[Scratch]

I've been a bit detached from DF lately, but yesterday I ran my second half-marathon. It wasn't a great run for me, but at least it qualifies as a diabetic type of triumph, so I'm dropping the race report I wrote for a runners' board in here too.

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Sunday morning, November 23rd, I peeled off the two layers of gloves I was wearing and dug down into the right front pocket of my shorts which had a ziploc bag that held a small glucose meter, a finger lancing device, and a tube of test strips which had some toilet paper wadded up inside to keep the strips in it from clacking around while running.

Blood sugar was 99 mg/dL. I dug into the left front pocket of the sweatpants I was wearing to help stay warm and pulled out 2 glucose tablets. With the various numbers I have collected over the past couple of years and whatever instinct it takes to try to manage insulin, blood sugars, and carbohydrates, I figure that 8g of carbs should lift my blood sugar about 30 mg/dL. Running up in the 120 to 140 mg/dL range when I can manage it works well to give me some buffer from the hypoglycemic range that begins in the neighborhood of 65 mg/dL.

Have I ever mentioned my unusual relationship with numbers? I’m freaky good at them in some ways, can add up, subtract and multiply numbers in my head faster than most people can use a calculator. I love their beauty in the stories they describe in baseball, both the truths they can reveal but also how they can lie and deceive. Anyhow, it was back in 2006 that I got more serious about taking care of the autommune disease that changed my life with its onset and diagnosis in March 1985. Getting serious has meant bleeding my fingers at least 8 times a day, sometimes up around 15 times in a day if things are going weird or I’m trying to gather more finely grained data and information.

I don’t suppose it would surprise anyone if I said that I hate it. Not a consuming hatred, but just one that at times is resentful or is longing for it go away and my life be made a bit simpler, that I wouldn’t end up setting an alarm clock to wake me up at 12:30 AM to check and make sure I’d be ready for today, having that alarm go off again at 2:30 AM, then leaving me with only a fitful 1.5 hour doze until it was time to wake up and get ready along with my brother to head on into Philadelphia.

It would be his first half-marathon. This would be my second half. Last year’s training for it was pretty **** cool. You ever had something that you achieved and it was triumphant, it ends up in the memory as beautiful as the first kiss you might have had, no, wait, better than that, that first passionate kiss you had of someone you loved and came from when you had realized a sense of urgency, of dedication, of surrendering yourself and in that, in that you come out renewed. Reborn. Alive. Shaking and aware of nerve endings which you had never known or had fallen asleep.

Now I was coming back but it had been an uneasy year for getting ready. Back June and the first half of July I was often overwhelmed by fatigue difficulties, which my doctor and I feel were probably because of how since I first contracted Epstein-Barr virus, it seems to reactivate every couple of years although thankfully it’s not as bad prior times with each recurrence. But I got back to running again late July and started to see a good build of mileage with a gradual increase in intensity with the tempo runs, hill repeats and finally intervals at the beginning of October.

My long runs peaked at 14 miles on October 11th which I did at mostly easy-feeling pace that came out to 10:53 minutes per mile. Things were looking good — in 2007 my peak long run was 13.1 miles 15 days before the HM and my average pace on that was 11:22. It was looking like a couple more good long runs I could be shaping up to have a chance at running Philly at 9:30 pace as a stretch, but I felt confident that better than 10 minutes per mile was almost cinched up for sure.

Still, there had been a few odd twinges while running that 14 miler. But I didn’t think too much of it even the next day on a short recovery run when there was a light dull ache on the inside of the upper left tibia. Finally on the Thursday following I ran an early o’dark intervals session at a high school track and was rewarded with enough pain that for the rest of the day I walked around limping. I had begun icing the area and I would examine the area with my fingers. What had been tiny spot of where pain would rise up at the fingertips pushing had grown in size.

I did the cautious thing and stopped running. I monitored the area each day with my fingers and after a week had passed, pain had lessened and the size had shrunk. Just shy of two weeks of no running, I was finally rewarded with being unable to make it hurt by pushing hard with the fingers. I waited a few days more and resumed running. I ran and there was no pain — there was a sensation of sorts to the area, but nothing painful. So from that point on I worked on running every 2 or 3 days with the hope of preserving whatever fitness had survived the 16 day layoff. I also decided on a plan that I would gallowalk the HM, try to use 9 minute run intervals with 1 minute walk breaks. On one run using that method I was rewarded with 9:35 pace over 4.2 miles, my legs felt fresh at the end of it, I felt like beating 10 minute per mile pace was possible.

My brother and I had gotten separated at the mess and confusion of the drop bag buses. I was a bit disappointed that we had been unable to stay together and I hung back for a while. I got confused by the speaker system talking about the wave starts and didn’t realize I should go forward earlier to get in my corral. That did work out kind of nicely, the portapotties emptied and I used one to empty my bladder. Then I went forward trying to figure out where I should be lining up until it slowly dawned on me that the wave I should have been in had already gotten underway. I got into the tail end of the line of slow marathoners and got underway. It would turn out that I was almost 20 minutes behind my wave start.

So I had gotten screwed up there, but that was okay in some ways. The wave start did relieve the congestion of 2007 when I ran an 11:45 first mile because it was so crowded. I hit the first mile here in 10:06 which was good because it hadn’t felt too strained, but on the other hand I hadn’t taken the walk break at 9 minutes because that had happened shortly after entering the construction area of Arch Street and I didn’t want to be a dick by pulling up into a walk, so I had kept running and made up my mind to start taking the walk breaks at the 19 minute mark.

The congestion of Arch and Race Streets for mile 2 along with pulling into my first walk break yielded a split of 10:33. By this time I suspected that 10 minutes per mile pace would not happen for the day, but I should be decent enough to squeeze out 10:15 maybe for the 13.1 miles and get a PR at least. Mile 3 showed up after 10:22 and I had ditched my extra long sleeve shirt. The mile 4 marker was off, I suspected it was off when I got a split of 12:33 but I had been starting to have some concerns. I had begun to acknowledge the sensation that my legs just weren’t quite all there. I kept pressing on and hit the mile 5 at an 8:37 split, so I had dropped back about 10:30 miles. I tried to dig a bit deep at that point and take advantage of how mile 6 often felt like gradual downhill, just tried to let the legs float along and I split mile 6 at 9:58.

It was in mile 7 that I had the first couple of flashes of what was to come. On a couple of strides I briefly felt the left calf muscle not wanting to come out of contraction, but I kept going in hope that it was just some odd twinge.

Mile 8 is the University City area and it features a gradual uphill for much of it. It was going uphill that the cramps began hitting hard enough to force me to pull up into a walk. I began what would become the way to get home 5.5 miles — run til I cramped, then walk out the cramps for a minute to minute and a half, then run again until the cramps hit. For a while downhill areas were my friends, for whatever reason I could let the legs relax and just try glide down them to hopefully make up time I was losing. Miles 8 and 9 would take me a total time of 21:41 as I missed the mile 8 marker, getting under 11 minutes per mile on that section was only thanks to the nice long downhill by the Philadelphia Zoo.

Mile 10 was brutal, not for cramping really so much, but with how I walked up the hill by Memorial Hall when I had run it last year. With how the cramps had hurt me on the uphills earlier, I had decided it would be best to walk up the hill and only resume the run til cramping method once it leveled out some again. Mile 10 was an awful split of 13:04 and pretty much nailed the door shut on any faint chance of beating my 2007 time.


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[Scratch]

I walked through the water stop at 10.5. Guy on the loudspeaker noticed that I was wearing a Dash for Diabetes shirt and yelled, “Way to go, Dash for Diabetes!” I thanked him and went on.

Mile 11 yielded a split of 12:15. By now I was only good for running about 1 to 2 minutes at a time before cramping up. I began watching for the Art Museum to appear. It finally slowly came into view and I worked on grinding out my miserably spastic legs. The bridge came to carry me across the Schulkyll and into the final stretch of the Art Museum circle. Last year I had been fairly floating along at that stretch, I had been feeling my legs wanting to cramp but nothing debilitating and I was driven along by purpose and triumph. This year I came into the area where the half-marathoners from the marathoners hurting, anguished and bitter. Yet it didn’t quite overwhelm me either. I cried a bit seeing that it was coming to an end and I would finish my second half-marathon, that I would achieve the goal of not having the half-marathon be a one time event in my life, but that I had done it again. I had done it on less than ideal training, I had done it on a cold cold day, I had done it on 5.5 miles of legs gone bad. I took one last brief walk break then gathered myself for one last push to the finish area where a number of people I know from Kickrunners would be cheering.

I lifted my hands in big yellow gloves as the bleachers came into view so Beaker could see. I ran as hard as I could to finish it up and collect my second half-marathon finisher’s medal. It was done. My calf muscles hated me. My watch said 2:23:38 to run-cramp-walk the 13.1 miles.


Tough day. It was cold. I got a mylar blanket being provided. I saw the huge line to have finisher’s pictures taken in front of American flags and decided against waiting for that. I just wanted my drop bag and the warm clothes in it.

I didn’t bother with the food tent. I felt fine and when I did test a bit later, my blood sugar was 155 mg/dL.

I don’t know what to make of it all a day later still. I’ve had bad races before but this one stings a lot. It stings enough to piss me off some down deep. Somehow I feel cheated that I did all I could do to take care of being diabetic but that doesn’t mean I get to have everything else go right. I know that's not entirely rational, but sometimes it feels like that.

I’m also trying to be positive though. I did finish it. I got it done. I had support from good people out there. I did the best I could with a bit of a lousy draw on some of the luck yesterday.

So we continue on. Next year can probably be better. I will get there again, I will do it again.

[Ronin]

Hey Scratch!

You're way too hard on yourself. All athletes have off days and, plagued by a cramp, this was one of yours. Remember two important things: first, most Americans your age aren't doing anywhere near the physical output you are and second, most people experiencing a cramp would have looked for a taxi to the finish line.

I've had bad bicycle days, times I've had to walk up hills, or find the shortcut home (even calling for a taxi) just because I didn't have "it" that particular day.

In the end it's all about doing the activity. As I learned from a line in the Sc-Fi Series Babylon-5 "...I'm alive, everything else is negotiable."