There are a lot of people saying things better than I could about the awful attack on yesterday’s Boston marathon, so I’ll be brief.

I wore this bib on my run today with thoughts of the dead, the wounded, the marathoners, the families, the first responders, and all of Boston heavy on my heart.

The Boston area has been my home for nearly 15 years, and running has been my sport for the last 4; but I know we all feel the visceral anguish and fear about evil hitting close to home. We are all parents, kids, friends, colleagues – we are all Boston. And we outnumber evil by a very large margin, which should give us all some hope as we try to start healing from this.

Runners, I hope you have a chance to wear a race shirt with pride and run a few miles with thoughts of those affected. I feel fortunate to have started today that way.

Over the years, I’ve developed a reasonable level of animal awareness/vigilance during runs. I’ve been bum-rushed by a few less-than-friendly dogs, stared down by wary deer, and trailed by birds of prey apparently interested in biting off way more than they can chew. But none of these incidents has ever resulted in actual danger to me… that is, until my long run during week 4 of training for the Covered Bridges Half Marathon.

Because it turns out that turkeys are jerks. If you look at the data on Runkeeper, you’ll see a tick up in my pace (the blue line) in the 4^th mile that represents my full-stop pull up for a bunch of gobblers. I see turkeys around our area all the time, and they usually just waddle across a street and disappear into the woods. But in this group, one tom just stood there staring at me; and when I got within about 50 feet, he started coming at me.

I tried to move to the other side of the road, and he moved right over, too. I stopped and yelled at him; he kept coming. I started to back-pedal, and he started to speed up.

So then I realized I either had to bolt the other way (but he definitely looked like he could catch me), get a big enough stick to fend him off, or pray for a bear to show up (because bears find turkeys tastier than humans; that’s just science, right there). Thankfully, a guy drove up at that point and suggested I get in his Merc, quick-like. I hesitated (hello?! Classic stranger danger) but saw Terrible Tom quickly closing the gap and decided the car was the least bad option. I hopped in, shut the door & the turkey lunged at the passenger side as we drove off.

The turkey & I were both unharmed, the driver dropped me off just clear of the turkeys, and I continued on my merry way. But now I know those jerks are not the cutesy little creatures of Thanksgiving coloring pages.

MENACE

At least I can be consoled by knowing I’m not the only one running from these fan-tailed freaks – check out this collection of videos when turkeys attack (note: there’s some *language* in the article that may not be suitable for everyone).

As a reminder, I’ve pledged to raise at least $500 for Health Connections of the Upper Valley so I can run CBHM with their team. Any level of contribution you could make via my donation page would be greatly appreciated!

After reading Budd Coates’s & Claire Kowalchik’s “Running on Air” article in a recent Runner’s World issue, I thought that would be interesting topic to wrap a training recap around. The general idea – which comes from their book on this topic – is that an even breathing pattern (two footstrikes for each inhale and exhale cycle, or 2:2) puts disproportionate stress on one side of the body (the one where the exhale coincides with the footstrike). The solution? A 5:2 or 3:2 pattern where there are 5 or 3 footstrikes, respectively, per inhale and exhale cycle.

But what’s the ideal breath pattern for bubble-blowing?

So I figured I’d spend week 3 of Covered Bridges Half Marathon training focused on re-working my breathing pattern which, frankly, I had paid no attention to before this. First, I needed a baseline. I laced up and headed out for a 6 miler last Monday, settled into my usual pace for an easy run, and counted… Foot, inhale, foot, foot, exhale.

And thus, I may be the only person who is annoyed to discover that she’s already doing something “the right way,” because it means I’ve got no fodder for a transformative, triumphant blog post. Overall, week 3 of training was fairly unremarkable. Same general smattering of hill sprints, 10k-pace intervals and progression runs, with a pleasant 9-mile LR at the end.

But, maybe this concept and that article will be of help to some other runner, who can try to inject a little odd-ness into their usual even-steven breathin’. And I’ll see what I can do to drum up another issue to fix here in week 4.

As a reminder, I’ve pledged to raise at least $500 for Health Connections of the Upper Valley so I can run CBHM with their team. Any level of contribution you could make via my donation page would be greatly appreciated!

No more than 10% – that’s the conventional wisdom about how much runners should increase their mileage from one week to the next during a training cycle. But do all runners adhere to this idea? No. Do we even know where this rule originated? Not really. Did I play it conservative when I started back into the first 2 weeks of training for the Covered Bridges Half Marathon? If you’re good with pattern recognition, this won’t be much of a surprise:

Weeks 1 (11 Mar) and 2 (16 Mar)

I wish I could claim this was a deliberate decision, supported by evidence that a runner who was recently running 30-40 mile weeks (thanks, marathon training) can handle 25% weekly increases in mileage without spontaneous muscle combustion. But it’s only retroactive justification, because I just went for it with the proverbial crossed fingers.

The week 2 long run wasn’t the big contributor (I actually cut it back to 6 miles after 7 in week 1); it was the addition of a 5^th running day. Weeks 3 & 4 will bring a 19% & 13% mileage increases, respectively, but thereafter things stabilize in the mid-30s without major oscillation for the following month. After all that jumping up, it may be nice to just go in a straight line for awhile…

As a reminder, I’ve pledged to raise at least $500 for Health Connections of the Upper Valley so I can run CBHM with their team. Any level of contribution you could make via my donation page would be greatly appreciated!

After ticking Texas off my race-in-50-states list, the rest of 2013 is about the low-hanging fruit – namely, remaining Northeast states. I’ve signed up for several races through early summer that mean the area bound by New Brunswick, New Jersey and the eastern-most Great Lakes will be covered my me & my Sauconys:

• Cherry Blossom 5k for ALS, in the greater Schenectady, NY area
• Covered Bridges Half Marathon in VT
• York (ME) Days Roadrace 5k

And just to keep things lively, I’m also running a 10k the day before the Twin Cities Marathon in Minnesota.

The Cherry Blossom 5k is first, but I’m focusing on CBHM and treating the 5k as a mid-cycle cutback from otherwise LR-filled weekends. This time around, I’d like to cut a few minutes of my HM PR and finish in 1:50 (sound familiar? Same goal I had for the Runners World HM where the hills damn near killed me). I’m following a training plan from Brad Hudson’s Run Faster, which I modified from the original 16-week version to a 12-week plan with more strength training included. Last week was the first in the training cycle, and the first time in a long time that I did hill sprints and a more-than-5-mile run.

An equally important goal for this race is to raise at least $500 for Health Connections of the Upper Valley.

CBHM is a popular race but organizers cap registration at 2,300 runners; if you don’t get one of the general spots within roughly 15 minutes of registration opening, runners can sign on to support a charity team. Choosing to run for Health Connections was a no-brainer for a public-health wonk and nutrition nerd like me – they are a health-education organization focused on “the two most significant causes of preventable death and chronic disease: tobacco use and obesity.”

I’ll admit, I’m not 100% confident about pulling off a HM PR, but I know we can blow past the fundraising minimum in record style. I’d love any level of contribution you could make via my donation page. Thanks in advance for your support of Health Connections in VT!

In the three weeks since I completed the Austin marathon, despite a noncompliant foot, I’ve been slow-cooking a recovery melange. Here’s a breakdown of ingredients by week:

Week 1: Ibuprofen; three straight rest days (the first stretch that long since… July, maybe?); wincing and hobbling. This video – via Jason Fitzgerald – pretty much sums things up.

Week 2: Several slow, low-mileage runs; a few strength-training sessions; and sleeping in long enough to be woken up by these two.

Week 3: Higher-mileage runs; a brief twinge from the left foot (the only one so far after the marathon nonsense); and a snowstorm that made me glad to be off an intense, run-every-day training plan.

I nearly got used to this leisurely lifestyle, but then I mapped out a 12-week training plan for my next half marathon and realized, whoa, this starts now. So I hit the hills for some sprints this morning, and got reacquainted with the foam roller. Time to cook up the next batch of running insanity.

The official distance of a marathon is 26.2 miles, but for me, yesterday’s Austin marathon came down to just one foot.

My left foot (on your right), before it derailed my race

It all started out well enough – my dad drove me downtown & I hung out at the VIP reception, where I met 4-hour pacers Doug & Colin. We traipsed over to the start under still-dark skies and the brightly lit Capitol building, and got going right at 7 am. I spent a lot of the first 4-5 miles dodging around other runners – the full and half share the course through roughly 10.8 miles, and it was packed the whole way.

We went down S Congress (which is, ironically, uphill the whole way) and back up 1^st St (which is then downhill), and turned over onto Cesar Chavez where a huge number of spectators had gathered. After grabbing high-fives from the Livestrong crowd, I shed my long-sleeve tee and we headed over Mopac toward the full/half break off point.

Shortly thereafter is where everything went downhill (again, ironically, on the stretch of Exposition that is marked by the steepest uphills on the course). Early in the race, something went very wrong in my left foot. Under the ball and up into my 1^st and 2^nd toes, I developed a pain like I was running on a large, very tender bruise. It was manageable from miles 2-8, got much worse over miles 8-11, and finally I had to pull up to walk for the first time around the 11-mile marker. Full tale of woe after the jump.

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It’s the night before I attempt the Austin Marathon, and I’ve got one last element of training under my belt: the carb load. And hoo boy, is the aforementioned belt straining. Today I’ve put away 2,600 calories and roughly 570 grams of carbohydrate. What’s that look like?

(Not pictured above: several glasses of orange juice & a green salad I also consumed)

The guidelines I had were to eat a minimum of 7 grams of carbs for each kg of body weight, and ideally more like 10 g/kg. That meant I was aiming for 430-610 grams today, and I managed to do pretty well with ~570 grams. This is way more than I’ve managed before previous races, so we’ll see if it helps me power through the later miles of the marathon.

Now I have a lot of other numbers to obsess about – 4am wake up, stop eating 2 hours before start, park before 6am, try like hell to stay with the 4-hour pace group. I’ll report back sometime after the race & see how the math worked out!