My Sport Is Your Sport's Cross-Training

This last weekend was, I believe, the thirty-first running of the largest 5K prediction run in the U.S., at McGuire's Irish Pub in Pensacola. The last time I ran it I swore I would never do it again. Too many people. However, my wife wanted to go out and enjoy the cameraderie (and a few beers), so I could not refuse. But I think the numbers were a little lower back then. This weekend's run had an official count of 11,057, give or take a couple, and gave me the chance to spend some time with some former athletes, present friends, and see if I could shock a couple of persons. One of my former athletes was definitely shocked, saying I looked larger in the upper torso than in the past...I had to disagree a skosh, though. If you have a well-developed neck and shoulder area, and tend to run in either short-sleeved or sleeveless t-shirts, then appearing in public in either a running-style tank (singlet) or a spaghetti-strapped top is going to make ANY PERSON'S neck and shoulder area look large. Place a long-legged woman in a pair of short shorts and you'll think she has, like Rod Stewart once sang, 'legs right up to her neck.'

It's all in your perspective.

As a guy who likes a nice day in the sun as much as the next 'reformed vampire,' eleven thousand people is sufficient company for three miles and change. But if you're interested in testing your fitness, eleven thousand people for a 5K, without corrals or wave starts, is a few thousand runners to the dark side. When it takes (a rehabilitating runner) 34 minutes to get from the middle of the pack, across the starting line, to the finish, that's way too long, in my case ten minutes too long. That ten minutes was the only time where I could travel in a perfectly straight line; the rest of my run was a demented blend of road race and heavyweight bout: Bob and weave, stick and move... By the time I hit the first mile (since this was a prediction run there were no splits or timing), which went from FOUR LANES down to a single lane of roadway, half-filled with parked vehicles on both sides a quote from "The Big Lebowski," '...let's go bowling,' made perfectly good sense.

Speaking of bowling, I never thought I'd hear someone call running a form of cross training. That is, until I had a bowler come out to train with my group. Joe's mother, Vicki, is a friend of mine. She race-walks marathons, does triathlon, coaches charity runners and occasionally writes about her race day experiences, so we have a bit in common. I always wondered whether the bowling thing was an act of rebellion or something. I guess if I was a kid who's mother was "the balloon lady" at marathons - basically, the harbinger of doom - I'd find a sport which didn't have much to do with running, either.

So, we were chattering during the warm-up, and Deena, my marathoner, asked Joe what he did as cross training. Joe's response was, 'well, I'm a bowler, so I guess running is my cross training.'

It's all in your perspective.

Joe was recently accepted to a college which has a serious intercollegiate bowling program, which I guess to the average guy (including this coach!) seems like a multifaceted contradiction. But then again it's not that far a stretch from road running in the southeastern US, where beer drinking before 9 a.m. on Saturday appears the norm.

I guess the difference between a serious intercollegiate program (in Joe's case, Wichita State University) and a less-than-serious one is the implementation of a fitness test for prospective athletes. Yes, you have to love it. Joe is in great shape; he took everything I would normally dish out at the track to an unknown athlete and enjoyed it. I worried during one repeat, until he told me he was grooving to the music over the nearby softball field's public address system.

I've seen T-shirts which said "my sport is your sport's punishment." But I've never looked at running from the point of view (save for the occasional anaerobic athlete who disdainfully calls it "cardio") of someone who is slinging 15-pound composites a hundred times a weekend. I'll keep running, thanks. Bowling shoes are too darned ugly. At least for me. Perhaps young Joe thinks differently.

It's all in your perspective.

Bruised In A New Place

"There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in traveling...that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place." - Washington Irving

The season has begun to change, and just in the nick of time for this ol' coach/runner. Tampa winters, all 14 of them, I could tolerate; there might (or might not!) be a week of nasty cold weather around the turn of the year, and February could have its moments here and there. But February is a short month and we could always look with longing to nice conditions in March.

Pensacola, on the other hand, has been a completely different story. How could a city which was more northerly be more hot, more humid and more...well...blah, during the summer? And, to top that all off, predictable in its climatic unpredictability in those months which possess an "R"?

It has been nice to get back on the streets, even if it's for twenty minutes at a time right now. I did go for a sixty-minute walk yesterday morning while my wife ran on the same course. I marveled at the blooms and buds, shoots and flowers which began to make their presence known as I strolled past some of the front yards in the neighborhood just a half mile from my home. It began to make me think life was going to be all right.

Then, I remembered it was the last days of February. March was not far behind.

March, here in the "Redneck Riviera," does not enter or depart like either a lion or a lamb. It's like a - lab - as in labrador retreiver. Smart enough to figure out how you're going to react, friendly enough while you're around, but if you fail to keep an eye on them then say farewell to those really nice shoes you just got on sale. March here doesn't go in one way and out in another...it comes in, makes a mess, then asks you (while you're comfortable in front of the tube)to let it back out. Ah, but we love it and wouldn't want it any other way. Especially the weekend around St. Patrick's Day, when we have the largest 5,000-meter prediction run in the country.

My wife and I went to brunch the other morning, after our morning efforts, with one of our closest friends, Charley and Sheila. We marveled at the conditions and wondered whether they would persist until the first week of May, when our summertime conditions show in full force. I then said, "Don't get too excited about this nice weather, because you know it's all going to hit the fan during the weekend of McGuire's. It will either be fantastic on the day and horrible immediately after, or it will be really nasty cold." Charley then laughed at the fact I would remember years past and the temperature tendencies; 80 degrees one day, 35 the next.

Forecast schizophrenia.

To plan for the McGuire's 5K, we pull out the racing attire we want to wear, the stuff we were forced to wear at the '07 Crescent City Classic, and then the oldest running gear we have, on which we won't mind having nasty green beer poured or spilled by someone else. Place all those items in a laundry basket (or "the bag" I wrote about a couple of weeks ago), shake them up and pluck out the first items which keep us from being busted for indecent exposure.

But getting back to the blooms, the weather and all...I started to think about what was going to happen to those pretty buds, blossoms and flowers which were starting to spring and would be meteorologically-blindsided by the middle of the month. They probably reacted to something in nature in the way plants react when everything seems to be all right. I looked at each of those gorgeous blooming trees and all I could think was: 'you fool, you fool...'

Those trees and I had a lot in common last Monday morning, after I did 4.5 miles, the first lick of running after three weeks without a step. Everything reverted back to something like normal. And then, reality set in around Tuesday evening. That chunk of running was a shock to my system, one which left me hobbling for the remainder of the week. Not only were there muscles I hadn't offended in a long time which were now very upset at me, but they took their cues from the unhappy people in Egypt; if protest could topple a 40-year rule, it certainly could hobble a (nearly) 50-year-old man. Every step going down stairwells at work caused my legs to fire uncontrollably. There were moments where my leg buckled as I was teaching my seminar late in the week. I hadn't felt this bad since my marathon walk-of-shame in 2007.

I had, as the Irving quote above suggests, felt the relief of change; the transition from sidelined runner to slow runner. Naturally, the bruises and discomfort had come, not so much in new places, but in places common to new runners. Nothing that time, patience, self-massage, hydration and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories could not alleviate.

Ah, the ache of being a born-again runner.