marathon

The first thing I did after crossing the marathon finish line was call my girlfriend so she could come get me. It was the last call I would make with my trusty RAZR. My hands were slick with sweat and the phone was coated with the salt and grime that had evaporated from my body during the 26.2 mile run. When it smashed to the ground it shattered as if it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The stomping feet of dozens of runners crushed what was left of it into the asphalt. I would have laughed if I’d had the strength. Instead I just sort of stared at it and made a sort of grunted smirk.

On Monday morning I went to the Cingular store near my office and bought a new RAZR. I got the same model for $100 (with a $50 mail-in rebate). It took me a few minutes of trudging through the Motorola site, but eventually I found the instructions to pair my Bluetooth headset to the phone.

When I ran the LA Marathon last year my goal was to finish in five hours. I had trained for about two months and gotten down to a slender 186 lbs, the least I’ve weighed since my last year of college. Because of a disastrous combination of being mentally unprepared for the event and wearing year-old sneakers, at some point around mile 22 my left knee made a sickening pop. By mile 24 my right knee had joined its brother and I was in excruciating pain. I (literally) limped across the finish line and recorded a disheartening time of 5:46.

This year I decided to run about two weeks ago. I trained my out-of-shape, 200 lb, 33-yr old body for ten days. I figured that I had little chance of doing anything great, but I just wanted to (a) finish the race and (b) beat last year’s time. It was grueling and painful, I got a huge blister on the instep of my left foot, and I thought more than once that I was going to face-plant into the asphalt. But I was much better prepared mentally this time. The miles blazed below me and when I crossed the finish line I was struck dumb by the time: 4 hours, 56 minutes.

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Head coaches in the NFL often “script” the first dozen or so offensive plays of a game. They do this to set the tone and pace of the game, and to try to get their players to understand that they want to dictate how the game will go. With that in mind I have “scripted” the first 3+ hours of the music I’ll hear on my iPod during Sunday’s LA Marathon.

For more than two years now I’ve been aggregating my favorite “running” songs into a discrete playlist specifically geared towards keeping me motivated and moving towards that 26.2 mi marker. Any time I see a song in my 9900+ track iTunes library rated with only one star, I know it means one of two things. Either it’s a crap song that needs to be deleted, or it’s a song that I one-starred while running because I wanted to save it to my special cardio playlist. It’s my own little iTunes lifehack.

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Seeing celebrities in Los Angeles is still pretty cool, even though I’ve lived here for 6+ years now. It seems like they’ve been coming out of the woodwork lately. Here’s a quick summary of the last week or so:

• On President’s Day I saw Chad Lowe at the Coral Tree Cafe in Brentwood.
• On Friday afternoon I went to DecadesTwo on Melrose to buy a present for my girlfriend. (I had read at Caroline’s site that they were having a big sale on Christian Louboutins, and I know those are my girl’s favorites. I didn’t like any of them, though, so I got her a sexy pair of Prada high heels instead.) The paparazzi was outside in full force because Nicky Hilton was there shopping, too.
• Saturday morning we had brunch at Hugo’s on Santa Monica and Taylor Kitsch — Riggins from Friday Night Lights — walked past our table with his mini-entourage.
• After brunch we were killing time in Hollywood and crossed paths with Dennis Rodman who was apparently getting his car washed.
• This afternoon I passed Lance Armstrong jogging on Santa Monica while I was on my last ten-mile run before next weekend’s LA Marathon.

There is a point on San Vicente while running West when one rounds a corner and is confronted with — shockingly — what appears to be the entire Pacific Ocean. It is an awe-inspiring sight, even at night. It is at this point, during what is more or less a fifteen mile run, that I usually realize I’ve forgotten to do something to protect my nipples. Aside from the Marathon, this route is the longest I’ve ever run. On little three- and six-mile runs I don’t need to do anything about my chest. On a fifteen mile run, though, thousands of thumping strides will cause a man’s t-shirt to chafe and rub against his nipples until they bleed. The adrenaline and runner’s high will prevent you from realizing how much damage you’ve done to your vestigial mammary glands until you finally arrive home and toss your sweat-drenched clothes into a heap in the bathroom floor. The blisters on your feet, the near-unbearable soreness of your legs and lower back and even arms, the inevitable lingering desire for water … none of these things the next day can compare to the burning pain of having basically rubbed off your nipples. File under: Ouch.

For at least a year or two I’ve been waiting for someone to build a web service I could use to map running routes. This morning I drove to my buddy’s house at 6 and we went on a long run around Beverly Hills. With less than three weeks until the LA Marathon, it’s time to get serious about hitting the pavement. It took us about an hour and ten minutes, but — once again — I had no reliable way to determine the distance other than driving the route and watching my odometer. This is simply not practical in Los Angeles; at 7:30 in the morning there is so much traffic it would have taken me another hour of driving to do that. When I got to the office I figured I’d try searching for a Google Maps mashup. With the Nike iPod for runners and all the other cool mashups I’ve seen for everything else lately, I figured there must be one for running by now.

And there are two! At USATF (USA Track & Field) some brilliant souls have built a perfect route-mapping tool. We ran 6.72 mi (10.81km) this morning. How awesome! And now I can map the other five or six routes we take all the time to see how far I’ve really been going. Awesome. (There’s also one by Nike, but it’s not as cool.)

When the LA Marathon first announced its new point-to-point course last summer, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke to the significance of transporting participants for free on the Metro on race day. Yesterday, L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, in her capacity as MTA Chair, said in a committee meeting that marathoners should not be provided with free race day transportation and withdrew the agenda item from next week’s MTA board meeting. Mayor Villaraigosa plans to take this matter directly to the MTA board meeting on February 22, 2007.

Please email Supervisor Molina and ask her to explain herself. Let her know that runners are going to be making traffic hell enough already without taking away this free pass!

Update: I sent an email a few hours ago and recently received a very interesting response. Continue reading for Supervisor Molina’s email reply.

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Somewhere between Mile 22 and Mile 23 my body decided that it had had quite enough of my shenanigans. I truly do not know where I found the mental effort it took to convince my knees that they were not in excruciating pain. But I did. After a three-minute tug-of-war with my muscles won — incrediby — by my mind, I was able to resume my by-then plodding pace and finish in a very acceptable 5:46:07.