Santa Monica Mountains

One of the things I like about DC is that you have four distinct seasons of approximately equal length (3 months).  Nudge a little north and spring starts to compress into a smidgeon at the end of May.  Even just 3 hours north in State College, you never had a proper spring, just muddy cold tails of winter for most of March and April.  Drift a little south into Virginia and the Carolinas and you lose a proper winter.  DC is a little mid-Atlantic sweet spot where each season takes itself seriously.

Snow means winter slack-off time!  (Dec 21, 2015 – White Grass resort, WV)

My body follows DC’s strong seasonality, with distinct fall and spring training cycles, and winter and summer off.  Maybe it’s a relic of the high school and college track and cross country cycles, with clear summer and winter downtimes followed by September and March buildups to marque championships in November and May.  Or maybe it’s just the tug of Miss Mother Nature, with the body’s natural drive kicking in with the cooling of summer heat or the budding of orchids.  Clover time.

This fall was peppered with works trips (Mexico, Taiwan, Florida, Virginia Tech), but I tried to squeeze as many races as I could between September and November (Big Schloss, Navy-AirForce Half Marathon, Ellen’s Run, MountainBack, Stone Mill 50).  After Stone Mill, I’d take some R&R and settle in for winter.

But sometimes different cycles collide.  A most overwhelmed uterus at Stone Mill smashed my little fall running plan to bits.  There was no crescendo.  Why would I take time off after covering a slow 27 miles at Stone Mill?  Physically I didn’t need a break.

I’ve noticed in Aaron’s UltraRunner magazine that there is a surging obsession with coaches for trail running.  Has anyone else noticed how many articles now are about professional coaching?  I’m so confused.  I thought the whole point of trail running was to get away from people telling you what to do.  After a youth drenched in athlete-coach tensions, the trails are my free space.  Part of the joy derives from knowing I can give two big middle fingers to anyone who starts to tell me what to do.  Aaron knows the line well.  Even Strava sometimes oversteps and has to be cut back.

But I will admit that in that one little moment after Stone Mill it would have been useful to have a coach, someone to whom I’m beholden, who could just affirm Marmot, take some bloody time off.

It felt unearned.  It felt stupid.  I wasn’t even sore.  Aaron reminded me that you can’t take a break from training when you haven’t been training to begin with.  But after Stone Mill I took a little vacation from running.  Which doesn’t necessarily mean no running.  It’s jut a hiatus from the almighty Strava.  No goals, no tracking miles. Whether I did 5 miles, 10 miles, or 40 miles over the course of a week, it was all the same.

Cue……Los Angeles.  Aaron’s brother Mark and his wife Amanda had just bought a new arts & crafts style house in Echo Park and were hosting Thanksgiving this year.  Aaron and I stayed with my aunt’s family in Santa Monica, and split time between the families.  Every day was sunny and cool and perfect.  The perfect place to kick off Operation KickBack.

Watching pelicans nose dive into the Pacific from the Santa Monica pier was my personal Thanksgiving highlight

Aaron and I indulged ourselves with a 22-mile loop in the Santa Monica mountains.  Remarkable how we could trot out the door from my aunt’s house in Santa Monica and zigzag a couple miles through some streets and find ourselves at Will Rogers Park and the entrance to miles upon miles of trails up into the mountains and overlooking the ocean.

The West Coast version of Vicki’s Death March

Now, I am not a California girl.  (Maybe that’s not as self-explanatory as it seems to me, but I’m not diving into that here.)  But I do like to visit.  My aunt and uncle have a cabin in Mammoth, and Aaron and I would love to get out to California more, for skiing in the winter and running in the summer.  We’ve also deduced that the LA marathon starts within a mile of Aaron’s brother’s house, and ends within a mile of my aunt’s house in Santa Monica.  Will definitely need to do that point-to-point some time, maybe in 2017.

The Santa Monica mountains reminded me a ton of Stanford’s foothills.

I continued Operation KickBack in Clearwater, Florida, where I flew directly from LA for a conference.  I made sure to escape from the conference for a sunset run along the beach that ended with a dip in the Gulf of Mexico.  It was my first time swimming in the Gulf of Mexico.  There’s something about floating in the dark salty water as the red fireball of the sun melts into the horizon that lets you forgive yourself of everything, past and present.

White sands of Clearwater Beach

As soon as I touched down from Florida in DC, it was time for Magnus Gluteus Maximus.  Last year, I did the whole 50k.  And spent most of those miles griping about how Sean had ditched me that year.  This year was a social run.  Sean had a knee problem.  Our dear delicate flower Schmidty this time had horrible kidney stones.  Hellgate was the following weekend and Aaron could join but not go too far.  Evan was post-Pinhoti and rounded out our merry band of slackers.  The plan was to run 5-6 miles out with Brian, Sean, and Aaron, and then continue on with Evan to perhaps do the whole thing.  But Evan and I had split for a minute or 2 before I realized my stupidity.  I was missing quality social miles!  Evan and I quickly reversed and caught Sean, Aaron, and Brian to run the 6 or so miles back to Hemlock with them.  Evan and I then ran a couple miles upstream, to round out a BlackJack 21.  It was a splendidly sunny and warm day, and the most fun I’d had on the trails in a while.  Sean was limping horribly and I was a little concerned.  But you can’t be friends with Sean if you can’t handle watching him hurt himself.

One of the things I’ve never understood about MGM is why the pizza doesn’t arrive until 1:30.  The winner of MGM is not the person who covers the 50k the fastest.  If you run too fast, you just have to wait longer for the food.  Last year I was the real winner, arriving just 10 minutes before the pizza came.  Changed out of my wet clothes and Bingo, hot food.  But most years I don’t run the whole thing and end up leaving around 12:30, the utmost limit of my hunger tolerance.  There’s a Wegmans on the way home.  And an awesome pizza place we discovered in Clifton.

This year, by 12:30 I’d eaten my fill of Katie’s sugar balls and was starting to motivate towards the door, when I ran into Clapper.

‘You know Michele told me to order the pizza earlier this year,’ he began.  ‘But then I thought that would just reward all the people who went short.’

I tried to wrap my head around the notion that a marmot who’d woken up at 6am and run 21 miles should be food-deprived and punished.

‘Really?  You want your party to just be the blowhards that run the whole thing?’  I found my logic unassailable.  ‘We’re leaving, Joe.  We’re hungry.  I ran 21 miles and I want food.’

You could see the lightbulb flash.  Now here Joe gets a lot of credit for how quickly he changed course.  He dialed up the pizza guys right away to try to rush-deliver the pies.  Sure, it was still another 45 minutes or so before they arrived.  But his efforts were symbolic, and the hangry marmot was appeased.  Sean, Aaron, Brian, and I held on for several more hours of festivities, one of which involved me exercising my duties as a member of the ‘Stick Club’.  If you want to know what the Stick Club is, you’ll have to query me offline.  I’m confident that only very close friends will have made it this far in the blog anyway, and there’s nothing to worry about, but Aaron says people might get the wrong idea about me.

I’m not a very politically active person.  I’m not terribly active in the VHTRC either.  But I do try, with all my marmot powers, to make running fun for myself and others, e.g., Donut Runs and Beer Miles.  For the month of December I’ve made our WUS runs ZooLights runs, zigzagging through the National Zoo and stopping into the animal houses to see the critters.  Aaron and I have been painstakingly shepherding WUS back to its roots as a fun social run, not a sprint free-for-all.  So if I can get the pizzas to arrive at noon at MGM, instead of 1:30, it will be a subtle but symbolic victory for putting more weight on having a fun and social time out on the trails, and less on running insanely long distances.

I next took my crazy notion that running should be fun to State College, PA, where Aaron and I spent the Friday before Christmas.  I met up with old running buddies (pun intended) at the noon time run from Rec Hall.  Tom, Meira, Dave M, Costas, and two new young guys Seth and Mike Z headed out with me for a golf course loop that quickly devolved into a group effort to keep a semi-inflated ball with us that I found on the side of the path.  We’re runners, not soccer players, so there was a fair bit of retrieving the ball from woods and ditches.  We got bonus points for kicking the ball into someone’s butt (preferably Costas’s).  At some point someone declared, We should have a ball on all our runs!  The game ended to much consternation when Costas accidentally kicked the ball into someone’s fenced-in yard and Costas refused to climb the fence to get it.  You know, the fact that a beat-up old ball can bring so much joy to a group of runners kind of makes you wonder how fun-deprived runners must normally be.

Meyer Dairy: best there’s ever been, and ever will be

I’ve waxed on previously about the unexpected charms of State College, and my attachment to the place and people, so I’ll refrain from too much of that.  I’ll admit that I felt a bit guilty Thursday night when it was clear that post-Hellgate exhausted Aaron was straining to keep his eyes open as we drove up to PA.  But after 48 hours in State College I didn’t feel guilty anymore.  State College is a fix I need a couple times a year.  It might seem stupid.  There are ostensibly plenty of places to get a massage in DC, a fair share of fancy ice cream places, plenty of shoe stores, running trails, etc. etc.

But, ironically, DC is a tough place to be if you like people.  You have to work really hard at it.  You have to plan things in advance.  You have to wake up really early.  On Sundays.  You have to coordinate schedules, and fight rush-hour traffic.  Hanging out with people in State College is seamless.  You want to do a happy hour on Friday?  Tom sent out an email to the listserv and we had to yank all the tables together to fit everyone.  You want to jaunt with friends in the mountains?  You roll out of bed at 9am, drive 5 minutes, and head off into the hills at the sane hour of 10am.  And if you haven’t had enough of your buddies, you whine and chant until your friends agree to go to the Naked Egg for brunch.  It turns out it’s graduation weekend and things are crAzY packed.  And by crazy packed, I mean we have to wait 20-30 minutes.  That would be the shortest brunch line in the history of the District of Columbia.

Don’t get me wrong, I love DC.  I love my job, my apartment, Rock Creek Park, Cleveland Park, WUS, Vace Pizza, etc etc.  Life is good.  But you have to work hard to be a social cat.  You have to organize and plan, sometimes months in advance.  Sarah Wright is one of my very best friends, not just in DC but in the world, and I can’t actually recall the last time I saw her.  It’s neither of our faults.  It’s just DC.

Tussey MountainBack 50-mile relay

State College, PA

October 25, 2015

The ‘Kid’ Team: Patrick, Andy, Dana, Alex, me & Cecily

‘So, was MountainBack about what you expected?’  I feared that I may have overhyped it in the days leading up the race.

‘Well,’ Cecily began, choosing her words carefully.  ‘When we started the trip I thought this was just going to be a fun run.’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted.  ‘I sold it that way to get you to sign up.’

‘And then it started to dribble out during our ride up that the DCR was actually a pretty seriously competitive event.’  We were taking the scenic way again for our drive home, winding through the rolling Pennsylvania farm lands in the dwindling light.  ‘And then when we met your friends for dinner, I kind of had an Oh Shit moment and realized that I was going to have to run really hard and fast.’

‘I bet the dead giveaway was when I suggested you warm up a lot before your first leg.’

Goldfine’s expression coming up Leg 1 cleared up any of Cecily’s confusion about how hard she was supposed to run Leg 2

‘But in the end, it was neither of those.  People were so laid back, even though we were running hard.’

Cecily was too fast for Judd’s shutter speed

‘So you had fun?’  I’d dragged Cecily into this whole shenanigan.  I was still worried she was scarred for life and never going to do it again.

‘Yes!  You know I haven’t run very competitively since college.’  Cecily had been a star 800m runner at Dartmouth, back in the day.  We’d competed together in high school.  ‘It felt like the good ole days of 4 x 800.’

Cecily’s flying handoff.  (She has more hand-off experience than the rest of the DCR combined.  Even Team Ream is impressed.)

MountainBack this year had its share of highs: pulling my team into the lead on that tough Leg 4 hill; re-taking the lead on the thrilling bomb down Leg 10; throwing my arms around Alex at the finish line, after he’d held onto our team’s lead by the skin of his teeth.  But nothing was more satisfying than knowing that Cecily had caught the magic of MountainBack.  That one race where you run against your friends with the fiercest of competition, running your guts out, whispering taunts, and then share hugs and beers at the end.

Dana begins cozying up to Mike ‘Beer Distributor’ Martin’s team halfway through when we discovered a catastrophic error: KID TEAM HAD NO BEER. Amateurs…….

This year the DCR had new Commissioners: Cali and CJ.  They mixed some things up: we had the draft just a couple days before the race, to minimize pre-race sandbagging.  This negated some traditions: ordering matching singlets, team names along a theme, the weeks of pre-race trash talk.  But it avoided a key draft problem: injury dropouts and ringer substitutions.

Cali explains reason #2 why Costas shouldn’t wear a pink scrunchie

Most of my team this year was newbies.  And, as Sheakowski noted in the MountainBack parking lot, we were the ‘Kid Team’, with an average age that was at least a decade less than everything other team.  Whenever a team wins the DCR, there’s typically an ensuing onslaught of sandbagging accusations.  But the Kid Team didn’t have any clear sandbaggers; everyone just ran solidly.  I took one gamble pick in the 4th round on Andy Bogus, who was a last minute sub and didn’t have much of a bio, and ended up churning out a clutch run up the killer Leg 11.  Drafting by phone is always a challenge.  You have no idea who’s been picked already.  You don’t have a chance to meet any of the new people.  But as Cali was listing off the folks still remaining in the 4th round, I yelled into the phone ‘Give me Bogus!’

Sheakoski thinks up ways he can accuse Cecily of sandbagging

The DCR was made more complex this year by the fact that every team had a different leg order.  So you had a lot of mismatches: captains running against 4th round picks on Legs 5 and 11, last-round picks against 3rd-round picks on Leg 2 and 8, etc.  So there were likely to be a lot of lead changes.  Patrick shot the Kid Team out to the lead on Leg 1, and we were in the lead for a larger percentage of the race than any other team.  At various times the Pink team (Costas’s team) and the Orange team (Zimmerman’s team) took the lead.  But on Legs 4 and 10 I managed to wrestle it back, and give Andy and Alex enough cushion to hold off Mike M, Zimmerman, Ken, and everyone else on their heels.

DCR game faces from Davis, McGuire, Zimmerman & Wilcox

Zaffino’s game face (must get past that point in the 50 when you wonder what possessed you to run the whole thing…).

Game face?

Still traumatized from Renz’s game face

This was my 11th consecutive Tussey MountainBack relay, and my 9th consecutive year of DCR (for more information on the elaborate Draft Challenge Relay, see blog posts from prior years).  But my first DCR win.  We also won the Standard Men’s division, which was a larger number of teams.  But we all know that the only thing that matters is how you stack up against the other DCR teams.

Overall, I liked a lot of things about the new Cali/CJ DCR.  Thank god I don’t have to buy another stupid singlet I’m never gonna wear.  And the lack of last-minute substitutions kept the competition a lot more fair.  No one can really hurl the customary sandbagger accusations at the Kid Team.  We just had a good strategy: (a) stack our front end on Legs 1/7 and 2/8 with speedsters Patrick and Cecily of Penn State men’s soccer and Dartmouth track team fame, respectively; (b) ask Dana to do his best to keep us in the race on Leg 3/9, knowing that he’d be running against runners picked higher in the draft order but if he kept us within sight of other DCR runners, the marmot’s competitive instincts would kick in; (c) sure enough, dangle some DCR headbands in front of me and I’ll track them down on 4/10, Taiwan jetlag be damned; and (d) count on Bogus and Andy’s pure toughness to clutch onto shrinking leads.

Going into Leg 10, I informed my team, ‘Now guys, you all made me work damn hard on Leg 4……’  Catching Meira and Costas on uphill legs had been grueling work.  My training involves neither (a) speedwork or (b) hills, so MountainBack is always a hard jolt to my system.  ‘So you all are going to give me a nice cushy lead on Leg 10.’  We’d been in the lead since the top of Leg 4, and a nice float down Leg 10 seemed like an apt reward for heaving my lungs out on Leg 4’s steep hills.

‘Chri-kies,’ I muttered as the Orange team came into view.  Pink team was right on our tail.  They were going to make me do it again.  And if we were going to win the DCR, putting us in the lead wasn’t enough.  With mismatched legs coming up, I had to give Bogus and Alex a couple minutes of cushion.  As I went by an ultra runner, he yelled, No one else running like that out here.  My hamstrings would be sore for more than a week.  But I gave the Kid Team the last push it needed.  Bogus held tough on Leg 11, a monster performance for a 4th round pick.  Alex put it all out there on Leg 12.

My fears about the Kid Team had been vanquished.  That Bogus, in his baggy pajama pants and oops-I-got-lost-mountain-biking-yesterday-and-did-way-too-many-miles had no idea what he was getting into on Leg 11.  That Cecily would hate me forever for dragging her into all this.  That I’d be crawling after a long, sleepless trip to Taiwan and back.

Kid Team goes home with some serious bling

As Cecily and I drove home to DC, I found myself admitting that a side of me still very much misses State College.  We had been there less than 24 hours, but it was enough for her to know exactly what I meant.  It might be tough to find a decent Ethiopian restaurant in the Happy Valley.  Or catch an Ariel Pink concert.  Or race with 45,000 people around the Mall.  But there’s a coziness, and an ease of living.  The way everyone was able to convene impromptu for happy hour at Toftrees (if we want to do something with friends in DC we have to plan weeks in advance — there’s no just scootin’ across the city).  The way the shoe guy at Rapid Transit, Brock, knew who I was and had shared friends, and helped me and Cecily sort through the entire basement of clothing racks to find just what we were looking for.

I describe last night’s mouse poo explosions in lurid detail

And of course how can we omit Luna and his wonderful doggies and garage apartment?  Sure, this year we had to contend with a lot of mouse poo (seriously, Luns, we got to get Leda in there).  But what’s MountainBack without a shower that ends with accidentally smearing mouse poo all over your wet body (as it turned out a little mouse had found the warm wrapped towel a delightful place to relieve himself)?  If there had been a live feed of Luna’s apartment the night before MountainBack, you would have seen me and Cecily shrieking and laughing, as I had taken a blanket from the upper reaches of the closet (‘no way a mouse could get all the way up there,’ Cecily had assured me) and thrown it onto my bed, sending pellets of poo flying in all directions across the apartment.  After scraping up all the pellets, we determined that one bed was 100% poo free, and Cecily and I tucked in together under the sheets.  Because friends don’t let friends sleep in mouse poo.

friends are for tricking other friends into running longer and faster than they planned to

Most of these photos were kindly provided by Judd Michael.

hardly had to write the blog: this picture says it all (notice the clenching of the toilet paper tissues for dear life)

‘I’m done.’  I whispered in Aaron’s ear.  The sun shone wide across the blue sky, and the fall air was crisp and calm.  It was perfect weather for a long day of trail running.  My eyes were tearing but my mouth was smiling.  ‘But walk with me, Bear.  I gotta find a place to scratch some leaves.  And quick.’

My legs had no interest in quitting.  They’d held up well over the 27 miles I’d covered.  Despite my abdominal organs all conspiring against me, I hadn’t actually lost any time on the lead woman.  But I had a clear intention for the Stone Mill 50m.  I wanted proof-of-concept that I could run 50 miles like a fat-ass: easy, uncompetitive, and just covering the miles no-drama.  As if it were Catawba.  Or the Teton Crest Trail.  A long day on the trail with friends and critters and without any parties in the stomach.

But by mile 17, where I met Aaron at the aid station, it was clear that my vision was unattainable.  Sometimes your race happens to fall on the wrong day of the calendar.  I have one day each month where I’m immobile.  If I take the day off from work, take a steaming hot bath with an overdose of prescription pain killers (up to the equivalent of 3200 mg of ibuprofen on particularly bad days), and curl up in a ball, I survive the day.  It’s hard to eat, but I force feed just enough to be able to take the heavy painkillers.  The pain comes and goes in waves, and sometimes if I take a short jog during a ‘good’ wave I can feel a little better.  Get the circulation moving the blood around.  But it’s not a day to race.

Maybe I was a little overly optimistic toeing the line at Stone Mill.  The timing of things was such that I knew that the first bad wave was coming.  But bodies are curious, and sometimes the body’s Schedule of Events doesn’t flow quite like clockwork.  Maybe I’d get lucky.

Luck is a funny thing.  As Aaron and I walked out of the Mile 17 aid station, I found a four-leaf clover on the side of the trail.  I screamed words of exultation that I hope no children overheard, I danced, I hugged Aaron.  The draught was over.  I’d been afraid I wouldn’t find another before winter set in.  After several months with no four-leafed friends, I had started to consider what I might have done to offend them.  True, it had been a very busy fall, with so much travel that I hadn’t once made it out to West Virginia to see the Sodds in their flaming fall colors.  West Virginia is where I go to put the pieces back together, and stop the rattling.  And rattling brains are not so likely to find clovers.

Whenever I tell people that I find clovers all the time, their first response is ‘Lucky.’  Sometimes I just nod and smile.  But if the mood strikes, I’ll point out that the only people who think clovers have anything to do with luck are the people who rarely find them.  Yes, I’ll admit that clovers do have something to do with serendipity, and the stochastic nature of life.  That the world is not as controlled as we’d like to think it is, and that low probability events have outsized effects on human existence.  But most of all, clovers signify the beauty of mutants.  That in any population there will be certain creatures that just fall outside of the charts.  And trying to homogenize them will bring only misery.  And, at a broader scale, that we are all unalike in our own little ways, and happiness is attainable only when you can still cherish people even when you don’t have foggiest idea how they can think the way they do.

It occurred to me that my little Mile 17 clover might turn my race around.  I had drunk an entire Ensure.  Holly had given me some Tums. (I had wanted to tell her that my problems were so much bigger than Tums, but she was so sweet about it.  And pain makes me taciturn.)  Hope was also buoyed by the way that the pain always goes in waves.  There were moments I felt invincible.  But then the good wave would always recede into a bad wave, and the reality sunk in: today was a day when I should be curled up on the carpet with a pile of blankets, not trying to cover 50 miles.

It occurred to me that Aaron might try to make me push on to one more aid station.  I resolved that if he wanted me to not quit at 27, I could push on to one more aid station.  I certainly didn’t want to, but I trust his judgment.  But Aaron is a smart bear.  He knew that if Stone Mill had been a priority race for me, I could have sufferfested to the finish.  He also knew that it was his job to nudge me on if he thought I was just going through a temporary bad spell and there was a chance that my race might turn around.  But he recognized that neither of these scenarios were true.  He also knows that I have proven multiple times that I can sufferfest to the 50-mile finish line.  Proving that again is pointless, and I would take no pride or joy in it.  It would only leave me with one more bad taste in my mouth and one more notch in the number of miserable ultra experiences I’m willing to tolerate before I throw in the towel and refocus on marathons and road races.

I rolled around on the carpet in pain for a while when we got home, happy that I had quit before things had gotten too bad.  I was uncomfortable, but it would have been so much worse if I’d made myself finish.  And I know what worse means: today was nothing compared to the aftermath of the NAF half marathon, where I’d missed my flight to Mexico.  I tried to have my post-race deconstruction talk with Sean, but my stomach wouldn’t allow it, and partway through I had to hang up.  I’ll still never forget the way he put an icepick in the wound when I dropped in my first Highland Sky at mile 32 (‘What?? You only had 8 miles to go.  You could have just walked it.’)  I wish I’d known then what I know now: that Sean is a mixed bag of sometimes gutting out the ugliest of times, and sometimes just dropping because the winds are wrong.  Earlier in the day, Holly had been telling me about having to drop at mile 97 at Massanuttan because of asthma that made her husband fear for her life.  At the end of the day, everyone who runs trails for long enough is going to have their own goodie bag of drops: the drops that were medically forced on us, the drops that we could have pushed through but didn’t feel like it, the drops that still eat at our hearts because we know we should have done differently, the easy breezy drops that mattered less than that time you forgot to scoop the cat box.

When I was feeling better, Aaron and I had a bit of dinner.  I ate my food eagerly.  I was in a surprisingly good mood for having had such a crap race and rough day.  ‘This is the first time,’ I declared, feeling a change stirring in me that I hadn’t felt before.  ‘Growing up, if I had a bad race, you know how that would’ve gone.  By dinner time Bob would still be dissecting it, piece by piece, where it went wrong, where I erred.  It would go on for days.’  I cradled a pile of string beans on my fork and scooped them into my mouth all together.  ‘You have to recognize how different this is.  Finito.  Move on.  Shit happens.’  I shook my head, marveling.  ‘Thank you.’

we want DONUTS!

Donut Run of Champions 3 (‘HalloWUS’)

October 27, 2015

the calm before the storm

Results:

12-donut/10k ‘Powerass’ division

JLD, repeat Donut King

Jonathan Loewus-Deitch (1:15:07) [and managed to not poop in any yards]

6-donut/10k ‘Classic’ division (men)

Sean Andrish (1:15:07) [ate 10 for good measure]

Jared Seiberg (1:45:28) 

Jeff Reed (1:45:28) [remarkable time given his mid-race visit to Good Guys]

6-donut/10k ‘Classic’ division (women)

Robin Watkins (1:19:04 gun time/1:18:55 chip time)

Cecily Garber (1:24:57)

Aras contributed with 1/10th of 1 donut

6-donut Connecticut Ave baby stroller division

Julian + Aras Jamison (46:42)

6-donut Full course (in)/Connecticut Ave (return trip) division

Adam Watkins (1:05:05)

9-donut + concoct your own 10k course division

Tom McNulty (1:19:04)

3-donut + lots of variations on course division

Sarah & Scott knew they could show up whenever they wanted and take their merry time, since Sarah’s had an in with the RD ever since she saved her ass in Vietnam (’04, not ’68)

Liana (aka, girl who married JLD after being impressed with his donut eating) (1:19:04 gun time/1:18:55 chip time)

Bobby G (not to be confused with the Bobby G of paleo/crossfit/underwear fame; the NEW Bobby G is our fresh-from-Amherst NIH intern who runs on actual streets and sometimes even when there are no photographers) (1:24:57)

Lisa (aka, girl who Jared hasn’t scared away yet, despite being forced to eat donuts while running *the farthest distance she’s ever been made to run*. EVER) (1:45:28)

Sarah (after timing mat had been removed)

Scott (after timing mat had been removed)

Best Blood

Adam tries to convince Bob that, at age 22, this is his donut-munching prime.

Bob Gaffey (apparently JLD and Sean heard a loud thud and thought it was a giant acorn)

Best Volunteers

Amanda Hicks (course markings: first year where we had no one get lost~)

Joey Cohen (first last-minute crap-we-need-more-donuts! mid-race KK run)

Boots (water, cups, and second last-minute crap-we-need-more-donuts! mid-race KK run)

Aaron (race starter, direction-giver, timer, photo taker, general enforcer)

Aras promises to pull his weight next time.

‘Mom, just want to be clear: I don’t care if we run tomorrow, but I’m happy to run it if you want to run it.’  My hamstrings were still sore from last week’s Navy-Air Force Half, and I was just generally tired from having just arrived the night before from a work trip to Mexico.

‘Well, I haven’t been training or anything.  But I’ll run it if you want to run it.’

With neither of us strongly opposed to running, the default was: run.

My mom is pretty selective about her races.  She’ll do the Race for the Cure 5k in May, in celebration of her survivorship.  She’ll do the Bethesda Turkey Chase 2mi fun run in November, Bethesda’s biggest event of the year.  And she’ll do Ellen’s Run.

ellen’s run finish area

Ellen’s Run is the closest I get to racing in my backyard.  The 5k course starts in Candy Cane City, just on the Maryland side of Rock Creek Park.  It winds through the parking lot where I first learned to ride a two-wheel bike (I can still recall the terror of my dad pushing me along and then suddenly letting go and yelling ‘pedal!’).  It passes by the playground that many iterations ago was made of wood that splintered into your fingertips.  And of course it cuts through the woods of Rock Creek Park, where  in the old days when no one was alarmed by the sight of two 7-year old girls wandering around in the woods on their own, in search of red-headed woodpeckers and muscrats.  In the last mile, you loop around the soccer fields, home to the legendary Nelson family Thanksgiving football games.  Not sure how a game that was supposedly ‘touch’ football could end with so many wounded sprawled on the field.

Ellen’s Run was first held a decade ago, 6 months after the death of Ellen Vala Schneider.  Ellen had been a highly engaged member of the Chevy Chase community prior to succumbing to her long-standing depression in February 2006, when she drowned herself in the Potomac waters off the Billy Goat Trail.  Her children attended BCC High School, where the community rallied to set up a run in her honor and to raise awareness and funding for mental health.  Ellen’s Run gets a healthy 350+ turnout every year, but retains a strong community feel.  BCC comes out in force, including the runners and coaches of the cross country team.  I always see my old BCC history teacher Bob Mathis, and sometimes my old soccer coach Pam Havel.  Ellen’s husband and two sons are there, always bringing a solemn poignancy.

trying to convince aaron that i’m still just ‘fun running’ despite being in the lead at mile 1

I’ve run Ellen’s Run 4 times — and won it 4 times.  In 2008, 2009, 2012, and this year, 2015.  It’s a fast course — I’ve run it as fast as 17:34 (2012).  Since the BCC boys cross country team runs it, I’ve had some spirited contests with boys not used to being beat by a girl.  This year I did not ‘race’.  But I knew that I could trot along happily at the same pace that won the NAF Half last week (6:05/mi) and still have a good shot of winning.

momma jill’s windmill-fueled surge to the finish

After I finished, Aaron and I looped around the earlier points of the course to cheer on my mom.  She was pleased to break 40 minutes, and even more pleased to see the sun peaking out.  The awards ceremony is always a moving affair, with words from Ellen’s son and husband, and an outpouring of support for all the many volunteers who have put all the blood, sweat, and tears into making the race happen each fall.  I won a dinner for 2 (limit $100) to Suski-Ko, the fancy Japanese restaurant in Friendship Heights.  I’ll be taking my mom.

Ellen’s Run has become a tradition for me and my mom (see 2012 race report), and both of our eyes got misty when the race organizers announced that, after a decade of Ellen’s Runs, this year would be the last.  Suddenly we were so glad that we’d made the last-ditch effort to be out there this morning, and to be part of this special little race for one last time.

it’s really important to have crew during 5ks