RETURN TO THE RUNNING—THIS TIME IN THE LOWER ALTITUTDE,
HIGHER TEMPERATURE MARYLAND ENVIRONMENT J
UNE 23-26, 2001
I have had a “Quiet Week in the Derwood Deer Woods” my home town. But, it is not because I am on the prairie and time forgot, but because I have been into re-entry and recovery, and spinning a dozen plans into something less than that number of globe-girdling trips, trying to smersh multiple objectives together. I have sent and received a dozen emails in trying to coordinate what will apparently be a very dense fall and early winter season. I have run, again in the magnificence of pre-dawn, with Joe and go each of us pumped up for a marathon in the fall. It turns out that Joe is making his comeback on home turf in the inaugural running of the new Baltimore Marathon with a familiar figure attempting his first ever marathon in the event—Mark O’Malley, the new mayor of Baltimore and a Gonzaga schoolmate and acquaintance of Joe, so it will be good to go well together, and not get upstage by Hizzoner in the Hilly Course
I SIGN UP FOR A SECOND INAUGURAL RUNNING OF A NEW MARATHON IN THE SPRING
I had run the inaugural Montgomery County Marathon in the Parks last November, and am signed up again to do this one as the last in my fall marathon blitz following the Marathon of the Americas –the new name for the San Antonio Marathon. The new Baltimore Marathon is coming up on October 20—the week before my 26th running of the MCM now so congested and contested by charity runners. It seems on the YUP’s to-do life-list, running a marathon has moved up several notches, ahead of making the first million in arbitrage, upgrading the beamer, and writing your best selling biography. So marathons are proliferating, even if marathoners that stay consistently at it are not. Enter the next one for which I am now one of the earliest registrants—the DC Marathon, to be running its first time on March14, 2002. I will probably run this one with Joe, having registered as two runners and called him inadvertently late to tell him so after he had already gone to bed.
This one gave me pause as I entered the data for On-Line Registration on the very first day it was opened. Sure enough, it will be three weeks ahead of the Boston Marathon and two weeks ahead of the Cherry Blossom, so it should not interfere with my intent to do each of these, and it should be after I come back from the January (Cumberland, ?Goa, Mozambique? Malawi) and the February Mindanao and the probable attendance at the March IHMEC meeting, in—of all places—Havana! But, the part that gave me pause is the entry box on the from which said “Age on race day” I wrote in “60”. Then I sat there and stared at it for a while—probably the first time I ha thought about that advanced age, and here I am plugging into an endurance event when I should be applying for an assisted living arrangement! I then submitted my application even before I knew how much they would be charging my American Express Card which number I had entered. The automated feedback came on screen, thanking for my entry with a confirmation number, and pointing out gratuitously that I was receiving a $5.00 discount off the $85.00 fee for being older than 60 years of age. But for the economy of it, I believe I would rather have declined the honor!AND, NOW, THE EXERCISE OF A NEW TOY TO CHECK ON
DURING THE ENDURANCE RUNS AND ALTITUDE CLIMBS
There are quite a few converts here who run with heart rate monitors, and try to set some threshold for their aerobic capacity by pushing their heart rate to some two thirds of its maximum—well, I now have a much more expensive and much better information than pulse only, sine I can directly read how aerobic I am by the saturation of my hemoglobin reading. So, I packed it up, and went off for a run down the Needwood Bike Trail to Aspen Hill and back with this device run as my base line for the anticipated use during climbing and running in Ladakh, Kamchatka and Nepal—all places where the air is a bit thin and the exertion can get to be quite maximal.
Off I went—after completing most of the Nutrition editorial that had been requested of me, with the annoying exception of bibliographic references from my recent and irretrievable bibliography—the subject of a flurry of emails with my computer guru regarding the update of my home page without large skipped sections that had been simply dropped. It was 3:30 in a hot sunny afternoon, and I was saturated in another way before even starting the run. I noted that the same baseline pulse of near 50 was accompanied by a O2 Sat of 96% as I punched my watch. Almost before I got to running, indeed, while only “thinking” about running, my pulse was up to 152. It actually decreased as I got well under way. The pulse rate came down to around 122 and the saturation did not change from the 96%. It stayed that way even when I would hold my breath, as, for example, when I was drinking at the fountain. The pulse monitor settled down and showed that I came down after I had been under way for a awhile to be rolling along at about 96—104. In fact, when I had slowed down to stand and drink, the pulse went up again. It seemed that the majority of the run was almost balanced out on the scale, of 96 pulse and 96% saturation. I believe I am supposed to exert more to achieve the highest training efficiency—but, it was a hot day and was getting along just fine, and we may await that test when I have to put on gloves and ear muffs—as the picture of me on the cover of the journal article about the Antarctic marathon.
I have about three weeks before departure to Ladakh, during which I will not only pack up for that trip, and also a second bag for the hunt upon my return, since I will leaves some of my excess stuff I might not use in Simla to be ready with the backpack to be carried forward to the Spiti Valley and the Nepal trek that will follow five weeks later. More importantly, I have only this limited amount of time to get things done, such as the four book chapters now due, with only one of them completed, and that today, when I stayed home to start and finish the Nutrition editorial as a favor that put it up the priority scale. I should get the long neglected revision of my Web Sites off the impasse they have been on, and also start up on the first six months of the year end review and the photos that will be needed to support it, since I am up to five full albums even before the mid-year, and the volume of the review will overwhelm the dense flurry of activities at year’s end. If I add the packing, the planning, the filing of my 2000 tax return before the extended August 15 deadline, and the extensive authorship and editorial work I must do between now and takeoff on the beginning of the non-stop roller coaster that begins July 15 and continues in high gear, by present estimate, through mid-April of 2002, I should use this calm before the storm to get as much of the backlog cleared before the new cascade of events overtakes and compounds that which I still have to do.
As I once said –and wrote—in Mozambique, this process of catching up and trying to live into the present tense, is like life. It is a hurried sequence of eventful days until something, like the filling in of “Age on Race Day” brings one up short, to realize just how fast the flow of days adds up to years.
For now, my next event beyond a new day of responding to the urgencies of calls and emails, is the chance to host Craig and Carol Schaefer who are coming up tomorrow top go out to dinner, delivering my new gunsafe and some gardening tools that I did not pick up in the Bronco when I was there last month, and then they will go on to Salisbury to close on their house.