Park City Marathon: the wall elevated

"You came all the way from New Jersey for this marathon?!  You're crazy!"

So said Sue, the nice lady at the first aid tent, while I laid there half-dazed with an oxygen mask on my face.  How did my ninth marathon end like this?

I did my hill training. I got to town early to adjust to the elevation. I spent all day Friday studying the course.  I did everything I could. Yet nothing seemed to prepare me for the challenge of the Park City Marathon.

Access to the start line was fast and easy. I love these small marathons for that. There was plenty of space to park in the Newpark plaza. No crowds, no shuttle buses, no problems.

It was still dark with perfect weather - cool and cloudy. I felt surprisingly ready. When the race kicked off, I bolted out behind the front-runners and out of the plaza on Newpark Boulevard and then Highland Drive. I deliberately tried to hang back a bit and not keep up with the leaders, but kept a healthy pace for fear of going too slow in the easy section.

At the first mile marker, I nailed a 6:20. Way too fast. I slowed it down for a few miles, still pushing on the uphills, especially the steep one around the next turn from Old Ranch Road to Trailside Drive, but relaxing on the downhill.

By the time I wove my way through the neighborhood with its lovely houses, past the school, and onto the bike path, I was in the zone. When I came to the end of the bike path and started the seven-mile stretch on the part dirt, part paved Rail Trail, I was on target for my 3:03 PR. I watched the sun rise over the mountains and everything felt right.

The nine-mile stretch of uphill began gradually in the eighth. By the ninth mile marker, I was still right on track with my goal pace of 7:01 I was working a lot harder than I should have been. Maybe the elevation (6600 feet above sea level) really does have an effect. Though it did not look like I was going uphill, it was feeling like it.

By the tenth mile I fell behind, but I was thoroughly in the moment and intent on simply running the best race I could at that time. And if I had to adjust and readjust the definition of that as the race went on, so be it.

The course turned off the Rail Trail and onto the bike path alongside Deer Valley Drive and that is where the real work started. The incline was no longer gentle.  But now in the 14th and 15th mile, after already running an incline for seven miles how could I gather the strength to push it to the top of the hill in this ski-lodge portion of town.

It is too bad that all my focus had to be diverted to this problem because from time to time I did notice that the path would have been aestethically enjoyable on any other day - snaking through underpasses and winding past parks.

If the final uphill push to the summit of 7200 feet was the end of the race, maybe I could have summoned some last blast of energy. Instead, I merely trotted at a pace of around nine minutes to that 16-mile mark figuring that I would make up lost time (or not lose any more) on the 10 miles of gradual downhill. The worst was supposedly over.

To my surprise, I had nothing left for the descent. Gravity helped me hit my last sub-8 mile in the 17th, but that short, steep monster of a hill in the 18th, just past the shopping plaza and the two small pedestrian bridges, was the final nail in this marathon's coffin.

Everyone that I usually beat was passing me - women first, then older guys, then the costumed guy. Somehow I mustered up the energy to yell to the guy that was way ahead of me on the road as I was about to make the turn he missed. And in a few minutes, he passed me for a second time as we ran through the residential streets.

How did this happen? When did this happen? I had hit the wall and I did not even know it.

On the bike path alongside Highway 224, I hit Mile 20 with a 10-minute mile. Each mile was slower than the previous one. On the dirt path back toward Old Ranch Road, I struggled to run an 11-minute mile. In the 24th, 12 minutes was the best I could do.

I can not describe the misery of the last two miles. This was now a race to beat my worst time (3:54 in Delaware last year), so I kept forcing one foot in front of the other, determined not to walk, even as I was now shuffling at a 13-minute pace.

Crossing the finish line, there was no triumph, only sweet, blessed relief. Too much relief, actually, as my body immediately began to shut down. My legs buckled a bit...my head started getting dizzy...my eyelids heavy...

Suddenly a woman was holding my arm while I entered the finish chute. "Come this way," she said, and then there was a man holding my other arm. My memory of it is fuzzy, but by the time we finished the short walk from the finish to the first aid tent, Sue and Herb were basically holding me up.

I was laid down on a cot and Herb put an oxygen mask on me as Sue took my blood pressure. A doctor who was originally from Paramus, N.J., (small world!) checked on me.

It took about a half hour for me to feel some kind of normalcy (discounting the soreness in my legs). I hung around a few minutes longer, but I had a schedule to keep - check out of the hotel in Sandy and head to Arches National Park in Moab.

There were no stomach troubles and no missed turns to blame for my poor showing.  It was a difficult course - one of the hardest in the country, according to Sue, after telling me I was crazy - and I gave it my all. 

That made me feel good.  Proud, even.  Crazy?  No way - it was worth everything I put into it.

A big nine-mile breakfast

Those (few) that watched my little movie about my experience at the Boston Marathon all seem to remember one particular moment.

As I crested the infamous Heartbreak Hill, the last of a series of hills through Newton in the second half of the race, I looked right into the camera I was holding and yelled (huffing, puffing and all red-faced), "Is that it?? I'm from northern New Jersey!! I EAT HILLS FOR BREAKFAST!!!" 

See it in this segment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZikyUD6umqU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Three years and four marathons later, I find myself daunted by the sight of the map and elevation chart for today's Park City Marathon.

The first notable challenge is the mixed terrain (paved roads, bike paths and dirt trails) and the myriad twists and turns in the route (will this be another Delaware?).

But the elevation chart is the real eye-opener.

It basically looks like a bell curve. The first mile is relatively flat (though starting at 6,400 feet above sea level). Then it shows a mile-long 200-foot upgrade followed by a slight drop and a flat stretch into mile seven.

And then it is all uphill for nine miles. Nine. Straight. Miles. Gradual at first, but then increasing to a 400-foot incline over two miles (14 to 16). That is more than just breakfast.

It is mostly downhill for the remaining 10 miles, save for a short, steep uptick in the 18th. Though cruising downward 600 feet for eight miles may sound like relief, it can be a painful hell on the Achilles and extensor tendons as well as the calves. After more than an hour of burning up the quadriceps, the sudden and relentless pounding on the lower leg muscles (with gravity adding force to the impact) may end up being torture.

Almost all of the reviews on marathonguide.com use words like "challenging" and "tough". They say it is not a PR course and I see why. 

But they also talk about its scenic beauty as one of the best. So will keep the same attitude I had in Missoula, Mont., two years ago. That race was not my best time, but it was a great time.

If all I am looking for is a PR, why travel so many miles? I am here to see Utah, not just run a race. I can not wait to take it all in.

Wish me luck. See you at the finish.

Terrible taper

Ah, the taper. 

No, not the guy that magnanimously records the Phish show to share with the rest of the world. That dude is so not terrible!

I am talking about the three week period between the final 20-mile training run and the marathon.

Usually, it provides a wonderful sense of relief, even triumph, knowing that the hardest part is over and the only thing left on which to focus is the race itself. You glide through the series of shorter and shorter runs, feeling your muscles repair and your strength building, so when race day arrives your legs are fresh and ready.

Usually.

For this, my ninth marathon, I do believe I overtrained and I am paying for it. I can not undo the damage done. I slogged through a 13-miler two Saturdays ago and even my mid-week five milers have felt efforted when they should have been effortless. My eight-miler this past Saturday was merely OK.

On the upside, my speedwork days have been rather successful. The last hill training day had me bounding up a one-third mile hill at an average of 2:07 each on four passes, and charging down twice at around 1:53 each.

On the final track day - just four 400-meter intervals - I burned through them at an average of 1:22 each. That is seven percent faster than my 5K pace.

Still, with less than two days until the race, I do not feel ready. My muscles do not feel like they have bounced back, ready to spring into action. I feel like I need more rest. But I am out of time. 

In about 22 hours, I will call upon my body to run 26.2 miles at a relatively fast pace - ideally 7:01, realistically 7:15. I have no idea whether my body will accept or reject that idea.

Back to the audience Phish tapes

I realized something last year after the Atlantic City Phish shows.

The awesome and pristine soundboard recordings provided by LivePhish.com for around 10 bucks apiece are missing something crucial - the audience.

A Phish show is a communal experience.  When you are there, you are among friends with whom you bond, sharing those special moments of great jams, surprise song selections and crazy segues.

Sometimes the audience participates in a way that enhances the experience even more. In A.C. last year, the shouts of "Woo!"  from "Twist" carried through to the next song "Piper" by the band and audience alike.  I was in the front there, and there was clear interplay between us with the "woos".  By the time the encore came, the band probably forgot about it, or at least put it behind them.  But as "First Tube" began to swell, we started doing the "Woo!" shouts again.  Trey saw it, acknowledged it and, I believe, played to it.  It was like electricity flowing between the band and the fans.

When I got home, I excitedly downloaded the shows and the first thing I went to was "First Tube".  None of what transpired came through on the recording.  It was just another (excellent) "First Tube".

Several months later, I was thinking about that night, so I downloaded the audience recording of "First Tube" from Phishows.com.  It gave me chills - the whole experience came flooding back.  The thrill of really being there, not listening at a distance, was present in that recording.

I thought about it again this year at SPAC when the audience was singing along to "Cities".  I started to wonder when "Cities" became a singalong.  You would never know it from the soundboards I had been downloading for 10 years.

So in the interest of saving some money and getting the communal experience again from listening to shows I can not attend, I will be exclusively downloading the audience recordings this year.  They take me back to the time when all we had were audience tapes and they remind me of how great it is to be at the show.  Great jams still comes through - we certainly enjoyed them through every hissy Maxell tape back in the day.

Now they are more accessible than ever and free thanks to the tapers that still schlep their equipment to the designated taper sections and to Phishshows.com which puts them out there for all who care to listen.  We do not even have to pay for postage and blank tapes anymore!

After the tour is completed, maybe I will cherry pick a few choice songs, jams, and shows to listen to in the amazing high-quality audio provided by LivePhish.com. But for now, I will favor the vibe of the experience over the clarity of the sound...and save 10 bucks each time.

Building up and falling apart

Weeks 14 through 16 of training followed the same pattern - sore and weak beginnings, strong middles and disastrous ends.

The weeks on Hal Higdon's Advanced 1 are front-loaded with short and/or easy runs. Even in the heavy, 50+ mile weeks, the five-, 10-, and five-mile runs on the first three days are at a comfortable pace. Coming off a long run, the first day is rough, the second a struggle to be better, and the third a mostly-recovered gallop.

The fourth day is reserved for speed business - hill training, speed intervals, or tempo run, depending on the week. I tackled these like a monster, pushing hard on six uphills (1/3-mile at around 2:07 each) and two crazy fast downhills (1:53 each), eight 800-meter track intervals at an average of 2:57 (which is faster than I should have been doing) and tempo runs up to 50 minutes with 15 minutes in the middle at 10K pace.

The fifth day is rest, thankfully, because the sixth day is a pace run. I admit, I worked harder than I should have with these. Every other week is pace, but I did it every week - doing runs of up to 10 miles at goal marathon pace of 7:01 - a lofty goal, yes, but I like a challenge and I want to break my 2009 PR.

By the time the seventh-day long run came around each week, I was not in top shape, fatigued from the work of the previous days:

My 13-miler in the summer heat was pathetic and painful, with aches everywhere.

My final 20-miler, along the Delaware and Raritan Canal (this time on the Pennsylvania side, 10 miles south and back from New Hope) started wonderfully but with a devolved in the middle and led to a crash into "the wall" at Mile 18.

My final 13-miler was another slow slog, with aches in my lower back, extensor tendons, and quadriceps.

From here, the plan is to taper the mileage, which is most welcome. But I can not help but feel like my peak training ended with a whimper and not with the strong, resounding triumph for which I had hoped.

It is going to be a shaky couple of weeks until the race.

A cold, wet summer night with Phish at Jones Beach, July 12

It was not how I imagined my 20th anniversary show.

On July 23, 1993, I went to Jones Beach Ampitheatre with my brother and a couple of his friends to see Phish, a relatively unknown band with a growing and dedicated following.

We decided the week before to go see this band that we had gotten into the previous summer. We went to our local Ticketmaster outlet and bought tickets for $19.50 each.  I only recognized the "album" songs, but was thoroughly impressed with the way they jammed on the songs. I was 18 years old and had never heard rock music do this thing that I had only known jazz to do.

Twenty years later, almost to the day, I attended my 92nd Phish show at that very same venue.  The ampitheater has gotten larger, as has the Phish crowd - good luck getting tickets the day they go on sale, let alone afterward - and the prices have gone up to $45 to $60 (still much cheaper than many other bands!), but it was still Jones Beach and it looked much the same.

Unfortunately, it was pouring.  Not a shower or a sprinkle - POURING.  This wasn't the warm summer rain of SPAC, this was torrential. And it simply would not let up.

I wore my quick-drying polyester running clothes, figuring that if the rain did stop, I would dry off quickly.  What I did not expect was the cold ocean wind that would have me freezing on a July night coming off of an intense heat wave.

Listen to it now and you will hear an amazing show. The first set included a string of excellent songs, including my first treat to Page's "Beauty of a Broken Heart" (a "purple" for the set list book!), one of my favorite of Mike songs, "Sugar Shack". It was a perfect mix of the old and new, culminating in a one-two punch of "Reba" (the song that hooked me in 1992) and "David Bowie".  But it was so difficult to enjoy while being drenched by cold rain.

We huddled under whatever cover we could find during set break. Many guys were hanging out in the bathroom because it was warm and they could try to dry their clothes under the hand dryers!

The rain thankfully slowed down and stopped for the second set, but it was just as (if not more) uncomfortable with the cold ocean wind whipping through the apmitheater while Phish did a monstrous, non-stop, segue-filled jamfest of the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" into Deodato's funked up "2001" ("Also Sprach Tharathustra" to some), into "Tweezer" with an awesome segue into the Talking Heads' "Cities" and a seamless move into "The Wedge".

"Wading in the Velvet Sea" was almost a given (what with the water theme of the beach and the rain also alluded to in the first set's "A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing" and "Water in the Sky") and the big ending of "Character Zero" topped it nicely.  But, damn, it was cold - yes, COLD - and uncomfortable and I would be lying if I said I was not glad it was over.

Well, almost over.  A totally botched (but charming, I suppose) "Sleeping Monkey" coupled with "Tweezer Reprise" ended the night and I could not get to my car fast enough.  I had a towel and some dry clothes in there that were calling my name.

Some shows have a you-had-to-be-there vibe.  For this one, I would say you might be better off if you were not.

Phish in Holmdel, July 10

My early 10-miler (hey, 9 a.m. is early on the day after a Phish show!) in Colonie, N.Y., was rough-going, and another hard week of training had begun.  The fact that two more Phish shows landed square in the middle of the second-hardest week on the schedule was a test of my Phish-phan/marathon-running mettle. Never has juggling the two been so difficult.

Somehow, I managed to kick some butt on the Wednesday hill training, even adding one more upward interval, as I averaged around 2:10 for each uphill on the 1/3-mile hill. 

That night was the fifth show of Phish tour, and my fourth of five in a row.  I will admit that I got pretty soused on vodka that evening because I showed up very early and decided to get nice and toasty in the parking lot...and in the venue, too, where a double-on-the-rocks put me right into dance-the-night-away mode.  The fact that it was my first time in an ampitheater pavilion since Bethel 2011 made me even happier.

I was in the back of the pav where the sound was great, the sight-line was perfect and the dancing room was plentiful.  And dance I did to the standard but rocking selections for the first set.  A mid-set "Julius" was strange, yet it totally worked; and who does not love a good, lounge-y "Lawn Boy"?  When Page acknowledged his and Trey's New Jersey heritage (as well as the "Jersey Strong" and "Stronger Than the Storm" catchphrases), you can imagine how the place reacted.

Question about "Ya Mar" - when and why did the drop the "He was a no good pa" part in the middle?

As good as the first set was, the second set really blew the roof off the place.  They brought out five - count them, five - big jam guns: "Crosseyed and Painless", "Harry Hood", "Sand", "Light" (my favorite 3.0 jam vehicle), and a gorgeous "Slave to the Traffic Light".  The fact that "Sand" felt cut short was forgivable because it was followed by "Light".

They peppered the rest of the set with rockers like "Axilla" (please bring back "Part II", or at least the ending!) and "Good Times Bad Times" (like "Julius", in a strange but welcome mid-set placement); concluding it with "Rocky Top" and "Cavern", leaving the crowd thoroughly satisfied, though I am not sure what was up with all of the "Maria" (from West Side Story) teases.

The "Possum" encore was superfluous.  I read a lot on Twitter about how everyone is sick of "Possum" (myself included), but at the shows, people are singing along with bursting energy.  So I guess the "Possums" will keep on coming.

I keep a setlist journal, and every time they play a song that I had not previously seen them do, I write it in purple.  Sometimes I get a little upset when there is no purple.  For this show, I would not have had it any other way.