Running Letters - 14
yoked and stoked
I’ve started a new policy of hilariously incremental strength training at work.
To enter my office, aka my work shed, I must do a pullup using the 2-inch edge on top of the door jam. I even installed some grip tape to season the skin and sand off excuses about sweaty hands or slick paint.
To leave my office I have to drop down and hit one or two pushups. I’m mixing those up: diamond, clap, feet elevated, seal splayed, strict, wide, offset, archer, etc.
I’m getting some minor activation of fingers, forearms, lats, biceps, triceps, shoulders, and pecs even while I’m trapped at my lovely place of employment. A few students have noticed. If I’m radicalizing the youth, which of course I hope I am, it’s in the dark arts of sneaking fitness progress into vocational and intellectual pursuits.
I’ve logged 44 finger pullups and 53 pushups so far. I know it’s not much, but it’s very much not nothing.
Hellbender is a mountain ultra and will require mountain muscles and mountain toughness. I want to be STOKED and YOKED. This slow drip approach should accrue a fair bit of additional strength and jacked-ness and general mountain rowdiness by exam week. I don’t think these incidental moves detract too much from my energy for running training.
When in doubt….move.
Hellbender is also apparently a very dangerous wilderness expedition if the required gear list is any indication. From the most recent informational email sent to all registrants:
And a reminder of our required gear list as you start planning your race. Due to the unpredictable mountain weather on this course we will require all RUNNERS and PACERS to carry the following gear at ALL times for their safety. This includes: headlamp, back-up light and batteries, flashing redlight to be worn on the back during nighttime road sections, weather proof jacket (seam-sealed), emergency bivy (an emergency blanket does not count), insulating long sleeve base layer, warm hat and gloves, emergency whistle, calories, hydration carrier (40oz+), water filter/purification, cell phone or Garmin inReach, and GPS unit provided by the race. We will be very strict about these gear requirements. We will have mandatory gear checks before race start, and at multiple times during the race. We will reserve the right to pull runners and/or pacers from the course at any time if you are not carrying the required gear.
Bruh, chill.
That’s a lot.
Time to spend some money and load down my vest. So much for my weight management mantra—“the lean wolf leads the pack.” So much for a clean and unencumbered aesthetic. So much for showing off my new office-chiseled physique by running shirtless with one bottle and a gel in my little belt thingy.
I’m getting a little antsy about my running volume and the rapid approach of the race. Block 2 is done (grades down below). There are only two more blocks and then a taper to go! Oh how time keeps going, too fast and too slow at the same time.
Will I be ready? Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter this week reminded me that “no one is every ready.”
So true. No need to panic train. I can’t cram for this exam.
I’ll just stay on the Righteous Path, building slowly, forever. Coach K has me training hard but sensibly. Hellbender will get the Crispy I give it, and that will be enough. I won’t win, but I will finish, and I will live to train, and read, and write another day.
Just because no one is ever ready doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try! If I keep waiting for perfect conditions, in my life, or in the world, or at work, to really crack on with this running and mountain adventuring thing, or writing the books I have planned, or reading all the books on my list, I’ll be on my deathbed any minute now wondering if tomorrow is the right day to start increasing my training volume a little bit.
So instead let’s of dying with training-volume-related regrets, let’s go pretty big right now and carry on building until fate strikes us down or we accomplish everything we’ve ever dreamed of at which point we can finally just garden and read poems and take care of our big rock and live in a little hobbit hole for the next several hundred years because that whispering salamander in Mohican was right and we’re actually wizards after all.
All this to say, I’m going to put in…
MY BIGGEST EVER RUNNING WEEK
(100-mile race weeks don’t count)
…to see how the body handles it. I’m hoping for 60 miles. Here is a brief history of my biggest ever running weeks. This whole review was prompted by Rowe on a recent run. Thanks for asking!
September 21st, 2020. 58 miles. Training for the MoFundo.
August 29th, 2022. 51 miles. Training for the Columbus Marathon.
April 3rd, 2023. 52 miles. Training for the Mohican 100.
April 7th, 2024. 55 miles. Training for the Mohican 100.
The response to my “super optionals” essay has been really gratifying. My typical readers of course ate it up (shout out Mom), but I also heard from new folks via DMs and text messages saying that they enjoyed it, and that it was moving or touching for them.
These little reactions mean a lot to me. They make the writing feel more worthwhile or validated or important to keep doing when I’m not in one of my occasional, semi-manic, states of inspiration. I started writing “super optionals” in November on our Thanksgiving vacation. I put it away for weeks at a time, but I occasionally pulled it back out for a few minutes to work on reorganizing a little section, or to select which pictures to use, or how much of my own feelings to inject into the summary, or which paragraphs to cut out entirely, then reinsert, then cut back out again, until eventually I was ready to share it with the world. Brandon Leonard calls these little messages of appreciation from readers “emotional paychecks.” My rainy day fund is full.
Rowe got second at the Super Bull Trail 5k today, running 27 flat on a very muddy, technical, and hilly course.
Meanwhile, I have been a very brave boy and survived a rest week. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing, just sitting there and enduring the palpable sense of time passing like a thick, chewy, sludge. You mostly just….wait. The training is working inside you. Slowly. Invisibly. You can’t check on it, by running long or fast, or you’ll ruin it.
The best recovery advice is the same as the best advice I’ve heard for saving money: “go inside your house and lay down.”
Listening to good advice sucks.
I find it all so painfully asymmetrical. You’re telling me I have to laze around, hardly moving, for seven days, in a row, just so I can run hard for the next 21?
Oh well, I guess it’s a good time to get caught up on some work stuff. Mostly I’ve been trying to follow the now-quite-famous Work Shorter plan: “work hard twice a week, long once a week, and then accumulate as few other work minutes as you can safely manage.” This rest week lets me accumulate some of those minutes so I can safely manage logging fewer between now and race day.
Hellbender 420 Grades for Week 7
Running quiz: Really lovely 20 miler in Mohican. I did it as a gentle squeeze-progression and PR’d a bunch of Strava segments without trying very hard. Feeling fit. A
Training: 56 miles on foot. 46 running. 10 hiking. 6,752 vert. 17:12 total training time. A
Reading: 216 pages. 2,443 total. B+
Writing: 2,500 new words in the manuscript. 35,573 total. A-
Hellbender 420 Grades for Week 8
Resting: 41 miles on foot. 30 running and 11 hiking. 2,953 feet up and down. 12:56 total training time. A for lack of effort
Writing: 3,266 more words in the manuscript. Things are taking shape nicely. I've also met my goal of publishing something every Sunday so far this semester. I’m really happy of myself. A
Reading: 290 pages this week. I finished two very different, but both very great, books—"Make It” by Brendan Leonard and “A Year in the Maine Woods” by Bernd Heinrich. I hope these two dudes have met. A+
One passage from the Heinrich made me think of my friends and smile:
The winter solstice was only three days away, and the urge to have a raucous good time among friends took hold. I jogged down the trail to the telephone, to call up reinforcements to engage in pagan rites under the stars.
I’m off for a brief training camp in the Smokies with Coach K.
Catch you in the morning moonlight,
Crispy