On Sunday I ran with my friend Larry over the 3 bridges that span the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. I say Brooklyn side, since this time we did the bridges in reverse and headed through Brooklyn to the Williamsburg Bridge for our first crossing into Manhattan. We got started around 9:30am and begin the day with a loop through Prospect Park, where we exited onto Grand Army Plaza. From there it was down Flatbush Avenue and onto the NYC Marathon Route through Fort Greene and into Williamsburg. It was supposed to be a cold and windy day, but in actuality it wasn’t so bad. At times it felt positively warm outside, especially when we were running in the sun.

When we got into Fort Greene we stopped at McCarren Park for a bathroom/water break. When we came out, the sun had suddenly disappeared and it felt like it dropped 20 degrees. We were only at about 7.5 miles at this point and the rapidly changing weather is what we had to contend with for the remainder of the day. It really wasn’t a problem as long as we kept moving. Otherwise, I tended to get a bit cold when standing still.

Once we left McCarren Park, we headed down Bedford Avenue for the Williamsburg Bridge. It was here that I decided to take my first picture of the day. I had brought my camera and asked Larry to take a picture. I am about ½ mile onto the bridge, just before the start of the bridges superstructure/suspension. If you can read the sign you can see that this bridge was completed in 1906. It is hard to believe they built these great structures so long ago. I wanted to take some more pictures once on the center of the Bridge, but felt it was poor form to ask Larry to keep stopping so I could indulge in my picture snapping habit.

It was a bit windy running over the Williamsburg Bridge, but the views were fantastic. The run over it took us to the Lower East Side. From there we headed back towards East River. We had a good view of the bridge from there, so we took another picture. Here I am trying to create an action shot. I hope it looks like I am running, though apparently I am heading right for a fence. After this picture, we headed down the east river towards the South Street Seaport and over to the Brooklyn Bridge. We stopped at a street vendor for some refreshments, who asked if we would like a hotdog. I have nothing against dirty water dogs, but not in the middle of a long run. We both got a Gatorade and then sat down on a bench by the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridges pedestrian path. I thought the Woolworth building looked particularly nice today so I asked Larry to take another picture. The building came out great, but I think I look like a dork.

We then did our run over the Brooklyn Bridge. The views from here are fantastic, but running the BB is a pain in the ass. It’s just too crowded. Once over the bridge we make a left onto Tillary Street and headed back into Manhattan by way of the south side of the Manhattan Bridge. It made for some excellent hill training. As we ran over it into Chinatown and we wondered if we would see any of the costumes for the Chinese New Year Parade. There was a lot of traffic, but other than that we didn’t see any revelers. We didn’t run for long in Chinatown and just crossed Canal Street for a nice tempo run back into Brooklyn on the North side of the bridge.

Once in Brooklyn, we headed back up Flatbush Avenue to Prospect Park. Larry and I were both wearing Polar 625x heart rate monitors which also gives you your distance ran. For some reason my monitor was reading about 1.5 miles greater in distance than Larry’s by this point. When we got back to our starting point in the park, I had just turned 20 miles, while Larry was at 18.2 miles. Larry wanted to turn 20 on his Polar 625x, so I accompanied him for a bonus 1.8 miles. For the record I think my watch was more accurate, so I am going to stick with my total distance on the day being just about 22 miles.

Once home, I ate, showered, ate again and then shocked my shin with my TENS Unit. After that I vegged out on my couch and iced my shins for about 40 minutes. My shin felt ok, not great, but not excruciatingly painful. Denial so far is still working out. For some reason, I was feeling a little tired by this point. I was a little concerned with this since 22 miles will have to feel as though it was nothing more than a warm-up at some point. However, I am not feeling tired or sore this morning so perhaps I was just running a little low on energy.

My shin was a bit painful today, but nothing too bad. I am still not limping when I walk. Developing a limp will be my litmus test to know I need to back off. In the meantime I am going to relish in my gradually increasing mileage. This week I am scheduled for two 9 milers, a 6 mile and a 24 miler. I am looking forward to them.

Well, I am still running on my leg with the painful shin. I just apply some Denial and I am good to go. Denial is a great product, you can get it right off the shelf and all it really costs is some breakthrough pain in the morning. So far the costs have been manageable, although it does seem to get a little bit more expensive every day. But as long as it is just a little bit at a time I think I can manage it. I attribute these rising cost to inflation (aka inflammation), but just so long as the price rises slowly I think I will be able to keep up with it.

I am really not sure what I will do if the cost suddenly spikes and I find myself no longer able to afford it. My whole identity as an athlete right now is wrapped up in doing this 100 mile race. I want it very bad and I am willing to put up with a lot. I just don’t see myself doing anything else right now. Well, check that, I can, but I don’t want to do them. Maybe I can spend some time on the Elliptical Trainer at the gym as an alternative to running once a week. At least the motion is similar to running.

Last night when I came home from work, I was feeling very tired, slightly nauseous and the Denial was wearing off a bit so my shin was feeling a bit painful. I really wanted to just go to sleep and call it a day, but doing that is not how a 100 mile runner is made. So I lathered on some more Denial, took 3 ibuprofen (works great in combination with Denial) and went out for an 8 mile run. I have to say that once I got going, I started to feel much better. I was very pleasantly surprised. Sometimes when I am tired I get a mile from home, run out of juice and wind up walking. Not last night though. My legs carried me very well and I had a spiffy 8.1 mile run in 1:11:16; only 6 seconds slower than my run on Tuesday night. Not bad considering how I felt when I started and the fact that I once again overdressed.

So to answer my Twitter friend Darkgracie’s question “you are crazy! your shin will just hurt worse… is living in denial working for you? *wink*”, – yes, denial is working for me so far. People live in denial all of the time and survive. Denial can take you a long way. I just need my denial to take me 100 miles.

Ah well, the unexpected has happened and it appears that I will be taking two days off from training this week. I hate when that happens, which is why I never plan for a day off or let myself slack very often. You never know when something beyond your control is going to come up and force you to miss a workout. When this happens, I begin to start feeling all out of shape. I need to keep up with a regular dose of exercise to feel normal.

My first day off was Monday. I had intended to spin on my trainer after I got home from work, but I was feeling a little lazy so I said that I’d do it after dinner. Well, that was the end of that. I sat on my couch after eating and promptly started to fall asleep. I just decided to screw the workout and went up to bed at 8pm. I guess I needed the sleep, because I slept through the night without any sleep aids until 7am the next morning. In fact, I wanted to sleep longer, work was my unfortunate reality.

Tuesday night though I got back into the swing of things. I had my regularly scheduled run with my friend Larry and we headed out to Prospect Park for a couple of loops (we ran 8.1 miles in 1:11:11). At first I was a little worried about doing this run. On Monday morning, my shin was hurting pretty badly and by Tuesday night it was only somewhat better. So far my method of ignoring the pain and hoping it will go away has been working, but if the pain starts to get any worse, I fear that I may have to revisit that strategy for dealing with the injury.

So anyway, it was with a bit of trepidation that I went out and hoped that the pain wouldn’t get any worse. I was feeling ok during the first few miles and I began to relax. The pain was there, but nothing too bad. At just before midway into the run, I remembered about a website on Chi Running that my Twitter friend Gracie told me about. It espouses the idea of running with a more forefoot stride. I changed myself to a forefoot stride a couple of years ago and that had been very successful until relatively recently. In fact it worked until I came back from an injury to my left hipflexor back in September of last year. Thinking about Chi Running, I realized for the first time that perhaps my stride had changed a bit since I came back from that injury. That could explain why my left shin has been such a problem lately. So I re-concentrated on landing forefoot, especially with my left foot and noticed an improvement in the way my left shin felt. It wasn’t much but it was progress.

I guess the real test came this morning when I first started to walk around. I was expecting the type of pain that I had on Monday morning, but it just wasn’t there. The shin was painful alright, but it felt different somehow. It was the type of pain I could definitely deal with, even if it is always present. I’ll just need to pay a little more attention to my stride, until really landing forefoot once again becomes natural.

So this leads me up to today (Wednesday), in which I need to take another day off from training. I have a school event to go to for one of my children that will take me into late this evening, so I have no chance of an evening workout. I suppose I could have made sure I got to bed real early last night, so I could have done a workout this morning, but I just didn’t feel like making myself go to sleep. In the past, I would take an Ambien to force myself to go to sleep, but that doesn’t really work for me anymore. My body has learned how to fight it off and stay awake right through it. So basically I am annoyed at myself right now for getting myself into a situation where I miss two workouts in a week.

Maybe that is a good thing though. Every time this happens to me, which isn’t too often, I get hard on myself and tell myself that it is time to focus and recommit. Every now and then I need to reset myself and get my act in gear. I have a big race coming up and I can’t be fooling around with it. What I put in today will show up tomorrow. It is all cumulative. If I don’t put it in now, I won’t have it to draw upon when I need it most.

Superbowl Sunday, 2/3/08

What a glorious day to be alive. It was cool, but not cold, clear and sunny with just the hint of a breeze. The perfect day for another running of the NYRR Gridiron Classic; an easy 4 mile run through Central Park. I had planned to once again run to the start, but I woke up too late to do so. But I wasn’t to worry, as I was able to get a lift to the start from my friend Chris (he was also doing the race) who lives next to me and was good enough to give me a ride. I am glad that this is the way it worked out. Instead of running to the start while it was still dark, I got to run home from the race on a beautiful sunny day.

Chris dropped me off near the NYRR club and then went to park the car. I went into the club to register for the race and then ran into another friend from my triathlon club on the way out. We ran down to the start together and headed to the Longest Football Throw Competition. This race and competition is held every year on Superbowl Sunday. I wasn’t going to participate in the throw, as I don’t have the best of arms, but after watching a bunch of pathetic throws from other guys, I decided to go for it as mine would be no more pathetic than the others.

I made my sad attempt at trying to match the longest throw and then hung around to watch others throw the ball. After a while the competition was over and I headed for the start in hopes of finding and running with my friend Chris. This was impossible as there were just under 5000 other people at this race. I stood up on a road divider to see if I could find him among the masses, but it was to no avail. I was however able to get this cool picture of myself while waiting for the start. As you can see from the picture I lined up pretty far away from the starting line. Usually I line up closer to the 6 minute mile flag, but I knew I wasn’t going to run fast, especially since I still had to run another 10 miles after the race.

I took it real easy while running. It’s nice to do a race without putting pressure on myself to do well. You would think that not trying to run your fastest in a race kind of defeats its purpose, however I was really doing the race just as a way to give myself an excuse to run in the city and to build up the 9 races I need to qualify for the 2009 NYC Marathon. Besides, its run to be running amongst 5000 other people. Since I wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere during the race, I even stopped in the middle of it to use a port-o-san. I still ran that mile in under 9 minutes. The race was only 4 miles and before I knew it, the race was over. I felt like I was barely warming up when I crossed the finish line. The highlight of the race was running behind a really cute girl with a spectacularly hot ass. She made the unfortunate wardrobe choice of wearing a Patriots jersey and a Red Sox cap, but truth be told I didn’t really mind such was the view.

Anyway, after crossing the finish line, I made my way through the finishing crowd, grabbed a cup of water and then made my way out of the park by Columbus Circle. I never run past this area unless I am running late to or from and appointment. On this day I decided to stop and chill out for a while (literally), checked my email and snapped a picture. From there it was over to the West Side Highway for a run down to the Brooklyn Bridge by way of the West Side Greenway.

The view of the Hudson River and New Jersey from the greenway was spectacular. It was so calm and clear and the river was flat as a pancake. On a day like this it seemed as though so many more people should be outside. I felt as though I had the path to myself. I stopped a few times to take pictures along the way. I love to memorialize my runs, especially when I am running in places I haven’t run before. I’ve ridden my bike up and down the Westside dozens of times, but I’ve never run it. It path is flat as can be and a nice and easy run.

I took a couple of pictures along the way down to Chambers Street, where I made my left turn to head to the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge was a lot more crowded and offers the most amazing views of the city. I’ve run/rode over this bridge so many times and I never get tired of the view. Words can’t describe it and pictures just can’t capture it. You need and IMAX camera to take it all in on film. By the time I got off the bridge I was starting to feel a little hungry. I thought of stopping into Juniors to get some cheesecake, but kept going. I wasn’t that far from home at this point and soon made it back to Prospect Park and then a short mile to home.

Once home I ate, showered and relaxed. I wanted to be rested for the Superbowl party I was going to later on in the day. I brought to the party a batch Guinness (beer) Chocolate Cupcakes that my wife helped me bake. Yummy. Watching the Giants defeat the Patriots was the perfect way to end a fantastic day.