If you read this blog, you’ll know by now that I have never actually led a running event, but I have run some very small events, and one of those taught me a lesson about being ‘leader of the pack.’

The Grand Valley Marathon (Palisade, Colorado, is wonderful, but tiny. In fact, one year I ran it, there were a total of twenty-seven finishers. Even considering there were a few more folks who DNF’d, spreading that few people across 26.2 miles means a lot of empty course and so, for several miles of this out-and-back, I got to experience a bit of what a Lead Dog must feel – nothing but open course from my nose to the finish line – and I have to admit I was enjoying the fantasy.

My big lesson came at mile 23 though, when the road we’d been following forever (at least it seemed like forever at that point) reached an intersection and for the life of me I could neither find a race sign nor remember with any certainty which way we’d entered this same intersection twenty miles before. Fortunately (I thought) the road heading off to the left rose up onto a bridge across the Colorado River, giving me a clue: starting about mile 2, we had followed the river’s bank for a mile or more, so I picked up my stride and headed down the road that seemed destined to hug the river, only to find myself, several minutes later, in a neighborhood I was sure I had never seen before.

You can guess the rest – I’d picked the wrong road, and by the time I was certain of that, I’d gone half a mile off course. And by the time I’d stood around being angry with myself, despaired at what this would do to my hoped-for finishing time, actually quit and started to walk back to my car before my left brain finally convinced my exhausted right brain that the morning would be better spent if I finished disappointingly-late than not at all – and made my way back to the intersection, where I immediately observed another runner not making the same mistake – I’d eaten up a good fifteen minutes. All because I’d been out there with no one ahead of me!

Not getting lost – one more way in which the view can be just grand, when you’re not Lead Dog!

One of the things I love about running is it simplicity – no deraileurs to adjust, no flats to repair by the side of the road in a chill drizzle – and the freedom to go nearly anywhere – pavement or trails, rural or urban, crowded sidewalk or lonesome nowhere. So it may not be surprising that I put off for a long time any thought of using a GPS. From the early handhelds to the initial wristwatch styles – comically oversized even on a big man’s wrist, which I do not have – they seemed like one more way to make our sport expensive, complicated and regimented.

At the same time, I accepted without thinking that I must limit serious training runs to half a dozen routes around home which I had been able to drive or measure on a topo map, so that I knew the distance accurately and could compute my time and pace. Runs in unfamiliar locations, while fun and rewarding, were pretty much just for maintenance, since I had no way of knowing how far I’d gone. Yeah, you can use Google Earth and map a route and get a distance, but it’s pretty cumbersome and not all that accurate unless you zoom way in to follow each twist and turn, not likely when you land in a new city and want to explore its neighborhoods and parks while maintaining the build-up to that next event.

Which is why I did eventually succumb, and discovered that running with a GPS actually grants me the freedom to run anywhere, and still keep track of it.

Not only can I go out to explore a new city, but even here at home, I no longer have to stick to established routes. Want to detour and add a hill?  No problem. Want to detour and avoid a hill? No problem. Feel like exploring that neighborhood I’ve run past a score of times but never ventured into? No Problem!

With GPS you can wander to your heart’s content and not only know how far you’ve gone today, but store that info away as a possible objective for the future. Where previously I’d felt limited to a few pre-measured routes, now every road, path or trail is a potential training route.

Just goes to show, you can teach an old dog a new trick, it just takes a little longer – and GPS will be happy to tell you just how long.

A recent long run (in preparation for my first event of the spring) reminded me of a basic truth: to be a distance runner, is to run a distance. And there are times when that is all you can do. Not fast, not pretty, not feeling grand.   Especially toward the end of a long run, when all your strategies are behind you and it’s hard to spare the energy even to dig that Advil out of your pocket, much less to tear open a gel-pack and re-fuel, you may need something really simple to fall back on.

When I find myself having one of those moments; when nothing else works, I seek satisfaction in the plain belligerence of not quitting and remind myself what I realized when someone asked how I’d completed my first marathon – ‘by the end, I was too worn out to do anything but keep on putting one foot in front of the other; I was too stupid to stop.’

Now, I’ve wondered if it would be more politically-correct to say I am ‘Too Smart To Stop,’ but that’s giving a tired runner more credit than they – or at least this one – deserve. Maybe ‘Too Determined To Stop,’ (TDTS) would be better, or ‘Too Committed To Quit,’ (TCTQ), or any number of other formulations… Sometimes, just pondering the possible variations on that theme is enough to distract me for a while, and when your feet are hurting – and your knees, and your hips, and your shoulders, and just about everything from your blistered toes to your sun-burned scalp – distraction is pretty valuable in itself.

Which is one more reason this MPR is proud to admit to all the world: “I don’t run pretty, I don’t run fast, I’m just TSTS – Too Stupid to Stop.”

Distance running is about maintaining a relatively high level of effort over a long time, and that takes concentration and motivation.  In the middle of the pack, we can work off other runners to make it both less difficult and more fun, by choosing a ‘rabbit.’

Once the initial warm-up is over, and you’ve settled into goal pace (which you’ll know from your GPS, stopwatch, or level of effort), pay attention to the other runners around you, noting who’s struggling to maintain that pace or dropping away, and who’s breezing off into the distance.  Keep your eyes peeled for a runner who passes you with confidence, but pulls way only gradually, and when that happens, challenge yourself to match their pace and keep a consistent distance instead of letting him or her disappear ahead.

You’ll know pretty soon if you’ve chosen well – if you quickly start feeling winded, let ‘em go, settle back, and see who else comes along. But if find you can keep up with just a bit more effort than you had been giving before, then you’ve chosen right.  Keep on his or her heels for a few minutes – or a few miles – and that rabbit may provide the focus you need to push yourself to do your best.

The goal is not to finish the run in a dead-heat competition – most times your paces will diverge long before that, but chasing rabbits every now and then can make any distance seem shorter – and way more fun.  It just may make the difference between a ho-hum run and one that truly satisfies.

Rabbits – one more reason the mid-pack view is nothing to sniff at!

A nerdy formula with a simple meaning: “Two is less than, and not equal to, 450,000.”

In the case of the 2013 Boston marathon tragedy, the number 2 represents the pair of misguided, impotent fools who tried to make the event a symbol of something they thought was wrong in the USA and the world.  (‘Impotent,’ is used intentionally, because despite what was apparently months of planning and preparation, and the ruination of their own lives and family, all those two really accomplished was to show just how little they could achieve and how much was wrong inside their own frustrated and cowardly minds.)

The 450,000 represents, in rough estimate, the number of positive energies present along the course that Monday, based on media statements that Boston (yeah, even mid-pack runners can pretend to a first-name basis with the Big Event) draws upwards of 400,000 spectators, plus knowing that in 2013 there were 26,000 scheduled runners, and allowing for the thousands of staff, volunteers (thank you, to every one of you) and media who were present.

Whenever I think back to that day, after taking time to remember the innocents who lost so much, I remind myself to focus on the astounding outpouring of support, encouragement and pure joy that went on for over five hours before the tragedy.  For 26.2 miles it seemed there was barely a ten foot stretch on either side of the course without a spectator; for most of the route they were lined shoulder to shoulder – sometimes several deep – and all of them making a continuous joyful noise for family, friends and strangers alike.  It truly felt, in the middle of that pack, like you were all running together, being cheered on by one enormous family, in pursuit of a goal you had each set by choice and worked for, out of a common human desire to strive and to achieve.

That positive energy – not the horror and grief – is the true meaning of Boston, even in 2013, and the running community will not allow any two individuals to take that away from the multitude who put so much of their better nature into that day.