Jamie Block Mayer a dynamo you should know

Posted on February 14, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

Mayer smiling.jpgJamie Block Mayer is not much more than five feet tall. Her legs are thus in perpetual motion as she speeds along at just over 6:00 pace in a 5k. Those legs keep her going for much longer than that as well. Last fall she won the women’s division of the Fox Valley Marathon in St. Charles, Illinois in a time of 3:19.

“I was running along and after about ten miles people started shouting that I was third woman,” she recalls. “And they said I wasn’t far behind second. So I decided I’d try to catch her. Then I was going through fifteen or so and people kept telling me I wasn’t far behind the first girl. So I thought, ‘I’ll try to catch her too.’ But then I was in first, and it wasn’t as fun trying to hold the lead as it was to catch people.”

mayer-fox-valley-finishYet she did hold the lead, and the joy on her face coming across the finish line expresses the relief and thrill of accomplishing a win in a marathon with more than 1000 competitors. “I try not to make things too complicated,” she says of her training leading up to the race. “It’s pretty much 40 miles a week with a tempo run and some intervals every week. A friend named Mike Behr told me how to train a few years back and I’ve tried to follow the same program. Maybe I’ll go online and find something that sort of matches. Then I just do it.”

Some tease her about the regimen she uses in training. Her Strava feed shows a series of out and back or loop courses leading from her home. They don’t vary much. “I have my 5K, 10K, 10-mile and 12-mile runs,” she relates. “Even when I run with other people like Mike, he’ll say, ‘Let’s turn here’ and I’ll go, ‘No, that’s not on my loop.”

mayer-famllyHer schedule and obligations demand that kind of focus. She is a professor at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. She has her Ph.D. in Communications Disorders and Neuroscience and instructs her students in Speech Pathology. Her husband Steve, an orthopedic physician with Northwestern Medicine, threw her a nice little party when she received tenure a few years back.

And while Steve is also an endurance athlete and an Ironman triathlete, the two seldom (if ever) train together. Their paces and priorities typically don’t match up given her penchant for speed and his focus on longer races.

mayer-finish“I won a 5K a few years ago,” Jamie notes. “I was just over 6:00 pace. And I’m pretty competitive in every race I enter. A couple years back at the Sycamore Pumpkinfest 10K I was standing next to this 20-something girl at the starting line and she was going on about how she was up late partying and didn’t feel that great. But then she beat me. And I was pissed,” she laughs.

Thus it isn’t age that defines Jamie Block Mayer, but the purity of effort and the joy of participation. She encourages the same love of sports in her children Tara, age 12, Max, age 9 and Ellie, age 6. The eldest is involved in gymnastics. The middle child has earned national championships in the sports of tumbling and trampoline. Her youngest seems headed for considerable achievements in gymnastics as well.

That schedule of getting kids to practices is shared by the couple, and that’s another reason why Jamie and Steve don’t often train together. “We have to get the kids where they need to go,” she observes.

With a running career that began in her early 20s, Jamie has achieved some notable accomplishments herself, qualifying for Boston a few years back. She ran the race in 2013 when the bombings hit near the finish line. “I heard a noise but I was down by the buses getting my gear,” she recalls. “Then Steve called me and said “Run!” and I answered, “I just got done running! Then he said, ‘Something really bad just happened. Get somewhere safe.”

Thus her experience in one of the world’s most famous marathons was colored by terror and tragedy. Thankfully such events have been rare in the world of road racing.

mayersPerhaps that contrast was more in evidence as she raced the bike trails in the Fox Valley Marathon last fall. The race follows the Fox River south to Aurora and back to St. Charles. Typically the weather has been fair and clear for the race, with leaves starting to change and the river surface reflecting the glory of the valley. The predominant noise is often the honking of geese and the cheers of happy fans staged along the course.

It’s almost hard to imagine those short Jamie Mayer legs carrying her the entire marathon distance. But anyone that has seen her run dispenses with those concerns immediately. And as she rounded the final corner into the finish of the Fox Valley Marathon with that huge smile on her face, the crowd cheered her every step. Jamie Block Mayer was very much in her element because while she may be small in stature, she believes in doing big things.

 

 

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Learning to smile on the hills

Posted on February 13, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

hillsYesterday we ran 10 miles in the Morton Arboretum, a hilly landscape in suburban Chicago. There aren’t than many places in northeastern Illinois where you get a set of hills so close together. The Arb cover a series of glacial kames in DuPage County. That means it is an attractive place to train for dozens of runners who descend on the place every Saturday and Sunday morning.

Our planned 10-miler took a tour of the east loop first. The road climbs gradually through a pine woods and winds toward the far east side. That’s where a semi-native forest of maple trees covers terrain that drains to the wetlands below. On summer days the humidity in these woods can prevent the pavement from drying. That means dangerous footing where moss lurks on the road edges. Cyclists must be careful in sections where the asphalt stays slick with morning dew.

For runners, the same holds true in winter months when melting snow can create wide patches of black ice. Fortunately for us, the roads were dry due to a prolonged warm spell that wiped out the snow several weeks ago. The temps were in the low 30s when we started out. That meant there were few other obstacles to address. It was just us, the hills, and ten miles to cover.

Hill running form

Sue has been working on hills over the winter months. Her coach has her doing treadmill work on inclines, and we’ve gone to several sweet hills to do repeats. So her technique in hill running has improved.

It’s a fine line for many people to figure out the optimal hill running form.

hills-leaning-backYou can’t just run up a hill using the same running form you use on the flats and expect the same efficiency and results. The simple physics of hill running demand a change in strategy and technique. Runners who employ a fairly erect body position while running on the flat would actually find themselves leaning somewhat backwards if they tried to maintain the same relative position to the ground.

That means leaning into the hill is important. But you also don’t want to get your head so far forward that you’re actually falling uphill. That’s not efficient either. So the extremes are something to avoid.

The ideal running position will vary depending on the degree of uphill you are climbing. Some of this takes practice to make perfect. Sue’s coach has been having her do hill repeats and it took several sessions for her to get a feel in combining her midfoot strike with proper arm carriage.

Don’t lose drive!

hills-leaning-forwardIt seems so simple, and yet there are plenty of people who make the mistake of carrying their arms a bit too high. You actually lose the companion drive necessary to run hills well when carrying the arms too high. But you also don’t want to straighten the arms completely when running hills. By definition that forces you to lengthen your stride in sync with the arms. That’s not the most efficient way to climb either long or short hills.

The ideal “structure” to arm carriage is having the forearms at about ninety degrees from the upper arm. This provides optimal swing capability and prevents you from “shrugging” your way up the hill by tucking your arms against your chest like a T Rex.

Watch your knee lift!

The optimal amount of knee lift is going to vary from runner to runner. So much depends on body structure, flexibility and the normal amount of knee lift engaged in the running stride. But this isn’t what you want to change anyway.

It is the ability to run off the midfoot that will produce the most drive in any type of running style. That is what you need to practice on hills before doing long, hilly runs in hopes of developing better efficiency.

Learning to drive uphill using a forefoot stride is far better than trying to “heel” your way up the same hill. Think about it: landing on your heels while going uphill actually requires you to lift your leg higher off the ground in order to place your heel in the next stride. That’s a bit of repeatedly wasted motion that gains you zero forward impetus. You’re actually putting the brakes on the entire way up the hill.

Paw your way up

The better way to hill run is to the “paw” your way up the hill using a “sweeping” motion with your forefoot as the principle point of contact. You’ll still have sufficient opportunity to push off with the foot. The degree of hill you are climbing simply demands that. But the propulsion of “toeing off” in combination with a ninety-degree arm swing is what produces the most drive up a hill.

This can all seem impossible when you’re in the middle of a steep hill in the middle of a long run such as ten miles. But that’s when you shorten your stride a bit and increase the cadence. It sounds counterintuitive, but you have to “let the running happen” in those moments. Sure, fatigue may be sinking into your thighs, but keeping that slight forward lean and driving with the arms and toe push off will get you up and over far better than sitting back on your heels and laboring along.

Build confidence!

Running hills in training can do plenty to build confidence in this respect. Run 100-meter intervals as a starting point. Focus on the feel of proper arm swing and consistent forward progress. Then increase your interval to 200 meters or about 1:30-2:00 sessions going uphill.

When you’ve built some confidence you’ll also have built some strength in hill running. This you can begin to employ in longer sessions where you run up a 400-meter hill if you can find one, and jog back down for recovery. Work your way up to ten of these intervals.

Then when you head out for a ten-mile run with hills, you will no longer face each one with such trepidation or concern that you can finish the job.

Steeping the muscles

hills-full-driveIn situations where truly steep, short hills stand in your path, the entire process gets compressed even further. Increase the forward lean, get serious with the toe push off and concentrate on an even, measured running stride. It’s common to start off too hard by charging into the hill. Better to use your forward progress as a relative measure of speed. Power your way up the hill rather than sprint it. Most of all, understand that you’re calling on some energy reserves in the process. These tend to be your sprinting muscles, which exhaust themselves more quickly. You may find that burning sensation uncomfortable, but it does not mean you are finished for the day. Often the other muscles take over when you’re up the hill and moving on the flats. Trust your body. It can carry you through.

More than anecdotes

I well recall a hill at the three-mile mark of a six-mile loop in a half-marathon in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The hill went up the side of a bluff and was nearly a half mile long. We ran and ran up that hill and toward the top, my butt literally started to lock up. That meant I’d fully engaged the driving muscles on the hill. A part of me worried that I’d burnt all the matches in the box. Yet after the crest came a long downhill and within 100 meters I was flying down the other side. I finished the race just over 1:11 that day. Not a bad effort on a tough course.

But the worst road race for hills was a 10-miler near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There was hardly a flat mile in the entire race. I went out with the leaders that day, who seemed to ignore the hills and took us through the first two miles in just over 5:00-mile pace. I hung with them through five when the ultimate leader pulled away. A pack of us fought up hills and down, at times flying on the downhills faster than 5:00 pace, then climbing another steep hill at over 6:00 pace. A topographic map of that race would have looked like the fibrillation of a dying heart patient. And at times, it felt that way inside my own body.

I still finished in 54:00, possibly one of the best running efforts I’d ever accomplished. There have been other hilly races including a four-miler in Glen Ellyn, Illinois where my time of 20:00 flat was exceptional given the massively hilly terrain on which the race was held.

Small proofs equal big progress

These are small proofs that it pays to take pride in your hill running, and work at it. There is no sense trying to fake it or avoid the fact that there are hills in this world. The pride and confidence you gain in climbing tough hills during training has direct applications in racing.

The same holds true for cyclists. Training on hills is a crucial source of strength-building. The techniques for successful climbing include consistent pedal strokes using both quads and hamstrings, and utilising core strength to support these two muscle groups. Clipped into a bike, it is yours to funnel strength all the way down to the pedals. It is a very different transfer of power from running. You almost want to pull your way up most hills rather than push exclusively with the thighs.

Yet there is beneficial transfer of strength from hill training in running and cycling. The psychology is much the same as well. There is no place to hide, but then again, that’s the point. It’s the hidden strength you build by practing on hills that exposes your true abilities. So go for it. Seek out those hills and do the work that builds strength and confidence. Then you’ll learn to smile as you head on up. “I can do this! I can run (or ride) this hill!”

And that’s where you want to be.

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The curse of the snack attack

Posted on February 10, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

A dietitian friend and multisport associate on Linkedin posted a description of how to manage snacking. I read the recommendation and something in my brain did not quite process it the way it should be. So I joked with her, because I’ve consulted with her previously about nutrition for athletes.

Laurie Snack Attacks.jpg

I was playing the part of the athletic fool, of course. But like most athletes, I’ll dig up any kind of excuse for a snack. Just writing the word snack makes me feel snackier.

So you have to set up some rules for yourself. Or else snacks will take over your life.

The key thing with snacking (as any fool can tell you…) is to cut down sugar and carbs. These are the foods that make us fat. They make me fat anyway.

But cutting them out can be tough because sugar is everywhere. It’s hiding in everything. Sometimes it’s even hiding in plain sight. That’s the case with the muffins and other goodies at Starbucks. They just plop those fat and sugar bombs right in the line of sight while you’re standing in line.

It’s so hard to resist. A good muffin is like a hot mess of carbohydratey goodness. “Eat me!” it hisses through the glass. “C’mon, eat meeeeee…”

It’s like that at just about every other coffee shop in this universe. And we’re at our weakest point when we’re starving from having just completed a run, ride or swim early in the morning.

Last weekend after an eight-mile run we happened to be parked by a popular Sunday morning breakfast place called Harner’s. It’s a classic local restaurant in all the good, right ways. The place is jammed with breakfast eaters and brunchers. But the real temptation zone is the donut and pastry case. It’s a glass structure thirty feet long and it is jammed with shiny rows of disgustingly good treats.

I ordered a yogurt parfait and a chocolate milk. Those sound like good choices, right? Well, half the yogurts we eat are chock full of sugar. And so is chocolate milk. My After, My Ass.

Powdered sugar donut.JPGAnyway, I walked over to pay for my good choices when I looked down to see the clean round shape of a powdered sugar donut. “I’ll have one of those too,” I told the young lady.

Now in a just and righteous world, that young lady would have looked me in the eye and said, “Sir, do you really need that donut?”

But instead, she asked, “Will that be all.”

Now that’s just evil. But I resisted further temptation and walked out the place clutching a brown paper bag full of sugar infested post-run diet busters.

Then I sat in the car and ate my parfait. It had fruit in it, but the fruit felt fake because it was a little rubbery from swimming around in that parfait. But I downed the lot and took a good swig of the chocolate milk.

Next came the donut, which I broke into bits because eating a powdered sugar donut by holding the whole thing up to your face is flirting with disaster. All it takes is one sniff of that fine powder and a sneeze will erupt that can kill a bird in mid-air. So I took little nibbles of that donut while licking my fingers after each bite. I look like a cocaine abuser anyway, because my nose and already silver goatee was rife with powdered sugar.

I was just about finished with my evil treat when Sue came trotting back from the extra two miles she logged beyond the eight that I had run. I hid the rest of the donut in the brown bag. It made me feel like a druggie hiding a stash of pot from the cops. She’s pretty damn disciplined about what she eats except when she’s not. Which isn’t all that frequently but it still happens. Sometimes she gets hungry for anything that is edible within fifteen feet of her. Because we’re athletes.

So I wasn’t kidding when I asked my friend Laurie if I could have two snacks instead of just one. Because I always share the extras with my sweetheart. Except when I don’t. Because a powdered sugar donut is just not meant to be shared if it’s going to ruin someone else’s discipline and diet.

Is it?

 

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Watching out for the Home Team

Posted on February 9, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

Home Selling.jpgThis morning while running I noticed yet another Real Estate sign featuring yet another “team” dedicated to selling a home. This trend to assemble “teams” rather than operating as lone wolf Real Estate agents has been building for years. There are reasons why it is so necessary.

When I sold my home this past October, the market for ranch houses was hot. My place sold in a day because we priced it right and there was a buyer salivating for the exact dimensions and location of that house.

Of course, that did not stop the potential buyer from bitching about things anyway. When I let them into the house for some planning and measurements, someone in her enclave started complaining that the living room measurements in the listing information were off by half a foot.

That’s how absurd and stupid people can get about their home-buying. Beyond that, the buyer also complained that I’d “torn up” the yard by removing some stones from the garden. I had specifically stated that would be the case, but people conveniently forget what they don’t want to believe.

By the time I’d completely cleaned out the house, I was so ready to be done with the place, there was hardly any sentiment left for the home where my kids grew up and we’d lived for 20 years. I simply could not afford the emotion at that point. I’d gone through some serious shit trying to separate family keepsakes from the stuff that no one would ever need. In the process, I discovered some family photos and shared those with my kids and in-laws. But there was a ton of stuff that simply had to go. It was a physically, emotionally and economically exhausting process.

Running from insanity

Between those house-cleaning sessions, I’d go for runs on routes that were so familiar to me after 2o years. Those loops have gotten me through some truly vicious shit during my time on earth. All those years of dealing with my late wife’s cancer. The ensuing job stress and financial challenges that came with it. Caregiving for my stroke-ridden father. Some of those periods were almost too tough to take. But not quite. I’d go out for a run or a ride and arrive back home at least temporarily freed from the heavy weight that rested on my shoulders.

Occasionally I’ll drive the street in front of my former home to check out what they’re doing with the place. Right now there is an installation of a new heater going on. The boiler and radiant heat in that home had served us well, but there was admittedly no central air conditioning. We relied on window units when necessary. But honestly, the prairie style overhang of the roof kept the place cool.

The Realtor who sold my home explained that the lack of air conditioning depressed the value of the home by $10,000 or so. When a Realtor comes through the house and finds out you don’t have air conditioning, or notices that your bathroom countertops are retro holdovers from the 1950s, they try not to wince. They know people can be total assholes about every niggling thing. Somehow the lack of full AC just never bothered us when we lived there. I was always kind of proud of the simplicity of it all.  But now the buyer is installing vents throughout the house to “improve” the place. Have at it.

Home-selling teams

All these challenges in home-selling are why the concept of home-selling “teams” has likely emerged. Dealing with the public means putting up with a whole lot of horseshit from the buyers and a shitpile of fear from the sellers. People can turn into greedy, selfish bastards on both ends of the deal. so here’s the truth: It takes an entire team of people to deal with this shit.  

Over the last 20 years, the Real Estate world has also gone through some serious shit. That mortgage crisis that contributed to the economic crash and recession of 2007 acted like a bitch slap to the temple for anyone in the housing industry that wasn’t already supremely capitalized. Only the strongest survived because houses simply weren’t selling for a few years in a row. The market rebounded a bit starting three years ago. Last spring there was an absolute home-selling rush for a few months.

If anything, selling homes is like being on a track team. No one is doing the same event, but everyone on the team is important. In track and field, you have your fat folks to throw the shot and discus around. The skinny people do the distance running. It also takes humans with hops to win the jumping events or fly over the bar in the pole vault.

It’s the same with a home-selling team. In the Real Estate business you’ve got your mortgage brokers to qualify people for the loans they need to buy property. Then you’ve got your home inspectors to check the place over, and lawyers to file all the paperwork. Before it’s all said and done every real estate transaction is like a mini-track-meet of things to do and hoops to jump through.

Competition

To make it all the tougher, the Real Estate market is really competitive. That is why it doesn’t take just a “team” to sell residential or commercial property. Sometimes it takes a whose Platoon, a Goddamned Battalion or a Freakin’ Army sometimes.

I’ve worked in the Real Estate industry marketing homes and pushing commercial properties. In many respects Real Estate is a shallow business dependent on the merest whims of potential buyers. While taking people through tours of commercial property the dynamic is strange at best. All the cliquish conversation can make you feel as if you don’t even physically exist. Then they turn to you and ask, as a collective, “Can we get this for $12 a foot?”

A voice in your head goes, “No, you fucking dimwits. This space is $20 a foot.” But you ask the company owner to take a look at the proposal they submit. Then the company owner meets with the prospective buyer and two days later a contract is signed for the property for $10 a foot. Then the company owner calls you into the office and says, “Sorry, we can’t pay you commission on that one. You didn’t negotiate well enough.”

You wonder to yourself, “What the fuck?”

But that’s how so much of the business world operates. Shareholders get their return on investment even when employees bleed out their ears trying to create it.

It’s all about back room deals and taking cuts up front and letting the devil reign over those in the hapless middle ground where unions try to keep their clutches on a few dollars of pay and middle managers sit in cubicles wondering when the fucking axe might fall.

It’s a simple rule: If you’re not in the decision process, you get cut out of the deal. And that, in a nutshell, is why the American Middle Class is struggling. There are vast swaths of America that have been cut out of the deal. That includes family farms swept under the rug of corporate agribusiness and dunned by Monsanto for wanting to keep a little corn or soybean seed from year to year. Yet they’re told to hate the city folks who refuse to buy GMO or hormone-infused products because the science is not clear on where all this is taking us.

It’s an ownership game, you see, and there are assholes on both ends of the deal. People in the middle have gotten screwed.

It all helps explain why that Real Estate sign in your neighborhood says “So-and-So Home Selling Team.” These are people banding together to keep their cut of the deal. I say more power to them. They’re simply watching out for the Home Team.

 

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Life in the Faust lane

Posted on February 8, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

Devil over shoulder.jpgAs I swam in the outside lane of the Marmion pool, I glanced across the surface to measure my pace against the better swimmers in the middle lanes. They did not seem to be going much faster me, but I knew too well they were.

I’ve never been scared to compare myself to others. But I am competitive, and it sucks at my soul to be the slowest swimmer in the pool.

So I was growing a little empty as I swam along, wondering if I would ever improve enough to keep up with the morning crew at Marmion.

At that moment, I felt a strange little presence over my left ear. Take note: that’s not my breathing side. I pretty much breathe on my right. But for curiosity’s sake, I breathed on the left for a moment and was shocked to see what appeared to be a small goatlike creature wearing a bright red Speedo perched over my left shoulder.

He seemed to flutter above the water. When droplets hit him, small sparks flew off his body. I recalled an experiment in high school chemistry where we threw chunks of magnesium in water. They hissed and kicked out bright light while bouncing around the surface.

That’s what the little creature over my shoulder looked like. He was grinning at me with eyes narrow as slits. He looked like a cat that had way too much catnip. Then he said, “Hello there Mr. Chris. Would you like to swim faster than the rest of those buggers?”

At that moment I came to the end of a lap and purposely did a long underwater surge coming away from the wall. I thought that perhaps I did not get enough sleep last night. We got up this morning at 4:30 a.m. Sue’s alarm went off four or five times before we finally rose of out bed. So it wasn’t beyond imagination that I might still be dreaming. Perhaps the little creature above me in the pool was just the remnant of some strange dream from the night before.

But no, he was still there. “I can make you as fast as Michael Phelps,” the creature muttered as I emerged above the surface to get a gulp of air. I tried swinging my left arm a little higher to see if I could hit the little red devil, but he dodged it easily.

“That’s better!” called coach Chris Colburn from the sideline. “Higher elbows! Bring your hand into the water at an angle!” So I did that, and suddenly felt a surge of speed. “I don’t need you,” I muttered to the devil hovering over my ear. “Can’t you see? I have a coach…”

“He can’t coach you like I can,” the devil hissed in a voice that smelled of chlorine. “What you want is real speed. Let’s leave these people in the dussssst….”

“Go. Away.” I sputtered.

“Not so fasssst,” the little red creature teased. “You just did your last 100 in over 2:00. How would like to do a 1:20 without even feeling it?”

“That’s impossible,” I blurbled. “That’s a forty second improvement.”

“Nothing’s impossible with me,” he sneered. “You want to be best in the pool? Win Masters races all over the Midwest? Be first out of the water in the Pleasant Prairie Olympic Triathlon this summer. Let’ssss talllllkkk…” he pleaded.

I did another turn and came up for air again. “Think of it this way,” he continued, sparks dropping into the water from his body like fireworks over a bucket on the Fourth of July. “No one needs to know! We’ll take it gradual-like. Just improve a few seconds every week. At first, they’ll all just be happy just to see you keeping up. We won’t let them know how you got so good. No one needs to know! Look at that woman and her daugther over there in lanes three and four. Do you think they got that good just by working out all the time?”

“I can just imagine what you’re asking,” I sputtered. “What will this cost me. My soul?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” he admitted. “But you can have it back when I’m through with it.”

oil2“And how long will that be?” I wanted to know. “Do I get my soul back before I die?”

“More like when you die,” the little devil told me. “But you don’t really need a soul if you’re getting what you want in life, do you?”

“Now that’s an interesting question,” I replied. “I know a few people that have sold their soul lately…”

By then I’d completed four out of five 200s. My average was just under 4:10. So the temptation to accept his offer was definitely there. I stood there breathing. The pool water felt extra warm. I could taste the salt coming off my own face.

He hovered over my shoulder offering his Faustian bargain after every lap I swam. “C’mon, slowpoke!” he’d tease.” You want to keep going like this the rest of your life? A freakin duck could keep up with you at this pace.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” I scolded him. “I happen to like ducks.”

“That’s good, because you swim like one. Piddle paddle piddle paddle. You’re pathetic,” the devil said.

Finally he got impatient. “Now how about it, Michael Un-Phelps. Are you going to take me up on my offer, or let this offer of swimming glory just pass you by?”

But having completed the last of the prescribed 200s, I stood by the shallow end of the pool while the rest of the gang was getting instructions from Coach Colburn at the other side. “Okay,” he barked out. “We’re doing 8 X 25s on the 30. Ready, go!”

I watched the other swimmers tear into the first 25. Then they paused in a neat row on the same end of the pool as me. So I waited, wondering if anyone else could see the little red devil perched above my left shoulder. He whispered: “Don’t even try to keep up with them. You can’t do it.”

But when they took off,  I dove into line with them and swam as hard as I could for 25 meters. Lord knows, I actually kept up with them. But I’d finished in 25 seconds, so there was only 5 seconds recovery before we went again. This time I faded toward the finish.

But when I popped up for air on the other end of the pool, that little devil was gone. I looked all around me, and even dipped below the surface of the water to pop back up with rivulets dripping off my goggles. And at that moment, the rest of the swimming crew had arrived back at my side of the pool. So I gathered myself and took off swimming again the 30. And kept up for yet another lap. “Hey!” I told myself. “I did it!”

By then I admit I was exhausted. So I finished the last two 25s on my own. I can in at 28 on one, and 29 on th eother. But in that moment, I realized I did not need to make a deal with the devil to become a better swimmer. Working hard and getting as good as I can on my own power is good enough.

Yet I’ll admit it. For a moment there, I was tempted by life in the Faust lane.

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Bumping along on the mountain bike

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

mountain-bikingYesterday turned warm and I was all set to go out on the Venge when I realized something had snapped a spoke in my rear wheel. Probably the wheel got knocked or caught on a bike pump, but whatever the cause, it was not fit for a ride.

That meant grabbing the Specialized Rockhopper to get out for a ride. The temps were in the mid-50s, so it was perfect weather for bumping along the mountain bike.

The problem with that statement is that it is literally true. Once I reached a small forest preserve along a country road, I pitched onto the grass trails and the bumpy ride began. The ground is a combination of frost-hardened soil and mushy, muddy furrows. So you alternately slide and bounce over the terrain.

Switching from high to low gears doesn’t help that much. Neither do the shocks on my front fork. My bike is a ‘hard-tail’ with my butt perched on a solid seat. So you absorb those shocks, and when your butt bones are just getting toughened up for the season, it hurts.

Riding a mountain bike on smooth roads isn’t what the sport is really all about. Yet I’ll admit relief when I climbed the last little hill leading from the forest preserve to the road and took off at fifteen miles an hour headed for the next turn.

hard-tailIt felt good to be riding at any rate. Today is also supposed to be a balmy day here in Illinois, with temps in the mid-50s. For February, that’s a heat wave. I might go out again on the bike.

Turning south yesterday, a small weather shift was coming in. The wind turned raw, but somehow it didn’t matter that much. Where I once hated the wind for its resistance, I’ve changed my mind to appreciate the training effect it has. Work hard into the wind, raise your heart rate. Get stronger.

Even the cold cutting through my jacket wasn’t that bad. I wore cycling shorts and my knees and calves were a bit chilled, but not in the shiver zone. It was late afternoon and a mist was starting to blow in. That would lead to rain by midnight and produce deep roars of thunder in the night.

Something in those sounds made me feel calm and complete. There is virtue in bumping along on your mountain bike, making contact with the land, that makes that cozy bed seem a little more honest.

werunandridelogo

 

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Weight, weight don’t tell me who won the Super Bowl

Posted on February 6, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

We attended a very nice Super Bowl party hosted by some triathlon friends. The game was both fun and strange to watch. It was more like two games packed into one. The Falcons won the first part, the Patriots the second.

In between, Lady Gaga swung around the stadium from the spider web of popularity known as patent fame. She dangled like a wingless fly until her twitching minions unhooked her to do another rendition of the ‘friendly hooker’ routine upon which so many Super Bowl halftime shows seem depend. Her outfit was finally deconstructed into a pair of sparkly diapers, which must have made her all the rage with those kinky adults who get into such things. Oaaahhh, you didn’t know that adult diaper wearing was a “thing?” Sorry to expand your world by accident. Seems there is a Super Bowl for everything, if you dig deep enough.

False consternation

janet-jackson-nipple.jpgYou may also recall that not so many years ago during Super Bowl halftime show, Justin Timberlake ripped the breastplate off the costume of Janet Jackson, exposing her carefully decorated nipple. Hardly an accident. That act set off tidal waves of conservative consternation that the Super Bowl had somehow been corrupted.

Hah. That’s a bit like accusing Beezelbub of engaging in excessive recruiting tactics. But that would be a metaphor better applied to Division One college football, where everything from hookers to cocaine to flat out cash has been used to cement the relationship between high school football player and college football school.

Accident my ass

chrissy-teigen-john-legend-super-bowl-02062017-1486395424-640x426

Even by accident, the Super Bowl can’t resist showing the best cleavage it can find. In this year’s edition of Super Bowl excess, model Chrissy Tiegan let a nipple show when cameras panned the many celebrities in attendance. Her exposure was obviously no accident. Says a breathless EOnline story: “Teigen went braless under a fishnet keyhole top and brown duster jacket for Super Bowl LI, and in true Chrissy form, she couldn’t have cared less about the nip slip. When a Twitter user zoomed in on a video of the celeb and tweeted it to her, she matter of factly responded, “boom goes the dynamite.”

Patriotic gestures

If one were cynical enough, it could be suggested that the faux innocence of America is its most dangerous trait. Let’s take the fact that a team called the New England Patriots won this year’s Super Bowl. In the Make America Great Again era in which slogans replace facts, the game could not have been better scripted to align with the political views of the current administration. And how weird was it that the Atlanta Falcons, having rushed to a 28-3 lead, somehow could not find a way to score the rest of the game. I predicted at halftime that they would be too tired to sustain the pace, but it still seemed strange.

And it would be cynical indeed to suggest the game was fixed. I don’t personally believe that the Super Bowl was fixed. But I do believe that the game of NFL football as a whole is fixed. The league doesn’t pay any taxes, for one thing. It calls itself some sort of “non-profit” organization. In these practices of avoiding taxes, the NFL perfectly aligns with the practices of our current president, who takes such matters as a point of pride and an indication of true patriotism. So you see how all this aligns?

Both the NFL and Donald Trump seem to thrive on casual references to taboo sex and sideline cheerleaders who are paid a pittance for shaking their asses. They also align in the marketing of raw, destructive violence to short-attention-span viewers who mistake brute force for clear thinking. Come to think of it, that’s the same formula used by Donald J. Trump to win the office he now occupies. America as a nation now has a concussion.

Weight gain and belt strain

fat-guy-in-patriots-shirt-wacthes-tv-300x186All I know is that I ate and drank just enough last night during the game to wake up two pounds heavier this morning. I’ll work off that extra weight in the next day or so.

The Super Bowl is a ritual of consumption. We all get that. But last night’s game was also the first full football game I’ve watched all season. Usually, I’ll sit for a quarter or so with our twenty-somethings while they chow on their afternoon meal of B-Dubs and beer. But then I get up and do something constructive.

I even ate relatively light last night. A bowl of chili and some munchy appetizers. But pause a moment to think about all those Americans for whom the Super Bowl is the final peg in a sixteen game binge of weekend pigouts all in a row. If the average Joe puts on five pounds a week during football season, and doesn’t do anything to work off that weight, they’ll gain eighty pounds just from the regular season, 20 pounds from the playoffs and another 5 pounds during the Super Bowl. That’s 110 pounds per football season. Don’t laugh, it’s possible.

Standards

According to a Gallup poll, the average American is close to 20 pounds over their “ideal” weight. Of course, that’s all relative to perspectives. A high school football player who competed at 210 pounds might balloon to 250 pounds after a couple years of sitting around watching college and pro football. Upon what standard is their perception of an ideal weight based? Is it their ideal weight based on when they were 18 years old?

fat-packer-fan.jpgThe world is full of overweight former athletes and soldiers who still view themselves in terms of the formerly fit beasts they were at one time in training. These are the armchair quarterbacks playing fantasy football and accusing people who casually watch the game of not being “true fans.”

Which is why the Super Bowl is such a comic venture. It actually parodies the weekly religious ritual of so many football fans for whom the gridiron is their second church. NFL football and its Super Bowl are now produced like one long, desperate ploy to hold the beer-infused attentions of billions eager to find out if the commercials are more interesting than the game itself. I don’t hate football, per se. But I am suspicious of what it has become. The pandering attempts at leveraging patriotic displays into popularity. The heavyhanded move to present “football as family.” These are cynical ventures at the heart. Yet people take them as signs of real American virtue.

Fruitless ventures

pepsi-super-bowl-50-halftime-show.jpgThe fact of the matter is that nobody really wins when it comes to celebrations of excess such as the Super Bowl. Advertisers spend billions to garner attention for their products through advertising, but the return on investment? Hmmm. Their commercials are rated and judged just like contestants in a beauty contest. It’s all very shallow and it’s vain.

Even commercials of substance, that actually try to make a commentary on the state of politics and patriotism in America, are attacked for trying to shed perspective on topics such as women’s rights and immigration. These days every opinion is a weapon, and every weapon an opinion.

aptopix-49ers-seahawks-footballAttacking the NFL for its violently dismissive nature has turned out to be as fruitless with some people as criticizing the NRA for defending the death of 11,000 people per year killed by gun violence. “Go criticize someone else,” the selfish logic goes. “I have my rights.”

The point here is that so much of America loves to deny the facts at the heart of its fattened brand of idiocy and selfish appetite for excessiveness. Those who hearken to the liberal austerity of limiting our consumptive appetites and moderating the extraction and waste that feed such cycles are mocked as “snowflakes” and “libtards” for actually caring enough to consider what it is we’re really doing to ourselves. These are the truly conservative instincts of the human race.

Those of us who run and ride and swim can be commended for a slightly more considerate lifestyle. We can at least claim to be engaged in activities that can generally be termed “healthy” for the human body and mind.

werunandridelogo

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The small joys of incremental progress

Posted on February 3, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

ttt2Yesterday was a track session at the Vaughn Center, a public fitness facility that has a 200-meter indoor track. It’s a great place to run on a February afternoon when temperatures are in the mid-teens and the wind chill makes it feel like five degrees outside.

There is also a track upstairs, but it has basically square corners and is typically clogged with folks walking, not running.

Plus it has no tangible connection between the distance around the track, actual interval times and pace per mile. The upstairs track is fine if you’re doing a steady five-mile run to stay out of the cold. But a track of an odd size is meaningless to any trackster worth their weight in 400s.

So I warmed up downstairs where the jumpers from Aurora University were practicing long jump, triple jump, and high jump. As a high school and college kid I did all three events, managing 19’6″ in the long jump, 40’4″ in the triple and 6’1.5″ (in college, both straddle and flop).

I teased one of the jumpers as I jogged past. “45 foot triple!” I called out. He smiled. I talked with the kid and he told me that he jumped 12.7 meters indoors. I asked his coach later how far that was in feet. “About 38 feet,” he replied.

So I felt kind of bad, cause I’d told the kid that I’d jumped 40 feet in high school assuming that he’d probably gone farther than that in college.

There was a trio of kids practicing the high jump. Guys and girls jumping together. I watched her form over the bar at five feet even and recalled how lithe I used to be. These days it would make no sense for me to high jump.

But I can still run decently. Not as fast as I once was, mind you. But not horrible. After the warmup, I did a set of 8 X 400 at 1:36. That’s about 6:25 per mile, my target race pace this year for a 5K. So there’s a lot of work still to do. But at least I know that I can actually run the pace I’m trying to achieve.

track-signsTwo weeks ago I did 6 X 400 and the starting pace was in the mid-1:40s for the first few. That was the first speed workout of the season. By the time I was on the fourth 400 the times had dropped to 1:36 and the running felt smooth.

All the strength work is helping too. Running on the straights felt strong and fun. The curves cause a little torque in the left knee and the right foot. That’s where I can feel that I’m not as young as I used to be. Other than that, the sensations of doing intervals are fun and familiar.

Even the fatigue on the last rep was familiar. I slogged the last 40 yards and finished in 1:41. Okay, that’s supposed to happen. The workout was probably just the right length for the second time on the track.

That’s incremental progress. Next week if my knee and feet hold up, I’ll add two more 400s to the mix. The goal is to do 12, then drop back down and increase the speed a bit. Add back up, and repeat.

It’s always worked for me. These 400 workouts. Simple to do. Simple to count. Simple to see progress. Incremental progress.

werunandridelogo

 

 

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It’s been a long road from Reagan to Trump

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

reagan-salutingBack in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan came into office, I was fresh out of college and eager to make a mark on the world. I had a new job with an investment banking firm. The company transferred me out to Philadelphia from Chicago to work in their marketing department. And eight months later they fired the VP of Marketing and sent the rest of us packing. So I limped back home to Chicago wondering what the hell just happened. Is this how the free market really works?

The economy was not all that hot at the time. I flirted with joining a Chicago advertising agency because the Creative Director was head of the corporate running team. They were eager for talent to beat all the other firms in town, and I was running 10ks just under 32:00 at the time.

But the agency wasn’t doing quite well enough to justify that leap of faith. Thus I learned that while running talent is nice, in the long haul, it really doesn’t have that much value in this world. Call that one of life’s little lessons in reality.

Still, I kept at it for a couple more years, winning plenty of races along the way. That was an investment, you might say, in my long-term satisfaction with life. Those few years were my window to run and race faster than I ever would again. There is only period in life when you set can all your PRs and continually improve.

During that period I also wrote like a fiend. One of those projects was a novel that sits in a computer into which I later transcribed all the hand-written pages I’d composed when my IBM Selectric went on the fritz. The novel was titled Admissions, and predicted (back in 1981, mind you) that one day a political movement calling itself The Mandate would emerge to take over AM Radio and create a political voice of instigation, accusation and control. And that came true. Fox News. Rush Limbaugh. The rest of those mandate idiots.

reagan-cowboyThere were many other predictions the novel contains that also have come true. Even back then, I could see where the Reagan Revolution, as some called it, was heading toward a winner-take-all plan to take over the country. Him and his cowboy hats. Bush II acted like that too.

I studied the Reagan philosophy and his installation of people such as James Watt, the man who viewed his Department of the Interior as an excuse to openly promote extraction policies and gut the burgeoning hopes of an environmental movement that had made significant progress improving the quality of air, water and resources in America. On top of his political ideology, Watt was also a religious nihilist who believed there was no sense in protecting the earth because Jesus was going to come back and fix the place anyway.

As a longtime Christian, I studied this philosophy as well. It motivated me to engage the subject one day in a book I wrote titled The Genesis Fix: A Repair Manual for Faith in the Modern Age. It examined the impacts of biblical literalism on politics, culture and the environment.

Perhaps I care a little too deeply about these matters. Perhaps I also cared a little too deeply about winning running races during those Reagan years. But it felt hellish more real than sitting around those Reagan Youth parties to which I was occasionally invited, those parties where guys sat around with popped polo shirt collars and perfect hair preaching trickle-down economics over Lite beers and fucking fondue pots. Shallow, phony bastards trying to get into the pants of the Stepford Women conservatives hanging out at the same goddamned parties. I had a tall blonde girlfriend with big tits at the time, and at one party we turned up the music and danced right over their goddamned Reagan Worship rituals.

“Fuck them,” I thought. And during those years I pumped my rage at their shallow brains into beating everyone I could on the roads. At the start of one 5-mile race, some joker in the first mile tried to play politics early in the race by asking, “How fast are you running today?” I didn’t even turn my head to answer. “Faster than you,” I replied. And took off for the victory at 24:47 for five miles.

Some of those same instincts course through my veins these days. This is the New Age of Shallowness. Those goddamned Reagan Youth grew up into Trump Supporters. They stand embittered by 40 years of failed Republican policies including an economic recession caused by their first Puppet President. But they needed someone else to blame. So they popped their collective collars  and voted for a man that even Ronald Reagan would not abide.

Remember what Ronnie said about the Soviets, the Russians? “Trust, but verify.” Trump has done exactly the opposite. The Russians hacked our elections and Trump doesn’t even care. In fact, he publicly invited Russians to hack his political opponent. It’s like someone stuck their arm up Reagan’s ass and turned him inside out.

trump-rich-cowboy-hatIt’s indeed been a long road from Reagan to Trump. But I can say with all confidence that I was never fooled by these asshats in the first place, and I’m not fooled this time around either. So I’ll end this diatribe (and that’s indeed what it is…) with a quote from Hunter S. Thompson that sums up the right-wing bullshit to which we’re all now front row witnesses.

“Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous ‘trickle-down’ theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow ‘trickle down’ to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.”

Thank you, Hunter. I could not have said it better. But I sure do know better. Too bad so much of America does not, and voted for the likes of Donald Trump, whose version of trickle-down ideology tends to be golden, bouncing off the backs off all those who voted for him while he tells them it’s raining. Welcome to Make America Great Again.

He got you good, didn’t he, Reagan Youth? He got you good.

“Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads?”–Hunter S. Thompson

 

 

 

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These dark and trusty streets

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Christopher Cudworth

IMG_5128This morning’s run began just before 6:00 a.m. At that hour, the sun has not risen and the streets are dark but for the shine of the next streetlight up the block. The sheen of early morning rain made it easy to detect each crack and tilt in the asphalt. So I ran with confidence until the streetlights ran out.

But even then, the streets were not entirely dark. Clouds pushing past on a southerly wind carried with them a faint yet consistent glow. This was light absorbed from the car dealerships a mile to the south.

Finally, I moved far enough north that this glow evaporated as well. Now the streets were truly dark. Yet having run on them often enough, I knew by memory where to trod. I ran up Hickory Lane, a township street that is largely free of traffic lights. Then came Deerpath Road, a winding, somewhat hilly road with homes tucked well back in the woods. It was wonderfully dark here. A quarter-mile ahead, a single fluorescent streetlight cast a pale circle on the spot where a residential loop makes its entrance to the larger road. I ran along with a clean cadence because Deerpath is a smooth and delightful road on which to run or ride.

Indeed, in several weeks when the weather moderates we’ll be humming along that stretch on our Specialized bikes. First I’ll take a few tours on the mountain bike to break in the quads and get used to outdoor riding again. Some dark mornings I’ll flick on the headlamp and taillight, wear reflective gear and pedal that stretch to make a loop around Dick Young Forest Preserve. There is a path through the prairie in the preserve that I run as well. Before the sun rises, all one can see out in the void is a dark mass of sullen grasses. Occasionally a small bird will chirp, usually a song sparrow in the late winter months.

I have always loved running before the sun is up. Then you can watch its first appearance, often just a crack in the eastern sky. It starts with a thin rail of red against the horizon. Then comes a burst of brightness a the roof of clouds illuminated.

We see the rising sun as a small circle on the horizon, Yet 93,000,000 miles away, the sun burns with a fury that someday will consume the earth and everything in it. We’re all just carbon forms winging through darkness anyway. It doesn’t matter all that much. Time is eternal except for these moments when we measure our steps through darkness, listening to the sound of each footfall, wondering if we’re going as fast as we did yesterday. Or ever will.

One needs these dark and trusty streets to consider such notions of movement and mortality. One can’t measure thoughts of the soul when the sun is bright and the movement of the day provides so many distractions. We have a spirit within us that needs darkness as well as light to find its balance.

To find its truth.

To find our way.

Home.

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