Well, folks, we did it! 26.2 miles! My second marathon, the wife’s first. Here’s our route, freshly uploaded from the GPS into Google Earth.

Temperatures were in the low 60s with fog, which made it perfect for me and perfect for running. In fact, it was so foggy, I couldn’t see further than 100 feet ahead when we were running across the bridge. The marathon was organized extremely well, with aid stations approximately every 2.5 miles, serving Ctyomax as electrolyte (which was excellent in taste and re-hydration) as well as water. There weren’t as many spectators as New York, but the ones that were there were genuine and enthusiastic. A great experience overall. If only I could say the same for my quads, at this point.

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Not sure if we’ll finish in the allotted time – there have been quite a few setbacks, especially in the last couple of months of training. Coincidentally, these months are also the most crucial. Nonetheless, we’ve registered, so it’s a go.

Come out and cheer. I’ll be the one with the elephant-head and pot-belly. Well ok, just the pot-belly. Although I do have big ears, and I am nosey…

Now this caught me completely by surprise. I’ve heard of people running through the freezing Arctic, through the Gobi desert, hell even doing an ultramarathon through Death Valley in July. But this is something else. Our very own Sunita Williams, astronaut desiordinaire, is going to run the Boston Marathon in space!

Sunita Williams, 41, a US Navy commander, will be tied to a treadmill to combat the effect of weightlessness.

She qualified for a place by finishing last year’s Houston Marathon in three hours 29 minutes and 57 seconds.

But she blasted off on board the Discovery space shuttle in December, prompting her decision to try to run the race in space on 16 April. [link]

Wow. I agree that qualifying for Boston is a unique honor, but girl, I’m sure they’ll defer your entry to next year!

The View From Up There

Methinks she just wants to continue breaking all those records that she’s so famous for breaking.

She has already broken the record for the length of time in space by a woman, and is poised to break the US record for continuous time in space before she returns home in the summer.

Ms Williams, though, is the first Boston marathon runner to attempt the course while orbiting 210 miles (338km) above the surface of the Earth. [link]

Talk about ambition. Well, she’s got her task cut out for her. It ain’t going to be easy.

Nasa has built a “vibration isolation system” to keep the space station steady as Ms Williams runs, but this places extra strain on the runner’s hips and shoulders.

“That harness gets hard on her back and her shoulders or her hips,” said the astronaut’s sister, Dina Pandya.

“Her foot was going numb because the strap was on her hip so much.”

And once Ms Williams finishes running she knows she will not have access to many of the home comforts available back on Earth.

“She mentioned the other day there’s no hot bath,” Ms Pandya said.

Well, good luck girl! You’re going to need it. Or not…

Also, I realized a few things this week: I’m getting much more comfortable in doing the longer weekly runs (for weekdays, “longer” is 5+ miles). This may be because I am getting used to the distance, or because I have learned to breathe much better while running.

Initially, I was a little concerned about going over five miles on any given weekday. When I was training for New York ’05, I didn’t really do more than five miles on any given weekday, and that too, it was mostly indoors. This was primarily because I had torn my ACL in the summer of ’04, and wanted to take it easy. It’s still torn, but now my leg has somewhat adapted and I feel much more comfortable running in the outdoors. The leg operates at around 65-70% capacity compared to my good leg, and there are complications like plantar fasciitis that occur in the bad leg, but overall no serious problems. However, I digress.

I also realized the importance of regular breathing while running. When I started swimming regularly many, many years ago, I could not complete even one length. As I swam more, I realized that while I was fit enough to do several lengths, it was my lack of proper breathing technique that was getting in my way.? Having figured that out, these days, I do close to a 100 lengths (or 50 laps). Regular breathing to make sure that your muscles have enough oxygen really helps. It’s really that simple. Compared to your resting state, when you can get by with fewer, shallow breaths, you really need to take deep, fuller breaths when running. If you breath regularly, then you can avoid those feelings of mild suffocation from not breathing enough. This may sound simple, but I know that I had a hell of a time (and plenty of coughing fits) from not breathing.

The way I do it is exhale hard on one step, inhale on the other. I read somewhere that it’s important not to exhale on the same foot all the time, because that makes that particular leg prone to injury, and gives one side-stitches. So I alternate every once in a while – sometimes I breathe out on the left foot, sometimes on the right. If I do it regularly enough, I feel I can run much more comfortably, and for significantly longer periods of time. There are other patterns which people also advocate. This one works for me, so I’m going to stick with it.

The bottomline? Remember to breathe! It makes my Thursdays so much more tolerable…

So, the RX Geek and me are training for the SF Marathon coming up at the end of July. We’re using this training schedule. We didn’t choose that particular one for any special reason other than that it was easy to find, was well-suited for beginners (it’s the first time for her) and fulfilled the “ten percent” criteria. It’s pretty normal for a marathon training schedule: five running days weekly, steadily increasing increments (no more than ten percent per week in mileage), and with a medium run on Wednesdays and the long run on Sundays. There are three consecutive running days on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and no matter how many miles we have to run, Thursday is always the hardest.

I am really not sure why – perhaps it’s a psychological thing because it’s the last running weekday. Or perhaps its because we are tired from doing the medium run the day before. I’m really not sure. But we always run about a minute slower than our regular pace, and it is always a pain. Today, especially, my quads were like wooden sticks (even after stretching). And the rain and cold didn’t exactly help. Particularly after my shoes and socks got drenched after inadvertent puddle-stepping.

On the bright side though, we resisted the urge to cut corners and did manage to finish. And then I remembered why I love running. The high. Man, is it good. And yes, I am aware that I’m addicted. Which reminds me, in addition to running SF this year, I’m also qualified for guaranteed entry into the New York Marathon. So this year, I’ll be running New York for the second time. Can’t wait!

Start spreading the news…

Apparently, running when you’re injured is good for you. An article ($) in January’s NYT talks about running through injuries and how it helps them heal faster. Now, before you naysayer couch-potato-types jump on me, it’s not like you should run with shattered kneecaps and fractured tibias, but you can run with certain not-so-serious (that’s a technical term) injuries. In fact, it may help them heal. The bottomline, of course, is that you should use your common sense.

It sounds almost like heresy. The usual advice in treating injuries is to rest until the pain goes away. But Dr. Weinstein and a number of leading sports medicine specialists say that is outdated and counterproductive. In fact, Dr. Weinstein says, when active people consult him, he usually tells them to keep exercising.

The idea, these orthopedists and exercise specialists say, is to use common sense. If you’ve got tendinitis or sprained a muscle or tendon by doing too much, don’t go right back to exercising at the same level. [link]

Weinstein is an orthopaedic surgeon at Dartmouth College. He should know. Not just because he’s in the business, but because he himself has run through several injuries, including lower back pain.

[He] was stretching to lift a heavy box and twisted his back. The pain was agonizing. He could not sit, and when he lay down he could barely get up.

”I took an anti-inflammatory, iced up, and off I went [for a run],” Dr. Weinstein recalled. When he returned, he said, he felt ”pretty good.” [link]

Picture Source: National Library of Medicine

The running is particularly good for inflamed tissue, but only when they are at a particular stage of inflammation.

…painful conditions that are essentially inflammation — arthritis and chronic lower back pain — actually improve when patients keep moving.

…

First, forceful stretching of tendons elicits the production of molecules that are involved in inflammation. But small repeated stretching of tendons that are already inflamed leads to the production of molecules that heal inflammation. That suggests moderate exercise can actually speed healing.

And now, their [Dr. Freddie Fu, a sports medicine expert and chairman of the orthopedic surgery department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and a colleague, James H-C. Wang] preliminary results suggest that the usual treatment for tendinitis — taking drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen — can help reduce inflammation when the injury begins. But after inflammation is under way, they can make matters worse. [link]

Picture Source: National Library of Medicine

The best advice comes from Dr. Mininder Kocher, a sports medicine specialist and orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital Boston:

His rule of thumb, Dr. Kocher said, is that if the pain is no worse after exercising than it is when the person simply walks, then the exercise ”makes a lot of sense.”

It also helps patients psychologically, he added. ”If you take athletes or active people out, they get depressed, they get wacky,” Dr. Kocher explained. [link]

Hear, hear. Now get out there and start running. All that sitting around isn’t going to get you anywhere.

After years in which almost no deaths were attributed to heart attacks at this country?s major marathons, at least six runners have died in 2006. [link]

Ouch. But one explanation is in the law of averages. Says, Rick Neales, director of the Marine Corps Marathon:

Statistically, maybe, it was inevitable.

Maybe it’s not statistics. Check this out: Researchers tested 60 (41 male, 19 female) runners before and after the 2004 and 2005 Boston marathons. In addition to testing for the usual suspects they also tested for troponin – a protein that is found in cardiac muscle cells, but is found in the blood when the heart undergoes some kind of trauma. Here’s what they found:

The runners had normal cardiac function before the marathon, with no signs of troponin in their blood. Twenty minutes after finishing, 60 percent of the group had elevated troponin levels, and 40 percent had levels high enough to indicate the destruction of heart muscle cells. Most also had noticeable changes in heart rhythms. Those who had run less than 35 miles a week leading up to the race had the highest troponin levels and the most pronounced changes in heart rhythm. [link]

Wow. So one thing is obvious – if you’re going to run the marathon, start to increase your weekly mileage ASAP so that you get it above 35 miles. But does this mean that marathoning is bad for you? Well, not quite. First off, the abnormalities disappeared over time. Secondly, says Dr. Arthur Siegel, the director of internal medicine at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard (also a co-author in the study),

Their hearts appeared to have been stunned.

Ok, that didn’t help much, did it? But this guy had something a little more enlightening to offer:

?Although the evidence is not conclusive, it does look like the Boston study is showing some effect on cardiac muscle,? said Dr. Paul D. Thompson, 59, the director of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, and an author of an editorial that accompanied the study. ?It?s far too early to draw any conclusions,? he added. ?We?d be seeing lots more bodies piling up if there were real lingering long-term cardiac damage? caused by running marathons.

?Over all, the evidence is strongly in favor of the idea that endurance exercise is helpful in terms of cardiac health,? said Dr. Thompson, who has run more than 30 marathons. [link]

Ok, that’s a relief. But we’re not completely off the hook. There was another German study on middle aged marathoners (each of whom had completed at least five marathons). They found that:

More than a third of the runners had significant calcium deposits, suggesting they were at relatively high risk for a heart attack. Only 22 percent of a control group of nonrunners had a comparable buildup.

The researchers scrupulously avoided suggesting that marathoning had caused the men to develop heart disease. (After all, running may have kept them alive when they would otherwise have keeled over years earlier.) But neither did the authors rule out the possibility that in some baffling way distance running had contributed to the men?s arterial gunk.

Hmm, that’s not exactly heartening either. Yet, cardiologists still are big fans of running. Except if you have a genetic history of heart disease, then it might make sense for you to be a little extra cautious. Or worse yet, as Dr. Siegel suggests:

His advice to runners with any history of heart trouble is ?train for the race, getting the cardiac benefits of endurance exercise,? then watch the event on television.

The risk of going into cardiac arrest as a spectator, he said, is only about one in a million. (The applicable studies of spectators involved Super Bowl fans.) [link]

That’s gotta suck. But probably a lot less than a heart attack. I guess the bottomline is you should use your own common sense and if you have a history or a bad feeling about it, then avoid it. Still, common sense is not that common, as they say. Let’s wait it out to see what the researchers come up with. Until then, run slow, run easy and stop when you have to.

Buzzwords and hype notwithstanding, if you’re a runner then you’ve bonked at some point in your running career. So what the hell is bonking you ask? Well, basically, it’s when you hit the proverbial ‘wall’ during one of your long runs or long races. If you’ve seen that Gatorade commercial where the athlete has his legs start to wobble and then he collapses, then you’ve seen one of the extreme cases. [The athlete, incidentally, was Chris Legh, an Australian triathlete, who was competing in the 1997 Ironman championships at the time.]

According to today’s NYT article, there are three kinds of bonking, based on their respective cause:

Number One: Fluid bonking is plain old dehydration. You know, when you don’t have enough fluids in your body. Perhaps you should think of sipping some tea on your next run?

Number Two: Energy bonking is when:

[you] feel as if your legs are mired in quicksand or as if your brain suddenly says “no more,” like Forrest Gump did at the end of his cross-country trek. [link]

This happens because your blood sugar is low and Lisa Dorfman, the sports nutritionist for the University of Miami, and who the NYT has quoted throughout the article, advices that you can prevent energy bonks by:

drinking a sports drink, or eating a citrus slice or banana, to boost glycogen and increase blood sugar. [link]

And, Number Three: Electrolyte bonking occurs when you have a depletion of electrolytes such as sodium and potassium. When you suffer from electrolyte bonking you usually:

see dots, feel nauseated, cramp up or have persistent headaches. [link]

Now, I don’t know about you, but I am painfully familiar with this type of bonking. To add to that, I also suffer from postural hypotension, which has even caused me to pass out a couple of times, particularly after an intense workout.

Needless to say, bonking is no fun. So how do you prevent it? Well, for me, a bottle of Gatorade in my hand while running has solved most of my bonking problems. But other than that, you should also watch what you eat, as well as when you eat it.

Most elite athletes today realize that what they eat and when they eat affects not only race-day performance but also how quickly they can recover from workouts.

It’s the rest of us who have been slow to catch on. [link]

So drinking Gatorade while running is good, but it’s better still if you load up on those glycogens a little before running:

“Taking in glucose during exercise will help offset muscle glycogen depletion,” said Monique Ryan, the author of “Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes” and a registered dietitian. “Studies have shown if you start doing it earlier on, you can prolong exercise.” [link]

As for me personally, I like to load up on the carbs starting the day before a long race, eating healthy whole-wheat carbs in small doses throughout the day, rather than all at once at night. That’s worked pretty well for me, so far. That’s for the day before a race. What about during the race? In the marathon, I ate half a power bar (not the Powerbar brand, which I hate, but another one) some time between the 16th and the 17th mile. I found that this really perked me up.

But everything in moderation. The middle-path of the Buddha. So eat during the race to avoid bonking, but don’t eat too much, either. Otherwise you’ll end up like Dennis Meeker, a 35-year-old triathlete from Boulder, Colo. who:

polished off extra PowerBars on the bike because he thought the heat would prevent him from eating during the last leg. Thirteen miles into the foot race, with little water in his system, he had caught the man in second. Then, Mr. Meeker said, “I just couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. There was cement in my legs and gut.”

… Comparing past successful triathlons to this gut wrencher, he calculated that the difference came down to a common problem (too little water) and a surprising one (too many calories, which sat like a lump in his stomach). Next time, he plans to ease off the PowerBars. [link]

An excellent decision, I might add.

Other than that, be smart and don’t run like a maniac in the beginning of a race, especially a marathon or a half-marathon. It’s easy to get caught up in race-day excitement. In fact, I consciously run slower in the first mile of a long race, taking around a minute or two more than my fastest anticipated race pace. Then I start running at my normal pace. The best gauge of whether you’re running too fast is your mental and physical state in the last couple of miles. You should be able to smile and sprint. If you can do that, then you’re doing good.

On the other hand, if you find yourself cursing all the innocent bystanders and wishing you had never signed up for the damn race (and believe me, I’ve been there a few times myself), then there’s a good chance that you’re running low on sugar, ran too fast through the race, or just plain didn’t get enough rest beforehand.

So here’s to running without bonking. And here’s also to bonking without running. In the latter’s case, I do mean the Hugh Grant-Andie MacDowell variety!

“Ha!” you scoff, “We’re all going to die anyway!”

Berating all joggers, you wait patiently for the next one to die of a heart attack, at which point you will say, with smug satisfaction, “What did I tell you? Jogging’s bad for you!” After which, you will once again lie down on the couch and complain about technology not being advanced enough because you have to resort to the crude technique of actually pressing that remote button, rather than just thinking of the channel you want to watch…

Well, my cynical friend, I have news for you. An article in today’s New York Times today says three basic things quite clearly:

Firstly, it says there is no doubt whatsoever that jogging increases your life-span. In fact,

In the long run, various studies have found, jogging adds years to life. Over all, each hour spent exercising (up to 30 hours a week) adds about two hours to a person’s life expectancy, according to the Harvard Alumni Study, which has tracked deaths among 17,000 men for more than two decades.

But what about those people who died of heart attacks while running? Well, here’s the thing – the risk of most heart attacks increase with the following factors: elevated blood cholesterol level, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, undue stress, family history and age. Except for family history and age, running reduces all of the other factors. There’s conclusive evidence to prove this. However, you can’t control family history and age (obviously) and therein lies the rub. Most people who died of heart attacks while running, usually had a family history of heart disease.

The heart is a muscle, like any other, except of course, that it’s an important one you can’t live without. When you run, you are causing your heart-rate to increase, and sometimes even become irregular. Your blood pressure can also increase. You are, essentially, putting it under tremendous stress. So, if you have genetic inclination towards heart problems, running will aggravate those problems. However, this is not to say that you cannot run, but you must be careful and not increase your pace suddenly, not make any abrupt lifestyle changes (like go from couch potato to marathoner in two days, for instance) and make absolutely sure that all the other risk factors are in check.

So, getting to the second conclusive point:

If you have a family history of premature heart disease (heart attacks in first-degree relatives that occurred before 65), or if you are middle-aged or older and have been fairly sedentary for years, you would be wise to undergo a thorough physical exam before taking up jogging.

If you have a family history of heart disease and you abruptly change your lifestyle and start running suddenly, you’re asking for trouble. This would especially be the case if you were middle-aged to boot. So take it easy, take it slow and let your body adapt to the increased physical stress.

And the third and final point is that even if you have a family history of heart disease, and you start running, you will lower your risk factors and improve your overall health. Further, it doesn’t matter that you waited till the age of 50 to start running, you can still reap the rewards.

…over all, people who jog, including those with major cardiac risk factors, are less likely to have a heart attack in the long run than if they had not been joggers… [A] study in Seattle of all people who died suddenly in one year showed that…if those with heart disease avoided all exercise, their overall risk of sudden death would increase, not decrease.

[Furthermore] a study of 7,620 joggers in Rhode Island [showed] that a middle-aged jogger with no known heart disease who ran for one more year was considerably less likely to die suddenly than was a middle-aged nonrunner who drove during that year.

Even those who did not start exercising until midlife had a 23 percent lower risk of death over the next 20-odd years.

And, by the way, what about us distance runners? Well, I can say, with smug satisfaction, that we have it best:

Endurance activities like running, cycling, lap swimming, brisk walking and cross-country skiing conferred the greatest benefit, adding six years of life expectancy over that of a couch potato.

Read the article.

Part spiritual quest, part kamikaze mission, 4 Deserts has become the next big endeavor for people who have raced every marathon, Ironman triathlon, and Eco-Challenge out there.

This article is about a software consultant from Chicago, Greg Kunhau, who completed all four deserts of the 4 Deserts challenge. The competition covers China’s Gobi desert, Chile’s Atacama, Egypt’s Sahara and ends with Antarctica. Last year, the race started with the Atacama, and Kunhau was there:

The course there offered almost no shade and traversed salt flats with daytime temperatures near 120 degrees, even in midwinter. In that race, Kunhau lost a big toenail, shed 17 pounds, and contracted bronchitis and strep throat. “I wanted to die,” he says.

He was part of a team of three people who did it together. I cannot even imagine what it must be like doing it alone.

While most racers prefer to go solo, he competed as part of a team of three (all entrepreneurs), because they wanted the company. In 2004, Joel Burrows, now 30, and Nancy Fudacz-Burrows, 38, a married couple who own a gym in Chicago called First Step Fitness, traveled with Kunhau[.]

They next went to China, to run in the Gobi.

The next spring the team flew to China to run in the Gobi desert, which competitors refer to as the “oven” because of its relentless sun and seemingly endless expanses of bare rock. Kunhau suffered chronic nausea and hallucinated from lack of sleep.

And, next to the Sahara.

[I]n the Sahara he lost another toenail and started vomiting so violently from the 130-degree heat that he had to crawl under a Volkswagen-sized rock to cool down. But the intensity of the experiences started to become addictive. “You learn to overcome fear,” Kunhau says. “You have to if you want to get through.”

At this point, I am speechless. When I ran the NYC marathon, I thought that was gruelling. That was nothing compared to this. In fact, that was nothing even compared to the Ironman (swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and then running a marathon – 26.2 miles). And Kunhau has run three of them.

Before the desert events, Kunhau had completed 17 marathons, three Ironman competitions, and, as he says, “too many triathlons to count.”

Amazing. How did he train for these things?

Before work Kunhau would wake at 5 A.M. to get in a 30-minute bike ride or a five-mile run. Other mornings he took his work to the Lake Michigan shore, ran an eight-mile loop along the waterfront, returned to his car for an hour or so of conference calls with clients, and then put in another eight-mile loop. At night he went to the gym for weight training, swimming, and treadmill work.”For a few months I didn’t have much of a social life,” he says.

I can empathize with the lack of a social life (I’m a grad student). And even I work out twice a day, but this is amazing. I mean, talk about life-changing experiences. The next time you say that a movie or a book “changed your life,” think about this. I think this is the real thing. In fact,

Life altering is the first expression most use when describing the desert races. According to Mary Gadams, 41, the U.S.-born founder and CEO of RacingThePlanet, the desert-based ultramarathons are so transforming that after completing one, about a third of the competitors quit their jobs to do something more fulfilling.

For once, I have nothing say except that this is one more thing to add to my life’s to-do list…