The race was the Stone Cat 50 Mile in Ipswich, Mass.  It left Doyon Elementary School at a very cold 6:15 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 7, and proceeded on four 12.5-mile loops through the Willowdale State Forest. I can’t tell you anything about the start or the first two loops, because I slept in and drove down later, arriving around 9:45 to get ready to pick Curt up and run pace with him as he started his third loop.

In this ultramarathon, my role as pacer wasn’t exactly setting the pace for the runner, the way a pacer does in a marathon.  Since this was Curt’s first ultra, his primary goal was to finish, and he needed to set his own pace based on how he was feeling. I was there for moral support, to provide distracting conversation over the long miles of the second half, to carry stuff, and apparently, to amuse the field with my unintentional physical comedy antics.  I would have also been there to encourage him to keep going if he seemed in danger of despair, which never even came close to happening.

It was sometime after 10 a.m., sunny and still pretty chilly at just over 40 F, when Curt and another friend, Gary, came in from their second loop, grabbed a few bites of food at the aide station and headed back out, this time with me along for the ride.  We ran along some beautiful doubletrack trail, passing many other runners coming in the other direction where the loop converged.  There had been a simultaneous marathon event and many runners were finishing that.  Curt was running strongly, I thought, especially considering he’d already gone 25 miles.  We angled onto a steep singletrack climb and we all shifted into fast walking.  That was the strategy, run when you could, walk the ascents and descents that were too

rocky or root-tangled to run at faster than walking pace anyway.  Eventually, Curt and Gary found they needed to run in slightly different gears.  At this point, I noticed the race really seemed spread out – each ultra-runner needed to find his or her own pace.  Curt pulled away and I followed him. We didn’t see Gary again until the end.

I should note that by this point I’d already rolled my right ankle for the first time. A short mile and half into the thing. I remember I’d just gotten done thinking how good my legs felt, and how great it felt to be out running along with friends in this amazing forest, and that maybe my fear of trail running was unfounded, when roll, I ganked my right ankle hard enough so that I heard those little cartilage flexing sounds that send chills down the spine any veteran ankle sprainer.  Some pacer, I thought.  I’m going to have to quit after a mile and half.  I stumbled, got up on it and ran a couple of hundred yards, caught up to Curt and realized that it was going to be sore, but it wasn’t sprained and I could certainly run on it.  Just don’t do it again, I admonished myself. Stay focused.  Fat chance.

Curt ran strong through the end of the third lap. We’ve trained together enough so that I could tell he was tired, but his spirits were good he kept his form together. I told bad jokes and old stories that came to mind as we ran.  I also tried to stay aware of when he wanted to talk and when he needed me to be quiet so he could focus. Sometimes the rustle of dried leaves that blanketed the trail inches deep in places seemed loud and strange.

It would have been mystical to be completely alone with that sound for so long, but maybe a bit scary, too.

Back at the school, Curt tossed me his water bottle and I filled it with Gatorade for him.  He grabbed something to eat while he ran and set out again. I filled my bottles, stuffed some food in my own mouth and filled the pockets of my jacket with bananas for Curt.  Then I doubletimed it to catch up with him as he slipped back into the forest.

The hours wore away and the light changed among the trees.  It was strange for me to be out there for as long as I was; I can only imagine what it was like for the ultra runners who’d been out since dawn.  We stopped for a few seconds at mile 40 so I could take Curt’s picture – he wanted a triumphal shot to acknowledge the milestone.  At 3:19:26 I noted my own milestone – I was officially into new territory in terms of time running.  I’d run farther (26.2 miles) than I would run pacing Curt that day, but I’d never run longer than 3:19:26, my slowest marathon finishing time.  On into the unknown!

Curt loves running on trails and it shows. Even after running 45, 46, 47 miles, he’d catch a toe here and stumble, but that was all.  He didn’t fall, didn’t twist his ankle, didn’t run headfirst into a tree.  (Okay, I didn’t run headfirst into a tree either, but I might have.)  On the other hand, it seemed like every time I got into a groove where I began to think, wow, I’m really getting a sense of the flow of trail running, sweet, I’d roll my ankle.  First one.  Then the other.  Then I’d catch a toe and splat, face down, full sprawl.  At which point I’d hope that my occasional grunts and oaths of pain were an amusing distraction for the runner who’d charged me with delivering him to the finish.  I’d leap back to feet after a face plant.  All good, yes, nothing to see, don’t break your stride, and go bounding forward to catch up.  Funny, yes, like John Cleese in a Monty Python sketch?  (For anyone interested in actual numbers, I managed two full falls and five solid ankle rolls over the first 22 or so miles. Last few miles were uneventful.)

I continued to attend to my duties. I calculated splits (sort of), I called Curt’s wife as we ran and let her know what time he expected to finish. I handed him chunks of banana (which must have been awfully linty from my pockets).  I told him that big knot in his quad would go away, and was then relieved when it actually did.

At each aid station we slowed down, Curt drank something, ate a bit, had some broth at one point, got his bottle refilled.  I was amazed at how supportive the volunteers were.  They were energetic and kind, and made sure that I knew as a pacer that I should eat and drink as well (which I’d wondered about before the race).

Towards the end, with about two miles to go, Curt observed that the pain (not the earlier quad pain, but the general pain) did not seem to be going away.  I said I didn’t think it would at this point.  But that he was too close for it to matter.  We had a conversation about redemptive suffering.  (Or I should say, I rambled on about redemptive suffering and he once never screamed, SHUTUP, SHUTUP, so I kept going with it.)

And then we were rounding the corner, off the trail and into the field where the finish was. I sprinted up ahead and stopped a couple hundred feet short of the finish so I could get a few pictures as Curt passed me.  His daughter Caroline broke from the waiting family and ran out to greet him and they ran on to cross the line together, about 9 hours and 28 minutes after he’d started.  His first ultramarthon; check.

We waited for Gary to come in, and watched the other runners come in, and Curt’s wife and kids gathered around him and helped him change into warmer clothes; it was getting cold again and he was beginning to shiver.  You could see that it was a deeply emotional thing for the runners finishing, they looked raw, like all their emotions were up on top of their skin; I’d felt that way at the end of my first marathon, having wrung every last bit of strength out of my body by mile 21 running too far too fast, and then running another 5.1 miles on nothing but stubbornness.

So I thought I had a bit of a sense of how these men and women were feeling. And with that sense, an understanding of why they were doing this.  There isn’t a long run that ends for me where I don’t have mixed emotions, deeply grateful it’s over, but sorry too.  Because the longer those efforts stretch out, the harder they are, the more places inside yourself and beyond yourself you get to explore; you bore deep into soul, and soar high into spirit. And if 16 miles, 20 miles, 25, 26.2 miles is good for this, how much more might there be in 50K, or 50 miles, or 60, or a 100?

“Next year, I’ll pace you on the 50,” Curt said as he and his family were getting ready to leave.  “Nah,” I said.  “I’m good with marathons.” But I’m not sure if I was sure when I said it, or if I’m sure now.  Not saying I’m rushing out to sign up for an ultra any time soon, but I get I why people do, and that’s always where these kinds of things start.  Congratulations Curt!

Check out a few more pics on my Flickr page…

And here’s a race report with the winners (course records were broken) over at Competitor Running.

Never hit the wall: nutrition and hydration notes

So the marathon was last Sunday.  Monday launched me into another extremely busy week at work, and so last, after another loooong day of writing code, running data imports, working on budgets and a variety of other non-running but still vital tasks, followed by dinner with Kris and the kids stories afterward, I finally sat down to write a bit of a race report.  That was Friday.  Now it’s nine Monday night and I’m finally getting back to it!  Basically, the training I described in my post last week worked. I ran at the pace I planned to, and that my training paces and distances had been aimed at, and despite the rain, the wind and cold.  I ran with my friend and training partner Curt and we hung together for the whole race, changed up the lead to when the wind was blowing hard to give each other turns to draft, and finished side by side at 3:13:19(18). It was not only a PR, but also a Boston Marathon qualifying time. I was happy.

Never hit the wall: nutrition and hydration notes

Our splits were even give or take a few seconds over all the miles, and I never hit the wall.  By mile 22 or 23 I was tired, no surprise, and my quads were starting to burn, but otherwise I felt fine.  No massive glycogen depletion bonk.  Beyond the training, I attribute this to three days of carbo loading. Not overeating at any meal, but taking extra pasta or carbs and less meat with both lunch and dinner. Polenta and pasta the night before.  And then three fried eggs and toast on race morning. I ate one of Kris’ amazing homemade sugar cookies right before my half-mile warmup run. Then took three 100-calorie packets of Gu over the first 16 miles. Then another sugar cookie at mile 19. Alternated Gatorade and water at every other water stop.  (I’ve finally gotten so I can cruise through these and drink from those little cups without losing my pace. I squeeze the top of the cup together, makes a little spout to sip from.) I’d worn my Fuel Belt, but only carried one of the four 8-oz water bottles it holds – mostly as a token. Really I wanted it for the pouch to hold Gu and cookies.

The cold: not an issue

It was about 40F and raining, with wind at the end, but the cold was never a factor during the run. I wore shorts, baseball-style running cap to keep the rain out of my eyes, ultra-light gloves and a long sleeve, winter-weight compression shirt.  I was never cold until I stopped at the finish line. Then, like everyone else, I began to shiver.  Body temperature dropped fast.  None of us were in the mood or condition to hang around in the rain post race. I was happy I’d already run Hyannis in exactly the same weather, and happy that several of my long training runs had been in the pouring rain.  You get used to it, and realize that it doesn’t have to have any effect on your pace. The wind is another story.

Training runs: Max distance 20.5 miles

I never ran more than 20.5 miles or so in one training run. And I didn’t do a lot of super fast speed or interval work. My program focused much more on a high volume of medium fast, medium long runs – tempo and lactate threshold work. One 16-20 miler on the weekends, many times with most of big chunks of miles at race pace. Then a couple of medium long 10-14 mile runs during the week, at night after the kids were in bed.  One at aerobic pace, one at tempo pace.

Friends and family

And that’s it. It was a great run and I was happy and tired afterward. It was good to have a good friend to train and run with, and good to have all our families there at the end. I was, as always, deeply grateful to Kris for supporting the whole idea of all this training, of coming to see me race, and feeling like it was important for the kids to come.  She’s much tougher than I am. And it was sweet of the kids to hang out in the rain and cold and still be happy to see me at the end – a sweaty, drenched, shivering daddy with the strangest sense of what constitutes fun.

PS

Oh yeah, I registered for Boston 2010 yesterday.  Sub-3:10 maybe?  Either way, woo hoo!

So a few weekends ago we went to Lull Farm down in Hollis and Kris’ mom treated the kids to apple picking. And I have to say, I eat apples constantly, all year long, but they never taste better than they do just a few minutes off the tree. Which is especially good news for us runners.

There’s another rite of fall to consider – the marathon season.  It’s certainly not as venerable as apple picking, but there is a connection.  Apples, I learned in this month’s issue of Runners World, can increase stamina. In a study documented in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, subjects were given 500 milligrams of the antioxidant quercetin daily for seven days and  this gave test subject a 13% endurance boost. Among the foods that provide quercetin? Apples! So for those of you getting ready for your next marathon (mine’s two weeks from yesterday!), eat up!

Our team, The Flyboys (not named for any of the members aeronautical proclivities, but a legacy from a runner no longer even on the team) finished the 11th Reach the Beach in 27:20 minutes, running the 207 miles at an average 7:54 second average pace. (Though our official time is 29:20 – we were docked two hours for a technical infraction we’re still trying to figure out, though it hardly matters now.) There were six of us, in order of our rotation: Curt, Gary, Liz, Eric, John, and me. Each of us ran six legs in those 27 hours.  Some ran more miles than others.  Some ran heavier duty hills. For those interested, my average pace was 7:13, of which I was proud, though I admit I had fast, easy terrain and a moderate (compared to some of the assignments that ranged all the way up to 39 miles!) 34 miles to cover.

We gathered at a parking lot in Merrimack at 6:30 Friday morning, Sept. 18, and packed Eric’s Suburban with food and gear – enough running clothes for six legs each in weather conditions ranging from chill northern New Hampshire fall rain to sunshine to cold mountain nights. For some of us, it was the first time we’d ever met. We drove north to Cannon Mountain, where at 10:40 a.m., after an extensive orientation with hundreds of other runners, gear safety check including our headlamps, blinking lights and reflective vests for the night legs, registration and team photo, our first runner, Curt started our team out toward Bretton Woods, the stark beauty of Crawford Notch, the valleys, the lakes, the rolling hills of southern New Hampshire, the sweet salt and apple tang of the seacoast.

The Logistics – An Endless Procession of White Vans

There were more than 400 teams in the race. Most of the teams were made up of 12 runners split between two rented white vans. Some of the teams, such as ours, were “ultra” teams, with only six runners and one vehicle to cover the same distance.  The race started at different times for different teams, depending on each teams’ runners’ projected mile paces.  Ideally this would make for a manageable range of finish times.  As each runner went out, the vans would wait a bit, then head down the same road, providing the runner with support (water, food, etc.) if needed before looping around to the next transition area. There the next runner would get warmed up and geared up (in reflective vest, lamp and safety blinkers if at night) and wait for the arriving runner. A wrist band served as a baton, and as it was passed the waiting runner headed out while the arriving runner cooled down, changed clothes, ate something and got ready to travel.  In the case of our ultra team, another runner would be supporting, another driving, another navigating, etc.  We were always busy.  I slept for forty five minutes during the whole event, and hardly even noticed.  It would be hard to imagine, if you didn’t see it, what the result of this process was by two or three in the morning – a stream of white vans and runners winding their way through narrow back roads in the Lakes Region heading toward Southern New Hampshire and the Seacoast, an endless parade of headlights and bobbing headlamps, of blinking red lights and straining legs and hearts and lungs.

The Volunteers

The complexity of such an endeavor is obvious, and I’m in awe of not only the race organizers, but the army of volunteers and race workers who made this possible.  That such a huge crowd of runners and vehicles could be successfully herded through so many transition areas and towns with so little conflict is amazing. And at many of the transition areas, beyond the flaggers who guided vans in and out of parking, and officials who saw runners off at the line, there were the good people of the small towns, of the church committees and school parent groups, volunteer firemen and girl scouts and innumerable others who labored through the day and night and day again to provide food, hot drinks and entertainment for the runners.

The Camaraderie – A Language of Running

I said earlier that some of us were strangers when we met that morning in the Merrimack parking lot. I only knew Curt, for example, and Liz only knew Gary, and Curt only knew Gary and me, or something like that. In any case, by the time the race was over, I felt like I knew everyone very well, through in retrospect, I don’t think we poured out a lot of deeply personal information as we drove and ran through the night. Sure we talked about our families, and what we did for work, but mostly we made small talk, or talked about running, and about the work of the race, and what we’d do next, and who was going to drive, and what the last split had been, and was it cold enough at 2 a.m. for running tights or would shorts still be enough.  But in that simple language, in those conditions, when everybody is tired and that drawn but determined look is on their faces when they get out of the van to run, and that relieved, and sometimes exuberant look is on their faces when they get back in, and you’re always glad for them, you feel as though you might have known them for years. They were fine people.  It’s a different kind of language you speak in those times, a sort of simple clarity and sincerity of expression you find often only in extremis.

The Food

One thing I’d guess runners always think about is food. What sort will sit well in their stomachs during a run, how soon before a run they can eat, what gives the best energy and what will provide for the fastest recovery, what food heals torn muscle fibers and replenishes glycogen stores. This run, with its six legs and no real long breaks, was a special challenge for some folks, I think.  If you don’t feel like you can eat and then run without feeling ill, you have to run without eating. And after a while that means you’re running on fumes. I saw some runners deal with some powerful calorie deficiencies by sheer force of will alone.  Happily, I had no such issues: I can eat anything (I think) before I run, and in fact must eat something fairly soon before a run or I don’t feel right. So I ate the food I brought (cold pasta with olive oil, salt and chick peas, hardboiled eggs, trail mix with nuts, raisins and M&Ms, banana, Mineolas, Power Bars, oatmeal raisin cookies, Gatorade, water, coffee) and the food served at the stations along the way (chicken soup, hamburgers, more soup, hot chocolate, more coffee, pancakes, scrambled eggs, ham, more bananas). I don’t want to make it sound like I ate like a glutton – sometimes I ate handfuls here and there, not whole servings of things, but I never felt like I was run down, and I still had a good amount of energy for the last leg, despite having slept for only 45 minutes the whole time. I attribute much of that to the food.

The Spiritual – Running Into God

It’s sometimes hard for me to separate running from prayer.  Long runs, especially, seem to strip away all the noisy things in my head that otherwise drown out the pure silence and the “still, small voice.”  I hear that voice on the longest of my long runs, and it seems like my heart opens out until it contains the whole of the road and sky.  That’s the way I felt on leg four of this run.  At 5:13 a.m., aching, tired, sleepy, cold, shivering, at the transition area, I took the wrist-band baton from John and began to run. And as it had on each prior leg, the cold and exhaustion fell away and the rhythm of running replaced it and I was warm and felt good.  Then somewhere during that seven mile stretch of rolling hills and night road, I looked up and saw how crisp and sharp the stars were in the velvet black sky, and I felt broken in the best sort of way, absolutely sure that I was no longer running under my own power, and grateful for that, because even though it was the fourth leg and I was running it faster than any of the prior three, it felt like coasting, like drifting, and I was gaining speed even up the hills, and I said part of a rosary, counting the prayers off on my fingers for a while until I couldn’t keep the train of thought, and then I just ran again, happy and light, until I got to Bear Brook State Park.  I ate pancakes and ham served by volunteers at the pavilion, and I mentioned in passing to one of my teammates what my fourth leg had been like. “Running humbles you,” he said. Just so.

The End

We finished, and it was just in time, because I don’t think I had anything left.  But it was still too soon. The combination of road trip and ultra marathon provided a new look at familiar roads, and a new sense of being at home in the state I call home.  Kris and the kids were waiting for me at the finish line and I’d missed them a great deal.  We went and sat on the sand, and the kids played, but I was too tired to do anything but watch them.  And when we got home we ordered pizza and I lay on the couch with the family watching television, and my eyes closed, just for an instant, and it was 12 hours later.

Did my last run, a short six miler at lunchtime, before Friday’s Reach the Beach relay race. Now, with the kids in bed, I’m printing out course maps, laying out gear – five pairs shorts, running shirts, two pairs sneakers, headlamp, reflective vest, six pairs socks, Garmin 205, blanket, towel, etc., etc. It’s a long list of stuff.  Tomorrow night I’ll make enough food to get me through 30 hours.  Friday morning I’ll meet my team at 6:30 a.m. in Merrimack and we’ll head north.  At 10:40, in Franconia Notch, our race, my first Reach the Beach, will begin.

There are six runners on our team, (this is considered an “ultra” team – standard teams have 12 runners).  The team name is “The Fly Boys” and I’ll have to remember to ask someone what the significance of this is.  Many pilots? I only know one of the team members – my good friend and training partner Curt, an air traffic controller and pilot – but I have a feeling I’ll know the rest pretty well by the time we hit Hampton Beach sometime around 2:54 p.m. on Saturday.

The run is divided into 36 legs that range from 3 to 9 miles. The team sees the first runner off at the start, then drives ahead to meet him at the checkpoint, where the next runner will warm up and get ready for the handoff. This goes on non-stop all day, all night and half the next day.  For our team it will end up being about 29 hours. Each runner on our team will have run between 30 and 40 miles.

My own legs in the race add up to 34 miles. I’m hoping to run them at about the same pace, or maybe 5 or 10 seconds per mile slower, than my goal marathon pace (7:20 minute miles) for the Baystate Marathon, a month from RTB, on Oct. 18.  This seems like a reasonable goal, but honestly, I have no idea how my body’s going to react to this event.  Each individual leg seems like a short distance, especially after a summer of marathon training long runs. Some weeks, I had a couple of nights with fast 10 mile tempo runs, 14 mile medium long runs, and a 20 mile long run on the weekend, with a few 6 mile recovery runs in between to rest.  So the individual legs aren’t daunting.  But on the other hand, what’s it like to run one, drive, eat, navigate, catnap, and five hours later, do it again, and then again, and again, all night long and into a new day? Is running 34 miles in about 24 hours (I’m runner number six, so my first leg is at about 2:40 p.m. Friday and my last one is the last leg, going into Hampton Beach at 2:23 p.m. Saturday) easier than running 34 miles all at once?  I assume it is, but there’s got to be some toll from stiffness, lack of sleep, etc.  Will I wish I’d put down 9 minute miles instead of 7:30s as my estimated pace by the end?

Anyhow, despite the unknowns, I’m tremendously excited for this. I feel fairly fit, like I’ve trained hard this summer but not so hard I’m coming into this exhausted or with a bunch of tweaks or injuries. I’m running faster and farther than I was this time last summer when I was getting ready for Portland (3:19:25) and I’m 10 pounds lighter than I was then. But despite all that, who knows? My hope, though, is that this will be a great pre-marathon-taper test, a great adventure, a weird and moving experience psychologically, an opportunity to dig the fall foliage and roam the beautiful New Hampshire roadways the best way there is, on foot, and a chance to get to know some folks really well.  I’ll try and post updates to Twitter and Facebook from my phone, with a few pictures, as the event proceeds, so you can check the Twitter feed here on the blog if you’re curious.

1.    The temperature’s perfect (most days)
2.    There are a ton of great races, from 5Ks to marathons and ultras
3.    You’re probably peaking in your training cycle and feeling great
4.    Stunning fall foliage can help distract you when running those hills
5.    As roadside bushes and trees lose leaves, visibility increases and those tight corners and narrow road shoulders become less dangerous.
6.    Warm apple cider, creamy hot chocolate or an autumn seasonal beer make great post-run recovery drinks
7.    Save money on Gu and Powerbars by taking leftover Halloween candy on your long runs.
8.    Long runs burn plenty of calories to make up for all those Halloween and Thanksgiving treats and feasts
9.    Stacking and splitting wood makes for a great warmup, cooldown or crosstraining activity
10.    It’s not winter yet

The polenta was a leftover from last night’s dinner, and I needed something quick – my schedule called for getting out the door right after getting home from church this morning.

I figured as an early lunch it would be filling enough to last through the coming 2-hour 45-minute run, but not so heavy or hard to digest as to make the run more difficult that it was likely going to be anyway. Last year my go-to, pre-long-run, calorie-storing meal was four huge slabs of greasy pepperoni and sausage pizza. But that had to be pre-run as in “the night before.” I have a fairly cast-iron stomach, but I doubt I could eat that on the way out the door for a long run without consequences.

[Which prompts this digression: many runners I know can't eat anything for several hours before running without causing cramps or other gastro difficulties. On the other hand, I and others I know, need to eat right before run. For me, if I haven't had a sandwich, or a plate of eggs, or something substantial within a half hour of hitting the road, I'm hungry through the whole run and never feel right. Feel free to comment as to which camp you fall into here.]

Back to the polenta – another reason I figured it might be worth a shot was its relation to pinole, one of the staple foods eaten by the Tarahumara, the legendary tribe of ultra-runners featured in Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run. Pinole is made from finely ground corn with some seasoning. Polenta is basically just corn grits. You cook it until it’s super thick, let it cool a bit, then slice and serve. It’s a high carb food like pasta, easy to digest, inexpensive, and I think tasty. Before you add butter or oil, polenta is 130 calories per serving (1/4 cup dry), with .5g fat, 27g carbohydrate, 0g sugar and 3g protein.

One other note on my diet during today’s run – I was out of Gu and so I took two chocolate chip cookies with me for on-the-move refueling. I didn’t look it up, but I’m guessing this were significantly higher in fat and sugar than the polenta. Perfect. I ate one at mile 10 and one at mile 14. Tasty and I think pretty effective in terms of an energy boost. Not the first time cookies have outperformed Gu or other artificial foods for me during a long run. Last winter, a couple of Kristen’s ultra-buttery sugar cookies powered me through a brutal 16-mile run through the hills of Goffstown – in a snowstorm. They may have been frozen solid by the time I got to eat them, but man they tasted good and brought my energy level back up almost instantly. Take that, lab foods.

Amazing book.  I still haven’t gotten around to writing about it yet, but Born to Run is a great, fast read,and while it’s about running, its appeal goes well beyond that.  McDougall’s efficient, energetic prose explores the culture of the Tarahumara people – a running tribe, the running shoe industry, and the community that has grown up around ultra-running (races 30 miles or more). May also convince one to try barefoot or minimalist running.  (I’m convinced I’d like to try it, and that in theory it could be the cure for recurring foot and leg injuries, but I haven’t quite gotten around to it, or buying the Vibram Five Fingers for that matter.)

I went from an informal but serious ramping back up of mileage into the Pfitzinger program a few weeks back.  And I’m faster than I ever was during the peak of my training for Portland (which I finished well), and running more miles than I did during the peak of my hideous winter training for Hyannis (which I did not finish due to an IT band injury at mile 18 which forced me to drop at mile 23). Those two stats, tracked in digital training logs, have me feeling cautiously optimistic. I think I know what went right at Portland (methodical, hard training, lots of miles), what went wrong at Hyannis (not enough rest after Portland led to injuries, led to sloppy training and too few miles), and how I’m not only going to squeeze the training into my busy schedule (lots of night and early morning runs, mainly), but use it to make me more productive across the board. Anyhow, Bay State here I come.