Eeny Meeny Miney Mo...

... run the marathon, yes or no?

This week I decided, no. I have been putting this off for months, but these are weeks when I would need to ramp up the volume of miles and the length of my long runs, so I couldn't put off the decision any longer.

I've been unfocused, undisciplined and emotional since last October. I wanted to train for another marathon because I thought it would give me structure, direction, and a mental and physical boost. And maybe if I were just running for the joy of it, that would be the case. But instead, the idea of training has been stressful, and I haven't been standing up well to the pressure. I dread runs, and skip workouts, mostly because I don't want test to test myself right now. I've been tested plenty enough lately. If running were easy for me, if I were a natural, I imagine I'd feel differently. But training for marathon requires a lot of mental effort, and I want a break from it.

I'm planning to defer my VCM entry to 2011, and think about running a fall marathon instead. I am going to keep running this spring, and racing. But the distances will be shorter, the goals smaller and the self-imposed pressure far less. Next weekend I turn 35, and I will be at the start line of the Unplugged Half Marathon on my birthday. Current forecast is an ideal 40-44 degrees, with a strong chance of rain. I have high hopes it will be a good day.


Irony alert
My friend Maria has a relay team in the Vermont City Marathon. When she put in the bid, I had planned to run that race, and we had planned for the relay team members to run along side me throughout the race. Now, I'm begging for a spot on the relay team, "Patti's Pacers."

Rear View Mirror: New Bedford

The New Bedford 1/2 Marathon was two weeks ago, but I've been a lapsed blogger since then. Here's to making up for lost time:

Going into the weekend I had a sartorial crisis. It began with an innocent-seeming email from Beth that said, 'Have you picked up your singlet yet?' We, and Heidi and Erika, were going down to New Bedford with the GMAA team -- team bus, team hotel, team dinner. All of these decisions were made so gradually that I was a little stunned and intimidated when I realized how thoroughly I had insinuated myself into a team racing weekend. With fast runners. Yikes.

I hit the limit of my comfort zone with the singlet. Just to be clear, a singlet is a tank top, not a wrestling suit as some of my rugby-playing friends assumed. More importantly, to me a singlet says, "I am a super fast racing demon! Step aside whilst I crush you with my speed!" But ME wearing a singlet? The message is more like, "Appreciate the irony! I am slow, but delusional enough to wear a racing singlet as I finish last!"

I drew a line on the team experience at wearing the singlet, and had to look askance and feign distraction at the team dinner when more than person said, "Does everyone have a singlet? We have extras for anyone who didn't get a singlet!"

On race day, the weather was gorgeous. The first warm, sunny day I'd experienced since the last visit to San Diego. The breeze was a little strong, but the sun actually felt too hot when the wind died down briefly. The course has a series of hills at the beginning, then miles of flatness then one long hill at the end. At breakfast, people who'd run the race before warned us to 'save something' for the last hill.

I was unsettled at the start line, full of emotion and agitation. I started out too fast, then calmed down and found an appropriate pace. I panicked at the first water stop when they had no cups left (WTF?! Insert complaints of back-of-the-pack-slow-runners-don't-get-no-respect here).

A few miles in, after the initial hill, I was keeping a steady, faster than I expected pace. My training had been... underwhelming and my expectations were limited to just finishing. But I was actually running 11-minute miles or under and feeling pretty strong. I lost a little time taking a port-o-let break, but then cruised into the last miles running faster than I had earlier in the race.

At mile 12, I saw the hill and was beginning to give myself a pep talk when Chad showed up to run the end of the race with me. During most of the 10:30 it took to run that mile, I was on the verge on saying, 'ok thanks - got it from here, sadist.' But he kept running just a bit faster than I thought I could go, and I managed to keep up with him. The course turns a corner just before the finish line, where I saw Beth and Heidi, long since finished, cheering me on before I hit the last timing mat.

My official time was 2:24, so much faster than I thought possible! (The weekend before I had run 12 miles in 2:27.) I knew towards the end of the race that I was in striking distance of my PR from the 2008 Unplugged Half in Burlington. I thought that time was 2:23, and coming so close after such miserable training felt like a triumph, and not at all a let down. But then I got home from Massachusetts, and dug my Unplugged bib out of a box and looked at the time I wrote on the back: 2:25!! I did PR! By one short minute.

A few quick observations about the differences between traveling with runners vs. traveling with rugby players. Runners seem to be well-organized, on time, prepared, almost fastidious. Rugby players... not so much. Bathroom breaks on the road were few and efficient. Rugby road trips... not so much. The runners showered and changed after the race, and had clean clothes to wear for the ride home. Rugby players..... well. But for all their exuberant, chaotic messiness, rugby road trips gave rise to some of my favorite stories of misadventures with friends. Like the time we got lost in Rhode Island, and ended up at a donut shop at midnight getting a tour of sprinkle bins and fryolaters from the Jehovah's Witnesses who worked there. Good times, made possible only by bad navigation and leaving later than we planned.

Have you seen this person?

I got out of Vermont for a weekend to visit Keith, one of my favorite friends from college, in Washington,D.C. He’s tapering for his first marathon, National Marathon on March 20, and a big focus of the weekend was talking about running, running, and recovering from running.

On Saturday, we took different routes for our long runs: Keith did 12 miles, including a long hilly stretch of the race he’s running; I had a 10-mile route that was an excellent tour of the city:

Starting in Adams Morgan, I would head through Georgetown, across the Key Bridge into Virginia, along the Potomac River, and then back into DC across the bridge that ends majestically at the Lincoln Memorial. From there, I would run all the way down the mall past the Washington MonumentWashington Monument, up past the White House, Dupont Circle and back to Adams Morgan. to the Capitol building, one lap around the reflecting pool, back to the

You’ll note the tense I’m writing in: I would have.

Before we headed out, Keith and I discussed our approaches to carrying ID on a long run. I’m not consistent about it at home, but in the big scary city I opted to carry my driver’s license, ATM card and $20 cash. Keith, drawing on the advice of world travelers everywhere, said it might be better to carry a photocopy of an ID. This is the kind of idle, pre-run chatter I might have paid closer attention to. As in, “This is an omen! Rethink your plan!”

Starting out, I was sore from strength training and speed work earlier in the week, but the dazzlingly warm, sunny weather and the stimulation of buildings, traffic and pedestrians made that easy to overcome. I was running well and enjoying it. Brick sidewalks in Georgetown, a sleepy canal towpath, bridges with expansive views of the river and the city, the reflecting pool on the mall (that is clearly a victim of maintenance budget cuts), sandy gravel walkways among the monuments – it was a really nice run.

After 5 miles I was in the shadow of the Washington Monument and looking for a bathroom. I stood at a crosswalk with my hand on my hip, and realized with admirable calm that my driver’s license was no longer snug in the pocket of my tights. It was... no where at all, actually. Aye. As quickly and modestly as I could, I searched myself for the possibility that the card had merely shifted out of the pocket. The ATM card and the cash weren’t where I put them, but they were accounted for. But no driver’s license. Aye.

I suppose of the three things I was carrying in that pocket, I would have chosen first to lose the $20 (no offense, Andrew Jackson), second the driver’s license, third the ATM card. So it could have been worse. But still, it wasn’t great.

Instead of finishing the planned route to the Capitol and the White House, I decided to complete the run by retracing the first 5 miles. As I dodged in and out of tourists, I sized up their potential as friends or fiends: ‘If you found my license, would you turn it in? You with the fanny pack and the kids, you look helpful. You, with the death metal t-shirt and the stink of disaffected youth? Probably not.’

For two miles or so, I had hope. I poked around when I saw trash that looked suspicious. I detoured into grassy areas where the winds might have taken my license. I talked to a nice lady at the visitors’ kiosk who took my information and told me to report it to the Park Service. (The Park Service dude, on the other hand, gave me a look like, ‘Good luck, fool.’)

I should probably be more concerned about identity theft, but I think it’s more likely my ID blew away in the breeze, or was picked up by a lucky underage girl with bar-hopping dreams. I was mostly interested in how I would get on the plane back to Vermont the next day.

Here’s some advice for wayward travelers: you don’t actually need to have a government-issued ID to get through TSA. You just need to look like a sad-sack and put a pile of references in the hands of the security guard in charge. Here are some of the things I had with me:

• Runner’s World magazine, name and address on the subscription label
• a written warning for speeding in Winooski (did you know that whole city is 25 mph?)
• credit cards, a partially used Dunkin Donuts gift card, a health insurance card

The security manager gave me an amused look as I proffered detritus from my purse as evidence of who I am. Cough drops, business card of the guy who taped my drywall, Chapstick, my phone... hey, I’ll prove my identity by updating my facebook status from my phone! 'Patti is currently being detained by TSA at Washington National Airport. Anyone want to meet up?'

But all my sad minutia didn't phase the security guard. He’d clearly been in this situation before. All he wanted to know was, do I have a Costco membership? A Costco membership! The grainy photo on the back of my (expired) Costco card is black and white, approximately ¼ inch square and I’m wearing a baseball cap and glasses. It's no regulation passport photo, but it was enough. I was in.

I had plenty of time to kill in the departure area, having arrived early to fight the good fight with security. I spent a good deal of that time admiring the runner's ID bracelets advertised in the magazine that almost got me home.

UPDATE! I might have sounded like a doe-eyed Vermonter when I said, "maybe someone will find it and mail it back to me....." But lo! In the mail today was my driver's license with a note, 'You must have dropped it running :-) ' Indeed. I'm mailing him maple syrup tomorrow.