99 Marthons and Ultras

Craig Stubing and I talked this past weekend about when my 100th lifetime marathon/ultra would be, and I was vague as usual. After that I was looking at my records in the Marathon Maniacs database and noticed I hadn't entered the Skyline to the Sea Clambake 50K, so I put it in there and added to my personal spreadsheet.

So both of these lists have 99 entries on them now. If you go by that number, the Chino Hills 50K on November 9 will be number 100.

But 5 of those 99 maybe shouldn't count.

1. Skyline to the Sea was a fun run, no entry fee, no official place or time. They even made us chant "This is not a race" at the start of the run.

2. I ran the Big Sur Marathon as part of a relay team. Both my brother Chris and I started at the starting line and continued through the whole course. It was a good run, but officially we ran the relay, not the marathon.

3. I was a DNF at the Pikes Peak Marathon in 2018. I ran the full distance, but not fast enough to be an official finisher.

4 and 5. In 2014 I ran the Majestic Marathon and the Fathers Day Marathon in Long Beach. There's no reason these two shouldn't count except for arbitrary Marathon Maniacs rules requiring 15 entrants and 10 finishers.

So I have 94 official Marathon Maniacs finishes.

You could easily say it's really 96.

If you want to be really generous and loose it's 99.
Maybe I'll have 100 be the Chino Hills 50K, or maybe I'll have it land on the Salmon Falls 50K.

Approaching 100

Please comment below and suggest events for my 100th race of marathon length or longer.
My official Marathon Maniacs count is currently 89, 76 marathons and 13 ultras.
Thank you.

I have a lot of events I should write something about, but I've been lacking inspiration.
These are the long races I've done since the last one I wrote about on this blog, Dances With Dirt, July 8, 2017:

2/3/2019     Surf City Marathon
1/12/2019    Avalon 50 Mile
12/1/2018    Death Valley Trail Marathon
10/27/2018   Lake Hodges 50K
10/7/2018    Long Beach Marathon
9/15/2018    Flagstaff Marathon
8/19/2018    Pikes Peak Marathon*
7/28/2018    Harding Hustle 50K
6/16/2018    Holcomb Valley Trail Run 33 mile
6/9/2018     Shadow of the Giants 50K
3/18/2018    LA Marathon
3/10/2018    Catalina Island Marathon
12/3/2017    California International Marathon
11/5/2017    Santa Clarita Marathon
10/7/2017    St. George Marathon
7/22/2017    Harding Hustle 50K

I had a DNF/unofficial finish at Pikes Peak, where I ran the distance but came in too late to count. That race is not counted in the 89 I mentioned above.

I have 5 more long races I am registered for this year. I expect to add more, and I expect to hit 100 sometime in 2020.

Dancing with Dirt at Devil's Lake

Somehow I got registered for the Dances With Dirt Devil's Lake 50K. Well, I guess I know how it happened. My youngest brother Chris, who had done the marathon at Devil's Lake twice, and who lives in Wisconsin, asked me if I'd like to come out and run it with him. We've met up to do races before, some of them described elsewhere in this blog.
Chris has done at least a dozen marathons, but no ultra marathons. He was considering the 50K, I think, and I had always said that a 50K is really in the same category as a marathon, like a ten mile race is in the same category as a half marathon.
But then, as I said in an earlier post in this blog, I ran the Relay Del Sol with a team of diabetic runners, and got inspired.
One of the things I got inspired to do was to quick sign up for the 50K at Devil's Lake and call Chris. "Hey, Chris, I registered for the 50K. You better sign up before it fills up!"

So Chris and I did the 50K last weekend. No big deal.

Even death?

 We were only concerned about finishing. We were both under-trained. Chris continually said he was doing less than I was, but that's what he always does. Then usually he runs my butt off on race day.
Thankfully, that didn't happen this time. Chris really was as out of shape as I was.
We had to beat the cutoff by reaching the 25 mile point before 1 PM, 7:30 after the 5:30 AM start. We did it with minutes to spare, then walked it in.

We went all over the country you see in the background.

Overall, a nice trek through beautiful country with good company. We ran a lot at first, but walked the steep hills from the beginning, then every hill, then after the cutoff, we just walked.

Dirt dancing legs.

My blood sugar behaved. It was a little high through the early miles, but came down to normal and never got low.

I am now inspired to harden myself up at the Harding Hustle next week.

Hello, Is this thing on?

First post on this blog in almost 5 years. I'm not sure who will notice this. The main reason I'm posting here is I'd like to write a little about an upcoming event, the St. George Marathon, and leave it here and link to it from Twitter and Facebook.

Type One Run has a few members going to the 2017 St. George Marathon, October 7, and is asking other interested runners with type 1 diabetes to register and run it with us.

If you buy a nice Type One Run running shirt, it will help us all make a good showing and represent people with diabetes. You can only get in on this order of shirts until 4/28/2017.

In the time since I last posted here, four and a half years, I ran 16 more marathons. Sadly, they were all terribly slow, mostly because I haven't trained properly.

Here are the details:

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6:37:19	15:10	2/7/2016	126	CA	Surf City Marathon
5:22:53	12:20	10/4/2015	154	MN	Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon
5:21:36	12:17	5/3/2015	64	CA	OC Marathon
6:29:49	12:35	2/28/2015	27	CA	Orange Curtain 50K
5:06:01	11:41	2/1/2015	85	CA	Surf City Marathon
7:46:08	17:47	11/8/2014	27	CA	Catalina Island Eco Marathon
5:26:18	12:27	10/12/2014	35	CA	Long Beach Marathon
5:49:38	13:21	9/7/2014	84	CA	Ventura Marathon
5:51:10	13:25	6/15/2014	42	CA	Fathers Day Marathon*
5:30:51	12:38	5/4/2014	44	CA	OC Marathon
9:01:21	20:39	3/23/2014	35	NM	Bataan Death March Marathon
5:27:15	12:30	2/16/2014	28	CA	Majestic Marathon*
5:37:11	12:52	1/19/2014	133	CA	Carlsbad Marathon
5:35:07	12:47	9/8/2013	224	CA	Ventura Marathon
5:55:57	13:35	1/27/2013	77	CA	Carlsbad Marathon
6:06:03	13:59	11/11/2012	294	CA	Malibu Marathon

That number between the date and the state in my spreadsheet is "days between", as in days between marathons. Since as you can see, the last marathon was February of 2016, and I'm not registered for another until July, the next "days between" number will be the highest ever. I've gone more than a year without running a marathon.

But just in time I've gotten inspired by this great group, Type One Run. I was incredibly fortunate to meet Craig Stubing, founder of Type One Run, at a JDRF Summit in Pasadena. We spoke briefly about running and the fact that Type One Run had a team in the Ragnar SoCal Relay.
Then a week later, I got an email saying that one of their runners had dropped out, and asking if I would like to join. Of course I would!

I've had this experience of being on an overnight relay with a team of diabetics four times now, and I would recommend it to anyone dealing with this disease.
My experience with Type One Run was relentlessly positive and inspiring. And it reminded me of a lot of things I've been missing in my life recently.

OK. A couple of things to explain in that list of marathons:
The Catalina Eco Marathon is just really, really tough, especially for a fat old, out of shape diabetic.

I did the Bataan Death March Marathon for my second time in 2014, but this time my youngest brother Chris did it with me, and we did it in the "Heavy" category, meaning we wore 35 pound backpacks. That is also a tough marathon, even without a pack, but not quite like Catalina Eco.

A Shrine to Me

OK, bear with me. I'm a little embarrased about this, but not so embarrassed that I'm not publishing it to the World Wide Web.
I'm moving, so that means packing stuff up, taking stock of what I need and what I don't need, what's clutter, and what's important.
One of the things that hit me during this process is that I have a buttload of medals, trophies, t-shirts, and other assorted race junk. I know there are charities that will take your old medals and give them to someone else who deserves and will appreciate them. Well, that's fine if that's what you want to do, but it doesn't feel right for me.
Maybe I'm too much of a packrat. Anyway, the medals and trophies mean something to me. If someone else has earned a medal, I'd rather buy them one than give them one of mine.
I've given away only one medal, and that was one that had a special meaning to me. I gave it to someone for whom I think it will have a special meaning.
But that's just what makes sense to me, not something I'm trying to convince anyone else of.
What this means is that I have a bunch of race junk. Which gets us to the embarrassing part. In one of our spare bedrooms, I had built up what kind of seemed like a shrine to me when I started packing it up.
Here are 5 medals from the Silicon Valley Marathon.

Next to that I had decorated a steer skull with 5 medals from the Tucson Marathon and a bunch of leather-strapped ceramic medals from the Big Sur Marathon and Marathon Relay.

When you walk around race expos, you see companies selling various methods for displaying your medals. These are often something a little like a small set of coathooks, six to twelve hooks or pegs to hang your medals on. That works fine if you only run a few races.
I would need about a dozen of those.
I got this great idea to use a four-by-six-foot sheet of pegboard and a box of pegs like you might use in a workshop.

I'm not going to get into the other stuff here, trophies, cups, plaques, etc. The medals filled a small box, a about the size of a four-slice toaster, that I put into a large plastic tote, which I then filled with the other stuff, using race shirts to protect the fragile stuff.
Yeah, I'm going to have to think about what it says about me before I open that tote and rebuild the shrine.

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Bad-Assedness

I wrote this a few days ago in the "Diabetics Who Run Marathons" group on TuDiabetes. It occurs to me that it might be OK for a blog post, and I'm not writing much else. So here it is.

So... I've been thinking about the headline "Stunts to Impress" in Higdon's advice on multiple marathons, and the much appreciated comments on me being "BADASS" and "amazing."
Of course I'm often looking for opportunities in the conversation here to brag about things I've done. I like to be called bad-ass. And I don't see anything wrong with that. Some of the greatest achievements of mankind have been done so someone could say the equivalent of "Look, Ma! No hands!"
A good part of people doing this is that it expands the realm of possibilities for others.
In that spirit I feel like I should point out that I know a type 1 diabetic who's run about twice as many marathons as I have, and run them faster.
I've met two diabetics who have gotten the silver buckle at the Western States 100 mile endurance run, and I'm aware of at least one other whom I haven't met. You get the silver buckle for finishing in less than 24 hours. There are probably others I'm not aware of.
There is a type 1 diabetic world class marathon and ultra marathon runner.
I could go on. I guess the point is that while I like being called "BADASS" and that's at least part of why I do some of the things I do, I'm aware that there are others more bad-ass than I am.
And 14 years ago I was a diabetic runner afraid to try a marathon. I was inspired and comforted by reading about or meeting other diabetic athletes, and not just the fantastic athletic ones, but the ordinary folks like me.
Wherever you're at with diabetes and exercise, there are people ahead of you and behind you on the bad-ass scale. Well, since everyone is different, and every life situation is different, there really isn't a scale we can all be measured against.
We are all inspiring each other.
Reading back over this, I kind of rambled. I hope I had something to say.
"Stunts to Impress" aren't necessarily a bad thing.

In other news, along with a contingent of runners from Glucomotive, I ran the Denver Rock 'N' Roll Marathon last Sunday.

Things I should have posted about

As a race, the Carlsbad Marathon on January 23rd went as well as I could expect. That means awful. But it was still a great experience. It was a huge Glucomotive event, and my brother Jon was also there to enjoy the festivities and support the race.
I had close to zero training, so I figured I had to be conservative. I thought 4:30 would be a remotely possible time goal, so I aimed for 10 minute miles.
I saw Gary Schmidt and Emily Iannello at the start and ran with them for a bit. I also met Ed Ettinghausen, who is going for the world record for marathons in one year.
He isn't keeping his stats up to date, but you can get an idea of what Ed's doing by looking at his stats on the Marathon Maniacs site.
Anyway, I ran OK to about 17 miles. It was clear well before that that I wasn't going to last, but at a big steep hill along the beach, at the last turnaround, I really came apart.
I slowed way down for about a mile. Realizing I was just trudging along, I started walking. Several times I tried to start running again, and it just seemed too hard. Then at about 20 miles, right before the marathon course hooked back up with the half course, I started running again and felt fine. At least fine enough to just jog through it.
I ran for a couple of miles, then came across some Glucomotive folks doing the half, Jim Collins and Ashley Ernst, who was one of the "Heroes of the Marathon", and Ashley's friend. I have to apologize for not remembering her name.
Jim was having cramp problems, so they were all helping each other along, walking and jogging as possible.
With a little over 3 miles to go, we got to the Glucomotive group of volunteers, where my brother Jon was with his girlfriend, Gina.
I asked them if they wanted to walk to the finish with me, and they did.
So I walked it off.
I had about a 20 mile run, and a lot of walking on the day. It was not a good race, but as I said, it was a great day.

In general, my new Animas Ping insulin pump is working great. I swim with it frequently. I just stick it in the side of my suit with the clip sticking out and the pump against my skin.
There are some little annoyances, but the same could be said for Medtronic pump I was using before. I wish I could take the good points from each and put them together. It all seems like common sense to me, the things I don't like, but I'm sure there are some patents that are keeping it from being as good as it could be.
For example, the Animas pump will calculate the bolus for me, then just display it. It's then up to me to enter how much I want to bolus. There's no way to just say, "Give me what you just calculated that I need, you stupid machine."
Then entering an amount to bolus is ridiculous. You can click up or down 0.05 units per button press, or you can hold down the button and it will start to roll by increasing amounts. You know how this goes. It's a similar to the Medtronic pumps. It's actually a pretty common interface, for setting digital clocks, thermostats, etc.
With Medtronic, it's easier to get used to. Animas is fricking crazy. It seems to go 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.50, 1,5, 3.5, 5, 8, ... not moving at all, then moving way way too fast. And the kicker is it doesn't stop when you take your finger off the button, so if you take your finger off at 5, it will probably stop at 6.5. Entering carbs is about the same.
So you either click up one step at a time or go way over then back down too far, then over, then under, getting closer and closer to what you want to enter. It's terrible. And I can't believe they could have failed to see this in usability testing.
Maybe I'll get used to it, but if I do, it will take a while, and I will be getting used to something that's more difficult than it has to be.
Changing the reservoir is harder on the Animas, but inserting an infusion site is easier. The Animas pump times out frequently, rapidly, while changing the reservoir. And when it times out, it goes back to the Home screen, so you have to click back into the Prime/Rewind screen. Crazy and annoying.
The woman who trained me on the Animas said that I'll eventually be able to change the reservoir and an infusion site without it timing out. After changing everything out several times, I doubt it. It would take the kind of skill required of Marines who can disassemble and reassemble an M16 blindfolded in 60 seconds.
The only way I've been able to get close, and still not avoid a time out, is to put in the new site and fill up a new reservoir, having everything ready before rewinding. It's not user friendly. It's unfriendly.
Still, I'm getting comfortable with the new pump, and as I said, it's great for swimming.

The Dexcom CGM is just incredible. I know my A1c is going to be down at my next checkup. I can't help it. Being able to see what is going on with my blood sugar all the time means I am fixing problems I wasn't even aware of before.


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Lost Weekend

OK, So I did that. The Pemberton Trail 50K on Saturday and the Lost Dutchman Marathon on Sunday.
And I wasn't alone. At least four of my fellow Marathon Maniacs did both events, and my friend, Melissa, who was not even registered for Lost Dutchman until the afternoon after running Pemberton, ran the whole race with me Sunday.
Melissa has now proudly joined the ranks of the Marathon Maniacs, and she does it at the exalted Iridium level, a level it took me two and a half years to achieve. Awesome.

Pemberton Trail 50K

Believe it or not, the hardest of the two days for me was Saturday. I started out thinking that two weeks off from marathons was enough recovery time for me to run well for the 50K. After all, it isn't a tough course for a trail run, and the trail should have been easier on these old joints.
As it turns out, I'm not as tough as I thought I was. I wasn't fully recovered from three marathons in the previous four weeks. I felt pretty tired after the first few miles.
I hit the wall hard after 17 or 18 miles.
Pemberton is a two lap course, and there's a rough, rocky section about two miles out from the start. The first time through was a breeze, actually kind of fun. The second time through I was just trying to keep my feet under me and not fall down.
There were less than 150 of us running this race, so I spent a lot of time running alone through the desert. This Haiku came to me as I covered the desolate miles on my aching legs:

when the race day comes
it doesn't help to regret
the workouts you missed

Something to remember every day during training. Sitting here now typing this up, I'm thinking along these lines:

easy to register
for unknown levels of pain
far in the future

With about 10 miles to go, I started walking every significant uphill. I was thinking ahead to Lost Dutchman, and I was unsure about being able to run it at all if I didn't try to conserve energy.


Lost Dutchman Marathon

Lost Dutchman is a fun race with lots of little things to make it interesting. That's why Runners World named it one of the Best Little Marathons, or something like that.
We got bussed out into the desert, under the weird rock formations at the base of the Superstition Mountains, where we warmed ourselves sitting around presto logs, waiting for the start.
The main difference between this start and Pemberton was that I had dreams of running well on Saturday. Sunday morning, those illusions were gone. I knew I just had to keep making forward progress, so that was my only goal.
And that turned out to be remarkably easy, if painful.
I wore my Marathon Maniacs shirt, which I hardly ever do, simply because I have so many other commitments and affiliations. But it's always good to get cheers from fellow Maniacs and comments from other marathoners when I do wear the yellow singlet. It was a good choice for a race that was going to take a long time and require a lot of encouragement.
Of course, as is usually the case, we saw a lot of the same people over and over again all day, and we made some new friends. Melissa was happy to tell anyone who would listen that we had run 50K the day before, and many people became fans.

There were no blood sugar issues either day. I checked three times during the 50K, and I was always above 120 and below 170. I went totally by feel through the marathon (by feel and experience) and was at 91 after the finish.