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At least in this case it did.
A boss, and friend, teased his co-worker enough that they raced against each other. The teasing was rooted in a strong friendship and both cared deeply about each other. My favorite thing about this is at their race to see who was the fastest they are wearing Obama and McCain shirts. Of course, Obama won that race!
And, more importantly, the man lost 151 pounds.
Huntsville State Park was closed from the day before Hurricane Ike made landfall until yesterday at 12:00pm. I made it out to the park at 2pm to run a seven mile loop and take pictures of what I encountered. I didn’t know what to expect but what I found wasn’t pretty.
The park has an enormous amount of trees that are either uprooted, snapped in half, or damaged so badly they probably won’t live through the winter. The trails have been cleaned of most larger trees and limbs but there is debris covering all the trees. You have to run over branches, pine cones, needles, and more leaves than I’ve seen. But at least it’s runnable. I’m not so certain I could ride my mountain bike through it.
Here are pictures that I took (click for larger images):
Okay these past few days have certainly been scary and stressful for all of us on the Gulf Coast along with many other people out there. As I drove to the airport the highway was filling with vehicles leaving the coast.
Once I safely made it to vegas I spent a lot of time watching the news. I saw Ike hit but I missed feeling the effects until my flight was canceled. Now I’m staying here an additional day.
I suppose that cacellation is ok. I’ll fly into Austin tomorrow and drive home where I don’t know all that awaits. I hear my power is off. I hear that my cat is doing alright. I hear that there is no gas. I don’t know if I’ll stay at home or get the cat and run to a friends place who has power.
No running for now.
I love Kara Goucher and think it’s awesome that she’s announced that she will step it up and run the marathon. I think she’s a fabulous runner, a nice individual, and a good representative for the sport so I can’t be much more than the thrilled I am. Good luck Kara.
Members of the Dallas Running Club have set up a program where they sponsor Marines abroad in their running. It sounds like a pretty good plan where they assist other runners and connect them to a broader running community.
The plan is to have each Marine assigned a Dallas running buddy, who will communicate long distance, offering marathon training tips, accountability and encouragement leading up to the club’s DRC Half in November. Wherever the troops happen to be the day of the race, they’ll set up a 13.1-mile course and, hopefully, run it simultaneously.
This is one of the things that running clubs should strive to do — connect with other runners and would be runners in their community. Just because someone is abroad serving for our country doesn’t exclude them from being in our community.
It’s true that the 10,000 meter run showed Americans that our country has the talent to be competitive in that race. I think both Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher could have medaled. Flanagan finished in a fantastic third place after battling intestinal problems for much of the week before the race. She often trains on a dirt trail in her hometown.
Meanwhile, Kara Goucher is upset with her running strategy. She won the bronze last year at the World Championships in Japan, so she knew she had the talent to win this. Unfortunately she started to think about how she could do well in later races and let that become an excuse not to push this race.
“Well, you know, I’m crazy,” she said. “I thought I could win. The pace was quick and it was starting to get hot, and I made a major mistake. I started thinking about Tuesday, and I let that become a reason that it’s OK not to gut it out.
“It was a big mistake, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.”
Tuesday she’ll run the 5,000 meter race.
I hate to discuss sad situations but this nightmare could happen anywhere. A runner was on a trail in her subdivision when a man physically and sexually assaulted her. During the assault her screams alerted another runner in the area to the danger and that runner scared off the sexual assaulter.
It’s a grim reality that people have to face. People just aren’t safe even in areas where you would feel a little extra safety. Hopefully this can serve as a reminder to others to take all the safety precautions they can: run in groups, don’t run alone at night, let others know when and where you are running, always be alert to your surroundings, watch for unusual behavior, and don’t immediately trust other people you see on a run.
Shalane Flanagan did a good job of dismantling the American 10K record previously held by Denna Kastor. Her sprint to the finish ended with a time of 30:34.49 which undid the record of 30:50.32. Below she speaks of how altitude training helps her prepare for races.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find a serious distance contender who doesn’t have a good amount of altitude training in their routine. There are some but it’s fewer and further between.
In the April 2008 edition of Wired magazine there was a short article entitled "Coming to a Gym Near You." It lists and describes six things athletes have to look forward to. Some of it is useful and plausible while others are either implausible or not useful for me.
Perhaps a little of the Dean Karnazes bashing will be silenced by his strong win at the Atacama Crossing this year. All the bashing is getting a little tiresome. It’d probably be good for the people making the noise to worry a little more about themselves and less about a solid runner who is living the dream of supporting himself doing nothing but ultrarunning. His advise would sit well: “The blisters will heal, the cuts and scratches will mend, the muscles soreness will ease, but the memories will last forever.”
Runners high is a verifiable condition. Although most runners are no doubt aware of the runner’s high, scientists are now ready to concede it’s a true phenomenon. Runners high is experienced at some point in a long workout.
The NY Times reports:
The runner’s-high hypothesis proposed that there were real biochemical effects of exercise on the brain. Chemicals were released that could change an athlete’s mood, and those chemicals were endorphins, the brain’s naturally occurring opiates.
Now there is scientific evidence to support this feeling.:
Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and the runner’s high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.
The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.
So what does this mean? It means that you should get out there and run some more. Run another day this week. Run another mile. Run a little faster than you would normally. Have a good time and experience the healthy high.
The New York Times published a great article about middle-distance great Bernard Lagat. In it they discuss his acquisition of citizenship in the United States and how his residency status changed just before he ran in the 2004 Athens Olympics. A lot has changed since he was outrun by Hicham el-Guerrouj of Morocco.
At the time he was running for the Kenyan national team. However, he was secretly no longer a legal permanent resident of the United States — he had become a citizen. Had this been known he might not have been eligible to compete for either the United States or Kenya for three years. Now he is fully eligible to compete for the United States which he will do in the 2008 Olympic games this summer in China.
In the article he discusses what it was like to lose in 2004 and what it’s like to be a front runner in the 2008 Olympics. He discusses his rivalry/friendship with Alan Webb. And he spends a little time talking about how some runners are unhappy with him joining the US team because that takes away one spot that would otherwise be open.
A blogger at the BBC is advocating, to some degree, the benefits that come with running fewer total miles per week. Just make sure that you’re making those fewer miles have more quality to them.
What drives the extremely talented elite Kenyan marathon runners to success? Is it their genetics, their diet, their training grounds? A commentator at the Austin American Statesman argues that partially it’s their desire to survive. With the recent political unrest that has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans, survival is certainly on their minds.
“You fear to go home because they are killing people,” says Ochoro, a 29-year-old Kenyan who moved to the United States in 2005 to train.
But just because the atrocities are on their minds doesn’t mean it’s their motivation, does it?
His fear is genuine. He and Mutinda used to train with Wesley Ngetich, the runner-up at last year’s AT&T Austin Marathon who was fatally shot in the chest with a poisoned arrow last month. Kenyan officials said the 34-year-old Ngetich was killed in the country’s Transmara district.
One thing is for sure, the money that you can earn by winning a major marathon is nothing to scoff at. I would be thrilled to win that kind of money. I can only imagine what it can do for someone in a country where the majority of people earn very little money. As I can’t win any marathon, I will be happy to cheer on all the elites who work their butts off for whatever motivation they bring with them.
Endurance Planet has produced a new podcast monthly magazine called Tales from the Trail. The first edition is about 45 minutes of content that includes a story about the Hardrock 100 (which sounds like someone reading a race report), a piece by Carey Smith about the Arkansas Traveler, and Andy Jones Wilkins.
On the face of it it sounds like a good idea. In fact, it is executed really well just like the endurance planet podcasts. But the $3.95 price tag mutes the intrigue (this month the podcast is available for free). With great podcasts, race reports, and blogs that have similar content for free, I’m sort of puzzled by the 4 dollar price.
Honestly, the 4 dollars isn’t a lot of money. But a couple months would buy you a good pair of socks for the trails. A year of it would come close to buy you a decent pair of kicks to dance through the trails. And so on. I guess the breaking point is that there are more blogs than I can read in a day, more race reports than I can ever get through, and more quality podcasts than I can listen to throughout the day. All of it is free. Even though the content here is good — I’ll leave it to someone else to buy a monthly copy at zombie runner.
I found a pretty nice article at the San Jose Mercury News about how the author discovered the joy of distance running. It was sort of through a prank in which he ended up out running the best mile runner at his school. Check it out.
It’s pretty cool that the Wall Street Journal ran an article about an ultrarunner in the D.C. area. Brian McNeill is a self-described middle of the pack runner who enjoys 100s & 50s of both the mile and kilometer ranges. The article gets pretty detailed about training and diet.
To many of us who are serious crazy about running, the marathon is only the beginning. Ultra endurance races are where the fun really begins.
Forbes recently highlighted the endurance races (not just running) that it believes are the world’s most grueling. It includes races like the Marathon des Sables where 700 people attempt to run 150 miles through the Sahara desert. It also lists the Great Divide mountain bike race, the Badwater Ultramarathon, and the Western States. What races are they missing?
David Epstein at Sports Illustrated wrote a column that argues that American distance runners are rebounding into the spotlight. It focuses on this past amazing Saturday in New York when 300 some hopefuls ran for a spot on the US Olympics team.
Of course, number one in the spotlight is the 25-year-old Ryan Hall who can run a 4:32 minute mile on mile 17 of a marathon (amazing, yes…) and still finish without showing much pain for the effort (even more amazing).
Next he discusses Dathan Ritzenhein who is probably more impressive to me than Ryan Hall (in spite of the 59:43 half marathon!!!). At 24 years old, Ritzenhein is famed for his 10K times that are much better than my 5K bests.
Finally, he discusses his favorite (at least it seems that way) — Brian Sell. He argues that Sell is the most important for American distance running. Why? Because he’s the everyman. He wasn’t ever a running prodigy before or during college. He just worked hard, trained with a good group, and kicked some ass. That’s what runners should do if they don’t land a scholarship to a fancy college. In fact, he now won’t have to resort to being a dentist as he would have gone to dental school had he not made the team.
Is American distance running catching up? Indeed. And in the words of Sell, “the future of American distance running is bright.”
Lots of news out of NYC this week for long distance runners. It was a weekend full of a lot of fun for many people. We got to enjoy the well earned victory of Paula Radcliffe who came back from giving birth to a child and from a disappointing Olympic performance. We have sorrow for Ryan Shay and his family. A young elite runner who collapsed about five miles into the Olympic qualifying marathon race. He was later pronounced dead. He was a nine-time all American runner from Notre Dame. He was just married in July of this year. However, we can look forward to runnings future with such young elite as Ryan Hall, Brian Sell, and Dathan Reitzenheim are going to represent the United States in Bejing, China. Hall finished in 2:09.02 which is an Olympic Trial record by over one minute.
It’s getting to be the time where people start coming down with a few more illnesses. I often wonder whether it’ll be best for me to relax or to exercise and burn off some bad calories. That’s Fit has a couple of good suggestions to help you make your personal decision:
If you feel sick above the neck then run as long as you can breath. On the other hand, if you feel the sickness below the neck or you have a fever or both then you should just relax.
That’s easy enough.
hundreds of people were sent to the hospital, at least one person died, and the marathon was called off. it’s way too hot out there.
It’s been about 20 years since distance runners from the USA took a gold at the Pan American Games. Well, until this year…
This year we were able to take the victories in the mens 5K and womens 10K. Sara Slattery took it in an incredibly quick time of 32:54.41 and Ed Moran won his race in 13:25.60.
It’s pretty amazing that runners are able to come back and win it.
ING has added the Denver Marathon to its list of marathons it financially supports. Since it began supporting the NYC Marathon in 1999, it has added Miami, Georgia, the San Francisco Bay to Breakers, and now Denver to its list. A spokesman from ING claims that it makes sense as running is similar to financial planning: starting small, setting goals, and working towards your goals over a long term.
Sponsorship of races, clubs, and various running events have had financial sponsors for a long time. As any race director will tell you, it’s not cheap to have an organized race. Everything from the obvious costs to the city, for t-shirts and goodies, refreshments, medals, prize purses to attract runners, and insurance cost a lot of money. Marathons cost an incredible amount of money. However, I don’t like that marathons are changing their name for the sponsorship.
I understand it but don’t like it.
The 2007 first place male at the Western States 100 is Hal Koerner who led it from the start. The first place female is Nikki Kimball. Joey Anderson, of runjoey, dropped at Devil’s Thumb but still made it nearly 50 miles! The website has more information about all the competitors and links to youtube videos.
Meanwhile the AT&T USA Track and Field Championships were held this weekend in Indiana. Alan Webb pulled out an amazing victory in the mile. Breaux Greer, complete with his faux hawk, threw the javelin 299 some feet for a victory. Nick Symmons was unable to win the 800 but he sure had an impressive second place finish. Angelo Taylor dove across the finish line to win the 400 meter sprint. Finally Terniere Clement won the 1500 meter race for the women.
All of these athletes make it look so effortless.
Runners, were you aware that today is National Trail Day? I encourage everyone to go out and run on a trail today. If it is your first time you could realize how much you enjoy trail running.
Take a look at this website to see if there are any activities going on in your area.
There are too many storms outside for me to run today but I see plenty going on in the running community.
Junior High students in Illinois could easy lap me in the 1500 meter race with times just over 4:30.
Anyone care to go on a run with me? Apparently you wouldn’t even need to come to Texas.
Look! A bunch of new ultramarathoners. Marathons aren’t 26.7 miles.
It looks like the Bay to Breakers 10K race in San Francisco was a great run. There was everything from nude runners to women dressed as care bears participating in the event. A group called CANKLE gathered to mockingly suggest that we should walk instead of run. They carried signs stating such messages as “Bring our runners home.”
All in all, it looks like it was a fun race.
This is just a little ridiculous. A marathon runner has been sleeping in a low oxygen bubble to improve his lungs. Run more and sleep less, dude.
May is designated, among other things, as National Bike Awareness Month in the US. This week has been the bike to work week with Friday being designated as a bike to work day.
I try to bike to work every day that I am not meeting a client or appearing in court. I think that the benefits are great: lower amounts of miles on my car, less fuel, exercise, being able to see my community at a slower pace, and stress relief. The negatives are only few: not being able to get to work immediately, being sweaty, drivers who don’t want to share the road, coworkers thinking it’s odd, and not being able to run out and buy a lunch.
How do I deal with the negatives? Well, I bring a messenger bag with me that has my change of clothes. I also put a couple of moisture wipes in it to take off the sweat. In my office, I have an underarm deodorant bar so that I can freshen up. I ride in on back road routes so that I won’t have to deal with as many cars, and I can explore new areas that way. I bring my lunch which also saves money.
I really enjoy it and hope that a few people try it. I didn’t think it would be as easy as it actually is. As for the distance — this guy I knew in Dallas rides 42 miles a day, three times a week. Give it a try this week!
Ethan Stone, a high school student, was interrupted while riding his bike on Thursday by a driver of a vehicle who allegedly hit him on the head with a baseball bat. Stone was wearing a helmet which potentially saved his life. He was able to walk away with a broken helmet, and an intact head.
I hope that everything is ok over there with the recent fire (arson?) in Griffith Park. This is a pretty terrible thing, but I am glad the zoo is ok:
Only one home was lightly damaged, and landmarks like the Los Angeles Zoo and the Griffith Observatory were spared, though the park, a 4,200-acre hilly getaway with ribbons of trails and breathtaking views, will remain closed through Thursday.
More than 800 acres were burned in this fire. I’m guessing that when this article speaks of trails it means things like hiking trails and general recreation trails. I would guess this might impact some runners who enjoy the park.
Anyhow, best wishes with this. I hope that the park recovers without too many problems.
Humans, it seems, are pretty pathetic when it comes to speed and power compared to other animals. But we outshine even horses and dogs at things like distance running. At least one Professor at Harvard seems to believe this to be the case.
In fact, we are the only animals that will run something like a marathon without being forced to do it. Our bodies, in many ways, developed into a snazzy runner form to help with hunting.
Specifically, we developed long, springy tendons in our legs and feet that function like large elastics, storing energy and releasing it with each running stride, reducing the amount of energy it takes to take another step. There are also several adaptations to help keep our bodies stable as we run, such as the way we counterbalance each step with an arm swing, our large butt muscles that hold our upper bodies upright, and an elastic ligament in our neck to help keep our head steady.Â
All I can say is that the other animals, like my lazy cat, don’t know what they are missing.
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If you happen to be an elite runner in the 800 to 10,000 meter range then there is a chance you could sponsored:
The club was worried about finding jobs for its athletes and a decent place to live close to Hayward Field. However, thanks to the full financial support of Nike, plus the welcoming embrace of the community, the club can provide all of its athletes with housing, health insurance and part-time jobs.
All you have to do is move to Eugene, Oregon.
Girls In Motion, a running club in Frederick County Maryland is for teenagers who want to emphasize that running isn’t just for amazing athletes and it can be very feminine.
But running can be very feminine. After all, it’s a time to have a heart to heart chat with your best girl friend, and you can do it wearing your latest running shorts.
Of course runners are great and just like me, you don’t have to be an amazing athlete to enjoy, and even be decent at, running.
800 meter versus marathon? I’d choose the marathon every time.
A great story from the Sacramento Bee about running mothers who are running 50 milers. They also run marathons at Olympic qualifying speeds.
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