Tag: Alex Hutchinson

2020 week forty two + one

Book Read
28. Win at All Costs — Matt Hart

Kilometres Ran
since week thirty one — 69.8

2020 to date: 2,002 KM

Kilometres Cycled
since week thirty one — 325.8*

2020 to date: 2,163 KM**

Matt Hart is a freelance journalist whose writing about endurance sports, sports science, and performance-enhancing drugs has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Outside and elsewhere. I first heard about this book exploring the shady side of Nike, Alberto Salazar and the Nike Oregon Project back in the spring, looked for a copy and saw that it wasn’t being published until the fall, and then forgot about it. Then in mid September Alex Hutchinson posted on Outside his Fall Book List and included it. I re-exhausted my usual review copy channels and forgot about it again. But this isn’t about my memory issues (or is it…). Staring down Thanksgiving long weekend on an island away from my Appalachian adventures on XBoxOne I looked for a book to get me through four days of tryptophania, and remembered I hate Nike. I read this in about a day. I could not put it down. I’ve made no secret of my dislike for Nike for quite some time so this did feel a bit like literary disaster tourism, but I felt special anguish for how Nike treated Adam and Kara Goucher. Especially tough for me is what to do with the NOP jacket and hoodie I own – burn them? But they’re so damn nice. I mean, put a stylish skull on just about anything and you’ll probably have my attention. (Except you, UA. You haven’t got a chance.) NOP is the main target of Hart’s book, but the whole of Nike culture is in his crosshairs including, albeit making just barely a cameo appearance, the shoes that changed (ruined) everything. You should definitely read it.

Back at the beginning of July I signed up for the 5 Peaks run / bike Great Canadian Crossing – 365 days to run and bike 4,800 KM “across Canada.” It seemed like a fun idea and I figured that barring some *disaster* averaging a little over 13 KM per day for a year would be pretty easy. After all, on July 1, I was on pace to run over 3,300 KM in 2020, and this was a run + bike challenge. Piece of cake!

Bike ride to nowhere.

On August 3 I was hit by a dumb fuck in a truck (DFIAT) while cycling on the Sea to Sky Highway. I remember lying on the asphalt in agony and asking someone at the scene to stop my watch, thereby adding another 70 KM to my Great Canadian Crossing challenge, which put me at 960 KM of running and cycling after 34 days; 513 KM ahead of pace. For the next couple months I’d watch my lead slowly evaporate 13 KM per day. At the beginning of September my physio- and concussion therapists gave me permission to get back on my bike, on my CycleOps trainer. The rules were I had to be able to get on and off without putting my still ragged body in danger, no weight bearing with my right arm, beginning with 5 minutes and adding one minute per day as long as concussion and physiology allowed. I immediately discovered that bike’s speed sensor did not survive the crash, which meant that my indoor bike rides to nowhere were indeed to nowhere. After each activity, first 5 minutes, then six, then seven, I would get an automated notification from the Great Canadian Crossing challenge congratulating me on my 0.00 KM bike ride and showing dwindling lead on pace, culminating in finally falling into the red on my ninth ride nowhere.

Two days later my replacement speed sensor arrived in the mail, and my eleventh ride on the training earned me 6.82 fake kilometres towards my fake trek across Canada. I would continue on adding a minute each day until I reach 30 minutes and then I thought I’d give my head a shake.

First SPLoop of post-DFIAT era.

So on September 30 I took my bike outside for a couple loops of Stanley Park just to see what would happen because I was genuinely curious to see what would happen. A couple days before I was overthinking about it and got to thinking that maybe I think it’s going to be tough to get back on my bike because I think that I’m supposed to think it’s going to be tough to get back on my bike. And I wanted to find out what would happen in my head. I was mad, that’s what happened. I had a bit of concussion symptoms come on during SPLoop two but other than headache and nausea and ragey-rage it was “fine.” I mean “fine” as in I expected to be really nervous; I was not. I’ve (still) not yet been on the highway so who knows what will happen there then, but for now I’m just mad at DFIAT. And my head hurts. And my shoulder hurts. And my ribs and back and arm hurt. But otherwise….

Physio during a pandemic, or ANTIFA meeting…or both?

I used to be pretty good about posting on here weekly but I haven’t written here or much elsewhere – especially about my recovery – because my lawyer warned me that ICBC trolls will be trolling for any excuse to limit my claim. But he works on commission, so…. Anyway, hi ICBC trolls! GFY! Running is what I really love and miss the most and DFIAT took that away and I’m still pretty mad about it, in case you didn’t notice. And so the orthopaedic surgeon and my GP and my physiotherapist and my concussion therapist all set up these hurdles for me to clear before I was allowed to run again and I proceeded to smash them so they all finally acquiesced. I mean, that’s the story I’m going with. Like the 5 minutes plus-a-minute on the bike, they allowed me to run a pretty strict (read: embarrassing) run/walk program. I set them all PRIVATE on Strava. (Curiously, they all still counted towards my Cross Canada total.) Then on Thanksgiving Saturday I took a break from reading about the dumpster fire that is Nike (see review above) and went for a proper run.

For the past two years I’ve woken up on the Saturday of Thanksgiving long weekend in Oak Bay and gone for a 5-and-a-bit kilometre shake out run before the Victoria Marathon (2018) and Victoria Half Marathon (2019) the following Sunday. I’d been run-walking and hating it a half dozen times and decided to see if I could string together 5 Kontinuous. So I did. It hurt a lot. Recovery from my encounter with DFIAT is proving to be, like this blog post, frustratingly long. I have spent a lot of time thinking about recover and what that really means. I mean, there’s the tangible stuff like, will this scarring on my face, hands, shoulder, side knees, ever go away? Will my ribs and clavicle ever stop looking like they’re desperately trying to escape my torso? Probably not. I haven’t quite accepted yet that I might never get full mobility back in my right arm. I haven’t talked about realizing I’m addicted to pain medication when I started trying to ween myself off. (My GP isn’t concerned, implies it’s normal given the circumstances.) It makes me really mad. A couple days before I met DFIAT I went for a pretty casual 21.1 KM run in 1:36 just for the Strava HM badge. Last weekend I ran 5K in 28 minutes and very nearly died. (Different kind of nearly died.) Part of recovery means getting back to being able to go for a casual 100 KM bike ride after a casual 96 minute half marathon. I am recovering. Some things I might never recover. Others are still a very long way off.

Today a thing happened that should have happened months ago and although it’s Monday and I typically write these by the week ending Sunday I thought I’d squeeze it in because who knows when I’m going to write again. Blame lawyer. No, blame ICBC. Today I went for a run out to Siwash Rock and back. It was an otherwise insignificant run except that I was alive and (ahem, mostly) able to do so but somewhat significantly it was my 1,000 run of all time on Strava and the run in which I passed 2,000 KM running in 2020. I should have passed those milestones months ago. I should be proud of them but they mostly just make me angry.

*As I wrote above, for 10 days I rode the trainer with 0.00 KM credited due to a busted speed sensor. Which begs the question, if I’m counting my kilometres since my encounter with DFIAT, do kilometres on a cycle trainer count? (I think they do.) But what if there’s nothing to measure them? If a concussed cripple cycles 95 minutes on a trainer and there’s no speed sensor to track the fake distance…you see where I’m going with this.

**Following along from * above, beginning with 5 minutes, and adding one minute per day for 10 days, equals 95 minutes at an average 27 km/h (roughly, guessing based on trainer spins #11 through #24) or approx. (you think I planned this but I did not) one marathon. So, since DFIAT my totals are closer to 368 KM, and 2,205 so far this year. But Strava says zero and we all know if it’s not on Strava it didn’t happen.

2020 week twenty

Stuff Read
– Why Hard Exercise Feels Worse When You’re Alone – Alex Hutchinson
– We’re Betting on Athletes – Mark Gainey & Michael Horvath
– Strava Cuts Off Leaderboard for Free Users, Reduces 3rd Party Apps for All, and More – Ray Maker

Kilometres Ran
week twenty – 60.3

2020 to date: 1,280

I really didn’t need Alex Hutchinson to tell me that going hard solo is hard but there it is. I’ve missed the Mile2Marathon Wednesday night group workouts a lot. And while I’ve managed to pull together a pretty consistent solo workout Wednesday regiment with the help of my coach, I have noticed that I’ve under performed and more than a few times tapped out a rep or two early, which I would have never gotten away with on a “normal” Wednesday. If you’ve followed along on here at all, you probably know I’m a bit of a Hutchinson fan, so it was an extra special treat to have him come out for a Q & A on the M2M athlete’s Zoom Tuesday this week. Then this morning (Monday, because it’s a holiday long weekend), Strava dropped the anvil onto its millions of users by announcing that a swath of key features were going behind a paywall and I’ve been spending the afternoon trying to figure out what that all means. The DC Rainmaker blog (although cycling focused) provides probably the best run down that I’ve seen (I didn’t look too hard, but Ray Maker goes pretty deep dive on this one). The biggest changes are to Segments and Route Builder, the latter being that it’s no longer free (which is pretty huge). The Segments piece is a bit more nuanced. As I understand it, free-users will no longer see deep analytics into their own Segment achievements and will only see the Top OA and Top Women for each segment. So, no more clicking “People I’m Following” or selecting your club to see how you’re measuring up. Now you have to pay for that. And while that’s annoying, it’s less annoying for me…potentially. I’ve been a premium subscriber for almost as long as I’ve been running. It just seemed like one of those things that you just buck up for when you start getting serious about this stupid sport that everyone reminds you how free it is except for three or four pairs of shoes per year plus race entries plus that one time you happened to be in Paris almost exactly a year earlier and picked up a ridiculously overpriced running top because you saw it and while you’d never actually heard of Satisfy you had to have it and now you’re addicted to all of their gear. But I digress. My point is that since I’ve been paying for Strava for a while so I’m not sure that I’m going to notice except if this new paywall causes an exodus of the people I enjoy following. I’m already curious to see how many people never actually read the announcement, and won’t even notice the features they’ve lost. I’m just happy that Strava finally created an algorithm to auto-flag impossible segment efforts, because the amount of flagging I’ve done this pandemic has been exhausting. Now if only they could collate top 10 personal efforts (I’d be happy with top 3 to start…I mean, they’re already doing it anyway…just show it to me) and make Beacon actually reliable, I’d be reasonably happy. After all, it costs like two Maurten Caf gels per month. Speaking of which….

With the cancellation of the Berlin Marathon I suggested to Coach that I run a marathon time trial and he replied, “nah.” Well, not really. He replied with a few questions that I hadn’t thought about and that made me rethink a marathon casual, let alone a TT. So I decided to go try to PB the half marathon distance, and set Wednesday as the day. I treated the whole thing as much like a race as I could, proper taper, my typical fueling routine, neurotic weather app checking…I’d planned the route and set the race start time under the Burrard Bridge as 7 a.m. rain or shine. I took a warm up jog from my house and got there about ten minutes before. What looked like a drencher had stopped and conditions were what I find pretty ideal. It was damp but not raining, cool but not cold, bit of a breeze. A bit too humid (mid 90s) but I can’t have everything. At 7 a.m. on the nose I set out for a clockwise loop around Stanley Park, followed by a clockwise loop of Lost Lagoon, then back onto the Seawall for a counter-loop of the Park and finish on the Seawall south of Second Beach Pool around the 8.5 KM plaque. I had a great start and stuck to my game plan to hang around 4:05 pace, but I pretty much knew it wasn’t going to be my day before I got to halfway. I hit 10 KM and was right in between the 10 KM splits in my fastest and second fastest half marathons but I had a bit of a struggle looping the Lagoon. At 13 KM as I started into the counter-loop I took a Maurten Caf and then for the next three kilometres I tried to hold it down. It was awful. I know the run-till-you-puke feeling and this was something different that I’d only experienced once before…at CIM. It sucks to finally figure it out now but there it is. Between Brockton Point and the Girl in a Wetsuit I passed a cyclist out with his camera taking photos of a humpback whale in the harbour (I missed it). He would catch up and pass me a bit before Siwash Rock and we had a short chat as he did. He had a pretty nice Canon slung on his back, so I told him about where I expected to finish and said if he got a couple shots of me there I’d pay him for his trouble. I was struggling quite a bit by now but I managed to keep it together and not completely bonk. I let my watch roll over to 21.12 KM before clicking it off at 1:30:02 for my third fastest half marathon and fastest one solo.

Pandemic (AKA Stay TF Away) face needs a razor. Photos: Brian Powell

Brian Powell (Insta: vancouverotter) was there with his camera. He emailed a few shots to me (including one of the whale I’d missed) but wouldn’t accept any payment, so I asked him to choose a charity from the Scotiabank Half Marathon Charity Challenge and I made a donation in his name to CLICK per his selection. A few days before I’d received an email from those Marathon Photo shysters offering me 30% off photos from my 2019 races. I donated the undiscounted amount.

As I’m apt to do, I took a bit of a dive into my race and came away with a few insights. While I was disappointed to not get a new personal best, I was pretty happy with my performance, especially considering it was completely solo. I took a 20 – 30 second break at 10 miles to give my stomach a chance to settle, and that seems to have been the difference between this being my second (at First Half this year) or third fastest half marathon. This one had a bit slower start but a much better second half than First Half. The other thing I did was to turn this route into a Strava Segment, and I was a bit surprised to find that there are a few other people who have run it (or at least through it) including one name that I recognize (who is much quicker than me). But in making this Segment I also gave myself another Crown and I thought it might be fun to challenge some other M2Mers to take it away from me, what with the virtual RunVan BMO Half Marathon* race currently going on, and the virtual Scotiabank Half Marathon** coming up this summer. It is going to be very interesting to see how that pans out with Strava’s new business model launching today.

PS – I should also mention that I have *most of* a crate of Maurten Caf that expires at the end of September that I’d be willing to trade 1-1 for Maurten regular or Endurance Tap Caf if anyone is interested.

*I submitted this activity as my virtual BMO Half Marathon and as of writing I’m currently top in my age group and top 10 overall, which is weird because I’ve seen Strava activities a lot faster than mine tagged as their virtual BMO, but they aren’t on the leader board. I’ll take it for now, but I don’t expect to still be there when the virtual BMO window closes

**I am seriously considering taking another stab at this route for my virtual Scotiabank Half Marathon later this summer. I just need to find the right window amongst the M2M Virtual Race Series (that you should totally check out).