an atheist ultrarunner’s humble prayer for boston

At times where ditching profound for profane makes the most sense, I’m trying my hardest to rationalize these events.  Without a God, people wonder where my prayers come from or go.  It’s through events like this that I am reminded that I have a God.  My God is the most flawed, angry, loving, jealous, vindictive, compassionate being in this world.  My God is the human spirit.  The same human spirit that tells a middle aged couch potato watching his life slip away each day that he can pile miles on top of one another and cross a finish line in a triumphant demonstration of love and commitment to the gift of life that has been bestowed upon him.  My God is the same human spirit that tells an abused woman that she need not sit quietly and listen to the hatred that’s kept her subservient.  She can make it to each next mile, until she’s crossed that line and proven to herself that anything is possible and that she needs not look to anyone but herself for affirmation.  My God is the same human spirit that, beaten and exhausted and depleted of all life from chasing a dream all morning, ties its shoes again and proceeds to the hospital on dead legs to give blood to those that only wished to support their loved ones.  So perhaps my God isn’t very different from yours.  Perhaps we don’t need scriptures and instructions and idols to construct our prayers for.  So I prayed the best way I knew how.   

My prayer came in the form of a 16 mile run.  2 hours of reflecting on the faces I remember most from my first marathon.  The faces that screamed as I turned through that last .2 miles.  Faces of people that had never met me and would never know me.  Faces that shared in my pain and my triumph. I spent two hours recalling what I saw as I looked over their faces and felt the blossoming euphoria and connection that only comes from such taxing endeavors.  I felt as though I was running for them now, and not just for me.  Those screams and cheers replaced feeling of death that had been riding me for the last several miles and made me faster and stronger than I ever remember being.  Those screams were the ‘barbaric yawp’ of our deepest struggles. They were symbiotic relationship between us all.  The human spirit.  My God.  These are the faces that, in an instant yesterday, turned from overwhelming joy to overwhelming terror.  These faces are at every competitive event I’ve ever attended and they are full of only love and joy.  I believe now that it isn’t possible to destroy these faces and that these attacks only serve to bolster the value of our compassion and our desire to see one another overcome obstacles.

And while we’re sitting around complaining because we can only carry ten deaths in our chamber at a time and pretending that we can ever justify having an instrument that makes it so easy to take the life from another human being, I’d prefer to think that we might grow enough at some point to lose ourselves in the precious moments that are now and are our entire existence and find the courage to stand in the face of hatred and intolerance and say that we can be better.  Life, whether we like it or not, inevitably has a finish line.  And, we can sit and gripe about the way things are, or we can change.  And the only important truth of our age is that we must find a way to change.  Change starts with each of us.  Surrender your hatred.  Quit fucking around.

Oh Bandera.

Disclaimer: If this of sounds overly dramatic it’s because it was my second trail race in two years and my first trail race over 6 miles.  Up until now I’ve been a road guy.  Road running and trail running are entirely different sports. I knew going into this that I was unprepared for the situation.  The winter conditions in Rochester made training properly impossible.  As did my recent ankle issues.  Lingering between repair and prepare is something we all do though.  So by no means does this qualify as an asterisk next to my time.

Oh Bandera, how I love thee.

I have been unable to mash words together that would constitute a race report.  I want this to be better.  I want these words to be different.  I want you stuck in my shoes as I try to come to grips with the fact that each one of them is caked with 2-4 lbs of mud (not an exaggerated figure if you ask anyone that ran that day).  I want you to breathe deep with me as I brace for another 20 sotol bushes to lacerate my exposed flesh.  Feel the earth punch through my heels, up through my femurs and hips and organs, jarring my soul with every cautiously reckless step.  I am a human.  I run.  This is nature.  It sits still. Every inch of it sprawling under the mist awaiting my arrival.

In a tent, I spend the night listening to the painfully loud drone of several generators about twenty feet away.  I’d manage three hours of sleep that night.  Those hours would come to a slow, crawling halt at 6 am as I realized that I was drowning in ice cold sweat.  Without ever having been in a comfort zone, there is no reason to pity oneself for wandering alone into the forthcoming hell.

• Priority 1: Put Ipod, shot blocks and gels in vest
• Priority 2: Pound the nearest energy drink and eat two clif bars
• Priority 3: Get in line at the porta-potty section
• Priority 4: Remove as much waste from the body as possible
• Priority 5: Figure out where the hell this thing starts and try to not miss it

I was rolling through my checklist, right up until 5.  Unbeknownst to my blank frame of existence at that hour, 50k and 25k runners all started at a different line than the 100k group.  Drowning in my own anxiety about the impending day, I must have missed the explanation as it came over the PA.  The consequences of my stupidity landed me running up the backside of a 265ish person pack that wouldn’t thin for what seemed like 20 minutes.

When one thinks about humidity they think about discomfort.  This is enhanced exponentially by the prospect of running a jagged and razor sharp 31 mile trail in visibly dense, oxygen deprived air…twice.  When one thinks of humidity thick enough to short out and render worthless the source of the day’s ultra-inspirational, meticulously planned playlist before the first mile has elapsed they think about…’fuck.’

So, with chronic tendinitis ravaging both ankles, three hours of jackhammer laden sleep, soaking wet clothes and not a single note of music in my ear, I set off into the rubble.

It would be beneficial if I could illustrate the dramatic absurdity of the course.  It makes this race what it is.  I’m afraid that there are no words for it.  Videos and photos also do it no justice.  It needs to be felt under foot to be believed.  Even then it is completely unbelievable.  I would say that to create a comparable course, one would take 31 miles of high powered explosives, drape them over a series of small mountains, like Christmas lights on the bushes in your front yard, and detonate them.  After some of the smoke clears and the endless sea of jagged and variably sized rocks settles, take thousands of needle wielding, psychoplants and position them in the most inconvenient places possible all over the course.  Then carve out an endless sea of deceptively intense climbs with utterly death defying descents (unless you’re one of the elite descent runners that seems superhuman when it comes to tap dancing a 5 minute mile down a jagged mess of inconsistency.)  No two foot falls are the same in this race.  Only after it ended, would I understand why this made it so perfect.

For twenty minutes I sauntered over narrow, technical climbs, going at the pace of the hundreds of people in front of me.  Aside from affording me the opportunity to observe the quiet morning beauty, I was certain I’d never start at the back of a pack again.  The feeling that I’d lost my strongest minutes never quite left me.  The negativity of my thoughts weighed me down as much as my already drenched clothes and my lungs felt heavy under the dense humidity.  I noticed very early that the gentle rainfall had left the rocks extremely slick.  This would make descents even more brutal than they already are.  Aid stations were stocked with typical fare; gels, soda, heed, pb&j, quesadillas, red bull, peanut butter covered apple slices, and orange slices; which i subsisted on for the better portion of the race, only eating bread at 31 miles to soak up some gel in my gut.  Most importantly the aid stations were stocked full of beautiful personalities that eagerly treated every runner with the utmost concern before assuring them that they were kicking ass, and sending them on their way.  There truly is no way to thank volunteers enough.  I’m always left in awe by their compassion and caring.  Bandera had the best I’ve ever encountered.

For 17 miles I talked myself into dropping out of the race.  I had essentially made up my mind to bail as soon as the next aid station was in my sight.  I’d broken free of all clusters and was logging 9 minute miles in my concrete shoes all alone and completely miserable since mile ten or so.  I’d hit a particularly nasty hill full of more of those sotol things; unavoidable ninja plants that somehow managed to annihilate me through my DIY compression sleeves/shin guards.  I even stopped after one particularly painful cut and just stood with my hands on my hips, muttering swear words and sighing breaths of defeat, like I would if I were in a Hollywood feature demonstrating what it looks like when one simply gives up.  Like life though, I prefer to believe that I’m not done unless I’m dead in the literal sense.  Figurative death is small. It is humbling but surmountable.  So I finished the climb, navigated the descent, landing on as many hard rocks as possible in an effort to break free of some mud, and began running again; telling myself, “If you can walk you can run.”  (I think Scott Jurek said that.  But I might be wrong.  I think Scott Jurek said half the stuff I tell myself when I feel like I’m plummeting straight to hell.)

“How’s it goin?” said the confident voice that was blowing by me on the right.

“Good,” I lied through a gasping cough, not looking at first.  Then noticing as the man passed me that it was Timothy Olson.  (Timothy Olson is one of the best runners in the country, and my personal hero.  He started the race some five miles behind the 100k group, just to give you an idea of the speed at which he was moving). Promptly realizing that one of my dreams was coming true, I increased my turnover by about 2 million percent and like the little star struck fanboy we all have in us somewhere, said, “I’m gonna run with you for a minute, because it’s a dream of mine.”

“Okay,” he chuckled, willing to converse for a second.

This meant the world to me. Having someone that’s deadlocked with another runner for first place in an extremely important race take time to exchange words with a mere mortal is something that oozes positivity.  It’s what makes this sport sustainable and unique.  We bantered for a minute and I stuck with him for maybe a mile or so before I got a grip on the situation and parted ways with him so that I had enough energy to get to the next aid station.   I didn’t think about quitting again til mile 31.

The thing about double loops on a course like Bandera is this:  You’ve just completed the most difficult task of your life.  Nothing else has even come close.  Brain death set in 3 hours ago and muscle failure set in shortly after.  You’ve reached the end, but its only the start.  You have to do this again.  Right now.  You have to take all the unfathomable agony that you just subjected yourself to, and make it happen again, basking in the complete awareness that you have nothing left to give.  So, I sat down for a minute.  I said to myself, “yea, I’m just gonna change my shoes.”  Which was code for ‘it’s over, I’m not doing this again.’

“Hey Mike!!!” said the familiar voice from over my shoulder.

It was Timothy again.  I knew immediately that I wasn’t dropping out of shit.  He told me excitedly that he won and I tried to conjure up enough energy to convey how happy I was for him.  We talked briefly again and I hobbled back into the tent to put different shoes on.  The dumbest thing I’ve ever done.

When changing shoes during a race, be certain not to put on smaller shoes.  Your feet are swollen after 30 miles.  I switched from my Brooks PureGrit, with about 50 miles on them, which were doing very well aside from holding too much mud, to my ancient New Balance MT 100’s that barely have soles on them anymore.  Why?  I don’t really know.  But I knew before I got back onto the course that it was going to make every step feel like I was being stabbed in the foot.  I feared that if I sat back down to change them back, I wouldn’t get up again.  So I set back out.  Whatever though.  What’s 31 miles of agony?

The only easy thing about a double loop trail course is writing the race report.  It makes the second half of the article a breeze.  The second half of the race was not so simple.  It went slow.  But hurt fast, like this: Blisters on four toes, bloody discharge from under three nails, puncture wounds in both shoes, thus in both feet, muscles running on bone movement alone, not even burning protein or muscle tissue; just existing in a perpetual state of agonizing forward motion.  Bone hinges swing involuntarily, much the way a pendulum swings without knowing why, but just knowing how. Descents are impossible to run under these conditions.  You take them fast anyways, hoping that you’ll misstep and your DNF will be due to skull fractures and grievous bodily harm inflicted by Ma’ Nature and her army of jagged rocks.  But, as in your training run fantasyland, the DNF never comes.  The DNF is just a finish line that you perpetually bypass until the race is actually over.  The idea kicks your heels all day.  It lays hurdles at shoulder height and compels you to climb over them because you can no longer jump over them.  When you know how it feels to have walking hurt more than running, then you know what this is all about.

So there are ten more miles in the pitch black, with fog so thick that partnered running with several headlamps is borderline necessity.  Or maybe I’ve just sunken into this logic as a means of pretending that I have a pacer.  Or because I’m sick of laying lonely footprints in the mud.  And my ears have spent 51 miles growing tired of my voice.  And I’ve finally learned to abandon the idea of placing above any given runner. And that the experience that almost kills us IS the adventure.  I’ve finally learned that adventures shared are so much more valuable than experiences that pass through me as quickly as I pass through them, never to be uttered again, because words can never do justice the things that shake our bones and rupture our flesh and force us bury our pride under a rock in the middle of the wilderness so we can accept how frail we are; and how strong we will be when its over.

I finished 32^nd out of 256 starters.  It was the USATF national championship 100k trail race.  This placing makes me happy.  This was the best field I’ve ever run against and my giddiness to have been on the same trail as Sage Canaday and Karl Meltzer and Dave Mackey and Timothy Olson and countless other incredible runners has yet to subside.  Ill be back for it next year with the intent of being healthy and shaving 2 hours off of my finish.

Mike Welden’s Rules of Successful Distance Running. And Life.

Keeping in mind that the average person thinks I am developmentally disabled because of my love for this sport, I decided to write out the rest of the things that I find critical to running.  Each one of them also applies to effectively living your life.  

1. Run.
2. If Iron Maiden is playing when your run is over, your run is no longer over.
3. Eat and drink enough to fuel you.  No more.  No less.
4. If it hurts, you’re doing it wrong. Or too much.
5. If you are injured, stop.  If you are hurt, be glad that you’re not injured.  And proceed with discretion.
6. Trust your body.  It is the single greatest technology the world has ever known.
7. To learn proper weight transfer and footstrike, warm up and cool down with 20 yard barefoot jaunts on pavement.  Focus on proprioceptive differences and the way your brain fixes your stride subconsciously.  Apply this stride to your normal running.  Be patient.
8. Run with the Earth.  This is not a hippie sentiment. This is science. It’s the relationship between you and the ground, and your surroundings.  Leave no footprint.  Run through puddles without splashing.  Run on ice without slipping.  Run through a herd of grazing deer without them second guessing you. 
9. Run with others from time to time. 
10. If running makes you miserable, ride a bike for a week then start over.   

The Man of Steel

One thing I didn’t anticipate writing about here was superhero movies.  I am undeniably a comic book nerd and more importantly I am a Superman nerd.  My love affair with this story dates back to my youth, when I first saw Christopher Reeve’s take on Superman.  Without going into the finer points about Reeve’s man of steel being an extremely important father figure to me, I will simply say that to this day I believe he is A) solely responsible for the modern superhero movie B) solely responsible for making us believe that a man could fly and C) the single best actor to ever play a superhero.  It’s important to note that I said ‘hero’ as I do believe that Heath Ledger completely annihilated any benchmark previously set by anyone in any of these movies.  No matter how fond I am of Norton’s Hulk and Downy Jr’s Ironman, I still stand firm in my belief, which I share with Richard Donner, director of the first Superman, that, a superhero MUST be portrayed by an unknown if the character will obtain COMPLETE believability.  This is also why i staunchly advocated for Brandon Routh as the torch-bearer after Reeve’s death.  And the fact that he looked identical to Reeve and aced the mannerisms probably better than anyone ever would be able to.  As Reeve and Routh both knew, playing superman is small potatoes.  Playing Clark Kent is where the role comes to life.  Superman become believable not through the cape and external underwear, but through his portrayal of our frailest personality traits.  Extremes and polar opposites make this character great.  Not the relatively generic storylines and completely overwhelming array of powers.   Now, where was I going with all of this?

Wait.  First lets pay appropriate homage.

Okay.  Forward now.  The things that I find to be critical to the value of the Superman movies are as follows;

• Not dumbing down the costume to make it more realistic
• Lex Luthor (Hackman was flawless, Spacey was flawless at playing Hackman playing Luthor
• John Williams score.  Do I really even need to explain this?
• Reeve and Routh being completely unknown actors
• Appropriate use and reuse of Marlon Brando as Jor El
• Delicate and respectful use of the origin story
• Lois Lane

Now things get weird.  I figured that at some point this franchise would be handed over to someone who has proven skilled in the ways of cramming DC heroes into the real world.  I braced for it and I have become okay with the notion.  I AM NOT OKAY YET with the idea of Routh being replaced.  But hearing that they are already rebooting Batman, I suppose I should just let go of all of my desires regarding this whole comic book movie thing and let everything fall into place by the hands of producers and directors and such.  (This doesn’t change the fact that within the next ten years, my brother and my best friend and I will drop the script for The Death of Superman in the hands of Christopher Nolan and say “here. we’ve done it.”)

I’ve watched the trailer for this about twenty times now.  I am very fond of the song.  If my ear serves me correctly, it is the bit of music that plays after Gandalf falls in Fellowship of the Ring.  It is a passionate sample, fit for stirring emotions and an early attachment to the character.  This is nothing new for the franchise.  The first teaser trailer for Superman Returns was one of the most brilliant ever, using Brando’s voice to weave Routh right into the story as it ends after Superman 2.  And i’ll post a trailer for the earlier Superman also, as it seems relevent to this article.  Here are the three trailers, using a trailer for Superman 2 instead of the first, because quite frankly, previews sucked in 1978 and they were pretty much shot as one film anyways.

I’ve let go of my elitism as I’ve grown older perhaps.  I find myself being less worried about having my childhood heroes obliterated at the hands of people that just don’t get it.  Either way, there are several things that I look forward to and some that I am concerned about in regards to this film.  I think that Crowe and Costner will do a fine job as Jor El and John Kent.  I also think that the overall atmosphere of the film,the mood and the textures will all be beautifully crafted.  Cavill is a relatively unknown actor.  This is tradition in this franchise and I think a good move, though Routh still would’ve been better.  I have no doubts about Cavill’s ability to play Superman.  Here is where my concerns begin though.  Can Cavill play a complete nerd?  Can he access and portray the weakest elements of man as perceived by an alien bent on saving us?  I don’t know.  Further concerns include;

• Diane Lane as Martha Kent (mostly because I still think she’s really hot.  This feels unwholsome on so many levels)
• Laurence Fishburne playing Perry White (Gary Cooper pioneered this and made it an extremely important role that I have difficulty imagining Fishburne in)
• General Zod (Terrence Stamp is the ONLY Zod that I feel comfortable kneeling before)

In fact, if I had to assemble a personal top five of comic cinema villains it would look like this; Ledger’s Joker, Hackman’s Luthor, Hardy’s Bane, Stamp’s Zod and Neeson’s Al Ghul.  Regardless of all of this, I look forward to this installment in the franchise and will continue to hold my breath in hopes that Snyder and Nolan do as well with this movie as they have done in the past.

Biking to Keuka. And back.

My best dude friend and my best dudette friend loaned me sweet bikes.  Perhaps they understand my situation as a poverty-stricken endurance athlete in need of cross training from time to time.  Or they’re just too good of people to tell me to pony up the cash and buy a huffy.

jennas bombproof commuter bike is on the left. it spent the weekend carrying me great distances.

That being said, on Friday I decided to ride the artillery tank out to Keuka Lake.  60.5 miles with about 3500 ft up and 33oo ft down.  Some of these hills are utterly absurd.  Especially on a bike heavy enough to withstand a trip through the minefield.  But it was because of this security that I deemed it the finer steed for what would end up being a pitch black, frostbitten journey across the land.  I’ll talk about this ride briefly, and the plethora of catastrophes contained within it.

I left the house at 1:30.  I assumed that because the temps in Rochester were comfortable (from a runner’s standpoint) that I could make the journey simply wearing my NB MT 100′s and a pair of Balega socks.  Unfortunately, running and biking are different.  Like being smart and being a dumbass.  Anyone familiar with the MT100 knows that they are essentially built to drain moisture.  This means they are a thin sheet of porous nothingness.  Balega’s are no different.  This amounts to me setting off barefooted into what would ultimately turn into a frigid tundra.  As a runner it was not instinctual to fear the wind breaking over my feet as i sliced through the cold air.  By the time I got to the end of my street I was complaining to myself about how cold my feet were.  By thirty miles I was curled up in a ball at the corner of CR 1 and East Lake Rd texting people to tell them that I had frostbite on my feet and was possibly going to die.  The next thirty miles were the most painful of my life.

Sleep.  The second catastrophic, gaping hole in my Friday evening ride, was being awake for 30 hours straight, coming out of a 4 hour night of sleep on Wednesday and an 11 hour overnight shift Thursday.  Sleep can absolutely not be underestimated in these situations.  One cannot successfully pedal a bike while his body falls into a sleep state.

Catastrophe, the third.  I decided to use this as a 60 mile opportunity to work on my systems fat burning capabilities.  Essentially during these workouts I consume ONLY enough carbohydrates and fuel to activate and sustain my body’s fat burning metabolism.  There are complex ratios and percentages and shit, but I don’t want to get into that right now.  So we’ll leave it at that.  I bonk intentionally and torture myself so that my body knows how to live off the 90000 calories of fat at its disposal.  If you’ve ever truly hit the wall in an endurance workout, you understand the emotional and physical plight that I’m not capable of describing.  I’m very familiar with this sort of thing in my running.  I embrace it.  For whatever reason, hitting the wall on a bike feels far more emotionally traumatic.  Oddly enough, the minute I ingest even a small amount of simple carbs, my mood skyrockets right back to normal.  My first experience with this complete and utter failure of my system on a bicycle was on my hundred mile ride with my friend Charlie.  We both became severely dehydrated and depleted of all fuel in a dangerously remote 50 mile stretch of road.  My second experience was here.  Laying in the grass at the corner of CR 1 and East Lake Rd in Canandaigua, 30 miles into a 60 mile ride with frostbitten toes, no heart left, no spirit, no life, no sunlight, no warmth, no backup plan, no retreat, no heroes, no nothin.  Just the idea of success flickering in my ever dimming mind.

So I got up and walked the bike up the hill.  Then I got on the bike.  Then I pushed the pedals slowly.  One after the other.  The same as at the ass end of an ultramarathon.  Just get to the next street and we’ll figure it out from there.  My first 30 miles clocked just under 2 hours.  To adequately demonstrate the ferocity of this bonk, my second thirty miles, containing FAR more downhills, took 3 hours and 5 minutes.  Whatever though.  ‘Just do it.  Do the work. Get over it.  Do it again on the way home and do it better.  Not because you’re a cyclist, because you’re clearly not.  But because the only thing that scares you is failing to be better than you were yesterday.’

I got drunk Friday and Saturday night.  As always, when drunk, I consumed quantities of food that would land most people in a psyche ward.  For whatever reason, I remained relatively unfazed through the next mornings ride home.  I felt well enough to nail dead even 20 mile splits of 1:16. I completed the trek in a mere 3:48 minutes and felt tremendous after.  My entire fuel source was the bevy of crap sitting in my digestive system from the previous two nights, a pack of skittles that I found and a bottle of Gatorade.  Factors contributing to the improvement in this workout are numerous.  Tailwind for much of the way.  The hills were worse this time, but the worst of them were over the first thirty miles, so by the time I’d cleared those and burnt all my energy away, I didn’t have much to worry about.  Day time helps a lot too.  As does being able to feel my feet.  Unseasonable warmth was my friend for this ride.  But these are just small pieces of the pie.  What really matters the most, and always makes me feel better to have faith in, is the immediate power of simple carbs.

After biking 140 miles over the weekend, I’m eager to get this ankle injury properly diagnosed and treated so that I can begin running again.  That’s all for now.

Stupid Fucking Vegan

… is one of my favorite songs ever, by one of my favorite bands ever, the Queers. Over a decade later, I find myself at odds with this, as a staunch advocate of a vegan diet.  Whatever though.  Things shouldn’t fit nicely in boxes.

i do not own the rights to this image. ive borrowed it to make a point.

 

I feel the need to document my entry into this plant-based lifestyle. If you’re gonna get butthurt over my refusal to inconvenience animals for food then don’t bother reading this.  Also, I’m not going to argue with anyone on here. If you think your current diet makes you feel good, then I am happy for you.

My family comes from many farms.  Literally every single extended family member I have.  Many of these are farms with cows.  Farms with fridges full of stuff from these cows. Farms in towns where the word ‘vegan’ likely isn’t uttered a single time throughout the course of any given decade.  On the census report, under population statistics, vegans would be right there with non-white residents at 0.0%

again, not my picture. I do not possess any rights to this. But it sure is fuckin cute.

Because of this family history, the idea of eating something that DIDN’T come from animals while growing up never even occurred to any of us.  Literally.  Everything had butter or milk on it.  If it didn’t, then it was flesh of some sort.  I recall nights of sitting down at the table and eating an entire loaf of white bread smeared with butter.  This always went nicely with my pork chops and mushroom gravy.  I never asked questions about what I was eating, and I have to believe that most people my age don’t.  Why?  The shit tastes good.  Perhaps life has changed in the average household, but back then I had no reason to ever question what was put in front of me.  Even when I’d become so chronically sick in my body and my mind that I spent years at a time either believing that I was on the brink of death or wishing that I was dead, I never once asked about the shit that I put in my body.  Why would I?  My parents are amongst the finest people in the world.  The all-seeing, all-knowing providers of my life.  They would never steer me in the wrong direction.

Not intentionally, anyhow.

My parents didn’t know any better.  None of us did.  It simply didn’t matter that the entire family was suffering from some sort of considerable illness and chronically using numerous prescription drugs. This is America, after all.  Land of the fat.  Land of the happily blind.  Land of the people who have become so detached from reality that they actually think that they DON’T feel like shit all the time. People are miserable and dying and don’t even notice.  Charles Baudelaire said it best, “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he did not exist.”  The genocide has been happening for the better part of a century. What was to be expected from the union of food and politics?  I don’t have time to explain that relationship in the blog, but I assure you, Adolf Hitler doesn’t have shit on the Standard American Diet.  Industry and Food should not have ever begun holding hands.  Do your own research.  Allow your mind to open up so that it can be blown to pieces.  Oh wait, back to veganism…

I believe veganism to be the finest particular dietary lifestyle that has ever appeared in the first world. To take it one step further, Low Fat Raw Veganism trumps even that in terms of unleashing the human potential for well-being.  Raw is not a lifestyle for me though, as it has been in the past.  Raw veganism is a Jacuzzi that i sit in sometimes to get back on track.  The fact that I lack the discipline to engage this lifestyle full-time certainly won’t prevent me from talking about it.

Additionally, regarding the plant-based lifestyle, there is no amount of arguing that is going to change my mind about this.  No amount of industry funded studies will convince me that I need to even keep the word protein in my vocabulary.  Naturally, as a vegan, I deal with a fair amount of “where do you get your protein?”

I DON’T

I’m also not in the mood to blog about amino acids and the reality of what your body does with them once they’re ingested.  What I will say, is that since abandoning the idea that I need a certain amount of protein in my diet I have seen only improvements in my overall physical health.  Additionally, my digestive system thanks me every day.  Sometimes two or three times a day.  Don’t listen to me and decide if I’m right.  Don’t listen to your nursing school friend that swears up and down that you will turn yellow and die if you stop killing animals for food.  Don’t listen to anyone.  Listen to your body.  Its my humble and untrained yet vastly experienced opinion, that it would be best for you (if you suffer from diet related health issues), to just for one month, assume that you have been lied to by the forces of industry since the day you picked up a spoon.  Eat an abundance of plant food for a month (without calorie deficiency!!!!!) and see if it makes you feel better.  Your body will possibly take time to adjust to this.  You may even feel like shit.  Deal with it.  You’ve felt like shit for a long time, you probably just forgot what it’s like to feel good.  Or don’t.  I don’t really care too much.  There are certainly ways to obtain a great degree of health without living off plant foods.  I’ve simply never found one.  And I’ve subjected myself to some fairly extreme things over the last 28 years.

The thing that has been most alarming to me over the last couple of years, is the extent to which so many non-vegan folks are offended by my lifestyle.  I attribute much of this to guilt, or perhaps to jealousy, but much of it also to ignorance.  I generally don’t insult the dietary lifestyles of others.  Sometimes I am shocked into questioning the train of thought of a person so fat they cant stand up without puking, yet would climb Mount Doom for a piece of pizza, but generally, if you’re eating what I believe to be shit, I keep to myself about it.  But if i had a nickel for every time someone insulted me for eating ‘rabbit food’ or telling me that veganism is for pussies, then I’d surely have enough money to get that fucking tree off my roof.

Just as shocking, is the amount of times I’ve sat down at a dinner table where people are eating steroid injected meat containing some MASSIVE percentage of a flavoring solution (because your meat is colorless and flavorless without these things), and had someone look at my tofu or tempeh or seitan and say something to the effect of, “eww, it looks so gross.  The texture is so gross.”  THINK ABOUT HOW FUCKING STUPID THIS SOUNDS.  You’re telling me that my plant-based patty is gross while stuffing your face with a stew of connective tissue, ligaments, tendons, fat and meat scraped off of a bone of an animal that probably lived knee deep in the feces of its peers.  Tofu is SOOO gross!!!

Lastly, my initial foray into this whole thing was not health related. I kept watching my dogs and cats sleep in piles of each other and learn behaviors from each other, and defend one another.  It seems reasonable to think that if such feeble-minded creatures can learn to exist without inconveniencing each other (by using available resources) then humans should be no different.

i do own this one. these are my favorite feet warmers. in the event of a catastrophe i would not eat them for food. I would feed myself to them.

2012 CanLake 50

My Day Chasing Daven Oskvig Around Canandaigua Lake

Spending seven hours in second place provides you with a unique perspective on an endurance event.  Especially when you haven’t seen your prey in five hours and the person chasing you could be the breeze that you just felt breathing down the back of your neck, but you don’t really feel like stopping to find out just how much ground you are sacrificing as your feet slowly become one with the pavement that you’ve been talking to for most of the morning and into the afternoon.

The start of the day was miserable.  I awoke at 5 am to make the drive from Rochester and was immediately disheartened by several things.  Most frightening, was the fact that I still had a low grade fever lingering from the previous day.  I was less concerned with this than the fact that for the fifth day in a row I felt as though someone had filled my lungs with cement.  Since transitioning to veganism at the end of 2010, my immune system has been a punishing machine of death for anything that slightly resembled illness.  So it only makes sense that I find myself choked out by an utterly debilitating respiratory infection for the entire week leading up to the race.  This was also not my biggest concern, as I had spent the prior days coming to terms with the fact that my first ever DNF was imminent.  You’ve all seen a fish out of water, so I need not describe what i felt like when I logged my staggeringly slow 5 mile jaunt the day before.  What really got under my skin was the sound of Armageddon on my rooftop.  You know, the kind of rain that sounds the way that drowning might feel. Had I not had my own funeral to attend at what was easily the least thought out race decision of my life, I certainly would’ve spent the next six hours doing all sorts of things that involved remaining completely comatose in the warmth of my bed.  Mostly just dreaming of oxygen in my lungs.

The rain followed us all to the starting line.  As I stood shivering in the blackness of the morning I looked around for a man named Daven Oskvig.  I had decided during the 45 minute drive out, that before DNF’ing and dying in the loving arms of the folks at the first aid station, i would try to hang out with him for a couple of miles.  I figured, when i saw the tremendously fit gentleman with the least amount of clothes on and no hydration on his person, that I’d either found the guy that had dialed his fueling so flawlessly that he knew he would win, or the guy that I saw sprinting repeats to warm up before the gun at my last 12 hour because he had no idea what his body was about to go through.  It was in fact Daven Oskvig and I was intimidated, just as I’d imagined I would be for the entire 8 weeks that I’d spent training.  I’d researched his race history and was staunchly aware of the fact that his experience doubles mine and his PR’s are all substantially faster than mine.  Fortunately I’m not big on training for any purpose other than victory.  I’m like every other sucker that spends his long runs imagining a shoulder to shoulder footrace down to the tape with the cheers of onlookers drowned out by the sound of my diaphragm forcing that last cup of Gatorade from my stomach back into my mouth as I claw desperately for triumph.

The race started as I’d expected.  He took off.  So I became his shadow.  I mimicked his every move, with the exception of dodging all the puddles that I’d heard him splashing through in the dark of the morning.  Wet feet were something that I’d deemed unacceptable this early in a race.  As we reached the lake, my lungs began to open for the first time in a week and I remembered the luxury of oxygen in my bloodstream.   At the starting line a gentleman had spoken of a gully that we would have to cross early on.  He’d said that it was full of water but we’d be able to jump over it without a problem.  It must have filled considerably since he’d last checked it because the only way I was clearing that expanse was with a pole.  I jumped straight into what felt like the lake itself and felt my hopes and dreams of dry feet drown instantly in my shoes.  Earlier in the week, while asking for advice to kick a respiratory infection in a matter of days, a friend of mine told me simply to “get a straw and suck it the fuck up.”  I’d thought about this briefly and decided that to be my only option.  I was decidedly not ready to be done yet.

We passed through a gate onto the road that would make up the first 20 or so miles of the race.  The leader went into cruise control and I followed suit, falling in directly behind him and matching every stride.  This felt surprisingly comfortable for most of the first ten miles or so.  When we’d reached the first noteworthy climb, he began to walk for a brief moment.  I knew that walking these brief but savage inclines was the smartest thing to do, but absent-mindedly made a move and passed him.  For roughly half a mile I galloped away from the real leader of the race.  I recall looking back and thinking of scenes from old horror movies in which soon-to-be victims are sprinting at full speed and every time they look back, the killer, walking casually, is getting closer to them.  He caught me on a hill shortly after my glorious stint at the front.  We engaged in small talk about who we are and what our training looks like and all that stuff that runners talk about.  A decent length into the conversation it occurred to me that we were charging up hills and he was still able to talk without breathing heavily.  This is probably the point in the race when I knew he was going to set a course record.  He lost me after eleven miles.  Somehow, he managed this on one of the most ridiculous downhills I’ve ever seen.  I’ve never been passed and subsequently dusted on a downhill.  I didn’t even think that sort of thing happened in the real world.  But it did.  And he was gone.  I suddenly had to be my own shadow.  Flattened to the pavement and desperately seeking an identity within a race that I still couldn’t fathom finishing.  Thus beginning my painfully silent battle against my own defeated body.

Bopple Hill redefined running for me.  It’s the kind of hill I always want to show people when they tell me they like to run hills.  I’d done repeats there several weeks prior to race day and managed to run up it five times without stopping.  I knew that on race day I would walk part of it simply because it makes sense at mile 15 of a 50 miler.  I made it to the top of the hill still feeling quite strong and resettled into a mid 7 minute pace.  Shortly thereafter I caught up to a group of early starters.  They informed me that Daven was 2 minutes ahead of me and I was finally able to relax and accept my role as the guy in second.

The downhill section that comes roughly a mile after the ascent of Bopple is one of those ‘free fall’ type of downhills that you spend cursing each step and wishing that it was on a trail, or that you included a parachute in your race day attire.  I struggled to slow beyond a 5:30 pace for this entire section and my knees began to disagree with my strategy of bombing hills and dealing with the pain later.  I’ve always been of the mindset that I have all the time in the world to recover after a race, but I only have the time immediately in front of me in which to finish the race.  So I absorbed the shock of the man-made world, regardless of how damaging it may have been.  I reached Bristol Springs with some gas in the tank and continued forth requiring only vaseline to help address the kind of situation that men face when they don’t pay attention to details on race day.

Though I’d not seen Mr. Oskvig in about 10 miles, I was just now beginning to feel the impact of continual solitude as I turned down Parish Rd.  Less than a mile long and completely flat, this road felt eternal and desolate and I spent most of it questioning whether or not I’d made a wrong turn.  I reached Rte. 245 several minutes later only to nearly have my DNF confirmed by an inattentive motorist that thought he might be able to go fastest if he traveled on the shoulder.  As I pressed on towards the Sunnyside aid station it occurred to me that i was going to beat my marathon PR.  This is borderline irrelevant though, as this PR is extremely outdated.  Nevertheless, it planted the seed in my head that I had gone out way too fast and continued to do so for far too long.  This was another byproduct of my certainty that I couldn’t finish the race.

My feet began to feel like bloody mush as I approached the Sunnyside aid station.  I imagined the scene in Robocop where the man turned to fleshy paste by toxic waste gets hit by the car and explodes.  I changed my socks without looking at my feet, as I was not intent on seeing how bad things really were, and chatted with my crew for a moment.  My longtime friend Devin, a total gear aficionado, loaned me his Balega socks (by far the best running socks ever), but I was not ready to abandon my waterlogged Green Silence shoes yet, so my feet instantly became saturated again.  Like a twit, the only backup shoes I brought were my brand new Newton Gravity’s that I’ve only logged 20 miles on.  I trust Green Silence to get me to hell and back but still managed to leave several pairs at home.  My handler and pacer each gave me updates on the locations of first and third place and sent me on my way.  Retrospectively, visiting with these three at aid stations was probably the only thing that got me from start to finish on that particular day.

Loneliness matters not, over the next leg of this course.  Something about seeing cows during a race puts me in a zen like state.  This is a good thing, especially at that point where your form takes a backseat to your agony and you move forward looking like a guy that accidentally left the nursing home without his wheelchair and is just beginning to remember that he hasn’t walked in five years.  The pavement along this leg is treacherously jagged.  I spent the majority of the time thinking that if i collapsed and fell, I would probably bleed out in the middle of the road.  A bow-hunter crossed the road in front of me, covered head to toe in camouflage, looking quite ready to kill.  I smiled and nodded.  He looked like he no longer wanted to kill deer, but rather the creep in the road with the dreadlocks.  I quickened my pace a bit.  I ran past a photographer at this point and realized several minutes later that most of my face was completely covered in snot.  ‘At least my respiratory/sinus ailments will be immortalized in the land of digital photography,’ I thought to myself.  For whatever reason these are the thoughts that get me through the darkest parts of the race.

There’s an aid station at a Church in Middlesex.  It’s thoughtfully placed before a relatively staggering climb up Rte. 364 to the intersection with S. Vine Valley Rd.  This was the first time I’d been beaten into a mantra by the awareness that my legs literally had nothing left to give.  I began repeating something stupid in my head.  Something rhythmic and meditative and related to the fact that without a body I could be without pain.  Ultrarunning is like that.  Sometimes you need to be able to leave your body and just let your mind do its thing.  No body.  No pain.  I turned onto S. Vine Valley Rd. at mile 30 and braced myself for my still imminent DNF.

Music, in my experience, becomes irrelevant at this point in a race.  It becomes background noise that may or may not be harmful to your body’s rhythm, stride and ability to interact safely with the ground.  Running is, after all, a simple relationship between your feet and the ground.  When you drown out the communication between the two, a plethora of things can go wrong.  I turned my music up at this point, first because I tend to ignore common sense and secondly because I was sick of listening to my mind.  The hills over this leg roll aggressively into another ferocious downhill and into the most demoralizing piece of the race.  A 1.5 mile out and back.  Out and backs are painful at any point in a race because covering the same ground twice feels like running up a downward escalator.  This particular one was made exponentially more painful by the fact that I’d seen Daven Oskvig coming out of it as I entered it and had no idea that he was 5k ahead of me.  For all I knew, I had just caught up with the leader.  What’s a guy to do in this situation but immediately accelerate to a six minute mile.  I passed him and he said, ‘good job, Mike, its only 3 miles down and back. You got it!’  I stopped immediately and walked to my handlers car.  ‘Give me salt pills,’ I said, defeated.  How do you make this situation worse than it is?  You’re 32 miles into a race. You’re cold and suffering from every imaginable running related pain known to your species.  You have to run 1.5 miles down a depressing stretch of single lane road and then back up it.  You’re 3 miles behind the guy that’s going to win.  Oh, wait. Now there’s that giant, unrestrained, territorial and completely pissed off dog that just ran onto the course because that the person in third place evidently wasn’t a good enough reason to run faster.  Running from a dog that is intent on biting you is a bad idea in any case.  I’ve been surrounded by dogs for many years and have yet to encounter one that I’m able to outrun.  Pissed off and completely willing to have a dog be the cause of my DNF, I turned to figure out how I was going to handle the situation and finally had some luck.  The dog lunged once, snapped at me and then backed off the road merely showing its teeth instead of latching on or leaving with any of my favorite appendages.

I picked up my pacer at this point.  It was refreshing to have a voice besides my own to listen to.  The excitement of this was perhaps dangerous however, as I picked him up on a downhill and immediately found us putting down a 6 minute mile into one of the biggest climbs of the race.  The Bare Hill Climb is about 2.7 miles of up.  Its relatively miserable, but more so over the last .7 miles where you are likely to be walking faster than you would be running due to the extreme incline.  I honestly have no recollection of this climb though.  I attribute this to having someone to talk to.  I was able to effectively ignore what was going on around me.

The 11th leg of the race was the most mind numbing for me.  My body had been worthless for about 12 miles and the rolling hills offered just enough monotony to keep me in a zombie like state.  This is the most satisfying part of ultrarunning in my mind.  It’s the section of the event where I absolutely detest all physical activity.  I habitually renounce running during these times.  Running never gives up on me though.  So I continue forth, through the pain and agonizing desire to withdraw myself.  Then next 6 miles were like this.  They were the reason I hate running and the reason that keep running.  At mile 47 I found reprieve.

There is a point where you wonder where the lake went.  The solace provided over so much of the race by the astounding views of the lake had all but vanished for the last several hours.  It’s here where everything came full circle.  Where I was able to start running with my body again, instead of my mind.  Down a mile long stretch of CR 18, before turning on to Lincoln Hill road and finishing out the race, the course rewarded me with the most astounding view of the lake I’d seen all day.  At the very least, a view majestic enough to make me forget how much pain I was in.  A view that dropped me safely back into the necessary stillness of mind.  I carried this stillness the entire way down Lincoln Rd and through the dead end only to be jarred out of it by the utterly punishing 100 yard section of rugged grass the spits you out onto the final stretch.  I spent the last three minutes of the race laughing with my pacer about a variety of things.  For the first time ever, the runner’s high hit me while a race was still going.  In the deepest recesses of my soul, I embrace the moments in which these events end.  A sense of achievement is so elusive in the lives of many people.  I’m no different.  I cross the line and look forward to a day or two of not being able to walk because it will remind me that after years of destroying my body with cigarettes and chemical abuse, I can still do something remarkable.

Sitting at the finishing line after a race like this is the most inspiring part of my life.  Watching people from all backgrounds and with greatly varying degrees of athleticism finish such an adventure makes my blood flow harder than the race itself.  Though I’ll aspire to one day catch Daven Oskvig and to run alongside the Tony Krupicka’s and Kilian Jornet’s of the world, it’s not the elites that impress me the most.  It’s the men and women that got up one day and decided to do something profound and prove to themselves that unfathomable satisfaction awaits just on the other side of the absurd.