Vapor Fly’s and Dead Squirrels
Baystate 2018
Brian came through the finish chute about 3:33. He got his medal, staggered a few feet, bent over and dry heaved for a bit. He gave it everything and got his qualification a minute and a half under the new standard.
I was in dry street clothes and had his backpack for him. We had ridden in together in the morning. He didn’t think his truck would fit in the parking garage. I handed him off to his wife and family, so he could get out of the wet clothes before he got cold.
Earlier, as I was waiting in the cold sun at the finish I was texting with Tim our other training pal. Tim was stationed out by the bridge at mile 17. I asked how Brian was doing. Tim said he went by on a 3:28 pace. Those last 5 miles must have been quite a fight.
It was supposed to be a tail wind on the last stretch. Instead it was a swirling, beat you up, head wind at times, that stood the runners up late in the race.
I stood by the fence watching the finishers wobble by. I took my station starting just as the 3 hour mark of the marathon clicked over. There was a lot of celebrating and hugging and tears. The culmination of many months of hard work come to fruition for the local elites.
This year Baystate was the USATF New England marathon championships. The way this works is that the regional USATF selects a race of each distance over the course of the season and local elite runners compete. There’s a points system and prizes at the end of the year.
Practically what it means is that you get a couple hundred extra, local elites in the race. The designation tends to change the character of the event to something a bit more competitive and exciting. You see a lot of familiar faces.
I saw Dave Dunham who owns the record for this race, on the old course, of somewhere around 2:22. He’s my age now but still looked to come in just about 3 hours. I saw Jim Rhodes who is the photographer for the Groton Road Race come in at 3 and change. I noted older guys, older than I, mixed in with the young elites. I saw many fit young athletes of all sexes, shapes and sizes, looking like they had run hard and well.
The body types were compact and small on the one end and tall and lanky on the other. There was still an occasional ½ marathoner in the mix and they stood out. There’s a bit of a visual dissonance between a 3-hour ½ marathon finisher and a 3-hour full marathon finisher.
It’s really something to be hanging on the fence at the finish of a local marathon. You should try it. You could fill countless novels with the stories that unfold in front of you along that fence.
The other notable thing among the elites were the bright orange Nike Vapor Fly shoes. A good 30% of people were wearing them. I even saw them on the course back in the midpack where I was. Supposedly they give you an extra 4% performance. I joked that at $250 they were about $125 an ounce.
Talking to the athletes that were wearing them they seem to be a similar design to the old Newtons with a very active forefoot launch pad. If your form is good enough to run on that crash pad they convert more energy into forward motion, or so the theory goes.
For we mere mortals I would caution that unless you have a very clean forefoot strike and are racing hard you should probably save your money.
There’s an interesting New York Times piece that did a data analysis on Strava data comparing finish times of people who switched shoes. They were able to rank all the shoes as to how they impact performance this way. And, sure enough, the Vapor Flys come out on top.
…
How did I end up leaning on the fence instead of stumbling through the finishing chute with the rest of these warriors? I DNF’ed. Well I kind of DNF’ed. This course is a two-loop course. Think of it as a long skinny figure eight. It runs along the river and crosses bridges to complete the loops.
The half marathon course does two loops of the inner section of the figure eight and the full does two loops of the outer section of the figure eight. The two courses start and finish together and touch each other in the middle.
What I ended up doing was not heading out on the second loop of the marathon course and instead jumping into the end of the ½ loop back to the finish. So, I either DNF’ed or ran a 16 mile half marathon.
Either way it wasn’t what I had hoped for.
The weather wasn’t perfect. It was cold, overcast and quite windy. But, the weather wasn’t a factor for me. It might have been if I had headed out on that second loop and had to battle the cold winds into the finish but it wasn’t a factor in my pulling up.
It wasn’t the weather. I just didn’t have the legs.
When you go back and try to diagnose these things it’s never easy. There was no silver bullet reason but several contributing factors.
Coach says I wasn’t recovered from the 100-miler. My legs certainly felt like they were ‘over-trained’. They had no ‘pop’ in them. Looking at the miles I did this summer you can truthfully say that I ran 8+ marathons during that ultra-cycle. That’s a lot of marathons in a short period of time.
I’ve been, I won’t say suffering from, but ‘feeling’ a very tight left hamstring that gives me piriformis pain when I sit too long. This is from the abrupt transition to speedwork after the slow slogging of ultra-training. I’ve not been able to spend the time to get the legs un-kinked. This tightness keeps my stride from relaxing – essentially I’m running ‘tight’. It’s not optimal.
My overall strength and fitness were not where they needed to be for the race I tried to run. My training was up and down. I went into the race tired and too heavy. But, most of all my commitment to the goal wasn’t overwhelming. My head wasn’t in it. It’s hard to achieve goals with lackluster commitment.
…
Isn’t qualifying for Boston a worthy goal? Isn’t it something that you can get passionate about? Of course, it is, but, as people like to remind me, I’ve got nothing to prove. And that nothing to prove attitude is the wrong one to bring into your training and approach if you’re serious.
Why re-qualify at all? Last year I ran my 20th Boston marathon. I didn’t qualify for all of them, but I qualified for that one and the majority of the rest. It took a lot of focus. It took a lot of change. Especially that first one. I had to go deep into the well to get that first one. That was before I knew I could do it. That was the icebreaker.
Ironically, with the new standards, I’d have to take 7 minutes off my 1998 race PR to qualify now. I’d have to break 3 hours. I’m not sure I could have done that. It took everything I was willing to give to get those sub-3:10 times back then.
You can say the qualifying times get easier as you get older. They certainly felt easier when I was 45. Now, not so much. Now, with the new standards, I’m racing against a 45-year-old me.
You still need to do the work, but your capacity to do the work declines. You need to watch for injuries more. You need to do all those things you might have been able to avoid in the old days. I could race hard back to back and still recover. I could do back to back hard efforts and bounce back for a new race.
The week before I ran my first Baystate in 1997 I did a 26-mile-long training run. I crushed that race. How much faster could I have gone if I knew then what I know now?
That’s the dilemma. It’s hard to qualify. It’s a worthy goal. But I feel like I’m not committed enough to drive the change needed to get it done. The new standards are right on the edge of my ability and I need to bring my ‘A’ game. If I’m not bringing my ‘A’ game, then why am I taking up a slot that someone else is working passionately for?
…(Break)…
I had planned to go out with the 3:30 pace group and use their momentum to pull me through the course. With the windy day this would give me a place to draft. My pacing skills are notoriously terrible and having a group to hang with would take the guesswork out of it.
I found Nat the pacer in the corral. He was the same pacer from last year and I remembered him. It was a cold morning and overcast. The wind wasn’t bad until we turned into the marathon loop. It was warmer than we expected. I wasn’t the only one who was overdressed due to PTSD from our Boston experiences earlier in the year. I had to ditch a layer and ended up losing my fuzzy hat on the course.
My A goal was a 3:30. That’s a 8 minute mile. My B goal, and my current qualifying standard was 3:35. That’s an 8:12 mile.
In my training I had been able to hold 8:10 paces well but blew up when I tried to hold 7:50 and below. I knew my fitness was right on that razor’s edge around an 8-minute mile. That’s why I was thankful for the pace group. Theoretically they should be running right on an 8-minute mile.
I figured if I could relax into the 3:30 group, even if I had to fight it at the end I would have 5 minutes to spare. That was the theory.
The problem, and I’m not blaming anyone, I should have been in better shape, is that we went out at a 3:28 pace and that was on the wrong side of the razor’s edge for my fitness. Nat dropped a 7:38 out of the gate. It didn’t feel awful, but it was strangely reminiscent of the two bad tempo runs I had at the end of my training where I went out at a similar pace and had my legs blow up on me after 8-9 miles.
The pace wasn’t hard to maintain but I was working way too hard. The first ½ of a marathon, even one you are racing for a goal should be relatively easy. If you have trained well and are fit and recovered the real work doesn’t start until the high miles.
My heart rate was very high; Zone 5 and Zone 6, which wasn’t unexpected with the cold start. I had run a mile or so easy before getting into the corral to warm up a bit, but at my age it takes awhile for the circulatory system to work out the kinks, especially on a cold day.
I wasn’t breathing hard. I was conversational. I tend to ignore heart rate and focus more on perceived effort in a race. Heart rate is a good piece of data but not the whole picture.
Nat slowed it down a bit as we worked through the first 10k and we even registered one 8:05. My splits through the first 10 miles were 7:38, 7:49, 8:05, 7:52, 8:00, 7:53, 7:48, 7:56, 7:54 and 7:54. Brian was running in the back of the pace group and I never saw him. He said he could feel the pack slow down after every mile split as the pacers realized they were STILL going too fast.
I did my best to relax and hold good form and stay in the pack. It was hard because we were all moving around to stay out of the wind and avoid the bad road sections. We were stepping on each other and that makes it hard to find a rhythm. There were probably 30 of us in that pace group.
The 3:30 pace group is also where the serious young women run. I was with a cadre of ex-college runners looking to qualify. They were good company. They told stories of having to come to grips with being slower after college and how they had to re-learn how to enjoy running without being so critical of themselves. They all had running boyfriends and fiancés. Strong women the lot of them.
As we crossed the river around mile 7 I was starting to struggle. Nat laid down a few more fast miles and I needed to get out of the front of that pack. As we passed through 9 and 10 I let myself drift back through the pack of about 30 runners to see if I couldn’t find a more comfortable pace. My heart rate was still in the 5’s and my legs were feeling heavy.
As I eased up and fell out of the back of the pack my legs felt worse. As if up to this point they had been doing something but now realized the effort of it. I slowed down to an 8:20 pace and thought about that second lap. The pace group moved ahead.
I had just executed and excellent 10-mile tempo run at 10+ seconds a mile faster than my goal pace. My legs knew it. I would feel it the next day. But it was too much, too fast and I could tell I had dug a hole my legs weren’t going to recover from. I didn’t have the fitness for the race I tried to run.
I’ve raced enough marathons to read the tea leaves at the 10-mile mark. I could see where this one was going. It could happen, but chances are I wasn’t going to recover enough and find a pace that would get me in under my goal time.
A more likely scenario was that I would fight for 8:10’s and 8:20’s for a few more miles then struggle with 8:40’s and 9:00’s for a few then fall into a desultory run/walk in the gusting winds of the final 10K for an ugly, hypothermic, 3:50ish finish. Another one of those 20-minute positive split races that I’m so good at.
That’s when I started thinking about how to get off the course without going through that. I’ve toughed out enough races in my life. I came here to qualify. That wasn’t happening. Time to go home.
It’s interesting to me that this makes people mad. They scream “How could you not finish?” “Who cares about the time?” “It’s about making the distance!”
I agree, in a 100-mile race or some other unreasonably difficult adventure it’s about the finish. For me, sometimes it’s just about the time. This is my 3rd DNF and each time I left the course because I knew I wasn’t going to make my time.
I dropped back to a slow jog and made my way back towards the bridge where the second loop started.
Brian’s sister Kelly was there, and I stopped to talk to her. I told her I was done. I realized that the back of the pack for the ½ marathon was crossing the bridge in the other direction. Kelly had to get back to the finish and I did too, so we jumped in and ran back with the 2 hour + ½ marathoners.
I had a funny moment near the finish where they were calling out runners’ names as they crossed a mat. I think it was Dave Camire doing the announcing. He read my name off, then did a comic double take and said “Wait that’s THE Chris Russell” as he looked up and saw me, probably wondering what I was doing in the back of the ½ marathon.
I got changed up and went back to wait for Brian.
…
I was sore the next day. Like I had raced a 10K. I got coach on the phone and talked him through it. His opinion was I never fully recovered from the 100.
As I am wont to do I raised the possibility of doubling down and racing again this fall. I’ve done it before. Moe than once. Pulled a rabbit out of a hat from a mediocre training cycle. Coach said not to. He said to take a rest, build some strength and focus on Boston in the spring.
So that’s what I’m going to do. It’s feels shitty to execute poorly and walk away from a race. But, I’m grateful for the gifts I’ve been given and I need to get my head right if I’m going to honor those gifts in an appropriate way.
The real question here is “What do dead squirrels have to do with anything?” Well, let me tell you. The course was literally covered with road kill. I must have seen 8 -10 squished squirrels underfoot. It has something to do with the squirrel cycle. There was an article about it in the Globe last month. We’ve been overrun with squirrels here in the Baystate.
My race was shitty, I had a bad day, but theirs was worse.
I’ll get to race again.