Interview with Casey Moulton here.

10 miles. I got caught up in a workout with Josh, Greg, and Joe and ended up doing a warmup, then 13 x 1 minute on, 1 minute off, then a cool down. 1 minute on was anywhere from 5:40 to 6:00 pace and 1 minute off was like 6:30 to 7:00s. Humid and hot out. I feel great and recovered. ------------------------------------------- I bought an antfarm for my daughter. It took four weeks for the ants to show up. They arrive in a tube that someone actually has to pack and seal with all the appropriate legal documentation. These things are amazing; the ants are all working together as they should and have decided, in a moment of anti-establishment fervor, to kill the farmer and his family in their little green house with their little green tractor and to take all the sand from the 'ground' and take over the farmer's property above ground. I spent 15 minutes watching them do this. I'm that way with nature things which is why I stay clear of nature shows on PBS or Animal Planet; I get sucked into it. So for all the life going on upstairs, there's death down on my porch; my daughter's friend convinced her to take ownership of five dead sand crabs which were taken, sadly, from the New Jersey shore. They became more dead as they sat outside festering in the 90-degree sun in a sealed tupperware jar for a grave overlooking Mexicans hauling ass on tractors cutting the grass behind McWorld. --------------------- Random, disjointed, boring thoughts about the meaning of life: -I've written this before: whether you realize it or not, you are going up or coming down; you are either cresting a peak in your racing--in your life too. Or, you are damned to throw yourself at race after race until you finally conclude with your head looking down at the ground, that you are getting older, you've done your best, and that there's always ultras right? We all get to this point in our lives. It's as destined and programmed in our DNA as that little cancer mutation, that we don't know about, that is waiting to explode at some point and take us into the bowels of the earth, despite the yellow Livestrong bracelets that look good with a nice tan and Bristol Myers Squibb's bottom line. It's going to happen, people. -Similar to above, we all get to ride a rollercoaster in our racing history. Some of us realize it at young ages, while others of us don't get the fun until we are a bit older. But it's always the same ride--we eat away at PRs in huge chunks and think, with enough caveman shit and good ole' Hollywood tears and Jimmy Chipwood spirit, that we can make it into the zone of greatness and win one for the Gipper. I struggle daily with this. Am I at the edge of my potential here or can I run faster? Can I keep throwing spirit, intensity, and sweat at this thing? Is the ride slowing down? Is this thing a dartboard and I've thrown one too many shots at 2:36 to make me stop believing in myself? If I do 50 thousand 800s at MP, will this burn the scrub oak forest to the ground and let the new, sub 2:30 grass take root? I mean this really is the sole reason why we have running blogs full of me-me doubtings, Oxysox, Gus, racing expos, Bart Yasso and the rest of the cottage industry out to sell you whatever magic beans you need. It's those magic questions that we can't seem to answer for ourselves--that we need someone else to help answer: can I get better? Is this the end of the road? Was that popping noise I just heard my gene mutating? Who says I can't run faster? Fuck them. Train, train, train. This is the only way to find out. We all have to keep training, keep hammering, keep running harder and harder. The more we don't believe anymore, the more we have to dig into the caveman shit bag and wail away. I'm also convinced that continual racing will dull the blade. Sharpen the blade, reforge it and use it sparingly. So this is a commitment to try to train more and to race less. My first reaction after this marathon is to fly somewhere cool, tomorrow, and to disprove the times. I would have done this last year. No. Keep it real. Train, train, train. Do the right things. Keep believing in myself, fuck the naysayers and the peanut gallery. Drive on. It's better to be over the crest and still trying than to give up not knowing that you really could have done it. ---------------------------------- I'm joining a track club. I've concluded that I need people that run 49 minute 10 milers to beat me into the ground and make me feel like shit to get any better. You are only going to get so good at 11pm on a cold street by yourself. The time has come to hand the stick to someone who's always going to be better than myself to beat me with. Details to follow later.

A Brief Chat With Duncan Larkin Subelite Wannabe Times sat down recently with Duncan Larkin for an interview after his lukewarm 2:36:22 showing at the Vermont City Marathon this past Sunday. Duncan Larkin runs for the Ascetic (TM) sock company and is currently the founder of Stickenstone Inc. He holds a 2:32 (AIDED) marathon PR as well as a 15:47(DUBIOUS) 5k PR. Besides running he likes to hang out with painted clowns and prancing ponies; he enjoys candied orange slices and drinking Falernian wine. Never one to hold his tongue or avoid conflict, Duncan has fought recent battles with John Bingham's brownshirts when he questioned the achievement standards of people like Jason Caity who PR'd with a 5:50 at the 1st Annual Anna Graham marathon. He's also dared to call Bart Yasso ubiquitous and accuse Bingham of doing meatball shots while drunk and possibly stoned. Regards to recent running, Duncan struggled in the Vermont City Marathon where he hoped, in perfect conditions, to go for a 2:29 attempt. Subelite Wannbe Times caught up with him at lunch as he was changing the bandage on the wound incurred when his Ascetic (TM) sock slipped underneath his Racer ST. SWT: Tell me about VCM. DL: It was hot for me at the start. I usually race better in low 50 degree temps and I think the temperatures were around 65-69 at the start with some humidity. I went out behind the leaders and was banging out consistent 5:40s until about 8 or 9. 5:40s started to hurt around that distance and so I let go of the goal and just committed to holding on. I pretty much knew that my goal was gone at 8 and I just wanted to end it respectably. I really ate it hard around mile 20-21 and that bothered me because I thought I'd come into this race very strong for the final miles. Also, contrary to the VCM website, I didn't run the 1/2 in 69. It was 1:15:low and I was in 6th place at the time. SWT: Were you in 6th place the whole time? DL: No, I passed Mark Churchill around mile 14th for 5th and then another guy at 16 for 4th. I held 4th until Mike Melfi passed me at 20 like I was standing still. Then some doctor guy from Vermont (not Skirack) passed me on the bikepath around 23. SWT: How does it feel to beat Skirack finally? DL: Who cares. They didn't put anyone up to it this year. Had their new recruit, recent Vermonter Rick Rountree been there, I'd still be writing about the vendetta that will never end. However, I do feel some sense of vindication, b/c had they sponsored me I'd have made them proud. But it's over. No more angst felt. No more bitterness. I even made peace with Leslie Myers. She encouraged me at mile 4 when I passed her (she was on a relay) and I reciprocated. Josh Brown, one of their sponsored runners and a real stand-up, friendly guy, caught my ear at the YAM scram and we shared some good memories of a few races. So the hatchet is buried and the lame boxer-ish grudges are done. My beef was never with the people on the team, but more with the way they allocated sponsorships. It made for good theater, that's all. The theater also helped increase the number of pageloads per day which increased my Google ad check from $.01 per month to $.10 per month. Note to self: conflict always drives revenue--good shit man. SWT: So what's up with your foot? DL: Since I'm sponsored by Ascetic(TM), no comment. Some people are asking about my shoes though. I run marathons in Racer STs and shorter races in T-4s. T-4s aren't cushioned enough for my endomorphic mass. SWT: What's next? DL: Good question, SWT. Damn you guys are on it. After the race, I considered hanging it all up. I stewed on the idea of taking up sailing and perhaps boat building. I've always wanted to sail the ocean and contemplated doing something Thor Heyerdahl-ish, you know, build like a primitive Kon Tiki vessel and take to the Pacific--the whole fucking Pacific. I thought about it during the entire 8-hour drive down from Vermont and when I pulled up into the parking lot at McWorld, I decided to keep running. I'll do the Pacific when I'm40. Until then, I'll keep tilting at a sub 2:30. SWT: What broke down in your training? What would you do differently? DL: Probably marathon pace. I preach Hudson and thump Hudson, but I don't live Hudson. My workouts were either progression down to MP or at the poopy 7:00 pace. In fact, when I tried MP stuff, I failed in the heat--so there you go. For my next go-around, it will be MP from the get-go. MP on the track at increasing MP distances. Another thing that I'll do differently is try and train with people more. I've got some new training partners with similar goals for a fall marathon and we'll all work together this time. I'm also on the verge of running on a local team. I also think the weather during the race was some factor. I felt hot from the start of the race. The Spring down in PA had been cool and my body wasn't acclimated. SWT: Did I just catch you making excuses? DL: Yes. SWT: Did you do striders before the race? DL: Yes, I pranced with the other prancers. I did a couple, but one of them was what I call a "social strider." I strided, and then saw some good friends behind the Parisian barricades and ran over to them and said hi. Social striders don't count as true striders and this may have been a major factor to why I died at mile 23. SWT: Anything you did well in training? DL: Yes, I like to think my mileage was right as well as doing mid-week progression runs. After all, I ran a 10-mile PR and a 5k (NO DUBIOUS) PR in this lead up. It was good stuff. One of my running mentors and friends, Bob Sweeney, told me recently that the dividends of doing the training I was doing won't necessarily get paid right away--it takes time. His words really stick with me. During the race, I hydrated at every stop taking gatorade at the beginning and water at the end. I got by with no GUs. I like to think this part of the race went well. SWT: Anything else you'd like to say about the race? DL: Yes, a couple thank yous. Thanks to the old vet with the ship baseball hat who walked me to the elite tent and got a tee shirt for me because my bag was missing. People like this--people that help you and then disappear unthanked--are the real heroes of these races and in life. Thank you to the entire VCM organization. You guys always put on a first-class event and take care of the subelite wannabes with all our little needy things like cutting in bathroom lines and having our little cattle pen surrounded by orange 'keep-out' signs. Thank you to Ron and Wendi for sharing their house and Rob and Lori for throwing the raging bonfire and the BBQ with the bountiful beer. Thank you to the 1000 of you who encouraged me along the beltline. I felt, as you encouraged me, that if you really knew how much of a jerk I was, you'd root for #7 not #6. Thanks also to all those that came to the race and helped me in this selfish pursuit, including the EMT folks that fixed up my Pickett's Charge ankle in the Civil War triage tent. Their words: "We are in awe of what you do" amazed me. To which I responded,"Nope, I'm in awe of what you do, you are helping people for free, I'm chasing a time for myself." I think it was after that exchange that I contemplated reading up on Thor Heyerdahl and drawing out Kon Tiki plans in my head. SWT: Red Hot Chili Peppers: By The Way, Californication, or Stadium Arcadium? DL: Stadium Arcadium sans the boop de hop de dop songs. Songs like "Hard To Concentrate" and "Strip My Mind"are the real gems. SWT: Lydiard or Daniels? DL: Hudson and Canova.

SWT: What do you make of McMillan's calculator? It nailed you on this one with your recent 5k time.

DL: McMillian's calculator, Avogadro's number, it's all Scotch-Italian math to me. Next question.

SWT (making the same gesture over the heart that Mike Wallace made when he asked the Ayatollah Khomeini if he was crazy): Forgive me, these are others' words, anonymous peoples' words, not mine, but 2:36. It's not that good. Is this the genetic wall or was it a bad race on a hot day?

DL waiting for translation then looking down at the microphone and after a long pause doing his best Ehrlichman: Is there a question in there somewhere? SWT: Now, to your previous novel... DL: Yes, "Wildcat" SWT: Not a success. Why? DL: Well... Wildcat was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular... [long pause] ... Wildcat... Wild... cat... [he stares into space]... pow... wildcat... I'm going to go. ---------------------

Working Titles: Sympathy Excuse #1. or... Red Badge of Stupidity. or... How Much of a Difference 1/2 an Inch of Sock Fabric Makes. or... Don't Buy 'Running' Socks at Target, Go to EMS. or... This Hurt Pretty Bad Starting at Mile 8. or.. Masseuse to Me Upon Taking Off This Festering Mess: "Oh My God! You Need to Go to the First Aid Tent!!" or... Me Caveman, Me Tough Guy, Me Strong and Brave. Me Blog About Myself With Picture. Hoo--AHHH!!!!! or... My 8 Year-Old Daughter Actually Packs a First Aid Kit and It Came in Handy! TA-DA! -------------------------- Rediscovered Recently and Used Everywhere, but Eternally Brilliant Nonetheless (I saved it for a rainy day such as today): "It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

2:36:low. 6th overall. Pretty much a disappointing race. A 1:15 half then disaster. Felt like poop starting at mile 8 or so. Skirack beaten, game over. The end. Roll credits, now. -----------------------------------

32 minutes easy. -------------------- Final ranking updates: 1. Wardian 2. Matt Pelletier (1:07 half a couple months ago) Both going for 2:22 tomorrow. #3-10, open. DesGranges is a no show and Decker's only pacing #1 and #2 until 18 or so at 5:20s. There's a few other guys around my ability that I'll try to hang with in the 2nd pack.

35 minutes on parts of the course down around miles 13-15 as well as near Howard Dean's humble, grass-roots mansion. There's a fog over the area and it reminds me of 19th Century London. The Ripper and the Lopper are out there somewhere, so I turned back at 17 minutes. But I did run past the corner where the Skirack henchmen, like those guys from the 2nd level of Double Dragon, will be waiting for me with their headbands and their big ass tire irons. ----------------------------- There's nothing like entering the Kingdom of Vermont from Route 149. You cross through run-down sections of New York, where billboards tell people that smoking crack while pregnant will kill two people and where emaciated young men with large beards spend their upstate New York heroin highs sitting on rocking chairs on old dilapidated porches. They stare at Suburban upon Suburban of New Jerseyites on three-day weekend get-aways passing quickly through these sad, rotting towns. You cross the border into Vermont and everything changes. The welcome center serves free Green Mountain coffee (blueberry flavor too!); the volunteers there, clad in socks n' Birkenstocks, smile from behind thick glasses offering anything to you and Carl Kasell's baritone voice booms at you from the bathroom speakers proclaiming that Bush sucks, the war's a damn mess, and the world's going to hell in handbasket. Occasionally on VT-22A you get to see the last dairy farmer in North America and his two sons, but they are harder and harder to spot because their collapsing barn is now at an acute angle and is being masked by the new age sculpture studio that was errected by the transplanted New Jersey artist with the small Volvo and the large inheritance. --------------------------------------------------- I'm getting ready to support next year's Healthy Kidney 10k--big time--by embarking on that same, miserable journey across the wilds of New Jersey and up the Hudson. Accordingly, I fully expect to pull the plug on the blog for the next few days. Thanks to those of you who left well-wishes and advice. The weather looks to be improving somewhat. The winds are down to 5mph, but the temps have gone up with the humidity in check. This is manageable if it holds and might cause me to re-evaluate my race strategy once again.

6 miles with a 2-mile time trial down the Betzwood (5:37, 5:40). Good to go. Adductor problem has been moped up. Legs are ready to roll. -------------------------------------------- And now for the bad news. Nice and warm...nice.....AND WARM? Details for Sunday 5/28 Sunday Nice and warm with sunshine and patchy clouds High Temperature: 78° F RealFeel®: 76° F Winds: SW at 13 mph Wind Gusts: 28 mph ---------------------------- So this is when reality sets in. I may be in 2:29 shape, but it would be on a flat course in 50-degree temps with no wind and a whole lotta luck. I'm changing things(if the weather comes as predicted). I'm going out with the sole focus of beating the best Skicrack runner. I'm easing into it cautious...we're talking 5:50s, maybe 6:00s the first couple. I die in the heat. I died in Miami and all my shit marathons are ones that are run in over 65 degree temps during the race. So lets all push back from the crack pipe and lets look reality in the face on this. Shall we? --------------------------- A fast 100m in Mombasa will buy you a dollar store plastic spatula and the following cd from the checkout rack: Kenny Loggins, His Greatest Hits 1979-1981--the Dark years, the Tenacious years. "Sample this. Paul Koech, a Prisons warder won $2.5 for winning the 100 metres dash under hot, humid and energy-sapping conditions at the Mombasa municipal stadium recently. Koech showed no emotion as he pocketed the small brown envelope stuffed with the equivalent of Ksh170." Would you show emotion? And a 2:11 marathon in Mombasa, the fastest time ever on Kenyan soil, will buy you a low-end kayak from EMS (non-Himalayan expedition version). "The following day Philip Kemei raked in $700 for winning the Mombasa International Marathon in 2:11:6 hours...Kemei's time in Mombasa - 2:11:6 hours - is the fastest on Kenyan soil and at 33 and with enough exposure, he has a few more years to earn decent money in appearance fees in the international circuit." -------------------------- Somewhere between touching a real velociraptor's tooth and looking through a transit, my daughter informed the visiting paleontologist at her school that I was running the Vermont City Marathon. The paleontologist has sent along his best wishes. ------------------------- I know I'm not a big 'form' and style guy but here's some observations: (click stories on the right) 1. Lance's form looks like doo-doo at the moment. 2. Gotta shorten the shorts. You can't run fast in those homeboy things. 3. Consider striders for the 2:45 NYC attempt. 4. Canyons not deep enough for a 2:45 presently. No need to shave legs for marathons, but consider wearing one of these. 5. Skirack's out of sponsorships for him because he's not fast enough with a 2:45. 6. Nike Free shoes + Lance Armstrong-esque intensity and Lance Armstrong-esque mileage dedication = big fucking stress fracture.

37 minutes out in Valley Forge. The legs are back on track. I've bounced back after a couple 9:30 bedtimes, candied orange slices, and some mental daba-doo. I do have some residual soreness in the right adductor, but since it's just that now, I can soak it up with my mind in the next few days. It will be gone. If it doesn't go away, it's just the freaking adductor; come race day, the endorphins will conquer it. Good stuff. ------------------------------------ The lower lot at VF today had transformed into some scene out of the movie Charade. Granted, there was no Seine, but there were balloons and folks holding hands out on fresh air constitutionals. Some young guys have a bike rental side business going on in the lot. They were listening to the Doors while throwing thousands of bike helmets from a large trailer into the back of a rusty pickup truck. Jim Morrison's deep voice, followed by the characteristic long organ solos of all Doors songs, reverberated off the rock walls and shot up into the clear blue sky on their way to reunite with the Lizard King atop his cloudy aerie. A group of seniors from a local rest home were picnicking within earshot of all this. Gray-haired men in wheelchairs sitting in front of picnic tables stuffed neatly trimmed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into their mouths. Their handler, an East African with a continuous smile, would occasionally roll the men to the bathroom and back. He smiled; they frowned and did more stuffing. What a shame. Funny how it's the smiling Africans that wipe our asses and feed us neatly trimmed sandwiches when we get old. The rest of the country is too busy with maximizing margin on Powerpoint charts and getting disgustingly rich, to suck up the golden years dancing and buying shit for themselves while procreating little families to do it all over again. The families are too busy to care for the parents because they need to get rich and dance and buy cool shit themselves. The older parents get tucked into neat, piss-smelling spaces at $10,000 a month where they eat at little picnics and wither under the hands of smiling Africans who get paid $2 an hour to wheel them out in front of the impatient, hoarding kids during the zoo's visiting hours and back and forth to the bathroom. Retta, my Ethiopian friend from the Westchester Track Club and a sub 2:20 marathoner, plays a vital role in this chain. Instead of wheeling people around though, he smiles and swabs the floors at the rest home in the middle of the night for pittance. ------------------------------ Proving things is damn near impossible sometimes--just ask the prosecuting attorneys of the OJ or Michael Jackson cases. But correlating the recent receipt of dumpster-sized volumes of spam delivered to the only email address link around these parts, with recent battles, makes me pretty damn suspicious. ------------------------------ Thoughts on pi, the golden rectangle, and the sun dance. I love books and TV shows that discuss historical connections or similarities across cultures. One of my Social Science teachers used to wheel in a VCR and make us watch a show called Connections, where a hyperactive Englishman with an afro (in the 70s he had one) runs all over the fucking place, speaking at 100mph, going into how Henry VIII's pubic hair, found under Anne Boleyin's pillow in the Tower of London, led to us putting a man on the moon. So here's some things that fascinate me: 1. Bows and arrows. All civilizations used bows and arrows. 2. Pyramids and the stars. Ancient civilizations like the Egyptian and the Mayan both built pyramids and both nailed the movement of the stars down cold. 3. The golden rectangle. See here. Craziness. 4. Suffering and rites of passage. From the Native American sun dance with its grisly wood skewers, to 14th Century Christian flagellants with their leathern scourges, to ongoing centuries of Shiites marking the day of Ashura with their bloody zanjeers, to those of us today not wearing nip guards with a cotton tee shirt at a cold, February marathon...rites of passage....blood and pain....leads to enlightenment....leads to the pillow in the Tower of London...leads to THE MAN ON THE MOON! BRILLIANT! --------------------- I left off all references to David Blaine and his bubble and Hesse's Siddhartha with the falling stone in that last essay because it all burst in front of a million of us on PRIME TIME. Actually, his fake SEAL team workout was the dead giveaway that magic Buddhaman wasn't going to make it. Naturally, if he made it, I'd have a different take on the whole thing--that's how I roll. -------------- I got my greasy palms on RHCP's Stadium Arcadium today. "Dani California" kicks the most ass so far. I listened to it today while running and thought about the video for Under the Bridge. This video is the vendetta taper incarnate. During the vendetta taper you need to run like Anthony Keidis does, in your black Levis, with your long hair flowing and your Indian tattoo on full display, with an atomic bomb exploding in the background. You need to be the guitarist with his Nepalese sherpa hat, pickin' and chillin'. You need to stand in front of a mirror and flex your canyons making exaggerated daba-booba hand movements. This is the V is for vendetta taper anthem, where you think about dark days and cold nights, where you remember steaming breath, 20 milers, and 3 layers of race shirts in minus 10 temps, fueled by anger....egged on, remembering stupid people with no patience who give you no hope....who close the door of their warm, elitist house on you and return back to counting their money. Good shit, man.

8.1 miles in 57 minutes including 1 mile at 5:51 pace to shake it all out. Felt better after some relative speed (thanks for the idea Meghan!) Deep soreness in right adductor, overall everything in the legs feels very tight still. I'm throwing eggwhites, bananas, vitamins, rest, Trent Reznor, and Heineken Light at the problem currently. ----------------------------------- Is it just me or do the Healthy Kidney 10k pictures on the NYRR site completely suck this year? Ok, there's like a minute video of the race this year, but it just ain't the same (by the way, it looks like Buster disses Fam. at the finish). Also, Buster is hauling ass and smooth as silk.... Editorial comment #4563: People that go out to the NYRR site and find the Healthy 10k video are the types that have the attention span and the desire to watch the whole race, so why not film the whole thing and throw it on the site for a week or so? This ain't the CBS Evening News with its perfectly timed segments according to the average attention span of cattle; we're talking distance runners here, yes, the types that read the Economist as well as most English newspapers with small typeface, written by cardigan-clad reporters who sip tea and solve nearly impossible cryptic puzzles under gray English skies. ------------------------------------ Surreal Healthy Kidney 10k video moment of the day: Does the camera pan onto the Embassy for the United Arab Emirates at the end? Did they sponsor this race? What the hell was that all about? Does this mean that a fraction of the gas money I spent to drive to the mailbox on Saturday, when I was super hungover, goes towards promoting healthy kidneys? ------------------------- Rage Against the Machine and Massive Attack in Soundrack+ Cited John Frusciante as musical inspiration+ Mohawk and spaded beard+ 0% body fat+ eskers n' canyons for legs+ Steeplechaser+ Doesn't give a shit+ 3rd in Healthy Kidney 10k =running hero. --------------------------- Tonight go find all your PRs. Stare at them. Commit yourself to training to knock one off. I don't care how old you are or what your excuses may be. Train to try. Just one. Go get it--there's one that you can get. And if you fail, you've got one hell of a good story. If you succeed, you've demonstrated that you still have control over your destiny, despite all the naysayers. --------------------------- Dedicated to this posting. Dedicated also to the Gold Sponsor(ZOOM IN NOW) of the Healthy Kidney 10k and to all of us, the fucking consumers! CHEERS! Close the hatch! Down the hatch! VRRRRRROOOOOOOMM!!!!!! (ZOOM IN ONE MORE TIME...UNITED ARAB EMIRATES) Helmet's "Driving Nowhere." Confront the daily setbacks All the lows and highs With anesthetic means I’m fit to socialize Driving nowhere fast Accelerate to pass Now I’ve got time to kill at last Bombing hometowns I canWatch it free from harm United Arab Emirates Still keep the gas in my car Driving nowhere fast Accelerate to pass Now I’ve got time to kill at last Keep the gas in my car Let me go far I’m driving nowhere fast Accelerate to pass Now I’ve got time to kill at last UNITED ARAB EMIRATES... (ZOOM OUT...NOW..FADE)now..show dude's back with race shirt. CUT.

6 miles. I don't get it, my legs feel horrible and stale, rusty and tired, dead and slow. Not good.

I'm interviewing Casey Moulton this week for this fine, soon to be ctrl-alt-deleted website. In case you don't know who he is, he ran a 2:15 at the Austin Marathon this year. Submit question ideas here. I'm already planning to ask him what happened at Boston. I got to now go remember how to work the Nixon desk device... ----------------------------

I'd like to take some time usually spent running to write something positive today. Most people that still hang around this space are either punch drunk from the spiked cynicism that I'm serving or they read it to get pissed off before a run. The pages and pages of sardonic jabs at various peoples or groups with appropriate grudges have now reached the ceiling and so I'm going to purge it all with a match about an establishment and a man that didn't either reject or ignore me. His acceptance of me and my idea came at a perfect time in my life--back when most things were dead ends or empty bottles. I think the timing is right for the story since I'm heading back to Vermont this week. About a week after Skirack told me about the hereditary nature of their sponsorships vis-a-vis my bloodline and said no thank you very much (ie. don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split you, but we'll take your credit card for them skis). I was out for a late night run. It was either the 10-degree temps or a run past the Rotisserie that made me think of the idea. The Rotisserie restaurant sits right on Williston road in South Burlington. It's a small rustic cabin that serves as a frequent watering hole for a homogeneous group of men, mostly hockey coaches or washed-up UVM hockey players or their fans. Everything is simple there: wood bar, wood tables, TV with hockey or the Red Sox game on, spilled beer, and prime rib. The prime rib and the draft beer go real well together. They also have pull-tabs that tend to be lucrative if you buy the whole aquarium at the right time. I've hit the $500 tab before by buying estimated remaining tabs, n, where n <500. My buddy Ken and I washed up there by chance one night. We got to meet its bartender, Dick (a fine marathoner in his own right), as well as its new owner, a young guy named Brendan. We shut the bar down a couple times talking with Dick and Brendan about running and other things. This place became a home away from home of sorts for me. So I got an idea that night to write a letter. It was like something Max Fischer from Rushmore would write; it was almost poetic; it was overly polite, very 19th Century-esque with a salutation like, "Dear Sir" and a closing like "With Warm Regards, Yours Truly," The gist of the letter was a request for sponsorship. I simply asked that Brendan buy me a pair of shoes and provide me a Rotisserie singlet and I would guarantee him a top 25 place at the 2004 VCM and some free advertising. It was cut and dry, no blood test, no proof of the Plantagenet gene, no name on some dusty waiting list--demonstrated results, that's all. I took a deep breath, walked into the Rotisserie one night, and handed it to Brendan. The rest of the conversation went like this: Brendan: "What's this?" Me: "A request for sponsorship letter." Brendan: "Sponsorship for what?" (I then made a sales pitch about how the Rotisserie sponsors a stockcar and if they sponsor a car, why the hell not a runner? We are much cheaper and we could turn the Rotisserie into a kick ass runners' hangout similar to that bar in Oregon in both Pre. movies where Kenny Moore's backslapping Pre. who's toasting good times much to the chagrin of Bowerman). I had visions of race bauble everywhere and framed photos of a smiling Salazar with his thick Latin eyebrows making beautiful commas, sitting behind a plate of prime rib throwin' a big ass thumbs up. You'd even have plates like the "Pre Special" or "Skirack's demise."* He didn't get the whole bar-in-Oregon part or the vendetta thing, but he still nodded and ushered me back to his office. He closed the door; I prepared for rejection. He reached for his checkbook. I bought a pair of Mizuno Aero marathon flats with his money--my first pair. I ran the race in an embroidered singlet that could have come from Max Fischer's hand--big bubbly red letters stating "The Rotisserie." That year I kept my end of the bargain by finishing 12th place. Just knowing the fact that someone believes in you can give you strength when bad times come, and I'm not just talking about running here. If you're in town this weekend, stop by the Rotisserie. Their open-faced prime rib sandwiches are delicious and very affordable. Brendan's someone who deserves your business. -------------------------------- See, me and Pandu can also have soft sides; even us tough, grudge guys like to frolic and dance and dance and frolic and be happy and dance--from time to time. -------------------------------- Conspiracy Theory of the Day. Everything's all Da-Vinci'ed to the nines these days so here's mine: All the anti-virus companies get together and pool some funds; they then liquidate them into cash through some cosmetic, charity-like means, and pay shady, 20-something cretins in basements to write viruses that Ma and Pa Household then have to go to Staples and buy their software to defend against. 20-something cretins are paid peanuts compared to the guaranteed revenue stream that comes in from 10 million scared Ma and Pa households not to forget the abc company and the AB-Motherfu-king C companies. ------------------------------------ *I was thinking that "Skirack's Demise" would be a plate of something raw or only pan seared; maybe tripe. The intent of Skirack's demise would be for the waiter to come over to your table with something really bloody or runny. Hmmm...I guess people wouldn't eat it. Maybe instead anything, but completely covered in that fake 'grass' shit you get on the sides of some plates. You'd have to dig your food out of it to eat it. You could call it instead "Skirack demise-style' like, 'I'll have the open-faced pub sandwich Skirack demise-style!" Much like you can order things "Wild Style" at In-N-Out burger.

10 miles at easy pace, 69 for the week. --------------------- The news for the day comes out of Tucson, AZ. This gentleman just PR'd his 5k by 30 seconds; he's on his way to greatness. --------------------- Instead of cleaning up after Friday night's blowout, or putting dowel DDEX into space #45, or writing about other things, I wasted my time putting this together today. Some people said they can't figure out what I'm doing and what I did so have at it. McMillan's calculator said that V=2+C or that the integral of my best running time where sigma = X+2 over V should yield a marathon time of only around 2:36 so don't get your underwear into a knot just yet.

10 miles -easy pace. --------------------------- This is a good interview. Key takeways. 1. He's going to go train under the master. 2. He does quarters; his quarter workouts make me cry just reading them. 3. He doesn't care what people think--especially the barbarians. --------------------------- Pandu ---------------------------

12.1 miles in 1:25 (7:01 pace) out in VF. -------------------------- When I reach the point in my life where I become a Chris McCandless ascetic and roll around the world on a squeaky bike with a flower basket, I'll be sure to keep in mind that I can get free food at road races. Most major cities in the U.S. have races during the week and always on the weekends. One needs to only look the part, which can mean a shaggy beard, a skinny frame, and clean hands. Dirty hands are a dead giveaway. Most porta potties have hand cleaners so, in theory, you could roll up on your squeaky bike, stash it under a bush, step into the portajohn, clean your hands, and then go feast on orange slices and bagels while sipping the mac daddy of energy drinks. Damn, it could go further. You could hang out at an expo, get your face painted like a fierce eagle and then wander around the hawkers and snakeoil salesmen, getting free samples of da Clif Shot Blokz and da magik Jelly Belly NRG beans. You could pretend to be genuinely interested as the guys from Clif with the messy-chic hair and the black-rimmed glasses tell you about how the secret Wonka recipe for their En-ER-G-barz were developed in a secret Swiss lab and how Clif is on the verge of developing a 'magic ball' that you stick up your ass during your race. The 'magic ball' disolves when lactic acid is produced and detected by the ball's antenna that gets extended--periscope-like--upon entry; it then shoots magic ball shotz of NRG through the periscope to your rectum. the NRG travels to your colon, then to your legs by way of your pancreas. You could pretend to be a marathoner and get a goodie bag with free vaseline (for chapped lips from riding across the Mojave on the bike) and free laundry detergent for your Tolstoy-esque rags. You could get a free calf massage (you will need it after that desert ride) from the 'stick' guys and a free backrub from the 'stone' guys. Then you could get the idea to combine the two into the 'stick and stone' device that you could sell for 2x the price of the 'stick' or of the 'stone.' Your jingle for this invention would be something like "Sticks and stones may break your bones but the sticknstone(TM) will never hurt you." (jingle copyrighted as of.....now). If you get bored at the expo, there's always Yasso. He's everywhere so he'd be somewhere near you to tell you about naked running and Yasso 800s and the time when Bingham got so drunk at the pasta dinner that he did meatball shots chased by Jaeger. If you get really bored, there really is Bingham--the pied piper of the new running boom (go here and buy, buy, buy!) --who rides shotgun in the Runner's World Batmobile in front of Yasso. Bingham has cornered the market on underachievement and has found that sweet spot of the running market, the lucrative and literal American cash cow: people who bask in self-pity and excuses. Still, Bingham will talk your ear off! But don't you dare ask him about that night with the meatballs, that's our secret! ;-) There was that point-to-point marathon run over 5 hours in 55 degree temps and no wind and then there was that other marathon where he ran around 5:30 because he was talking to someone about whether or not Bruce Willis really was dead in Sixth Sense or if he just thought he was dead. That damn N.Night Shamalamadingdong, he's so crafty! What is it with them Indians? From pincushioning Custer with arrows to pushing Pandu down our throats to promting us to question our own mortality! A place to sleep would be easy: all the pre-race tents that get set up the night before. You could pretend to be a volunteer and get free coffee in the morning and even some free raingear as you man a water stop. Then when the race is over, you could help at the feast and drink cup upon cup of chicken noodle soup. Finally, when everyone is really gone, you could just wander around and pick up discarded Hazmat suits and unwanted race tee-shirts for warmth to stow in your flower basket as you prepare to cross the Rockies on your way to your next race. ------------------------------ There was a flurry of emails today unbeknownst to you folks. The correspondence was between some Vermont friends of mine and myself about a potential ringer at the VCM. This ringer was a newly recruited Skirack runner who was supposed to be in for the win. Well he ain't running it (I already got wind of him from a fellow Bucknell runner); the seas of correspondence became calmer during the day; things are back on track.

----------------------------- Hot damn, it's garlic time again! ----------------------------- More about the Stickenstone(TM). Here's a technical drawing of what I have in mind. Bill of Materials: -Stick from the backyard (we got lots of them out there, but Tippet eats them whole so we got to get him some pig ears or something, because sticks are sacred now) -2 rollerskating wheels (rollerblading wheels can be substituted) -Duct tape to keep the wheel in place -Nylon 550 parachute cord -Bigass rock from the backyard (bountiful harvest just outside McWorld) -Nail to hold the parachute cord in place The roller wheels will be attached with duct tape along the X-axis of the stick, parallel to the grain of the wood that was grown during the halcyon days of McWorld--before development and the Hoot movie and the Hoot movie poster in front of the development. You can then massage your body with the wheels (wash them first if rubbing them on exposed skin for Pete's sake!) The bigass rock will then be tied to the cord and the cord nailed to the stick. The rock will be placed on your back so when you move the stick, the cord will pull the rock against your back and massage it as well. You get twice the massage! I've found that you need to sit in like an Easyboy chair when doing this; it makes the rock flush against your back. I think this thing is good for 5 minutes in a marathon PR and if you upgrade to the Stickenstone 2-Electric Boogaloo(TM) which is a bigger stick and larger, dolly-sized wheels with the same size bigass rock, you are good for 10 minutes or so. ------------------------ More Brady Bunch Season 4 observations:

• Mike Brady pats his tummy during uncomfortable situations like when he's got to deal with the crazy archaeologist who tied up his kids in the spooky cave and stuck a spear at them. Very delicate situation...must pat tummy.
• Tiki Taboo spooky noise appears during the antique lamp breakage episode. Mo need to reuse that noise; it belongs on the Waikiki beaches with the 10-foot swells and the misplaced tarnantulas.
• There's some fucked-up washboard noise every now and then. The more mysterious the situation, the more the washboard comes out.
• Alice, everyone makes fun of Alice, but I GET Alice. What does Mrs. Brady do and why does Alice even have to put up with all THAT? Alice is my hero.
• In the episode where the boys are out to spook the girls and vice-versa, Mike Brady shows up wearing the most insane jacket that Moby wouldn't even try to wear nowadays. If Moby won't wear it, then what does it signify?
• In that same episode, there's no way in hell that the trunk in the attic could lift. I'll yield the tape recorder, but not the moment arm required from the girls' room to the trunk. No way. I have a Civil Engineering degree from the school that built Vauban fortresses during the age of cannon, back when the more 45-degree angles you put into the fortress, the more you deflected shit and the better the military scholar you were; I simply cannot vouch for the soundness of this. Nope. Maybe Sherwood Schwartz approved it, but not me.

1st overall, 558th Mount Falernus Unhealthy Liver 5k. 16:02 (5:10 per mile pace) 1 mile warmup, 3 mile race, 3 mile cool down 7 miles on the books --------------------------------- A damn fine race. Results here. Firsts in my life tonight: 1. Broke a tape that was held by people on opposite ends. Nice feeling while doing it in front of the Philly Art Museum in a big race with hulking, metropolitan skyscrapers for background like some Pole Position screenshot. 2. Dropped a guy (who ran a 53:48 at Broad Street) by running a 4:57 opening mile and holding to a 10:07 2nd mile, then death, but the ruse worked. I learned a little bit more about the mental aspects of racing tonight. I'm of the mindset that during a race, if you can put on a bit of a show with your breathing, if you can act as relaxed as possible when someone's right on your heels, you can shake them loose, provided they are struggling themselves. It was a confidence builder; it was happy times and relative comfort; it was enjoyable for the most part and relaxed. I'm really chalking this one up at a PR effort b/c we all know by now that the 15:47 was not a true 5k--barbarian kick or not. I'm ready for VCM. Other good stuff: Joe, one of my friends who I train with, had another PR. He's on that joyful PR learning curve that we've all been on where almost each race leads to a PR, where the bottom isn't in sight yet. It's nice to see progress in people that get it. He did his first Mount Misery repeat session on Thursday. Sub 17 is just around the corner. Around this time last year, my ex-girlfriend, IBM, wouldn't even put our corporate challenge win in their newsletter (see May 20 entry). Last night, my current place of employment won all but 1 category in the race and will surely put us front in center in their monthly publication, where we were when we won the Miami Marathon Corporate race on a company-paid, 4 day trip this past January. -------------------------- This just in from the Evel Karnievel PR machine.... And this... Hoo muthafucking aaah!!! Saving babies yesterday, kicking some SEAL Team ass today. Baby Catalina is safe everyone...she was saved. Thank God! She's safe!!!!

10 miles out in VF at 7:25s. My legs feel very heavy; this makes no sense. Tomorrow, this. It's fast and flat. It should be a good one if I can get the feeling back. I'd be happy with anything under 16:19. I had the luck of tucking my daughter in tonight. She's aware of this race and her line of questioning before the race, and before all races that I run, is always some strange flowchart of award possibilities--from money down to gimcrack. Sometimes when she's asking me these questions, my one-word answers are similar to T.E. Lawrence's in that wonderful movie. The shortness of them speaks volumes to her. Josie: Race tomorrow DD? Me: Yes. Josie: 5k? Me: Yes. Josie: Kenyans? Me: No, I doubt it. Josie: Money? Me: No. Josie: Trophies? Me: Yes. Josie: What kind of trophies? How big? Me: I don't know what the gimcrack will be. Josie: What's gimcrack, DD? Me: Garbage. Josie: I thought you said there'd be trophies, not garbage? Me: Yes. Josie: I don't get it DD! Me: That's ok. Goodnight dear, I love you. Josie: Goodnight, DD. I love you too! --------------------------- Hot damn I love garlic. I take pieces when I cook steak and slide them into the meat. I then take dry rub and smother the steak. Apologies to any of you vegetarians for that remark. Right now I'm actually chewing on a piece of garlic. I let a sliver of it sit in my mouth and I just take it all in. Hot damn again; I love garlic. When I ran the Reach the Beach Relay last year, I felt like doo on the beginning of my last leg. I started to catch the runner from the Bucknell masters team. He had a good lead on me to start with (minutes). During the last few minutes something weird happened: I shed all my fatigue: I came up on my toes and ran fast. I don't know how fast it was, but I'd wager my final mile was about 5:00. The only reason I bring this up is that this mental 'barbarian kick' resides in all of us. The more I race 5ks, the more I realize that I have it somewhere and that what separates me from a real 15:4X 5k is going down there and finding it again. Training won't make it happen, something else will and I need to think more about where to look for it. Maybe just acknowledging its existence is the first place to start? I don't want to waste this horridly written essay any more on this topic--especially since this feeling was first with me during the Northern CA. XC sectionals in 1990 where I placed 8th overall after coming from like 50th place. It springs up from time to time. It was there last year when I ran a probably-short 15:47 5k after making the wrong turn at the start. I think it's the same feeling that Mills at the end of his race as well as Viren after he got back up off the ground in that magic Olympic 10,000-meter final. We all have it somewhere. -------------------------------------- This one's worth a gander. --------------------------------------- The following comment was left sometime this morning by Tony Jasica. Had he not made the false statement that I hate him, I'd have left the comments to stand for themselves. Silence is good sometimes, but not now--especially when the word 'hate' is carpet-bombed across this site: "I am curious as to why you hate me so much...You seem to take delight in humiliating me in your blogs, yet you offer no real reason why, except to expose the fact you are such are are a superior runner than myself. Wow, Mr. Larkin, I bowdown before your ability to make fun of the "Fat Runners" in America, because God knows we are not an easy target... " Dear Tony, You expect readers to come across this comment and jump into your corner; you look for sympathy and cast the same tired stereotypes of the 'elite' fast and skinny guy making fun of the poor ole' slow guy; you may even hope that people will associate you as the underdog, David, taking on Goliath, the big loudmouth, sub-elite wannabe: me. We've already got a few Davids lurking about on this site with slingshots--just so you know. But not so fast. Had you gone a few layers past your own Google search for your name which brought you here, had you ventured past the month of May on my blog, had you perhaps even googled someone else besides yourself, you might have responded differently. You might even have connected the dots on why I seem to go after you from time to time. I suppose it's these words that do it for me. Your words, from this article: "Dear Sir...Perhaps you should have read the feature article about my story in the 1/7 Tampa Tribune before making fun of my supposedly hilarious marathon effort. Apparently the people at Balance Bars found my story compelling enough to award me one of 11 nationwide grants from over 1200 applicants. So, until you know the facts, please keep your pedantic writing to yourself. And to Jennifer...until you've had to overcome any personal adversity, physical problems, and societal prejudice that overweight people face on a daily basis --don't you dare call ANYONE who finishes a marathon a "lemming"." The quote first smells of entitlement; it drifts around for a couple sentences and then it disappears, replaced by a more pungent, sickening odor: self-pity. And now a repeat of a very important sentence. Had you learned about the person you say 'hates' you, had you really tried to learn about my own walk in life and my own struggles with the genetic endomorphic monster (a sprightly 230lbs in 2001 babee), had you read about me and my marathon history or people on this very site who I associate with and their waistlines or marathon paces, instead of looking for more about yourself, you'd perhaps understand that I'm not as simple as a skinny, 'fast' guy at the other end of the ring out to go make fun of 'fat runners.' I'm like everyone else--I'm one hell of a complex guy, and I like to think there's some rhyme to my reason. I was closer to you than you realize. Do some homework; read a bit; slow down; take a breath. Be a meticulous investigative reporter instead of a spontaneous, misinformed mudslinger. I don't hate you; I'd love to see you run faster and to reach higher than the first goal of marathon completion. I'd love to read the fact that some day you qualify for Boston--without a grant from a candy bar company that poses as a nutrition bar company. I'd love to witness all this taking place buried below the headlines where the folks that truly deserve a brighter spotlight belong. I suppose it comes down to the spotlight. You never once agreed with the point that while your feat was admirable, it happens every day, along quiet roads to thousands of people. Thousands of people wake up, look at themselves in the mirror, and commit themselves to the lofty challenge of weight loss. They run their first marathon without a fancy story or a nifty press release or a sponsorship. They don't beat their chests about it and then defend it over and over again in endless vanitygoogle searches across multiple blogs. They do it in silence. Some of them even realize that it can go further. They don't settle for a now relatively low standard and rest on their 'I did it!" laurels for a lifetime of memories of that glorious 5:58 slog. They aspire to run faster, to push their bodies to new places--they dream to win. Winning, now that's a headline! ------------------------------ Injustice. I'm always quick to find them in the slightest degree with regards to my pathetic self, so here's one major fucking injustice: Deena Kastor runs a 2:19 to win the London Marathon and she sits in a running store in NYC by herself less than one month later. Where do I begin? Webb breaks Steve Scott's record.... Ritz kicks Meb's 10k to the curb....then Webb beats Ritz and then Ritznwebb beats Webbnritz Goucher makes a comeback and just runs really fast behind Bekele and a million imported, African, Qatarian runners coached by Mr. Canova who's tailed by Mr. Hudson who's taking notes behind the pillar--disguised in a brown trenchcoat, a Lands' End seersucker suit, and a deerstalker cap---posing as a reporter for Runner's World who's real assignment is to find the stolen running stones. This particular scene plays out like a Peter Sellers movie, even down to the David Niven jewel thief character who's hidden the stolen stones in Goucher's Nike Rival(TM) XC spikes. Rupp, looking the part from the PG-13 movie, and under the gentle, fatherly eyes of Salazar, falls down on the new Nike(TM) track after a hard run...he throws his hands up to the sky as the flashbulbs pop and the cheesy music starts to kick in.... Meb kicks Khalid to the curb....USA! USA! USA! um..Eritrea n USA!...Eritrea n USA!....Eritrea n USA!....NO!!! damnit....USA! USA! USA! you commie bastards.... All men, all wouldn't sit by themselves in a store a month later....think about it. Just do it. Swoosh. Bling-Bling.

10 mile run, with 8 miles progression on the Betzwood in some humidity and some wind. I was listening to an eclectic mix of Radiohead's Amnesiac and Luna's song, "Star-Spangled Man" which made things a bit more manageable, especially when the chorus of "Star-Spangled Man" kicked in--it's peaceful, it's Lou Reed-sounding, mellow meditation for 5:4X poopers. Maybe I should wear the HAZMAT suit when I listen to it next time; I'd then really be "The Star-Spangled Man." Here's how it went down: Mile 1 warmup (7:20s) out to the trail Mile 2 6:44 (down) Mile 3 6:14 (down) Mile 4 6:02 (down) Mile 5 5:48 (down) Mile 6 5:47 (up, headwind) Mile 7 5:55 (up, mental toughness moment, wanted to quit, into some wind, started thinking of Faustian deals and bullshit excuses) Mile 8 5:43 (up) Mile 9 5:38 (up) Mile 10 cool down home (7:20s) My legs are feeling heavy; this workout felt harder than it should have. I suspect the racing volume is deep down there still. ----------------------------- There's been too much general, emotional commentary written about tapers. We are all guilty of complaining about about how they stink when it's our turn in line. I'd like to go a bit deeper than that: tapers are festering sores of doubt. By the time I reach them, I start to doubt my marathon goal pace; I doubt my workouts; I doubt my abilities. I question everything and come up short. Everyone in the field seems faster than me; nothing will work out right; the world is coming to an end. That kind of stuff. You know the deal. ---------------------- When Leonard Nimoy, mescaline, a bad Star Trek revenue year, and JRR Tolkien mix ----------------------- It should come as no surprise that my ability to wantonly buy books far exceeds my ability to sit for more than 30 seconds at a time and read them. Accordingly, on a recommendation from fellow Fitzgerald fan, Stephen, I purchased Ellison's The Invisible Man today. I walked around the hulking DaVinci Code displays with DaVinci Code prominently displayed from ceiling to floor with the DaVinci Code game acting as the display's bookends. I slipped past the DaVinci Code coffee table book and lifted my knees high as I stepped over fallen copies of the DaVinci Code: Deciphered which lay strewn across the floor as if someone just cracked the DaVinci Code and left in a hurry to stop the end of the world. I worked my way once again to the classics, wavering in front of James Joyce this time; I hesitated with his Ulysses in my greedy palms; I put him back down because the summit seemed too high, the climb too dangerous, the company too disagreeable today. Maybe some other time I'll buy it and stick it underneath the stack of books in my reading nook. It will wait patiently in line, behind The Quiet American, for probably about 10 years. Somewhat unrelated, the real reason we were in the bookstore was to purchase a treat for my daughter: The Brady Bunch Season 4. My daughter is going through a Brady Bunch mania right now and I'm complicit in the whole bloody thing. I'm a sucker for the show and find myself watching it with her. If you pay real close attention to the same laugh track on this show and you focus only on the laugh track, you can find yourself keying in on one specific laugh. It's hyenia-like and you wonder what the hell is going on with THAT.

10.1 miles in 1:08:30 (6:46 pace). I forgot my running shorts and so I was forced to run in sweats which made the miles pass like kidney stones. I tried doing these miles "off the run"(Trademark Pending*)...meaning that I fasted by only partaking in one piece of toast with cinnamon sugar on it for breakfast. Maybe honey would be better next time? ---------------------------- This is the HAZMAT suit. It's got special Team America powers too. -------------------------------- I fully realize that the overall tone on this blog has sunk to new levels of cynicism and jadedness. I guess the average reader is calloused from this and so the continuing volley of arrows loosened by my countercultural, buck-the-running-system longbow don't strike too close to the heart. They really shouldn't. By now the regular reader should be saying to herself/himself that perhaps this guy really has lost it and that maybe its time to unsubscribe from this shit vein. Because its demise is inevitable, I've finally selected a cemetery plot for the blog: it's a small-size plot and has got a view of the newly constructed superterrifichappyfunmall. Let me try a different tone..... Today was a tough day. I ran really hard. It was a killer workout. The miles flew by. I need to work on my form more. I wish I didn't have to work in a cubicle, but it pays the bills! LOL! I feel that I have trained really hard for this marathon. This will be the ultimate test of strength, mind, and will. As Aristotle once wrote back during the Middle Ages: "To be or not to be, that is the question." His quote will be with me when times get rough. I will repeat these words over and over again. Aristotle's my hero. When they tried to burn him at the steak, he stood up corageously and said something like, "Our is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die!" I like that quote too. It rocks! I'm still a bit sore from the 2nd Annual "Fly Like an Eagle into the Future" 5k. The trophy I got for it sucks though. They need to spend more money on trophies because success breeds success and no one likes to be a loser. 2nd place is first loser in my book. I have always carried that quote with me too. Because, as Mr. Anderson, my high school wrestling coach told us, "win, pin, or die!" Tonight is trash night, so I need to put out all my wine bottles when it gets dark. I'll be like a spy-vs-spy guy, you know, the dark spy, and put them out when everyone has gone to bed. People go to bed early in my neighborhood. The seniors usually go to bed first, but sometimes the noise from the kids crying in the windows of the adjacent houses keep them up until around 8pm. They will then write laws or something that prevents kids from being near open windows. That's my silly neighborhood! Now that I am tapering, it will be even harder to focus my efforts and strengths on my goals. God I hate the taper! Tapers suck. Who invented tapers anyway? Geez. Well, I guess I have to get going now. I'm going to get something to eat and then get back to work. I'm listening to Lez Miserabels that is being played in the office right now. Thenardier's singing "Master of the House" and it's making me laugh! Since Lez Miserabels is playing, I'll leave you with a quote from it. Can't you tell I like quotes? ;-) "Master of the house Doling out the charm Ready with a handshake And an open palm Tells a saucy tale Makes a little stir Customers appreciate a bon-viveur." ~Thenardier in Lez Miserbels. ----------------------------------- *"Off the run" is a concept that I am working on. Basically, you don't walk or run anywhere and you try to sit in your chair, in a cubicle, as long as possible during the day (no windows, just gray 'pre-midlife crisis' walls). You don't want your legs to move at all. However, you have permission to not listen to Les Miserables or Gary Gygax's farts, but those are the only two exceptions. "Off the run" basically means sitting and stewing. Got it? "Off the Run"(TM pending) has a secondary purpose: fasting. When you are "Off the Run"(TM pending) you are to fast with occasional lighter meals like cinnamon toast or something with honey in it--maybe Kellogg's Honey Smacks(TM)--MAYBE. I'm for sure thinking honey is the way to go. Honey kicks major running ass. Honey's dietary benefits as it pertains to runners far outweigh those of ground cinnamon's mixed with nasty refined sugars--FOR SURE. My next thing will be "Between the Run" (TM not yet pending but soon--SOON) which will entail drinking red wine between doubles (Falernian preferred, maybe Sangiovese--MAYBE). Then, I'm working on "After the Run"(TM after "Between the Run" gets its trademark) which is, of course, more wine, chased by frozen eggrolls and General Tso's chicken. General Tso's may eventually be substituted for organic Andean quinoa** and wild Pacific salmon. I need to do a bit more consulting with Evel Karnievel first; he's into "Indie Rock" and Pacific Salmon and he runs really hard (350 miles nonstop babee!) so he may be onto something. But I'll wait until he's done saving Baby Katalina. I don't want to cut in line and bother him in the middle of his rescue. **All quinoa needs to come from fairly traded indigenous peoples of South America--none of this corporate Frankenfood shit ok?

12 miles at 7:16 pace. 97 miles for the week. ---------------------------------------- A great chasm stands between beer and wine in the state of Pennsylvania. There are laws on the books that separate the sale of both such that the seeds of distribution corruption will have an equal chance to germinate in two distinct fields. Graft and back alley profiteering serve as the radiant sun which shines down upon both of these fields. Obese, third-string Pennsylvanian aldermen then come along and harvest these two fruits, forcing those of us that imbibe on both sources of alcohol to forever fund their 15-foot Ranger bass boats, pleather sectionals and their wives' collection of hundreds of garish, Liza Minelli-esque cocktail gowns. Despite all this, it's worth noting the differences between the stores. Since I frequent both, regularly, I fancy myself an astute observer and fully qualified to write such judgmental, raging, shameful satire. In other words, I fully intend to insult, disparage, and mock the remora for people and the shady for processes of alcohol distribution and sales in this otherwise fine Keystone state. If you are anyway associated with this or have a sensitive psyche and like prancing ponies and politically correct, emoticon-spewed writings, then go hide underneath the banner of www.merunhard.com or go lurk around someone else's blog. The beer stores are dark warehouses with high ceilings; their cash register clerks are usually 22 year-old miscreants who wear their baseball caps backwards and are always in mid-conversation about some act of unreal sexual conquest as I approach the counter. From time to time, they share the counter with the first chink in the great graft chain: the fat man with the long nosehair. This guy's role is to stand behind the miscreants with his arms folded and to supervise the proceedings--grunting in vicarious laughter upon hearing the juicy end of the stories about all the sex and the sex and the smelly, sticky, unreal sex---and then ensure the appropriate funneling of the cash to all the right people. He's also there to make sure to have a few extra crisp $100s to place into the alderman's palm whenever he's in the area and needs to buy some exotic Killians Red for his wife, the Minelli fan, who's going through a funk because of Minelli's compromising of her career by appearing too regularly in Arrested Development. Nosehair man's got an aluminum baseball bat in the back just in case things get out of hand with the customers or with the 22 year-olds who got five extra pints of sex-infused testosterone. The liquor stores, on the other hand, have short ceilings and lights everywhere. A liquor-test-babe stands right in front of the door and half-expects you to sip some new Italian Sangiovese just because she wears a short skirt and laughs a lot. The rest of the store is 100% men. Unlike beerland, they all carry themselves more as men should; they wear tight collars and peer down at you behind thin glasses that are seconds away from falling off the bridges of their noses. Almost all of them have those sponge glasses that you see at the post office or bank. The guy I bought wine from today played the role of Pontius Pilate and dipped his fingers too often into the sponge glass with too much yellowish water collected at the bottom; during checkout, this was his routine: take credit card, dip fingers, run credit card, dip fingers and flick them dry against the side of the glass, open bag, dip fingers quickly, hand card back, dip again, etc. The liquor store still has the first chink of that corruption chain, but he's trimmed his nosehairs and he doesn't fold his arms; he instead puts them on his hips as he stands in a money-counting office with large blinds adjacent to the checkout counter, watching all of that alcoholic dough come in and dreaming of early retirement; he visualizes cruising in his bass boat, plowing the waters of a silent, misty lake on an early morning far away from the addicts and the skimmed profits. ------------------------------ As proof of the cork shortages we got in the world among other things, the wine that I bought today was sealed with some sort of plastic gasket. I don't have a wine suction sealer thing or an extra cork, so I am sealing it with a wad of my daughter's modelling clay that she needs for an art project on a make-your-own dinosaur: the rockosaurus. If some of it gets into the wine, it's non-toxic and it should help mask the flavor of cheaply harvested Sangiovese grapes. ------------------------------- Whether you realize it or not, there's a furniture hierarchy out there. I used to sit at the bottom: particle board on top of particle board. I then moved my way up to actually going to a furniture store; then something big happened and I was knocked back down the ladder, to the underground, which is reverting to upside down boxes and West Point trunks for most things. Well, today, I have crawled back; I've moved a couple notches past the particle board stage to the next, more noble stage: unfinished, real pine furniture. I bought a small desk where I will complete my first writing marathon. I'm on Tony Jasica, Balance Bar(TM) pace and expect to finish this marathon in about 30 years but at least I got somewhere to put my writing-cramped elbows besides my kitchen counter. ............................... Maybe not so fast. The desk-in-a-box has 400 parts which require dowels, glue, and measurement. The combination of all these elements with occasional glancing at the instructions will result in something resembling my parent's mailbox which I also built, upon graduation with a Civil Engineering minor degree. The mailbox fell over the first time the mailman closed it and would not still stand today were it not for the pieces of concrete patio block that my father shored it up with. I suspect that was a poorly crafted analogy. Let's try another. How about all my model airplanes which I built using so much glue and so little attention to the instructions that the landing gear would go 90 degrees and hinge on globs of that Testors glue that you would find in the orange tube that smelled so damn good? The decals, always the best part of the process, just went wherever. "DANGER: JET INTAKE" was upside down over by the tail of the plane and the flashing teeth of the A-10 Warthog were always ripped in two and dangling off the side of the plane's nose. As with most things in my life, the process was more to hurry up and be over with the damn thing than to study, read, and learn.

1st overall, 2nd annual Flight of Vicarious 5k with a horrid 18:15 or something. 1 mile cool down then 2 x 1 mile on the Betzwood, first mile 5:42, 2nd mile 5:33 which both felt insanely easy. 6 miles on the books. 85 miles in 6 days. ---------------------------- It was some combination of no field, a new route this year that had my first mile at 6:00 and in 5:10-type oxygen debt, 100 hairpin turns, and my caution while jumping Tarzan-style across streams and up strange single-track paths with exposed roots for handles, that probably led to this crap for a time. But I suppose I could have run faster had I done striders beforehand. I'll have to remember that for my next race. I keep forgetting that pre-race striders beget low 16-minute 5ks and 4:30 1600s. Afterwards, I linked up with friends Josh and Joe who happened to be at the Betzwood for a 6 x 1 mile workout and skipped the bauble extravaganza in its entirety. I had to cut the workout short to pick up Josie. All-in-all I guess it was better than sleeping in; it was a small, forgotten race, moving relatively fast, on tired legs. ---------------------------- The new Brooks T-4s are magnifique. ---------------------------- More important things. My entire family got to dress up recently. ---------------------------- Introspection upon taper. I obviously haven't run VCM yet, but I already know where I haven't trained properly and where I have. Too much: 7:00-7:30 pace garbage runs, runs to hit mileage. Too little: 2 mile repeats, MP training (I failed big time here and will start next training cycle on this largest weakness), sub 6 sustained training, hills, run and workout differentiation. Just right: progression runs, quarters, 1k repeats, mileage, racing, continued running with minimal or no recovery between days. --------------------------- Take note Florida runners: do quarters for this reason. --------------------------- More random thoughts: - I recently read this interview and found this quote worth posting: "MR: I’ve been to Iten, Kenya, and have run with Augustine Chore [who defeated Mottram at the Commonwealth Games in March]. I couldn’t believe how slow we were going on recovery runs. Do you do that? CM: We always run slowly. That’s why you have your [hard] sessions. Recovery runs are just that—recovery runs." I've toyed with experimenting with recovery under perhaps some foolish notion that good marathoners with established bases train for their final 10 miles or so by pushing tired legs and training tired legs to go on. Like a waffling Reagan Democrat, I'm not sure where I stand on recovery. Mottram is a shorter distance guy and his track sessions are so brutal that I would think that easy-pace recovery would be needed. Along these lines, I've recently re-read the detailed logs of a 2:21 guy I'm thinking post VCM of having the following staples...again, this is pure brainstorming and may change: - 1 track workout per week, working the majority at 5k goal pace maybe considering doing MP repeats on the track. - 1 tempo run per week. All tempo will be purely marathon pace and will be worked up to increasing distances - 1 recovery run per week done after the track workout or whatever the hardest workout is. Recovery = Iten pace. - 1 long run > 20 miles per week - 1 day of hills - 1 progression run down to threshold - 1 day of garbage (6:55-7:20 pace) And then there's the caveman shit. I caveman thing per month or every other week.

14 miles --easy pace (7:30s) out in VF. ------------------------------------------ My Manichean Monde. The comments are on a roll. Let's keep it up. Partial list below. Bad guys: Skicrackers and self-pitying back-of-the-packers, senile, child-hating condo association misanthropes and American Idol-watching-mopes, inept, anti-social running store businessmen and emoticon-spewing cattle with a profound lack of ken, cowards and shirkers, Petraeus and General Douglas Haig, New Years swish-swish and cars hauling ass to buy a singing santas, super size slurpers and People Magazine poopers, greedy Penguins and snakeoil salesmen--both peddling garbage, running expo hawkers and Grace Slick librarian wastoids, innocence-corrupting adults and stale realists, Shaq's autobiography and the new, dumbed-down version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 99% of the American entertainment industry and 100% of anything on TV between the hours of 11am-3pm (weekdays), The View and Star Jones, The show Friends and all the actors from the show Friends, Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews, Anderson Cooper (YO, AC-360 babeee) and the Foxnewsbabemachine, Foxnews video game sound effects and the IBM Fishkill rec. center, Simon and Gary Gygax, Jane Austen and her 1000 pages of painted dandies in pantaloons (that I haven't read but care not to)..... Good guys/good things: Panda bears and Pandu, flowers and painted clowns, beautiful daughters and dogs, Bill Rodgers and Brian Sell, mountain climbers and explorers, Shackleton and Stanley, Masters and Van der Post, mom and dad, brothers and sister, World War 1 trench lions and forgotten Marines clearing Baghdad houses -- both led by career-minded donkeys, giant used bookstores with endless library discards for $1(discarded by Grace Slick wastoids in favor of Shaq's autobiography), C.S. Lewis and Tolkien but also Graves and Sassoon, bitter disillusionment with power and people fighting against the odds, Team Cutters, Seinfeld repeats, Arrested Development and most other things directed by Ron Howard, Wes Anderson and Bill Murray, all of Bill Murray's characters in all of Wes Anderson's films, complex people with onion-like conflicting layers of personality and people that question things instead of grazing in the field of life, followers of Aristotle and Socrates, short running shorts and Brooks T-4s, moaning Martin Gore and jaded crooning Morrissey, Fitzgerald and Twain, Jack London and Graham Greene .... Regards to this being a sermon, you're damn straight it's one. Feel free to stand up and leave the church of the Holy Manichean monde whenever you damn well please. That's right, you, leave as you please. Go! Now! Reduce my bloglines.com subscriptions to manageable levels, lighten my comment-approval responsibilities, help me deconstruct this soapbox back to a gray screen with a textbox. Better yet, use all your time spent reading this garbage and create your own Manichean world, display it on your blog and seek to increase bloglines.com subscriptions while driving up the price of your blogshares. Or, use the time to meticulously check your statistics every 3 seconds to make you feel as though you are indeed making a kick-ass mark on this world as the seconds pass and the days grow shorter, as you move one step closer to a life of mediocrity and of nights watching Simon chastize the beautiful person out to sing their way into a large-size cemetery plot. Best of all, go running. Bye-Bye. ------------------------- Tomorrow, this. The best part of this story is that I'm buying some XC spikes to run it in due to all the rain last night as well as my fear of getting injured on the single-track trails. I am buying the spikes from a former All-American who has recently opened a local running store. I've been lucky enough to run with him on a couple occasions and I will try to give him all the business I can. I've never owned XC spikes before and so I just told him to pick something out: whatever. There was a pregnant pause on the other end of the phone but it was only 3 seconds pregnant. The third trimester came when I asked him if the XC spikes came with the spikes already in the shoes or if I had to buy the spikes and the wrench-thing seperately.

11 miles after work at 7:15 pace--easy--out here thanks to some local knowledge from a reliable source who I am now thanking. I ran in the middle of a thunderstorm and half-wanted to get hit by lightning, but then lightning started to strike close and the thunder boomed right behind it and so I wanted it to go somewhere else. -------------------------------- Ode to some of you--more of you than you may realize, sadly. :-( With special thanks to Morrissey. Further into the fog I fall well, I was just following you! when you said:"Do as I do and scrap your fey ways"(dial-a-cliche)" grow up, be a man, and close your mealy-mouth!"(dial-a-cliche) But the person underneath where does he go? does he slide by the wayside? or...does he just die? when you find that you've organized your feelings, for people who didn't like you then and do not like you now yet still you say:"Do as I do and scrap your fey ways"(dial-a-cliche)" grow up, be a man, and close your mealy-mouth!"(dial-a-cliche)" the Safe way is the only way! there's always time to change, son!"yes well I've changed but I'm in pain! dial-a-cliche ---------------------------------------- Parting comments about censorship as it relates to blogging. I've always considered people's blogs to be a dining room conversation of some sorts. I've tried to respect people's space and my comments left at their tables never cross lines of decency. I rarely use swearwords on others' space and my comments, though controversial or brutally candid, never revert to obscenity or off-topic ramblings about sexual innuendo or toilet bowl contents. I even avoid politics and religion comments on others' space, because sometimes being a good guest means keeping your damn mouth shut. As such, this space is my space. It's my table. So when I'm off talking about running along the C&O Towpath and someone walks into my house and interrupts our conversation, yelling at the top of their lungs about the excrement of someone else, I kick their ass out of my house. Sure, I can let people look like asses, and let their comments stand for themselves, but not today. The funny thing about all this is that most of you didn't catch the part that I already correlated who the baboon was that left the comments. I'd like to now close with comments about this blog in general. Terms like 'controversial',' inflammatory', and 'rage' are being tossed around about me and my writings. I won't debate them. Heck, with Mondo Kilgore and Kevin Beck now silent, perhaps I now have a corner market on acerbic running blogs. I'll just leave it as such: like porn, some of those that condemn these types of sites, are the very ones caught with the browser cookie looking at them. Peace out.

17 mile single run out here. Ran it in 1:55 (6:45 pace), but did the first 13 at 6:37 pace and then self-imploded in the last 4 in the languid, unshaded sections of the canal, where stagnant water and sunning turtles made me want to go hide underneath a tree; I am completely fried now. This part of the country and parts of this canal are pretty damn close to the African Congo in the Heart of Darkness. You got Nile-esque cataracts, prehistoric reptiles, mysterious water with strange bubbles, and dead things laying in the middle of dusty trails, frying, decomposing, smelling. For some reason, I ate Chili for lunch and barfed it up in heartburn-induced spurts along the secret byways of this fine towpath. ----------------------------------- Whoever is leaving anonymous, 9th grade scatalogical baboon comments on this blog, knock it the fuck off. Your anonymity is as certain as the time stamp correlated with my stats. I'm a few keystrokes from disabling all comments and a few more from shitcanning this whole blog because I don't have time to play the role of the shop teacher to you, the monkey with the real maturity problem in the back row. Take your bullshit to the bar, take it anywhere else, but here. ----------------------------------- This incident of immature punks leaving letsrun.com b-board snippets out here was inevitable, and it's almost like I'm now pulling out a speech that was written about this very moment, in my head, a long time ago. Ode to Growing Up. Something has become unhinged these days--more so with men, than women. Sure, there's always been idiots and asses since the dawn of man. History is replete with them, and so it is a broad generalization to state that things were 'different' or 'better' in the old days. But when it comes to maturity vis-a-vis gentlemen there is compelling evidence nowadays that juvenile males are simply ceasing to mature into men. A very trusted person in my life has recently told me and several others in front of a broader audience, while reading a prepared speech, that we've simply forgotten to become 'men.' Middle school sexual immaturity begets high school experimentation begets wanton collegiate savagery. All that is normal--nothing has changed since the dawn of man despite the revisionist 'Happy Days' mantra that your Gollygee Leave it to Beaver-1950s parents may try to shove down your throat. But a period is then supposed to happen in your life, a new sentence is supposed to begin, yes, a new paragraph should then take hold with a new idea: a new thesis--cleaner, fresher, calmer. For the most part, once you leave college, it should be expected of you to conduct yourself in certain affairs in a certain manner. You are expected to demonstrate a moderate amount of civility and decency, and to at least hold yourself up to a relatively moderate standard; children should look up to you; your image in the mirror should be one of dignity and some semblance of chivalry. Not chivalry in the archaic, pre-feminist movement sense, but rather chivalry in the modern sense where your actions and calculated restraint now speak volumes and your mark on the planet is more constructive than selfish, more example setting than scatalogical, ad hominem high fives, wet tee shirts, WAAAAHOOOO! and Comedy Central sewage. So this is directed at all the 'guys' out there: be a man.

20.8 mile single run in 2:34. I forgot to mention that an enormous tree limb crashed down upon the Betzwood trail about 10 feet behind me at the end of my run. Zeus must have missed. ---------------------------- In my humble opinion, we should do a Lexis-Nexis search on the terms: "marathon" and "carb loading" and replace 1/2 the "carb loading" entries with "balanced protein, fat, carb loading" and the other half with "eat eggwhites." Protein is the lonely kid never invited to the party. For shame. ---------------------------- In my neighborhood, the difference between everyone else's trash and mine is worth writing a couple sentences about. Monday nights are always the same: everyone goes outside, nods, says stupid niceties, drops trash, and then goes back inside to peer out the window and mumble things about each other behind the curtain. I am continually being watched in my neighborhood. I am but one or two moves away from throwing a raging keg party and the elected bluehair condo association Gestapo are keeping tabs on me--big time. My trash comprises: clanging wine bottles (wakes up people when the Mexicans dump it at 5am), a few beer bottles, pizza boxes, and half-tied garbage bags. Everyone else's: Crate and Barrel boxes, LL Bean boxes, Pottery Barn boxes, neatly-tied trash bags. ---------------------------- I found out on the run tonight that I was banned from a local running team for a while because I was some sort of "typical military guy" or something like that. But it's all good now, and I'm not banned from them anymore, but I'm not on their team, so I guess the point really is moot. But still, at least Elia Kazan my ass for being a loud-mouth, judgmental clown. If either you looked at my thick head of hair and Raggedy-Ann, unstarched uniform and chocolate bar jump boots, or you pulled aside my Battalion Commander* three days before I left the service and interviewed him, I don't think "typical military guy" would enter anywhere near the lexicon. -------------------- I'm driving down to the Washington D.C. metro area tomorrow. The drive comprises really no worthwhile scenery other than the Havre de Grace bridge where the lobbyists hang out down below on the S.S. 'Dukester' chewing on foie gras and continually having to re-tie their Sperry Topsiders because of those damn leather laces. I also always stare at Baltimore and shake my head as it passes off to the right. It just looks like one big mess. Oh, I almost forgot too the rest stops on 95 which are about as good as people watching gets (second to the Walmart in Fishkill, NY). ------------------------------ *LTC Cory was killed in a helicopter crash on a return visit to Vietnam. The Soviet-era helicopter that he was traveling in hit a mountain in bad weather. I believe in ghosts because of this incident. The night he was killed was very strange with some odd events. Maybe I'll relate them some other time. Suffice it to say, he didn't like me very much. I was on my way out and he was on his way up--we didn't get along. ---------------------- Penn Relays Photo. Provided to depict: 1. The thrill of running in front of tens of thousands of people within earshot of me. THIS WAS PENN RELAYS!!! WITH ALL THE COWBELLS AND THE WHOOOP WHOOP...THE NOISE WAS DEAFENING!!! 2. My highly-efficient, Cassidy-eat-your-heart-out miler form. 3. See what is looks like to run an entire minute slower in my 1600 leg than the Kenyan anchor man ran in his. 4. Wonder where Bill Cosby went and contemplate what the corporations can do next year to get him to watch us and to hand out the gimcrack at the end while toasting the spirit of it all, tipping back lukewarm soda in plastic cups and eating cheese cubes on paper plates behind wood-paneled walls. ------------------------------------------ Back in the Infantry Officer Basic Course, every time we'd get ready to go out in the field for weeks on end, it would start to rain. It's hard to describe that feeling of hearing the pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof of your Bachelor Officer Quarter Motel 6 room, fully knowing that the next week to weeks would be spent sleeping out in the SHIT. No tent. You would only be as good as how tight you could make your poncho using bungee cords and Army-issue 550 parachute cord. The poncho was stretched out about 3-inches above you and you'd squeeze yourself into a fetal ball trying to keep dry until Il Duce would wake you up at 3am screaming in your ear that the enemy is in the wire and that you are all dead because you all fucking suck. Get up! Go! Go Go! Go! LARKIN...YOU ARE A FAT PIECE OF SHIT, YOU WON'T LAST 2 DAYS IN RANGER SCHOOL.......(I was inded 'fat' but I ran an 11:30 two-mile PT test run) Where was I? The reason for this little memory is because my buddy Ron and I used to quote this whenever we'd hear the rain. We'd sit on our rucksacks in our little hotel room watching The Real World, San Francisco. We'd hear Pedro and Puck fighting and we'd see Rachel bitching about getting wet on her camping trip in Hawaii. We'd say it over and over again. I say it now when I have to do intervals alone...THE HORROR....THE HORROR

Workout 1. 10 miles in 74 minutes. Workout 2. 7 miles in 52 minutes. 17 miles in doubles. --------------------------------- I'm already thinking about my October marathon. I want to run a 2:29 there. I have to approach the training with some sense of logic, but the more I run and after reading the Blaine quote below, the more I realize that I need to apply more illogic than logic to achieve this. I won't get all mystic on you and will instead call these illogical things, "caveman shit." I'm starting a list of caveman shit that I will attempt to do--Blaine in the bubble-style--as I try to run a 2:29 in about 6 months. It will be a supplement to the Magna Carta. I don't know if I can do any of this, but it looks good in my cave under the flickering light of my grudge-loving campfire. Yes, you could call these Karnievel stunts, but the results are just me trying to run a relatively crappy 2:29 instead of me making big bucks and posing with North Face(TM) gear on. I consider the list more akin to Cassidy's magical workout in Parker's classic. Caveman Shit, by me: - 26.2 miles, or a marathon distance a day (in doubles mostly) for 7 days = around 184 miles for the week - 51 x 800 @ 2:51 per with 1:30 rest between each rep. (peace out, Brad Hudson) - 100 hill repeats at 1:00 per repeat - 20 Mount Misery circuits - 35 mile single run - 3 x double mountain loops - 22 mile progression run ended with 4 Mount Misery hill circuits - Fast for 24 hrs, run 26 miles in the next 24 hours (only water and coffee). More to come as I think of them during my runs. ------------------------------- I am about to embark on one hell of a writing marathon--yes, a 2:29-type writing marathon. Accordingly, I need to dedicate my time to running and writing non-publically, so this blog may go very quiet from time to time. I'll try to post my workouts at an absolute minimum. But the 3 page sacramental rites about Barney Fife 5ks ain't gonna happen. ----------------------- I've been following David Blaine's magic trick to some degree. I have no opinion on the matter other than I like the quote that he mentioned has been with him his whole life. It's from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and worth posting here to a group of runners with goals: "When you throw a stone into the water, it finds the quickest way to the bottom of the water. It is the same when Siddhartha has an aim, a goal. Siddhartha does nothing; he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he goes through the affairs of the world like a stone through the water, without bestirring himself; he is drawn and lets himself fall. He is drawn by his goal, for he does not allow anything to enter his mind which opposes his goal…Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.” - -------------------------------- I have come across a letter today that was written by a man who's dying of cancer. I don't know the man directly and only spoke to him once, before his world blew up. Stumbling upon this latest letter about tubes, treatments, nervous doctors, and crying family have caused me to pause and reflect. It's sadly tragic how the world--at this very instant--is so different for everyone. This man is dying in a bed at a hospital that is across the street from a mall where a woman contemplates in the mirror which blouse goes better with her new hairdo. Down one more block, somewhere upstairs, you've got a kid playing a video game and a deadbeat dad behind closed doors getting his daily fix of heroin. Downstairs, a family is heading to Bible study as they cross the street in front of the man who's heading in to get the results of his biopsy at that same hospital where that one man is dying. We all need to read letters like this from time-to-time. It should make us thankful for where we are today and what we have, for being able to even run, regardless of pace, and for catching sight of the cardinal in the pine tree.

45th overall, Broad Street 10 Mile Run. 53:57(chip), 53:59(gun). 5:23 average miles. Aided course (net drop around 170 feet). 10 mile PR improvement by 2 minutes and 21 seconds. Bear in mind, this course always runs fast, is a significant drop, and is point-to-point with only 2 turns, so lets put the hubris back in the bottle for now. Everyone runs fast on it. That's a fact, Jack. ------------------------------- 2 miles warmup, 10 miles race, 5 miles cooldown after the race in some haphazard fashion. 17 miles. 100 miles for the week ---------------------- Race rundown. 5:00 wakeup after a Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence dream involving Bowie and Bowie's song: The Width of a Circle combined with a really mean Japanese prisoner camp commandant. 6:00 meetup. 7:00 subway to the start--arm and arm with a million people smelling of either Ben Gay, BO, or alcohol. The alcohol part was the guy who wandered onto the train wearing the raiment of the horny 20-something man: Gap club shirt, Gap blue jeans with almost-bellbottom flare, and black track shoes with the squared toes. The gel in his hair had given up and left his head--by way of his greasy hand--either after the 5th shot of Jaeger or the 10th rejection from the tired girl with the gay roommate. 8:00 on the track stands in North Philly. A million people doing warmups kick up a cloud of dust; a Kenyan swims upstream and runs warmups going counter-clockwise. 8:15: Get the hell out of the track stands and make way to the start. A million people try to thread through a 10-foot wide gate; a thousand people bitch about everything; a hundred people stand in the way and do nothing but talk to friends on the other side of the gate. 8:25: Prancing Philly Track Club ponies and prancing Bryn Mawr ponies--striders that I'm supposed to do. Everyone looking the part and prancing around like immaculate racehorses. 8:30. The National Anthem that seems more and more to just become a thing to be over with. The starting gun goes off and some Kenyans jump the gun and run back quickly to make it all honest. Mile 1. 5:14. Insane downhill. A million people that don't belong and go anaerobic IMMEDIATELY. Mile 2-3. Just clipping out 5:20s and enjoying things. Anaerobic Middys put the brakes on and high-tail it back to the corral 10 folks. Some guy's dogtags chink-chink back and forth which grates me for some reason and I promptly leave the scene just to avoid the noise. Mile 4: A black man on the side of the road yells at the top of his lungs: "AFRICAN-AMERICANS ARE THE MOST UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. I CAN'T GET A JOB BECAUSE I AM AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN.....then again.....but distant now since I'm gone......AFRICAN-AMERICANS ARE THE MOST...." Mile 5: An eclectic mix of female, Muslim, African-American volunteers wearing hijabs, hand out cups of water while African-American men immaculately dressed in 3 piece suits and fedoras stroll down the street on their way to church. Mile 6. I quickly pass Kevin, owner of the Cobra Kai dojo and I feel a sense of closure; the guy never responded to my three emails and when I bought shoes from him, his handshake: dead fish, my credit card: center fucking stage. Later dude. I know, how sophomoric and letsrun-ish it is to act this way....with my little grudges and my immature and false cast of pompous villains and humble heroes. So be it. Mile 7: Around City Hall and the Disney statue of William Penn atop the Disney castle. Mile 8: I'm with the #2 female and she's letting out bursts of vocalized pain. I tell her to relax and give her a couple 'almost there's but she looks at me all-elite-athlete'ish (I got my Amby 'Chuck's Steakhouse' 2-504 tee shirt on, remember); she looks at me like I'm an intruding ass--which I am-- so I just leave her be: quickly. Mile 9: Reel in here and reel in there. I pass a few folks. Downhill. Mile 10: End, while barely squeaking out under 54. Overall, a great race. However, this race is always insanely fast, so I'm not walking around with dreams of 5:35 opening miles at VCM. I am confident and feel great. The race was enjoyable and relaxed--the miles came and went. My form never broke; I could carry on conversations and don't feel that it was anaerobic. It pushes me towards risking opening miles of 5:43-5:45 at VCM. Most importantly, it validates that my routine--my fucked up lack of science and anti-textbook gobbledygook--is working. It validates--to some very small degree--my flimsy soapbox shouts to the running engineers and the guys who quote running scripture, as if each moment in a run is vital, as if the pluses, minus, dates, and quotes from dead men who care not about you, are more important than just getting your ass out there and running in a simplistic fashion using but a few principles. ---------------------- Reading the Cobra Kai comments and trying to triangulate them with previously stated Skirack comments into some perceived bias of mine against local running stores ain't gonna work. Nope. I'm well aware of the value of local running stores, and I got no beef with them: I support them where I can. I got a ride today from a runner on this store's team and drank some beers (that he graciously provided as well as brownies/chips etc) with him, his team, and the manager of the store (see previous day's posting about Penn Relays and meeting the Providence College assistant coach). You see, some people get it and the others are either elite snobs with pedigreed sponsorship requirements or inept capitalists. ------------------------------- Postscripps. My niece's (attending Scripps College now, ahem!) and her boyfriend's jazz funk band. Good shit, man. Good post race music well worth listening to...peace to my Spokane Symphony-playing, Gonzaga University-teaching homie musician sista--Erin. -------------------------------- On the plate for next week: Week 8 May - 14 May: Objective--speed Mileage--90 Speed: 2 sessions, 1 hill session Long run: maybe 1 more long run, but no MP stuff.

5 mile shakeout up and down the fractal route. 5 x 100m downhill striders during the run. 83 miles in 6 days. ------------------------------------- Josie and I rolled on out to the expo today to play the parts of the wandering runners who are succumbed by a tidal wave of gratuitous capitalism and shady snakeoil. I am so weary of these things now. I think I prefer the two old dudes in a stuffy Knights of Columbus hall, sitting behind the table with the bent leg, over looking your name up on a billboard that resembles the Vietnam Memorial. I went from bib #12,XXX to bib #34 after a few winks from Josie's beautiful brown eyes. The woman in charge of seeded assignments eagerly handed me my new number and told me as we left that it was nice to see dads who could run near the front. Naturally you have to pass through the same gauntlet of hawkers to get your tee shirt; Josie wears a small, so that's why we did it. The expo was a who's-who of the Philly distance-running scene. I caught sight of him, wearing a nametag, shoving shoes into a bag and running a credit card through a machine; I saw him talking to Mike who happened to sell me a pair of cheap minimalist shoes that nuked my feet somewhere in the Coconut Grove. He walked over to the balloon man where Josie was having the finishing touches put on her flying dog. Some guy on the outskirts of the medicine show sporting an Elvis pompadour and talking on a cellphone, was selling shirts and tights that are supposed to heal your back problems and your ass problems and your everything problems. That was enough for us to call it a day. ------------------------ Someone needs to give away Chuck's Steakhouse singlets for races; they sure as hell beat swoosh this and swoosh that. In honor of it all, I think I'm wearing a gray, 2-504th PIR PT shirt tomorrow. There really is something to Amby's attire that we need more of these days. ------------------------ How do you react to someone that tells you their sole goal tomorrow is to beat you? And you are tired, your legs are weary from some long runs and you just want it all to be over?

How do you react when your daughter tells you that the lyrics in Luna's song "Rainbow Babe" are completely inaccurate because 2 and 2 is not 42; 2 and 2 is 4!

------------------------- I'm not sure what it is, but I'm bothered about a few things right now. I am very sensitive to begin with and when a few verbal comments come my way about things that grate me, I usually react so here goes. I was chided, mocked, laughed-at, whatever you want to call it, for not doing 'striders' or a 'warmup' or sufficient preparation before Penn Relays. I am supposedly an injury waiting to happen and I probably could have run faster if I bolted down the U. Penn campus, pumping my arms like a fucking idiot for 5 minutes. I also don't 'look' like a runner. The little things don't matter to me--the little acts and rituals and shenanigans before a race. I've never been a pre-race 'strider' guy, or a pre-race anything guy besides walking far away from the bullshit and putting a hood up or looking down at the ants and the blades of grass growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. I don't stretch or pump my arms while moving my legs quickly in place. I'm more folded hands in the peace of a good song than violent explosion and extroverted theater. I am growing very tired of some of running's quirks and the 'must dos' and the drama with the required lines and the fancy one-act plays. I also grow tired of the immaturity and the name-calling while on runs, of being one of the 'boyz' and waxing sexual braggadocio about those damn objects: women--while putting down others who don't happen to be there. And lets throw single fathers in the mix too... It's sophomoric, idiotic and not me. But it's so typical of this sect of fuckheads that think they rule the world because they run 'kickass'; it's the barbarism of letsrun out in the fields and on the trails where I run, and in the end, I prefer to be alone and lonely over being stuck with a flange of knuckledragging baboons.

Workout 1. A bit over 8 miles in VF. 6:50s. Easy. Workout 2. 4 miles dread in 30 mins. Easy 300 crunches. 12 miles in doubles = 78 cumulative for the week. Resting up for the Broad Street 10 miler on Sunday. ------------------------------- Linda Tripp on this..... My first experiences as a FREElance writer entailed approaching a disinterested electronics store employee, who was leaning against a table full of ipods, and asking him how to best tape record telephone conversations. This question probably always gets people to stop leaning on anything and to look around cautiously before answering; which is what he did. --------------------- Maybe putting a Nix on the recordings....FREElancing Catholic guilt trips for no reason. Part 2. Radioshack. FREElance writer and daughter enter store. Clerk appears from the backroom where all things seem to come from at the 'Shhhhhhhack Clerk, pointing to a black cord while wearing a Lando Calrissian ear thing: You need this adapter to record conversations. Me: So I don't need an old fashioned phone then? Clerk: What's an old fashioned phone? Me: One with cords. Clerk: No, you put this on the base station and you should be all set. Me: Thanks, I'll take it. Clerk clears his throat and peers down behind his glasses: Ahem, sir, I must first read you this statement before you purchase the adapter. You need to say "I will" at the end of it. Clerk pulls book out from behind counter and reads from it, following along with his finger like a priest reading from a wedding hymnal: "According to the laws of this state, all phone conversations require prior consent from both parties. Will you comply with this?" Me, stoically, looking into the clerk's eyes: I will Clerk hands me the adapter and I start to walk out, but I make the following statement: You know I'm just interviewing a runner, Dan Browne, that's all I need it for. Clerk: Sure, I see. I get lots of people that need these things for various reasons. Me: Yeah, well I'll follow the law, and it's just a harmless interview you know. Clerk: Have a nice day sir. ----------------------------------------------- In case you haven't figured it out yet, my parents have given me most of our family slides in digital format. This picture above depicts the largest fish that I've ever caught. It was a lake trout that was fished from the first five feet of the private dock at Donner Lake in the Sierras. There's no River Runs Through It story about ghosts in the water and the coming of age, all underneath the hulking backdrop of Donner Pass; I caught it with an Ugly Stick baitcaster and a flashy luer that I bought in one of those bait shops that sell enormous hooks with pictures of 1940s guys in 1940s attire, holding stringers full of enormous fish. The best part of the story is probably how much of a surprise this fish was both to me and to my family. I used to be the only Larkin kid that would get up early--just to get up early--and walk down to the dock throwing my line out into the still water only to come back with nothing. It used to be so bad that my father felt sorry for me one year and took me to a trout pond where anything remotely resembling anything aquatic hanging off an impossibly large hook will yield a farmed, starved fish. The other half of my fishing stories before this fish were all about snags, thrown pieces of reel into the lake, and the accidental catching of ducks. So you can imagine the surprise when I walked into our vacation rental with this guy. Like most things fishing, despite the bullshit TV shows on OLN, the fish came to me and let itself be caught. I had chanced upon a school of enormous lake trout that were cruising the shore early that summer morning. Their scales glimmered in the crystal clear waters of Donner Lake. The school was so big that the entire section of the dock was shining and flashing with gargantuan trout that usually belong deep and safe in the cold middle of the lake--left only to be harvested by the rich guys in the boats with their fish finders and their thousand dollar downriggers. So I threw the best luer I had out into the glistening lake. A strike from a fish that size in the hands of someone used to strikes from fish so small was quite a shock. There was no setting the hook and no playing line out--Hemingway style. I had a Raleys pole with a Raleys reel so when he was on, I was reeling desperately and quickly, thinking of all the things I'd tell the slumbering Doubting Thomas' back home: those folks, my family, behind the four walls and the locked doors. I had to get him in; stories about near-misses wouldn't fly with my anti-St. Peter track record. There are only a few moments in our lives where we get to shine--where everything comes together and weaves itself into a thread of tangible magic. The magic returns only when our memory is triggered from a picture or a word or a gesture: something. This was one of my moments to shine. Every time we'd have a family slideshow, I'd make my parents pause on this picture. I'd walk up to the wall and put my finger up next to the fish, tapping the wall next to the young boy in his frozen moment of hubris; I'd turn around, looking back into the blinding light of the slide projector and tell everyone--over the throttling rattle of the projector's fan--that no one ever thought I could catch a fish this big. You all doubted me. I've always looked back on this magical moment and have reflected often on its lessons, especially as regards to running. The constant drumbeat of these same lessons pound away day after day; they will until I die; they are a part of my very being: -Nothing is impossible; never sell yourself and your abilities short. -Getting up early, walking to the dock, and throwing line out into the water over and over again is sometimes all it takes. If you come up short, you still rose before everyone else. You got to see a part of the world that few see--that only the persistent and the dedicated see. You existed out on those hairy edges, where real beauty lies. -One day you'll get that chance to cast it all out into the sea of glimmering possibilities and walk home with the trophy to disprove the naysayers. -The world is divided into the embarrassed realists and the silly idealists, those afraid to think big because big may never happen and those unafraid to think big because big can't happen without dreams. Someone recently made fun of me because I called Brian Sell my 'hero.' He scoffed at the remark and dismissed it, saying that his heroes aren't runners--especially men younger than himself. I don't know who his heroes are; I hope he has some. I'll always be a dreamer and will gladly take the arrows from the short-sighted realists who stive for mediocrity because greatness is too silly to admit. -------------------------------- If you are a recent Chilli Pepper fan like I am (Californication forward), you are sure to like their new album. You can listen to it for free streaming off of VH1's site.

Imitation is the best form of flattery. I'll admit it, I copy people that I admire--what a shocker! I've taken on some sort of role writing role for this fine new website. Of all the sites I link to, please go out here and bookmark it. Anyway, I'm doing my first elite athlete profile and will be speaking with Dan Browne this weekend. If you have any questions for Dan, post them here. Again, this is my first interview so I am reminded of this Chris Farley skit. This is how I expect it will go down. --------------------------------- ahhh shucks...since I found the Farley interview....enjoy this.

16 miles out in VF. Easy pace. ------------------------------------ 66 cumulative in 4 days. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1989. XC dual meet. Clint and I at #1 and #2. I'll write about this race and picture later. ----------------------------------------------------- The bug, my girlfriend, and moi during the glory days. The bug ended up being pushed down First Street by a bunch of pissed off teenagers; the girlfriend dumped me one month into my West Point travails by writing me a Dear John letter which was found by some upper-class Nazis one night and posted on my door--for all to see--like Luther's Theses. In the background, behind the bug, is another VW that I haven't written about yet: my father's 1963 Karmann Ghia. It was once a fine car until one of my brothers decided that he'd tried to ford it across the Sacramento River Delta one night. I got it starting again (my largest mechanical feat), but it was never the same. I'd floor it and go about 1 mph down the street. The car's weight increased by 50 pounds from all the Bondo we slapped on it; my other brother hit a cat one day going 50 mph down our court. We thought the cat was ok and so we turned around and parked the car. The cat wasn't ok. Still, it always was a haphazard, jerry-rigged death trap--so typical of all things in my gene pool; the door hinge was broken and I remember my dad used an Ace Hardware door chain as a substitute. One of my first adrenaline rushes was as a five year-old child, on the way to soccer practice, flying down the road with my dad. I leaned against the door to test the chain out and as I flew out the door, my dad reached over and grabbed the bag of soccer balls that I was clinging to. So you had dad with one hand on the wheel and the other grabbing a mesh bag of balls--me, grabbing the mesh bag, hanging out the door looking at the highway below. It was a chain of desperate struggle and a fight for survival, against those immutable centripetal forces. -------------------------------- The XC picture. This is one of but a handful of running pictures that remain from my high school career. It's a picture of my fellow running companion, Clint, and myself at about mile 1.5 of a 3 mile dual meet. I think we went 1,2 that night and I can't remember who got 1 and who got 2. But I do remember that the course was 3 loops with 1 giant hill that came your way fast. The picture is us crossing the stream in the park before heading back up the beast. I also remember my same coach with the same Grace Slick-Econ. teacher affair. He didn't bother to give us splits or any salient advice; he'd stare down at us behind Blue Blockers and rest his hands on his Bike shorts and say something like: "You guys go out and kick some ass ok?" We were $500 or whatever the school district paid for him to babysit us--that's all. His $500 was earned peering down behind the Blue Blockers saying insipid things or putting his feet up on his P.E.-issue swivel chair in his office with the pictures of Joe Montana on the wall, eating an apple, telling us to just go out and run something like 4 or 5 miles--whatever. I also remember him getting pissed off because we used to sit in the back of the bus and go out the emergency exit in all our meets which would require some government form that had to be routed up the bus driving chain of command and probably threatened subsequent $500 checks that were to be used for hot, philandering, surreptious sex in Benicia's only fancy hotel. Clint was good shit; he motivated the hell out of me and was a better runner than myself. I was a Senior and running only bolstered my over-achieving college application. Running was yet another thing to be used to get into the 5-star school to make lots of money, become an ambassador, backslap people but remain Machiavellian behind the scenes, join the Rotary Club, and raise 2.5 kids on my way to a kick ass retirement package. To him, running was more; it was what it is for me now. It was magical and intangible. Clint would call me up at night and push me to go for a run. Almost always, I'd opt for other things--most of which are not going to be recorded here for a million prurient cyber strangers from India. I regret how I treated Clint; he looked up to me to some degree. He came from a broken family and was a single child growing up in true 1980s latchkey style--in the decade of Michael Douglas' famous "Greed is Good" quote. I was the big brother who never seemed to give a damn. He was used to get me to run a 10:17 2-mile so I could be the captain of the Cross Country team. That was about all. Now he's just a faded picture and a major regret. ------------------------------- F bomb time. I don't ask for much. I have served my country for five years and pay my taxes promptly. I file my taxes by paying for software out of my pocket so that the tidy 9-5 government employees in their beehive hairdoos and gnawed-on pencils sitting behind gray walls with plastic GSA clocks somewhere within the beltline, will leave me the fuck alone. Not so this year. I get some note today from the IRS telling me to substantiate the taxes withheld on my 1040 that was in the fucking W-2s that I provided in the first place. At this very minute you got offshore Ken Lays chillin' with babes and pineapple slices; you got fat worldcom poops somewhere in L.A. wearing Fiddiecent's baseball cap as he drops it down low at the private concert, but the IRS has the time to send me a fucking letter asking for SOMETHING I ALREADY PROVIDED??!!! I also have to put a self-purchased stamp on the return letter as well as cut out a piece of paper with the return address and make it fit inside the envelope.

22 mile single run with a 6.5 mile progression at the end. Here's how it went down: Miles 1-9 (7:18 avg pace) Miles 10-14.5 (7:19 avg pace) 6.5 mile finishing progression run: Mile 14.5-15.5 (6:39) Mile 15.5-16.5 (6:28) Mile 17.5-18.5 (6:32) --uphill slight Mile 18.5-19.5 (6:07) Mile 19.5-20.5 (5:54) Mile 20.5-21 (5:50 pace) Mile 21-22 (6:50 cool down) 50 miles cumulative in 3 days ------------------------------------------- This run kicked ass. I was extremely pissed off at my attitude and my outlook last night. I was so far in the valley that I dug my way to China and popped my head out on the other side today. I did a couple things to right the ship: 1. Bed at 9:30 last night 2. Steak dinner/veggies last night 3. Massive hydration today 4. Sound lunch eating: eggwhites, beans, salad greens, and nuts 4 hours before the run. I'm convinced that my malaise comes around because I am not taking my diet, hydration, and rest seriously. These are dire matters and I'm treating them in a flip manner, like a caveman would. I need to PAY CLOSER ATTENTION TO THIS IN THE UPCOMING WEEKS! My adductor problems have gone away. A few of you have written me with the reason: no posting of my ab workouts. As I ramped my mileage up, I cut all that cross training out and I need to get back to doing crunches again. ------------------------------------ The comedian Dave Attell has a good routine about runners. He says he'd never be a runner because runners are always the people that find the dead body. This posting is close, and it affirms my belief that it's only a matter of time for me; I've discovered simian couples in the solecistic act of open procreation out there, so why not find the other end of it all and get to act out Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet when he finds the ear and the ants? It's funny how us runners never get anything in the middle. We are polarity incarnate; we are at the opposite ends of everything--from our rigid belief constructs (ie. God or no god), to stumbling upon the course edges of the world, out where the wild things are. I'll admit, it's why I am so drawn--yes, magnetically-- to this hobby. The world has increasingly been normalized, standardized, and made into a boring series of sunrises and sunsets where whitebread folks do whitebread things safely between the pull of the poles--where these same folks never shake the dust off of their existence and end up lying in a bed of it, over in the plot next to the Superfantastic Shopping Mall (TM). A long time ago, more people lived near these rough edges, these small opportunities to make life worth living through danger, risk, and adventure. I don't want to say that I want to stumble upon a body, but the fact that I push myself close to it all, makes for a worthy series of sunrises and sunsets. --------------------------------- One cool thing about my place of employment is that someone got the idea to open up a charitable used bookstore downstairs near the cafeteria. The books are all donations, so you can imagine the selection: the okely-dokely Left Behind series in its entirety with uncracked spines, WEB Griffin's testosterone with brown-flecked toilet paper for bookmarks, and a smidgen of Anne Rice and Chicken Soup for the Soul literary pieces of garbage. I usually go in there and leave in about three seconds. Things I'm looking for--real literary fiction or worthwhile non-fiction about crazy mountain climbers and Congo expeditions--never seem to make it on the book racks. But I reluctantly bought something today. It's Faulkner. I've always avoided Faulker; his works call to mind sweltering humid nights and jackhammering cicadas or sitting on rocking chairs on large porches under slowly turning fans while sipping mint juleps decked out in Colonel Sanders attire. Well I bought him and I'm going to read him. I've got a paperback version of a Light in August for $1. Why not. I wavered on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. However, all I needed to read on its back was a comparison between it and something flowery by Jane Austin; life is too short to waste it with your nose behind a book about prancing 19th Century dandies in ball-hugging breeches, romantic intrigue spilled out over 1000 pages, and giggling ladies in curls behind large fans at the grand ball or some such silly climactic scene. So I immediately set it back down next to ten copies of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics.

11 miles. ---------------------- Double mountain loop. Felt like complete garbage. I'm growing weary of the energy peaks and valleys that I'm experiencing in training. Probably about 70% of my days lately are shuffling around with my head hanging heavy. When I feel this way, my runs have been miserable, my feet and legs: completely vapid. ---------------------- Adductor problems. Very sore. This combined with my tiredness all day have forced me to stick with 11 as a single today. I'm writing this day off and taking a torch to it. I will most likely switch my plan around somewhat. I'm racing the Broad Street 10 miler on Sunday and want to be relatively fresh for that to run hopefully a PR. Unsure how I'll attack the 22 miler planned for this week. I may bag it. Wardian ran yet another marathon last weekend with a strong 2:26 showing so I'm pretty much resigned to my fate of slogging out my best effort at the VCM regardless of front runners and places. Run a strong race--that's all I want now.

Penn Relays. After the 9.75 mile run on Friday, I laid my forehead on my desk and contemplated it all; I was beat--perhaps 50% nerves, 50% real malaise. I forgot about the nervous lethargy that hits you hours before a track meet. Back in the REM Green days, pre-race ritual was more yawn, less strider; more laying on the hard plastic bus bench feeling the hum of the tires wishing it all could hurry up and be a quaint college application bullet and less bobbing head to NWA and 2LIVECREW in the walkman. I carpooled with a friend in his 1990-something beater car listening to Bob Seger's "Nightmoves" on some crackling AM station while we rolled through rough sections of Philadelphia with giant banners of black heroes immaculately painted on the brick sides of the early 20th Century buildings with their brilliant spires and their gables. My car mate was running on the A team 800 and I was the B team 1600. The nervous conversation was all selfish 400 splits, almost as if we were talking to ourselves: "66s and I'm dead." "72s....gotta nail 72s." "64...if I even run a 64, it's over. I got to hit 68 that first lap." "69....can tolerate that maybe, an opening 69, but 66...I'm toast. God I feel like shit man." Seger now, rough and ready as he always is: "WORKING ON MYSTERIES WITH OUT ANY CLUES...WORKING ON THE NIGHT MOVES...." No, it wasn't Seger's "Against the Wind." That would have been too cliched. We both shut up after the burst of fatalistic times and my friend pushed his beater car into increasing traffic from the relays. After parking in an impossible space and slamming the meter with quarters, we strolled up to the hulking mass that is Franklin Field. Built a long time ago, and probably spaded by Italian immigrant masons with thick moustaches and 10 kids, Franklin Field is one towering mass of brick and mortar. Small pennants sat atop its steep spires and formed a tapestry of waving cloth. At its base, we flashed our competitor badges to a disinterested security guard who performed a token search on the inside of one of my T-4s. Inside the gates now. Athletes, a disparate mixture of athletes--all runners--form on either side of us. Unintentionally, racially and distance-segregated masses of young men and women doing token warmups come and go. Here, a clear group of white distance men jogging together; their hair all long, curly and unkempt, very 1970s-chic; their arms, rail thin; they are all perfected samples of lean body mass. They are white pictures of Iliac crests in Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs. There, on the other side, black sprinters in warm-up sweats--the flashing gold of their chains contrasting with their white, serpentine earbud cords--pumping their arms and legs in place. An enormous, out-of-place Army recruiting RV, reminiscent of the Urban Assault Vehicle in Stripes, is parked in the background of all this; it sits next to a gigantic blow-up Marine that wears a drill instructor hat. He's flexing his muscles for no one. We enter the stadium through brick arches and up high stairs. Shafts of light from the setting Friday sun form perfectly straight orange lines through the last set of the arches that lead out into the seats. I'm temporarily blinded by these rays and only hear the roar of the spectators as I feel my way out into it all....more roaring now, muffled announcers voice, followed by the crunch of fast spikes digging on rubber track. Below me, a long line of men with their college singlets pound it out around turn 4. The track surface itself looks older than I imagined; it's got inside lanes that are separated by a metal rail on the inside and a steeplechase obstacle with dirty, standing water on the outside lane. Men with cheesy red jackets, ties, and out-of-place baseball caps sit above it all in some watchtower carrying clipboards and acting official. A flashing screen behind them tells us the heat, the schools and the lane assignments as well as the times. Watching the watchers, watching all of us, sits an enormous castle for a building that cuts the stadium in a quarter. It's very Ivy League--almost Oxford, but not quite. Everyone else on the team wants to warmup; everyone's excited and chipper. But I'm so very 1989-bus ride; despite the sun, I'm cold and so I put on my monk jacket and curl up into a ball up near the top of the stands--away from it all. Some girl just got passed in the 4 x 400 relay and so the stadium makes one large bullfrog sound: WHHHHHOOOOOP......WHOOOOOOOPPPPP!!!!! I forgot about these track antics; track meets even in the late 80s had some yell or expression to denote some silly event. The midfields were always circles of boys--white and black--yelling out "YO MAMA'S SO OLD THAT...."-cutdowns followed by the water balloon wars across the inside lanes as we ran our 8 laps. So the WHOOOP and the primal dances really don't surprise me as much as it does others I suppose. More heats, more Whooping....more red-hatted old white men with hemorrhoids and power trips... It's our turn. We pick up our bags and head down to the paddock area which is nothing but an alleyway of nervous energy guarded by a red jacketed man with a clipboard and a broad mustache. Mini water bottles litter the ground, as do clumps of hats, shirts, sweats and bags. Racers are all lined up in a sequential order and we form some sort of papal conclave of uniformed silliness. We enter, lay down our things and then exit and run across the street to do warmups on the adjacent U. Penn campus. To the shock of my team, I don't warmup and my two striders are more a contemplative Capuchin monk with hands still in my jacket's pockets than a burst of explosive energy. I've got cottonmouth--another one of those things I forgot from the Green album days. Time to go! We run together back to the paddock and form up with the other corporate teams in a line. The red jackets scream out orders: "LEAD OFF LEGS....LETS GO! LEAVE YOUR SWEATS IN THE PADDOCK AREA!" We are waves of nervousness; I can't help but compare it all to standing in a jump door of a plane. The guys up front near the door, those poor bastards, they are so close to it all. I'm back here....I got some more time. Whew. My mouth crackles and my tongue has swollen with my nervousness. The smell of someone's Ben Gay permeates my nose as I adjust my uniform and slap a large "N" on my left hip; I'm the anchor for the 'N' team. "OKAY...ANCHOR LEGS....LETS GO...MOVE FORWARD!" It's a blur and before I know it I have the baton and begin to move out on the track. I pump my arms and look up at an empty stadium; the sun has set below the edges of the stadium and the shadows have come to bathe us all in darkness at certain turns. The run is boring. I realize it's slow and I just hope to not get passed and don't expect to pass the GE guy ahead of me, because I recognize him as a damn good runner. "GO DUNCAN!!" echoes at the corners of all my turns.....lactic acid.....iron taste.....hitting that damned inside rail with my feet a couple times....here comes the END! Hands go to my knees and I heave in the dark air. I move up next to the GE guy in the same position and ask him what he had for a time. He shrugs, "4:40 something?" (I was clocked at a 4:49 with a 69-second opening lap) There's something in the air --pollution or pollen or both. It sticks to all of our lungs and fills our alveoli; it causes the entire field to heave and hack in the gloaming; we are this as we stumble our way up to the awards ceremony. The ceremony is inside that castle that overlooks the field; it's upstairs in some ornate, wood-paneled room donated by tree-rings for now dead, once-rich alumni. Ancient guys in 3-point stances and leathern helmets stare back at us from behind portraits and dusty plaques. We throw our stuff at the feet of one of these pictures; it's a walrus-mustachioed man who died a hero in some forgotten war. His calvary sabers are crossed below his face and his real medals surround his chest; he gazes out at us through the fog of ignored dust. I sometimes feel like I'm the only guy that sees these things. He's clear to me and I stare at his medals: Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star with 'V' device. Damn fine job. Real gimcrack I suppose. Enormous, open windows display the panorama of a now-dark, now-quiet track. The entire room is almost Oxford and Cambridge, but again, it falls short--the culprit this time, are the plastic cups, crunchy ice, and diet Pepsi drinks, served by a tired woman in a tee shirt. I go up and congratulate Ryan who really ran a super closing race, on very tired legs, to win it all for Raytheon. One of the red jackets then appears; he gives a rather lengthy speech about the glory of corporate competition and then hands out awards to people holding paper plates with cubes of Swiss cheese and stalks of lettuce. Corporate DMR gimcrack ceremonies at the Penn Relays are a bit more fancy than a Barney Fife 5k, but not by much. In the end it's always the same operatic theme: food on flimsy plates, impatience, shitty speeches, and greedy hands. At its conclusion, my team makes a beeline for a bar. By now the atmosphere of the relays has substantially changed. The fans, flashy black sprinters, and gangly, curly-haired distance white boys with the model Iliac crests, are long gone. U. Penn students--one gigantic crowd of over-achieving, application-embellishing, "society"-quoting High School presidents-- are now spilled out into the street wearing their backpacks and discussing intellectual things while making intellectual laughs. We find a tavern and recline at table in its loud basement next to a table with red-faced college men wearing backwards baseball caps. We all order greasy food and drink warm beer from wet glasses, raising them in a toast to a good race and a damn fine day.

Sunday: 0. Day off. 84 miles in the week. All weekly goals exceeded. ----------------------------------- Monday: Workout 1. Starvation run-caveman run. I experimented today and fasted from 8pm last night to this workout at 3pm today, taking only coffee and 0 water to see what I could do with no food and water during that time. I wanted to push it to a level that simulates the last 12 miles of the marathon. 13 miles, 12 of which were a medium-easy-type progression run on the Betzwood. 1 mile cool down at the end. Mile splits as follows: 1. 6:53 2. 6:38 3. 6:33 4. 6:35 5. 6:22 6. 6:32 7. 6:29 8. 6:15 9. 5:54 10. 5:56 11. 5:50 12. 5:51 13. 8:01 Workout 2. 4 miles on the dread. 3 miles progressed from 7:00 down to 6:15 pace. Last mile 7:30s. 17 miles in doubles today -------------------------------- I'll have to say, it's been enjoyable not being the Lawnmower Man these past couple days, but I'm still going to write about the Penn Relays at some point. ----------------------- Mail call: "Gary G." posted the following comment with question on Friday. "Hi Duncan, this is my first time to your site. I must say that I am amazed at your running ability. You're awesome. I currently weigh 230 pounds and I'm 5'7. I have been running but Im really not making any progress. I have been on the Atkins diet for about 6 months. Im actually down 25 pounds. My neighbor is an avid runner(4:51 miler in college) and has been advising me. He told me a good start-up program would be to run 3 minutes as hard as I can followed by 2 minutes of jump rope (3x/week). Easy days consist of a moderate walk for 10 minutes. I also do 10 chinups and 40 situps twice a week. My goal is to get down to 190 and be able to complete a 10 mile run within the next 3 months. Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated." To which I will reply: I'm no exercise physiologist; I don't have a good grasp on weight loss techniques and really don't feel comfortable trying to craft some formula for completing a 10 miler in 3 months while losing weight--all apparently starting from ground level. However, if I had to give some commentary, it would be more a list of should and shouldn't do based on your comments. Should not do: -"run 3 minutes as hard followed by 2 minutes of jump rope." Why run hard at all? If you want to lose weight and just complete a 10 miler, then forget that Rocky crap. Jumping rope on a heavy frame sounds like a recipe for a career-ending injury to me. -Atkins diet. This thing royally sucks ass. I have seen people in diners on this diet in line with plates of sausage and bacon and fried eggs. The evil apples--the natural sugar carb demons and enemies of Atkins' greasy proteins---are left off the plate for some reason. You want a diet? Read Enter the Zone. 40-30-30 ratio of carbs, protein and fat broken down into good vs bad of each. Rather simple stuff. -10 chinups. Why? Use the time spent on that to do more walking or running/jogging. Become a strongman after you lose all that weight. Good for abs..40 situps 2 x week should be 40 situps a day..abs are amazing muscles..1 day recovery is sufficient. Increase the reps. Buy a Swiss ball. Work the back to balance the opposing muscle groups out. Should do: -Walk. Walk during work. Park far away from the work door and walk. Walk to work. Walk around the halls during your coffee break;walk everywhere. Walk to the park, walk to the store, walk.....burn more calories than you consume...simple math at the end of the day. -Jog/run. Don't do any easy/hard offsets. Everything is easy pace. Your goal is to complete 10 miles so completion means just doing it. I don't know enough of your history to write some plan here, but if you are going for 10 miles..work a long run into your week and increase it 10% per week until you are around 15 miles. 3 months ain't much time if you are ground zero. Again, no hard/easy stuff. Just run. Just jog. As you keep doing this, your pace will naturally quicken. -Cross train for weight loss. Anything you think of...swim/bike/elliptical/stairmaster/hike...anything to burn calories. Hope this helps...good luck. ------------------------------------ Homework assignment for those of you that use the following equation: PR = (rigid schedule x 180 days)^pi / (width of Himalayan trail running shoe) + 1 tsp of bingoggamawhaddy Seriously, some people have written to me lately asking me why I have quoted Hudson and then made correlations to lotus flowers and Buddha. The article has influenced my running. I think he's on to something (though I disagree with him on quarters).