The RunRunLive 4.0 Podcast Episode 4-375 – Leadville Father and Son
(Audio: link) audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi4375.mp3]
Link epi4375.mp3
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 the RunRunLive Podcast. My name is Chris. I’ll be your host for today. And for that I am truly grateful. I guess you could say I’m your senior citizen of endurance sports.
We’ve got a lot to talk about today. “We need to talk.” – no, seriously, today’s show is going to be chock-a-block with racing and running. It is that time of year, right? This is the end of the summer training campaign where we put all the chips down and race. We take the test at the end of the term.
Sometimes we pass, sometimes we fail. Either way we learn. And then we slide into the winter solstice of our training. A celebration lap of Thanksgiving races and solstice celebrations. It is the cycle of our lives.
Along the way today, between the racing talk, there may even be some other thoughts. I can never be sure once I start writing!
In fact, the act of writing an episode is a bit like toeing the line at a race. I never know what’s actually going to happen. Until I get out there and feel the race. That’s the good part. That’s the uncertainty that keeps us moving forward.
Today we’ll have a couple of race reports probably and I try to squeeze something important out of Eric and his son Zach who ended up running Leadville together and serendipitously finishing together.
I am still quite busy in my life. I have raced twice since we last talked. And, I see many of you have raced as well. I see your smiling faces and sweat-shiny bodies sprawled exultantly in the grass of a finish line, exhausted and triumphant!
Good for you. You’ve cracked the code. You’ve sipped from the well of knowledge that is endurance sports.
Race weeks are actually less busy for me. My workouts are shorter and less intense. For me these were local races so there were fewer logistics as well. Basically I just have to lay out my kit and set the alarm.
Like I said, this is the end of my season. This is the old cadence. Train through the summer and race in the fall.
Now, whether you’ve made your goals or not, you cycle down. It can be a full-on rest. Or it can be a change of pace. But you need to cycle to refresh. You can’t balance on that edge of race fitness for too long. It’s a peak condition. A point on the curve. Now you cycle down and start, in reality, building momentum for the next cycle, the next peak.
The mistake people make is to load up a bunch of races in a row and just keep trying to execute. When I do this I settle into a sort of mediocre purgatory of performance and enjoyment. Life has rhythms. You need to breath in and breathe out the physical and mental cycles to get your most fulfillment and best performance.
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Last episode I did a pep-talk piece on why we should all stop complaining and just show up and race. I want to make sure that you understand when I do these oratory type pieces I am not focused on any specific individual. Actually, I am focused on one specific individual; me.
Yeah, that’s right when I drop into lecture or inspirational talk mode, most of the time I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to me. These pieces are a way of me sorting through my thoughts, emotions and fears. To get them down on the paper (yeah I still write with a pen in a notebook sometimes). To tease out the ‘why am I feeling this way?’ and ‘Why did I do this stupid thing?’ and ‘What can I learn from it?’
I know it feels sometimes like I’m talking about you or to you, and I am, in a way because the human comedy has the same patterns. If it resonates with you that’s great.
Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
On with the show.
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I’ll remind you that the RunRunLive podcast is ad free and listener supported. What does that mean? It means you don’t have to listen to me trying to sound sincere about Stamps.com or Audible.. (although, fyi, my MarathonBQ book is on audible) We do have a membership option where you can become a member and as a special thank you, you will get access to member’s only audio. There are book reviews, odd philosophical thoughts, zombie stories and I curate old episodes for you to listen to. I recently added that guy who cut off is foot so he could keep training and my first call with Geoff Galloway. “Curated” means I add some introductory comments and edit them up a bit. So anyhow – become a member so I can keep paying my bills.
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The RunRunLive podcast is Ad Free and listener supported. We do this by offering a membership option where members get Access to Exclusive Members Only audio and articles.
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- Member only race reports, essays and other bits just for you!
Links are in the show notes and at RunRunLive.com
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Section one – Clip from Cheap Trick – Surrender
Voices of reason – the conversation
Eric and Zach Strand
Hey Chris,
Three photos attached, you choose.
Link for the 2017 Leadville video with Zach: https://youtu.be/Tjk20Xj1wTQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tjk20Xj1wTQ&authuser=0
My poorly maintained website: www.leadfeet.com
Congrats again on your Baystate run, super solid effort. Makes it kind of hard to say 2018 is your last year at Boston.
Eric
Section two – Big D and the Kid’s Table – “Little Bitch”
Outro
That is it my friends, you have stumbled up and down rocky mountains in the dark and at altitude for 30 hours the end of a training cycle and yet another RunRunLive podcast. Episode 4-375 in the can.
I’ve got a seasonal recipe idea for you. This time of year there are lots of apples where I live. You can only eat so many apples. But, you can make Apple sauce.
Preheat your oven to 200-250. Yes low heat. Good for drying pumpkin seeds too!
Take those over-ripe, over abundant apples. As many as you want. Peel them. Core them. Cut up into pieces. You can either mix in some spices before or after you cook them. Your choice. Cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon – whatever you like.
No sugar! This is where I depart from grandma’s recipe. And no butter! You can add a bit of coconut or other healthy oil if you want.
Put them in an oven safe crock or pan of some sort covered. Ignore them while they bake on low heat for a couple hours. When, some hours later, you walk by the stove and think “Crap those apples are still in there!” you can take out the crock and stir up the now applesauce. If just have to have sweetner you can add some honey.
Mix it in with your morning oatmeal. Use it as a condiment. It’s healthy and awesome.
And, since we are getting all seasonally Martha on you here’s another tip. I have been struggling with this problem ever since I bought the house I live in. There is no fan in the master bathroom. In the summer I can open a window. In the colder months I have trouble shaving because the mirror fogs up.
I can wipe it with the towel, but it just doesn’t work well. Th internet provided me with the trick. You take a little shampoo, (or anything like that), and spread it on the part of the mirror you don’t want to fog up. Then wipe it off. Now, believe or not, that section will not fog no matter how long of a post-run hot shower you indulge in.
Very helpful.
Next up for me is the Thinksgiving 5K and right after that the Mill Cities Relay with my club. And then the 6th rendition of the Groton Marathon! Looks like Frank and Brian and maybe even Ryan will be healthy enough to run with me this year – on Dec 31st.
End of the season!. I have to think of something to keep me interested. Then we get back on the next cycle for my 20th Boston Marathon. I think I’ll have a party this year.
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I have a great podcast story for you.
This last week I went to see Mike Duncan speak at the Harvard Book Store on my way home from the city one night. The smart kids in class will remember that Mike is the voice behind The History of Rome podcast.
Mike was one of the early podcasters and The History of Rome was one of the first podcasts back in 2007. Coincidently around when I started RunRunLive. Mike completed the arc of the history of Rome a few years back and has continued with a new history podcast called Revolutions which is quite good as well. The History of Rome took him around 300 episodes and is still out there in podcast land.
Those of you who have been with me on this journey for a while might remember that I interviewed Mike on the show. He made the great mistake of mentioning that his wife was a half marathoner so I had an excuse to talk history with him. (episode 160)
Tuesday night when I popped out of the train at Harvard Square and walked over to the Bookstore I was surprised to see quite a large crowd there to see Mike. Standing room only. Overflow crowd. And they had sold out his new book, The Storm before the Storm, the Beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, which he was there to speak on. {Link in the show notes}.
I was coincidently waiting for Teresa to get out of class, so I hung around with the overflow crowd, crouching in an aisle between biographies and gender studies and listened to Mikes talk over the loud speakers.
I hung around and waited out the 45 minute line of people waiting to shake his hand or get their book signed. I introduced myself to Brandi, Mike’s wife, and we chatted about running. She had just run the Marine Corps Marathon a couple days earlier. We had a great chat. I gave Mike my congrats on his successful book launch.
Talking to the people in the crowd, they weren’t necessarily there for Mike’s book, but they were there because of Mike’s podcast. The voice had touched them. The power of the voice of Mike’s podcast made them invested in Mike in a unique way.
Over the 10 years Mike has been doing the podcast, we, his audience have seen him, heard him, been with him on his journey. Starting as an unemployed history major, getting married, having two kids and now publishing a real book.
He discovered that he could do what he loved from a room with a mic in Madison WI. And make a living at it. He didn’t need to ask for permission. He just started talking about something that was interesting to him. I’m very happy for his success.
Mike also found his tribe. I saw them in Cambridge Tuesday night. Bow-tied, balding, tweed-suited history students and teachers waiting in line for a chance to shake the hand of the voice that had become a comfort and a friend to them in some deep disembodied way. That for me was a bit awe inspiring and humbling.
The lessons here are manifold. First, of course, it to take action and do what you love and you will find your tribe. Do it consistently and you may find success, however you define that.
Another lesson, closer to home, is that your tribe is at once a great privileged and a humbling responsibility. To have written the words and produced the voice that creates this investment from your tribe, just by doing what you love, is a great responsibility.
We all have our tribes. We have this responsibility for our tribes. What are you going to do today to make the investment of your tribe worth it and honorable?
I am humbled. I am truly grateful. Thank you for joining me on my adventure. On my journey.
I’ll see you out there.
Ok my friends you have run very quickly to the end of episode 4-374 of the RunRunLive Podcast. Let’s go for a cool-down and stretch a bit, shall we?
After the Maine Marathon I decide to double down and run BayState in a couple weeks. It’s a flatish course design for qualifying. I’ve qualified there twice. I know the course. My buddies Frank and Brian are running so Hopefully we can pace each other. Based on the Maine marathon I’m in good enough shape to run a fast race on the right day.
I’m going to run the Groton Town Forest 10 miler tomorrow as a workout. I’ll go out easy for the first 3 miles then race it in. Should be fun. It’s a difficult course and one of my favorites. It’s one of my club races and I do love to support the club.
I’ve adjusted to the new work schedule. The most challenging part has been burning in new habits. I take the train in with Teresa. Most mornings I’ll where my workout stuff and do my workout early then shower up for work. The logistical challenge is remembering to bring everything you need for both activities and doing so either at night before you go to bed or in the morning before you head in.
So far I have forgotten, a belt, my office keys, my car keys, and my wallet and my shaving stuff – on different days this month. No big deal – I just work around it. One day this week I was throwing my workout stuff into my backpack – BTW I’ve found a use for the backpack that ASICS gave me – and I grabbed what I thought were my Hokas, but they ended up being a 6-year old pair of Brooks Launch that had been retired to lawn mowing long ago.
I had an easy run on the schedule. I just wore the old shoes. I mean I ran a few hundred miles in those shoes at some point so I should be able to jog around the city in them for an hour! See? Smikle and muddle through. It all works out.
I quick update of Buddy the old Wonder dog. He’s doing ok. He’s shrinking. Literally shrinking. He appreciates the colder weather but he can’t run much anymore. His back end bothers him and he’s slow getting up and down. Just like me, he doesn’t’ know he’s old. He sleeps all day and gets bored still. He’s happy, but that’s built into his DNA.
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Another product I want to give you a review on is a pair of Bluetooth Headphones I’ve been trying to kill. I got these sent to me in June by a company called Jaybird Wireless. They are the X3 – sweat proof, secure fit. I have not been able to kill them.
You see my super-power is sweat. Not just any sweat, toxic Chris sweat. You folks are privy to the kind of workouts I do in all kinds of weather. Most headphones I’ve used that claim to be sweat-proof are not Chris-Sweat-Proof. They last a couple weeks and I kill them. I have not been able to kill these. The closest I got was one long workout in July when I filled them with so much fluid that they sounded like they were underwater. I thought that was it, but they bounced back.
They survived the sweat filled days of July and august. They survived multiple of those as long runs. They survive the occasional rainy tempest – like the back half of the Wapack Trial race. At this point I’m willing to concede that these things are tough. The only thing I managed to kill was the little blue light that comes on when you put them in the charging cradle. That does not come on anymore. But they still charge.
They come in an overly complex iPhone type collectors box packaging. They have a tricky little USB charging cradle. They have a companion iPhone audio program that has dozens of audio profile adjustments and other tweaky Millennial thingies which I ignored. The default sound is fine.
They are on a flat wire that you can loop around the back of your neck. They have multiple secure-fit ear thingies. They work ok but I’ve been losing the little ear buds and I’ve found them hit or miss on the security side. I’ve had my best luck jamming the earbud deep into my ears and looping the wire over my right ear to support the mic.
The challenge with this deep-jamming methodology is that they become totally noise cancelling which isn’t always a good thing when you’re running in traffic. The plastic wing-thingies that are supposed to grip onto the inside curve of your ears work, but I find them a bit stiff so that they make my ears sore after a while.
They are supposed to work for making calls. When I’ve tried that the people on the other end can’t hear me. I’m probably doing something wrong. The Bluetooth set up and sync works great. Actually, too well. They will sync to my phone and my computer and my car and sometimes I have no idea what they are connecting to until I notice sound coming out.
I do love the hands-free, wire-free experience. You can put your iPhone in a plastic bag and stick it in your pocket or in your backpack. That’s very convenient and safer for the iPhone. They claim an 8 hour battery life. I haven’t taken them much beyond 4-5 hours but they made it that far.
The bottom line here is that I tried to kill these headphones and couldn’t. I’m going to keep trying. I do have some challenges keeping them in my ears but I do appreciate them and they have helped make some long runs much more enjoyable.
Again, I don’t make any money off it, but the links are in the show notes.
https://jaybirdsport.com/en-us/x3-bluetooth-headphones.html
That’s it. I did have some lady offer me a mattress to test. That’s interesting, huh? How exactly would I test it? That’s a topic for an entirely different podcast.
I’ll see you out there.
MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks – http://www.marathonbq.com/qualify-for-the-boston-marathon-in-14-weeks/