Running for Your Life: Managing Pain

Each couple of weeks or so Steamtown Marathon scribe Jim Cummings writes an email update to those running the Oct. 13 race. These witty dispatches – the event is less than seven weeks away – draw attention to such details as the date upon which entry fees will not be refunded, usually because the would-be racer has suffered from injury or been deficient in training. Once past that date, it’s good luck to you.

Truth is any runner can enter a marathon (except Boston). The trick is to enter and finish four hours or under. In other words, to push your inner athlete, to manage pain (because no matter what you do as a non-elite athlete there is going to be pain.)

For beginners, those who are making the leap from recreational running, the occasional half-marathon, fun runs, etc., stepping up to marathon training, is no easy task. And because of that, one-and-done bucket list runners who’ve completed a marathon and then retired makes good sense. There comes a time when pro athletes decide to hang up the cleats or skates. Training to compete in a tough sport at a better than average level is a punishing proposition. The proof is in the pain, almost despite the train.

Thankfully, after 10 weeks of training – that means both stretching and strengthening, rest days, pretty much alternate week long runs – I’m hoping that it’s enough. That’s because I’m actually going to have to delay my long run. I tried on Wednesday (Aug. 28), during an especially humid day, to get it in and managed closer to 15 miles – and significant forefoot pain that well . . .

Okay, it’s now a day after that run (Aug. 29), and it wasn’t great, my dogs, both of them, started with that old pain that I’ve written about here too much by half, so much so that I actually went to a podiatrist who took one look at my orthotics and said, please, they are worn to the hard shells, refurbish them, you’ve been running with little real support, the lift you need, no wonder you’re in pain. I can’t imagine it, really (that was in her eyes); it’s been a helluva morning, sitting at the Dunkin’ drinking sweet coffee and glazed donuts and earlier – on an endless commute to get to the doctor’s did a most unscientific study of the subway car I’m riding in and an average of sixty percent of people around me (I’ve zero energy to read; as I said it’s been a horrid morning) are either wired or are staring dully, screens in their hands.

It’s a down moment. Training will yield a few like this. But I’m on the road. The lifts are in the capable hands of Eddie’s Shoe Repair at Rockefeller Center – they’ll be back to me the morning of Rosh Hashanah (Sept. 4.), Eddie has assured me, which means my long run (20+ miles) won’t happen until the following week. About a month before Steamtown . . .

Next: Running for Your Life: There Oughta Be a Law

Running for Your Life: Why Race?

It’s not an easy answer, this one. It’s been posed before in this space.

Truth is, for twenty-three years – 1987 to 2010 – I didn’t race. In fact, aside from the occasional tennis game in the’90s and early oughts and a memorable broomball match at Mohonk Mountain Lodge in New Paltz, NY, (our team won 2-0 and I scored both goals!) I didn’t do much in the way of competitive sports.

Instead I ran. But in the manner of Confucius, who famously said, “The superior man has nothing to compete for.” That the spirit of competition itself fouls the purity of sport.

Last week (Aug. 19-23) my mother sent a card to M and me celebrating our 24th wedding anniversary. Inside, she’d stowed a small trove of daily newspaper clippings she’d kept for me – some for as long as fifty years.

One, I couldn’t believe. In a one-column headline, set in 18- to 20-point type were my names in lower case style: Larry O’Connor. The second and third lines told readers that I’d scored a hat trick in an ice hockey game. As I recall I was probably about sixteen years old.

I had totally forgotten that at one time I had been a young competitive athlete. My mom, God bless her, didn’t forget. (Word to the wise: No one loves you quite like a mother.)

Is it about approval then? So strong is that need for parental approval. Run, sure, but race and take a chance that what you will accomplish will again fill that breast of pride, create another clipping, one that your mother will snip out and hold for you, stir the blood like nothing on Earth.

You could call it pride. Or you could call it a mother’s love.

Of course, I’d feel her love if I were to return to simply running – not racing – for my life. But frankly I’ve come to like the idea of the clipping. And if God is good, it won’t be my last.

Next: Running for Your Life: Managing Pain

Running for Your Life: California Mood

So much about life here feels like an outtake.

Scene: Rose Café, Venice:

A couple of old guys, retired, recount their pre-retirement stories; a clutch of young people, in jeans, flannel shirts, open neck, listening to a geek in a beard detailing ideals about business plans, set on charting a path away from producing things we need, rather toward purchases based on the pressure of social and personal tastes.

It is easy to fill a life with the empty, rather than the endless, why we tend to think that the endless is equivalent to the empty when in a certain frame of mind the endless is precisely what we want from life, which is what Neruda teaches us in the most beautiful line:

“Life in its jewel boxes is as endless as sand.”

What can we see in a tide pool? How does it change? How can we simulate that endlessness in what we surround ourselves with in our own lives? Must keep moving forward. Like the tide pool.

Entrepreneur table: Woman perched (see the emphasis of the perky breasts) never says a word, others lock in on “cachet,” “techno-centric,” “primal version of storytelling around the fire,” “platform toolset.”

Retired guys: Blowhard movie dude in conversation with the RG Woody Allen-sighting anecdoters, tells some kind of story that involves Gettysburg (Civil War?) and then in what seems way too scripted receives a cell phone call (loud ring); looks at the screen, and yes, acknowledges to the cronies that with mild regret he must take the call, walking away in a tone of voice that is both loud and important-sounding . . .

*

On to, well, Week 9A, of Steamtown Marathon (Oct. 13) training. In the interest of keeping body (if not mind) in order, I’m taking a second relief week before Week 10, and my longest training run (now planned for Friday, Aug. 30) of about 20 miles. Steady as she goes, folks.

Next: Running for Your Life: Why Race?

Running for Your Life: Just Try to Slow Down

It’s Week 8 of my 15-week training program that will end in my entry in the 2013 edition of the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from my teaching days (and with living with M) is that you don’t keep going back to anything unless you’re learning something new.

So it goes with marathon training. The Sunday, October 13 running of Steamtown will mark my seventh entry in this bruiser of an event, a 26.2-mile foot race. In the previous six, I’ve finished four of them. (In 2011, I was forced to pull out of the Boston Marathon due to injury … I’m not counting that one because I didn’t make it to the starting line.)

What I’ve learned – especially as an older than average marathoner – is that my body will not do what it used to in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. (Despite my best efforts to counteract those aging effects through attention to diet, anti-inflammatory meds and foods, stretching and strengthening.)

More than anything, as I crest the hump of my 100-day training program (Aug. 6 is Day 51), I am facing my Achilles Heel – So, ease up, already, OC!

Instead though I continue to run – even during my long, over 15 milers – at my marathon pace, or about eight minutes per mile. Or train on the treadmill at fast speeds, rather than slow ones.

The manual I’m using, Joe Henderson’s, Marathon Training, The Proven 100-Day Program for Success http://amzn.to/15DmV56, is very helpful at instructing me to alternate long runs with shorter runs (as well as take plenty of rest days and cross train).

But how to throw the body into that lower gear. Currently it is taking me a day or more to recover, with stiff muscles and soreness, tender hammies. I’ve been bound and determined to get close to a New York City Marathon qualifying time of 3:14, a 19-minute lop from my first Steamtown in 2010. It’s doable. But this week is a critical one. On Thursday, as per Henderson’s manual, I plan to run a 10K race simulation. But otherwise I’m going short and slow, with days of rest. At the end of the Week 8, or Day 56, I’ll have only put in about 20 miles. With the view that during Week 9, I’ll have paced myself enough to resume harder training.

Next: Running for Your Life: California Mood