Had one final 20 miler this weekend before my taper for Shamrock on the 21st. I needed some confidence from my run. I was scheduled at MP+15 (9:15) pace. My previous 20 miler had gone just ok. I finished with 19.4 on the Garmin and waffled at the end. I just didn’t have the will to complete it. I needed my final 20 before the Shamrock taper to be good. I got decent carbs yesterday and pre-run, had hydrated pretty well for the past 3 days and had everything ready. I just needed to do it.

I did the first 7 out and back from the parking lot and grabbed a banana off the top of my car and swapped my empty bottle out with a spare and kept going. I wasn’t going to let hydration or lack of carbs bonk me today, by god. At mile 8 I decided I was going to add a mile. I’d short-shifted my previous 20, I’ll grab an extra mile just to tell my body who’s boss. So I ran down to the 10.5 mile marker and turned around for the return trip. I was essentially on a metronome, staying within 60 feet of my Garmin virtual training partner the whole way. I never let myself into the black but I usually don’t mind going up to 100 or 200 feet ahead. Not today, I kept it on pace.

I finished my final Clif shot — note to self: buy more Gu… Clif Shots are yucky — at the 17 mile mark and kept going. I was completely looking forward to the final incline — not so much to enjoy it as to enjoy being done with it — and kept pace up it which brought me to 2.5 miles out. At the 1.5 mile marker I got soundly passed by another long runner, friendly guy and I told him to keep it up. Just before I hit the final mile I decided I was going to rope him in. I did just that at the 0.5 marker — averaging about 7:40 over the final mile — and talked with him a bit.

“Last mile is always welcome,” I said.

“I wish. I still have a long way to go.”

“How far into it are you?” I asked. We’re still pulling a bit under 8:00 pace. Talking. Who the hell is this crazy guy running my 21? Can’t be me.

“9 miles into 22,” he said. “You?”

“Final mile of 21. You training for anything?”

“Yes, the Tobacco Road marathon,” he said, which is the new local event right there on my home trail. “Are you?”

“Yeah, Shamrock in Virginia Beach. Found out about Tobacco Road after I’d signed up for Shamrock.” Which is mostly true, but I was nervous about an inaugural event and I need a bit more course support — people shouting my name enthusiastically, endless adoring adulation etc, etc — so I opted for Shamrock.

“Let me see if I can finish this up right, have a good one,” I said as I picked it up again. That final push was in the 7:20 range.

There’s a confidence builder! No wall for me today. Now I get to take it relatively easy — 13 miles at MP for the long run next week and 8-10 at MP the week after — and get the legs rested for Shamrock. I feel good about it, though!

Surprisingly enough my running has gone better than I could have imagined, even with the appearance of seemingly certain setbacks. A few weeks ago I got home from playing in a typical late night hockey league game, went to sleep and woke up at almost 4 in the morning having difficulty breathing. I was coughing and couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen. After wandering around the house double-checking the CO2 detectors and assuring myself we weren’t all going to die in our sleep — from that anyway — I was able to get back to sleep but the problem lingered throughout the day enough that I saw the doc who gave me a chest X-ray then sent me for a cat scan of my chest, neither of which showed much of anything. I had another episode of very labored breathing after the cat scan and the following morning and a follow-up appointment resulted in a diagnosis of asthma.

2 days of inhaler use got me over it — in time to rescue Julia — and now I’m only using it before hockey games. Supposedly ice hockey is a prime trigger for asthma. Who knew?

I really thought I’d be screwed running, but have had no difficulty whatsoever. In fact I logged my longest continuous run in what must be two decades with a 5 3/8 mile lunchtime jog. I’ve done 10k runs in the past when I was younger but, to be honest, I can’t recall whether I actually made it all the way through the races running the whole way. Maybe I just had a good day today but I felt good before I ran and figured I’d do an extra lap around the lake that I skirt during my lunchtime runs which adds right around a mile and a quarter to my usual 4.1 mile run. The human brain and body are amazing, vexing machines. As I was meeting back up with the lake at about the 3 1/2 mile mark I was smiling. Ordinarily I’m working pretty hard at that point with about half a mile to go but today, knowing that I had just under two miles still to go, I didn’t start getting into that “finishing” mindset where I yearn for the finish and being done.

Then I get to the 4 3/4 mile mark and I get passed by a father and his little daughter about or a bit under Julia’s age on bikes (aside: figures this little girl is riding her bike like a champ with no training wheels whereas Julia isn’t comfortable even with training wheels). It’s so friggin’ adorable that I forget about just about everything, though I’m kicking my pace up. When I realize my pace is faster I just keep going. I ended up passing them at about the 5 mile mark and wind up sprinting the final quarter mile or so. It just felt so damned good.

That brings me to a project I’ve been working on. I’m getting closer to feature complete, but it’s usable as it stands now and a little glance is offered to the right. The design is placeholder, obviously, as I want to get everything in before I start making it pretty. I enjoy side projects and constantly try to come up with something that I find interesting that could conceivably make money. I’m not convinced this will make a dime, but I’m having fun anyway. The only downer is that after doing a cursory glance around I didn’t find anything much like it before I started. After getting something functional I of course discovered something quite similar, done by the government no less. I think there are enough differences and advantages I have in mind to at least keep going with it, but it’s still a bit disheartening.

The idea is essentially a workout tracker that acts as a virtual trip across America. As you log workouts, your distance is tracked as progress along a route across the US. There’s a bit more of a social element with my implementation such that you’ll see those who are “around” you on the road. You can have groups so that you can track along with friends for competition or comparison. There are milestones which are (hopefully) interesting distance comparisons (e.g. the length of 1,000 football fields). There are also what I’m currently calling badges which are akin to Xbox Live achievements applied to the real world. My current favorite is “The Snake Plissken Memorial Badge” for crossing the border from New York into Jersey. It will also support some of the social sites. It’ll integrate into Facebook via Facebook Connect, you’ll be able to send information to Twitter if you so desire, and it will support OpenID credentials. If other sites make sense to integrate I will add them too.

The primary goal is just to provide some incentive to exercise. And give me a fun side project while learning something new. This time that something is Ruby on Rails, as well as the Google Maps API, neither of which I’d ever touched before.

I’ll be looking for beta testers soon so if you exercise regularly and want to be involved, let me know. Hopefully it’ll be fun.