January Extremes

Today it warmed up to the mid-40s in Highlands, and some of us met to run at the warmest part of the day.  It was quite a contrast!  We had spotted ice skaters on Harris Lake yesterday, and they were still out there in numbers.  And me?  It was so warm that I was wearing shorts.  It felt a little strange running by ice skaters in my shorts:

Tomorrow morning we are leaving for a few days on Amelia Island, Florida, where we hope to enjoy some warmer temperatures.  And there won't be any ice skating.

Track Workout in the Snow

Saturday morning the temperature was 18 degrees in Highlands, with a wind chill below zero.  So I did what any smart runner would do:  I re-scheduled.

I planned instead on a three-mile run Saturday afternoon when it was supposed to warm into the 20s, possibly including some more intervals, and then a long run on Sunday when it was supposed to warm into the 40s.  My best laid plans changed, however, and I learned that I had to go to Franklin and Clayton.  Run cancelled?

Suddenly I realized that I had the opportunity to run my three-miles on a real track. Run on.

I am not a track runner as some in our running club are, but I have come to appreciate its appeal to the obsessive-compulsive in me.  Every lap on the inside lane is precisely 400-meters, and the surface is as flat as it gets.  So that's what I did, here on the Franklin High School Track, in snow flurries, 28 degrees, and shorts.

So at the end of the day I was able to write in my running log:  3.00 miles (note the accuracy) including 4 X 400 @ 1:58, 1:57, 1:59, and 2:00.  (Note the slow deterioration of time as the stiff wind took its toll!)

One good thing about it was that the usual walkers, who invariably hug the inside lane and do not respond to the time-honored cry of "Track!" coming from behind them, were not out.  In fact, I had the place absolutely to myself.

Redeemed by Beauty

Despite the bravado of Tuesday's post, running day after day in the relentless cold is not always rewarding, especially when it's not snowing and it's just plain cold.  The temperature is not supposed to go above freezing for the next three days, so once again it's a matter of trying to find the most optimum time of day, dressing out, and simply getting out the door without too much hesitation or delay.  I know that is the state of mind a runner would have to have who endures the winters in colder places than Highlands, which after all usually has such mild winters that runners don't have to miss many days out on the road. 

I took a look at the temperature this morning and noted that it had risen to a balmy 25 degrees, higher than that predicted in Highlands by mid-afternoon.  It is always 5 to 10 degrees warmer here in Clear Creek, so I decided to get a short run in this morning, down the sunny valley below our house, out of the wind.  That would give me time to split some more of that firewood in the afternoon.

Running when it is in the 20s or colder is just maintenance - it doesn't make sense to me to try to go long, or fast.  So I eased on down the hill and around the corner, and I have to admit I had not expected that the wind would be so strong and the cold so bitter.  I found myself running backward at one point, and turning my head to the side, simply to give my face a break from the wind.  Running due west for a mile or so, I expected that it would feel nice to have that cold wind at my back on the return trip.  But somehow the prevailing conditions tricked me again, and I found myself running into the wind again after I had turned and headed back home.  "How is that even possible?"  I thought. 

What an ordeal!  I tried to look around at the frozen fields, the brittle icy branches, and find some beauty and satisfaction in this hard and windy world.  And suddenly I was rewarded:  the flash of three big white flags appeared in the woods along the road as a little herd of deer crashed and galloped away, leaping crazily over little logs and disappearing up the ridge. 

A run redeemed once again by unexpected beauty.   

Sweet are the Uses of Adversity

Monday's run turned out to be a little over seven miles, and it felt absolutely wonderful - temperatures in the mid-50s, wearing shorts, and a little warm with my long-sleeved shirt. 

I awoke this morning filled with energy, so I decided to tackle the pile of logs above the driveway.  I have fallen behind in accrual of firewood this season, and had begun working on the biggest of these logs Monday morning.  I took it slowly (partly because of a little case of tennis elbow that I developed three or four weeks ago), and my little Stihl seemed comfortable in my hand; I paused after every cut to roll the cut log downhill, and to stop and stretch my back and take in the sharp morning air.  Paraphrasing Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, I love the smell of chain lube in the morning!

The weather was still mild, but snow had been forecast and the afternoon sky began to look more and more like it might begin soon.  Sure enough, during lunch a few flakes began to fall, so I went out and split some of the wood in the midst of the sparse and gentle snow-showers.  By 3:00 in the afternoon, as I headed up to Town to go running, it was coming down thick and fast, and when I rounded Mitchell's Curve the road was suddenly white and slick, as if I had turned the page of a book and abruptly changed scene and story.  There was nobody in the parking lot at the appointed time, so I started off by myself, picking my way carefully down the increasingly slick-looking streets.

What a great run!  The wind was blowing hard out of the north and the west, and the snow was sticking on every single branch and rhododendron leaf along the way, a transformation I never tire of seeing.  "This is what runners live for!" I said to myself.  Pat passed me in his pickup truck just before the one-mile mark and rolled his window down.  "Park and come with me," I said.  "It's wonderful!"  And it was!  But that is sometimes a hard thing to explain to somebody who is passing by in a warm truck which is rocking a little in the strong wind, and I could not prevail upon him to join me.   Maybe next time.

By the time I had turned west again and begun to pick my way up Main Street, which was whiter and slicker than I would have expected, the snow had turned to sharp little pellets of ice that began to pepper my face.  Another mile?  No, I knew it was time to go in.

Bob wrote afterward that he had been out, too, but had missed me. 

The wind picked up that evening and I thought about our footprints along Harris Lake filling up with drifting snow.  I hope Bob was doing as I was - sitting home drinking something warm and feeling that immense satisfaction of having prevailed in even a little adversity.

 

A Warm Day in January

The temperature on the deck this morning when I was doing my morning exercise was 39, but it quickly warmed into the low 40s.  So I got outside as quickly as possible and began puttering in the yard - gathering kindling for the barrels I keep filled on the hearth, carrying fire-wood from under the tree-house to the back porch, and yes, taking down the last of the Christmas decorations, a single strand remaining around the front door.  When I had finished all of this I checked again and it was an unbelievable 50.5 degrees:

Even the cat seemed to be filled with joy this morning, running up the rhododendron branches like a squirrel and darting around in the woods behind the Folly.  She has been outside only briefly during the past few weeks, and has remained near the door, hoping to quickly slip inside and dart upstairs to her warm afghan in the upstairs bedroom.  But today there is no desire to be inside.  Like me, she wants to enjoy this as long as possible.  Tomorrow it will be back in the thirties again, and then down to 12 tomorrow night and not above freezing for three days.

January was just teasing us after all.  Did I really expect that Spring was jut around the corner?

Runners?  Let's enjoy this while we have it, and go as long as we can this afternoon!

The Best Time to Run

I'm not the only one to rely on my iPhone these days.  This time of year in Highlands, finding the optimum time to run can be a challenge.  For example, this morning it was 18 at my house (colder in Town) with a 15 mph wind out of the northwest.  So I ran this afternoon when it was 31 degrees and the wind had died down substantially.  I refer to this little hourly forecast from Intellicast pretty frequently, and while some of its others features leave something to be desired, it seems to have the most accurate hourly forecast:

To view incoming rain or snow, I like WeatherBug, and also my latest discovery, MyRadar, which simply gives you the Doppler radar wherever you are located, in great detail, and without any extraneous information.

Gone are the days of getting caught in a shower?  Not quite, but these devices sure make possible a more informative guess about what conditions to expect.  I have found that I no longer enjoy "character-building" runs as much as I used to.  And I can have a much better workout when my shoes aren't sloshing through ankle-keep puddles or slipping on icy roads.

Still, I miss the mystery of incoming snow, how the sky darkens gradually - it just "looks like a snow sky" - and the air seems to take on a metallic scent.  I don't always want to know it when those big flakes start to fall.  I remember this memorable 3-mile run several years ago that caught four of us completely by surprise, huge snowflakes coming down like silver dollars out of the sky, until it looked like this when we got back to the parking lot:

Could our smart phones have predicted that one?

I like to think not.

Tracking Progress

Many runners seem to be a little obsessive-compulsive about recording their runs.  Morris downloads his daily workouts to the Garmin site, and tracks his heart rate recovery during a session of intervals.  I like to keep up with my mileage (overall mileage last year:  1241 miles - see October 7 post) and I also record the times for my interval sessions and tempo runs, to the second.  And I use a little daily calender called a "Day Runner" simply because it is what I have used for 15 years or so.  Also, this information won't disappear when my hard drive fails.

Last Friday I began my little program of learning to run fast again.  I did not say what those two initial 400-meter intervals were because they were so embarrassingly slow.  (They were 2:06 and 2:05.)  Yesterday I ran four "road intervals" with Morris - that is, we included some 400-meter intervals in the course of running 4.28 miles.  My times were 1:59, 2:01, 2:01, and 2:01.  (It is always remarkable to me how close together intervals are, separated by a mere second or two!)

That doesn't seem like much progress, but it absolutely thrilled me to get under 2:00!  Gone are the days (perhaps forever) of running 1:30 and 1:40, as I did only a few years ago.  But 2:00 - an 8-minute mile - is respectable at my age, I like to think.

So I guess that's why we like tracking our progress so much:  we want to be able to recognize and record those little bursts of progress that occur in defiance of the long eventual decline of simply getting old.

Give Us This Day

I've been learning how to bake Artisan bread - see January 6 post - from a great book I gave Martha for Christmas called The New Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, by an appealing couple of bakers, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.  Jeff, a doctor, approached traditional bread baking from a scientific perspective, and learned that you can bake bread in a much shorter amount of time using a wet dough method.  He teamed up with a friend (Zoe) who was a Culinary Institute graduate, to write the book.

I invested in a baking stone and a bread peel.  But my first attempt produced a little loaf with good flavor but not much rise - it was supposed to be a big, rounded "boule" as depicted on the cover of the book, but it turned out to be a flat boule, as if someone had pricked it with a pin:

Not only that,. the dough was so thin and sticky that I could barely work it.  It literally slipped through my fingers.  A little investigation on the website led me to change the kind of flour, from light and fluffy White Lily (great for southern biscuits no doubt) to Gold Medal, the brand recommended in the book, which apparently has a different protein amount and is much denser.  My third attempt was perfect.  Here it came, straight from the oven, high and magnificent:

And delicious!

Four hard miles yesterday afternoon with Pat and Kelder, fueled by the power of Artisan bread!  Every runner needs good carbs.

Streaker

If the word streaker brings to mind a naked man running across a football field, then the reader (if anyone is actually following this blog) must be unfamiliar with the running "streaker" - someone who runs every single day. There is actually an organization which maintains records of these obsessive individuals - the U. S. Running Streak Association or USRSA:

The rules of the USRSA require that anyone wanting to establish a streaking record must run at least one mile, unassisted, every single day.  The current leader in this competition is Jon Sutherland, a 63-year-old runner from West Hills, California, who has run a total of 16,306 days (44.64 years).  Now that is an impressive stretch of time, and one which I might be approaching had I begun running while still in college, at the tender age of 20 (about the time Jon began) and never missed a day.  Alas, my misspent youth did not even consider such an ambition, and if you had told me when I was 20 that I would be a 64-year-old runner who has completed 19 marathons, I would have looked at you as if you were a lunatic.

These days I can appreciate that record more than I could when I was living the wild life of a college student in Central Florida in 1969.  I am a little obsessive about some things, after all.  I have practiced my daily Tai Chi every morning, if I am not mistaken, for nearly 20 years, and since the summer of 2010 more often than not on the new deck I built.  But when it is pouring rain, or too slick to stand, or when I am on vacation, I can practice Tai Chi in a living room or a motel room or a parking lot.

But although I do not like to miss more than two days of running, I do not feel compelled to run every single day.  After a hard run, I think it is good to take a day off, and I used to take a solid week off after a marathon.  That rest day in the midst of marathon training is especially welcome, beckoning like an oasis at the end of  a long week of intervals and tempo runs and 20-,milers!

And when it comes to writing this blog, it is the same.  I do not intend to write every day.  But, like running, I am coming to feel that I don't like to take too much time off between posts.  It keeps me fit.  It gives me the opportunity to think and to reflect, and to enjoy that elemental pleasure of placing one word after another, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.

Rules of Thumb

It's an interesting phrase - "A Rule of Thumb" - and according to Wikipedia its origin is uncertain.
 
"The term is thought to originate with carpenters who used the width of their thumbs (i.e., inches) rather than rulers for measuring things, cementing its modern use as an imprecise yet reliable and convenient standard."  

I happen to be a believer in Rules of Thumb.  As someone who has done quite a bit of carpentry, the Rule of Thumb to "measure twice, cut once" has proven to be uncannily good advice, as I have learned to my regret on more than one occasion.  And every stone mason, which again I consider myself to be, knows the old principle, "one stone on two, two stones on one," which is why all of my stone walls here at our home - some of them constructed nearly 30 years ago - have still not cracked.

Runners have Rules of Thumb, too.  There is the old formula for how much a pound of flesh costs (and I'm not talking about The Merchant of Venice here):  two seconds per mile per pound.  That is the amount of time over distance one can expect to gain by losing weight, down to one's optimum weight (below which diminishing returns can be expected).  Translated into time, a runner who is ten pounds over his ideal weight can expect to lose 20 seconds per mile, or 8.73 minutes over the course of a marathon - a considerable cost in time.

Today I used a Rule of Thumb which has also proven reliable over time for me:  do no hard running for as many days after a race as the number of miles in the race.  So, for a 10-K, I run easy for six days; for a 5-K, only three easy days are needed.  For a marathon, 26 days seems like a long time, but I have found (also to my regret) that it is not too long at all for me.  Perhaps an elite runner, or even a talented runner, can get by with less recovery time, but not a mere mortal like I am.  I realized that it has been 27 days since my last marathon, and today I included in my 3-mile run some speed-work, for the first time - two 400-meter intervals.  "Wake up," I kept telling my stubborn legs!  They had been trained over a long period of time last fall to run long and slow, and it is always a slow process to begin to run fast again.  

How fast were those intervals?  Not very.  That's covered under another Rule of Thumb which I have also come to appreciate over the years, and which I remember I first saw on the back of an old codger's shirt on some long-ago Race Day:

"The older I  get, the faster I was."

Remembering '93

The temperature dropped down to zero this morning - more accurately, 0.9 Fahrenheit - and I am sure it is well below that in Highlands, which is usually about 8 degrees colder during the winter.  The elevation here is about 2650, and on Main Street in Highlands it is 3850 (contrary to the new "Wayfinding Signs" which perpetuate the fictional 4118).

When it drops to zero and below, the natural world changes in unexpected ways.  In the woods, branches become brittle, and bizarre white flowers of ice expand and push out of the ground, snapping and crunching as you walk along.  The tree house near the back door that I built for Katy twenty years ago and which is connected to two trees pops and snaps in the lightest breeze.  Even walking on the deck is a new experience as it makes little creaking sounds, like I would imagine the masts make on an old sailing ship.

These frigid temperatures have not been seen here in many years, and it reminds me of the Blizzard of '93, which struck Highlands on March 12-13 that year.  That storm was unexpected (I wonder if modern meteorology would predict it today), and Martha was visiting her grandmother in Raleigh at the time with our only four-wheel-drive vehicle, so six-year-old Katy and I were stranded with our Honda Prelude, without power for two or three days.  What a wonderful time that was!  The wild wind blew the trees dizzyingly around our house, and some of them came down.  We had plenty of firewood and we kept the woodstove (fireplace insert) going 24/7, stacking snow-covered wood all around the stone hearth so that it could dry enough to burn, and pulling the sofa up close at night to sleep, waking every hour or two to feed the fire.  We ate almost the entire box of chocolate powerbars in the pantry, as I remember it, and heated up soup on the little propane stove.  For years afterward, Katy and I would celebrate March 13 with a Blizzard Party, re-enacting those resourceful days by cutting off the main breaker on the electrical panel and eating power bars in front of the fireplace.  We would turn on that little Mickey Mouse radio, purchased on some trip to Disney World - our only source of news of the outside world, a radio station in South Carolina:  about 1100 AM on Mickey's left ear.

The weather instruments on the wall to our bedroom still carry that penciled date next to the barometer, just below 28.5 - an arbitrary number, since I simply have the barometer's needle set midway on the dial at the "Change" position because of the low barometric pressure in these mountain, but a point below which that needle has never gone since, during any kind of weather.

And I don't think it's been that cold, either, since 1993.

The Polar Vortex

That's what they are calling it - the Polar Vortex, an arctic storm extending its cold embrace all the way into the South, with temperatures expected to reach zero or just below by morning.  I drove up to Town to run some errands, and while there was a lot of good-natured joking at the Post Office about why I was not out running in my shorts, the thought had not occurred to me.  Temperatures were in the teens by then and continued to drop during the afternoon.  The tops of all the northern ridges were white with rime - hoar frost - and the wind was picking up.  We did not have the 12 to 14-inch snow with three-foot drifts that my sister, who lives in Indiana, has been telling me about, but it was too cold for this runner to venture out.

It was a good day to stay indoors instead and learn to bake bread from this book I gave Martha for Christmas:

About 4:00, I sent out an e-mail, asking where all the runners were, and including a photo of pansies.

I was horrified to learn that Bob had run - about a mile in all - in 6-degree temperatures.  I shot him an e-mail containing photographs of a frostbitten face, but told him he had my grudging admiration.

And then I cut into my first loaf of bread.

Sunday Afternoon: Climbing into Sunlight

Sunday is usually a rest day for the runners in our Club, but I sent this e-mail out to Bob and several others this morning:

Let's meet at Town Hall at 3:00 today. I'll see if anybody else wants to go. With single-digit or sub-zero temps on the way this may be our last opportunity to have a nice long run for 2 or 3 days.

This may indeed be the last good day, with temperatures up in the 40s right now.  And I do not plan on running when the temperature plunges below zero.  The two Bobs responded and we had a great run.  On the way up to Town, I found myself climbing and climbing into brighter and brighter fog, which suddenly broke open into blue sky with a blanket of fog down in the valleys below - a phenomenon which I have seen before and sometimes stopped to photograph at the overlook on the  Walhalla Road.  But it never seems to do it justice:

Too Cold to Run?

The arrival of the first of two cold fronts made running seem a little daunting this morning.  It was 18 degrees in Clear Creek, but I didn't need to look at the thermometer because the tightly-curled leaves of our rhododendron told the temperature.  Rhododendron are nature's thermometer; they respond to the cold by first drooping down, and then curling up as tightly as pencils:

Don't we do the same thing in the cold, wrapping our arms tightly around our chests and pulling our shoulders in toward our ears?

So what about running in conditions like this?  It's actually very pleasant, up to a point, although I know that non-runners seeing us out in cold like this will be convinced that we are all lunatics.  Running gear has improved so much over the years that it now permits lunatics like me to run in comfort unimaginable in the days of cotton, or when runners would wear panty-hose in the cold.  Now we have good, breathable, flexible tights, like the CW-X tights that I prize when the temperature gets down below 30.  A breathable micro-fiber shirt, Gore-tex against the wind, and good head-gear and mittens were all I needed for a short run down the road, where the sun was just starting to kiss the tops of the trees along the ridge-line, pink and gold, and melting the light snow in the pastures.  That keen metallic fragrance of arctic air.  And absolute silence, just the quiet rhythm of my footsteps, my breathing, and the dark, crinkly ripple of Clear Creek flowing alongside.

 

First Winter Storm

We had our first winter storm early this morning.   All night, we lay in bed hearing the wild wind blowing the trees all around our house.  There are a lot of trees around our house so this is a concern.  During the night, we noticed that the power was out - the face of the alarm clock pitch black - and no power this morning.  But we are used to being prepared in Highlands, and I had recently bought some fresh gasoline for the generator and cranked it up a couple of weeks ago to make sure it was working and there was enough oil.  I got it going in no time, and soon both refrigerators and the furnace were working.  We had caught some water, too, so we had water for coffee.  And the little propane burner heated up the kettle for oatmeal.  I even replaced the batteries in the carbon monoxide detectors, although the generator is outside and the house is pretty tight against the fumes.  And I filled the five-gallon buckets with water from the little waterfall out back and was able to flush the toilets, too - Martha could see how much I was enjoying myself.  And  by noon the power had come back on, the community well began pumping again, and all was back to normal.

Feeling pretty resourceful!  But no running today - it was a planned day off anyway.  A day of rest is a day of becoming stronger.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

I am privileged to be a member of a Running Club which contains so many remarkable members.  The men and women I run with are so varied in their backgrounds, dispositions, and abilities that, should a runner want some good company out on the road, there is always somebody to oblige.  Morris can remember more jokes than I thought anyone could possibly have heard, and as the miles build up, oxygenated blood seems to plumb the depths of his memory more and more thoroughly.  Anthony has run 37 marathons at last count, including an impressive string of successive Boston Marathons; he loves to talk so much while he runs that Morris jokes his jaw muscle is connected to his legs.  (When he was asked several years ago, "Are we going to run, or talk about it?" he replied, "Why do I have to choose?")  Fred has 47 marathons in his past, including two only five days apart, but rarely talks while running and never talks while racing (as I learned at Tybee Island many years ago.)

And then there is Glenda, who read the latest Newsletter wherein I watched the weather front approaching my last marathon in agonizing detail (see blog post of December 16) and commented drolly that she thought I was The Man Who Knew Too Much.  That's just like Glenda, who actually reads my newsletters and unfailingly thanks me for putting them together - 135 of them now, since the Club began in 1995.  Glenda decided out of the blue in 2004 that she wanted to run a marathon.  There were some doubtful comments from some quarters since Glenda had raced no farther than 5-K at the time.  But some of us saw the determination in this woman, who had just turned 60, and gave her a few pointers.  We both ran the Richmond Marathon in November, she and I, and she ran an incredible 4:34:40, only (she later discovered) a little slower than her Boston Qualifying time of 4:30.  So the next year she ran the Victoria Marathon in British Columbia, qualified handily, and ran Boston the following year.  I don't think I have ever witnessed so swift an ascent to Boston.   

I am indeed The Man Who Knows Too Much sometimes.  (I even know Glenda's time in Richmond!)  And I know the predicted weather from four or five weather apps on my iPhone, my exact mileage and pace at any given time during a run, my planned distance, my cadence, my approximate heartbeat, the location of the afternoon running group when I have arrived late and must catch up to them, and where that patch of ice will be on Lower Lake Road.  Some of these things are good to know (e.g. patch of ice) but others can distract us from the things we should be discovering along the way, like the aroma of pine needles over by the Biological Station, the light skim of ice on Harris Lake, that indomitable oak tree on Fifth Street that is still clutching all its brown leaves in January.

Thanks for inadvertently making me think again about how and why I run, Glenda.

This year I resolve to know less.  So that I can discover more.

A New Year

What a great way to begin 2014 this morning!  These resolute runners showed up to run/walk anywhere from three to seven miles, beginning the year by dedicating a little time toward staying fit.  I know everyone in this photo, some of them better than others, and they include some truly remarkable runners and people.  For some of us, our best races are in the past, and for others they still lie ahead, out on the open road.  But for everybody who simply showed up this morning:  congratulations!  You are giving yourself a wonderful gift:  getting out the door, enjoying the out-of-doors, moving outside of your comfort zone, taking a risk.  And for those of us who are inexorably growing older and slower, remember that "Growing Old is Not for Sissies."

So run strong in 2014!