What Are You Running From?

Not so long ago, in response to my telling him I had been running for the past two hours of the day, a friend responded with the ever witty, never funny, “Who was chasing you?”

I was reminded of that exchange this week when I happened to hear the story of Diane Van Deren, the ultra runner who started running to combat her seizures and whose surgery to remove the part of her brain that was causing those seizures took away her ability to conceive of the relative nature of time. Having no sense of the passage of time, Van Deren just keeps running. Those moments the rest of us have when our brains tell us we’ve run long enough, we’ve run too far, we have too far still to go, are completely foreign to her.

This got me to thinking about ultra runners in general. Are they simply programmed differently than the rest of us? The women and men who lace up the shoes and run 50 or 100 miles or more able to do so because of something in their brains that we just don’t have? Or is it something we have that they don’t? Many of the ultra runners I know, for example, are recovering addicts. Did their youthful transgressions chip away at a piece of their brains that would otherwise tell them to stop running at a reasonable point?

Not wanting to resort to heavy drug use or have part of my gray matter removed from my skull, I wonder if there is a way to train your brain to get into the zone Van Deren describes, where she only remembers the last few steps she’s taken and can only imagine the next few she will take.

And all of this leads me back to my friend’s not funny attempt at running humor. Evolutionarily we are all runners. We had to be, because the food was running away from us and things that thought we were food were chasing us.

I have a completely unsupported theory that says we are all running from something. Something is chasing us all the time, and that is why we keep going.

My most productive running period was during a particularly dark and challenging time of my life. I was very definitely running from the circumstances that were causing that darkness. I realize this is a very pessimistic take on distance running, and I realize that it would be just as easy to spin it as running to something rather than running from something, but I am curious about it. Were our ancestors running away from the predators or running toward the prey? Is one instinct more imperative than the other? Think about that for a minute. Are we more efficient, effective runners when we are being chased or when we are chasing? Tapping into the right instinct might help us be better runners. I, for one, hope that the answer isn’t  in the flight instinct, because I don’t want to have to sustain negativity in order to promote better running.

New Year: New Goals

Yours truly met a couple of his running goals this year. I finished an ultra, I logged more miles than last year (1,276 when this was written), and I stayed mostly healthy. Not bad.

Now I am faced with the new year and I need a new set of goals. I’m still developing my list, but I want your ideas to help me plan 2013. Follow me on Twitter @GregVanBelle or visit the Real Running page on Facebook and let me know what goals you would like to see me set and meet (or not) in the coming year.

Playing Hurt

In order to make the point I want to make this month, I have to first confess that I do sit around most Sundays with various friends and brothers in law watching American Professional Tackle Football*. Make of that what you will. On a recent Sunday the various dudes on couches in my living room watched as a kick returner got hit by about five men at the same time, and we cringed as we watched the replay of the runner’s ankle rolling over so far his shin bone was on the ground. I could almost hear the soft tissue tearing right through the screen.

The runner went down in a heap, and after they peeled the other team off of him, the trainers attended to him and carried him off the field. His team started their offensive drive without him. Five plays later, he was lining up as a wide receiver.

That same injury – minus the 250 pound linebackers beating me to a pulp – kept me out of running shoes for 2 weeks. A sore foot will sideline me for a week. Heck, even a bad cough can sideline my running plans. As I watched this player hobble back on the field with twenty dollars worth of athletic tape on his ankle, I started thinking about playing hurt and the decisions we have to make as recreational runners when it comes to pushing through pain or stepping back and letting our bodies heal.

As I get older I find myself listening to every little twinge or ache as I run. A little pain that I would have ignored ten years ago is suddenly cause for alarm, and it isn’t because I can’t take the pain. Like most distance runners, I am pretty good at gritting my teeth and working through pain. For me it is increasingly about longevity. I don’t need to meet my daily or weekly goal nearly as much as I want to be healthy for the whole year. And the year after that. So when I rolled my ankle on a tree root a few months back, I probably could have finished my planned ten miles, gone home, and suffered the consequences. Instead, I tightened my shoe, turned around, and walked the two miles back to my car.

How do we know when to stop? When to push? Which injuries have potential long term ramifications and which are just aches and pains? When do you see a doctor and when do you just surf the running message boards for similar symptoms? How many rhetorical questions can I write in one paragraph?

For the football player the lines are clearer and the decisions simpler. In fact, in most cases it isn’t his decision to make. The trainers tell him if he can play, and the coach tells him if he will play. Plus, chances are he has a few million bucks on the line.

Despite the differences, there is a model in the way football players deal with injury, however. For them it is all about game day. An injured player is held out of practice, given special training programs, and basically allowed to heal rather than practicing with his team. It’s all about game day.

This is all reinforcement for my theory that you should always have a race on the calendar. You should always be training for something, and that event should be the focus of your running energy. If you have a half marathon in two weeks and your knee hurts a little, back off a bit. Maybe take an extra rest day. Save yourself for the race. If you push in training and get hurt, the race is ruined. If you push in the race and get hurt, you just need a little longer to recover from the race than you otherwise would have.

It is also reinforcement for my theory that we all just need to be running more often than we do. The more time we spend on our feet, the more we learn which twinges and aches are serious and which are not.

*I should also confess that I purposely schedule my rest days on Sundays so I can spend the entire day watching football and obsessing over my fantasy football team.

It's All Connected

I write this with an icepack wrapped around my right knee. But I don’t remember ever hurting it. I didn’t twist it, I didn’t hyper-extend it, I didn’t land on it. I have just been running. So when the doctor asked what I did to it, I had nothing to say except that I have been running and one day it hurt.

She gave me a look that suggested she didn’t believe me and asked me to describe the three runs prior to noticing the pain. Nothing remarkable, I said. I nice long trail run, an easy afternoon of loops near home, and tempo run the morning I first noticed the pain and swelling.

She gave me that look again. She figured I was holding something back.

Then she started testing things. Twist, turn, bend, etc. Stand on one foot and do a squat.

She gave me the look again and started manipulating my ankles. No problems. My ankles don’t hurt.

“Are you sure you didn’t twist or roll your ankle recently?”

Well come to think of it, I sure did. On that long trail run. But it’s my knee that hurts.

“And you did it early in the run?”

Well, yeah. About halfway.

Her look changed. Now she was a disappointed teacher who clearly thought I understood anatomy better than I do.

Without resorting to a chart or singing that song about the bones all being connected, she treated me like the mental toddler that I can be and explained that in rolling my ankle early in the run, I transferred the stress to my knee, and likely favored my ankle for the rest of the run.

“Did your hip hurt after that run? Your lower back?”

Well…yeah.

“Your knee will be fine. You need to strengthen your ankle and your core. Call me in two weeks.”

This is a mistake I’m sure a lot of runners make. We get very strong and fit in one direction, with one set of muscles, often neglecting the rest of the body. So once I’m done icing this knee, I’m going to go to the gym instead of hitting the trails.

I hate the gym. I love the trails. You can see how I get myself into these situations.

Who Are You Kidding?

By now both of my regular readers know of vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s less than accurate assessment of his marathon performance. Real Running doesn’t want to be political, so I will leave Mr. Ryan’s case aside here. Sort of.

This came up with a colleague of mine a few years ago after the Seattle Marathon. He was skeptical of a friend’s claim of a 3:15:00 finish time and did a little digging. In pictures late on the course, his friend looked remarkably fresh compared the runners around him. And there was no finishing photo of him. I suggested he look at the split times or the finish times of the runners around him in the pictures. My colleague ultimately didn’t care whether or not his friend had cheated, but wondered aloud: why on earth one would fabricate a finish time in a marathon?

Dude, you’re the psych professor, you tell me.

All I can come up with on this front is that for so many people marathon training is a terribly public endeavor. Especially when training for our first 26.2, we employ family and friends. They support us, talk to us about running, and wish us luck on race day. So to fail would feel like you are letting others down. Otherwise what would be the point? Unless you are simply a pathological liar…which I suppose is always a possibility.

There is also another level to this. If you haven’t yet read the story of Kip Litton and his graduate-level marathon cheating, you should. I will link to it on my Twitter feed for both of you. Spoiler alert: When you fabricate an entire event, including fake runners, so you can claim a fast time, you might have a problem. See also: Donald Crowhurst. Seriously. Look him up.

In summary, there is no good reason to lie about a marathon time. Which leaves very few ways to explain why one would do so. Worse, it is a little disturbing that one would try to get away with such a fabrication in the technology-saturated running world we live in.

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @GregVanBelle, where I won’t lie to you about my training runs, injury status, race plans, and various other topics.

Welcome to Fall. Give me Money.

Fall Colors Breaking Out in the Cascades

Fall!

There is a brief window each fall when the days are still long and warm, the kids are back in school, and my pesky little job teaching young writers hasn’t yet started up for the year.

Setting aside the fact that I happen to love back-to-school shopping (office supplies and new jeans for everyone!), fall is simply the best.

Let’s start with the fact that in the Northwest there is no better weather than in September and October. It’s not exactly sunbathing and headed down to the old swimmin’ hole weather, but for running the cool mornings and warm dry afternoons are perfect because it lets me use more of my unnecessarily complex running wardrobe. Early morning runs require a lightweight windbreaker (of which I own three, in different colors and in three slightly different styles). In the afternoon I can decide between sleeveless, short sleeved, or lightweight long sleeve depending on temperature (and mood).

And the marginally maintained school bus pulling away from the corner in a cloud of diesel smoke means the kids are off the streets, off the trails, and out of the corner booth at my favorite coffee shop. No more getting run down by mountain bikers in Mad Max armor. On the first day of school, I ventured out to the Real Running Super Secret Trail Running Test Grounds, which are somehow always crowded with people despite being super secret. I made my way around my usual 4 mile loop twice before seeing another soul, and that was the park ranger, who was wandering around the woods befuddled by the lack of teenagers smoking and making out on the picnic tables. It was perfectly awesome.

Fall also gives me a chance to dig into the bucket of running gadgets I have stashed under my desk. Reflective bands, blinky lights, headlamps, running packs (to carry the other assorted gadgets I might need). It’s an accessory hound’s dream!

It’s fleeting, though. In a few weeks fall will give up and winter will take over. If you’re looking to mark it on your calendar, it’s the day before the Seattle Marathon.

Race Season

Speaking of the Seattle 26.2 mile foot race, marathon “season” is upon us. The usual suspects in Portland and Seattle are coming up soon, and if you haven’t started training yet, you might want to get started. I usually run in at least one of the major local races each year, but this year I’m on a small race kick. This year I’m on the lookout for any race in a town I’ve heard of but never been to, any race for a cause that is only marginally a cause, and any race that has a distance with a “plus or minus” after it. So come on North Yelm Approximate Marathon Distance Running Race for Feline Depression! I’ll buy that t-shirt.

Whatever your pleasure, do yourself a favor and sign up for at least one fall race. The calendar is jammed, and as the weather turns you’re going to need something to get you out of the house and log your miles.

Listenings

Yes, I’m that guy who is always running with headphones on. But despite my rock and roll exterior, I’m not always listening to . Am I the only one who is listening to old podcasts of “Car Talk” while I run? Honestly, the podcast has revolutionized my training. I don’t need two and a half minute bursts of energy from . I need forty-five minutes of distraction from pain and suffering. As a bonus, I get my training done and sometimes I learn a little something about colors, or pain, or fetal maturation. Thanks Radiolab!

Best Column Money Can Buy

Last night we watched the Morgan Spurlock documentary “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” the premise of which is the effect of product placement and overt advertising on filmmaking. This got me to thinking about how to continue to fund the ever-expanding budget of Real Running. What I need are some sponsors.

How easy it would be to casually mention my BRAND NAME shoes or the refreshing flavor of BRAND NAME hydration right here in this column! I could go on about my great BRAND NAME watches, or BRAND NAME compression shorts.

Heck, I’ll even promote products that have nothing to do with running. For the right price. And the right price is free stuff. Ahem. I know someone who works for someone who sells, promotes, manufactures, or distributes running products is reading this.

Tweet

It took me a while, but it happened. I’m on Twitter. Follow me @GregVanBelle. I’ll even promote your product there. You know, for the right price. See above.

Running Your Age

Sooner or later, usually sooner, every runner faces some variation of this question: why do you do it?

Why do you torture yourself? Why do you put up with those nasty black toenails and the technical shirts that smell like the floormats of a teenager’s Honda? Why do you get up at dark-thirty and spend an hour trudging around in the rain?

Here’s the thing about these questions: they don’t really want to hear the real answer. Anyone asking a question like that isn’t interested in the real reasons behind your passion. The person asking the question wants you to say something that is, in their minds, equally as crazy as your commitment to running in the first place so they can brush you off as insane and go about their day.

So don’t waste a second coming up with a good answer. There isn’t one. A good answer would poetically dig down and express the joy of effortless miles. A compelling answer would convey the beauty of a mile of winding singletrack with nothing but the sound of your shoes hitting the dirt. The best answer would make the questioner want to lace up the shoes and head to the track.

No such answer exists. I just shrug and say, “I don’t know. I guess I’m just crazy.”

Here are some other stock answers you might want to have pre-loaded for the next time someone asks…

“I’m part Kenyan. It’s just in my blood.”

“I’m not good at any other sports.”

“I’m staying fit in case I have to run from the cops.”

“I save a lot of money on gym memberships.”

“I just like to hurt myself. I’m into that. Wink.”

Then just walk away.

Every time someone asks me any variant of the “why do you run?” question, I do reflexively ask myself the same question. What’s in it for me? I think the simplest answer is that I run so I can eat whatever I want. That might be all there is to it.

However, once you get beyond basic health maintenance – which is for most the only reasonable excuse for running – what is the reason to keep going? Weight management and fitness only requires a few miles a day. So why does my training log show so many 60 mile weeks?

I don’t want to speak for both of you, but I have come up with a pretty decent answer, and it came to me on my 40^th birthday.

For no good reason, I decided that for this landmark birthday I would challenge myself to a mile for every year of my life. 40 for 40. Try explaining that to your family and friends.

It was during my (failed) attempt at 40 miles on my 40^th birthday that I finally figured out, for me, what this running thing was all about.  We have established that I will never win a race. I will likely never be faster than I am now. I have no extrinsic motivation to lace my shoes and run.

Maybe it is just a variant of the classic mountain climbing excuse “because it’s there,” but when I filter out every other possible motivation to keep running, I do it because I want to see what this old body can do. I run distances because I can. And I want to see just how much I can do.

Human endurance is an incredible thing, and in the western world, we live largely free of circumstances that require us to really use it. We read remarkable tales of survival and sea or in the mountains, and they are remarkable precisely because they are so rare. 

I don’t want to be stranded in the mountains (been there, done that) or adrift in the ocean on a dismasted yacht. But whatever force gets people through those situations is precisely the force that makes me want to see just how far my legs can run. It’s a survival instinct that I hope to never have to actually use.

It’s that force that took me around my first marathon course, and it’s why I found myself at the Redmond Watershed recently in an attempt to run 40 miles on my 40^th birthday. I came up short with an injury, but I’ll be back next year. 41 for 41.

My First Ultra!

Be warned, new runners. 7 years ago I struggled and cramped my way through a 10k race and finished feeling like I had just climbed Everest. A few weeks ago I found myself standing ankle-deep in a puddle in Bellingham thinking it was reasonable to run 50k in the rain, snow, mud, and wind. It will happen to you.

I mean, if you can do 6.2 miles, why not 13.1? And certainly if you can run 13.1 miles once, you can do it twice. So why not sign up for a marathon? And so it goes.

When I ran my first marathon I really didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a longer distance than that. I crossed the finish like feeling like I’d just climbed Everest and figured I’d done it. All that was left to do was run 26.2 miles faster.

Then a funny thing happened. Every time I tried to get my body to go faster, it just broke. So my marathon times never really changed. Well, I said to myself, if I can’t go faster, I can do more. So I set goals of doing more marathons. Two things happened with that plan. One, I went broke paying entry fees and booking hotel rooms. Two, I got hurt more often.

On a doctor’s advice, I started running on “soft” surfaces more often to reduce the impact injuries I was suffering. I’d be out running 4 miles on the trails and groups water bottle carrying athletes would bound past me and bounce uphill over the rocks and roots. These strange creatures are ultra-marathoners.

Ultra-marathons? I didn’t know there was such a thing. But once I knew there was a distance goal above 26.2, I just had to have it. Because I’m an idiot. And I hang out with idiots who think such things are reasonable.

So back to the starting line. I was trying to be serious about what I was about to do, but I looked around at the 300 other people in my starting group and noticed that they all had silly grins on their faces. Some of them were even laughing and joking around. Are you people insane?

Yes, they are insane. And I was now one of them. So I grinned and made a lame joke to person standing next to me. And before I knew it, Scott Jurek was telling us to have fun out there…Fun?

Running any distance is ultimately about seeing what your body can do. It’s about testing your fitness and your mental toughness. I was about to find out what I could do. I had never run anything over 27 miles in my life, let alone with thousands of feet of climbing on muddy, snow-covered trails and fire roads.

A mile into the race I started noticing a few things. In most marathons, we all queue up and put our heads down, waiting for the starting gun. Then we huff and puff our way quietly through the first few miles. In an ultra, people are smiling, patting each other on the back, talking about training, asking about friends. Someone running near me noticed that my shoes were the same brand he wore. Cool man. Nice kicks.

At the second aid station – which emerged out of the snowy forest like some sort of frozen, tented oasis, one of my ultra-running friends was manning the water pitchers. He couldn’t run this race, but he came out anyway to be a part of it. He recognized me as I came in, gave me some advice about the course, smiled and kicked my butt out of the aid station and up the hill. That doesn’t happen at your local 10k.

In the middle miles I fell in with a small group of men and women and we ran together for a while. I slowed down a bit on a steep climb (it felt steep to me, anyway) and a woman I don’t know and had never seen before the race stopped and kicked my butt to keep running. You don’t get that in your average half marathon.

And eventually my watch ticked over 26.2 miles. Then over 27. 28. I was in new territory. My longest ever run, and it didn’t kill me.

I dragged myself across the finish line, eventually. Two more of my ultra runner friends who couldn’t run this race were there, directing traffic, high fiving finishers, and basically hanging out having a good time. I dwelled on the fact that I had just finished an ultra marathon for roughly 30 seconds before one of these “friends” asked me when I was going to sign up for a 50 miler.

Be warned. It will happen to you, too.

How to Die in the Woods

Back in my more adventurous days I was unfortunate enough to spend several unplanned nights in the wilderness. These were usually mountaineering efforts gone awry, long approach hikes washed out by bad weather, or rare instances when a climbing partner got hurt. But that was mountaineering, and we openly talked of that risk. It was a known entity. Climbers dismiss such nights as a quick “bivvy.” It’s part of the adventure, and over time you learn the difference between an inconvenient night on a rock ledge and a life-threatening situation.

Having given up any real vertical aspirations, I assumed I was pretty much done with the unplanned wilderness overnight adventure. But on a recent trail run, as things started to spiral out of control, I was smacked in the face by the reality that running in the wilderness is no different from climbing in the wilderness. Things can go wrong, and if you make enough mistakes, you can die on a trail run just as easily as you can while climbing a mountain…Using my recent experience in New Zealand to illustrate, I’m here to tell you how to do it:

1.     Go alone. This way no one will be there to see those embarrassing last moments as you slowly die from exposure or a head injury.

2.     Ignore the Weather. The run in question was in a national park known for being both the rainiest and the sunniest place on the north Island of New Zealand. As weird as that sounds, it should have at least registered in my brain as a variable in my plan. When I woke that morning, heavy rain clouds were racing in from the ocean. The mountain I intended to run the flanks of was shrouded in mist. But instead of using my actual senses to assess the situation, I looked at the online weather report, took the optimistic high temperature, and dressed for that.

3.     Don’t research. I had already glanced at a 100 word description of the track I was going to do. Most of the trails I’d been on in the week or so before this had been very well marked and logical. I hadn’t once used one of the maps carried. And I was still riding the high I was on from the day before, where I just randomly happened upon a brilliant track that wasn’t on any maps or in any guidebooks. Just go for it! So I left for the mountain with no maps.

4.     Be in a hurry. This is important if you want to die, because when you’re in a hurry, you forget things. You forget to charge your GPS watch, for example. Or you forget to refill your hydration pack. Heck, you even forget to grab a fresh pair of shoes because you know there are some shoes in the car already.

5.     Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. The very kind woman at the parking lot near the trailhead was a little concerned about my plans. I was going to do what they considered to be a 2-3 day tramp in 3-4 hours. As I stood there shivering in my shorts and tank top (see #2) she asked whether anyone would miss me if I didn’t return. That’s exactly how she phrased it. Umm, yeah. Eventually. If I don’t get off an Air New Zealand flight in a week, people might miss me. But no. I hadn’t told anyone my plans.

6.     Be cheap. The well-meaning ranger suggested I purchase the official topo map of the mountain before I set out. These maps are unbelievably good and are produced by the New Zealand government to keep people from dying in the woods. But fourteen dollars? I’ll be fine with this promotional map I got from a brochure on guided summit expeditions, thank you.

7.     Be proud. A mile into this trail and I knew it was going to be a struggle. Steep climbs, slippery descents, treacherous stream crossings, and waist deep bogs were the order of the day. When my under-charged GPS watch died at mile 6 (see #4) I had already been struggling on this trail for almost 2 hours. Do the math. But rather than turning around, I kept pressing on, and before long I was past the halfway point. I think. I didn’t have a map (#3, #6).

8.     Take risks. Sure, there’s an easier way to cross that river about a half mile upstream, but this is a more direct route. This is the logic that almost did me in. Leap to one rock. Solid. Breathe. Leap again. Miss. Slip and fall into the freezing river. Narrowly miss smashing your skull on a rock. Watch in slow motion as the rock you jumped to starts rolling toward you. Think about 127 Hours. Panic.

I eventually dragged myself out of the forest and back to my car, of course. But I spent over half of what turned out to be 21 miles talking to myself like a crazy man, worrying that I was hopelessly lost, and cursing myself for being a moron.

Be careful out there. I need both of my readers to keep this thing going!

Coming in Next Month's Issue

 In next month's Northwest Runner, I give advice on how to die in the woods! Here's a preview: Ignore signage like this:

Bet you can't wait for the rest.

DNS

I just put a few scorch marks on the Real Running credit card signing up for a few spring and summer races. Sixty dollars here. Ninety dollars there. I even snuck in a thirty-five dollar entry fee. Bargain! Of course, that doesn’t include a t-shirt.

Not that I need another t-shirt.

Over the last year I signed up for a dozen races. I ran in six of them. Race fees, like most airfares, are non-refundable, which you would think would be motivation enough to not miss an event I signed up for. But no. I have come up with some really interesting excuses to avoid toeing the starting line recently. And with the spring and summer race season starting up in the Northwest, I thought I’d offer myself up as a cautionary tale to those of you with your credit card out and your calendar open.

First, let me just say that it is too darn easy to sign up for races. Open a website, click an event, click a few more buttons and now you’re the proud owner of spot on the starting line. All races look great online. Neat logos, fancy interactive course maps, pictures of smiling finishers holding medals or flowers or infants, or all three.

But that’s another issue entirely.  We’re here to chase all those entry fees I kindly donated to the race organizers last year.

I consciously chose to skip one race. It’s true. I bagged out. I thought I’d have more time to train. I thought I could cram in a few long runs right before the race. I’d run 26.2 miles before. What the heck. But the week before the race, as I labored through the last mile of a short run on a flat road, I knew I would do nothing but suffer if I laced up the shoes for marathon weekend. So I quit. I stayed home and watched a Top Chef marathon on TV. I still think this was a wise decision. A DNS is better than a DNF any day, if you ask me.

Compare that to last summer. I was in good running shape, had been training hard, had a couple of great long training runs under my feet, and had plans to do a marathon I’ve wanted to do for years. The day before the race, I was tempting fate by walking around the yard barefoot. Fate broke my toe. The day before the race. No run for me.

Later in the summer I was traveling in the week before a trail race. I was supposed to fly home the night before, get a good night’s sleep, and show up at the trailhead ready to go. Instead, my flight got canceled. And the next one was overbooked. And the other airlines didn’t have flights until morning. I did finally get on a flight. And as we started our descent into Sea-Tac, the race was just starting. Missed that one.

A month later one of our kids came home from school sick. Within three days everyone was sick. Day four was the Portland Marathon. Since even getting out of bed was a struggle, I didn’t figure running around the streets of Portland was the best idea.

I slept through my alarm on a race day in November.

I wrote down the wrong date for a race in December and missed it by a week.

And now I’m looking at this slate of races I have registered and paid for between now and summer and wondering what circumstances will come my way and prevent me from getting to the starting line. I’m putting my money on alien invasion.

The Foot Commute

My official place of work (that is, not the milk crates and plywood from which I do the important work of writing about recreational distance running) has several incentives in place to encourage employees to carpool, ride the bus, and even bicycle to work. Heck, there is even a National Bike-to-Work Day every year. If you carpool you get the best parking spaces. If you ride the bus you get…um…you get to ride the bus. If you ride your bike you get a neat locker where you can safely store your mount while you toil the day away. If you can brave the mildew and don’t mind bathing in public, there are also showers.

We can even win prizes for not driving to work alone. I have been the fortunate recipient of not one but three coffee mugs celebrating my alternative commuting practices. I keep paperclips and highlighters in them despite the fact that I have never used a paperclip or a highlighter at work.

Carpools and mass transit are fine. Bicycling to work is great (though in Seattle you are certainly putting your life into the hands of some very angry SUV drivers if you choose to ride anywhere).  But what about getting to work on foot?

Lately, as a way to fit in my training miles and get to and from work, I’ve been doing the Foot Commute. I can get from my office to my front door in as few as 7 miles and there are interesting routes up to 15 miles (I haven’t done any of those long ones, but they look good on the map). Once I have sent my last email and deftly avoided attending any late afternoon meetings by claiming to be in yet another meeting, I slide on the shorts and shoes and hit the road. An hour or so later, I’m home and I have managed not only to commute but also to build up some miles on the old training calendar. I don’t have to get motivated to go back out after driving home, and I don’t have to interrupt my evening to get my run in. If I want to get home from work, I have to run.

The Foot Commute has some logistic limitations, of course. One is distance. If you live over ten miles from your job, you probably aren’t too likely to lace ‘em up after the 5 o’clock whistle blows. Another is the type of work you do. It’s a little rough to carry your ladders and tools on your back to the job site. Swing shift presents some issues, as does any kid-related shuttling. Most kids aren’t too happy running 5 miles to soccer practice.

Having a reasonable route doesn’t hurt, either. If your driving commute is a reasonable distance but is on the freeway, count on your Foot Commute to considerably longer as you get lost in neighborhoods and industrial parks.

Since we live where we do, weather is also a consideration. Often, I go to work expecting a nice afternoon run in shorts and a t-shirt, only to find it prematurely dark, windy, and cold out when I leave the office.  I leave an old windbreaker in my office for just such occasions.

A final consideration is safety. Remember that everyone out on those streets is coming home, too. And many of them really seem anxious to get there. Running during rush hour requires some extra vigilance against texting drivers, crosswalk creepers, and plain old idiots who don’t believe pedestrians should exist. As it gets darker this fall, be sure to light yourself up and wear reflective clothing. Remember, you’re on defense.

If you work in an office or anywhere that doesn’t require you to carry anything heavy to and from the job, you’re a good Foot Commute candidate. It just takes a little planning and preparation. Some clothes to change into, some way to wash the stank off, and some sort of plan for carrying whatever you need to carry.  For many reasons, Foot Commuting home from work is usually an easier venture. Carpool in, run home.

I think the Foot Commute will catch on.  Give it a try. The Real Runner who logs the most Foot Commute miles between the day this issue hits the stands and the end of the year will win a fabulous prize from the Real Running Prize Vault (also known as my desk drawer). Send your miles to gregsrealrunning@gmail.com

On Being a Minimalist

The Gadgets

Both of my loyal readers know that I am something of a gadget freak. I salivate every time Apple announces a pending announcement. I visit Garmin’s website every day, hoping that a new GPS watch will be hitting the market soon. I have a backup for my backup iPod.  I’ve written before about my love of such things, and also about unplugging from them. But lately the gadgetry has gotten out of hand.

Last week as I prepared for a run, I had one of those moments where you see what you must look like to everyone else in the world. I stood in front of my closet full of running shoes, rifling through a drawer for my running socks, wondering where my running hat was. My headphones dangled from my neck, connected to the iPod clipped to my waistband. My watch beeped, alerting me that it had “acquired” my heart rate monitor. I scanned my selection of shoes. Light weight? Medium? Support? Trail? Minimalist? Maybe this was the day I start breaking in the new pair that just arrived in the mail yesterday? All of my technical fabric shirts were in the wash. I eyed my sorry assortment of plain old cotton t-shirts. This would never do.

Just me and the trail. Try to ignore the fact that I had to carry a camera to get this shot.

I never did find the socks I was looking for. I never did make it out for that run. What is wrong with me?

With apologies to all of the fine sponsors of this magazine (and especially those compelled to send me their products for “testing”), we really don’t need any of this stuff. Any of it. One can make an argument for good shoes, but beyond that? Ratty old gym shorts and a t-shirt will serve the purpose of covering your shame as you run. What else do you need?

In fact, one of the key reasons I don’t do as much cycling as I probably should is because of all the equipment. It just doesn’t feel as real with all of that rubber, carbon fiber, and aluminum between me and the road. I imagine it is the purity of running that appeals to us, whether we know it consciously or not. But how pure is a running experience that includes beeping electronics, carbon fiber insoles, corrective braces, and alternative rock blaring directly into your brain?

Of late I’m on a purity kick. I’m running free of all the tethers of electronics and over-engineered footwear. I run in the same shoes for everything, when I wear shoes. I leave the iPod in the car. Even my trusty GPS stays in my pocket where I can’t see it. No beeping. No music.

At first I was bored. I’m so used to Pearl Jam pushing me through the middle miles that I wasn’t sure what to do. But like the family who takes out the Scrabble board when the power goes out, I quickly learned that I didn’t need the electronics. In fact, I came to realize that my little old brain does a fine job of entertaining me.

I worried about pace. How would I know if I was running too fast? Too slow? Turns out your body tells you, if you listen to it. How will I know when I’ve gone far enough and need to turn around? Simple: I got tired and turned around. What about heart rate? How can I stay in my target zone? Well, for starters, you could pay attention to your breathing and your effort.

This isn’t to say that I’m completely reformed. I still occasionally listen to music on a long run, and I do track all of my runs on my GPS watch. But it is incredibly freeing to be able to just throw on some shorts and go running. I don’t know if we do enough of that. Just go run. For no reason, with no goal, and no destination. Just go run around for a while.

Doing so has reminded me that I actually like running. I used to say I liked that I had gone running, but not necessarily the running itself. Immersing myself in the running itself, resisting distractions, and paying attention to my body has made running more fun than it was when I did everything I could to create a virtual world in which I pretended I wasn’t actually running.

This is all about Real Running after all. What’s more real than just running?

This column originally appeared in the December issue of Northwest Runner Magazine

Real Runner Profile: Owen Connell

Owen Connell at Parlor F in Seattle.

Two years ago at a business meeting in Southern California, I noticed a pair of running shoes near the door of the house where we were meeting. Thinking I might get some good ideas for a local running route, I asked about the shoes. It turned out the owner was an ultra-marathoner who was a recent transplant from Seattle.*

That’s interesting, because my friend Owen is an ultra runner in Seattle, I said.

“You know Owen? He’s one of my best friends! Let’s call him up!” And so it goes when you know Owen Connell.

Now I’m sitting in the chair at Parlor F, Owen’s tattoo parlor and work space on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Owen is inking a new tattoo on my left arm, and we’re talking about running.

I met Owen several years ago when a friend of a friend recommended him to my girlfriend as a good tattoo artist. It was in our first meeting that I learned he was a runner. I must not have been paying any attention before that, because it’s hard to miss Owen in the Northwest running community.

If you do any competitive trail running in the Northwest or follow the ultra-marathon circuit at all, you probably already know Owen. If you run at all in the Seattle area you probably know him too, even if you don’t know his name. And on the off chance you have never seen Owen at a race, you’ve probably seen his work.

Owen is the “tattoo guy.” He claims he doesn’t hear it anymore, but when you run with him, you hear it from the sidelines. “There goes that tattoo guy!” He is unmistakable for sure. His long legs are literally covered in body art. As are his arms and much of the rest of his body. I’m surprised I know what it’s like to run with Owen, actually, because he is much fitter and much faster than I am.

Running with Owen at the Seattle 26.2

We’ve never planned it, but for the last three years, Owen and I have run into each other somewhere in the first few miles of the Seattle Marathon and run together for the next couple of hours. Last year, I was pretty pleased to be keeping up with him and doing well into mile 15, when he casually told me that he had run a marathon that day before, too.

What?

He wanted to see if he could do two sub-four hour marathons back to back. He can. And he did. He finished the 2010 Seattle Marathon in 3:42:28 the day after running a 3:50:35 the day before in the Ghost of Seattle Marathon. I struggled in 8 minutes behind him

In last year’s Redmond Watershed 12 Hour race, Owen logged 68.1 miles in the 12 hour time limit. He finished the Cascade Crest 100 Mile Endurance Race in 25 hours, 24 minutes. Those numbers still make me shake my head. 68 miles? That’s the distance from downtown Seattle to Olympia, just to put it into perspective. I get tired driving that far.

It’s easy to think of marathoners and ultra runners as super-human, or to imagine that they are somehow seasoned athletes who have trained all of their lives to get to that level. Owen quickly debunks that myth.

“I was like everybody else,” he told me as he inked one of his signature shapes onto my arm. “I was running three or four miles now and then and I thought ‘no way I can run a half marathon!’ Then I went out and did one and it was the biggest thing I had ever done. And once I had done a few of those, I thought, ‘no way I can run a marathon!’ But I tried that and realized it was possible…and if you can run a marathon you can probably run an ultra if you can get your mind around it.”

To hear Owen tell it, running is all about overcoming mental obstacles. So much so, that he forgets ever being injured.

“I’ve been lucky,” he said after I updated him on my latest bout of foot pain. “I just haven’t been injured. “Well, I guess that’s not true. I mean, I get hurt sometimes, but never anything serious. Well…”

And what follows is a list of the types of small injuries that sideline the rest of us but that for Owen are just a part of the mental challenge of running.

“That’s the trick: battling through the low spots and making your body do what you want.”

As I listen to him talk, I actually start to believe that I could tackle one of these ultra marathons. To hear Owen tell it, you just have to ramp up the training miles a little bit and go for it.

But he’s probably been running all his life, right? Nope.

“I was never a runner as a kid or anything. I played sports and was in shape and whatever, but running never occurred to me. Then about 10 years ago I sort of woke up and was overweight, was partying too much, and just wasn’t happy. So I started running.”

At the very least, he must have a pretty detailed and rigorous training schedule, right? Not so much.

“I don’t have a real training plan. I’m kind of an idiot with that stuff. I just go running and try to get my mileage up for races. My girlfriend (ultra-runner Alison Moore) always gets on me about stretching and varying my training and taking days off and all that. I just sort of go out and run. That’s probably why she’s a better runner than I am? I dunno.”

Owen punctuates most of his sentences with question marks or self-deprecating comments, which merely emphasizes his humility. He’s just one of those people that everyone likes.

“I could probably be faster if I trained better. Or if I had a coach. For a while I wanted to try to run a three hour marathon, but I realized I’d need to commit so much time to track running and speed work and all that. I’d rather just go out and run with my friends.”

Running for Owen is a social thing. You get together with some friends on a sunny afternoon and take off into the hills for a few hours. You support each other and have fun together. Maybe that’s why ultra running appeals to him so much. Compared to the thousands of people who lace up for big marathons, the trail running community is small, and everyone is in it together.

Owen's Design on the White River 50 Shirt. 2008.

That’s what appeals to him about art as well, it turns out. It is a normally solitary venture that you can share with other people. His work has been featured on concert posters, event t-shirts, and on the skin of countless people, runners and otherwise.

Owen’s tattoo business is old school. There is no storefront. He doesn’t do drop-in work for weekend partiers or impulse shoppers. His work is art, not iconography.

Parlor F is an artist’s studio hidden in non-descript building on Capitol Hill. He works by appointment only, and does all of his own designs. Sometimes those designs are based on something a customer has in mind, but Owen usually works in abstraction. A tattoo project can take three or four visits before a needle ever touches your skin. The design as to be right, and it’s not uncommon for Owen to go through several drafts of a design idea and to still be tweaking it as it goes from the two dimensions of the paper to three dimensions of the body.

Three hours after I sat down, Owen is putting the final touches on my new tattoo. The lines and shapes are unmistakably his work, but it somehow matches what I had in mind when I first started talking with him about it over a month ago.

My New Tattoo. Undeniably Parlor F.

His work is unique and recognizable, and once you know it, you will see Owen’s art everywhere. As I queued up for a recent trail race on the Eastside, I noticed a design on the calf of the young woman in front of me.

“Owen?” I asked, gesturing to her tattoo.

“Yep. You know Owen?”

And just this week, as I labored through a run with low energy and tired legs, I remembered something Owen said to me the last time I saw him. He was a day away from going in for major abdominal surgery that would sideline him for a month or more and he had just returned from an hour-long run.

“I never feel worse after I go running. No matter how bad the run is, it’s always better to have done gone out there and done it.”

*That transplanted Seattle runner is Jonathan Bernard, the evil genius who came up with Dizzy Daze, an ultra event that goes around, and around, and around Greenlake.

Sign Me Up!

In our kitchen we have one of those big paper calendars you can buy at office supply stores and that (I assume) professional people used to have at their desks to track their meetings before iPhones took over the world. We use our big paper calendar to keep track of where everyone in the family is at any given time.

I have very little on the calendar, but every other weekend or so there is an entry in my hobbled handwriting that says something like “Southern Bellevue Half Marathon, 10k,  and Kids Fun Run for Ingrown Toenails?” (There’s always a question mark at the end, indicating my general lack of commitment to such events.)

 I like to go through the race schedule here in Northwest Runner and put potential races on the family calendar. Note that I don’t usually sign up for anything. That would require commitment.

Usually after a good run where I feel pretty strong and I didn’t crash, I’ll sit down and find interesting races for the next couple of months. On the rare occasions that I have this burst of optimism AND my giant paycheck from Northwest Runner arrives at the same time, I’ll actually register for a race.  I never really know why.

What possesses us to run in these races? We aren’t going to win. As many a reluctant spectator has muttered over the years, we are essentially paying someone else for the pleasure of torturing ourselves. So why sign up?

A lot of runners sign up for races because of the cause the run supports. Cancer research is a popular one. I have no problem with this other than the fact that I think it is a shame we have to hold fundraisers to find cures to diseases. And just about every run these days is a run for a cause. Name your cause, its name is on a technical t-shirt from a half-marathon.

Speaking of t-shirts, what better reason to sign up for a race than to get a shirt? Like many casual runners, I have a closet full of $100 free t-shirts. Some of them are really cool. Most of them have paint or motor oil on them.

I mostly sign up for races out of guilt. I spend a dozen or more hours a week running and staying in shape. I spend paycheck after paycheck on shoes, clothes, and gadgets related to running. I write this column. If I don’t race I sort of feel like I’m doing it all for nothing. So I sign up.

My friends also guilt me into running, whether they know it or not. Cap’n Ron keeps signing up for races and posting about it on Facebook. Guilt. Owen runs a million miles a week and just decides at the last minute to run marathons and ultras because it’s fun. And the ladies from last year’s Ragnar team keep posting awesome results that shame the rest of us. I seem sort of lame if I don’t step up and tie a timing chip to my shoe once in a while.

The races themselves sometimes pressure me into signing up. The threat that a race I really don’t want to run anyway might sell out sometimes makes me break out the Real Running credit card. (This explains why I am running the North Olympic Discovery Marathon despite being nowhere near prepared for it and why I am already signed up for next fall’s Portland Marathon. Sucker.)

Don’t get me wrong, I love race day. Once I am out of bed and have that number pinned to my shirt, I enjoy the low-grade anxiety and the social aspect of the events. I like the challenge of a race. I like having elementary school kids hand me paper cups of water (and if I were rich I would hire a cadre of small children to stand around and hand me water all day).

Races are there to give us a goal on the calendar. Races are there to force us to train and not skip track days. Race days are there to lamely justify our addiction to running.

Race day is for seeing how well you have trained. On race day you have a reason to go a little faster and try a little harder. And if everything comes together, maybe you can set that new PR. That’s why we race.

Sure, we won’t win. But we might beat that guy right in front of us…

The Social Network

Despite the number of hours spent alone, plodding along the sidewalks and paths of your neighborhood, endlessly circling Green Lake with a thousand other lonely people, or suffering through the last three miles of a long run, running is ultimately a very social pursuit. It just seems like most of us haven’t figured that out yet.

On just about every run, I see cyclists in huge pelotons bombing down the trail, men and women in groups of five walking their dogs, new mothers pushing convoys of strollers to the coffee shop, and a gaggle of unkempt teenagers trying their latest moves at the skate park. Together. But we runners are all alone, as if running is some sort of holy, solitary pursuit that we alone can understand and that must be endured in isolation.

Of course I have days where all I want to do is lace up the trail shoes and spend a couple of hours alone decompressing from a long day, but if we’re all out there anyway, why are we by ourselves? There are hundreds of people out right now running alone…together. We’re not much of a community of runners, it seems.

I’ve been doing my part. Whenever I see another runner I give her the friendly wave, a thumbs up, maybe a quick “howdy.” More often than not, I get a confused stare in return. Sometimes an eye roll. Often, I am just ignored. I have tried to figure this out for years now. While cyclists, walkers, skiers, motorcycle riders and dog walkers share a friendly wave and a chat, runners shuffle past each other in solitude. Why? Somewhere along the way, we’ve been taught to suffer in silence. I don’t get it. Why suffer at all? I recently left the house on a rainy afternoon for a run. I had no plan, nowhere to go, and no time limit. I decided to just run for a while.

A mile into the run, I spotted a runner merging onto the trail and gave him a quick wave.

And miracle of all miracles, he waved back! He then fell into stride with me and we ran together for a few miles. We talked about different races, about shoes, about nutrition, about running routes. After a while, he checked his watch and turned around with a friendly good bye. I looked at my own watch. Five miles of running had slipped by unnoticed. No suffering required.

Even if you don’t run together, meeting up with friends for a weekly or nightly run makes it less of a chore and more of an event that you are less likely to skip. It’s easy to bail on yourself, but if your three pals are waiting for you at the trailhead at Cougar, you will at least have to come up with a lame excuse before you bag out.

Now I know some of you run with groups or training teams. I know there are pockets of the running world that are social, but from what I see on the streets, those groups are not the norm. We have to fix this.

1.     When you see another runner on the trail or the sidewalk. Wave. Simple. A smile doesn’t hurt.

2.     When you see a runner struggling and working hard, say something you have read on a sign at a race before. “There’s beer at the end” is often a good choice.

3.     Before you head out for a run, call someone and invite them along. They might say yes.

4.     If you see someone ahead of you, catch up and run with them a while. Introduce yourself. (Note to men, use this tactic with caution, and don’t be a creep.)

5.     When you are running with other people, make it fun. Anyone else remember playing “race you to the garbage can” in school? Try that. See who can turn in the fastest mile. Challenge each other up that hill. Last one to the car buys the beer.

Run with your head up and a smile on your face. Most runners are cool people (except you, grumpy guy in Woodinville who threw your empty GU package at my feet. You know who you are.) You just might meet someone worth hanging out with.

But maybe you’re just not a social person. At least in real life. Facebook thinks I have a couple hundred friends. I actually only have a couple. Social networking is apparently here to stay, and the running industry has made a clumsy pass at online technology.  Maybe someday we can virtually run together by syncing out treadmills and web cams. In the meantime, grab some friends and lace ‘em up. See you out there.