Oak Hill Flyer

what does the sidewalk artist feel when the forecast calls for showers?

the street appears the same as it did yesterday: mailboxes, cats, driveways in need of trim. the passer-by would think nothing of the sight, the sight that today appears as illusion.

does truth lie in the temporal? indeed, it must.

Posted by OHF at 22:09 | Permalink | Comments

while some may offer up other suggestions for the best highlight of game 2 of the NLCS, my vote goes to what i saw on a commerical break early on in the game.

watch "marathon" (from mastercard's "priceless" ad series).

despite my speculation that less than five percent of the viewing audience actually recognized the protagonist of this spot, i was thrilled to see one of running's current-day heroes crack into some very expensive airtime during the baseball postseason.

[...]

"sports drink?" "magazine?" is that all yousguys can come up with? don't tell me that any of these ideas for the script didn't cross your mind:

• full body massage: $45


• half rack of ribs: $11


• thirteen ounces of pure petroleum jelly: $1.99

even the low-hanging "new pair of running shoes" would have livened it up a bit. you'll see--someday we runners will get the same writers that the star quarterbacks get. someday.

Posted by OHF at 23:59 | Permalink | Comments

miles 24-26.2
i was able to pick up the pace to some degree on the downhill 24th mile, but not to the extent that i would have liked. not that i was looking at my pace chart much anymore... at this stage of the game, you do whatever the hell you can to get to the finish. by the time lexington parkway came around, it was time to climb again. i wasn't able to take to the gentle ascent as aggressively as the big hill at mile 21; the marathon was starting to feel like a marathon at this point, and i had dig down and push. i made myself a deal: if i suck it up for the next fifteen minutes and get to the finish, i'll never run again. i agreed to its terms, the spectators as my witnesses; east on summit we went.

as i crossed mile 25, i had to take a look at the overall time to see whereabouts i might be arriving. my elapsed time read 2:57:54--i was 8:22 away from my 2005 PR with 1.2 miles to go. "jesus, i could do this on fresh legs," i thought. "let's go; let's get this."

my form was breaking at this point. i don't know how smooth it looked to the spectators, but it sure didn't feel like floating anymore. my only respite was the sight of a cross on top of a steeple that peeked through the houses to the left. that respite was needed--my left shin muscle was cramping, which kept my foot pointed upward and prevented me from landing on it properly.

the past four miles on summit ave were a tunnel of residential houses and people on a heavily tree-lined street. when summit turns into john ireland boulevard, the tunnel abruptly ends--you're left with a panoramic view of st. paul proper. to the right, downtown st. paul. to the left, the cathedral of st. paul, whose steeple i saw earlier. and straight ahead lay a 50 foot drop to the finish line in front of the minnesota state capitol under a cloudless blue sky. it was a fabulous view.

the downhill relived the cramp, and i pushed as much as i could into the finish. with about 50m to go, i saw 3:06:16 tick away on my watch. honestly, i didn't really care. this was my new PR, this was my day. i felt a great sense of relief crossing the finish line--my eighth marathon was in the books with a 3:06:28.

the finish line was well organized and easy to navigate. they had hot vegetable broth (genius yet again!), which i loved for its high salt content. i hobbled over to the massage tent; i was having some cramping issues that needed to be resolved. after about fifteen minutes in the tent, i was ready to go and face the day.

i hadn't realized that a full half-hour had passed from the time that i finished to the time that i called lars, which is why i was somewhat surprised to hear that lars and fisher were both in already. we met up in front of the capitol--lars finished in 3:17 and fisher finished in 3:32. lars's parents picked us up, and within an hour we were relaxing in the family hottub munching on some local pizza. alex came and joined us at the roe house that afternoon. we discover that no only did he run a debut 3:13, but he also scored digits from some gal at the finish line as well. ha!

in the afternoon, i had the pleasure of seeing the live television broadcast of the twins winning the central division title and joe mauer winning the AL batting title at the metrodome. and to think that i was just there this morning for the start of the marathon! i was a twins fan for sure, if but just for a day.

that night, we had a party at lars's townhouse, where fisher and i met plenty of his friends along with some other folks who ran the marathon as well. lars was in fine form (to no one's surprise); fisher tried to get some sembalance of sleep so that he could catch his 5:30am flight the next morning.

postlude
this may have been the best marathon experience i've ever had. the organization of the race, the course, the weather, having lars's parents around, and the luxury of having a house to wake up in/come back to... it was all just gangbusters. my only real complaint is that the published elevation map is deceiving--the course has more inclines (miles 14-20, 24-25) than the map leads to believe, and the hill published on mile 9 has several decents that make it faster than expected. fortunately i found all of this out the day before the race on our course tour, so i don't really have any personal beef.

as for the twelve seconds... i've given them a lot of thought over the past week, despite the difficulty of the course. at the finish line, i could have cared less about them, and that still holds true today. i've asked myself about the easy-paced mile 1, whether i could have taken 15 seconds off there. but as i look at my actual versus target splits, i made up for the slow start on the very next mile (albeit unintentional). the only mile i didn't really hit was mile 24 (the one mile respite from all the climbing), but even that was offset by an unintentionally fast mile 9. in short, i planned my run, ran my plan and couldn't be any happier.

comparing my 3:06:28 run on sunday to my previous two PRs, i'm left to believe that although i ran the first 5k on sunday exactly at my planned pace, the planned pace itself was a touch conservative. it's interesting to note how delicate those first three miles are, especially when compared to my austin '99 run in the same graph... a real "butterfly flaps its wings" scenario if there was one. given the climbing at the end of TCM, i can't fault myself for being conservative in the first 5k. now that i know the course better, i'll take off 20 seconds in those first three miles next time. if anything, the TCM chart showed the least variance in pace throughout the middle 75% of the run, in contrast to the other two PRs; it makes me wonder what the hell i was doing back in '99. the comparison of mile 22 across the three marathons is also a real treat--mile 22 at TCM was a vertical wall in constrast to the two austin runs, and the fact that it is almost the fast of the three miles in that cross-section is a testament to how good i was feeling at that moment.

i spent the entire summer working on my speed. now it feels like it all went by way too fast. if anything, the twelve seconds serve as a reminder to that which is easily forgotten after marathons such as this: there's more running out there.

the numbers
3:06:28--7:07/mi, 239th overall, 46th 30-34 male.
1:34:00/1:32:28 split (7:11/7:04).
==============
807 0:08:07
708 0:15:15
733 0:24:48
704 0:29:52
707 0:36:59 (mile 5, 7:24/mi cumulative pace)
709 0:44:08
709 0:51:17
707 0:58:23
659 1:05:22
657 1:12:19 (10, 7:14)
653 1:19:11
708 1:26:20
654 1:33:14
700 1:40:14
658 1:47:12 (15, 7:09)
651 1:54:03
649 2:00:52
654 2:07:46
649 2:14:35
656 2:21:31 (20, 7:05)
659 2:28:31
716 2:35:47
731 2:43:18
715 2:50:33
721 2:57:54 (25, 7:07)
707 3:05:01
128 3:06:28 (26.2, 7:07)

Posted by OHF at 18:35 | Permalink | Comments

miles 14-20
between the first half of the marathon and the next seven miles, there was a pace difference of about 15 seconds per mile. that's a fairly significant difference--think about how far you can run in 15 seconds--and it felt like i shifted up a gear to hit the pace. but after two miles or so at this pace, i didn't feel good... i felt dangerous.

with a pace change like this, you start passing people left and right. and with each pass, you become a little more confident, feel a little bit stronger. and the machine begins to feed itself very quickly. amongst the windy, tree-lined streets, my confidence was further increased by the fact that i raced a 15k two weeks prior at a pace 20 seconds per mile faster than what i was running right now. i felt like i was floating.

around mile 16, i spot a runner wearing an austin marathon shirt. it was fisher--apparently, he went for broke. "it's over," were his first words upon seeing me. he still looked together, but his illness this week really has drained him. i wished him well, and hoped that his illness wouldn't get the best of him in the final 10 miles.

despite the ever-so-slight persistent incline for these 6 miles, i felt strong and aggressive. the miles, much like the leaves of the surrounding trees, fell by the wayside with every step. i'm still passing people on the franklin street bridge entering into st. paul. the mississippi spilled out from underneath me to my right, carving through a valley of color.

"this is how roger must have felt." i hooked a hard right and made hay on the ensuing descent.

miles 21-23
one of the strategies i employed during the race was never looking at my overall time (the lone exception being the halfway split). i only worked on the mile at hand. i looked up my goal, i hit my goal, i looked up my next goal. after doing this successfully for the past 20 miles, there was no concept of how far i've gone. all that existed what the road ahead and my next goal. with the 5 mile climb to the finish in front of me, there was no time to be thinking about the fact that i've just run 20 miles. the thought never crossed my mind.

they had this inflatable castle wall arcing over the road just after mile 20. it looked as intimidating and insignificant as birthday balloons. during this final downhill stretch, i'm passing people more so than before.

passing under lake street, the race that i've been waiting for all morning--which is to say, all summer--finally begun. a 150 ft ascent over 2.5 miles up to mile 23 lay in front of me. lars, fisher and i ran this hill yesterday. coupled with the fact that i've been training on the similarly-profiled old bee caves road all summer, i felt like i was on home turf. despite my pace band telling me to back off, i attacked. now we're really passing people. and i'm feeling like a million dollars. my summer mornings spent on old bee caves made me feel invincible.

the largest crowd of the race was present at the left-hand turn onto summit ave. as i run the tangents, i have no shame in running tight to the crowd and forcing them to take a step or two back. the flashes of color, the blurs of sound... it make the event feel more "live" for myself, and i can only speculate it does for the spectators as well.

it was during this tight turn that a girl with a broken leg and crutches popped out of the crowd and onto the street, 15 feet in front of me. i don't know who pulled her back, but i was inches away from smashing into her. in the event that i wasn't awake yet this morning, i sure as all hell was now.

it was a giant relief to make it to snelling avenue. here the climb gave way to a ever-so-slight decent, if but for just a mile. after 20 minutes of all-out climbing on top of two-plus hours of running, its arrival was more than welcome.

Posted by OHF at 22:57 | Permalink | Comments

words, words, words. BOR-ING!

trip photos
personal photos on flickr.com

race photos by Action Sports International
matt fisher
alex haley
lars roe
rich yavorsky

Posted by OHF at 22:36 | Permalink | Comments

prerace
"damn, fisher's still at it." it was tough to ignore the crouping coming from the other room. nonetheless, duty called, and duty said that you had less than two hours to get to the start line. aside from the presence of lars's parents (who arrived during the night) the morning at the house was uneventful. we planned to leave at 715 for an 8am start. i can't say enough how nice it was to be inside a house with private restrooms to prepare for the run. we even had high-speed internet at our disposal for a last-minute look at the forecast (for better or worse, nothing had changed).

the five of us crawled into the car for the trip downtown, the three runners relegated to the back. lars mentioned that he was going to stick with me for the first half, and there were murmurs of fisher attempting to go sub-3. we're dropped off two blocks away from the start at the footsteps of the metrodome. given the pleasant morning conditions (48 degrees, sunny), i see no point in lugging my dropbag with me, and unload it into a wheeled garbage can for its journey to the finish (wheeled garbage cans with bib number ranges posted on the front--goddamn genius!). fisher wants to head to the start; we bid him well. lars and i head into the metrodome for restrooms and stretching (a 50,000 seat indoor stadium to shelter 10,000 runners before the gun--genius again!). some of the walkways into the ballpark proper were open; i couldn't resist a 60-second peek into the home of homer hankies and the 1991 world series. it didn't look all that bad for a domed stadium; made me wish i had tickets to that afternoon's game.

nevermind the twins; there was a race to be run. lars and i find a decent position at the start; sixth street paved the path straight ahead. the skyline of downtown minneapolis was but 800 meters in front of us. a helicopter chopped at the cloud-free sky above us as the anthem was sung.

hand over fist, this was the best start line experience i have ever had at a marathon.

miles 1-7
for the past month, i've been saying that i'm gonna run this first mile 45 seconds slower than my target pace. i go out easy. real easy. i watch the 3:10, 3:20, 3:30 pace groups pass me as if i were one of the skyscrapers that i was passing. "fools... all of them," i thought. lars and i wondered where fisher was, what he was doing. we passed through mile 1 a full 60 seconds slower than target; i could have cared less. here's the deal: 9 out of 10 people who have bad marathons have bad marathons because they "went out too fast." for the low, low price of 15 seconds, i figuratively guaranteed that i wasn't going to be one of those nine people.

mile two, in contrast, went by 20 seconds faster than planned. this was okay because (a) it was predominantly downhill, and (b) i now had calibrated two a broad spectrum of pacing. as we enter the west neighborhoods, lars notices that the ink of his pace band was washed away by sweat. now i know he'll be sticking by me tight for the first half--i fill him in on the underlying reasoning of what i'm doing in the event we split up.

over the next five miles, we pass our first two lakes: lake of the isles and lake calhoun. and in all honesty, i wasn't quite comfortable. there was a bit of being overwhelmed ("holy shit, i'm in minnesota in october"), and a bit of fear ("holy shit, i'm in a marathon"). in the meanwhile, lars seemed extremely comfortable--given that he grew up in the twin cities, he was recognizing spectators and runners at a rate of about one every five minutes, and wasn't shy about saying hello and introducing me. he'd fill me in on who he just saw: old classmate, relative, etc. despite our contrast, the air did feel nice, and the two of us were hitting my target splits in fine time.

the spectators made themselves apparent early, and set what would be the curbside tone for over two-thirds of the race course: a single line of spectators on each side, cheering. i'll take that simple midwestern fanfare over the million-person-mayhem of boston anyday.

miles 8-13
being in a different part of the country is always curious because the unfamiliar seems so familiar, but not. the alma maters on bumper stickers, the artwork on grocery store bags, etc... all different. nowhere was this more apparent during the race than on the apparel of the spectators lining the roads. i enjoyed perusing the logos and designs of everyone's clothes. then i saw a fellow wearing, of all schools, a university of northern iowa sweatshirt. it just happens that UNI is the school that my sister is doing her study-abroad master's through, and his sweatshirt made me think of her. and that just relaxed me something fierce for whatever reason. i saw the colors of fall and it reminded me of schenley park back in pittsburgh. and all of a sudden, i felt GOOD. we weren't picking up the pace just yet, but i mentioned to lars that at 13, things are going to change.

lars's mother met us at mile nine and ran with us for a short while; we weren't in much need of anything, but her visit was welcome. mile nine--presumably the most hilly mile in the first half of the race--turned out to have plenty of downhills, and we went through it ten seconds faster than expected. i had no concern of this at all.

passing by lake harriet, i come out of my game face for a moment, shake the limbs out and ask lars how he's doing. he says fine, and we make our way to lake nokomis. i feared that the southerly trip over the lake's only bridge would prove to have significant headwinds, but there was nothing more than a 5 mph breeze. albeit that was a relief, it also meant that i was going to have to tackle the northbound second third of the course without any wind assistance. translated: the negative split effort would rest squarely on my hips. i was a touch concerned, but i still felt quite fine as we crossed the halfway point.

"1:34 flat" i told lars as i looked at my watch, "that's a 3:08 finish, but there's hills ahead." as for getting lars to the halfway point in hopes of a 3:10, we couldn't have been at a better pace. as for following my pace plan, i was splitting one arrow after another. and as scheduled, i picked up the pace. lars was 30 yards behind me within a minute; he was going to attempt to finish 3:10. i elected to stick to my original plan--i flipped the switch and headed north.

Posted by OHF at 01:59 | Permalink | Comments

it all happened so fast, more so than in other marathons past. maybe because of its locale (minnesota, my first ever visit there); maybe because of the company (lars and fisher, who now live away from austin). maybe because i haven't seen fall colors in over five years.

"it all happened so fast." one doesn't ever really expect to say that about a 26.2 mile footrace.

saturday night
i cooked dinner for the three of us in the roe kitchen; the fate of the universe seemed to be hanging in the pot of nishiki rice being prepared on the stovetop (screw up the carb reserves, and screw up tomorrow morning for all present). we enjoyed an otherwise quiet stir-fry together (my pre-race meal of choice--digests much more easily than pasta and packs plenty of heat).

before retiring, i was faced with my final preparation task: determine the pace strategy. with predicted winds coming from the south at 10mph on an otherwise brisk morning, reason kept screaming at me to hold back on the southbound first third of the course, push pace on the northbound second third, and bet the house that the conservative start allows for an aggressive trip through the hills of the eastbound final third.

i never have run a negative split at a marathon. even my PR in 2005 was a touch positive. and to pick this course of all courses to attempt the feat felt a little gutsy. but it's how i like to run, and i've felt strong all week. i threw numbers into a spreadsheet to calculate a 3:10 negative split finish, then dropped a 0.975 factor across the board to calculate a 3:05 PR attempt. fisher, nosing around at my work, catches an important error that would have caused me to pace myself for a 27 mile run. i scratch the corrected numbers onto a pace band, place tape over the ink, and staple it to my bib number. i'm pretty sure that lars thought i was nuts, constantly asking him for random office supplies minutes before going to bed. fisher, tired from the day's activities, retired earlier. lars and i couldn't help notice that he had a 3:00 pace band with his running gear in the living room.

1030pm: lights out. i had a nightmare about getting lost going to the metrodome, then getting lost inside the metrodome and missing the start of the marathon. despite the dream, i get a full 7.5 hours of sleep that night and wake up five minutes before my alarm clock does.

[to be continued...]

Posted by OHF at 23:15 | Permalink | Comments

as of this evening, i'm back in austin, texas. i've gotten just about everything that i have from minnesota unpacked and put away, execpt for this goofy grin that seems permanently attached to my face... i might have to live like this for a while before i can file this one away.

twin cities was incredible. missing my austin 2005 time by 12 seconds, yesterday's 3:06:28 negative split is nonetheless my new PR, given the contrast of TCM's elevation profile to austin 2005's profile.

i've much more to write about the weekend, but for now i'll let the numbers tell some of the story. see the graph below for the mile-by-mile target pace versus the actual split.

Posted by OHF at 00:21 | Permalink | Comments