Personal Worst (yay me)!

I knew it was coming. My running buddies and I have been talking about going for our fastest times on this 3-mile loop that we regularly run. I haven't gone all out on a 3-mile run since high school. So I was interested to see how my time would stack up.

Well... it didn't quite stack, unless "stacking" means to nicely place the worst time ever on top of the better times. Yeah, I didn't think so.

I ran the 2.96 miles in 19 minutes, 51 seconds. This represents a 6:42 average mile. I'm not extremely unsatisfied with the time. It just kind of sucks realizing that your 17-year old self could have seriously kicked your ass. After making myself a warm bottle of milk and crying myself to sleep, my next steps are to hit the track for some interval training. I've said it before and I'll say it again... "No punk 17-year old high school version of myself is going to kick MY ass!!"

See below for the run where I achieved "Personal Worst".


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Journey to the Blue Hole

Belize may just be the easiest vacation spot in Central America. It's a relatively short flight from the US, English is the official language, and there are plenty of restaurants and accommodations that can make you feel like you're staying in a well developed country. Or there are the more local spots that can provide you with that sense of adventure.

So now for the blue hole. This is some kind of diver's mecca, and it definitely amounts to the "Best Dive Ever" in my book.



The blue hole is actually a cave that developed during the last ice age. It's a pretty cool looking cave too, with stalactites and stalagmites (don't even ask me which is which). Back in the last ice age the ocean levels were low enough that this cave wasn't even covered in water. But once the earth starting warming, ocean levels rose from melting glaciers, and this cave collapsed under the weight of the water. The collapsed section is in the form of a hole, and now has a beautiful corral reef surrounding it. You have to travel down the collapsed hole about 100 feet to reach the cave. We dove down 130 feet. The hole goes 400 feet deep, but humans can't dive that deep without leaving their bones on the bottom. For this reason, it's important that a diver has control of their buoyancy.



While the entire dive lasted 25 minutes, you can only remain in the depth of the cave for about 10 minutes before developing nitrogen narcosis. While in the cave I saw a few sharks. And sharks are scary! Especially these ones. They are called Caribbean Reef Sharks, and pretty much look like Great Whites, except they are only about the size of a person. Once out of the cave and back to depths of about 20 feet, I saw about 50 reef sharks. I made sure I was surrounded with other people. Kind of like schools of fish that don't want to get stuck on the outside, I feel my chances of being eaten are slim when there are other meals around me. This was also my thought when I swam from Alcatraz last year. Realistically though, sharks don't eat humans. And there is pretty much no chance that these reef sharks will attack you if unprovoked. Sharks are still scary though!


Caribbean Reef Sharks

Running in Belize was also an adventure. I went on three runs. Two on the beach with my girlfriend. And one down a dirt road by myself, through a fence that I opened so I could run with the horses in there, and then holy crap, there's a guard dog coming toward me, reverse, back out the fence, close the fence quickly, and back down the dirt road to home. I think the horses were sad...


The dirt road and sad horses. It took me forever to open the fence. Not so long to re-open it.

I have always wanted to run up to the top of a Mayan or Incan ruin. Something about those long staircases just seem like a challenge. So that's what I did. Xunantunich is the tallest building in all of Belize. That might sound really tall, but there are no skyscrapers in Belize. So at 130 feet tall, Xunantunich is the equivalent of a 12-story building. I sprinted up multiple staircases to reach the top. Some had really big steps and others small. My girlfriend heard two older woman that were watching me exclaim, "Just watching that makes me feel like I'm going to have a heart attack!" Dang, I don't want to get old. I used to think 30 was old though, and here I am thinking I'm young.



After spending a few days on the mainland, we took a ferry to the popular vacation island called Ambergris Caye. There we relaxed on the beach and hit up several restaurants and bars in town, including a place where people place bets on where a chicken is going to take a dump. They take a chicken, make somebody blow on its ass (I guess that makes it want to poop?), and throw it into a roped-off area where it walks on what looks like a checker board with numbers in each square. It soon unloads on some number, and the winner gets $100. I didn't win any money, but did get to see some drunk person brown-nose the chicken as she pulled it too close to her face while trying to blow on its butt. So that was probably worth $100 or so. Good times.

Conoco Phillips Rodeo Run 2010

All I can say is, I've never seen so many 6:30 mile pace runners in my life that ran a 9-minute mile pace. Let me explain...

This race had 13,000 participants, and the crowd at the starting line stretched back as far as I could see, which was several blocks. To organize the crowd, they put up large signs to represent expected mile pace, with the expectation that everyone would organize themselves by speed. They had signs for 5:00, 5:30, 6:00, etc. I lined up in front of the 6:30 sign, which was my pacing goal for this run.

Gun goes off, people start shuffling toward the starting line, then the shuffle becomes a jog as we pass through the starting line. A 6:30 pace jog? Nope. 7:30 pace? Nope. Try 9:00 pace. And I got the feeling that they weren't getting any faster. So I did what any impatient Garmin-watch running fool would do. I literally clawed my way through a wall of about 500 people to reach the runners that were actually running a 6:30 mile pace (yeah...they lined up at the 5:00 sign).

Guess who else I passed? At mile 3 I passed a child!? What the...? How was a child ahead of me for 3 miles? Yay for me...I'm faster than a 10-year old. Then as I was feeling very manly after having asserted my dominance by passing that kid, I saw another kid ahead of me at mile 4. He coughed as I was approaching, and in the high-pitched tone of his cough I could hear that he hadn't even gone through puberty yet. Holy crap! How is some prepubescent kid running a 6:50 mile pace? Total stud.

I finished with a time of 42:45, or a 6:52 mile pace. That's probably like thousandth place or something. Yay for me again. I got thousandth place. I also got the same time as the 10K that I ran last year. This race time shows me that I have some major conditioning required if I want to qualify for Boston. Well that's good, because I'm not letting up anytime soon. So take THAT rodeo run!

Hitting the Trails

I've known for some time now that I live only a couple miles from a number of dirt trails that loop around all the hills here. It's taken an injured knee though to get myself to stray from my routine of hitting up the paved trails that are accessible from just behind my apartment.

I looked at Google maps to understand all my options for accessing the dirt trails, and finally settled on a route 2.7 miles from my apartment. I hopped on my bike, put on my Five Fingered Toes, and took off for the trail head. When I arrived I couldn't believe my eyes. Wide dirt trails, tall green grass, and hills as far as the eye could see. And practically right in my back yard! I parked my bike against a cattle fence and started running.

At the first fork in the trail I turned right, which quickly narrowed into what was merely an indention in the grass. And the grass was two feet tall and soaking wet. After continuing for a quarter mile and seeing the trail slowly disappear from under me, I decided to cut my losses and head back to the fork. So I turned around and chose the other path. Here is what the grass-indented trail looked like where I turned around. Can you see the trail?

Another fork had me choose between two trails, and I soon found myself running through what I'll call "Ankle Twist Alley." The trail was covered with deep rivets everywhere caused by horse hooves. And it ain't easy running through hardened horse hoof indentions. There was really no way around it. And while it didn't feel too good in my shoes that simulate barefoot running, the view was phenomenal (see below).

In all, I ran six miles through the trails before I got back on my bike and headed home. And guess what? My knees didn't hurt a bit. I'm looking forward to getting back out there and becoming one of those weird trail runner dudes.

Please Don't Grow Hooves!

On the day of my first barefoot run, my girlfriend went out to lunch with a friend of hers and mentioned that I went running barefoot that morning. Her friend replied that there were tribes in various places of the world that develop "hooves" as a result of living barefoot. Not actual hooves of course, but just that their feet become so calloused that they resemble hooves.

My girlfriend quickly connected the dots... (1) I can be become obsessive about things, (2) running barefoot might become one of my obsessions, (3) if I start to regularly run barefoot I will grow hooves, (4) there's a good chance I'll grow hooves.

Result: She came home and begged me not to grow hooves.

Confused, I tried to imagine how a foot might be slowly morphed by many barefoot runs to resemble a hoof. Below is my best guess.








On the left is an image of my foot, with a cut on my big toe from accidentally scraping it on the ground during my barefoot run. I'm sure that as the cut heals, the skin that replaces it will grow back tougher and more calloused. After even more abuse from the trails, it will eventually resemble the foot in the middle, and finally make its way to full "hoof-dom" as you see on the right. For all we know, the image on the right could be an actual human foot. And for all we know, that could be my foot in two years.

Out of curiosity I went online and searched for images of the feet of barefoot tribes. I tried all kinds of phrases: "hoof feet", "barefoot tribe", "goblin foot", "calloused feet", and more. In conclusion, I saw that a healthy foot, no matter how calloused, looks just like a normal foot. Except that the dude with the calloused feet is more of a badass.

Seriously though, imagine two guys walking on gravel. One guy is looking like he's walking on hot coals saying "ouch, ouch ouch," and the other guy is standing tall, looking like he's walking on soft grass. We all know who the badass is. The guy with the hooves.

Intervals Suck

Ever since running intervals in high school cross country practice I have never forgotten how much they suck. So much so that I have spent the last two years unsuccessfully trying to will myself onto a track for an interval workout. The solution? Enlisting a few friends for motivation. I wrote down the workout on a piece of paper and handed it to them in the car during our ride over to the track. There were no complaints, so we busted it out and went home feeling fantastic! They joked that they hated me for making them do intervals. But they stanked up my car on the way home. So we're even. Bunch of stank hater lovers.

Here's the workout:

• 1 mile: sprinting the straightaways, jogging the turns
• Two 800-meter sprints
• Two 400-meter sprints
• Two 200-meter sprints
• 10 pushups or 20 situps between each sprint
• 2-minutes rest between each sprint (we may have cheated a little)

I made up this workout with three things in mind. First, make it challenging but not grueling. Second, have lots of variety to keep it interesting, Third, put the most difficult segments at the beginning, so as people finish those difficult segments they are motivated by the idea that everything will be "easier" going forward.

I'm convinced that peer pressure is the only way to run intervals. And what a great workout! Intervals are how you get FASTER, in the same way that heavy weights and few reps gets you buffed in the gym. You can run 10-milers all day long, and while these runs will help you run far, they aren't the most efficient use of your time if you're trying to cut down your average mile pace.

High intensity + shorter duration = huge increases in performance. Try it. There's a reason it hurts so good.

My Mortal Eccentricity

Running barefoot down a heavily populated bike trail isn't for the faint of heart. Of course, first is the discomfort experienced by the foot after years of being pampered in comfortable shoes. But second, and perhaps the more difficult challenge, is being aware of the fact that you are that freak on the trail that everyone is puzzled by.

An unlikely character made this second challenge a piece of cake.

I've been reading The Dharma Bums. The book is about the Beat generation, and follows the journeys of a man as he seeks nirvana. At one point the protagonist is living with his mother, jobless, his hair long and shaggy, hanging out in the woods meditating every day, and frequently spouting off Buddhist philosophy like "Everything is empty but awake. Things are empty in time and space and mind." Obviously many people in town thought he was a nut job. I kind of think he's a nut job.

Personally though, I have been very impressed with how comfortable he is with being different. And something he said about this really impressed me. He says, "So what did I care what the old tobacco-chewing stickwhittlers at the crossroads store had to say about my mortal eccentricity, we all get to be gum in the graves anyway." Well put.

My experience consisted of a 1.5 mile run to a public pool where I swam a mile, and then a 1.5 mile run back home. It was exhilarating. The ground was cold and slightly wet from yesterday's rain. I filled up a small backpack with a towel, a bottle of water, and my swim card. And then I took off. There is a lot of required concentration on the present moment when you are running barefoot. Foot placement is a big deal since a wrong move can mean that a sharp rock gets jammed up your foot. So I was continually focused on the task of foot placement, and making sure to keep my knees slightly bent so that they could catch my fall if I made a wrong move.

I recently read that one of the tenets of zen running is to spend time concentrating on the moment, not the past or the future. This run really helped me accomplish that, as I was literally forced to focus on the way my feet struck the ground. Looks like I may be on my way to nirvana as well...