Running History

Racing has never been my main goal, so I haven't run that many, and I was never fast. Many runners like to measure themselves and other runners by their race times, so I provide some measure here:

1981 2.5 mile 16:nn *
1982 10k 41:nn, untrained
1993 10k 40:nn
1995 8k 32:nn *
2002 Finger lakes 50s 50 miles 11:33
2003 10 miles 1:16 *
2004 Groundhog 50k, PA 5:39 *
2004 Baltimore rail trail marathon 3:59
2005 Escarpment trail run 4:24 *
2005 Vermont 50 mile trail run 10:04 *
2006 5k 21:37
2006 Escarpment trail run 4:10 *
2006 Vermont 50 mile trail run 9:57 *
2007 Escarpment trail run 4:17 *
2008 Escarpment trail run 5:24
2009 Escarpment trail run 4:49
2010 Escarpment trail run 5:29
2011 Escarpment trail run 5:07
(* = in shape and best effort)

Running and Other Sports

As a kid, I was as active as possible, mostly with neighborhood pick-up games of all sorts, but football and baseball were my favorites. I played football in Jr high and then switched to soccer in high school. I also rode my bicycle everywhere for transportation until I was 17 and even after that. In those days not every high schooler had their own car. I also skate-boarded all the time and got good at many of the tricks of my day. We also did a little backpacking and lots of  hiking and often ran down the hills, which was my introduction to running on trails. But in those days I loved sprints so much that I would go out at night and run sprints on the street just for the fun of it.

Soccer

Playing soccer midfield for several years was my first big involvement with running, and we did a limited amount of long-distance run training for that, along with many kinds of sprint and soccer drills of course. I remember early on being able to run sprints in games with no problem, but when I first tried to run over a mile straight it was difficult. For soccer I eventually ran more but I hated distance running at that time, though that would quickly change.

Orienteering

Our school had an introduction to orienteering program, and while I didn't do the program, my best friend did and he loved it, so I soon tried it. So, no sooner than my soccer career had ended, I found a new sport to love much more than I ever loved soccer. Orienteering is a running sport that evolved in Scandinavia but is now common for elite military training all over the world, as I would find out by going to orienteering meets organized by the US military academy at West Point. Basically there is a set course of points out in the woods that you have to find in sequence using a map and compass to navigate, mostly off-trail.

I found orienteering so compelling and fun that I spent lots of time out running in the woods with orienteering maps practicing my skills and training hard for the first time in my life. I was always a better sprinter than a distance runner, but I did my best to get into optimal shape for orienteering and I improved rapidly and soon graduated to the elite level blue course and started traveling around to most of the 2-day national orienteering meets held on the east coast.

I was usually in the middle of the field of finishers, sometimes a little bit closer up to the leaders. When I was able to run both days of a DVOA meet in southeastern PA in under 100 minutes for each run, that was the pinnacle of my orienteering career. I wasn't winning anything, but I had beat the US champion on the first day of that meet, even when he had a worse day (more navigational problems) than me that day, I had reached a certain point of satisfaction and a small place among blue course runners.

I orienteered for several years intensively, and enjoyed the hell out of it. Ultimately I ended up getting injured and that messed up my training enough to where I couldn't really run the blue course well, so I stopped orienteering for that time. For intermediate distance running events lasting one to two hours, orienteering is the most demanding kind of running you can do; basically orienteering kicks your ass, and if you don't believe me, go out and try it. If you do the shorter easier courses and go slow, you can do it more often and with less effect, but if you do the long courses competitively, it's a very demanding sport.

Biking

All along I had been biking a fair amount on and off. When I was 19, I rode my bicycle from New York to mid-coast Maine in 4 days. Before and after that I often did a lot of riding, and sometimes did very long rides with friends. I had one close friend who got into bicycle racing early, and a cousin who raced somewhat later. I always enjoyed trying to keep up with them on basic training rides. Bike racing requires a certain very high level of fitness and commitment, and I was always just a recreational rider. To this day though, sometimes nothing beats a ride though the countryside. I'm now a trail runner almost exclusive of roads entirely, but when it comes to biking I love the smooth flow of power and speed over roads much more than mountain biking on trails of any kind.

Running

When I was in college I had less time for training at first, but soon started running up a local hill almost every day. I ran mostly on roads, but sometimes I would run the hiking trails in the local parks. I didn't really race then, but I was probably in the best shape of my life, as I took to running the hill loop as fast as possible to challenge myself. Even though it was still lower volume stuff at 4-6 miles per day, I was running it so hard and I was young so no amount of training I did in later years would recapture the speed and power I had then. I wish I had run some races then to see what I could have done, but I just wasn't into races at that time. I ran for myself only, races were early in the morning, and I didn't particularly like flat road races. I did enjoy the personal challenge of getting faster and faster up my little 650 foot mountain though. There were not as many trail races then that I was aware of, but I was running for purely personal reasons anyway.

Malaise

I went through a period, like many people, where my activity dropped off for various reasons, and (of course) I gained a bunch of weight, getting up to almost 210 lbs on my 5'9" stocky frame. In high school I had been about 170 beefed up a little bit for soccer, and later when in college in prime condition I was low 160s. At least when you've been in great shape enough times in your life, you have that as a powerful memory to draw from, and it's also something you already know how and want to do; so all that was supporting me, keeping me from getting too far gone to get back to where I had been, but it was still hard to see how to start from where I was, and to have to wait a long time before I would once again feel really good. Even running a little during that difficult couple of years kept me sane and in touch with my more active self.

Resurrection

When I was about 40 I decided to start putting things together to get myself into shape and to challenge myself with sporting activities. I had already made a big push to get back into shape in my late 30s, but that was when I was doing mostly biking, and my level of activity would drop way off in the winter, because the bike is damn cold in winter and I wasn't healthy enough to stick myself out there in the cold with the wind-bone-chill of biking. But one year I got into such great shape riding my bike 8 to 10 hours a week and doing sets of hill intervals that made heart-rate charts with cool patterns. That year I did some orienteering for the first time in many years, with no run training, but with solid biking fitness. Considering, I actually did ok and had a lot of fun, even joining the relay team, where  I disappointed a few, but it wasn't because of my running as much as from a stupid navigational error, which are common for all orienteerers -- but hell, I hadn't really done any running, and I hadn't practiced orienteering for many years. I had fun and it felt great to be in some kind of shape.

After that I did some more Orienteering and did some ROGAINEs also. That stands for Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance, and it's a hell of a lot of fun. They differing durations, but 6, 12 and 24 hours are often held at the bigger events. You get a map showing all the spots that are flagged, and how many points each is worth if you find it. Then you plan your route during a brief time and then go out and get as many points as you can. Sometimes top teams run the whole way and get all the points, which is really amazing when you look at the map and everywhere they had to go. Showing others and discussing your routes and places where you had challenges is part of the fun afterwards. Our teams would run a lot but at that time (and subsequently) I wasn't in shape to run for 24 hours (or even 12), especially on and off trails.

A Try at Ultrarunning

I started to get much more into trail running in my early 40s, and still did a great deal of biking in the warmer months whenever possible. I would often ride my bike from a few miles up to 25 miles to a trail-head somewhere and then go trail running, riding home later. But I didn't really have any clear goals until I got it into my head somehow that I wanted to run 50 miles. At that time in 2002 I was doing a lot of cross-training with trail running and biking and I just decided out of the blue to take a stab at ultra-distance. I had seen the website for finger lakes 50s, where you could run 25k, 50k or 50 miles and decide once you were out there running which distance to stop after. That was right before the big wave of popularity that seems to be sweeping trail ultras in recent years, so I was able to register and get in fairly close to the race date.

That first race was such an experience that I've often told about it elsewhere in posts to rec.running, but I will summarize here:  through 50k in about 6:20 feeling pretty good, then a death-slog, with quads that were shot to hell so bad I was forced to run down the hills backwards after 35 miles. I finished in an unimpressive 11:33, but in some ways I had no business running 50 miles, so once I had recovered sufficiently, which was many months later, I felt pride in pushing myself so hard to finish it. The stupidity of not realizing that my game was up after 50k, and that I could have stopped and gotten credit for that and been happy with it, is fully evident in retrospect. Though I didn't stop running or thinking about new goals, it would be a full two years before I would pick another big goal race and go for it.


Escarpment Trail Runs

About 20 years ago I heard of the Escarpment trail run, an 18+ mile trail race on extremely rugged hiking trails over several large Catskill mountains. I ended up hiking the route a few times before I ran any of it until in training for the 2005 race. After so many years of trail running, the harder terrain was the draw for me, not because of the challenge, but because it's the most fun for me. The challenge is the length of the race much more than the terrain for me, but some of the hills are pretty big and long: 3.5/1700, 1/1000, and 1.5/900 (miles/feet). I have a separate blog about my Escarpment trail runs. 


Vermont 50 milers

In addition to the Escarpment trail, my main goal for several years, I also wanted to have a few more tries at 50 miles, and with more consideration in training, I was ready again in 2005, two months after the Escarpment trail. For a couple of years I had those two races as peak goals. I loved running 50 miles at Vermont, but training and recovery for 50 miles was too much. I just didn't enjoy not feeling good in longer runs for several months after those efforts. I had many discussions in rec.running and elsewhere about why I ultimately decided not to run ultras longer than 50k anymore. Some said I could improve my training more, build up a much stronger base over time, and then recovery wouldn't be so bad. But I know that for several years I'd trained about as hard as I could, and I was happy with my sub-10 hour effort at Vermont in 2006, so I decided to focus on mostly shorter trail runs, but not ruling out trail 50ks. I know I can run hard for the ~6 hours of a 50k and enjoy it more, so that's my limit. I posted some of my race reports & Vermont in Past Race Reports.