[audio:https://runrunlive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi131.mp3|titles=Episode 131 – BQ Series Amanda BQ at 19]

Show intro by:

Lost Trail Runner

Intro:

Hello, and welcome to the fly around the world and eat too much RunRunLive Podcast. This week we’ve got a great show for you. By the way this IS Chris your host. Today, we speak with Amanda who grew up in Massachusetts, ran the Boston Marathon but now lives in Texas. She tells us how she trained with a famous Boston coach, qualified and ran the race when she was 19. She’s got some great insights; I think you’ll enjoy it. I’m presenting these folks to you so you can learn from their, and our collective tribal knowledge and wisdom. Isn’t that what all the self-help experts tell you to do? If you want to become a lumberjack, for example, find ask the world’s best lumberjack how it’s done. If you want to lead a well balanced life that includes endurance sports, or qualify for Boston someday ask the people who have done it. That’s how you learn, leverage the learning of others. Our community is an open text book.

I’ve also got some great stories, scenes, vignettes and flip-book sketches from the strange, vagabond, endurance and sleep deprived reality that is my universe. And the universe is having a laugh at me I’m sure.

But, hey this isn’t the Mad Dog Vanity Cast – this is the RunRunLive podcast. So how is your training going? If you’re training for a fall race it’s probably starting to get hard, yeh? It’s ok just stick to your plan. You’ll be glad you did.

Busy wweek for me. I’m down in Atlanta again. Saturday I rode 110 miles on the road bike with my bike-buddy Dan. And I have to tell you it was easy. We rode down by his house just before you get onto Cape Cod and it’s flat. So we were able to just spin 17-18 miles an hour for 6 hours and it’s so different than all the hills around my house. It was great. I borrowed Tom’s bike Italian bike, pretty sweet.

Then Sunday I volunteered for the local triathlon with my wife. We work the last corner into T2. Which is where they come off the bike and go into the run. I took a movie and it’s up on my youtube feed (cyktrussell on You tube) with the Show. I did not run, a couple of my running club friends did and they did well.

So I flew down to Atlanta Monday night. I wanted to ride so I asked my friend Shawn, who you may remember from Trilogy running to ride with me. He said he was too busy but I could borrow his bike.

This is going to be a long story – so get comfortable. Seriously, you want to stop and get a drink? I’ll wait.

An Atlanta Running Story…sort of…

The borrowed bike

I flew down to Atlanta Monday night on a business trip. I’m training for a 100 mile mountain bike race in less than two weeks. I wanted to ride so I asked my friend Shawn to loan me a bike and ride with me. He said he was too busy but I could borrow his bike. So – cool – I pack my shoes and pedals.

It turns out he’s working a job really close to Buckhead – so I go over and pick it up Tuesday morning. Shawn is one of my vast network of virtual running friends. He used to host the Trilogy Running Podcast with his brother Jason and I paced him into the med tent at the Atlanta ING Marathon in the spring of ’09.

I worked all day Tuesday and got back to the hotel around 6:30. I’m going to get my ride in Dammit! Daylight was fading so I changed into my bike stuff. I didn’t have a helmet so I just went with the hippie helmet – the bandana – so I looked like an awkward old pirate on a borrowed bike. The hotel valets were fascinated as I spun my pedals on and pumped up the tires to go.

With no helmet I was a bit terrified by the Atlanta traffic and decide to head across the back roads from Buckhead towards Vinings to see if I could make it to the Silver Comet rail trail. After 45 minutes with the sun going down I managed to get out to Cobb parkway in Vinings by the Chattahoochee State Park and the old IBM complex. This is cool because I used to have an office over there. But was running out of daylight and I was probably 10 or 11 miles out with all the stop lights and wrong turns and hills. It was time to turn around.

I turned around and started down this long hill on Cobb parkway. I was feeling more comfortable on the bike and going a bazillion miles an hour and, yup, I nail a pot-hole at the bottom of the hill and hear that noise we all hate to hear. Flat back tire. I’m a reasonably competent adult, so I fished around in the seat pack and Shawn didn’t have a patch kit, but he did have the tire levers, an extra tube and one of those emergency CO2 compressed air tire filler upper thingys. Cool, I can do this.

I got the wheel off; swapped out the tube, no muss no fuss. Now it’s Atlanta and 95+ degrees out so I was at this point covered in sweat and grease. I put the Co2 thingy on and uh oh…spent cartridge!

So, here I am 10 miles from the hotel, flat tire, no phone, all I’ve got is my room key, $2 and an American Express card.

What to do? Can’t go to a gas station because bike tube valves have the other kind of stem on them and the gas station pumps won’t fit, that plus they typically only get up to 45 pounds where your bike tire needs 100 or so. Looks like I’m walking. Do the math – if you walk fast you can go 3 miles an hour. Time for a long walk.

Next problem – can’t walk in road bike shoes, they have cleats on them and you just can’t walk on the road with them. So I take my shoes off and start pushing Shawn’s broken bike. After a little bit a biker comes don the road. I serious looking biker with the race shirt etc. and I yell “Got a pump?”, “No, Sorry!” he yells back without even slowing down. Jerk. What is the probability that a serious Roadie doesn’t have a pump or a C02 rescue with them?

This is where the story turns into the parable of the Good Samaritan. I’m sure he had something really important to do, much more important than a four-hour walk in stocking feet. I kept trudging.

Near the top of the next hill a runner passes me from behind and I don’t hear him coming and he scares me out of my tight little padded shorts by saying “Hey, how are you doing?” I jump, but I rejoin “I’d be better if I had a pump”. He stops, takes the ear-buds out and inquires as to my situation. I fill him in and he says, “Well I just live around the corner, let me run home and I’ll give you a ride.”

No kidding – that’s how we runners are. I meet this total stranger out on the road and he takes me back to his house, loads up the bike and drives me back to Buckhead. So, thank you Michael, my new Atlanta running friend. Think about whether you’d help a greasy pirate pushing a broken bike down the road in his socks! You’d better, because it might be me!

The Pirate’s revenge…

The next day I call Shawn with the bad news. He’s a good sport and we have a good laugh. While I have him on the phone I say, “Hey, let’s go for a run when I bring the bike back in the morning.” He resists saying he has to start at 5:30 and he hasn’t run in six weeks…blah, blah, blah. I convince him that we’ll do an easy 4 miles and I’ll meet him at 4:15 AM. Yeah, that’s how I roll. He agrees.

The last time I ran with Shawn was his first marathon. I paced him into the med tent. He probably should have known better than to run with me again.

I met him at 4:15 AM. Gave him his busted bike back. We went out on a conversational pace in the Atlanta pre-dawn. We ran through the affluent, wooded neighborhoods of Buckhead. It is very hilly, but quite nice before the heat of the sun and before the cars come out.

At 40 minutes out we turn around and start jogging back. We are chatting away. Eventually we realize we don’t know where we are anymore. Shawn is stressed that he’s not going to make it back for work. 40 minutes pass and we are running up and down, reading road signs in the dark, and retracing our steps. By the time we find the wrong turn we took it’s been well over an hour. I ran Shawn over a mile in the wrong direction!

By the time we got back to the school, Shawn’s Garmin read 7+ miles and it was 5:30. I bet he won’t ever run with me again. Maybe he’ll forget in another 12 months. I left Shawn all sweaty and dehydrated to suffer through his long day with dead legs. I left him his busted bike. I went to Starbucks to fuel up for my day!

So just remember you really can’t be so wrapped up in your on head that you can’t help a person in justifiable need. If you see a greasy pirate in stocking feet by the side of the road, stop and help, it’s probably me!

On with the show!

Audio clips in this episode:

Audio from Atlanta

Skits, commercials and parodies in this episode:

Swamp-A$$ fever – by the ressurected Runner

http://www.resurrectedrunner.com

Story time:

Barb – Kelownagurl – read Busy as a beaver from the “Mid-Packer’s Lament”

Listener Comments:

Featured Interview:

Amanda Lanza

Quick Tip:

Ran out of time!

Outro:

Ok Folks that’s it you have traveled to the end of another runrunlive podcast episode 131 in the can.

Got some great shows coming up. We have a number of interviews already done and in the advanced editing process at RunRunLive HQ in Singapore. I had fun talking to Doug (really not a runner) about his 5k Lex’s Run that’s coming up. I spoke with Mike Wardian, an elite ultra racer, a spoke with Beth from Traxee.com a women’s running site and much much more.

I also had a creative burst and have three pretty darn funny running related parody skits that I have in the editing process.

Next Friday, a week from today I drive down to Pennsylvania for the Wilderness 101 on Saturday. And then I’m doing something abnormal and out-of-character for me. I’m going on vacation for 2 weeks. And since I’ll be on vacation I’ve recruited two members of our community to cover for me on the podcast. Who will it be? What will they do? Frankly, I have no idea and you’re just going to have to wait and see!

I told you earlier that I worked at the local sprint triathlon last weekend. It is really interesting. I don’t know how to put this without sounding like a jerk, so I’ll just say it. There are a lot of un-fit people who do sprint triathlons. There were some hugely overweight people competing and completing in this race. But, good for them. The moral for you is that a sprint triathlon is not that difficult to accomplish. I would recommend it for runners as a nice change of pace. Especially for runners because you get to pass everyone at the end.

It seems like a bit of a racket to me charging $100 for a glorified 5k, but, like I said, if that’s what gets people off the couch and out into our world then God love ‘em.

I talked about the universe having a laugh at me earlier, mostly in jest but there is an interesting cultural thread here. Napoleon Hill in his seminal book from the early 20^th century spent a bunch of time talking about tapping into the “Universal Mastermind”. This as a time when they were just discovering radiation and radio waves and he saw the universal mastermind as this karmic pool of mental energy that surrounds all of us like ether or dark energy in today’s parlance and that anyone can tap into if they have the right attitude.

You’ll see echoes of this sentiment in a lot of the contemporary self help gurus. The ‘secret’ and the ‘attractor factor’ it manifests in the theory that if you can open yourself up to it you can create good things simply by thinking about and doing good things.

You can also see this type of thought is classical religion with the Greek muse or the Hindu Karma. In our pop culture people always think of karma in a historic sense – what you did in a past life is why you get XYZ now, but you can think of it in a future sense in that what you think and do now builds and contributes to the universal good and for that you are in turn enriched.

If you strip off the shamanism and magic veneer, I think all of this is cause and effect. It probably has less to do with a magic and mysterious universal energy and more to do with the fact that when you focus your own personal energies in one direction they necessarily move you in that direction.

So get out your long sipping straw and stick in into the universal energy pool today. I’ll be swimming in the pool as well, and I’ll see you out there.

Music tonight is east_of_ealing-are_we_there_yet_.mp3

Music:

east_of_ealing-are_we_there_yet_.mp3

dan_elson-terrifying_lee.mp3

checkerboard_jive-how_many_more.mp3

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