Missed Calls and Memory Lane

I checked my watch and noted the distance: 14.93. Ok, I thought. Let’s make it an even 15 and call it a morning. I clicked my watch and came to a stop just feet away from Table Talk, the restaurant where I planned to meet my two friends for breakfast. A cold wind blustered around me but the warmth from the run still lingered. I had timed it perfectly both in terms of route and time. Or so I thought. We planned to meet at 9:30 and it was 9:27. I did a quick scan of the cramped parking lot: jammed…but not with my friends’ cars….


My wife has the misfortune of spending 11 days in a hotel in Alexandria, VA a mere 20 miles away from our home. However, her company has seen fit to put her up in the hotel with other co-workers to conduct a training. Well, I got to missing her as you might imagine, so decided to spend Thursday night through Sunday with her at the hotel. While she worked on Saturday (all day), I decided to re-traverse the routes I ran a few years ago when we lived in this area, a run down memory lane of sorts. I fastened on the zipper pouch I keep my gels in but instead dropped in my credit card and hotel room key and let out from the hotel. I decided to leave my cell phone in the room….

I took another moment to walk off the run and do a few stretches, all while keeping an eye on the lot. Instead, I only saw the line to the restaurant get farther and farther out the door. So, I decided to walk in, or at least into the narrow lobby, and wait for a table. “Three,” I signaled to the overwhelmed hostess by holding up three digits. She blew a strand of hair from her face and didn’t bother to write it down. She had some kind of system going…or maybe she didn’t. I waited in the stream of sunshine pouring in through the glass that kept me warm….

When I set out just over two hours ago, I took off down King Street’s uneven brick sidewalks toward the waterfront. Old Town hadn’t woken up yet and I shared the empty street with a sparse number of early morning runners. A sliver of solitude before the town stores filled with shoppers, tourists, eaters, and all of the above. When I hit the waterfront, I turned left and ran alongside the piers where the sun began to ripple along the Potomac. From there, I turned again onto Cameron Street, trading shop fronts for colonial town homes and a steady climb….

At 9:43, I stood among a throng of “the waiting” while we eyed each table in their various states of dining, willing the occupants to eat faster. I kept reflexively sniffing around me wondering if I smelled like sweat. The hostess pointed at me and in broken English asked if I was ready. I squeezed through the others and took my seat, nervously glancing out the window for my friends. Instead of worrying about whether or not I smelled, I worried about not being able to fill these two seats. The waitress took some time to come over. She took my coffee order and I apologized saying I’d order in 10 minutes if my friends hadn’t shown up. “Oh, I don’t care,” she said, dropping off a glass of water. My eyes shifted around the place, wondering if I should have taken a spot at the counter or…oh, God, what if they were on the other side of the restaurant and I just never saw them. I reached for my phone, but it was back in the hotel….

If the hill up Cameron Street was steep, the hill up King from the Masonic Temple was a monster. Still, I made my way up casually, not worrying about pace and enjoying the memories of marathons past as they resurfaced. I tapped old landmarks that signaled mile markers or the trees and bushes that marked the near end of a climb or the stretch where I “raced” some adversary who wanted to push the pace on the other side of the street. At the “summit,” I took a sharp left onto a trail where the wind blew harder and colder. It carried a bite and pushed the dark cloud that split the sky ahead. Blue skies and sun behind me, black and foreboding ahead. When I came off the trail, that ominous cloud opened up with…snow. The sun continued to beam behind me as the snow swirled, light at first, then heavy all at once. Then, just as soon as it came on, it disappeared. I turned around, passing our old apartment, our first place together, a small smile breaking across my face as I turned down the backside of those up hills…

I sipped on my coffee and my tension melted away. I watched the lobby spill over with people and nervously tapped my fingers on the table. They had to be looking at me, wondering why they would ever seat someone with those two seats open. Then I saw one of my friends sift through the crowd and I waved over to her. She sighed with what looked like relief and went out to grab our other friend.

They both sat down and the waitress came over with coffee for them.

“You don’t have your phone do you?”
“No, I never went back to the hotel,” I said, sheepishly. “I didn’t have time.” They laughed.
“Well, you’ll have about 20 texts and missed calls from us.”
“We got here about five minutes early but there was no place to park so we thought about another place to go to eat.”
“Oh, no! I must have just missed you. I got here at 9:27.” We shared a collective eye roll.
“We went to your hotel. Then we started to wonder if something happened to you. We got coffee at Panera and continued the search until we got back here.”
“We even checked Twitter to see if you tweeted about your run like usual. Nothing. But here you are.”
“Here I am,” I said, turning red and not from the wind.
“Just know that we care about you. Now let’s eat some pancakes.”

And whether you’re on a run through the past or a run for breakfast, it’s probably good to have a phone on you…somewhere.

Carrying the Weight

Check out those quads.

First came the quick machine gun jangle of my dog’s collar. She huffed and shook her way excitedly to the front door. Then I heard the faint sounds of a woman bellowing opera in German. I half opened my eyes, only half recognizing just what in the hell was going on. The front door opened. More collar jangling. My wife’s voice. “Where’s dad? Is dad home?” Then the tumbling of paw steps up the stairs and a wet nose in my face. My wife followed along with her laughter.

“Are you ok?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
“Um,” I blearily said, rubbing my eyes with the back of one hand. The wind pressed against the windows outside and I hunkered down a little further under the covers. “I needed a nap.”
“What are you listening too?”
“It’s German opera,” I said without missing a beat but perhaps wisely missing the “duh.”
“Did you run your 14?”
“Yep.”
“Did you go to the gym afterward?”
“Yep.”
“No wonder you needed a nap.”
“Mmm.”

Ah, the nap. I don't think I've taken a nap since sophomore year in college. But after Saturday, I may have to reconsider. After that initial grogginess wore off -- the one where you feel slightly nauseous and out of sorts because, well, you just slept in the middle of the day -- after that, I felt spectacular.

A few years back, I remember sitting on the table at the ortho’s office as he pulled, twisted, and contorted my leg to figure out just what was wrong with that knee of mine.

“What do you do for strength training?” he asked.
I gave an arrogant sniff. “I run hill repeats and about 50 miles a week.”
“Uh huh,” he said, just as dismissively. “You should really get into the gym and lift some weights.”

Then I heard the same from my uncle. And so (many) months later, I found being injured (again) the perfect time to get into the weight room and do something about it. I recruited my friend who has a personal trainer certification to put a program together for me. I have an upper body day (Wednesday mornings) and a lower body day (whenever I can fit it in).

While those upper body days make an afternoon run a tad sluggish, I’ve been trying to find the ideal time to get that lower body day in. I knew I didn’t want to do it on a Friday before my long run. Nor did I want to do it Tuesday night after an interval workout or Monday the day before said interval workout. So, I’ve been doing it early Saturday afternoon following my long run and breakfast club meal, subscribing to the idea that you keep the hard days hard and the easy days easy. That gives me roughly 52 hours until my next run.

After getting up early to run last week and again on Saturday, “it,” as they say, caught up to me. I walked into the house after breakfast, cold-faced, wide-eyed, and slack-jawed. I went upstairs, eyed the bed, and turned away so I could quickly get out of my running clothes and into some gym clothes without being seduced into that perfect homeostasis where the air is cold but it's warm under the covers.

The gym was eerily quiet, made more so by the softly falling snow outside. I shivered watching the flakes fall onto the covered pool outside before lugging some dumbbells off the rack. I methodically went through each exercise, knowing that with each set crossed off, I was closer to that nap.

My lower body workout looks like this:

- 4x10 dumbbell squats
- 4x12 calf raises
- 4x8 deadlifts
- 4x10 kettlebell swings
- 3x10 single leg squats with weight
- 3x10 twisting lunges with a medicine ball

It takes about 45 minutes and not only chisels your legs but gives you the best night sleep of your life week in and week out.

The snow swirled around my car on the way home and the wind pushed my car from side to side. Luckily, my gym is in my neighborhood, so it’s a short drive (.8mi to be exact). In other words, it was the perfect day to pull on some compression socks, flannel pj pants, and a hooded sweatshirt and climb (gingerly) into bed, and close my eyes. And of course, a little German Opera to carry you into dreamland.

This Porridge is Too Boring

Please, sir. I'd like NO more.

If variety is the spice of life, then monotony is the gloppy porridge of the mundane.

Last Saturday, my breakfast club mates and I sat across from one another eagerly gulping at our fresh cups of coffee (our second “warm up” in less than 10 minutes). When the mugs hit the table again, we cast a long stare at one another, the road-worn and weathered faithful we’d become.

Finally someone spoke up. “I can’t do it again?”
“Do what?”
“I can’t do another out and back on the Mt. Vernon trail. Where else can we run next weekend?”

And so the plotting began.

I started experiencing what I’ve come to coin as “route fatigue,” and I define it as the point at which I can no longer mentally wrap my head around covering the same loop, path, or trail without thoughts of leaping in front of a car or throwing myself into the river popping into my head. It is the running equivalent of “Groundhog Day,”(Bing!), only instead of being trapped in Punxsutawney, I am locked in some strange purgatory that stretches from mile post 16 to mile post 5 on the Mt. Vernon Trail.

I think the first symptoms came way back in November after I completed my final 20-miler and headed into taper town. The euphoria of that "good time" faded and left me with this lingering hangover.

That same Saturday, I tried heading north on the trail toward D.C. and cutting over into the city for a few miles. The city miles helped some, but the dread of running past the airport in this interminable stretch of trail that climbs but never really seems to drop, coupled with the throngs of other runners, who for some reason think it’s ok to run four across the trail (can Team in Training work trail etiquette into their training plans, please?), flew around my head like the mosquito you continue to swat at but can’t ever make go away.

Whew. Ok, better now.

I hit this point a couple years ago, when the sidewalks and roads became impassable because the blizzards rolled in one after another like wave sets. I had one four mile loop that I could safely do without slipping or getting swiped by traffic. So whether the calendar called for six miles or 18 miles, I ran it over and over and over and over again, until my nerves frayed…

Anyway.

With my Saturday distance creeping back up again (14 mile cut down run tomorrow), I’m thrilled – and even a little giddy – at the thought of a “new” trail tomorrow. As we hatched our plan, one of the most important factors of course became that the route be near a breakfast place. So, we settled on the W&OD Trail, a 45 mile stretch that features long steady climbs and equal descents from Alexandria, VA to Purcellville, VA.

In the somewhat edited words of Goldilocks, “This porridge is too boring.” Time to spice things up.