The RunRunLive 4.0 Podcast Episode 4-337 – Addiction Counseling with Greg Milbourne

(Audio: link)

[audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi4337.mp3]

Link epi4337.mp3

Team Hoyt Boston 2016 Campaign -> https://www.crowdrise.com/teamhoytbostonmarath/fundraiser/christopherrussell

MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks – http://www.marathonbq.com/qualify-for-the-boston-marathon-in-14-weeks/

Hello and welcome to episode 4-337 of the RunRunLive Podcast. Today we are going to continue our exploration of the relationship between addiction and endurance sports with longtime friend of the show Greg. I recorded this interview a few weeks ago the same week I spoke with Nate so I was using that discussion as a starting point with Greg to till new ground.

In section one I’ll give you my Boston Marathon 2016 walk through. In section two I’ll give you a post I wrote on innovation that has a business slant but you folks are smart enough to tease out how it all applies to your personal lives as well.

Remember no Harry’s razors ads here, because then my kids don’t get to go to school. That’s right. One of the companies I was on the leadership team of sold a good sized deal to Gillette who makes those expensive razor blades everyone is trying to disintermediate. If we hadn’t sold that deal, I wouldn’t get my bonus and my kids would be street urchins now.

That’s why we’re Ad free and listener supported – to keep my kids off the street.

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I’d like to welcome new members Ken, Rebecca, Foti and Greg for helping keep the kids off the street over here at RunRunLive.

The Boston piece in this show is a bit long so I’ll keep my intro comments brief. I’m in my taper for Boston. I knocked out my last real workout on Sunday with a 9 mile pace run that was again right where I need to be. The weather looks decent. Now I just have to have a good day.

I’m trying to eat clean and relatively lightly this week. I’m locked down. I’ve got no travel until next week and I’ve got enough projects to keep me busy. It’s still very stressful to sit around and try to stay calm.

…

So, It’s time to line up for Boston again. When this episode drops it will be Friday before the Patriot’s Day. 20 years ago I started running again and ran my first Boston Marathon. It had its way with me that first year. It taught me a lesson about what the marathon distance expects from a runner. Boston expects even more.

When I first started running Boston it was still mostly a local affair. We had our fans and acolytes among the serious runners of the world but it was a still a local race and a local tradition. When the rest of the world didn’t really care much about city marathons we had a deeply embedded heroic culture and mythology that was already a century old.

We grew up with the marathon in our lives.

Boston shaped the long distance road running culture in Boston and New England. The spring and fall race calendar revolved around it. You were either training for Boston or training to qualify for Boston. Seasons of training and racing that had a nice and comfortable cadence.

Some things have changed, but things always change in this world. It’s still the greatest marathon in the world. And it’s still our marathon.

Over the last couple years Boston has become a bit of a white whale for me. But I’m working on that. I know I can’t keep doing it forever and the new standards and new qualification windows really force it uncomfortably into my life.

I’m completely grateful to have had the privilege of this old race in my life. I’m grateful to have been able to meet the great men and women who have written their stories there.

Time is a river and you can never step in the same water twice, but I’m happy to have gotten my feet wet when I had the chance.

On with the Show!

Section one – Running Tips

Boston 2016 Walkthrough – https://runrunlive.com/boston-marathon-2016-walk-through

Voices of reason – the conversation

Greg Millbourne – http://www.drmilbourne.com/

As a psychologist, a father, a husband, a runner, a former Army officer and a former country manager of an American business in Russia, I bring a varied and eclectic style to my work. Trained in marital, family and child therapy, I have worked with clients from childhood into retirement and enjoy the diversity of seeing people at all stages of their life and development.

My goal is to maximize happiness and reduce anxiety and the impediments to truly enjoying your life. To do so, I am happy to see individuals, couples or families, and look forward to seeing you!

Section two

What is innovation – https://runrunlive.com/what-is-innovation

Outro

That’s it my friends, let the credits roll as we gracefully taper our way out of Episode 4-337 of the RunRunLive Podcast.

With any luck this episode will drop on the Friday before Boston. Remember, Boston, being the special, on-of-a-kind unicorn that it is, is held on Monday. That’s Monday the 18^th.

Then I have to turn my cranky old self around and pull off the Groton Road Race the following weekend.

I’m starting back into a fairly heavy travel schedule so that should keep me busy. After Boston I’ve got my Grand Canyon adventure planned for the middle of May. And I told Coach I’d run the Portland Marathon with him in the fall. But, I really don’t have any athletic goals for the summer.

I’d consider a trail 50K if I could find an interesting one. I want to get off the roads and I’ve never raced the 50K distance – so that would be something new for me. I think that’s what my future agenda is going to skew towards – new and interesting stuff.

You can still support my Team Hoyt campaign for Boston. The links are in the show notes.

April 24^th is the Groton Road Race. You can runit virtually if you’re not in the area – or show up and say hi – just go to GrotonRoadRace.com. We took a crew out Saturday and cleaned all the trash up on one section of the 10k to make it pretty for you.

…

I’m a bit stressed out this week, because, you know, beyond all of this I still have a job and a family and a home and an old dog to take care of! I took Buddy to the vet and they thought he was fine. I have a regularly scheduled appointment in June and we’ll decide whether we want to remove the big fatty tumor in the ‘armpit’ of his back leg that seems to be impinging on his range of motion.

He’s happy. He still gets out. Ironically this week as I’m laying low into Boston he’ll get plenty of walks around the neighborhood. Hey, if all he can do is give hugs, that’s ok with us.

…

Closing comments

Who out there has seen the original Batman movie? I’m not talking about Michael Keaton. I’m talking about the campy one they made from the TV show in 1966.

In one of the scenes they have Batman (played by Adam West) trying to get rid of a bomb. The bomb is one of those ones like in the cartoons. A cannon ball shaped thing with a fuse burning. Batman has the bomb in his hands and is running around the piers on the waterfront trying to get rid of it.

The gag is that every time he goes to throw it in off the pier there is something in the way. Like a boat or a flock of ducks. So he’s running around with this smoking bomb that he can’t get rid of.

I had a workout like that last week.

Coach scheduled a little tune up workout of 3 sets of 3 X 200 meters all out with 20 second rest between reps and 3 minutes between sets. It’s basically a lactic acid buffering workout. Fine tuning for the race. Compared to what I have been doing it’s an easy workout, maybe 3-4 miles total even with the warm up and cool down.

I was working from home and of course the day got away from me and it was getting into the afternoon before I got ready to go. I was coming off a delayed flight from Chicago the night before and was a bit jet lagged.

I figured I’d head down to the track and knock it out. I drove down to the track and much to my surprise and frustration there was a track meet in progress! Who do these people think they are using my track!

I had to go to plan B. I figured I’d just knock them out in my neighborhood. But, of course, my neighborhood doesn’t have the 200’s marked off. I had to go back to my desk and program this workout into my Garmin. It took a few minutes to do this, because the workout is a bit detailed in structure. Then I synced it to my watch and headed out.

I ran about a 2K warm up and hit the button to start the first 200. I’m going all out on these, 99% effort, which for my neighbors I’m sure looked like I was having some sort of fit in the road.

Now, I’ve done enough track work to know how far approximately 200 meters is. I got to that point and the watch didn’t go off. Now I’m thinking, “Did I enter 200M into the watch or 300M?” Because there’s a big difference there for this workout.

I turn around and do another one back to where I started and now I’m pretty sure the distance is wrong. No problem I’ll check the watch and see what it says. The only problem is that in order to do that I have to stop the workout in process. Crap.

I stop the workout and start editing it on the watch and I still can’t tell what it says because the watch has converted everything to miles and even though I’m a smart guy I don’t know how to convert 200 or 300 meters to .19 blah blah miles. So, I have to change the watch default to metric and then see that I indeed programmed 300m instead of 200m.

That’s not going to work.

Back to the house. Log back into Garmin Connect. Fix the workout. Re-sync. Back out the door.

The actual workout really wasn’t that bad, but it fought me all day, it was a test of wills and I wasn’t going to let it win. In the end this easy 30 -40 minute workout probably chewed up 2 hours of my afternoon.

Just like Adam West trying to get rid of that smoking bomb.

I’ll see you out there.

So, yeah, the universe is in balance… – and l’ll see you out there.