Saturday 10/22: I took an early Saturday flight from Logan to Lambert on Southwest. There’s a very new looking & shiny metrolink train from the airport that runs you straight downtown. I wandered around a bit, finding America’s Center & the race expo. This was the inaugural year of the race being Rock ‘n’ Roll series event which means loud radio-style rock blasting everywhere. It was crowded and I had all my luggage with me so people kept asking if I was from out of town. Yes, I am.

I decide to wait for Monica at the expo, but that means I have to kill a few hours. The arch is not far from the convention center and the sun is shining so I go hang out with the rest of the STL tourists for a while. I’ve been to this place so many times – I went up with my family as a kid, stopped here with Jill after a post-college road trip, came here to get dizzy with AZ. Lots of strange mashed-up memories of love & loss.

I find Monica, we get her number but frustratingly they won’t let us have Lydia’s. After that a long drive out to O’Fallon where we meet up with the rest of the cousins & kids and dogs and husbands of cousins. We chat about life & the race and then I’m off to my hotel for an early bedtime, despite the Cardinals/Rangers game. I get to see Pujols hit two of his three home runs, one of the best personal performances in World Series history. FORESHADOWING.

Sunday 10/23: Up at 3:20am. I didn’t really sleep much after 1am, waking up every few minutes to check my clock, eventually getting up well before the first alarm went off. Natalie & a friend of hers picked me up and we drove the 40 minutes down to the start, luckily finding a free meter within a block of the action. It’s still dark out still but there are runners massing everywhere. There’s a stage set up and inappropriately loud music being blasted for the hour – presumably Rock ‘n’ Roll people can only have events where there aren’t residential neighbors. All the cousins met up for one last photo.

I decide for one last cycle through the bathroom lines after we split for our respective corrals – this turns out to be a mistake because the line takes more than 30 minutes, pushing me past the 7:30am start time. It takes a long while to get this many people started (half & full marathoners all start together here) but still I’m on the wrong side of the start line when the gun goes off for the wheelchairs. I work my way back to corral #11 which is really too slow for me – my pace group is two ahead in #9. Lydia is supposedly in #11 with me but it’s too packed, I can’t find her. I’m actually in the overflow off the course at the very back of the pack.

We get rolling maybe twenty minutes later, in my mind I’m estimating two minute gaps between corrals. By this math, if I can catch & hang with my pace group (4:10) I’ll finish well under that. The first few miles are downtown, near but not quite to the arch, tall buildings. I find and pass both 4:20 and 4:10 pace groups, trying to put some distance between myself and them. A bigger problem is the half pace groups – I get stuck behind 2:05 for a while as these guys cork up the entire width of the course.

The biggest difference between St. Louis and Baltimore the week prior is I don’t really have anyone to look for on this course. So it’s much more focused on distance, my splits and breathing properly. I’m definitely more tired in this race than last week – I notice myself dragging by the half mark, but my time is still good, under two hours. I’m more or less successfully trying to keep all my splits between 9:00 and 9:30 – each mile in this range means I’m moving incrementally ahead of my pace group. It’s a bit like the swimming events in the Olympics where they have the colored bar in the pool trailing the swimmers with the record time – I know there’s a invisible line sweeping along behind me and I know that I’ll drop off near the end so need to be as far ahead of that as possible before that time comes.

Anyway – race highlights. Mile 5 we pass through SLU, I recognize this from my previous visit and realize I’m not far from AZ’s house. Mile 8 we dump the half marathoners, which turns out to be the vast bulk of the field. From here on we’re a straggly group running through residential neighborhoods. Somewhere around Mile 11 I see some fat guy on the front porch who has set up a bunch of angry signs in his yard (“26.2 Miles – No One Cares”, “You’re Wasting Your Sunday And Mine”, etc). Mile 15 is the start of the loop-back part of the course in Carondelet Park. At Mile 18 right before the overlap ends I see Monica (actually, she sees me) – she’s about 3 miles behind at this point which is about what we thought would happen. I’m about 100 meters from the Mile 22 marker when I realize I’m running even with the 4:10 guys – I had hoped to put them off for at least one more mile. I push ahead of them past that marker and keep them off for another half mile, but I’m fading and not able to run with them anymore. Just after this we meet up with the tail end of the “half marathoners”, quotes necessary as these are all overweight walkers. It’s tricky to maneuver through this slow field. The last few miles are mostly downhill, I’m constantly doing the calculations on the shrinking gap between my projected finish and my goal. This is much, much harder without SMHB to double check my math. I had almost 13 minutes to spare at mile 25 which even I can tell is more than an easy 10:00 split – I kick that home with minimal trauma. Final chip time, 4:09:21, 136th of 339 in my M35-39 division. I could not be happier than I am, solidly under my goal of 4:10 and with considerably less sickness than I did the week prior in Baltimore.

Post race – I find Natalie almost immediately in the finish chute, she’s beat her goal of 4:00, by 10 seconds. I see a few moments of the “rock ‘n’ roll” headliners, Sugar Ray. There’s some requisite stumbling around before we find Monica and Lyds. Some celebratory photos later – and that’s it. I bummed a ride to AZ’s place where there was celebratory pizza and beer and watching the Cardinals lose and embarrassingly falling asleep on the floor in front of her friends.

So, there’s the St. Louis Rock ‘n’ Roll. Marathon #2 in two weeks. Tomorrow will be my third and final of the month, if the pre-Halloween snow storms and coastal flooding and 55mph(!!) expected wind gusts will lighten up a bit. I definitely don’t expect to set another PR and will be happy to finish strong in non-frozen form. We shall see.

So for the record, my 1/2 marathon PR is 1:42:52 (a 7:51 split), running with team Dana Farber back in 2003. I don’t anticipate besting that this year.

I successfully enrolled in the 2010 BAA half-marathon this morning, along with the rest of Team HB, plus special guest star LZ. The race is October 10th, a short twelve weeks from this Sunday. This will be my fourth (?) BAA half, and will meet the latter part of resolution #2.

I’m going to need all 12 weeks, as my mileage has alternated between sad and horrific as of late. I last ‘ran’ the day before Nate’s wedding, where approximately two minutes in (just as I was telling KKV of my plan to register for this race) I stepped on the edge of a 5-inch curb and snapped the ever living hell out of the few remaining ligaments in my right ankle. Which would have been fun in and of itself, but for bonus thrills I came just about this close to doing a header into an automobile of the large, fast, oncoming type. What is the proper wedding protocol when a groomsman bites it hours before the rehearsal dinner? I would expect, at the least, some sort of tux discount for the funeral.

Point being, the race is twelve weeks from Sunday, and as of today I’m still not really able to walk comfortably. Can this be done? With the psychic help of the bicoastal* runaholics support group, I’m a confident maybe.

*Speaking of which, only six months later, the hevelonian tag line is no longer “bicoastal, bimodal, bionic”. Help me think of a better one or we’re gonna get stuck with the bouncing baby crap that’s up there now.

**Double speaking of which, Team HardCortex are triathalon-ing it up out in California this weekend. The east-coasters are very psyched for this and are looking forward to hearing of their top ten finish (in the money baby!).

The second annual Jingle Blast has finally found a date that makes most folks happy. So henceforth we’re officially on for Saturday January 2nd, 9am. We will be meeting in the North End to get our run on, followed by coffee & crumpets. Bring your tattered remnants of Christmas spirit and residual hangover, along with your present for me if you accidentally forgot to give me one before. Much like it’s cousin-in-spirit, the “Super Bowl”, the Jingle Blast now faces the challenge of being located in a different calendar year than the regular season, making it inappropriate to dub it Jingle Blast 2010 (since the inaugural was held in 2008 that makes it look like we skipped a year). And since nobody wants to end up running the Jingle Blast LDCXXXII I’ll stick this year’s race with the played out but technically accurate 2.0 suffix.

For posterity, here are the specs from last year’s race. I don’t assume the route will be identical but it should be similar in spirit. 4.2 BLAZING kilometers!

Fuzz and I did our last joint SF run this morning, through the park, by the beach, up and around Land’s End. It occurs to me that we’re right at one month post-marathon, and somehow I’ve taken a few giant steps backwards in that time. I’m running like I have a giant anchor around my neck. I would have thought cutting the miles back like I’ve done would give more spring in step, more go but this hasn’t been the case.

BAA registration is closed. That was my backup plan for fixing the situation. Maybe I need something like the Bradbury Bruiser for my birthday. Or the Harwich Cranberry Harvesters Half. YJP and VC have their forthcoming triathalon to look forward to, I’ve got… what, exactly? Anyone down for something?

Yesterday was National Running Day so the dogbrake and I did a midweek 8 to celebrate. It was surprisingly warm out, finally fog free, some welcoming summer sun. The run was unremarkable until near the end, where we found the wind coming off Ocean Beach to be in full-on sandblast mode.

Along the sea wall there are a series of stairwells down to the beach, some of which fill up with sand forming a ski jump-like spout for the rest of their gritty neighbors to ride up and out of, into the face of everyone passing by. So despite gorgeous, magic hour lighting at sunset, turning to look towards the water was not really an eyesight preserving option.

Eventually, DPW will send a truck out and someone will languorously shovel the sand that builds up on the sidewalk back to the beach through these smaller spouts that must be designed just for this. They don’t worry about job security – the wind is always going to blow in from the ocean, making its incremental effort to inch San Francisco eastward. Will this work? Look at the geographic change in the last 15,000 years. It almost seems inevitable that, given enough time, all of this will eventually just blow away.

But for now, we keep our heads down and earn back our elevation up along the cliffs, turn east along Point Lobos, the wind now at our backs and gravity taking us the rest of the way home.

Dog-brake made a case for increasing her mileage quota cap from five to six miles tonight.

Pros: it’s nice to have company, and she was enthusiastic about coming even after I told her I was going to leave her fuzzness home.

Cons: her tendency to throw in random ankle snapping lunges towards the omnipresent holes of invisible pocket gophers throughout Golden Gate Park is getting old.

In the end though she didn’t crap out on me, I didn’t have to drag or carry her at the end, and we finished the massive post-stairs uphill bit by the VA without any walking.

On a related note, one of the surgeons at work mentioned that Robin Williams lives (or possibly, used to live) in Seacliff fairly near to my house (despite them being vascular surgeons and him needing an aortic valve replacement we were just discussing it in terms of running landmarks). It turns out I’ve unknowingly been by his house many times – it’s near the end of my long run route, a huge walled mansion amongst more modest mansions. From a pedestrian perspective his place is notable for the fact that the (very narrow) sidewalk on the left ends a half block before the more normal sidewalk on the right begins making it an optimal location if you’re looking to get run over by a speed-racing luxury automobile. That’s it below.

Given the tiny mileage bread snatcher and I did this morning and the fact that this half is in just over two weeks away I’d have to increase my daily rate by a mere 8 percent(!) each day for the next 19 days to be ready for the Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon. The power of compound interest leads to delusions of grandeur. It’d be easier with a MBF to foolishly Yes We Can along the way with me.

Dogbrake & I modified our route a little tonight to avoid the GGP stabfest and instead extend down to Ocean Beach. I didn’t have my camera (obviously, and not that it’s working anyway) but this is shot is roughly representative of the color the sky was. The last surfers were packing up and out when we turned back up Cabrillo.

As is custom, an annual moment of gratitude. I’m thankful for my family – specifically my parents who with characteristic kindness were (without comment) willing to wake and take me to the airport at 4:30am. I’m thankful for my various sisters & their assorted hangers on. I’m uber-thankful to see the fuzzy one after a too-long break, thankful for getting to see both NYC & DC during the holiday. I’m thankful to have been able to see so many CNY & EP friends over the break (& Z!) and am immensely thankful to finally get my girl out to California (& to VC for rescuing both of us from SFO).

I’m also thankful for Team HB for a fun and motivating realsgiving race at the Gobble Gobble Gobble this morning, thankful the city of Somerville has fairly modest hills, thankful for the grandma rocking the double stroller who passed me on the homestretch. I have to say though – grandma, if I see you (or your ilk) at the Bay to Breakers, you’re going down.