Ever forged your way up a hill early in a run, only to find, when you come upon another hill later, that your legs feel leaden and unresponsive? I certainly have, in fact it has always seemed to me that there was only so much climbing in my legs, and once it was used up, it was gone for several days. Now, I’m not so convinced.

Preparing for a rather intimidating trail event that that includes several large climbs spaced out over the total distance, I set the goal one morning of running up the largest of the climbs twice in a row – with even a distant thought I might be able to tough-out three laps. (Masochism runs in the family…)

The first time up was just as I expected with a fresh start; hard work, but steady, and I crested the ridge in decent (for me) time. On the way down I reveled in gravity’s assist while reminding myself not to overdo it – I’ve learned the hard way that even on a steep downhill, too fast a pace can take it out of you, and I had another lap planned.

Once at the bottom I turned right around and headed back up, but this time, because I’d set such a stiff goal – two laps on a hill I’d always considered an achievement to do once – I set out pretty slowly, telling myself it would be enough just to keep a running stride, regardless of the pace. Enlisting the music in my headphones to drown out the cries of my leaden legs, I settled in to daydreaming, but here’s the thing – when I glanced down at my GPS a good while later, I was surprised to find myself not that far off the pace of my first lap, and feeling almost as strong!

Which made me wonder: maybe that dreaded dead-leg syndrome was not so much about the exhaustion of particular muscles, as it was about the shock to the entire system when different muscles were enlisted in different ways to transition from downhill (or flat) to climbing once again. Between my low expectations and the distraction of music coming from my Shuffle, I’d managed to coast thru that transition and only gradually drift back up to the cadence, stride and level of effort that my conditioning caused to feel natural.

Now, I’m not saying it was painless getting up that hill again, and yes, my time was a bit slower than the first lap, but I made it feeling surprisingly strong, and headed back down with newfound optimism. Enough so that there was no doubt about trying for lap three, on which I made a point of starting out super-slow, and only building the pace as my legs felt capable, which they did after a few minutes of perfunctory complaining. Cruising down after cresting that ridge three times felt great, and I found myself looking forward to the upcoming event more than ever before.

From now on, my goal when approaching yet another hill will be to ease-in the clutch as slowly as possible, allowing the wise physiology of the body plenty of time to drop into a different gear before asking it to do its best.

Ever lace up your shoes and head out the door, only to have that the first mile blow you away with how easy and natural it feels, then look down to find a fabulously fast time on your watch at the end of it?

Neither have I.

In fact, I usually feel like the first part of every run is a total slog, calling into question whether I have any business being out there; if I shouldn’t just pack it in and head for the couch. Other runners I’ve talked to say the same thing.

Run with a GPS though, set to show current pace, and you may be able to watch what’s happening. Going out strong, that first mile pace is likely a full minute (or two) slower than your brain says it ‘should be.’ Get distracted by the traffic, the scenery, music or thoughts, and the next mile comes up faster, with the same perceived effort, and the next one may be quicker still.

More than reading any articles or books, observing those times has proven to me that there really is such a thing as warming-up – that first few minutes (or at my age, fifteen!) when the body is shifting gears, re-allocating resources and getting its bio-chemical support systems up to full operation. Getting on a treadmill with a heart rate monitor tells a similar story – for the first few minutes my heart rate seems way higher than it should be, even at a moderate pace, then gradually settles down. Halfway thru the workout, I find myself running a faster pace at a lower heart rate – and with less perceived effort.

Recognizing this can play into strategy for events. For short distances, make sure you are thoroughly warmed-up before the start. That’ll make every measured mile count in your favor, and since it’s a short event, you don’t have to worry about your warm-up draining energy reserves enough that it might hurt overall performance.

For a longer event, where stamina is the key and a slow start can get evened out over many miles, you may choose only a minimal warm-up, and let the rest happen in the first part of the event, conserving your body’s reserves for the long haul. That’s especially true in mass starts, where you’re going to be held back by the crowd anyway, so you may as well let that initial ‘Times Square Shuffle’ be your intro.

Any way you play it though, recognizing the Warm-up Factor can help reduce that ‘what was I thinking?!?’ reflex to a minimum.

A very important person in my life likes to say, “if it hurts… don’t do it!”

As a runner I respond, “well, yeah, but…”

Truth is, if you’re at all interested in running, you’ve probably heard or read comments like “running to your full potential requires a high tolerance for pain…,” and even those of us in the middle of the pack – who may not be hell-bent on pushing our limits – have to expect some level of unpleasant sensations. Heat and sweat, hunger and thirst, sore tired muscles, rubbing and blistering, they all come with the territory, but are they really ‘pain’?

My battered old paperback Webster’s defines ‘pain’ as “physical or mental suffering…” and I’ll admit that sounds a lot like how running sometimes feels. Fortunately, the good Dr. Daniel W. goes on to say “… caused by injury, disease, grief, anxiety, etc.,”   Now we’re talking! ‘Pain’ is that category of suffering which is caused by some sort of negative influence; ergo – I love using that word; it sounds like the name of the robot dog in some sci-fi carton series, doesn’t it? – ergo: the category of suffering caused by something which is not negative or destructive, is not ‘pain.’ (It’s just ‘suffering,’ as if that is any better, right?)

Well, actually, this MPR does find it is better, especially if you take it one step further and consider that suffering is not all that different from ‘being uncomfortable.’ If I am suffering because I’m pursuing something I love and enjoy (even if I enjoy it most when I finally stop, having achieved my goal for the day…), then I’m not in pain, I’m just uncomfortable, and you don’t have to be a Navy Seal to know that life isn’t supposed to always be ‘comfortable.”   (You just have to have a few Scottish-Presbyterian ancestors – or Eastern-European, or African-American, Jewish, Korean, or any other nationality or ethnicity that had to work and struggle for survival or to establish themselves in a new strange land – which is all of them).

So when the going gets tough and the right side of your brain says “I’m in pain,” use the left side to drill down thru the sensations and figure out just what is causing them. If you can tell that something is doing damage, will potentially cause you not to be able to run tomorrow or the next day, then by all means, pull over and take care of yourself. But if the answer is no, I’m not doing damage, I’m just sore – or tired or hot or hungry or (fill in the blank) – put it in the box labeled ‘uncomfortable,’ do what you can to get more comfortable (take a drink, eat a gel, vary your stride, strip off layer…) and get on with the laudable objective of proving yourself ‘Too Stubborn To Stop.’

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.

If you’ve ever read the reviews in a boating magazine (yes, I’ve wasted plenty of hours in my lifetime…), one thing you may have noticed is that although a boat has a top speed, what seems more important to the reviewers is its ‘cruising speed.’

The Oxford online dictionary defines Cruising Speed as “a speed for a particular vehicle, ship, or aircraft, usually somewhat below maximum, that is comfortable and economical.”

For a runner, ‘cruising speed’ is that pace at which you realize your body is doing something it was actually designed to do, and you feel (for the moment) like you could go on forever (though the objective mind knows that is not actually the case….).

Mid-pack runners are well served to find their own cruising speed, and use it as a baseline, consciously choosing when to run faster (that last gallop to the finish, or when someone you passed a half-mile back shows up in the corner of your eye and starts to creep ahead…) and when to run slower (that December-weekend long run in the snow and slush).

You’ll find your cruising speed by feel, but it helps to have a measurement and a way to compare from day to day.  Since mid-pack runners generally aren’t doing laps on a track with a stopwatch, keeping track of total time and distance every time you run is generally the way to go, but since your pace varies from beginning to end, it will be pretty inexact.  For those ready to make a larger investment, a GPS watch that tells your pace at any given time is great, but whatever way you measure your cruising speed, it’s really the feeling that matters.

There’s a real cachet to the Marathon – that Greek history, all the great runners who’ve made a name for themselves by winning in New York, Boston, Chicago, London, or the Olympics, the sheer absurdity of any normal mortal actually choosing to run that far.  But 26.2 miles is a long way to go, and an even longer distance to train for.

The half marathon has a lot in common with the full. It’s long enough that you must train, so there’s a real sense of achievement, and it draws on many of the same skills – goal-setting, proper pacing, hydration and nutrition, developing an efficient and non-injurious stride.  And, there’s much the same camaraderie stepping up to the start and at the finish, plus there seem to be a lot more ‘halfs’ around (maybe because they can accommodate more runners with less traffic-management and fewer volunteers/staff).

The only thing holding back this otherwise very appealing event is that name – half­- marathon.  Like being half-asleep, or half-qualified (or half-pregnant!) it just doesn’t sound very satisfying.  I mean, where’s the sense of accomplishment in completing half of anything!

The 13.1 mile run deserves its own full name, and my modest suggestion is to call this event the Hemithon – as in hemisphere, hemihydrates, or the ubiquitous hemidomaphobia (fear of half a house).    It’s got the same punch as its longer sibling, and sufficient semantic resemblance to connect to that grand heritage, but rolls quickly enough off the tongue to sound casual and confident. And even thought we all know ‘hemi’ really means the same thing as ‘half,’ that Latinate construction obscures things just enough to sound like a whole of its self (and a lot more credible than ‘Halfathon.’)

13.1 miles, I hereby christen thee, the Hemithon.

P.S. – The folks in Green River, Utah used to put on a wonderful small event in scenic Goblin Valley, which offered an Ultramarathon (anything over 26.2 qualifies; this one was 50k or about 30 miles) and a 25 k event (about 15 miles).  I did the latter, and ever since have struggled to figure out how to explain my Goblin Valley Ultramarathon t-shirt:  did I run a half-ultra-marathon, or an ultra-half-marathon, or half an ultramarathon – or maybe not an ultra-anything-at-all?   There’s just no way to combine ‘half’ and ‘ultra’ in the same language that doesn’t sound like you’re trying to get away with something, but if my plan gets enough traction, maybe I can finally be proud to claim my Ultrahemithon completion.