Boston Marathon Week 2 of 18: speed, snow, & vertical

A white Christmas for us!

Season's Greetings from snowy Spokane, WA where we are spending Christmas with Don's family. Also, it is COLD. Yes, it is often much colder here than in San Francisco, but as our SF winters average probably 55F and rarely dip below 40F, that's not a tough bar. In Spokane it's frequently in the 30s and 40s and sometimes the mid-20s, but we knew that this year it would be been teens & low-to-mid 20s for our entire stay, so when packing I pretty much just emptied my ski bag into my suitcase.

The deal with those fancy new Nike shoes.

ICYMI the ever-inquisitive Alex Hutchinson has left Competitor (RIP Competitor, which is *kind of* still Competitor but not really) and now writing for Outside Online. Most recently he tackled the issue of those fancy new Nike shoes, the Vaporfly, which purportedly improve efficiency by 4%. Now, for a while that was just Nike making claims, though the lack of actual scientific evidence did not stop many people from rushing out to drop hundreds (!) of dollars on them. But last week the results of an actual, rigorous randomized control trial run by a legit, reputable lab (the University of Colorado’s Locomotion Laboratory) were published in a for-real peer reviewed science journal (Sports Medicine), and it's official; the Vaporfly really does (or at least can) honestly and truly improve runners' efficiency by over 4%.

Yes, the study was funded by Nike because that's how research works, but given the reputation of the lab and the researchers involved and how the paper was published, you can be reasonably sure that the results are legit and not just more Nike propaganda. So, yeah, if someone is wearing them and seems to have an astonishingly good race, there is a nonzero change that the shoe really did have something to do with it. (As you probably already know, Eliud Kipchoge was wearing them when he clocked that just-barely-not a 2 hour marathon in Italy earlier this year, and Shalane Flanagan was wearing them when she destroyed the NYC marathon last month; see also Galen Rupp in Chicago and Camille Herron destroying the 100 mile record by over an hour.) To quote Hutchinson, "There’s something going on with these shoes."

Boston Marathon Week 1 of 18: On your mark, Get set......

The scene that greeted me as I finished Friday's threshold run just after sunset. Gorgeous, yes, but unfortunately the lovely colors are mostly the result of a bunch of crap in the air from the Thomas fire down south.

Ahhhh, the CIM stories just keep pouring in. So many wonderful races for so many friends and internet acquaintances, and I feel pretty certain this is the most PR and BQ stories I've heard from one race for as long as I've been running. I'd been planning to take some time off from marathons after next April but I already love that damn race so much that every time someone else is like, "Oh, yeah, I forgot to post about CIM, [AMAZING THING ACCOMPLISHED]," I feel like I'm right there in those last miles again getting all weepy and giddy and then my race registration finger starts getting twitchy. The CIM $99 holiday sale is not helping matters.

But I'm not giving in! Not just yet, anyway. I mean, I'm not saying I won't run CIM next year, but spots will certainly still be there in May. No, they won't be $99 anymore, but the last thing I want to do is buy a cheap registration, realize come summer that I am just plain marathon'd out for a while, & then feel like I have to jump back into training so I don't waste that $99. I'd rather pay more and be sure because there's no such thing as a good deal on a DNS or a race you're not excited about.

Meanwhile, back here in 2017...

Some Shoe Talk

I don't know if you know this already but I have a lot of running shoes.

Race Talk: You Have A Right to Your Disappointment

This past weekend was the Cal International Marathon in Sacramento, which when it comes to marathons, we all know is 100% the best in the west. Any number of my good friends were out there, as well as a number of other bloggers or visible social media-type people that I follow, and I've spent the last couple days liking/heart-ing/favoriting my little heart out of dozens of pictures, tweets, and various other types of social media posts.

Far & away one of my favorite parts of big race weekends, whether I'm racing or not, is celebrating the hard-fought victories of friends and others, and last weekend was no exception. From all accounts, the weather was perfect, the temperature was lovely, and PRs, BQs, and OTQs were racked up by the barrel full.

There are always other stories, though. Stories of giving it everything you had and still coming up short of a long-held goal. Of being foiled by some dumb injury. Of training that didn't go as planned, of DNFs and DNSs. Of working and working and working to get back to a certain time and coming nowhere close. Whether you had an amazing day or an abysmal one, it's hard to know what to say sometimes when others around you are in a different place.