I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of inefficiency.

I said this to a coworker the other night as I shut off the Bissel sound machine, which at some point in its short life also doubled as a vacuum cleaner. After a few more passes over the same speck of dust on the rug, I was ready to give up. Two platitudes warred: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" was ultimately drowned out by "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." I shut off the vacuum and pulled out the broom instead.

Sometimes I wonder this about my running. I'm slow, often painfully so, and half the time I'm at peace with this knowledge--that is, on the days my legs are fresh and I'm hitting my target pace, I tell myself it's okay that my long runs often are two to four minutes slower per mile than my shorter (5-10 mile) runs. Basically I do the same thing over and over again, and wait for the results to change--while riding a long, long plateau.

About two weeks ago, I had my longest run ever. I completed 18 miles in about three and a half hours, a pace that should have left me feeling comfortable, though tired and sore. I hydrated throughout the run, consumed a scant few calories even, and while I was tired mentally that last mile, I felt fine. I shouldn't have been dry-heaving for half an hour after I stopped. I shouldn't have passed out on the community's gym floor, where I stopped when I couldn't make the extra two hundred foot walk to my apartment. I shouldn't have had to sleep for three hours after I was finally able to crawl out of the bathroom.

And then I woke up the next morning, banged out six more miles, and went on with my life.

This coming Wednesday, I have another long run ahead and frankly after my last performance, I'm terrified. What did I do wrong last time? What can I change this time around? I am capable of completing this distance--I'm stubborn to a fault and will likely die trying to meet a distance goal someday--but I'd like to do so without the foam around the mouth, gelatinous legs, migraine-level headaches and fever. And at a pace faster than 11:40 miles.

This week I'll change up my nutrition, because quite frankly, even though my stomach tightens and can't hold food during a run, NOT eating (and getting in sodium) hasn't helped my body cover  long distances with any degree of efficiency.

I'm not sure 50 kilometers is going to be as nice to me as my last 18-miler.

Marathon Training: A week in review

Last Sunday, I ran 11 miles. The following day, I ran another 10. Tuesday morning over a bowl of oatmeal, breakfast ice cream and a few bananas, I decided I needed to develop a base if I was going to keep running like this. Four ten-mile runs in a one-week period was probably more than my undeveloped running muscles could handle, and I'm still getting a grip on what it means to fuel. (Hence ice cream at 7 a.m.)

The marathon seems like a good place to start. I downloaded some generic "intermediate" training plan after breakfast, and started plugging all the mileage into my Google calendar. Because of Monday's unnecessary long run, I picked up the training plan a day late. This schedule does exactly what I need it to. It lets me run six days a week, gives me a mandatory rest day--something I'm not very good with--and forces me to incorporate a speed workout.

Wednesday was a 6-mile run. Nothing to shake a stick at. Thursday I ran 4 miles, and clocked in averaging an 8:48 mile. I liked the short distance because I could run faster. That is, until I ran into a steep hill charging at an 8:20 pace that degenerated into an 11 minute per mile shuffle. Friday I ran 6 miles, pacing under a 9-minute mile. Was I already getting faster?

Saturday's 3-mile run started off poorly. As I was rounding the corner of my apartment community's parking lot, one of the cars facing the street honked at me. Startled, I stumbled and fumbled with my iPhone to pause my run tracker. The woman sitting in the driver's seat could have been 40 or 70, dressed in a bathrobe and draped with a blanket. The car had a stale cigarette smell, and I pitied the aging golden retriever wheezing in the passenger's seat. The back was filled with junk,  probably everything the lady owned.

"Tell me how to get to McDonald's," she said. I had to step back, because the cigarette smoke was burning my already over-taxed lungs.

I haven't been in a McDonald's in over six years, and I've stopped "seeing" them. They're everywhere. I gave the woman some generic directions to what might have been a McDonald's, or a Taco Bell, or a Wendy's. I'm still not sure, all I know is there's some fast food restaurant where I directed her, because I'd used the drive-thru to reach the street on a previous day's run.

Despite the interruption, overall it wound up being a nice short run with negative splits, averaging an 8:32 pace.

Sunday's 10-mile run was a drag. I'd made a gel with chia seeds and agave nectar, which I tried to sip while I was still jogging and managed to inhale the seeds, some of which are still lodged in my nose.

Today is a rest day, which I will use to (possibly) get another few thousand words into my novella-in-progress, and (hopefully) extract the sprouting chia seeds from my nasal cavity.

Long distance versus speed..

I'm not a fast runner.

I accept this fact. There was a time in my running life, back in college when I had definition in my abs and an 8-minute mile was my easy day. But that time has come and gone.

Nowadays, I've shortened my stride. Slowed myself down to enjoy the mountains. I stop to take pictures, slow down on the uphills and focus on my footwork. I try to convince myself I run because I love to run, and not to get faster or break any land speed records.

However, I don't find that I'm any easier on myself at the end of the run, and while I shouldn't make any excuses for my performance (unless it's valid), I need to take some pause before doing so.

I ran an easy 10 miles today. I went out knowing it was going to be long and slow, and I had no idea how fast it was going to be. Didn't really care, because it was cold, windy, raining, maybe snowing, and cloudy in Denver for the first time in ages. I finished the run at about a 10-minute pace with splits all over the place because of long and steep hills. I felt good the whole way, never feeling like I was exerting too much energy and ended back at my apartment fairly certain I could run another several miles at the same pace comfortably.

Then I really looked at my numbers, and felt defeated. No, I didn't hurt at mile 4, but I could have sworn I was running at least a 9-minute pace. Did I really only finish the final mile in 9:58, because I swore I was flying!

Afterwards, I compared my time with my last easy long run, a 9.29 mile lap up the road and back about two months ago. I averaged a 10:51 pace that run (even when I paused the timer to take the two pictures at Bear Creek on the right, which I ran by today under heavy cloud cover). I did almost a minute better per mile over a longer distance today.

Long distances are humbling. It isn't just how physically fit you are, but mentally prepared as well. Two hours of running, four, six, twenty-four hours... it takes more than strong legs to get you there.

And gives you a greater appreciation for the view!

How school almost made me hate running but then taught me to appreciate it

To me, gym class always seemed like punishment. I was short, overweight and painfully shy, so this loud, highly social class was always a struggle for me. If choosing teams in gym class were the litmus test for popularity, I was consistently the least popular kid in school--even though my volleyball serve was killer. None of that really bothered me, though. The only thing I was really, truly frightened of was the dreaded mile run.

In middle school, the "mile" was us running 9 and a half times around our school yard, where the gym teacher would heckle us as we plodded along, telling us that he sees a 60-year-old man out there every day running the mile, and we couldn't catch up to him at the pace we were going. That meant little to me then, because as an overweight 12-year-old, I could barely shlog a lap, much less run it. ("Shlog" is a word I will use frequently.)

I turned 27 earlier this month, and if I stretch my spine and keep really good posture, the top of my head can hit the 5'3" mark. I know for sure when I was 14 years old, I wasn't quite up to my full height potential, but was already pushing 150 pounds, and still couldn't run half a mile without stopping.

I went to one of the city's top high schools where the academics were rigorous, and gym class was no exception--I thought they were joking when they said we'd have written exams in every class. Besides the actually tests we had in gym, the teacher was... tough. She was a no-excuses woman who was rumored to be a retired drill sergeant. And she had us out running 4 miles in a single gym period.

If we didn't meet certain goals in one gym period, we'd be out running the next day. If we ran one day, but didn't meet the expectations set for us, we'd be out again the next day. Normally we'd know it was a running day because she would chase us out of the locker rooms and out the front door. Some days, we'd be settled into the gymnasium ready to do ANYTHING but running, and--surprise!--out the door we'd go for a 3-mile time trial. We were just out there, sprinting laps or trying to race the gym teacher around the track. I dry-heaved a few times at the end of a run, came close to vomiting more than once. Some kids did throw up on the track.

Running became punishment for me, and the idea that some people did this for fun absolutely boggled my mind. I watched the tall, lean cross-country kids glide along the track effortlessly, while I was running (shlogging) mile after mile with terrible form, in cotton T-shirts or sweatshirts and Payless-brand sneakers, with no access to water and a really, really bad attitude following me every quarter-mile.

Eventually all that running did pay off. There were other things going on in my life at the time, but by my third year in high school, I had lost nearly 30 pounds. I stopped skipping laps on the track. I still couldn't finish four miles in a gym period, but I could jog 3 without stopping. And over the summer, every once in a while once or twice a month, I'd even go out for a short fun run in the park near my house.

The seed was planted, but it took years to germinate and grow to its full potential. Even now, when anyone comments on my form, how far or fast or whether I should focus on intervals or weight training, I find myself retreating a little because it reminds me of the time when running wasn't fun. But then I get over it. Or put the volume up a little louder on my iPod.

It's just blood

I've been planning some kind of epic first post outlining my motivation for starting a blog in a feeble attempt to make it different from all other beginner running blogs. To emphasize how I went from non-runner to halfhearted runner to oh-my-gods-I-love-being-a runner and all the road dirt and trail mud caked to my legs is something I should be proud of.

I'm still somewhere between "this doesn't suck so much anymore" and "halfhearted."

But (there always is one), I don't think I'll be running for a few days now, so I may as well use Post One for lamentations on why I won't be logging miles.

Last night, I heard my cat scratching up my sofa. We have two cats, the Wants-To-Be-Good one who weighs nearly 20 pounds and thinks sitting on our faces and purring like an engine is what we want him to do, and the Generally-Evil-With-Sweet-Moments one, who waits until we're in bed to scratch on the couch because he knows we won't do anything about it. Just look at that face... pure evil! Since this happens every night, normally I roll over, put the pillow over my head and try to ignore it. It was a cheap World Market sofa, anyway.

This night, however, is different from most other nights in that I wasn't so comfortably settled into bed that I couldn't get up to do something about it. In fact, my partner and I were watching a pretty depressing documentary about mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia when all I selfishly wanted to do was finish reading my book.

My partner swears he was going to tell me not to do it, but I grabbed a pillow anyway and ran into the living room. Now, I'd never actually hit my cat (and admit to it publicly), but he has an irrational fear of pillows being swung through the air in his general direction, and my intention was to condition him against scratching the furniture. Scratch the furniture, crazy pillow-wielding ladies will come after you. Simple enough for a small cat-mind to comprehend, yes?

On my clumsy amble into the living room, I felt my pinky toe scratch against something. It hurt, but I was on a mission. Jack, the furniture-destroying cat, was already hiding under the coffee table. Somehow I found myself on the floor clutching my foot and screaming about how I'd removed my toenail. For whatever reason, we have a brick propping the bedroom door open, and I'd kicked that on my way out the door.

My partner grabbed our backpacking first-aid kit, ready to use the skills we developed when we took a Wilderness First Aid course. While he was rummaging around for it, I peeked under my hand and tried to make sense of where all the blood was coming from. My toenail was fine. What I had actually done was ripped the tip of my pinky toe off. Once I had finished screaming (I'm not very good at dealing with injuries) and the river of blood slowed to a trickle, we irrigated the wound, dabbed some triple antibiotic ointment around the toe, wrapped it in gauze and tape, and crossed our fingers that the skin would reattach in the morning.

So far, so good. This morning, without investigated too closely and disrupting the healing process--or throwing up--everything looks like it's stitching back together. Hopefully it will stop throbbing and I'll be back on the trail by Monday so I can use my new running toy!