Change of Pace

2005 Drinks to date:..92.....Miles: 116 1/2

"...the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and...thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past."

As that esteemed Colombian, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, wrote, I have been a "easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia." I really was missing New York over those last few days in Bogotá, but now that I'm back to the ice and snow and miserable frigid winds and decidedly unpleasant running conditions, I'm having second thoughts. Not to mention the fact that my life here is entirely overscheduled and I'm unlikely to finish editing my travel photos and unpacking my bags until g-d knows when.

And thus far I've been entirely unimpressed with the wonders of altitude training. On the two runs I've struggled through since I've been home, I think I'm actually slower now that I was before spending two weeks running in the Andes. Definitely time to start throwing some speedwork into the mix...

2005 Drinks to date:..97.....Miles: 116 1/2

I just dropped a greasy pizza tomato on my powder pink suede skirt. Serves me right for wearing animal products I suppose. If anyone knows how to get grease stains out of suede...

Work today has been all about Martha. She's not really very interesting to me, though I will admit she looked incredibly svelte in those skinny jeans as she left prison last night. Which reminds me, when did Kelly Clarkson get all hot? She had that slightly chubby, wholesome, midwestern Christian Rock look about her the last time I looked and now all of a sudden she's a better coifed Avril-clone.

But back to work. Next week will be Dan's last three days and everything about the show has started to feel spookily final. I don't even know where we'll be broadcasting out of as of Thursday, since I think they're planning on tearing the current stage set apart on Wednesday night. Each department took group photos with the big man today on the anchor desk, so we were all dressed up for the occasion. They didn't even hire a professional photographer for the shoot, but I guess that's to be expected. They're making us cut back by half how many newspapers we get in the research office every day which will save the network...oh, maybe $800 a year? Yeah, that's really going to give the company a tangible financial boost. At least we're still getting something of a goodbye party for Dan. We can live without our newspapers, but free booze is a luxury that we all can use right now.

2005 Drinks to date:..100.....Miles: 127

It was just a 5K, but it was painfully chilly and the main motivation to run a fast time was just to get the damn thing over with. I was pretty sure I had a good chance of getting an age-group prize, but damn, it was miserable waiting around in the cold for the results to be posted. The trophy itself was not the most attractive piece of metal I've ever seen, but it was kind of fun carrying it around afterwards as the official 7th place finisher, women's age-group 30-39. The local Irish pub, Coogans, sponsored a raucous party afterwards with free food and more importantly, free Guinness, and all the local politicians showed up to make the rounds. I shook hands with Rep. Charles Rangel and I have a little crush now on State Senator Eric Schneiderman. I'd been a little jealous of the young kids who got hugs from firemen as they finished their races, but in the end, I managed to connive a goodbye kiss out of a young Bronx firefighter named Freddy. Oh yeah, and my time for the race was 20:40. Not stellar, but it was a hilly course, so I'm reasonably satisfied with that.

2005 Drinks to date:..100.....Miles: 145

My running is definitively outpacing my drinking now. I'm a very, very bad alcoholic. But there are 12 days before my next team points race and it's a half marathon, so I've got myself some work to do between now and then. Today wasn't so bad, despite the rain and mud. 50 degree weather is just too delicious a concept at this point in the year to complain about getting a little wet. But snow is on the way again (falling as I write, actually) and the temperature is supposed to drop to 17 degrees tonight, so I'm expecting the rest up the week to be rather unpleasant for running. Though now that I've gotten in two decent long runs for the week, I can just use the bitter temps as an excuse to do some shorter speed workouts.

2005 Drinks to date:..106.....Miles: 145

It's icy and cold and I've got my hair all straight and pretty, so I'm taking a few days off from the running. I've got a lot on my mind outside of getting the miles in right now anyway, but I'll be back out in the park this weekend.

Wednesday was Dan's last night in the anchor chair. The whole day had a tense feeling of anxious anticipation about it and no one seemed to know quite what they should be feeling or doing.

As the broadcast was about to begin, people from other broadcasts and other parts of the network started to trickle past my office onto the balcony over the newsroom to watch Dan tape his final goodbye. Feeling a little awkward, I joined the crowd in the hallway during the broadcast.

As soon as the official sign-off went over the airwaves, the whole room burst into applause and a wave of emotion must have swept the room, because suddenly everyone's eyes got really wet and shiny.

Dan spoke for a bit and then he and his wife Jean watched and listened as colleagues toasted his career with bourbon and champagne. So many people had something to say about how special Dan had been in their lives - both professionally and personally.

2005 Drinks to date:..113.....Miles: 162

Okay, this is not new stuff. We were popping the LSD gospel back in high school, when long slow distance only meant one measly hour of running. And I went out and bought my heart rate monitor at least three or four years ago, but I'm pretty sure I never really understood what exactly I was supposed to do with it.

Last year I started to think more about the discrepancies in my race times and what training techniques I could be utilizing to make my shorter race PRs more commensurate with my marathon PR. At the same time, I was dating another competitive runner. A novelty in my life, since I'd never had anyone encourage me to talk about my split times and eat, drink and breathe training theories 24 hours a day. The end result was that I was getting in more mileage, more track work outs and more measured, thoughtful training below my lactic acid threshold. Come the end of May, I popped off a 19:12 5K, effectively cutting 2 minutes off my previous PR and suddenly (finally!) putting my best short race time right in line with what you would predict from my 3:09 marathon PR.

So the point is, I'd like to continue this trend. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of this training philosophy, it's all in this Heart Rate Training link. But the basic guidelines to see if you're where you're supposed to be are to take your race times and compare them. Your 10K mile pace should be 15 seconds faster than your 5K pace, Half marathon pace should be 15 seconds faster than your 10K pace, marathon pace 15 seconds faster than your half, yadda, yadda, yadda...

2005 Drinks to date:..117.....Miles: 169

Seven miles this morning, keeping my heart rate more or less between 155 and 165 beats a minute. Not an easy thing to do. I'm getting used how it feels to run at a 9 min pace, but it's still hard to get used to all those people passing me. And I have to remember to leave myself more time for my run in the morning as well. I keep running out of time to get ready for work and I've been late every day this week!

And I don't think I'm buying into this heart rate training because it's gimmicky. There is a lot of research into the importance of raising your lactate threshold and how to go about doing that. More miles and less intensity. That's pretty standard, so I don't think I'm 'complicating' my training regime by integrating these ideas into it. Running hard every time out just burns me out and leaves me injured, so I think these slower, longer runs may be a smarter way for me to go. I guess only time will tell.

At any rate, I think my theories for getting faster will work a lot better than CBS's strategies for raising the ratings of the Evening News. Our new mantras here are supposed to be "Tell Me Something I Don't Know", "Make Me Look" and "Make Me Listen." Not bad things to keep in mind, I guess, but everything is undermined when the four people with the most power over the broadcast all seem to have completely different ideas about what it should look like. Again, only time will tell, but at the very least the power struggles here should be entertaining to watch.

2005 Drinks to date:..117.....Miles: 176

I am a very bad runner.

I am not untalented. I think I've always had an enormous amount of raw potential, even if I am unfortunately a little prone to injury. I think it was the University of Colorado x-c coach who came up with the three-pronged formula for a good runner (which my ex might be kind enough to forward to me if he still reads this blog) which included durability as one of the necessary qualities for success. However, when it comes down to it, I am very, very lazy. Always have been. I used to fake injuries in high school to get out of practice and up until my senior year I was still winning races, so I didn't think there was anything wrong with that.

I had to get a little more serious about things in college because I was team captain and people actually looked to me as some sort of role model. (silly, silly people...) But that's also when I started running marathons...using the same training schedule as I did for my 5k cross country races except for adding in one 13 mile long run. One time I didn't even train at all, just went out and ran the thing. It was a miserable experience, but I still ran a 3:45, even with walking the last few miles of it.

Gradually, I've gotten more serious about it all, but it's been a slow, painful process. I really do want to know what I'm capable of though and after three years of being 'the slow Michelle' on my running team I've got a chip on my shoulder and something to prove.

Now that I've finally got exel on my work computer I can make pretty graphs to chart my progress. I'm probably cutting it close in terms of being ready for a June marathon, but it's still nice to see how many more miles I've already run this year as compared to last.

2005 Drinks to date:..120.....Miles: 176

How cool is this? I went to hear my running team pal Richie play at a piano bar on the Upper East Side last night for St. Patrick's Day. Afterwards I went out for dinner in that neighborhood, which is pretty rare for me.

I happened to have the classic 1972 children's music CD Free to Be...You and Me in my purse because I'd brought it to work to lend to my officemate for her kids. She'd been out for the day, so I still had it on me. And who is at the restaurant but Alan Alda, who directed the project!

According to the Team Oregon pace calculator, based on my time of 20:40 in the 5k a couple of weeks ago, I can expect to run a 1:37:47 in the half marathon tomorrow. Ha. I scoff at that. Did you hear me? I scoff. I haven't run a 1:37 since...oh...August. Nevermind. It could happen.

I actually ran a 1:36 for this race last year though and I think I'm in somewhat better shape now. I'm not positive because the race was held a month later last year, so I actually did have a little more training under my belt by that point. I started it too fast though and was stupidly trying to impress a boy at the time. I ran a stupid race and died nine miles into it, but it was okay, because so did he.

We'll see. I'm making no predictions. If anyone cares, my PR for the distance is 1:29, which I ran in this same race three years ago.

2005 Drinks to date:..125.....Miles: 196

It’s amazing what can start to seem normal. Humans are incredibly adaptive creatures. There’s always the odd crowd who can’t bear the idea of change, but for the most part, we as a species adjust very quickly to new situations. After any major disaster, be it natural or man-made, when the rational mind cannot comprehend that it is possible to go on living, with rare exceptions, everybody does. You see it if you’ve ever been to a war zone or lived under the threat of terrorism or traveled to a place where something very bad or sad has recently happened…groceries still need to be purchased, children still need to laugh, day-to-day life must continue.

As a runner you hear a lot of trite phrases from people who just don’t understand. ”I couldn’t even drive that far!”,”I couldn’t even run a block!”, “How long is the marathon you’re training for?”…and then just the simple looks of disbelief, or even slight horror, when you tell them that you ran 15 miles before work that morning. I don’t want to be glib about what it takes to train for a marathon, but it really is funny how the legitimately ridiculous distances really do become routine over time. When you first start thinking about getting back into shape after taking a break, even five miles can feel sooo long. You adjust. You accept. The body gets used to operating at 170 beats a minute for two or three hours at a time and learns that this is the new normal. Just don’t expect to casually mention that you’ll be running 22 miles on Saturday and not get those looks that remind you that the rest of the world thinks you are insane.

2005 Drinks to date:..126.....Miles: 203

I woke up this morning and tried to figure out what that weird beeping noise was. That really annoying beeping noise....oh, my alarm clock. I realized that I haven't heard that sound in months, since I tend to wake up 5 - 10 minutes before it goes off and I turn it off before it can start it's incessant bleating. Good thing I did set it though; I'm not sure I would have woken up at all. I felt like I had lead weights strapped to my limps as I dragged myself to the edge of the bed in the general direction of my running shoes. Everything hurt.

The television weather report went on and on about what a beautiful day it was going to be, but that it would be all downhill for the rest of the week. There's no way I could have wimped out at that point...I had to leave myself the option to do that tomorrow.

So now I'm back at my desk, trying to find a way to sit that takes the pressure off my lower back, flexing my heels incessantly to kill the burn in my calves, pressing a golf ball between my left hamstring and my chair and simply trying to stay awake thinking...haven't I been here before.

2005 Drinks to date:..128.....Miles: 212

It was supposed to be soggy this morning, but it wasn't. And because of that, I had that bouncy Blind Melon song going through my head for the whole nine miles. Icy drops finally started to fall on me during the last half mile or so, which was just fine with me.

I stumbled across a blog yesterday by a cool running chick about the same age as me and she's had the genius idea of naming her heart rate monitor 'Fred'. This is great for narritive purposes as running is such a silent solitary past time. Instead of writing, I felt like I was really pushing it this morning, she can write something like, I knew I was getting a really intense run in because Fred would just not shut up! At any rate, I like it.

I think mine is more of a Sybil though. She'll just about convince me that her battery is dead and she's useless, blaring away that my heart rate is 35 one minute and 212 the next. Then all of the sudden it's like she decides to cooperate, only giving me the gentlest of beeps when I push the uphills a little too hard. It's lonely running out there all by myself. Sybil's a little emotionally unstable at times, but it's still nice to have the company.

2005 Drinks to date:..130.....Miles: 218

I left Sybil at home this morning since she's been bruising my ribs and I wasn't going to be doing her kind of training today anyway. Yesterday's snow had turned the bridle path into a sloppy, slushy mess and now I have a good reason to be doing some faster running on the pavement.

I've occasionally griped about not getting much in the way of attention or training guidance from my coach. He really prefers that people read his book first and then ask questions later and I still haven't gotten around to doing that. So I was a little surprised to get an e-mail from him asking if I'd be running in the next team points race in April, a fast four miler. Turns out that it is just a few days after the Boston Marathon and quite a few of our top runners, the 'speed queens', will have just run that. So I guess as a second tier speed queen, this suddenly makes me much more important to the team.

I'm actually quite pleased to suddenly feel like my contribution matters and it doesn't hurt at all to have a good short-term goal to aim towards. This gives me a real reason to make sure I start mixing in some speed work with these long slow plods I've been doing of late. Today's assignment was to run tempo repeats of a hilly 1.15 mile loop up at the north end of the park. 8:43, 8:18, 7:59...with a 2:30 jog between each one and another mile at the warm-up and cool-down. I think my nose was actually running faster than my legs were, but it felt good. At any rate, it's a start.

Stultifyingly slow day at work today. Just because the markets are closed, I guess? I have gotten exactly ZERO e-mails from friends today and only one comment on the blog. How's a girl supposed to entertain herself? It's a Friday in New York City and I haven't made any plans for the evening and feel profoundly unmotivated to start now. I think I'll go home and tidy the apartment...vacuum the floors, clean the bathroom. Now that should make for an exciting night.

I left Sybil at home this morning again. I'm struggling with some sort of mild head cold that left me most inclined to just stay in bed, but I did eventually motivate myself into running clothes and out the door. By that time I had less than an hour to fit in a workout, so I just ran the mile to the park and did eight quarters (or what I've decided to call a quarter) at just under six-minute pace. I figure I can use the speed work and tomorrow is a long run anyway. I don't feel at all excited about doing it, but I'm feeling sort of down in general. Maybe a nice, long, easy run will boost my mood. Let's hope.

2005 Drinks to date:..135.....Miles: 236

I think I'm really supposed to be doing long runs of 16 miles and up at this point if I'm aiming for a marathon in June, but I haven't really been training that seriously yet and besides, I'm just getting over a cold. So I ran 14 this morning, but I did them with Sybil setting the pace, so it took almost two hours. I think it did the trick. My nose stopped running and I actually feel pretty good.

2005 Drinks to date:..137.....Miles: 245

You could argue that I took an hour and eighteen minute shower this morning. A cold one at that, so any carnal desires that I might have experienced should be good and dead after running nine miles into a chilly, driving rain. Still, it wasn't really that bad. Especially now that it's over with. The worst part was probably just the solitude since I pretty much had the park to myself. I think I saw six other runners the whole time, but I couldn't really even acknowledge them since when I did try to look up and nod at one of them, I got so much water in my face that I nearly lost a contact lens. Once I finally finished and was in my elevator up to my apartment, I bent over to stretch and the hood of my windbreaker (aka 'the reservoir') dumped a good pint or two of water onto the floor. Oops.

Still...the weather reports show tomorrow morning just being drizzly and temperatures are supposed to pop above 60 on Wednesday, so there shouldn't be too many more mornings like this. And dammit, I like that I'm gritty enough to be out there. When conditions are really miserable, you just have to remember that your competitors are out there doing their workouts and rolling over and going back to sleep is tantamount to forfeiting the race. Every morning now I wake up and think about the three hour marathon. I'm tired and my head hurts and every muscle is achy and strained, but then I ask myself, "How bad do you want this?" The truth is, I really want it. I want it so badly it hurts. So most mornings I'm finding, the getting out of bed really isn't that difficult after all.

2005 Drinks to date:..139.....Miles: 261

I don't know if I should blame myself or Sybil, but my heart rate was all over the place this morning. I'd be shuffling along and easy and slow as I could and she would be flashing '180...181...184' at me and then halfway up a hill, exhausted and out of breath, I'd look again and she'd be happily coasting along at '145'. Usually though, it was the first circumstance. It sort of made sense though. My body was feeling very fatigued today after a little bit of a rough night last night and I guess the heart compensates by having to work that much harder than usual. If not for the last two 9 mile mornings and the big steak dinner and the bourbon and the cabernet and the late bedtime and the strippers...well, anyway, I'll just have to make sure I work on getting to sleep a little earlier for the rest of the week.

All the same, I was glad that I did manage to drag myself outside for a run this morning. It was a brilliant, sunny, blue-skied day and a real treat after my rainy ordeal on Monday.

2005 Drinks to date:..139.....Miles: 266

It felt so good to have an easy, low-mileage, speed day today. An easy jog to and from the park and three miles of quarters with a 45 second rest. The sun was out, the temperature was perfect and the annoying people with dogs on 100m leashes stayed well out of my way. I hate that. People allow their fashionably garbed Shih Tzus all the way out on their retractable leashes and then give me an annoyed look when I have to run all the way to the far edge of the path to avoid being tripped by their precious little mutt. But I'm not bitter.

I also splurged and bought a new pair of racing shoes today, not on eBay for once. They're actually Asics lightweight trainers, not racing flats, but there's really nothing to them and they feel fast. I went to the shmancy new Columbus Circle Mall just because it's convenient to work, but I do recommend the running store there because the salesboys are adorable.