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Anyone who bicycle commutes at this time of year has to deal with two key factors: wet roads and darkness. When I first started cycling more seriously a few years ago, darkness or rain meant that I would simply not ride. I’ve since learned that the right gear makes it viable to ride in these conditions. While riding in 80 degrees and sunny weather will always be nicer than 45 degrees, dark and rainy, having bike specifically put together for wet & dark conditions allows riding in the winter while being reasonably safe and comfortable.
The Platform: what sort of bike?
Since my bike commute is at least nineteen miles, I like to go reasonably fast. So, while some people use mountain or hybrid bikes for bike commuting, I start with a road bike frame and handlebars. My first attempt at assembling a wet & dark bike was to retrofit an old Cannondale R1000 road bike with the necessary gear. However, using a traditional road bike is problematic because the fork and chainstays are typically too narrow to fit full fenders. Also, for commuting and riding in the rain you want the best brakes you can find, and the side-pull brakes on road bikes aren’t quite as powerful as disk or cantilever brakes.
A few bike companies sell bikes designed to be set up for wet & dark conditions. Examples include the Trek Portland and the Schwinn DBX. Additionally, most touring bikes can provide a decent platform, and they have the advantage that they’re set up to handle luggage carriers and panniers to carry stuff.
All of these bikes have less aggressive geometry that is designed more for comfort than speed. I like to ride fast, and also it is helpful for to do commuting on a setup more similar to the much more aggressive bike I use for triathlons. I try to be pretty minimalistic in what I carry when I commute—just wallet, cell phone and keys—so I don’t need panniers.
I learned from the road bike racing community that a great starting point for the attributes I want is a cyclocross bike. These bikes are similar to road racing bikes in geometry, but they are designed to accommodate larger tires for off-road riding, which gives them the room to accommodate full fenders. They also typically have more heavy-duty brakes. I settled on the Redline Conquest, which has served as a great platform for my wet & dark bike.
Handling Wet
Fenders. By far, the best thing you can do to handle wet conditions is to use full fenders. When it is raining, the water that comes from the sky is typically clean, and there usually isn’t all that much of it (at least in the typical Seattle drizzle). The water that your tires splash up is pretty miserable, filled with dirt and grit that are both uncomfortable and damaging to bike components. 
Half fenders and seatpost fenders that attach easily to pretty much any bike are certainly better than nothing, but they still allow dirty water to get all over your bike. Full fenders like the Planet Bike Cascadia Hybrid do a great job containing the gross stuff to a relatively small area of the bike. If you’re going to invest in assembling a wet & dark bike, I strongly recommend full fenders.
Tires. While pretty much any type of tire will work when it is wet and cold, there are small benefits in using tires designed for these conditions. Also, you likely want better flat resistance than typical road slicks. I use Continental Grand Prix 4Season tires on my wet & dark bike, as these are still pretty light and quick while improving handling and durability for tough conditions.
Brake pads. Again normal brake pads will still function when it is wet, I have found that the Koolstop Salmon brake pads provide moderately better braking performance in the wet. They do have one disadvantage in that they tend not to last as long.
Handling Dark
Headlights. Unless you are riding on well-lit streets, you will need a headlight with enough power to illuminate the road or trail in front of you. Headlights also help drivers to see you. If you don’t have some sort of headlight, you really should not be riding in the dark.
I like to ride with two headlights. Why two? Most importantly, having two headlights allows me a backup if one of them has some sort of problem like running out of battery power. It would not be good to be stranded because I can’t see! Secondly, I often put the secondary headlight into its blinking more by default, which hopefully makes me more obvious to drivers.
For the primary light, I use the Light & Motion ARC, an older model which has been replac
ed by the Seca. The ARC is still a great light: it is extremely bright, and the battery lasts over two hours. The one downside is that it is pretty critical to shield the light when approaching other cyclists on narrow bike trails like the Burke Gilman, lest they get blinded by the powerful brightness.
For a secondary light, I use a Light & Motion Vega, also an older model that has since been upgraded. This small, lightweight light is adequate as a primary light when necessary, although I usually just have it blink to be seen better.
Taillights. As with headlights, I ride with two taillights for redundancy. Most bike taillights are small and inexpensive. I use a pair of the Planet Bike Superflash, which are really obvious to anyone behind me.
Passive visibility. Because being seen by drivers is so important in the dark, it is smart to supplement active lighting with reflective components. Lots of different things can help passive visibility: clothing, spoke reflectors, etc. I recently found a pretty cool way to enhance passive visibility of the bike frame itself: reflective tape applied directly on the bike frame. ReflectivelyYours sells a great variety of sizes and colors. As my bike frame is black, I just use a black adhesive reflective tape kit applied to the down tube, seat stays, top tube, seat tube, cranks and fork. When it is light, it is hardly visible; when it is dark and car lights shine on it, it is amazingly noticeable, as you can see in the photo below where a flash is illuminating the tape and changing it from black to a very bright white color.
While not on the topics I normally write about here, I found this story about the water landing of US Airways flight 1549 to be amazingly inspirational. The audio demonstrates extraordinary competence on the part of pilot Chesley Sullenberger and controller Patrick Hardin.
Relative to bicycling and bike commuting, the gear involved in running and run commuting is fairly simple. At the extreme, all that is truly necessary are shoes, shorts and a shirt. This is one of the cool things about running: it is perhaps the simplest sport, exercise or transportation mechanism that you can do.
That said, having appropriate gear can make the experience a little nicer, especially in the winter when cold and rain are bigger issues. For the most part, there’s not a significant difference between the clothing you’d wear for run commuting and the clothing you’d wear for a normal run under comparable conditions. The main differences come from the fact that you may be running on routes which have more traffic, so you will want to consider ways that make it easier for drivers to see you and for you to deal with things like headlights. If, like me, you need a bus trip as part of your run commute, that also adds some constraints.
Here are some of the things I have found to facilitate run commuting:
Bright Clothing: This is obvious and just plain smart for any running you do in the dark. I typically wear a florescent windbreaker-style jacket, as the Seattle Times article on run commuting pictured. It is pretty typical that this sort of clothing also has reflective patches, and those further enhance “passive visibility” for drivers. Some people wear visibility vests, but I find those a little annoying because it is one more piece of gear to worry about; it is more efficient for my jacket to have the brightness “built in.”
Vents, zippers: When you are running, you create a lot of body heat. Common advice is to dress for “20 degrees warmer.” That is, if it is 50 degrees out, select your clothing as if it were 70 degrees if you weren’t running. That is a great rule of thumb, but if you have a bus section of your run commute, this is tougher because you will cool down while you are waiting for and sitting on the bus. A good way to work around this is to overdress slightly, but use clothing with vents and zippers that you can open up while running, then close when you stop.
Indoor/outdoor thermometer: No, I don’t run with an indoor/outdoor thermometer. Rather, I have one in my bathroom that I can quickly check while determining what clothes to put on. I dress differently for about every five degrees of temperature difference: heavier clothes as it gets colder, of course. Knowing the outdoor temperature immediately before I head out is quite handy for dressing correctly. It takes a while of trial-and-error to know the correspondence between temperature and clothing, but it is worth the minor effort it takes.
Tech fabrics: Cotton is comfortable, but it is very poor for athletic gear as compared to modern tech fabrics. These wick better, they are as comfortable as cotton, and they do much better handling temperature changes if you have a bus leg. You definitely don’t want to be in a sweaty cotton shirt getting cold at the bus stop!
Running cap: I like using a running cap for running in general, but run commuting routes often have me running near cars in the dark. When running toward headlights, the brightness kills night vision, and it is quite annoying. The bill of a baseball-style running cap is great for this: pull the cap down low and it can shield most headlights. The bill of the cap also keeps rain out of your face and sun out of your eyes.
Bike tail lights: As an added precaution for running in the dark, I often attach a red blinking bike tail light to the back of my running cap. These lights, such as this Planet Bike model, cost little, weigh little, and they are really obvious. Amphipod also sells several lights geared specifically for running. Just make sure to turn off the light when you get on the bus, lest you seriously annoy your fellow passengers!
Waist pack: I minimize what I carry when commuting to just my wallet, cell phone and keys. Often I will carry water as well. After LOTS of experimentation with different ways to carry this stuff, I have settled on the Amphipod Full Tilt Trail. It is big enough to hold what I need to carry, but it is still fairly light. If tight enough, it does not bounce at all. I dislike running with anything in my hands, and running with a backpack just doesn’t work for me. I know that some people dislike the feeling of waist packs, preferring backpacks instead. Others don’t mind carrying stuff while running. Experiment and see what works best for you.
Entertainment: While cycling with earphones is a bad idea for safety, the significantly lower speeds and higher maneuverability of running make me feel that using headphones with moderate volume is OK for running. It also helps a lot to have something to listen to while on the bus. I wrote a while ago about Entertainment while Running on what works for me in terms of gear for this.
As with most things about exercise commuting, there is a learning curve while you figure out the right gear to use. Experiment with different approaches to figure out what works best for you!
Shortly after a strange, low-speed bike crash hosed last summer’s triathlon season for me, a colleague invited me to try cross country (XC) with the Eastside Runners. His timing was perfect, as there was enough time to do a full periodization cycle for my training, and I have occasionally wondered about focusing on middle distance running for a season.
Although I’d never done any XC running, a nice coincidence is that my 11-year-old son David had also chosen to try his first season of XC with his school. So, we both got to experience our first XC at the same time. David is the second from the left in this photo. Some additional photos of his races are here and here. He had a good time with it, and he tells me that he expects to do it again next year.
Perception. When I told people I was doing XC, I often got a puzzled look. “Dude, isn’t cross country something that someone makes you do when you are in junior high school, and then you quit as soon as you can? If you’re having a mid-life crisis, buy a Corvette.” Unlike triathlon, which seems to be dominated by adults with background in one of the three disciplines, it is true that XC is something that is mostly done by people in high school and college. In fact, several of the races we did were community races associated with college or high school meets. Not a lot of adults do XC, apparently!
Fast competition. The adults who do XC, however, tend to be quite fast. Road running races include a broad cross-section of the population. XC races seem to have only people near the top of the pyramid for runners. When I ran in “open” races that had no age restrictions, I was typically near the back of the pack. In the “masters” races that are age 40+, I was generally in the middle. 
Contrast that with road races like the Seattle Marathon 5k where I was 10th place out of 261 men and 590 total participants.
Strong team component. Although endurance sports are a mostly individual pursuit, XC has a strong team component that adds a lot to the experience. Most of the races score the teams, and it is a lot of fun to feel like my efforts are helping the team (albeit minimally, given my finishes in the middle). Team workouts also add motivation. It was fun travelling with the team to big races. The group was exceptionally supportive of one another, and the leaders like John Sweeney did a fantastic job with coaching and logistics.
Simpler Races. XC races range between 5k (3.1 miles) and 10k (6.2 miles). With that distance, there is a lot less complexity and “nuance” than marathons and triathlons. You show up, you run. Typically a race has only one or two notable occurances, unlike longer and multi-sport races which ten to have many interesting things happen. This is why I wrote only one race report; there just wasn’t enough depth to justify regular reports.
Lots of races. It is only possible to do two or three fast marathons a year, since the recovery time is quite long. With shorter races, it is possible to race every week or two without breaking down. I approached many of the races as hard training runs. It was also possible to experiment with different approaches, like trying to go out fast to see how it works (for me, it doesn’t work).
Slower, unpredictable courses. Running on soft surfaces like grass and dirt is definitely slower than running on pavement, at least for me. XC courses also tend to have lots and lots of turns, some tight. Therefore, times are slower. For me, this was around ten seconds per mile for courses of comparable flatness/hilliness. For example, my best time in an XC 5k was 18:20 at the Eastside Runners Invitational, a fairly flat course at Lake Sammamish State Park. With similar fitness and quality of race execution, I did 17:46 at the Seattle Marathon 5k, which was on pavement and comparably flat. There was also a lot more variability in course difficulty, so it was hard to compare performances across races
.
Easier to mess up pacing. With road races, I am usually pretty good at pacing myself correctly. For several XC races early in the season, I seriously messed up my pacing by going out too fast and dying at the end. One reason for this is the soft surfaces slowing me down: I sometimes tried to run at a pace that would have been fine on pavement but which was beyond my abilities on grass. Another reason is getting sucked along by the competition. Since the same people do the races week after week, I’d get too competitive and try to stick with someone who was near my ability. After screwing up a couple of races this way, I re-learned my conviction for “run your own race,” so I did the last few races of the year with good execution.
Harsh conditions. Being an outdoor, fall sport, XC is subject to occasionally bad weather. In the races in the Seattle area, this meant occasionally very wet conditions, which on grass and dirt courses means running through mud. For the XC Club Nationals in Spokane, the climactic race of the season, we had snow, temperatures in the 20s, and hard wind gusting to what I think was around 40 MPH. It was easily the harshest conditions I’ve ever raced in, and as a result my time for the 10k was 40:12. That was somewhat slower than the 39:06 I did on the exact same course three weeks earlier at the XC Northwest Regionals, despite being fully peaked and tapered for the Nationals.
Spikes matter. For the first few races, I used the Newton running shoes that work really well for me on the road. When there was decent traction on the courses, they worked fine. At the Pacific Northwest Track Foundation XC Championships at Woodland Park, however, I learned why spikes are sometimes critical. It was a wet day and the course was very hilly and on grass. For every uphill, I was sliding a little on each step. The turns were very dicey, forcing me to slow considerably. This made for my slowest race of the year, a 6:48/mile pace for the 6k that was slower than even the brutal conditions at Nationals. Later that same day I bought some Brooks XC spikes, and I used them successfully at all of the remaining races.
Similar training concepts. Once again I followed Daniels to guide my training, and once again it was successful. His general structure of training phases where the weekly plan usually consists of two or three planned quality workouts and a lot of easy-pace base training on other days works well for me on many levels. Of course I used run commuting for most of my volume training. My weekly mileage was a little less than when I was focusing on marathons, around 65 miles per week instead of the 75 I did with marathon training. This made sense given the shorter races.
I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to try XC. Trying new facets of endurance sports is a lot of fun. It gives a feeling of novelty that really helps motivation, and the learning from trying something new is a lot of fun. The fact that there is a lot of similarity between different sorts of endurance sports is also helpful.
Thanks to John Swenson for inviting me to give XC a shot, thanks to John Sweeney for all his work leading the Eastside Runners XC team, thanks to Markus Van Achte for being captain of the Masters Men group for the team, and thanks to all of the Eastside Runners who made me feel welcomed on the team.
Over the holidays at the end of December, I spent a bunch of time messing around with computer stuff. I often do this at the end of the year, as it is a good time to do things like re-building machines to clean out the “kruft” and experiment with new things when I have plenty of time to handle any problems I run into.
In his CES keynote, Steve Ballmer talked about how this is an exciting time in the computer industry, despite the economic turmoil going on. Although I will surely come across as biased on saying this, I really, strongly agree. My explorations in recent weeks brought me to the same conclusion.
Here’s some of the more exciting stuff I played with:
Windows Live wave 3. OK this was not new to me, since I’ve been working on it for over a year now, but I spent the time to update all my machines to the new builds of the WL Essentials. WL wave 3 is really compelling, with features like deep “What’s New” support, better integration with other social services like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr, the ability to use Messenger simultaneously on multiple machines, cool support for groups, web favorites synchronization across machines, advances in all the apps like Photo Gallery, Live Writer, and much, much more.
64-bit computing. It’s time. Although I have messed around with 64-bit OS installs many times in the past, I never deeply adopted it on my primary machines due to various issues with drivers and the like. When I learned that I could use VueScan to support my Nikon film scanner on a 64-bit Vista installation, the last real hurdle was gone. Now I’m using things like Photoshop CS4 on my 8GB home desktop, and it flies. Having all that additional RAM really helps in many situations—things are much faster with so much RAM caching enabled.
Windows 7. You might have heard rumblings that Windows 7 is good. Updating an OS, especially to a beta, is always a scary proposition, as you never know what might break: apps, drivers, scenarios and more are all often at risk. So I did my initial Win7 installs on fresh hard drive, keeping around my Vista installations on separate hard drives so I could easily revert if needed. Well, I never needed it. I’ve installed Win7 on four machines now, and I’ve had no notable problems on any of them. This OS works amazingly well: it is fast, robust, easy to learn and use, attractive, and so far I have not run into any app or driver incompatibilities beyond minor stuff. I’m sold, and I heartily recommend the Win7 beta to any more sophisticated computer user.
SSDs. “Solid state drives” use flash technology instead of rotating disks to store data. I’ve messed with them in the past, but they were always disappointing. Although they bring modest advantages in weight and battery life, I’d not experienced the performance benefits often touted for these things. In fact, in real-world usage they were far slower than even 5400RPM laptop drives. Well, that is now changing in a HUGE way. A colleague gave me an Intel X25-M to try out, and I am absolutely blown away by the performance of it on my two-year-old laptop. It is significantly faster than the hard drive I previously used. It feels like a 100,000RPM drive. Nearly everything I do is faster: booting the OS, running Office and Outlook, file copies, browsing, suspend/hibernate/resume, etc. These are truly a quantum advance in computing, a game changer that may be even bigger than things like multi-core CPUs. They’re expensive now, but with our friend Moore’s Law, we can expect a very exciting future with them.
Huge 2.5” USB HDDs. One downside of SSDs is that they have less storage capacity then today’s HDDs (Hard Disk Drives). The SSD I use is “just” 80GB. I have more data than that, so I like a way to carry it around, especially in travel situations where I may not have a fast network connection back to my home and work machines that store everything. Historically, the external USB hard drives were a pain to use, requiring a separate power supply, using large 3.5” drives to get 100s of GB of capacity or being very space constrained and requiring funky double USB connectors for the more svelte 2.5” form factor. Well that too has changed. I bought a couple of Western Ditigal My Passport Essential 500GB drives. These are small, use just a single, simple USB connector, and they’re pretty inexpensive.
Netbooks. Through the 1990s, “the computer you want” cost around $5000. We all know that has changed significantly, and the recent crop of netbooks take this to the next level. I got an ASUS Eee PC 900HA XP. For just $329 this tiny computer has decent power for basic scenarios like web browsing, Office and running the Zune app, it is lightweight, and I get four or five hours of battery life. The keyboard and monitor are on the small side, so I wouldn’t use it as a primary computer, but it is really handy to have around the house as an occasional-use machine.
"”Network sound card.” Like most people, I have many thousands of songs that I have ripped from CD over the years. I’m also starting to buy more digital music online. Now there’s the excellent Zune Pass offering, which gives access to nearly all music for $15/month. With these giant music collections, selecting something to play can be hard. Using a remote control or even a device like a Zune, it can take an annoying few minutes to find something specific. A keyboard, monitor and mouse are much, much quicker for selecting music, as typing is a very quick way to specify a song, album or artist. In other words, using software like the Zune 3.0 client on a PC works a lot better than nearly any other way to do music selection. The problem is connecting a PC to a home stereo receiver: you want the keyboard/monitor/mouse where you’re sitting, and that is usually not near the receiver.
I found a pretty good solution in the Sondigo Sirocco Wireless Audio Bridge. The way it works is that you install software on the PC basically like a normal sound card driver, then you attach the device via SPDIF or RCA cables directly to the receiver. The PC sends audio over 802.11 or Ethernet to the device—no special wires required between the PC and the receiver. It can be controlled from multiple different PCs, but I usually control it from the Asus netbook. Basically, I think of the netbook as a sophisticated “remote control” that can also do things like web browsing.
One warning on the Sirocco: it was pretty difficult to set up. If you don’t know about IP addresses and DHCP, it might be too much hassle.
Amazon Kindle. For a while after its introduction, I was pretty skeptical of the Kindle. I have enough computing devices in my life already, so why would I want another when it is easy to use books, magazines and newspapers? My wife Lynn got me one for my birthday a couple of months ago, and now I am a convert. It is small and light, so it is easy to carry around. The screen is very readable—much better than a LCD screen. The battery life is very good. The best part, though, is the wireless connectivity. Being able to download instantly a newspaper is a really nice feature. When travelling, I can trivially buy a current newspaper. It is also nice to be able to have plenty of reading content without having to carry the weight of several books and magazines.
Virtual PC. OS virtualization is a pretty amazing technology that can enable a ton of scenarios. For a while after Vista came out, I used Virtual PC to run old apps in an XP guest running on the Vista host. Nowadays that is hardly ever necessary, but a recent way in which I have been using virtualization a lot is to have fully Microsoft-IT-managed virtual machines that I run on my home machines which I don’t want under the control of the IT department. It is also handy for checking out new software. I can copy a version of the VHD file, install some dicey software, try it out, and if I don’t like it then the easiest “uninstall” is simply to erase the new VHD file and revert to the copy I saved. There are many other ways in which client virtualization is handy; I wouldn’t recommend it for the typical computer user today, but if you work with computers a lot, you should have it in your toolbox. Until recently, client computers weren’t fast enough to run virtual machines with acceptable performance, but with 64-bit, multi-core and the like, it is fine for basic computing scenarios like email and web browsing.
Mesh. So with all these devices, all this data, all these applications, and all the people with whom I interact, I need ways to keep them all connected and in synch. Having worked on it for a while, I’m surely biased on this as well, but technologies like Mesh really facilitate all of this. Mesh truly makes it a lot easier to make the best use of client computers, the web and the mobile phone. It also helps things like exercise commuting, as I do not have to carry a laptop to and from work when I’m synchronizing everything I care about. On Friday, the technology was voted as the Best Technology Innovation or Achievement of 2008 at the Crunchies, which was a great honor for the team. If you use more than one computer regularly or if you need to share a lot of files with friends or family, check it out.
My perception is that 2009 will be a very exciting time for computing. A lot of seeds planted in the last few years are starting to come to fruition, and that will enable a tremendous breadth of new and improved scenarios.
Last night, I rode my bike home from work. I’m starting to bike a little more, doing base training for the upcoming triathlon season.
It was very rainy (floods today!), windy and dark, which makes for kinda difficult conditions. Several times during the ride, I thought to myself, “boy, it would suck to have to change a flat tire in this mess.”
Well, as Murphy’s Law would have it, about 20 miles into the ride the back end started feeling loose, a sign of a slow flat. I rode for a mile before stopping a little north of the U District on the Burke Gilman trail. I stopped at an intersection under a street light to check it out, and sure enough the back tire was indeed nearly flat. I had to change the tube. Grrr.
Fortunately I ride equipped for this sort of thing; it just takes several annoying minutes. While doing it, I was thoroughly impressed by all the offers of help. Of the five cyclists who passed while I was fixing it, four slowed to ask variations of “got everything you need?”
“Yep, thanks!”
This is pretty common among cyclists: I suppose we have a common bond, and the sort of people who ride in harsh January conditions are probably more serious cyclists.
What surprised me some, however, was the two cars who stopped to ask essentially the same question. Wow.
As I finished up and mounted the bike to get going again, the real winner came by. A fellow with his young daughter had apparently walked some distance to check things out with me. He crossed the street, then asked “did you get it all fixed? I came by to see if you need a ride somewhere.”
Now that was incredibly cool of him.
Whoever you all were, thank you.
I’ve had a Zune Pass for a while, and I have enjoyed using it to listen to pretty much any music I want to explore. For just $15/month, you have access to most music; I find that it has about 90% of the music I might want to listen to. The playlists and channels are also cool features.
Recently, my friend Cam Ferroni pointed me to the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. This book enumerates most of the "important" popular albums from 1955 to 2005. It is fun to page through, seeing many albums I know and many I have heard but never heard.
What is really cool is combining both of these. I can spot a new album in 1001 Albums, and with the Zune Pass I can be listening to it a few seconds later. This makes for an easy, legal way to explore new music, and it has helped me to find some unexpected winners like Johnny Cash’s last album American IV: The Man Comes Around.
If you want to track your 1001 albums, check out Cam’s Facebook app, 1001 Albums You Must hear Before You Die. It does a great job of letting you see track which of the albums you have heard, and it is fun to see which ones your friends have heard and enjoyed.
Normally when I do road running races, I’m reasonably competitive. Not that I am in any danger of winning, but I usually manage to finish in the top 10%.
Today I did my first XC race, the Sundodger Invitational. This is a real college XC race that the University of Washington sponsors, but they allow some local club teams to run as well. With a men’s qualifying standard of 39:35 for a 10k, I knew it would be pretty fast: at 38:20 my 10k PR is not much faster than the standard. I was hoping not to finish in the bottom 10%.
Well, I just made it, finishing #120 out of 134 folks in the Men’s Open 8k. #122 was the top of the bottom 10%. I did a time of 30:46 for the 8k distance, which is about a 6:11/mile pace.
Brief Race Report
The plan was to start kinda easy, then try to have a strong finish. I was shooting for an even or negative split.
| Distance | Split | Comments |
| 1k | 3:32 | I was basically in last place after about 100 yards. Geez this was gonna be a fast race indeed! |
| 2k | There was no 2k mark, but the first mile split was 5:38! It was downhill this mile, but still crazy fast for me. | |
| 3k | 7:26 | I had passed a few folks, so no longer in last by this point, but I think that there were only 5-8 folks behind me. |
| 4k | 4:09 | Had a slow middle of the race, not sure why. I felt like I was in a decent rhythm. |
| 5k | 4:14 | Got passed by a couple of folks in the downhill here–that is rare for me, usually I pass on downhills. |
| 6k | 3:51 | Re-passed folks on the uphill at the start of this kilometer. I was picking it up in anticipation of the finish. |
| 7k | 3:53 | Tried to hold my position and targeted a guy in front of me named "Win" whom everyone seemed to know. |
| 8k | 3:41 | Traded passes with Win, then heard his footsteps just behind me as I tried to finish strong. Win didn’t win. |
Notes, Learnings
It was about a year ago that I started to get serious about trying a marathon training cycle. Regular readers here know that I ended up doing a couple of marathons, Seattle and Boston, achieving good results but not quite hitting my stretch goal of having a marathon PR whose first digit is the number 2. In each race, I was on track for the bulk of the race, but I had weak finishes due to cramping in both races and overheating and dehydration in Boston.
Still, each was a truly great, memorable experience. The lens of time always yields perspective, and this seems like a good time to document some of the more significant things I learned from the races. I’ve also given some thought to debugging what happened at the end of the races, and I think I understand better the problems I had. Before both of those marathons, I wrote about what I learned from the training cycles: Seattle here and Boston here. Re-reading those postings, all of the points still resonate with me, so I’ll avoid re-iterating those points in this posting.
Focused training cycles really help marathon performance. Periodization is a key concept for maximizing performance in endurance sports. I feel that my two marathon cycles were lifetime bests for me in following a quality periodization schedule. Of course, I was helped significantly by following the Jack Daniels marathon plan "A" which very effectively laid out what I needed to do when. For the several months before each race, I had the singular goal of great performances in the marathon races, which I believe really helped my marathon fitness and motivation.
Late Fall marathons fit best with a training cycle. Seattle weather patterns are very well suited to a training cycle that ends with a late-Fall marathon like the Seattle Marathon. The end of summer is a great time to do lots of high-volume base building. As the weather gets cooler, it is time to introduce faster workouts, and doing speed in cooler weather is much nicer and more effective. The challenge with a Spring marathon like Boston is that it requires a lot of training in the dead of winter, and while running in dark, cold and rainy conditions is certainly possible, it is a lot harder. Partly as a result of this factor, my cycle for the Seattle marathon was better than the Boston cycle, and I believe that I had moderately better fitness for the Seattle marathon.
Underdress. Thinking about what went wrong in Boston, I am now convinced that I was dressed too heavily for the race. It was not all that warm on race day, probably low 70s on the road, but I over-heated badly in the last few miles. I should have skipped the cap, and I should worn a singlet and light running shorts instead of a tight shirt and longer, heavier shorts. Being a little cold at the start would have been much better than the significant overheating I endured at the end. Being on the big side and that doing all of my training in cold weather likely also contributed to the overheating. I think I was also a little overdressed for Seattle, but the much colder day made this less of an issue.
Overhydrate. Although I drank at most of the aid stations in Boston, I am certain that I dehydrated in the last half of the race, and this definitely impacted my performance. I should have taken the water from Sara around the halfway point, and I should have grabbed more water at the aid stations deeper into the race. I now believe that I was a little dehydrated in Seattle, which was probably a partial cause of my hamstring cramps thee.
It’s a different world after mile 20. For shorter races, it is easy and appropriate to do over-distance training. For example, someone training for a fast 10k should do reasonably frequent runs longer than 10k. That’s not feasible for a marathon, at least not for most people, because running more than around twenty miles is hugely stressful on the body. It risks injury and overtraining to attempt it. It’s also not feasible to do low-priority "tune up" marathons in advance of the "A" race, given the long recovery period that results from a marathon. The last part of a marathon is therefore an entirely new challenge, one which is difficult to prepare for in training. I’m certainly not the first person to conclude this, but I definitely experienced it. Perhaps it gets better with more marathon experience?
Sharing enhances the experience. Although endurance sports are a pretty personal endeavor, I have found that sharing my experiences with family, friends and, yes, you blog readers makes the experience much more satisfying. I have learned a ton from all of these interactions, and the mere action of writing down my thoughts forces me to think through things more deeply, in turn better understanding myself and how I can be a better athlete. With many things in life, "you get out of it what you put into it." Putting in the energy to share my learnings and experiences has definitely yielded much better results for me in many dimensions. Of course, I have to thank you all for your engagement on this blog!
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