Demons

"What do your demons make you do?"
"About sixteen, eighteen miles a day."

In the beginning, there was one thing: NEUROSIS

Miles, not enough. Pacing, sub-optimal. Terrain, too flat, too much concrete. What will I change tomorrow, what will I change next week, what will I change next season? Everything, absolutely everything matters. What you eat? When you sleep? How much stress? Which shoes? Orthotics? Frees? Vitamins? I'm a believer in "all in", you put a half-ass in, you get a half-ass out (Goldhammer, John. later works, circa. 2003). Some people think the neurosis is bad, but the reality is just that I like to think about it all, constantly, obsessively, like a crazy person.

Neurotic, never satisfied, always think I'm 1-2 minutes faster than I really am. The day that I cease to have this blind faith in my potential, will be the day that I cease to race, because no one else can believe for you. Demons. I don't have a plan for how it all ends. I'm not looking for times, or awards or accomplishments anymore. There are goals along the way, but I'm training for only one race. One race that I don't know when it will be, what distance, against whom or what the outcome will be... but it will be the race of my lifetime. When it comes, I will be ready.

Today though, today is 45:47 (Bailey Canyon to the Wilson Connector, 3-4 miles, 2000 ft elevation gain). Not a bad start to El Comeback Tour, Take 2, Week 2. Despite the illness and the injuries, I'm not too far off of my PR here a month ago, 45:09 courtesy of The Brain himself. Not even a twinge of knee pain on the slow shuffle back down--I can't remember the last time that happened.

The air was cold and crystalline like December in New England, and higher on up were patches of unmelted snowflakes. The woods had turned to winter for sure, leaves and branches frozen into a finely tuned tension that would have shattered to pieces with an errant poke. It reminded me of icicles hanging from the roof at home, a long long time ago. When the mountain cleared away on both sides at the very end, the city of LA emerged with unusual brightness and clarity-- little clusters of buildings like toy cities. Downtown where I work, Century city where I used to work... and smaller, farther clusters keeping the 101 company, winding up the coast and disappearing under distant cloud cover.

*PLOT SUMMARY* (for our new viewers)

This is Day One, in some frame of relativity. I am starting again, though not from scratch. I've been running since fall of 2003, and running for Caltech that first year was rough. I showed some early promise in XC 2004 and Track 20005 on my own as an unattached runner following that, but both of my seasons were cut short by injury just as I was making what felt like a breakthrough. Driven almost to insanity by my own perception of unrealized potential, I made a series of critical training errors that made both XC 2005 and Track 2006 into demoralizing disasters, that left me slower than the previous year and crushed and broken, both physically (ask KB about the toe :)) and mentally.

Armed with new research, new training ideas, a comprehensive new plan and a renewed passion for running, I started XC 2006 with a fresh new start. For a while it seemed that my new plan too, was failing, but I had a breakthrough in my last race at UC Riverside, and have been making steady progress. After handling a minor hip injury, I was back on the ball until I was felled yet again, this time by el virus unit, The Cold. Despite 84 zinc lozenges, it was to be a particularly long and severe illness, that finally left me with only 2 weeks to train for the South Pasadena Tiger Run 10K, which was to be the crowning achievement of my shortened fall season--the event about which I had dreamed every dream for every day that has passed since late August when I began my comeback. This log begins in the second of those two weeks, the week of my race.