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By BrianFlash, on November 30th, 2009
Kathy and I hosted the Flaspohler throng for Thanksgiving Day. Traditionally, my Dad’s side of the family gets together on this holiday. In years past, either my Aunt Barbara or Aunt Charlotte would host the gathering. We decided that we’d try and give them a break. We planned the menu and cooked nearly all the food. Two exceptions were the sweet potatoes that my mom brought and the pies provided by my Aunt Charlotte (who is permanently contracted to bring pies to all family gatherings). She brought a pecan pie (my favorite), an apple pie, and the traditional pumpkin pie. All three were very tasty (and I personally verified this by eating some of each). Hopefully her pumpkin pie creation doesn’t involve anything like this:
Kathy put me in charge of the turkey, the ham, and the dinner rolls. She took command of the rest of the menu. With the two of us swarming the kitchen (and Kathy making a few dishes a day ahead of time), we cooked enough food for around 30 people. But we only had 19 attendees to our soirée. So there was extra food available. But that’s the beauty of Thanksgiving – no one is allowed to leave until they’ve eaten enough food to stretch their stomach to comic proportions.
I didn’t take many pictures. I didn’t want to shoot anyone while they were eating and after everyone scattered to the chairs, it was tough to get some decent shots. In point of fact, the pictures I took were terrible. Here’s about the best one:
Clockwise from lower left, Cousin Greg, Aunt Charlotte, Cousin Kim, Uncle Larry, a suit of chainmale, the boyfriend Harold, and an unidentified pair of legs. Kim is perusing my South African guidebook. Kim – come on along – its going to be a great trip!
A Flaspohler family tradition is to talk about everyone who doesn’t show up to the meal. We do this to encourage full attendance. But there are always holdouts who can’t make it for whatever reason. And we spend the majority of the time talking about them. Heck, we even talk about Flaspohlers that we don’t know. Here is the exact transcript of a conversation between my mom and one of my aunts:
“Ashley Flaspohler – she’s a biker chick.” Disparagingly uttered, to say the least.
“How did you meet her?”
“Daniel is friends with her on Facebook.”
“Who is she?”
“I have no idea.”
But the family had a great time overall. We ate way too many calories and had our typical great conversations. Jason and Rocio were two of our non-attendees – they skipped out and decided to vacation in France instead. So we talked about them of course, but I was left all alone to field discussions associated with our plans to run Comrades in South Africa. The conversations took two different tacts:
“How many miles is the run?”
“56”
“All in one day?! You guys are completely nuts.”
or
“How long is this going to take?”
“There’s a 12 hour cutoff – If you finish slower then 12 hours, you get nothing.”
“56 miles in 12 hours. That’s less then five miles an hour. You should be able to do that easy!”
On Friday I did an easy 70 minutes (7.8 miles) to help burn up my Thanksgiving meal. Saturday morning, I went out for my weekly five mile tempo run. Instead of Forest Park, I headed off to the Chesterfield Monarch Levee. The purpose of this run is two-fold: 1) To get a fast run in and improve my cruising speed and 2) To track my fitness level. As long as my per mile pace is the same or faster and my heart rate is the same or slower, then I’ll consider this a success. This week my per mile pace was 7:30 and my average heart rate was 170. Last week, my numbers were 7:35 and 175, so it looks like a pretty substantial improvement. But at least some of that is misleading because I ran on the Forest Park rollers last week, while this week was flat and fast. I’ll probably most often try to run this effort on the flat levee course so that I have a more predictable measuring tool. I also think doing speedwork on the flat might be slightly less damaging then on the hills. Besides, the hill repeats up Mt. Flash are pretty fast so no need to do both of my weekly hard workouts on the slopes.
On Sunday, my cousin Steve and I went to the St. Louis Rams game. Steve is a super fan, having had his season tickets to the Rams ever since they moved to St. Louis. He has only missed two games during the fourteen seasons they’ve been here. That’s a 98.2% attendance rate! Needless to say, Steve also never misses a family get together. He’s the Cal Ripken of the clan. Given the Rams complete ineptitude the last few years, Steve sometimes has a hard time finding someone to take his second ticket. But I was available because what better way to spend a Sunday then in a dome watching two teams that have won a total of four football games this season? Our Rams came away with the loss again, at the hands of the Seahawks. Even when the game was superficially close (14-10 at halftime), you have the feeling that they have no chance of winning. But it is always cool to attend a professional game, regardless of how much of a joke the teams are.
Overall, a great Thanksgiving weekend!
By BrianFlash, on November 24th, 2009
Congrats to a St. Louisan for setting a new world record! Zac Fruedenberg typically wins the local races he enters and now he’s got a world record! His record is for the fastest marathon while pushing a baby stroller. He pushed his son thru the Tulsa Route 66 marathon in 2:32. That’s pretty sweet. As a bonus, another St. Louisan, John Aerni-Flessner, finished third. He was not pushing a stroller but he did run Comrades in 2009 and talked about the experience earlier this year. Jason and I went down to hear the speech.
My weekly assault on Mt. Flash (thanks Beth) was tonight. The weather was cool but at least it wasn’t raining. I did have a little head wind on the climbs, just to make it interesting. My six two minute long ascents covered .27, .27, .27, .27, .26, and .27 miles. Very nice consistency if not quite up to my .29 goal. Isn’t it funny how during this 68:30 run I only had 12 minutes of pain yet that small amount of intensity makes me dread this workout worst of all my runs. Eleven climbs done – 174 more to go!
By BrianFlash, on November 22nd, 2009
Saturday was my first of what is going to be my weekly tempo run. Each week from now until ‘The Race’ I’m supposed to do a five mile time trial so I can track my fitness improvement. So Kathy and I went down to Forest Park for the run. She was doing a 7 mile jaunt so thought the park would be a good place for the run.
The conditions were nearly perfect. I warmed up for a mile and then broke into my tempo. I always run the route clockwise now. I think it is psychologically easier to run around the park perimeter in that direction. Kathy takes the opposite direction. Where the bike path and the running path diverge on the east side of the park, I head down the running path. Of course all the other runners are taking the bike path. Shortly I find out why. The last few days of wet weather have left a pond in my way. But I’m already tempoing, so damn the torpedoes! A heavy muddy sloshing commences and my shoes take a serious soaking. But I clear the pond and am good to go – if a bit squishy. My five miles pass in 37:55, a 7:35 pace. So that’s where I’m at now.
What was pretty cool was that my cool down mile was done in 9:01. It is amazing to me how your body gets used to running the fast pace and then when you slow up, you can tolerate a faster pace then you would expect. My heart rate was actually declining rapidly at that pace, so that got me jazzed up.
On Saturday evening, the trivia team took on 41 other tables in an event put on to support one of my coworkers with melanoma. She is fighting the cancer and this benefit was to help defray some of the costs associated with the experimental treatments she is getting ready to undergo. Make sure you use that sunblock runners! Our team was minus Jason and Rocio – they decided they would rather visit Paris then stay in St. Louis for this contest. But I added in a coworker and his girlfriend and we didn’t miss a beat. After a night of very difficult questions, we found ourselves in third place, a podium finish! Here’s the team in all our glory:
Starting at left and going clockwise: Suresh, Anna, Kathy, Barbara, Dan, Brian, Kelly, Mayhem. This was taken after round 5 when we found ourselves several points out of the money. The Team’s morale was at a low – Mayhem’s expression shows this! But we turned in semi-consistent rounds from this point and clawed our way back into third. As always, we seemed to blow a few questions that we shouldn’t have missed. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
On Sunday I did an easy 60 minutes around the Chesterfield Parkway. I was able to make this a run to get something, stopping by the Post Office with a credit card. So stamps are now mine. My creditors should be happy. Guido – call off Stan the Club and Mikey. The checks will be in the mail tomorrow. I promise!
By BrianFlash, on November 17th, 2009
Tonight I did my first hill repeat workout. I’m supposed to be working on my weaknesses and running uphill is definitely one of those. Even the slightest grade slows my legs and speeds my heart. And my current training on the St. Louis rollers hasn’t been making my ascending any stronger. So, I’m starting my weekly two minute repeats at 5K pace, starting at five repeats and building to ten. Lucky for me, I have a hill near my house and I think it will work pretty well for this sort of torture. It has four major features that caused me to select it:
1) It is near my house
2) The grade is consistent and steepish without being insane
3) It is long enough that I can’t run the full length in 2 minutes, regardless of how blazing fast I get
4) I don’t have to share traffic with cars or bikes
The weather this evening was fabulous. Mid 40s and cold annoying drizzly steady rain. Typically I’d ditch the effort and stay inside but I’m still in the ‘highly motivated by Comrades’ portion of my training. So I sucked it up and got ready to get cold and wet. After 20 minutes of easy running, I headed up the hill for the first time (symbolic first ascent – I’ve previously run this hill many times on normal training runs). Since I’m running fixed times, I’m measuring my progress in distance per repeat (Garmin, I bow again to your data collection wizardry). My eventual goal is to hit .29 miles for each interval. For my five repeats tonight, I ran .28, .28, .27, .26, and .28. I refuse to rule that a failure – I didn’t expect to be able to knock out .29 miles regularly yet.
Surprisingly, I was not completely miserable during the workout. The rain really wasn’t that bad, I warmed up pretty quickly, and only really suffered on the runs up the hill. My hands got a little cold on the easy portion of the run back home and I was half blind most of the time due to rain collecting on my classes, but really not that bad. Next week – 6 repeats!
Five climbs finished – only 180 more to go. All the great Comrades hills are named: Inchanga, Botha’s Hill, Field’s Hill, Cowie’s Hill, Polly Shortts. The names are legendary. There is no way I can climb this hill 180 more times (not including regular runs) without naming it. So I’ll describe it a bit and toss out some possible names.
‘The Hill’
Length – .45 miles (measured precisely with Garmin sorcery)
Average grade – 3.5% (ditto)
Scenery – A subdivision under construction on the left, a subdivision fully constructed on the right, and a four lane road right up the middle. Very picturesque :-! But it won’t matter because the bulk of these repeats happen in the dark.
Running surface – Concrete sidewalk (freshly poured so it hasn’t had time to settle and create trip hazards)
Topography – A lazy S shaped curve from the bottom of the hill to the summit
Possible names so far:
Baxter Bulge (for the road that climbs it)
Wild Horse Creek Knoll (for the nearest stream)
Flash’s Mountain (egotistical – but I’m gonna own this sucker after climbing it this much)
Chesterfield Tor (for our fine city)
Mississippian Mound (after the local native Americans)
Comrades Rock (because it was used to train for Comrades)
This Effing Hill (how I typically refer to it when running on it)
And finally, maybe I don’t look as crazy with my headlamp as I thought I did. When running past a house in my subdivision, a little girl was riding her bike in the garage (because little girls melt if they get wet). When she saw me trot by, she squealed, “That’s awesome!” Obviously referring to my headlamp.
By BrianFlash, on November 16th, 2009
The official Comrades website has confirmed that both Jason and I have been accepted into Comrades! It took them 15 days to get us in the database, but we’re finally confirmed in. I’ve been awarded number 29218 and Jason has been given 29219. My Comrades’ number hero is Richard Swart, the only previous runner to have number 29218. He finished Comrades three times: in 1992, 1993, and 1995. In the latter two years, he broke 9 hours, which is my goal for the race. Thankfully they gave me the even number – even numbers are lucky and I suspect this will vault me into the 8:59:59 club.
29 other entrants have chosen ‘The United States’ as their running club. I thought that meant that 29 other Americans would be joining us, but apparently you didn’t have to chose a running club. There are other Americans signed up. A quick search showed that Team Flash supporter Bart Yasso and his wife Laura are also signed up. Bart – just let me know you and your wife’s shirt sizes – I’ll get you two Team Flash shirts for the race.
So I’m declaring this blog the center of the American Comrade experience. Jason and I live in the neighborhood of the population center of the United States so we’re officially the most representative (except that our coolness factor is so much higher) Americans running the race in 2010.
By BrianFlash, on November 15th, 2009
In my continuing series of runs that actually go somewhere, I decided to head to the United States Post Office. “But Brian, its Sunday. The Post Office is closed!” En contraire my fine reader. Our post office has 24 hour self service and a mechanical stamp machine which was the target of my visit. Yes, I still use stamps and real letters – very primitive. Well, I arrive at the Post with my cash and take a look at the machine. ‘Credit/Debit Cards only.’ Very nice Post Office. Here I am with cash in hand and all you want is a credit card. And that would have been easier to carry anyway (or at least less likely to be damage by the sweat rolling off my body) in the 54 degree weather. So, running journey unsuccessful as far as securing stamps but completely successful at training myself to withstand the rolling hills of South Africa. 6.59 miles in 60 minutes – average heart rate 153.
And I did this run fueled on a night before meal of brats, nachos, chips, beer, and soda. Kathy received two tickets to watch the St. Louis Blues from a luxury suite. The suite had a full spread of food which I partook of fully. In fact, I unmercifully stuffed myself because the food was surprisingly good. The Blues also provided the ‘finest’ selection of beers, Bud Select and Bud Light. I drank a Select and it tasted so much like water I switched to Bud Light for more flavor. That sentence is inconceivable! So after downing the Light, I drank a Pepsi and called it a night. Free cold beer and all I drank were two – I’m definitely getting old. If only they had offered a Schlafly product. And the Blues lost, scoring only one goal.
Team Flash race update – we’re ditching plans to run in the Chesterfield Turkey Trot 5K. With the plan to host the Flaspohler clan (projecting two dozen or so guests) we’ve decided it is more important to get the food ready then to run this race. It also relieves me of the requirement to run any more intervals this year. Which is a huge positive in any case. But in their place I start hill repeats. That should be fun.
By BrianFlash, on November 10th, 2009
Since daylight savings time is no more, I’m running in the dark during the week. Jason suggested that I try not to get hit by a car or a lancer. One way to make this less likely is to wear a head lamp. So I visited my local running store – Fleet Feet – and found a fine little LED head lamp, the Tikka Plus, made by Petzl. With batteries, this baby weighs only four ounces and has a comfortable elastic head strap. It has four modes: dull glow, pen light, penetrating blaze, and epileptic strobe.
Tonight I did my first run with this baby, a three mile tempo run. After a warm up mile, I took off along the levee trail. I was going along quite nicely, with the first mile at 7:11. At the 1.5 mile point I turned around and quickly discovered why I was moving so well. There was a gale force tail wind. Immediately that became a head wind! My pace for mile 2 was 7:20. And for mile 3, my pace fell off to 7:33. The head wind was relentless. But I got it done and didn’t get hit by a car.
However, someone running around in the dark with a headlamp is not the most appealing character in the world. I passed a few of my neighbors out on their nightly walks and got some pretty strange looks. It reminded me of an old ‘Far Side’ cartoon. For you youngsters, this was a single panel cartoon that appeared in a ‘newspaper’. A newspaper was a document that had the daily news printed on it and was delivered to your house by the ‘paperboy.’ But enough of the explanations!
This would be a nice image added to that cartoon:
By BrianFlash, on November 8th, 2009
In order to try and get ready for this 5K on Thanksgiving morning, I scheduled myself for speedwork each of the next three Saturdays. If I’m planning to continue lowering the PR by 70 seconds on each 5K I run, I need to get myself sped up again. So my plan is 6 x 800 each weekend, dropping the track workouts after the Turkey Trot is done.
My last interval session was two months ago, so I figured this would be a little bit tough. My first 800 was in 3:05. Pretty nice but the pain was already rearing up. The next three were 3:12, 3:17, and 3:23 respectively. Since my times were degrading so rapidly and I’m trying to teach my body to hold a turn of speed, I figured two more that were bound to get slower were not going to help me out. So I shortened the last two to 400 meters. I cranked them out at 1:31 and 1:30. This workout was not fun.
On Sunday, the mercury rose to the 77 degree line on the thermometer. All the heat acclimation that I did this summer was obviously lost. I ran 6.48 miles in an hour and suffered. I shouldn’t even type this, but I wish it would cool off a bit…
By BrianFlash, on November 4th, 2009
This whole Comrades Marathon thing sounded good in theory. It was great talking about running in it ‘someday.’ But now that someday is May 30, 2010, and this is no longer a thought experiment. I actually have to start training and maybe this might not be so much fun after all. After I downloaded the sub 9 hour training plan from the Comrades’ website and starting looking it over, I discovered several things that could be a bit annoying:
1) This training plan suggests running FIVE days a week. My body is finely tuned to run four days a week. That’s a 25% increase in the number of days I have to run. Unfortunately, it also means that my number of rest days decreases by 33%!
2) The notes before the schedule specify that ‘The down run is very painful. Gym will help to overcome this pain.’ So now I have to spend some time working out. Hopefully Tony Horton’s yoga counts because I did that for the first time in a while on Sunday. It sucked.
3) By March, I’m supposed to do 2 hours easy on Saturday and 4 hours easy on Sunday. Every Saturday and Sunday. And another estimated 4 hours during the three weekday runs. That’s ten hours a week or around 65 miles. I’ve NEVER run 65 miles a week. How fun is that going to be?
4) In April there is a scheduled 37.2 mile run. Enough said.
5) I have to get shots so I don’t catch some major disease in South Africa.
6) Hill repeats one day a week for December thru May. And these aren’t little 20 second repeaters either – 2 minute repeats x 10. At a 5K pace! The horror!
7) Finally a completely nutty 56 mile run in South Africa at the end of May. Who thought that was a good idea?
Last night – three tempo miles at 7:21 pace. Tonight, 3.28 miles in 30 minutes. Both in the dark. I can’t wait for those 65 mile weeks in March when I can run when it is light again!
By JasonFlash, on November 2nd, 2009
The 2010 Comrades Marathon sold out in 27 hours. I am one of the lucky 5,000 novice runners who scored a coveted place. I feel like I am holding a Golden ticket for the chocolate factory, but I have to run 1,500 training miles here and fly to South Africa for 56 more to collect my prize. What kind of prize is that – 200 days of training for a 56 mile death march? Should be a hell of an adventure one way or the other, I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
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