Sweet Victory

It's been a crazy busy week, but I had to take the time to share this:

It's nearly 11pm and I'm still sitting in the Ft. Lauderdale airport... at this rate, I'll get home around 4am. Ugh. But it was a good week... The World Media Run was very successful, considering it was the first race organized by our company, the show management company and the Doral Resort. But it was a winner, with 30 or so participants at the flagship race in Miami - all of whom had a blast. Virtual runner results will be coming in throughout the weekend. Running-wise, I only ran a 20:30, good for 2nd place in Miami. Us cool PA boys definitely weren't ready for the heat. Plus, I did 5.5 miles the day before the run. I also did 5 miles today. All in all, a short-ish week of running, but all things considered, I'll take it. That is, I'll take it somewhere if the plane ever takes off. :)

Today was the Ugly Mudder in Reading, PA - billed as 7.25 miles on the ugliest trails on the mountain beside Reading.. trails that other races don't include because they're too damned rocky, bumpy, briar-filled, etc.... Last year when I did this race, there were 3 inches of hard-pack ice the entire way. I waddled through in 1:19, good for top 28%. Knowing the conditions would be different today, I didn't think much of time, only wanting to finish higher in my age group. Around the 5.2 mile mark, I tell a young kid I've been trading places with that we had about 2 miles to go. Except, just after that I realized where we were -- close to the finish. A volunteer yells, "You've got a quarter mile to go," and I think I really need a refund on my Garmin. I kicked it hard to the end (wouldn't you if you thought you have 2 miles left and in reality you had basically.. nothing?), and passed two people going up the infamous Mt. Mud. In the end, it turns out the ...

In the comments in the previous post, Maggie mentioned something I don't think I officially mentioned: I'm racing this weekend. My shin recovery has gone unbelievably well and I've had no pain in more than a week. I've also been a good boy, alternating between running and cycling workouts. I had a nice long nine miler last weekend, and a tempo effort on the trails earlier this week. This weekend, I return to the Ugly Mudder, one of the largest trail races East of the Mississippi. Last year, it was my first trail race, and it was amazing. 3 inches of ice for more than 7 miles. Literally insane. The good news is that there won't be 3 inches of ice this weekend, so a course PR is pretty much assured. Next Friday is the World Media Run . At last check, we had nearly fifty runners ready to race in Miami (Yay!) and only a handful of virtual runners registered (Boo!). C'mon people, what are you waiting for? The shirts shipped yesterday and my sales rep at the shirt com...

I'm a member of a beer club at work. Every month, we trade beer. It's more elaborate than that, but you get the idea. Anyhow, it's always fun to try new beers and most of them are good. Some of them are strange. Only once in a blue moon are they awesome. Lagunita Brown Shugga' is awesome . Holy moly, if all beer were like that, I'd be a drunk. Get yourself some.

At least, that's the current fear according to this story : The 10,000-patient study, dubbed ACCORD, was supposed to answer a big question: Could pushing blood sugar to near-normal levels, below today's recommended target, help protect these high-risk patients' hearts? Instead, the National Institutes of Health took the rare step of halting part of the study 18 months early — citing 257 deaths among aggressively treated patients compared to 203 among diabetics given more standard care. First up, what does "aggressive treatment" look like? Were these diabetics beaten when caught staring at Ding-Dongs? But I digress... The goal of the study was to produce an A1C reading of below 6, which translates to a blood sugar reading of 135 ("normal" is 80-120). Most docs encourage diabetics to get below 7 (170) and the AACE recommends being below 6.5. (I had this one annoying Doc who told me that I was 6.4, however lower is always better. What a dork. How's th...

So I've been playing with Twitter for a few weeks now. Only the thing is, I don't like playing with web stuff. I like using it. So I was looking for a way to use Twitter for something useful and I may have found it: SugarStats . SugarStats is an online way to keep track of your blood sugars, carbs and what-not. Truth be told, I don't log any of my stuff anywhere. I use a OneTouch UltraSmart, which has a big memory and all kinds of graphs. I go to my Doc, toss her the meter and let her click away. I tend to keep a fairly close watch on things, so it's rare that I miss trends in my control. But SugarStats lets you upload data via Twitter, and that's kind of cool. So I'm thinking that if I take something kind of useful (Twitter) and let it upload data to something that's sort of useful (SugarStats), I'll find the results to be useful. Well, sort of. Here's my SugarStats page , which I plan to update only via Twitter.

This is my son. He seems to think that if I post a cute picture of him, you'll donate to his Jump Rope for Heart page . Clever, eh? Incidentally, if this works, don't blame me if I set up a Garmin 405 for Marcus page.

So I was Googling myself today (oh, you know you've done it) and discovered that Google has now indexed the first book I contributed to many many years ago. Read all about my experiences in the wild world of radio here .

Yesterday, I turned 37 - a nothing birthday. No new age group, no new privileges. Nada. The good news is that it combines my two favorite numbers. My best presents? A copy of Advanced Marathoning and a ten pack of Cliff Recovery Cocoa. That stuff rocks! Over lunch, I stopped by the Home Depot for some salt for the water softener. As is often the case at Home Depot, the line wasn't moving. I turned around to complain to the guy behind me and instantly recognized the old fella in his Tigers cap. "Hey, you're Don Wert !" I said. "Yes I am," he said. And I enjoyed a nice conversation with the former all-star third baseman of the Detroit Tigers. Hey, in Lancaster, PA, that's what passes for celebrity, and when the guy's as pleasant as Don, I'm cool with that. On my birthday, I also bought two URL's. Not sure what I'll do with them, but for now, both www.Type1Runner.com and www.PumpRunner.com will bring you here. These were actually consolati...

Two weeks ago, I ran a 5 mile loop around my house... it was like my 6th run in 7th days. My legs were tired, my shin was sore and I limped through it in 8:13 miles. I felt like garbage. Today, I ran the same loop over lunch. This was my third run in the past six days (though I've also been on the bike). I did it in 8:05 miles without breaking a sweat. I felt like Superman. While I love the idea of running more - more miles, more days, etc., the reality is that my body sure does like cross training more. Probably the only thing a little scary was that I almost forgot to do my special shin stretches... it's easy to forget when you're feeling so good. For this week, same deal: run on Wed., Fri and Sun. Bike on Tues and Thurs.

Today was a 4.5 miler at a very easy 8:15 pace. Zero shin pain. In retrospect, I was an idiot in January. Too many days running. Too fast. Too soon to dive into a speed and tempo workout after too little base training. It was a train wreck waiting to happen. But all is not lost - not by a long shot. This January had many more miles than last January and I'm predicting a better February this year than last as well. Lots of easy aerobic work over the next eight weeks should set me up for a healthy summer of racing, which I'm thrilled about. Incidentally, on today's run I listened to Phedippidations - episode Fdip126, which is all about base training. It's a little bit scary how little I understood about base training and running slow until today. I mean, I read a lot of running crap, but there was a ton of good explanation in this podcast that hadn't sunk in until today. Needless to say, I'm more than cool going slow for a while. If you're in base training mo...