<- Left Turns Only!

After an extended weekend, and a very busy week here at the office, I’m finally getting around to posting my race summary and weekend travels. 

To recap, I started out flying into Los Angeles on Thursday.  Upon arrival, after my friend almost ran over Mia Hamm and Nomar Garciaparra (seriously, 15 minutes into the trip and we almost hit them with the car when making a right at a red light as they walked across the street), I spent the day hanging around here:

and here:

Here are the true tourist photos:

On Friday, I drove up the coast with my friends Angela and Leslie.  It’s a long drive when you’re trekking from Los Angeles to San Francisco (we didn’t end up making it all the way to San Fran), but it’s well worth the drive.  Here are a few pics from some of the scenic places where we stopped to get some air - the pictures alone explain why it’s worth the drive.

 Saturday, I got in my race prep, at the several of Napa and Sonoma’s finest vineyards.  Okay, I didn’t get any race prep in but I did have a few glasses of wine.  I’m not much of a wine connoisseur, but I did manage to buy one bottle of red wine after having a glass.  It’ll probably sit on top of my refrigerator for ages.    Anyway, here are some pics from Napa/Sonoma:

FINALLY - on Sunday, I the race was on.  The fog was pretty much just clearing off at 7:15, when the race was scheduled to start.  Oddly, we started the race in the middle of a hill.  Although, given that we were in Napa I guess it was fitting.  The first 7.5 miles were run through rolling hills.  I didn’t get that impression from the elevation chart that they listed on the race website, nonetheless… the hills were there.  I felt good at the first split marker, around 7.5 miles in.  My time was 58:00.3 at that point.  A little slower than I had hoped, but not bad. 

The second half of the race proved to be the true test.  At about the 10 mile mark, my upper back and neck started to tighten up.  I could feel the pounding of each step, and ended up slowing down quite a bit for about 2 miles.  I was a two mile stretch of slow jogging and stretching my upper body while on the run. I am guessing that I probably ran the 10th and 11th miles in about 10 minutes each.  I started to feel loose at the 12 mile marker, and turned it up a bit over the last mile and a tenth.  Still, over the last 5.6 miles it took me 49:29.7, well over 8 minutes a mile. 

I ended up finishing in 1:48:00.5 (gun time) and 1:47:30.1 (chip time).   I placed 25th in my age group, out of 88 - although my chip time was faster than the guy that is listed in 24th.  Puzzling to me, because I’m not sure why they have chip timing if the gun time is the one they use to place people.  Unless there was something wrong with the chips?!?!  Another odd thing about this race was that there wasn’t a single clock on the entire course.  You simply passed by the mile markers.  I asked several people what time they had on their watches as we passed a couple of mile markers.  I haven’t run with a watch on since my heart rate monitor died… guess it’s time to get a new battery, before the next half marathon (Chicago Distance Classic - no hills! - August 12th).

The Napa-to-Sonoma Wine Country Half Marathon is a less than a week away!  As of right now the Sunday weather forecast in Napa is calling for Sunny skies, with a high of 85 and a low of 57.  The race starts at 7:15am (no, I’m not crazy about that) so it should be somewhat cool when we start.  I’m hoping to finish the race in about an hour and a half, we’ll see.  The course has a few hills, but nothing that looks too steep after the initial hill.  The incline after the 8-mile mark might be a pain… let you know next week.  Either way, I’m hoping to maintain a steady pace the entire race. 

I’ll be flying to Los Angeles on Thursday morning, meeting up with some friends and checking out L.A. for a day.  Then we will be heading out on Friday to drive up the coast.  No real attack plan as of yet.  The only things “on the schedule” are a stop in Monterrey for a late lunch with my old roommate, and dinner in San Francisco with some friends on Friday night.  Saturday will probably consist of some wine country touring and a visit to the race Expo to check-in.

We’ll see how it all plays out… I’ll post pictures next week when I get back. 

On a non-Speedskating side note — Every so often I will come across an article, or in this case a video clip, that reminds me to do my part in keeping the world a cleaner, greener place.  Today’s clip comes from ABC News, via Yahoo News, and it talks about the effects of bottled water.  Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t make every effort possible to be a clean, green, Al Gore machine.  I probably drink 3-4 bottles of water a day.  We have cases of it in our breakroom here at the office.  I know the stack of plastic bottles probably isn’t doing any good for the environment… but always assumed that most were getting recycled.  What I really never gave much thought about was the amount of oil that gets used to produce the bottles and then transport them to the retailers.  2 ounces of oil to deliver one large bottled water… that’s a pretty sizable amount of waste.

www.mapmyrun.com

I was talking to a friend the other day and he told me about this site.  Pretty cool site if you ever wanted to find out exactly how far you are running, blading, biking, etc…

These are the two routes that I run most of the time (creature of habit):

7.25 mile run through the city

9.38 mile Lakefront run

I typically run the city run on weeknights at about 10, since the temperature usually drops off some by then.  I tend to run the lakefront path on the weekends.  It’s a great run on Saturday or Sunday nights at about 6pm.  The pedestrian traffic is pretty light at those hours.  If you ran this route on a Saturday morning you’d be smothered by all of the marathon training groups.  Not to mention the beach crowd arriving to scope out their spots in the sun, volleyball net space, BBQ areas, etc…

I now have all of my training gadgets for the rest of the summer (I don’t think the budget will allow me to buy anymore at this point anyway).  I bought some new inline skates two weeks ago, they arrived in the mail last week.  Along with another new toy, I think I have also covered all of the possible sore/irritated body parts now as well.  The pic below shows the corner of the skate tongue, where I left behind some of my ankle during a good long skate last night:

Here’s a pic of the new skate setup…

My old skates were Bont Shark Attacks, on 80mm wheels.  After a couple of summers, two Zephyr Adventures trips, two trips to the Great EsSkate (see you all in February!?!), and some riding through the streets of Chicago the old boots are pretty much trashed.   As I was discussing getting a new pair with one of our club coaches, he suggested that I step up to 100mm wheels.  I was a little hesitant at first.  I think it was mainly because - regardless of the fact that I’ve yet to have a really bad crash on my inlines - 100mm wheels look a lot faster… and I could only imagine that the inevitable crash will only be that much harder!    Then again, I managed to skate through Switzerland and the Netherlands without killing myself… so skating the quiet streets of suburban Chicago shouldn’t be that bad, right?

Anyway, tonight I hit the pavement for a run.  Need to get about 10 miles in after my softball game.  This is the last long run I’m putting in before the trip to the West Coast next weekend, for the Napa-to-Sonoma half-marathon.  No 5K races this past weekend.  I was going to run the Race to the Taste 5K, coincides with the Taste of Chicago, but opted to sleep in after being woken up three times during the night (by various idiots lighting fireworks in the neighborhood and my neighbor leaving his alarm clock on - set to 3:30am - while he was not home).  I don’t think his roommates appreciated it much either, since I went next door and rang the doorbell about a thousand times in six minutes to let them know.  Oh well.  Price one pays for living in the city, I suppose…