Feeble disclosures
1. I topped 55 miles this week. That's a first for this calendar year and my highest total since last July, before I injured my right knee. I'm a little hesitant to push much higher than this, but I think that if I'm careful about where I run and attentive to replacing my shoes when they are excessively beat up, I can stay in the range of 60 to 70. I have as much time as I need and sufficient motivation, even if things have changed on the go-for-it front since the days I had a solid shot at qualifying for the Olympic Trials.
Obviously I can't know for sure my body will hold up, but I've been receiving a veritable flood of thoughts and prayers from various interstellar sources (a good chunk of which, it must be noted, is the metaphysical equivalent of hate mail) so I'm going for it.
2. Very much relatedly, I decided to hire a coach. As much genuine fulfillment as I derive from putting in my hour or so a day or puttering around the extended neighborhood, I can no more go for daily runs without lapsing into fantasies about testing myself in a committed way than Peter Griffin could spend every night at the Drunken Clam and limit himself to Diet Cokes. And if I am going to enter races, I am going to train seriously for them. That means as close to 10 miles a day as I can manage along with a couple of serious efforts a week. But recent history has shown that I just won't do that stuff by myself anymore.
This sums up my willingness to run hard on my own.
So, after some informed sniffing around, I decided last week to hook up with a brand-new training group, Run Boulder AC, headed by two-time Olympian Kathy Butler. Boulder is to endurance sports what the Silicon Valley is to tech (except that there is, or at least was, money to be made in that sector). The area is littered with retired or aspiring elites and people calling themselves coaches, and it's almost impossible to tell the various training groups and clubs apart. But local folk have spoken highly of Kathy, and when I chatted with her recently for a Motiv Running article it was plain for various reasons why this is so. I did a tentative set of 8 x 300s at Potts Field on Friday morning and got a good sense of the group, none of whom are full-time runners (and the fact that Kathy is not a full-time coach actually lends weight to her status as a coach, in my mind, for reasons that are perhaps evident).
I'm the blonde in the black shorts. If I'd know it was picture day I would have worn a different bra.
This will be a malleable project. I'm not sure what my goals for the fall are, and I have't decided how soon I will even jump into a race. Which brings me to...
3. Road trip. For the fifth straight year I'm heading to New England for the Boston Marathon as a spectator and guide. It's kind of funny that I have one Olympic distance runner feeding me training and another taking advice from me, and my creds are personal bests that amount to national-class women's times and a lot of lively dreck published in running rags over the years. (To my credit, I read a lot, or at least used to.) Also, at least one of the people I myself advise has coaching clients of his own, making Kathy a great grand-coach of a few Massachusetts residents she'll never meet or learn the names of. This could turn into a fun quasi-genealogy exploration.
This year, I am going to drive to New England rather than fly. I am #blessed to be able to take my work wherever I go as long as I have an Internet connection and enough of a buffer around me so that I can curse at my laptop screen without anyone discerning exactly how profane and antisocial I can be when engaged in vocational tasks. I've also become so irritated with the airline industry that I would rather burn through a dozen tanks of gas over a six-week period and stare at the bleak nothingness of Kansas or Nebraska than deal with DIA and Logan Airport for even a couple of days. Also, I can bring my keyboard and a lot of other not-easily-flown crap along.