Addendum

I neglected to mention that Richie Innamorato was one of the 60th birthday honorees today, and he responded by running the whole race, about 25 miles. He said it was the most he's run at one time since 1995! Way to go Richie!

6-Hour 60th Birthday Run

Today was the 10th annual 6-Hour 60th Birthday Run at Sunken Meadow State Park, Long Island. This is always one of my favorite races, it's the last event of the year in the Grand Prix, everyone finishes at the same time, and there's always lots of great food at the end.

Now for me, who loves running in the rain, and I generally prefer cold weather, even I say this was really crappy weather. Low 40's, light but steady rain, strong winds. The trail sections of the 2.11-mile loop were in pretty good shape at the start but got pretty muddy by the end.

I haven't run more than 6 miles at one time since the 24-hour two weeks ago, but I thought if things went well I might be able to get 40 miles. The first two hours were quick and comfortable, but soon enough the miles caught up to me. But I was able to keep running and did finish with 40.6 miles, good enough for 2nd place to who else but Byron Lane. Since I won this race in 2005 and 2007 I was secretly hoping to keep winning the odd numbered years, but that just wasn't to be. Jodi Kartes-Heino won the women's race for the third (or fourth?) time. In the tradition of this race, special recognition was given to the runners who turned or turn 60 this year - who were born in 1949. The men's 60-year-old winner was veteran and good friend Grant McKeown with 34 miles and change. (I apologize that I don't remember the name of the women's 60-year-old winner. Results will surely be up soon at www.newyorkutrarunning.org.

The food at the finish didn't disappoint, with 6-foot subs, rice and pasta dishes, and birthday cake that the 49'ers were willing to share. It was a good race, a good hard run, and I'm happy to be back and warm and clean in my toasty apartment!

North Coast 24 Hour Run

October 3-4 was the date for the first North Coast 24 Hour race, and it also served as the 2009 national championship. I was very excited about running this one, as those involved in organizing the race had a great reputation, and it was indeed a great event, a real pleasure to run. You couldn't hve asked for better with the course, the weather, the aid station o the staff and volunteers, not to mention the other runners who were a real pleasure to spend a day with.



Speaking of whom, another aspect that excited me was the depth of the men's field. There were a number of runners who'd run t least 140 miles in the last couple of years - Bill Allen, Michael Henze, Serge Arbona, Akos Konya as well as myself. Also present were last year's top three - Byron Lane, defending champ (and my roomie the night before the race), veteran John Geesler and Dan Rose. There were also Matt Chaffin from this year's national 24-hour team, Todd Baum and Keith Straw from this year's Badwater, Umstead winner Dave James, Scott Jurek (no introduction needed) and current recordholder Mark Godale. My apologies to anyone else I missed, there were so many great runners. Admittedly, I wasn't paying as much attention to the women's field, but Connie Gardner was going to shoot for the women's record, and Deb Horn and Jill Perry were also among the favorites.



I admit I was going for that men's record of 162.4 miles. On the .9-mile course, 181 laps would do the job. I was feeling healthy, ready and confident at the start. The course looked perfect, the weather was perfect - cool and cloudy, with a chance for scattered showers during the day, and a projected high of about 60. I tried not to go out too fast, and there were a number of runners who quickly pulled ahead of me. After the first lap, I noticed that I did indeed have room to slow down a bit and stay on schedule for a potential record run. I had the assistance of Tania Pacev, who was supporting what seemed like a dozen runners, and who kept imploring me to slow down. Mostly just smiled at her and said "I will". Among those in front of me were Mark Godale, who lapped me quicklya number of times, although I was told that he didn't intend to run more than 100k, Dave James who was also zipping around nicely, Scott Jurek and Serge Arbona, who were running together about half a lap ahead of me.



I continued on my schedule, and all felt good for several hours. At some point I passed both Serge and Scott, and had lapped most of the other runners, and by 9 hours it looked like my main competition would be Dave, several laps ahead. It looked to me like he was shooting for afast 100-mile split, and I was hoping he might slow down after that. After about 9 hours, I started slowing down off record pace, so I let that happen and continue at a relatively comfortable pace.



At about 11:30 into the race, I felt pain on my left foothill from something in my shoe. I stopped into the medical tent, and it was not a serious problem, apparently a malplaced seam on my shoe, but Dr. Andy and the wonderful staff there pt on some lubrication, and while I was there they took care of a couple blisters and gave my legs a quick rubdown. After about a 2-minute delay I was back on my way, now with a long-sleevd shirt, which came off again after one lap.



Dave got his 100 miles in an incredible (and certified) 13:06, one of the best times ever by an American, and kept on truckin. I hit my split (uncertified) in 14:48 and was now running at the same speed as Dave, who was 11 laps ahead of me. At this point all I could do was keep on and see if Dave would tire. At one point Bill Allen told me that he saw Dave going into his tent to lay down. This was confirmed as time went on and Dave's total laps stayed the same at 133 laps. What a feeling it was when I overtook the lead at 134 laps! So I just kept plugging away. I felt more relaxed and was checking the screen for placement of other runners, and saw that Bill was second male runner on the course. Jill Perry was very high in the overall placement as well, and for a while was second overall. As time went on, Bill stepped off the course but John Geesler and Dan Rose were moving strong. By the end of the race, they would repeat their 2nd and 3rd place finishes from last year, but this time each with over 139 miles, enough to qualify them for the US team. Keith Straw, who was giving some very nice words of encouragement finished 4th with 137 miles. Jill won the women's race and 5th overall with 136 miles. Anna Piskorska and Deb Horn were 2nd and 3rd women.

It was a great race, and there were many friends there - from the New York area and beyond. A particularly good representation from BUS (Broadway Ultra Society), and from the state of New York in general! A special thanks to Byron for his support - and looking forward to our next battle, and to Frank and Annette for their friendship, and to Deb and Roger, and also to Ray Krolewicz, who seems to be my good luck charm, as he seems to be present at my best races, and always helpful in keeping track of all the runners.

This was my first 24-hour win, and I admit that this was one race that I really wanted to win. I felt relaxed and confident throughout. I didn't get the record, or even a personal record, but it was maybe the most satisfying race I've ever had, and I hope I'm able to build on it and have continued success at the next race!

Labor Day weekend (Labor Weekend)

Howdy all (if more than one person is reading this!). Having computer problems so it's tough to update this, on top of my laziness. It's been a good weekend for running. I'm still not hitting the real high mileage, last week and this past week up to about 80 miles each. Still want to enjoy myself. But I did get a nice 6-hour training run in yesterday. Ran to City Island in the Bronx, then up to the Westchester (the New Rochelle, the Mt. Vernon) before coming back to the Bronx and the Van Cortland Park and finally back to the Manhattan. About 37-38 miles roughly, I never measure too carefully. Felt great, though and finished up Ft. George Hill (a steep 1/4 mile hill - roughly). I'm in the office now to get on the computer, don't want to spend too much time here. It's a beautiful day out. Have a nice Labor Day!

Percy Sutton 5K

Howdy! Today I ran the Percy Sutton 5K in Harlem, my first 5K in quite a while I think. It was a nice course, fairly hilly, but through nice streets, mainly St. Nicholas Ave., Edgecomb, Convent Ave. , and St. Nicholas Terrace, and nice to get out of Central Park, no offense. Plus these races outside of CP are generally smaller in turnout which gives me a better chance at placing. So today I ran 18:03, not a PR at all, but good for 19th place overall, and 2nd in 40-44 age group. It rained a little at the beginning, but it was SOOO STICKY!!! Really nasty humid day today. Didn't see any of my regular running buddies there, but I did say hello tosome of my West Side teammates, including Lilan Kroner, who finished a few seconds behind me and was second woman, and 14 year old Luis Porto and 13 year old Alberto Rivera, who both finished just ahead of me in under 18 minutes - wow!!! Congrats, team!

Running good for the knees?

Found in the New York Times:

August 11, 2009
Phys Ed: Can Running Actually Help Your Knees?
By Gretchen Reynolds

An article in Skeletal Radiology, a well-respected journal, created something of a sensation in Europe last year. It reported that researchers from Danube Hospital in Austria examined the knees of marathon runners using M.R.I. imaging, before and after the 1997 Vienna marathon. Ten years later, they scanned the same runners’ knees again. The results were striking. “No major new internal damage in the knee joints of marathon runners was found after a 10-year interval,” the researchers reported. Only one of the participants had a knee that was truly a mess, and he’d quit running before the 1997 marathon (but had been included in that study anyway). His 1997 knee M.R.I. revealed cartilage lesions, swelling and other abnormalities. In the years that followed, the knee became worse, showing augmented tissue damage and more serious lesions. His exam prompted the researchers to wonder whether he would have been better off persisting as a runner, because, as they speculate, “continuous exercise is protective, rather than destructive,” to knees.

You can’t be a runner past the age of 40, as I am, without hearing that running will ruin your knees, by which doomsayers usually mean that we’ll develop “degeneration of the cartilage in the kneecap, which ­reduces its shock-absorbing capacity,” says Ross Tucker, a physiologist in South Africa and co-author of the new book “The Runner’s Body: How the Latest Exercise Science Can Help You Run Stronger, Longer and Faster.” In other words, we’ll be afflicted with arthritis.
It’s not an unreasonable supposition; other sports have been linked with early-onset arthritis in knees. In a British study, almost half of the middle-aged, formerly elite soccer players were found to have crippling, bone-on-bone arthritis in at least one knee. Former weight lifters also have a high incidence of the condition, as do retired N.F.L. players.
But despite entrenched mythology to the contrary, runners don’t seem prone to degenerating knees. An important 2008 study, this one from Stanford University, followed middle-aged, longtime distance runners (not necessarily marathoners) for nearly 20 years, beginning in 1984, when most were in their 50s or 60s. At that time, 6.7 percent of the runners had creaky, mildly arthritic knees, while none of an age-matched control group did. After 20 years, however, the runners’ knees were healthier; only 20 percent showed arthritic changes, versus 32 percent of the control group’s knees. Barely 2 percent of the runners’ knees were severely arthritic, while almost 10 percent of the control group’s were. “We were quite surprised,” says Eliza Chakravarty, an assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “Our hypothesis going in had been that runners, because of the repetitive pounding, would develop more frequent and more severe arthritis.”

Instead, recent evidence suggests that running may actually shield somewhat against arthritis, in part because the knee develops a kind of motion groove. A group of engineers and doctors at Stanford published a study in the February issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery that showed that by moving and loading your knee joint, as you do when walking or running, you “condition” your cartilage to the load. It grows accustomed to those particular movements. You can run for miles, decades, a lifetime, without harming it. But if this exquisite balance is disturbed, usually by an injury, the loading mechanisms shift, the moving parts of the knee are no longer in their accustomed alignment and a “degenerative pathway” seems to open. The cartilage, like an unbalanced tire, wears away. Pain, tissue disintegration and, eventually, arthritis can follow.

So, the best way to ensure that your knees aren’t hurt by running is not to hurt them in the first place. “The biggest predictor of injury is previous injury,” Tucker says, and one of the best deterrents against a first (or subsequent) knee injury is targeted strength training. “The hip stabilizers, quads, hamstrings and core must all be strong enough. As soon as there is weakness, some other muscle or joint must take over, and that’s when injuries happen.”
If you’ve injured your knee in the past, particularly if you’ve ever torn an A.C.L. (an injury that, in the Stanford gait study, was closely associated with misalignment and cartilage degeneration), talk to your physician before running. But for most runners, the scientific observations of Chakravarty will ring true. “What struck me,” she says, “is that the runners we studied were still running, well into their 70s and 80s.” They weren’t running far, she says. They weren’t running frequently. They averaged perhaps 90 minutes a week. “But they were still running.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Team Championships

Howdy! Today was the annual NYRR Team Championships, a 5-miler through Central Park. I was running as a proud member of West Side Runners (WSX), and it was one of my teammates, Bado Worku Merdessa who won the race! The men's team still finished 2nd, and is still in 2nd place for the year, but closing in. I finished in an even 30:00, about 45 seconds slower than I ran in late June, but not bad. The best part was the picnic afterwards and chatting with my West Side buddies, as well as many of my ultrarunning friends who were there: Frank Colella, Emmy Stocker, Frank Deleo, Sal Caretta, Admas Belilgne (also WSX), Lucimar Araujo, Ruth Liebowitz, Al Prawda. But I really should work on my Spanish before the post-marathon party.

Oh, and Frank, can I put your pics up on my blog? ;)