There is a slight twinge in the area between my shin and calf, which I have and will run on.

There is a gravity to longer races, like larger things. They hold you close and squeeze your vision and then, when circumstances and effort shift you away and your trajectory alters, the delta changes as well, and you're flung into the space between the stars, an unlight of experiential lack.

This is the not remembering, the propulsive browsing, the fearing the fear of missing out.

Which is to say, of course, that I'm back to running and eager to train for something, anything, though I don't know what.

---

This is an experience I've had before, and likely, if you're reading this--and you are--one you have as well. And so it is perhaps not worth saying, except that I suspect the only reason anyone writes anything at all is the drive to share universals in a unique way, so we can all gesture and say yes, yes, it is like that, we are not alone here or in our experiences.

I could tell you that a marathon is long and hard in the same way I could tell you that Anna Karenina and Middlemarch are long and great and the Mississippi wide and the bronze burning sunset crowning it beautiful.

Books particularly strike me as similar experiences to significant races, in that one spends a great deal of time and emotional energy invested in a world that is not precisely shared by most people we interact with and so you look up and around and talk and it takes you a while to orient yourself that this is here, and not there, and in fact people don't know the contents of your mind, nor you theirs.

This, I suppose, is why book clubs have always worked, and why races are useful.

It probably also why there are a lot of books about running, and probably soon a Nobel prize winning author with one. (Admittedly, I've DNF'd races and IQ84.)

The Des Moines marathon has, if you're interested, a lot to recommend it. Good volunteers who hold cups correctly, a few more hills than you might like, and a bit longer--but they're all early. If you're smarter than me the second half could be run very fast; it's a course calling out for a negative split. I listened but did not, as teachers sometimes told me in grade school, listen. There was a Motley Crue cover band at mile 25, but they hadn't started playing yet when I passed, so I guess that's a negative. (Or maybe they were primarily for the half marathon, and were done already? I don't know and won't research the matter further.)

I started the race too fast, in a pack, justifying the act to myself by drafting and social pressure and the idea that if they could do it, so could I. Many of the runners were college--or just graduated--young men, and they really liked the sign one spectator was holding about how you should "find a cute butt and follow it". 

They all pulled away between 3-6 miles. About half would come back, Icarus-style, much later.

I persisted, knowing I'd gone too fast, but wanting not to overcompensate and now go too slow. I got passed and did a little passing, but mostly ran a solo tempo until mile 12, at which point I entered the Drake track, and make a loop of the blue surface. This felt rather exceptional. There were people, one of whom was my dad, and I knew now I'd essentially made it half way and was on time. 

There was another long stretch of straight and solo running then, and a park around mile 18, which I knew would continue until mile 24. There was a dirt trail, and I briefly entertained the notion of darting that way, of doing a little dirt jogging and rock hopping, and just abandoning this whole thing. It hurt, then. I threw an empty water cup into a trash can, and the volunteers cheered, and that helped. I tried to do another behind my back, and didn't succeed, but they cheered that too. 

I got passed by a hard charging man by a lake at mile 22. He told me to come with him, and I said that I couldn't. I then caught one of the aforementioned college guys, and then another. The second stayed with me for a bit, and a friend of his darted along the course, yelling encouragement, alternating between insisting that said friend beat me or work with me--he apologized when the former command was issued. 

We trudged on together. There was briefly the notion of a Motley Crue cover band--but then, as we've established, there was no such band. A bridge, then, and a couple turns. The announcer said I looked pumped; and indeed, the photos I'm not going to buy and thus will not post show a large smile. 

I finished at 2:55:30, drank half a bottle of water, grabbed another, and waited for my girlfriend to come across the line. She had wanted to break 3 hours, but didn't. She will, though. We had some pretty good cookies--I always erroneously assume I'll just make do with whatever food is around, whenever I stumble on it. 

It's Wednesday now, and that happened Sunday. I'm pretty happy with it all, though I believe I can get much fitter, and execute better. So, I believe I can go faster. But who doesn't? 

It has also occurred to me that I now have a PR I don't hate at every distance but 100 miles, because I haven't finished 100 miles. People I know are tired of me talking about that, so I probably need to do it. Granted, post sign up, I'll probably talk about it to an insufferable degree. We'll see.

Des Moines Marathon

2:55:30

For the best, probably, that this time represents a happy enough medium between "I won't be embarrassed to say it if asked in a social setting" and "what I think is possible if I get fitter and get everything right on the day itself".

I wonder if anyone at Newton is grinding teeth over Nike taking the forefoot lugs idea, injecting fancy foam and carbon plates, and maybe subsequently breaking the marathon with the idea.

I do also wonder how the whole thing works. A stiff plate makes your calves and ankles work harder--so Nike curved theirs, eliminating the problem. Do the forefoot pods mitigate the drop of the shoe, thus reengaging the calves while still taking advantage of the sloped plate to mitigate fatigue? That is, is this a shoe that combines the benefits of lower and higher drop shoe geometry--track spikes and conventional marathon flats, say--while decreasing the drawbacks of each? I kinda think so.

Of course, I also wonder whether anyone will be able to buy these--and for how much.

Anyway, I'm going to run the Des Moines marathon this weekend, in Altras, because I hate my calves and am one of "those" people.

Psycho Psummer 50K

4:35:35

3rd overall

Big hills, lots of rocks, hot as hell except Dante actually said hell was cold. Maybe that was poetic licence. 

Everyone used to blog about their running and now fewer people do. This is one of the agreed upon truisms in trail and ultrarunning, but I remember well enough to attest to it.

I'm 31, which is as old as I've ever been and as young as I'll ever be, and I've been in and around this weird jogging subculture for nearly a decade. To many, that won't seem very long at all. To some, it will be an impossible eternity. I realize that's saying nothing, but it's important to establish, even while I write self-indulgently, that there's nothing really unique or special about my perspective. But it's mine, and it's what I have. 

I was part of what I must, somewhat irritatingly but honestly, call the Born to Run generation. Whether we read the book or not--I did eventually, but it was actually Racing the Antelope that functioned as my gateway--there was a wave that crested. People took off their shoes or wore flimsy ones and checked Riding the Wind every week and dreamed of 200 mile weeks and to hell with everything that wasn't volume, the knife with which you'd carve a version of yourself who only cared about forward and vertical bipedal propulsion. 

That wave broke, some years ago. That, also, is an agreed upon truism. 

Ultras used to be populated by the weirdos and then came the hipster weirdos and then the crossfit/OCR crowd and the marathon instagrammers and the really really fast people and now we are where we are, and if this sounds like I'm complaining I should be clear that I have no more right to a space than anyone else and everyone has been very nice to me and I hope I have been nice to them and it's all good, really. 

When I told my girlfriend I wanted to do Psycho Psummer, I said it was because I needed to go home. I hope that conveys the amount of affection here accurately. 

I told her, at the end of our last tempo-adjacent 15-miler, that I'd been waiting 8 years to be in the kind of shape I presently felt. Of course I was wrong about that. I had been training--not waiting--for that amount of time. I've gotten a little better several times, and that adds up. This has been a good year. Not much racing, and I haven't won anything, but: I ran my fastest Pi Day half marathon; I finally got (one second below) 17 minutes in a 5K; I trained a lot and harder than ever; and then, this race.

I was told by a very fast person once that he thought maybe, given years of hard work and some affinity for the sport, I could be a regional class ultrarunner. It was an unprompted compliment that was really just an appraisal. I remember it because I haven't really come close. I've had some success at shorter distances, and won one 50-miler, but in general I've been pretty bad at ultras. 

I think Psycho Psummer is a regional class race. There was an Olympic trials marathoner there, as well as Omaha and Kansas City's best trail ultra guys. 

The Omaha guy smoked me, and everyone. He finished in 4:04. 

The Kansas City guy blew up once. I tried to drop him but that haymaker put me off balance, and his counterpunch put me on the mat. He beat me by ten minutes. 

The trials guy walked it in, twenty minutes after me. I beat him only insofar as a vulture beats a gazelle. And it probably helped that I have a lot more practice running 9-minute miles. 

I got a lot wrong, if I'm being honest. It was 100 degrees and the humidity supposedly made it feel like 115. Yet, I had no mechanism to carry ice and I outright skipped some aid stations. I ought to have run faster, but I don't think it would have altered my place any. But I think I can get in better shape next time, and the time after that, on and on and on, and then execute better. And who knows?

The thing about good races is they make you think you can have better races.

So I'd like to try. Maybe some strong local--dare I say regional?--50K fields or try for 2:45 or maybe a 100, finally, because people are tired of me wondering out loud. 

I don't know; but it's good to be around and to think, as the wave goes out to sea, that I've been washed up on a pretty nice shore. And I still have my flimsy, flat shoes.