Lobsterfest VI

Chevy Chase, MD

April 25, 2015

 

As Sarah W. pointed out at the 6th Annual LobsterFest, the only people who have annual birthday parties anymore are kids under 10 and grandparents over 90.  And Martha.

When I was a kid I had homemade birthday parties.  My mom would make a cake.  My brother would do a magic show.  There would be a bug hunt in the lawn.  As a goodie bag, you could take your bugs home with you.  As we got older there might be some wiffle ball in the front lawn.  It was a home run if you could hit it onto our neighbor Krish’s roof.  Then on the actual day of my birthday my mom would ask me what I wanted to have for dinner. Lobster!

My great-grandmother Martha Palonen (the Finnish one) lived in Gloucester, MA, a fishing town north of Boston that must be one of the lobster capitals of the world.  Here we could buy lobsters fresh off the fishing boat and boil them ourselves.

When I moved back to DC in 2008 to work at the NIH, my parents had just bought a second home in Shepherdstown, WV and were in a habit of hosting parties up there.  We also discovered that there was a nice little 5k race up there that supported the local Potomac Audubon Society that was held around the time of my birthday.  Race for the Birds + lobsters at Shepherdstown + friends and family = the initiation of Lobsterfest I for my 28th birthday.

Last January my parents’ house at Shepherdstown burned to the ground during a fire of unknown causes.  My parents were home in Chevy Chase, no one was hurt, but it was devastating for my parents.  My father’s massive library of books was in the basement.  That year we had no Lobsterfest, just a small family dinner.

But my parents have been rebuilding the house and it was hoped that it would be ready in time for LobsterFest VI.  But as we got close to the date, we realized that LobsterFest in Shepherdstown was not going to be a reality this year.  My mom made some peeps about using neighbors’ toilets, but I summarily rejected these.

It was thought that we would still go up for Race for the Birds.  This year R4B was even expanding into a 15k trail race option.  But I had been under the weather ever since returning from Boston at the start of the week puking (I didn’t even run the Marathon and I was still booting!).

So this year ended up being kind of LobsterFest Lite.  Many of my friends have been to previous LobsterFests and know how much fun the ‘real’ version can be.  This time, the cold rainy weather didn’t cooperate and we had to eat inside, forego tennis and excursions, etc.  We kept invoking the Passover mantra of: Next Year….In Shepherdstown.

But we had a wonderful turnout of family and friends from work, running, and childhood.  My brother Fred and him family came all the way down from Vermont.  ‘Cookie’ Jen also won big points for driving all the way from Ashburn to deliver her treats even though she didn’t feel well enough to stay.  The lobsters were absolutely delicious (I ate 2).  The croquet was fierce until the weather turned.  Fearless bug hunters braved the rain (Fred and Summer won for greatest diversity of bug, Savannah and I won for prettiest bug — as prizes I gave out the 4-leaf and 5-leaf clovers I had found that day clearing sticks from the croquet lawn). As the greatest single mark of success of LobsterFest Lite, we cleared out all of my parents’ bottles of red wine in the cellar.

 

 

 

Bull Run in Quotes in Reverse Chronological Order

2 Days After Finishing Bull Run Run

‘So Aaron, do you know why I keep running ultras, even though they’re just bouts of prolonged misery that drain the life out of my soul?’

Aaron swiveled his chair around but did not say anything.  I think I’ve mentioned before that Aaron does not like guessing games.

‘Because they’re the best possible way to prepare for a marathon.  After suffering through an ultra, a marathon feels like a breezy walk in the park.  After Holiday Lake, I felt like I was running on air at Rock ‘n’ Roll.’

‘That’s very sad.’

‘It’s kind of like how flying to Atlanta feels like a tiny puddle jump after Australia.’

Aaron made a sad face.

‘No, I’m serious.  I thought about giving up ultras and just running road races.  But ultra running teaches me how to shove gels down my throat even when it’s the last thing on earth I want to do.  It teaches me how to cruise through muscle twinges, knowing that they’re likely to pass.  Knowing how to do that does way more for my marathon performance than mile repeats or 80-mile training weeks could ever do.’

After two days of listening to me wrestle with the philosophical question of whether I should continue to run ultras, a question that seemed to rattle the essence of my identity as a runner who runs for fun, Aaron was too exhausted to offer any further response.

‘No, bear, this is good!  I’ve figured out how to reconcile ultra running with not being masochistic.  I’m suffering for a tightly defined purpose — it works!’

~            ~             ~

1 Day After Finishing Bull Run

‘Every runner out there has their own personal challenge.  Yours just happens to be your stomach.’  Aaron tried his best to put my struggles in perspective.

‘My challenge sucks!  Can I trade it in for a different one?’

~            ~             ~

1 Hour After Finishing Bull Run

‘I set a PR!’

‘Oh wow!’

‘Puke Record!  Seven spews!’

~            ~             ~

Mile 49 of Bull Run

‘Come on, run with us the last mile!’  A couple guys passed me very cheerfully.

‘Uh, no, I’ve been puking for the last couple hours.  If I go any faster I’ll puke.’

‘Yay!  We love puke!  We want to see you puke!’

~            ~             ~

Mile 45 of Bull Run

‘Hey, girl!  How you doin’?’  Some guys were sitting on a hill in the sunshine on the other side of the Marina aid station.

I glanced at them.  And then vomited three times on my right Montrail shoe.

‘Whoa, that’s the first time a girl has ever responded to me that way!’

~            ~             ~

Mile 36 of Bull Run

‘Yay, Boots!’

‘Martha!’

Gag reflex.  Followed by my first puke of the day.

‘Ooh, it’s okay, Martha.  You’ve got this!’

~            ~             ~

Mile 35 of Bull Run

‘Julian, I’m going to throw up.  Not now, but soon.’

‘No, you’ll be fine, you’ll be totally fine.’  If there was ever anyone who could convince me that everything would be fine, it was Julian J.  But I knew what was lurking in my stomach.  I had starting gagging about an hour prior, and the illness was steadily creeping upward.

‘It’s just a matter of time.’

~            ~             ~

Mile 29 of Bull Run

‘Kathleen, just let me know if I’m bugging you.’  I had promised Aaron I would go slowly for at least the first 38 miles.  Kathleen was holding a very nice steady pace and it seemed wise to duck in behind her.  We had been running most of the Hemlock-to-Fountainhead together, chatting breezily.  But my loquaciousness had gotten under her skin, and I was trying to be as quiet as I could on the White Loop.

‘Just so you know, Kathleen, if you ever need me to talk less, just go ahead and say so.  I will not be offended.’

~            ~             ~

Mile 1 of Bull Run

‘Aaron there is something seriously wrong with my bladder.  It’s flopping all around.  Can you fix it?’

Aaron fumbled with my pack while we slowed our trot.  ‘Is that better?’

‘Ooh, yeah, that’s much better.  I think it wasn’t fully in.  Can you just try to shove it in a little deeper?’  Pause.  ‘Ha!  That’s What She Said!’

Keith chortled.

 

UPDATE – SHOES ARE TAKEN – very glad to see them go to good homes!

My feet expanded from a womens size 8 to size 8.5, and I have finally owned up to the fact that I can no longer wear the majority of my previous shoes. When I really like a shoe, I often buy several pairs, so many of these shoes are still in the box and have never been worn. Or they were shoes I won and never wore, or shoes that just never quite worked.  These shoes are all too small for me, so contact me if you have interest in any of these (I am not selling these for $$ but if you’d like to make a small donation to Homeward Trails Animal Rescue as a token gesture that would be appreciated):

 

 

‘Aaron, I have one goal.  Can you guess what it is?’

Aaron dislikes guessing games, especially poorly defined guessing games.  ‘I can’t even begin to.  What are the parameters of this said goal?’

‘Ultras.’

‘Oh, okay.  Umm… To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamentations of their women?’

‘No.’

Aaron was unwilling to offer another guess.

‘I want to win Western States.’

‘How original.’

‘On a pony.’

He grinned.  ‘You mean the Tevis Cup.’

‘Yes.’

He kept grinning.

‘You don’t think I can do it.’  I was incredulous.

‘What’s a winning time for horses?’

‘No idea.  Not as fast as you’d think.’

‘Doesn’t really seem like you have the requisite expertise there.’

‘Dream big, baby.  It’ll happen when I’m in my 50s.’

Full Circle

The first time I ever rode a horse was on a family vacation at Lone Mountain Ranch in Montana when I was five years old. The animal was a large chestnut quarter horse with a white blaze named Nugget. I wore a massively oversized Washington Redskins ball cap, which didn’t cover my ears, and they were burnt red at the end of the long day.  Nugget liked to eat a lot of grass, and clearly was not bothered in the least by my tiny feet that flailed like duck wings, not even reaching his flank.  I fancied myself a great horsewoman (I had read all the Black Stallion books), so it was humiliating when they had to attach his bridle to the lead horse with a rope.  But it was a beautiful ride through the Montana mountains. A golden eagle soared above. Mule deer bounded in the distance. I wrapped my fingers through Nugget’s mane, and nuzzled his smooth neck with my cheek. My parents had no idea how much trouble this ride would cause in the Nelson household for years to come.

My family lived in a suburb a couple miles from the Washington, DC border. When I turned eight I started taking horseback riding lessons at the nearby Meadowbrook Stables. One by one, my friends eventually tired of horses, and quit, and my parents expected me to do the same. I had lot of other interests: I was also on a travel soccer team that made it to the finals of the Maryland State Championship, I played basketball and tennis and showed promise as a runner. My elementary school gym teacher had already phone up the high school track coach after he saw me run the mile.

It sounds absolutely absurd to suggest that my upbringing was anything but supremely privileged.  I went to sleep away camp.  My soccer team had a professional coach.  My family traveled to Europe when I was 10 to visit our Finnish relatives.  By all American standards I grew up with the world on a silver platter.  But in the context of the DC horse world, we were dirt poor.  I wasn’t going to get my own pony.  I wasn’t even going to get Devon boots.  Everything I owned was used — my show jacket, my chaps, my jodhpurs, my boots.  At the other end of the spectrum was Paige Johnson, who boarded her million dollar ponies at my barn.  Her dad owned BET television.

My parents saw the writing on the wall.  They saw how dejected I’d get when my exasperated instructor fumed about how I would have won the Pony Medal if it weren’t for my outfit: the color of my jodhpurs was wrong, my jacket was ill-fitting, my short boots were for kid riders….This was not the world for the Nelsons.

I had to give up horses in high school.  I had advanced to a point where I needed to start riding the A-rated shows in Culpepper.  My parents tallied that it would cost upwards of a grand a weekend and laughed.  But I never forgot about horses.  In college when I had a free Saturday without a game or a meet, I borrowed some friends’ riding clothes and competed in the inter-collegiate horse shows, winning some of the over fences events. It was my first time wearing tall boots.

These days I think all the time about taking up riding again.  But in the DC area it’s still $70-100 for a 1-hr lesson.  DC is teeming with lawyers and lobbyists who can drop that kind of money without blinking.  Aaron and I have great jobs that afford us a very comfortable lifestyle.  But not quite that comfortable.

When I was interviewing at veterinary schools, many of the profs at Cornell and NC State had horses.  Visiting Ithaca, I envisioned exactly what my new life would be like: a medium house with a sprawling track of land, some mutts and barn cats running loose, and a couple of thoroughbred rescues off the track that started off as crazies but came to love the trails as much as we do.  I’ve still got many miles to go before I get to this dream.  Miles on my own two feet.  But if Aaron’s counting on the dream fading over the next 20 years, he should remember how I told him I don’t want no wedding ring: just a horse.

 

DC Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon

March 14, 2015

Results

 Media coverage

“To move freely you must be deeply rooted.” -Bella Lewitsky, dancer (13 Jan 1916-2004)

Ooh, that’s no good. My shoulders sank when I saw the 1:30 time on the monitor.  I realized that, for the first time in seven years, I might race a marathon in over 3 hours.

My calves hurt. My right IT band was squirming. I had to piss like a race horse. My cold, drenched shirt clung heavily to my torso.

~ ~ ~
Aaron had sworn to the existence of a mythical creature: The Marathon That Doesn’t Suck So Hard You Wish You’d Get Hit By A Bus So You Didn’t Have to Run Miles 22-26. He attested to have experienced it himself, on many an occasion.
Personally, my spectrum of the post-marathon experience spans from a best-case scenario of curling up in fetal position for most of the day, to the not-uncommon medical tent-wheelchairs-hospitals-IVs combo.

Aaron had suggested several times a novel idea that ‘marathons feel better when you train for them’. But he also knew exactly how I felt about training. But as I’ve described in recent posts, I’ve softened just in the last few months to the idea that tracking my training and doing some more road running and pickups could result in less pain train on race day. Aaron bought me a very basic GPS watch and HR monitor this winter that I use from time to time to track my weekly mileage, along with Strava. I haven’t been using the HR monitor much in training, so we haven’t gotten down the measurements to a science yet. But I have at least a ballpark sense of what is an absurdly inappropriate heart race for a marathon pace.

The DC Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon presented the perfect opportunity to test whether I could run a marathon that wasn’t a suck-athon. I was bounded: I had to fly to Amsterdam for a work trip at 6:30pm the day of the marathon. I simply couldn’t afford to spend my afternoon curled up in a fetal position, let alone a the hospital.

The Rock ‘n’ Roll is a tough marathon to pace because the marathoners and half marathoners start together, making it all too easy to get pulled into going too fast by people who you know you’d be faster than if you weren’t running twice their distance. Good thing I had my handy dandy HR monitor to tell me if I was wildly out-doing myself.

Unfortunately, by mile 6 my HR monitor was informing me that I was wildly out-doing myself, with readings around 180. It would turn out that the monitor was picking up my cadence and not my actual heart rate, but it created enough confusion that I crawled through the 13.1-mile halfway point in 1:30 and change. At that point I realized the HR monitor was rubbish and wouldn’t look at my watch again for the remainder of the race.

I have a streak going of slipping in under 3 hours no matter the circumstances. Typically I give myself a good cushion so that I can positive split and still break 3. And the second half of the DC marathon is not quick. The field really thins out after the half marathoners finish, and there are few spectators along the course, especially in the Anacostia section. And there’s a major hill at mile 22. It was raining steadily and the road was filled with puddles. I had dug myself into a hole that I was unlikely to recover from.

~ ~ ~

The only upshot of the rain and desolation of the second half was that I finally had the privacy to relieve my bladder. I found the perfect spot around mile 14, with a large wall on my left and no one in sight, where without breaking stride I let ‘er flow. And flow. And flow. I was still peeing when I turned the corner. I was still peeing when the official photo guy snapped my picture. I think I peed for a full minute.

I came out of that pee a different runner: loose, relaxed, comfortable. The rain was coming down hard, but I started picking off the runners in front of me.  I ate four gels over the course of the race, and never got nauseated.  I ran the second 13.1 miles in 1:24, negative splitting by over 5 minutes. My last 10k was sub-40. I ran the second half of the race the way you boil a frog: gradually heating up the pace.

The last time I ran so freely was the backstretch of the Women’s Half Marathon back in September.  The cramping in my calves had abated, I was able to eat four energy gels with no nausea.  I spent the last 6 miles flying by guys like they were standing still.

‘This is your treat,’ I told myself, looking across the Anacostia River at DC’s waterfront, finally feeling what Aaron had described.  As some of you are aware, the last couple years have taken a toll on me, as I’ve reluctantly entertained the idea of relocating for a professorship — I’ve interviewed from New York to Scotland to Australia. But just in the last week or so, everything in my life finally sorted itself out.  I finally secured my dream job here in DC at the Fogarty International Center at the NIH, where I’ve been working for 7 years as a contractor.  We are so very happy here in DC.  So even though it was a bit lonely running over there on the other side of the Anacostia River, gazing over at DC gave me a great feeling of peace and a sense of being rooted that I haven’t had in many years.  This is my city.

~ ~ ~

I’ve had some high drama moments over my long running career. As a sophomore in high school I trailed for most of the race by over 100 meters at the Maryland State Cross Country Championship.  In the last quarter mile of the race I caught up to the leader, Kari McCarty of Hagerstown, and passed her in the finishing sprint across the field at Hereford.  Kari had beaten me by over a minute at Regionals.  I also had a come-from-behind victory at the Montgomery County Cross Country Championship.  The county championship was even bigger for me than states because it was all my friends and rivals and all four school size categories competing together (1A, 2A, 3A, 4A).  But these days marathons and ultras rarely come down to the final meters, so it’s been a while since I’ve had to use a big finishing kick.

When you cross the Anacostia River and head towards RFK, you can glimpse an arch of balloons that appears to be the finish line. Rounding into the finish, I had no awareness that the first woman was just ahead of me until the crowd started going nuts. I heard a fan yell, ‘Go get her!  She’s just ahead!’  When I spotted her, I could tell that she wasn’t moving well, but she had a long lead and it looked like there might not be enough turf left in the race to catch her. And I still had to spin myself around that horrible hairpin just before the finish.

Despite the rain there were hoards of people crowded at the finish and there was total mayhem when I blitzed by.  If this were a Disney movie, this is where it would go all slo-mo.   She was hurting and couldn’t put up much fight. But there was a twist: the arch of balloons wasn’t the actual finish line. You can imagine the kind of curse words I was sputtering when I surged to what I thought was the finish and there was no time mat there. There was a bit of panic, as I couldn’t even see where the real finish line was and had to run under another damn under pass.  But fortunately the finish line was just on the other side of the under pass, my legs held, and there waiting for me was Aaron.  He was shocked when I came in breaking the tape.  The last time he’d seen me along the course I was 5+ min behind the leader.

I got the celebrity treatment after the race — interviews, flowers, awards, got to meet Jim Ryun (I was pretty giddy about that), and, the best gift of all, I got to stand on a very warmly heated stage that finally got my teeth to stop chattering.  The second place woman, Rebecca Bader, and I huddled together right in front of the heater, milking it for as long as we could.  She had finished 2nd last year as well, but nothing bonds two women more quickly than sharing a heat source.  The celebrity treatment continued on the metro, where other runners were adorably excited to meet the ‘girl who’d won the marathon’ that day.

I haven’t had this kind of thrill at the races in a long time.  But I have to admit, 2:55 is not a PR for me — this was actually the fifth time I’ve run 2:55.  But even though the race wasn’t faster by time, the feeling of the race was fundamentally different from the previous times, getting faster and stronger as the race went on.  I’m heartened by running the last 10k in 39:45, and the second half in 1:24, including the big hill at mile 22.  Honestly, even though a PR would have been nice, I’d easily trade a race that felt great for one where I suffer my way through to a new PR any day.