so (and I'll resist the desire to use a curse word): This is about getting really, really strong.

Saturday - 12 -- Early in the run, on Independence Ave., I noticed a runner ahead I'd seen a few times since moving to Capitol Hill in November. I pushed it a little bit and caught him on Maryland Ave., where I introduced myself.
This habit of mine goes back a long way: If I am running alone and see a runner who is clearly legit, I try to track them down and say "hello." Usually, it goes over well, and I've made some great friends this way.
Part of the reason I was intrigued by Dan Rose was that, at least twice, I saw him wearing a USA jersey, and usually the only runners who don such sacred singlets are the ones who have earned them (and not through their paycheck.) As it turns out, Rose, who lives a block or two away from me and works at the Library of Congress (sweet commute!) is a very good ultrarunner -- so good, in fact, that he's on the U.S. Team for the 24-hour run, having placed third last year at the national champs in Ohio, where he covered 139.28 miles. I joined him for his loop around Hains Point (I was probably heading there, anyway), an 8.5-mile run that he does during the week (and today because he was tapering for a 100-miler). He typically runs 25-ish on Saturday and 40-ish on Sunday. And ... he's a cancer survivor.
Check his story out: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=3569221 ... Also, he blogs at http://run192.blogspot.com/

Sunday - 20 - I was in NJ. Ran some familiar roads, for sure. The weather was so much cooler than it is down here. I sort of groaned when, on my return, I parked outside my apartment and stepped out into an oven -- at 10:30 p.m.

Total -- 105 ... Comments: I feel good about the last three weeks of training, if for no other reason than because they were very consistent. Hard running, on grass, on Wednesday. Something gritty on Friday. Long Sunday. This is a pattern I'd like to abide by, as I think the routine really helps during weeks of high volume. Like, on Wednesdays, I think even though, overall, I was pretty tired, my body really knew -- as I drank my coffee while driving home from work -- what was coming and responded.
Six years after getting it as a gift, I'm finally reading "Running Within," which explores the mental side of the sport -- a side of it, as it happens, that I've sort of been denying a long time. Particularly after college, when I no longer had to race every weekend and could put myself through long, uninterrupted blocks of training, in my mind, performance became training + course + conditions = result. The mind had nothing to do with it. You just executed. You just stayed out of the way.
Or maybe that's just it: I need to continue to do the training and stay out of the way -- as much as possible, to run without any sense of limits and absolutely no doubt.
In the picture above, I was 25. It was my third marathon. I was more of a blank slate than I am now.
Some people were kind of surprised when I ran 2:29; I was actually hoping to run faster, and faltered a bit against the 35 MPH headwind on Michigan Avenue, the last 7K. But I was oblivious then to the many things that can go wrong (I didn't really fully understand how hard the marathon race is).
I'd never run a marathon in 100-plus temps without water for 20 miles. I'd never had someone clip my heel and cause me to lose my shoe. I'd never run through a downpour. I'd never had my legs tighten up at 11 miles, as they did in Philadelphia. So many things have to come together for a runner to run their absolute best in the marathon.
It can be tough when you have a feeling you are going to be ready to run considerably faster than you ever have, but there is no real precedent to suggest you should. You have to stay out of the way, believe, be blank, try not to let the doubt creep in. Going to back to an earlier post, Don Juan, I recall, said something to Castaneda along the lines of erase your history. You need to think like Bill Rodgers or Dick Beardsley, which I think is very similar to how the African runners of today are thinking.