Duluth

Such a white sparkly winterland out there.  Dusk to night.  Overlooking the St. Louis River and Duluth/Superior in our treehouse at the top of Spirit Mountain.  Skiers still skiing.  Steve all bundled and enjoying a cigar and Thirsty Pagan beer on the deck.  After listening (appropriately) to Trampled by Turtles, 1971 Neil Young at the Massey now sings Old Man, which, of course, makes one reflective.

"24 and there's so much more."  Wow.

Last full day of vacation.  Sigh.

Packers/Vikings play-off game at 7 and going to President's to watch the first half.  Really??

Running in the Pool

Not an actual pool, but it felt like a pool. We started this morning with the air fully saturated - so muggy it was foggy. Steve had a 16.2 miler planned (he's training for Whistlestop too) and as the weather forecast crystallized, he started complaining. On Thursday. This pretty much continued through this morning until we got to where I was starting our run in Victoria. Then I took off (I was doing 20.4) and mom & dad got to ride with the Mister Complainy Pants until he started his run in Excelsior.

But he rocked! I'd planned our runs so we'd get back to our house about the same time, and he beat me by a full 10 minutes. And when we talked about it afterward, he even liked parts of it! The Budweiser frogs, the beauty of the fog over Lake Minnetonka, the woodsy trail. The best part was finishing and polishing off a Blue Cow Caffrey's sandwich (roast beef, a little bacon, blue cheese - mmmm) and a wheat beer.

Post Boston

It was a good day to run. Good weather, great crowds, and a finishing time of 4:14:11 - 16 minutes faster than my sandbagged 4:30 goal time. The course was deceptively easy until Newton, and then the real marathon started. They tell you about the Newton hills, but they're even bigger in real life. At least you have all the drunk guys at Boston College to cheer you over the top and down the other side. I have to say, though, I ran a good race with a 2:08 first half and 2:06 second half. And even better, we got to spend 6 days with our excellent friends David & Michele and their kids Marten & Consi & Enya.

Hola Amigos/as !

It seems We are mudded. That means white walls and even primed and ready for paint.

Many thanks to The Action Team including: AlienAllan Carr, Jimi Owens, Brian Mccarthy, Mark GutzGutzmer, Jimmy theK Kleinman, Rev Barry White, and Wifey Nancy for their intellectual, physical, and ergonomic efforts. It's starting to look like it might get done. Stay tuned...

RIP Uptown Bar

So many wonderful, fun memories, from dating days to married days, hanging out with Michele & Mort Necros & all our other neighborhood pals, eating nachos, enjoying the best chef salad in Mpls, curing hangovers with bloodys and hash browns (and the #7 with fiberglass cheese). It was Steve's after-bartending hangout. Steve went to the second-to-last concert there last night and got to sing with the band - dressed in his Elvis suit. Sigh. All good things come to an end :(

The Race

It was the wind that woke me up - the sound coming into my fragmented sleep, shaking the leaves, whooshing up the street. I got up and looked out at the streetlight, taking in the inch of wet snow on the ground and the horizontal slashes of snow in front of the light. A good time to pee.

I knew the bad weather was coming. You train and train and train for a marathon, but when the day comes, nature sees it as any other day, and any random crazy weather thing can happen. So on this day in early October, nature’s randomness produced snow and sub-freezing temperatures. Okay. What are you gonna do? Go back to bed, get a couple more hours of rotisserie “sleep,” and see what it looks like at 6:30.

At 6:30 the snow had stopped, there were pretty, puffy clouds scooting across a sky with occasional peeks of just-dawn blue, and the temperature was 25. At this point the questions are purely practical ones: What will the weather be during the window from 9 AM to 1 PM when I’m running? Tights or capris? Tee-shirt under the jacket or long-sleeves? I know I have Steve planning to meet me at miles 8, 16 and 20 along the course, so I will have the option of dumping clothes or taking more on, but I’ve also learned that it’s good to be prepared for your person not being there at all (anything could happen! It could snow in October!) I dress in things I know I can handle for the whole distance. Just in case.

The other thing is having a backup race plan. I want to run this marathon in under four hours. Bad. In 1991 I ran my first marathon. I finished in 4:00:51. Since then I’ve run eight more, none of them faster, and a few far slower. But the last two have been good - my most recent one in May qualified me for Boston in 4:04:40. My plan had been to qualify for Boston in today’s race, but by the grace of the running gods I got it in Madison. So here I am with my final running goal: break four hours; a goal I’ve had in front of me for almost 20 years. It’s bigger than Boston. It’s personal. And, almost 20 years after I almost got there, I really wasn’t sure if I could do it.

But the thing about goals like this is that if you fail to meet them, you feel crappy - and I don’t want to feel crappy about finishing a marathon, or even attempting to finish one. I still recognize this as a pretty cool accomplishment. So - the backup plan. I have three running plans: the “in my dreams” sub-four-hour time, the time I know I can do, and the “I’m just gonna finish” time. Today, though, because the weather was looking very iffy, I had a fourth plan: bail out and run a different marathon two weeks later with the hope of breaking through the four-hour wall then. Part of the reason to have Steve at miles 16 and 20 was to have the option to say, “Uh-uh - not today.”

Yeah, but I still really want to do it today. And when we get to the start, the wind has let up, the snow has stopped, and the morning is actually, truly, quite lovely. Snow hangs on the leaves, which have all their fall colors. The sun breaks through the clouds. Every breeze shakes down crystals of snow that sparkle in the sunlight as they fall against the reds and yellows of the leaves. It’s cold, but cold is better than hot for running as far as I’m concerned. It’s, well, perfect. And after a couple of manic photos, we are off.

It takes a couple miles to get into the groove, and after that, it takes some concentration to deal with the dirt trail on which this marathon is run. It’s loose in the middle, and the sides are only slightly better. But, man, it’s awfully pretty, and soon the miles are clicking by, and the trail is improving, and I’m feeling good, very good. I see Steve, I reach the halfway mark at almost 1:59, the spectators and race volunteers are wonderful, I see Steve again at 16 and finally again at 20, still feeling very good, and then somewhere between miles 23 and 24, I start running out of steam. This is where it gets real. But I am still on track to finish in under four hours - all I have to do at this point is maintain anything under a 10-minute mile. And I’ve been running just under 9s. I know I’m going to make it. This alone is enough jet fuel to get me through those last three miles.

The wind had picked up a couple hours into the race, but it’s been felt mostly as a tailwind or maybe a crosswind as we’ve run the forested course. But at mile 26, making the turns in the open to the finish, we feel its full force. It is a mighty wind that makes me grateful I wasn’t running into its maw for 26 miles; I just have to suck it up for the last two tenths. How hard is that? And look at my time coming to the finish line - 3:54!! I pump my arms and smile huge: a good day to run after all.

Happy Vacation Wonderland

Vacation=wake, coffee, run, breakfast, newspaper, read, adventure, hammock, fish, cocktails, dinner, fish, read, doze, repeat.

Bayview lodge was almost a month ago but recent snow[s] remind of us blissful 2 weeks of perfect sweatshirt mornings followed by sunny afternoons. We scored on the weather and lost track of days= perfect. Mark and Jenee joined us for tequila, action was tempered with idleness, and relaxation was achieved. So good to return to magic place of boyhood wanderings [?].

We could handle being retired up here ...