10 Years of Running – Memories from the middle of the pack, Part 1

I haven’t kept every shoe, but I’ve kept most of them. Much to my wife’s chagrin.

This month marks 10 years since I became a real runner. That seems like a milestone worth commemorating. Buckle up folks, this is bound to be a long one.

I wish I knew the precise date I went for the run that started me down the long and winding path I’ve been on ever since, but alas that information is lost to the universe. That is partly because there was nothing particularly special about it. I’d gone for plenty of runs before. Cross country was the first thing I ever signed up for in high school and at various points during my adolescence and teenage years I got into running for a few months, mostly as a means to the end of looking and feeling good – not for the sake of running.

Penance for Pizza

That all changed at some point in May 2011. I had just gotten back from a winter in the Yukon working on a research project with Parks Canada that I had fallen ass-backwards into. The Yukon was incredible. It was beautiful, I met fantastic people, I had adventures, I even saw a freaking lynx. The only rough part about it was that the winter I spent up there saw an accumulation of snow that managed to raise the eyebrows of even the Parks staff I was working with – real Yukoners.

The avalanche risk was in the red zone for the majority of the time I spent up there and, as such, I spent a lot of time confined to easy trails or the room where I was staying. I also got to know the fine folks working at the Domino’s in Whitehorse more than any person should. As a result I had fallen out of shape. This was especially disappointing given that I had just completed what I dubbed “The Year of Adventure” wherein I spent every month of 2010 climbing hiking or paddling my way into the far-flung corners of my part of the world. Something needed to be done.

Fortunately I came home to the job I had left at Adventure Guide Inc., the outdoor gear store in Waterloo, ON that not only paid my bills but also made my camping gear addiction moderately more affordable. Also fortunately, they sold running shoes. On my first shift back I bought a pair of Vibram FiveFingers and set my sights on regaining my lost physical prowess.

It didn’t go well.

I remember my first run in those shoes as vividly as I remember all of the torturously awful events of my life. It was unseasonably hot and humid for May. The air was so thick you could almost drink it and I struggled for every sip. Google Maps suggests that the route I ran that day was over 6K, but that doesn’t seem right. I remember mapping it the day I did it and it coming out to around 5. Maybe my memory isn’t as sharp as I thought, but what I do know is that I drank all the water I brought 2K into it at a full stop at the bottom of a hill and it took me 45 minutes to get home.

Stepping into my mom’s overly air-conditioned house, drenched in sweat, saved my life. I glanced at the comically huge clock on the living room wall, noting my time. I knew the only way I’d ever run again was if I made it a little competition with myself to shave a few minutes off. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this little mental trick is what flipped a weirdly competitive switch in me. It’s also, I’ve come to learn, the entire basis of endurance sports as a hobby. All of the running friends I’ve made in the years since share the same compulsion to beat their past selves rather than actually winning a race.

Achievement 1 Unlocked.

The Fitocracy Years

Somehow I managed to keep at it for the rest of 2011. I can’t say how many kilometers I ran or how often I laced up my shoes (the data before I starting logging runs online is non-existent) but I remember being fairly consistent, running at least a couple of times a week until I had dropped 25ish pounds to get back to a more typical weight for me. The conditioning was also a bonus on hikes, bike rides and miscellaneous other adventures.

I like to think I would have kept at it indefinitely on my own, but I probably wouldn’t have. In September 2011, Marianne and I moved to Vancouver and lived with each other for the first time. She started running with me and we explored the trails around the city and on Burnaby Mountain, where our apartment was. The company certainly kept me going. I also started in the Resource and Environmental Management master’s program at SFU and quickly made friends who, it turns out, were also into running and outdoor adventure. Go figure.

That was all well and good, but the next big step in me taking running somewhat seriously as a hobby came out of the blue when one of my good friends sent me a link to a website he found where you could log exercise and some algorithm would turn it into points, like in a video game. Within days all my friends from back in Ontario and many of my new BC pals had signed up for Fitocracy and so commenced two solid years of weekly challenges to see who could run the furthest, do the most push ups, or just rack up the most points.

Fitocracy lit a competitive fire in me that I didn’t know was there. In the past couple weeks, I’ve made an attempt to go back through all the logs that website has of my activities between January 2012 and June 2014 (when I got my running watch, which became my main means for tracking runs) but there are too many to tally in the time I am willing to put into that thankless task. I did manage to add up the kilometers to the end of April 2013 and the figure is 921 km. Not bad, considering I wasn’t training for anything and was also hiking in ever spare moment I could find.

The competition was incredible and I owe my friends a deep debt of gratitude for making it so much fun. I remember many days of heading out for multiple runs in the morning and at the end of the day just because I needed to chase down someone who had pulled ahead of me by 200 meaningless points in a challenge I can’t remember the winner of. It was fantastic.

Skipping Class to Run My First Half Marathon

Probably the most memorable event from the years spent of Fitocracy came in the first few weeks I was using it, while it was still fresh and I was at peak motivation. I was sitting in a Research Methods class with my new grad school friends. The class was mandatory, but covered material I had been over a bunch of times already in the extra stats classes I took during my undergrad (I’ve always loved data). The lectures were also 2 hours long and occasionally happened on Fridays. It was brutal.

On one particular Friday – January 13, 2012 – I found my attention drifting from the class to the view out the window. It was raining in classic west coast winter fashion. A steady drizzle that takes the billion shades of green you will find in a temperate rainforest and makes each of them just a little deeper and richer. It just so happened that the classroom we were in that day looked out over the ring road around campus, which also had a trail that ran mostly parallel to it. I ran that trail a lot. One lap of the campus was almost exactly 5K. With numbers already drifting around in my head I began to wonder how many laps of the campus I could run before my body totally quit on me. It seemed like a much better use of time than learning about ANOVAs again, or whatever we were talking about.

At the halfway break of the lecture I walked up to the professor – a young guy who I remember liking, but I can’t remember much about aside from him possibly having red hair and a beard – and lied right to his face. I told him I had a dentist appointment. It was a lazy lie and he probably didn’t believe it (who comes to half a class when they have a dentist appointment booked in the middle of it?), but he let me leave. I walked back to my campus apartment, changed into running clothes and set out.

I could make up some stuff about the run itself, but the truth is I don’t remember anything about it save for two things:

1. Every time I ran by the class I was supposed to be in I got a little nervous that the prof would see me, but I was also hoping some of my friends would notice and think I was some kind of rebel.
2. At some point probably around lap 3 I decided I was running a half marathon and on my last lap I finished the extra 1.1 km on the university track in the pouring rain. I almost collapsed, but it felt amazing.

That run did a few things for me. It introduced me to my favourite racing distance (half marathon), it set a timing benchmark for me to try and beat (2 hours and 14 minutes), and it inspired me to see what these legs could really do… I’m still finding out.

Watch Out

By the spring of 2014 a lot had changed. Marianne and I moved to Ottawa for a brief stint in 2013 before deciding we weren’t done with the west coast and moving back to Vancouver at the start of the year. I also wasn’t a student anymore, having taken a research job with a not-for-profit that saw me working at a surprisingly nice downtown office and living in a shockingly affordable apartment in Burnaby. Life was good.

With memories of my student lifestyle still fresh in my mind, I was shocked at the effect that actually being paid for my work was having on my bank account. For the first time in my adult life I had some disposable income and I found myself researching GPS running watches in my spare time. It didn’t help that I could walk to The Running Room on my lunch break and look at the watch display with the same wide-eyed fascination that Alvin had looking at that harmonica in The Chipmunks Christmas Special. Sadly, no kind old lady every decided to buy me a watch.

Eventually after months of wearing myself down and convincing my wife that this was not a stupid waste of money, I bought a Garmin Forerunner 620. I probably would have been just as happy with the 220 (which was about $200 cheaper), but the data geek in me needed to know my vertical oscillation and ground-contact time stats… I have a problem.

The first time I turned the watch on, I was standing in my office looking out the window at the Vancouver Seawall. It was a good thing the battery only had enough charge for me to finish the set up, otherwise I probably would have run myself to death right then and there.

As it turned out, the first run I ever logged with that watch ended up being with one of my best friends while he was visiting from Ontario. We ran around a grueling canyon route in North Vancouver. It was one of the most fun runs I’ve ever done. The excitement of a new toy combined with the excitement of seeing my friend and running through what it probably one of the nicest environments on the planet was really working for me.

I very quickly fell in love with having a running-focused computer on my wrist and set my sites on newer and bigger achievements. My newfound motivation would lead me to places I never dreamed of visiting when I set off on that first run and help me deal with some of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in my life. But more on that in Part 2.

Touching Base

I’m back from vacation and dealing with an increased workload at my job so just a quick check in today.

The challenge continues! I’m officially one month in and up to 31 minutes of running and it feels surprisingly good, but it’s getting tiring. No rest will soon start wearing me down I imagine.

The push ups and pull ups are both onto a daily total scheme, but I’m improving a lot. I can do sets of five pull ups without much difficulty and the push ups haven’t taken me more than two sets yet.

Feeling the Burn

I’m at a work retreat this week on the west coast but I’ve been sticking to my workout routine pretty strictly. It doesn’t seem like too much to call it a workout now that I’m up to 18 pull ups 18 push ups and 18:00 of running. It is enough that my arms still feel tired at the end of the day, which probably speaks more to my lack of strength than to the difficultly of the challenge. Thankfully the hotel has a good gym that I’ve been taking full advantage of.

I even got outside for a run yesterday. We were supposed to go skiing but that outing got cancelled due to high winds. We went to Deep Cove instead – one of my favourite places in Vancouver. It turned out to be a good thing because I realized yesterday that I didn’t bank a run for the 20th and don’t really see an opening in my plans for that day to sneak one in. I opted to run the 2K trail to Quarry Rock instead of hike with everyone else. I made it to the end in 16 minutes (it’s a challenging trail) so had to double back to get my 20 minutes.

It felt great but the consequence was that I was by myself in the rain until everyone else showed up. Luckily I had an amazing view to keep me company.

As a result of all the activity yesterday I was pretty exhausted when I woke up this morning but I had to hit the gym again anyway. The funny thing is that I feel like I have more energy now. It’s all about getting the motor going in the morning, I suppose.

I’m starting to feel the building fatigue of 26 runs in 18 days but my knee is healing up nicely and I get to hike all next week.

To the mountains I go!

A Convenient Injury

This week has been more physically demanding than I anticipated. I spent all of Tuesday night shoveling snow off the roof and have had to break up several ice dams as a rather intense winter rolls on.

Somewhere along the way I tweaked my right knee and for the past couple days walking has been a little painful – especially up and down stairs. The funny thing is, I’ve been able to run through it with basically no issues.

The human body is a funny thing, very specific motions can cause pain while other similar motions don’t. Chalk it up to evolutionary versatility.

As I’ve continued to bank runs in advance of my vacation at the end of the month I’m also exploring corners of my iPod that I’ve neglected for many years. I’ve rediscovered the Goo Goo Dolls among many other great but forgotten bands. As a result, my daily runs are something I look forward to more than I have in a long time.

It’s a happy side effect of this challenge, but easy, daily runs where I don’t care about total distance are rekindling my live of running. Who knew?

Sore but Not Sorry

I wasn’t looking forward to getting on the treadmill today. Marianne and I hit up the local cross-country ski trails yesterday and after three hours of movement that I am not used to I woke up feeling pretty sore.

Funny enough, as so often happens, the days I am most dreading end up being the days where I feel the strongest. Once I got moving the soreness went away and it was mostly effortless to log my 24 minutes to bank January 24th and then (after a short break) knock out my 8 minutes for today.

I’ve been running at a slower pace than I normally would to lessen the day to day fatigue and it seems to be working. Pacing will be the biggest challenge of this whole endeavour as the days get longer.

Also, I am aware how boring all the pictures of my treadmill are so I’m hoping to get back outside when that is even remotely feasible.

Over the weekend I official hit my pull-up limit (5 apparently). I’ve switched to doing the daily total in as few sets as possible, which still seems to be in the spirit of the challenge. Push-ups are still going strong with a single set approach, but the days of that are likely numbered as well.

Overall I feel good today though and forcing myself to run has likely prevented some additional stiffness from the skiing. I need to bank three more runs this week to prep for my vacation. Let’s see how that goes…

Taking it Easy

The plan for today is to take it easy. After two days of banking runs and walking my dog through waist-deep snow I’m feeling the beginnings of fatigue in my legs, which will rapidly develop into actual fatigue if I’m not careful.

That said, I just got off the treadmill and am feeling pretty great, so the temptation for a longer run this afternoon might get the best of me. That would be a bad move since it would cut my recovery time in half before I have to run again tomorrow morning, but I’ve been known to be an idiot from time to time.

The push ups went well today but I’m reaching my limit for single set pull ups. It’s looking more and more like I’ve half to switch to a single day total before I’m even two weeks into the year for that particular item.

Regardless, I’m go nog to try and limit myself for the rest of the day. It is -37C with the windchill today so there’s no strong drive to get outside. I’ll take that as permission to be lazy.

The Banking Rule

As much as I would like to take on this challenge in the purist way possible, I know that I’m going to come up against some obstacles that will get in the way of my being active in the way I want. The first and most obvious obstacle is a camping trip I have planned for the third week of January. As much as I love winter camping, it is not conducive to running.

For that reason – and to accommodate similarly challenging events this year – Paul (the friend who is doing the challenge with me) and I have agreed to what I am calling “The Banking Rule.” Put simply, if we anticipate that there is a day when activity will not be possible for whatever reason, we can perform the activity in advance. This rule also permits rest days if we plan ahead enough.

To accommodate our camping trip, I’ve spent the last two days running doubles on the treadmill. Today I ran not only my four minute for Jan 4, but also did a separate 22 minute run for Jan 22 – a day I will be spending in the woods in waist-deep snow. I plan to bank runs for that entire week, effectively erasing the only “easy” week this challenge could have had.

In related news, I easily did 4 push-ups and struggled through 4 pull-ups this morning. I won’t get any style points for the latter, but they’re done. I also looked up the world record for single set pull-ups and learned it is 236. If I make it to the end of of year, I’ll have to call Guinness.

An Impossible Resolution

It has been a long time since I updated this blog. That is largely because I have not embarked on an absurd physical quest with any degree of commitment since my first marathon. That has changed.

On a whim, at a New Years party, after probably one too many glasses of champagne a friend and I agreed to what can only be described as a resolution that is doomed to fail. The premise is simple. Do one push-up, one pull-up and one minute of running on Jan 1; then do two push-ups, two pull-ups and two minutes of running on Jan 2… and so on until failure.

I don’t have high hopes for the strength exercises. This is not my forte and I am starting from basically nowhere. In fact today (Jan 3) marked a real struggle on the pull up bar in my office. The running however holds some intrigue.

I have been a somewhat devoted runner for the past seven years. I’ve run three marathons, around a dozen official half-marathons and I even won an organized 5K race last year (against a field of children and less-than-Olympic parents). That said, I’m pretty average runner in terms of outputs.

My personal best times put me firmly towards the front of mid-pack runners (I once calculated my marathon time is somewhere in the top 25% of finishers, but not much beyond the lower limit of that), but those records are two years old. Last year I ran a paltry 730-something kilometres, down from 2000 in 2015. Even still, one minute isn’t a long time.

I’m aware that the challenge will come in a couple of months when I am tasked with running for one hour each day with no days off. Worse will be the back-to-back-to-back-to-unending half marathons beginning in April or May. I know I won’t make it to the purely hypothetical 6-hour run on New Years Eve, but I wonder how far I can go.

Driven by nothing but that curiosity, I’ve begun. Taking the task in stride, I ran as fast as my treadmill would allow for 3 minutes. I made it half a mile. It was great. I didn’t take a picture though, so I’ve added the Day 1 shot instead.

I’ll post periodic updates on this blog until the wheels come off. Happy New Year, everyone.

To Hell and Back: The story of my first marathon

It has been 124 days since I ran my first marathon (BMO Vancouver Marathon). I realize that is a ridiculously long time to wait before writing a race report, but what can I say? It has been a summer full of unexpected twists and turns that have distracted me from finally doing this. Now, exactly once month out from Marathon #2, I feel like I have both the perspective and the motivation to record these thoughts before they get muddled with another race. And away we go…

The weeks leading up to May 3 did not go completely according to plan. After my last super-long training run on April 5 I started experiencing pretty bad pain on the outside of my right foot, towards my heel. I went to a physio clinic where a doctor specializing in sports medicine (and coincidentally training for the same race) told me that it was an overuse injury that was aggravated my landing too far towards the outside of my foot and possibly too far forward. He gave me some exercises to do and told me to hit the gym for some low-impact activities to keep my fitness up while I let my foot recover.

I think I did the exercises once, but I went to the gym for the first few weeks of April in lieu of running. My plan was just to give my body as much recovery time as possible before kicking off race season. Two weeks out from the marathon the rest appeared to be paying off when I ran a person best of 44:42 at the Vancouver Sun Run 10K, but I was concerned afterwords as my foot pain had seemingly returned full force. I did only 3 short runs in the two weeks that followed and crossed my fingers for the marathon.

My training buddies and I.

May 3 rolled around with perfect weather. The morning was cool and I wore a sweater over my Under Armour sleeveless shirt on the shuttle to the start line. I met up with my training partners as we all nervously stretched before lining up. I remember doing my best to stay off my feet, still leery of stressing my injured foot. Eventually we headed to the corals and worked our way up towards the start line as the national anthem played and no one paid attention.

The first few kilometers were great. The excitement off all the other runners and the novelty of being part of an organized race (only my third at any distance since high school) spurred me out to a strong pace. Up until the moment the gun went off my plan had been to try to break 3:40. Based on my long runs I felt I could do it. However, at the expo where we picked up our race packs I met the founder of the Running Room, who after hearing my finishing times at 10K and 21.1K told me to shoot for 3:30. I thought that seemed ambitious but as the kilometers ticked away and I rode a 5:00/km pace, I began to revise my plan.

I caught up to the 3:30 pace runner about 5K into the race and ran along with him at what in hindsight should have seemed too quick of a pace. It turned out his plan was to bank a few minutes early in the race and cut the pace towards the end. we ran down 49th street towards the major climbing section of the course and the idea of banking a few minutes before the hill up to UBC seemed to make sense. I pulled ahead of the 3:30 pacer, ticking off km’s 5, 6 and 7 at a 4:34 pace (I’m an idiot).

As expected, the hills up to UBC, particularly the infamous Camosun Street hill ate into my time. Kilometer 10 took 5:27, but I wasn’t worried. I settled back into a comfortable pace just under 5:00/km and began to feel like breaking 3:30 was all but inevitable. I even made friends with a girl running at roughly my pace and trying to break 3:35 to qualify for Boston and told her to stick with me. However, by the half-marathon mark, cracks in the armor were beginning to show. The most damning evidence against my ambitious new goal came as I set a new half-marathon PB in the first half of my first full marathon.

As I ran by the clock at the half marathon point, though, I didn’t even realize I had set a new PB. I was beginning to feel tired and struggled to take in a gel, but things were going alright. That is, until kilometer 24.

In the lead up to the race I had tried to run every step of the route on my various training runs and I had largely succeeded, with one exception. On a long run, my training partner and I had attempted the Jericho Beach section but got mixed up and ended up skipping a 1.5K section. It turned out we had missed the second steepest hill on the course, and for that mistake I would pay. I chugged up the unexpected hill and made the turn onto 4th Ave, but in trying to maintain my pace I had burned through too much energy.

The wall came at kilometer 27, almost exactly. I was running down 4th towards the section of the course I was the most familiar with, having run it more than a dozen times on lunch breaks at work, but the roads looked completely foreign. Each slight hill was an unwelcome and soul-crushing shock to my system. All at once, I had had enough and needed to take a walking break to recollect myself.

I struggled, walking and running in spurts to Kits point where I refilled my handheld water bottle at an aid station. As I screwed the top on, the first of my two running partners who I had started the race with caught up. I ran with him for probably 500 meters before I just couldn’t keep up. I wished him well and went back to my misery.

I had been looking forward to the Burrard Bridge before the race, having trained on it with a lot of success on both short and long runs, but I couldn’t make it to the top without walking. My other running buddy caught me on the bridge and tried to motivate me by pushing be up the hill, but I had to tell him I just couldn’t do it. At this point I would be lucky to break 4 hours at the finish line.

Dying on the downhill side of the Burrard Bridge.

I made it to the apex of the bridge and used the downhill grade to get back into a running pace before I made it to the aid station at kilometer 31. Up until that point the aid stations had provided water and some sports drink and occasionally gels, but this one was different. I weaved through a sea of runners and out of the crowd, seemingly in a spotlight from heaven, arose a table with bananas. I devoured my first piece of real food in hours and almost instantly was a changed man. I threw the peel in the trash and fixed my gaze on Stanley Park and the Seawall. My last chance to own this race.

With my sugar stores replenished, I could think more clearly, so think I did
. Rational thought produced a solid plan. Based on the time I had left, I worked out that I could afford to walk the first 100 meters of each kilometer and still break 3 hours and 50 minutes if I ran the rest at a pace around 5:45/km. With the ocean on my left and the forest on my right, I stuck to the plan religiously and was amazed how good I felt. My pace was steady around the park as other runners began to lose steam. I passed countless other warriors including my two training partners before rounding the final bend, in site of downtown.

Smiling, somehow.

My wife, fresh of completing the half marathon, waited at kilometer 40 with our camera where, amazingly, she caught a picture of me smiling. I ran past the 41 km marker where I briefly considered the last 1.2K to be humanly impossible before getting back to work.

Cruelly, as you make the last turn and get a glimpse of the finish line, Georgia Street rears up in an ugly and demoralizing hill that, again, forced me to walk. It was only when I saw the clock, siting at 3:48:00 that I got my sense of urgency back. With every last morsel of my strength I sprinted, or more accurately shuffled, towards the finish line. When I made it through in 3:49:02 my legs nearly gave out.

Don’t believe the clock, official time was 3:49:02.

I grabbed all the food I could get my hands on and collapsed against the fence in the finisher’s area. Eventually I found myself laying flat on my back on Pender Street, ignoring my regularly vegetarian diet and gorging on a turkey sandwich (the best of my life) the next human voice I could make sense of came from another runner, also sprawled in the middle of the street, telling my my head was on his banana. We laughed and congratulated each other for a while before I told him I had to meet my wife 2 blocks away at the Olympic Cauldron. Agreeing that I would probably die on the way, we said our goodbyes and I limped my way o
ut of the fenced area.

I met up with Marianne and we snapped a few pictures of each of us with our medals before making a new friend (a half marathon finisher) and deciding to use the free beer coupons that came in our race packages to get drinks at a pub nearby. We ate and laughed and had a great time.

The “sprint” to the finish.

Spent.

Victory pose with the wife.

Best lunch ever.

It was the hardest and most worth-it thing I’ve ever done.

Health Benefits: VO2 Max

According to my Garmin I crossed a pretty significant milestone today that I have been working towards for a while. It isn’t a distance or a time sort of milestone, it is a measure of my health. Today I crossed the line between Good and Excellent in terms of my aerobic fitness with a VO2 Max estimate of 52 mL/kg/min. For anyone reading this who isn’t a health and fitness nerd like me, VO2 Max is a measure of how efficiently your body makes use of oxygen. The higher the number, the more oxygen your blood is able to carry through your body and, presumably, the less effort it takes your heart to keep you going. According to the Garmin Connect website, an average VO2 Max for someone of my age and gender is 43.9.

I had been holding steady at 51 mL/kg/min for probably the past month. I’ve been slacking a bit on my speed training so I wasn’t expecting to make the leap anytime soon. However, today as I set out running in the rain I felt fatigued and the thought of going a full 10K was less than appealing. I opted instead for an easy day running between 6 and 7 K. At my eventual 3.5 K turnaround point I spun around on the road and off of the trail at Burnaby Lake popped another runner. A woman probably around my age… and she was moving. Now, I don’t like to think of myself as a competitive runner. I like running because it is a sport where people encourage each other, not try to crush each other. That being said, I do have a competitive streak in me and when I saw her hop onto the road I decided that if I wasn’t going to run a full 10K, I could at least try to keep pace or pass this total stranger. With that, I kicked into a higher gear.

The last half of my run was run at what is probably the max speed I can manage over any kind of significant distance (4:20 to 4:30/km). I managed to pass the other runner (we exchanged friendly good morning’s) and did my best to build a lead and hold it until I was back home. The effect was that I turned my easy, short run into an impromptu speed day. Speed days are when you push your VO2 Max and that is how I ended up reaching my goal. So, to whoever the runner was who hopped onto the Central Valley Greenway at Burnaby Lake around 10:20 this morning, thank you. You motivated me to push myself and I am a better runner for it.