Oskar Blues Brewery 4-Miler

From next month's newsletter:

Your humble editor and his wife drove to Brevard in light but steadily diminishing rain on a mild Saturday morning.  Arriving at the Brewery (great venue for any road race), it was still raining, but literally as soon as we signed the race day entry forms, the rain stopped, and by the end of the race the sun was shining.  It just goes to show:  if runners merely show up and persevere, conditions often improve dramatically.  Or worsen dramatically.  We saw Miguel Rosas at the finish line; Miguel just started running with us last week and ran a good race.  This is a well-organized race on a relatively flat course at an easy-going time of day (11:00 a.m.), and we will put it on our personal race calendars for next year.  It’s a good time of year to knock out the cobwebs after a winter of low mileage and spotty consistency.  And after all, it’s the Lenten season, a time for humility and repentance, and it is always humbling to get beaten by a nine-year-old and three eight-year-olds, as this extremely humble editor soundly was.  On the other hand, it was the first 4-miler I had ever run, and thus I set a new PR, as did Martha.  Not something we do very often these days.

That Winter Five Pounds

There is not a runner in our running group who has not gained at least five pounds over the winter, and most of us are a little worried about it.  Will this little bulge above the belt stay with me from now on?  That age-old, tested formula comes to mind:  two seconds per mile per pound.  That is the amount of time over distance one can expect to gain by losing weight (or lose by gaining weight), down to the optimum weight, below which diminishing returns can be expected.   You can do the math yourself - that is a huge amount of time whether you are running a 5-K or a marathon.  Even the current issue of Runner's World which came yesterday is called the "Weight Loss Issue," and features an article optimistically entitled "Run Your Way Lean."  On the cover is a woman having absolutely no fat and displaying very well-developed abs.

I am not worried.  I have been a runner for a long time, after all, and I know that I can gain an extraordinary amount of weight, especially when that December post-marathon binging segues smoothly into the Christmas holidays.  And it all starts to melt like a lump of butter on a hot griddle when serious training begins, like double-digit-miles and hill training.  

Christopher Robin nodded. 'Then there's only one thing to be done,' he said. 'We shall have to wait for you to get thin again.' 'How long does getting thin take?' asked Pooh anxiously. 'About a week I should think.' 

Well, a bit longer than that.

March Running

It's that most changeable of all months, and whether or not I believe that old saying about the Lion and the Lamb, it is true that both of these creatures are likely to visit at the most unexpected times.  So Saturday the temperatures soared into the 50s and we had a good morning turnout of our running group, enjoying the sunshine and the mild (i.e. lamb-like) conditions, nary a pair of tights to be seen and only a few pairs of gloves.

Nine miles!  My running log tells me that this is the longest I have run so far this year, and that is a nice feeling.  Our half marathon is only six weeks away now, and it seems as it does every Spring in Highlands that my training is behind.

This little fellow was sighted Sunday on a hike to Anna Ruby Falls (and ours are almost blooming) blowing that trumpet that heralds Spring.  Spring and warm running, fragrant breezes - surely the most blessed time of year to be a runner.