Running Commentary

Not thinking about pain in the abstract right now, thinking about pain in the lower left quadrant of my body. I just did 13 miles along the Ohlone Greenway, having wimped out yesterday and not done the scheduled 12 with the training group, which went to Walnut Creek. On my run today I was specifically thinking of pain and how I relate it to the wise words of running guru George Sheehan , who said more than once that we are all an experiment of one. Well for a while today, I was a darned painful experiment. Around mile 2, my left knee hurt. By mile 4 the pain had migrated to my left quad. By mile 5 my left piriformis muscle was on fire. By mile 7 the pain had traveled across my glute and settled in the left bursa , the site of my original injury. By mile 8 I had decided to change my plan to run the Oakland Marathon into a plan to run the Oakland Half Marathon. As soon as I decided this--Yes! That's it! I'll do it!--as if on cue, all the pain left my body. The final 5 miles of ...

Today was slated to be a 20-miler for the marathon training group. I paced some half marathoners and one intrepid full marathoner. I say intrepid because anyone who came out today was intrepid. Overnight the forecast went from a 25 percent chance of rain to the reality of a steady downpour. I only made it 14.25 miles ( only ), but at the relatively slow pace of my gutsy group that meant being out there for more than three hours. My hip let me know it's still an issue, but I was able to persevere. I know I am not alone in my aches and pains. At this point in training for a long race, runners with no pain are probably not running enough! Every single person who came out in the rain today is my hero. In some odd way, for me (and possible for others?) it was even fun. Yes, cold, yes, wet. Bring it on--I'm alive! We ran on the SF Bay Trail, from Emeryville to Berkeley to Albany to El Cerrito and back. There's only one real hill on the course, so here's the view from its mo...

Because I'm scheduled to do a long run this weekend and will most likely be brain dead for days afterward, I wanted to do a rather scatter-gun post while I'm still a little better than a typing monkey. A scatter-gun post is one that's lucky if it nails anything other than hot air. Or you could call it an omnibus--a vehicle for anything that wants to jump aboard. One guaranteed running-related item is that I didn't run at all last weekend. Still, Saturday and Sunday had much to do with running: Along with a number of other LMJS folks, I took a two-day coaching certification class. The food was great! (Oh, yeah, I think I'm supposed to report on the class here.) The best thing I can say is that I was exposed to a large amount of very useful information about the best ways to train and about how a good coach can impart this information to others. A 100-question test along with certifications in CPR and First Aid stand between me and my coaching certification, but I...

The day. I have been reluctant to write about the Kaiser Half Marathon, which I ran last Sunday. Although my experience was positive, there's an undercurrent of sadness in my race-day reflections because while I was still out on the Great Highway, a runner who had just crossed the finish line collapsed and died. Deaths at races, like deaths at many other kinds of events, are rare--but they do occur. For me, learning of this particular death felt like a splash of ink hitting the sky-blue bucket of the day. I traveled to SF with Lucretia (l.) and Kate (r.). They wowed me with their times--especially Kate, who scored a medal by finishing second in her (and my!) age group. That was more than 45 minutes before I crossed the finish line. (These girls rock.) We toed the start line at 8 a.m. Well, that's a figure of speech. For me, it actually means that I milled around some 200 yards behind the start line along with thousands of other enthusiastic but not-too-fast runners and then, ...