Tag Archives: Half-marathon

How much running is too much?

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I thought this was an interesting article about running too much. It sounds like there is no conclusive answer, but I am glad to hear that being a relatively amateur runner (a couple times a week for 3-4 miles) seems to be pretty good from a health perspective. Some highlights:

“… runners on average had a 19 percent lower risk of death during the study period (1971-2002) than a control group of nonrunners. The runners with the lowest death rate were those who ran less than 20 miles a week in 2 to 5 days of running at a pace of about 8:35/mile. Runners who ran more, or more days, or faster, had higher death rates.”

More good news: you don’t have to be super speedy either! (Although often I am more in the 9:00-9:30/mile pace.)

“… a group of 60+ year-old runners had half the death-rate of a matched group of their nonrunning peers. They also had much more “functionality,” and their improved-health gap vs. their peers appeared to be increasing with age.”

I imagine that the occasional half marathon is not too bad! (Especially if it gets you to come down from 318 lbs!)

November, 2006

July 2011

Asthma

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So, we promised to get back to the subject of Eyegirl needing an asthma inhaler.

Until the 500 Festival Mini-Marathon, she didn’t. Everything went well throughout the race. As usual, I was excited at the beginning and wanted to run fast, but Eyegirl was smart and paced herself. By 10-13 miles, I was dragging my butt along and she was doing fine and checking to make sure I was OK.

For the last half mile, awesome motivational rock music was playing over the speakers and tons of people were watching from the sidelines. I probably looked like a huge idiot playing air guitar as we strolled along the last stretch. As you can see from the picture, we crossed the finish line feeling pretty good! (Despite all the other states of emotion you can see in the picture. By the way, our actual time was under 3 hours, but as you can see our gun time was longer as it took us almost a half hour to get through the huge crowd at the starting line.)

As we started walking, I was looking around for the snacks and water, but thankfully one of our amazing US soldiers standing at the finish line noticed that Eyegirl was in distress, struggling to take deep breaths. He ushered her to the medical tent even though she wasn’t sure what was happening.

Fortunately, after about 30 minutes of water, rest, and albuterol treatments, she was back to normal. “You should go tell that soldier thanks for noticing I was in trouble,” she said, “I probably wouldn’t have realized I needed to go to the medical tent on my own.” So I did and he seemed to appreciate hearing back from us.  Not to get too off topic, but we are so grateful for our service men and women and encourage you to show them at every chance you get!

In the following weeks, her primary care doctor prescribed a personal albuterol inhaler to use before exercise, especially when it’s cold outside. Being new to this stuff, we are dummies and frequently forget to bring it.

Fast forward to last month. Eyegirl got a surprise day off from work and was able to run a 5K race with me as part of an event for my work. The fastest runner for each age group scores points for the company’s team, so I had the bright idea that we would split up and I would run as fast as I could to try to score the most points for our team. In the sense, the plan worked, since I ran my fastest 5K yet (26:25). However, in another sense, it didn’t work:

I was cooking along, somewhere around the 2.5 mile mark, where the course looped back on itself. This is great, I thought, I am really going fast and Eyegirl is probably right behind me. When I turn the corner, I will cheer her on big-time! I turned the corner and started scanning the crowd coming the other way: girl in pink…shirtless guy…a group of guys in skin-tight orange bodysuits… hmm, weird but don’t see Eyegirl yet – keep looking. There she is! “Alright, nice work!” I yelled.

But she didn’t smile. Instead, she pinched her fingers in front of her face. Yeah, it is smelly downtown. For some reason, there is often a sewage smell when you are down-wind around here. I kept running.

Strange, we’ve talked about that before, why would she feel the need to signal me regarding the sewage smell? By now, we had crossed paths and were out of each others’ sight.

Oh no, was she signaling that she needs her ashtma inhaler? It wasn’t really a nose pinch, but sort of a general pinch in front of the face. More up and down than side to side.  Crap! Should I turn around? I was nearing the finish line. What do I do? I know, I’ll scout the location of the medical tent and then watch for her to cross and take her there. Should I go tell them to get an inhaler ready?

It felt like forever watching the crowd come across the finish line. I hope she didn’t collapse out on the course! At least there were a lot of people around. But sure enough, she came blazing across the finish line. I waved her down, “Do you need your inhaler?”

She nodded and off we went to the medical tent.

After everything was all better, she told me, “I knew if I signaled, you would scout out the location of the medical tent and be waiting to take me there.”

“Oh good, that worked out well then. I thought I was just panicking.”

Sometimes we’re really on the same page.

The race that almost wasn’t, part 2

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Race report, part 2 (probably not as exciting as part 1)

So, despite the garage door trying it’s best to prevent us from getting to the race, we made it on time to the start line and even had a few minutes to stretch and get loosened up. “I can’t believe we made it,” I said with a hoarse voice from the Tarzan-yelling.

Eyegirl took a puff from her asthma inhaler and we put it in my cycling jersey rear pocket. I think it was actually a great choice to wear the cycling jersey. Maybe I looked like a dummy, but I hardly noticed having the inhaler in there, compared to my shorts pocket, where I am always worried things will fall out.

We agreed in advance to walk the first mile, especially since a good warm up is supposed to be helpful in preventing an asthma attack. (We are new to this asthma stuff, and need to soon write about the story of how we discovered it.) It’s tempting to start running at the beginning of a race, especially when everyone is buzzing past you, but the more experience we have accumulated with running, the more we are starting to realize that a little bit of walking doesn’t seem to affect your overall time that much.

So, we crossed the first mile marker somewhere around 15 minutes and started at our usual jogging pace. The weather was pretty much ideal, we thought and the scenery was nice, lots of leaves changing color and the course snakes through the State Park. One thing that we both found frustrating though about the route was that in a number of places, the course loops back on itself, so you see the runners ahead of you coming back for a long time and not sure when the turn around is going to happen. On the plus side, this did mean that we got to see the leaders blazing by at their insane 5 minute pace.

Anyhow, we plugged along, mostly with my bum dragging behind Eyegirl at least a few steps. (My pre-race prediction was that I would start strong, feeling good and wanting to run faster, and then somewhere around the middle, I would be dragging and Eyegirl would be just getting into high gear. Pretty much came true.) I was worried because we had forgotten the energy chews in the scramble to leave, and the banana smoothie was the only thing she had to eat. But of course, she is a champ and blasted through the race, proving you don’t need much special equipment to get it done.

Normally it bothers me a little that endurance athletes use the term “suffering,” especially cyclists, to describe what they are doing. After all, we run and ride our bikes for fun. But for this race, I really did feel like I needed to gather up some willpower to keep going through miles 10-13. (Maybe because we didn’t train nearly enough on the longer distances.) For the last mile, I kept wondering, where is the finish line?

We eventually saw it, and crossed with our best half marathon time yet, 2:36:40, still not too speedy compared to some of you folks out there, but about 5 minutes faster than our previous attempt! Another reason the cycling jersey came in handy: Normally when we finish a race, I grab a banana, granola bar, and water, then realize after it’s too late that I wish I had picked up some more snacks. This time, especially since Eyegirl had not had too much to eat, I grabbed a bunch of things and put them in my pockets. This worked out great, since I mentioned that I had also forgotten my wallet and we were going to have to make it home before we could get some lunch.

Thanks to all of the volunteers who helped with this race!

Unfortunately we don’t have any pictures from the race itself (forgot the camera in the scramble), but here is an “after” picture:

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