Category: Minnesota

Maple Syrup Run 2009

This morning, I did the River Bend Nature Center‘s “Maple Syrup Run,” a 5k trail race through the RBNC’s wonderful property on the (quite curvy) Straight River in Faribault, Minnesota. I didn’t quite hit my goal time but it was a great race, just as family friends who’ve run the race several times assured me. 

The event took place in hand-numbing drizzle which probably slowed everyone down (and which didn’t make it fun for Shannon and the girls to watch) but which didn’t much affect the course’s dirt trails over the RBNC’s hilly terrain. After the usual scrum in the first 50 meters, the racers sorted out into a single file that crossed a bit of pavement and then plummeted down to the river bottom. We wound along the river on a twisty, wet path that was reminiscent of high-school cross country races and perfect for moving up the field – you could see everyone up ahead, count off the seconds after they went through a curve, and push harder to close the gap before the next curve. I was pleased to see that my heart rate was staying at the low end of my highest range – around 165 or so, or 90% of my maximum – and that I felt pretty good.

The riverside path ended abruptly with a sharp right turn onto a stiff, steep climb that recouped all the earlier elevation loss in about 50 meters but was for good for making a couple more passes. From there, we skirted the edge of the center, keeping just inside the treeline but also passing by the Faribault prison. Talk about irony: I paid cash money to run in the cold drizzle right past a place where you can’t run more than a couple hundred feet in any one direction.

Not long after that, near what must have been the end of the second mile, the course pointed back toward the interior of RBNC’s grounds and started a long, steady climb up the ridge that overlooks the interpretive center. This section wasn’t incredibly hard, but it did have a couple false ends – turn the corner and oh crap there’s more climbing to do. My heart rate spiked and stayed high here, and I started to feel some burning in my legs, but the effort was worth it, helping me pass another three or four racers on the climb. I couldn’t quite catch one kid who was just a few meters ahead…

At the actual top of the ridge, the course bent and went almost straight down to the prairie at the core of the center. I should have tried to speed up here, since it turned out that we were less than three minutes from the finish line, but I hadn’t studied the course map well enough, and didn’t want to blow up by trying a 100 yards-to-go pace with a half mile to go. Instead, I just maintained my pace until it was obvious we were finishing. And at that point, there was no one who could either catch me or be caught, so I just cruised in at 23:15, feeling pretty good in all the right ways – tired, but not crushed and pleased with having carried out my race plan. And Julia ran right up to me to hug my legs, shouting, “Good job!” All in all, a nice way to start the season.

With my intermittent personal history of running and fitness – a lot of cross country running and skiing and track in high school, then nothing for a decade until slowly starting again to run and rollerski and cross-country ski in the last few years – I am struck by the “types” of runners encountered at races like the Maple Syrup Run and the Defeat of Jesse James Days road races in Northfield every September. There are always a few obviously fast men and women – the whippets who use their extreme fitness, paucity of body fat, complicated shoes, and $75 shirts to take the top spots. There are quite a few the more-or-less fit but not very fast folks like me, and a smaller number of people who are pretty clearly out of shape, but trying hard to get back into the swing of things (and who often run, bafflingly, in full sweatsuits). Commingling with those groups are the kids, the teens and tweens who run with each other or with parents and who invariably take off like bullets, only to fade badly by about the 1-mile marker. Today’s run had a good number of racers in this last group, and I guess the top two men’s spots went to high schoolers. On the other hand, I spent the first five minutes of the race weaving through fast-starting young guns and caught a few more during the rest of the race – though I never did catch the kid who had to actually stop and walk up the last bit of the longest climb. He was saving something for a big sprint to the line. Crazy kid.

“Athletic” Goals, 2009-2010

Sunday, I’m running a 5k race on the trails of the River Bend Nature Center in Faribault, Minnesota – my first event in what I hope will be a fairly active year of training and racing. I’ve been pretty consistently training four to six times a week for a couple years now, so I hope this season – running from now through next February’s ski races – will be a good one, “athletically.”

Beyond what I’ve been doing for training (primarily hourlong runs, rollerskis, and skis, interspersed with shorter, harder sessions), I’m going to try to do at least one 2-hour session each month (probably running with poles or rollerskiing) and at least two intensity sessions in each 10-day period – more at certain points, and trying to do a lot of uphill and/or relatively long efforts, such as fast four minute uphill runs or skis.) In large part, adding these kinds of workouts is an attempt to avoid another race as bad as my horrible experience at the City of Lakes Loppet in February.

As for racing, I have five events in mind. If I can do even three of them, I’ll be happy. If I can do all five – especially the two ski races in February – I’ll be elated. And tired. And appreciative of Shannon’s needing to cover for me at home. Here is the list of goal races, along with the distance and a target time. (If anybody wants to front the money that would let me do the Marcialonga in Italy in January or the Vasaloppet in Sweden in March, I’ll be happy to do the training.)

Sunday, April 19, 2009
Maple Syrup Run at River Bend Nature Center in Faribault, Minnesota
5k – 22:00

Sunday, September 13, 2009
Defeat of Jesse James Days road races in Northfield, Minnesota
5k – 20:30 or 15k – 1:05:00

Saturday, October 17, 2009
Nerstrand Big Woods Run in Nerstrand, Minnesota
half marathon/21k – 2:00:00

Sunday, February 7, 2010
City of Lakes Loppet in Minneapolis, Minnesota
33k freestyle – 1:45 or 25k classic – no idea what would be possible or good!

Sunday, February 14, 2010
Mora Vasaloppet in Mora, Minnesota
58k skate or 42k classic – again, no idea what would be possible or good

Ten Signs of Spring at Carleton

1. Surly geese on the Lyman Lakes
2. The disappearance of every trace of the Bald Spot ice rinks
3. Guys playing open-course frisbee golf all over campus (but never women – why not?)
4. Smokers lingering outside the library
5. Three different sports being practiced at once on the fields behind the Rec Center (Tuesdays rundown: soccer [men’s and women’s], lacrosse, frisbee)
6. The sky slowly disappearing behind budding trees
7. Daffodils sprouting in all the flowerbeds
8. Students whipping frisbees back and forth with enormous precision and force on the Bald Spot
9. Crowded bike racks

And of course
10. Outdoor classes distributed over all available green space

Flood Fight II: The Cities Triumph

It looks like the long-awaited and feared second crest of the Red River of the North in Fargo-Moorhead won’t be anywhere near as bad as the first crest, two weeks ago. Thank the god of rivers for that. Those poor folks up there need a break and a head start on cleaning up the colossal mess created by the first “Flood Fight”: piles of sand, stray sandbags, clay dikes in the middle of the street, construction machinery parked helter-skelter all over town, sinister puddles of purple-black water in every low spot.

Driving around Fargo-Moorhead over the weekend, and driving north to my in-laws’ little country church on Easter, it was perfectly obvious why and how an overflowing Red can be so calamitous. This is the view from US-75 northwest of Moorhead: flat as a sheet of plywood, and about as capable, now, of absorbing water.
North of Moorhead

Piratical

If you were watching the news around noon today, you might have heard a report from the Minnesota state patrol about two pirates who seized an SUV and two adults traveling on I-94 north of Rogers. The pirate chief rejected calls for naps and demanded snacks instead. Eventually the SUV’s crew reestablished their authority when the pirates grew too whiny to maintain their own control. Investigations are continuing.

Three Seasons in One Run

Walking from the office to the car this afternoon, the air had that heavy, unmistakable smell of spring: wet, green, growing. This contrasted sharply with my run on Sunday – the longest run of the new training year, from my house to the far northeastern corner of the Lower Arb, near the Waterford Bridge. I was out for a nice long time, and in that time, I experienced every season but summer.

I started into a brutal north headwind that was first just chilly but that, when I reached the Arb, started to create wet little squalls by blowing frozen and melted snow out of the trees onto me, the robins, and the squirrels. Where I could see them through the trees, the Carleton and St. Olaf wind turbines were spinning madly, trying to put that wind to more productive use. For one long stretch, as I crossed some open fields, a red-tailed hawk rode the gusts above me, using the wind for his own purposes and, I worried, deciding if I was edible.

Deeper in the woods, where the morning sun had only intermittently shone on the path, the trails were either still covered with supremely wet, sticky snow or with supremely wet, sticky black mud. At one point, the goo in my left shoe’s treads picked up a foot-long twig that was godawfully hard to shake off. When I stopped to yank the stick loose, a pheasant screeched somewhere nearby, giving me a literal and figurative start. A few minutes after that, just before the turnaround at Canada Avenue, I reached a mudpatch so wide, long, and deep that I turned around instead of eking out the last few meters to the parking lot.

The second half of the run was hazier, thanks to fatigue, but as I passed the perfect little Kettle Hole Marsh, I heard a bedlam chorus of spring peepers – this, just a few hours after the last snow of the season. And just a few minutes after that, the sun slid out from behind the gray-white clouds, spectacularly lighting up the still gray-brown fields.

Pepper in the Sky

For a day that’s had about two-thirds of the usual minimum hours of sleep between, say, midnight at three p.m., things aren’t half bad. Genevieve is alternating exhausted screeching and stubbornness with wonderful observations. On our walk back from the park, she first asked about “dat black and white thing that goes up and up and up” (which turned out to be some heavily shadowed vertical blinds in the windows of a house near the park) and later, watching, a flock of starlings fly up and away into the white-blue sky, said, “Dat yooks like pepper in the sky!”

Springy

Even though there’s light snow in the weekend forecast, I’m okay with spring. Today I biked home through the Upper Arb, which still looks pretty winter-sleepy and brown (and even sports a few little traces of snow and ice), and tonight I’m going to go for a nighttime run in the Lower Arb along the river. Sure, I’d rather be skiing in both locations, but I’ll take what I can get!

April First News

Lots of April First news to report…

Here in Northfield, Carleton College is installing a Dutch-style windmill, while our neighbors across town, St. Olaf College, has already installed a fiery eye on top of its tallest dorm. Both of these initiatives should be more successful than the City of Northfield’s costly cat park.

Elsewhere in Minnesota, the northwoods resort town of Ely announced a late bid to host the 2016 Olympics at a press conference. This gambit succeeds last year’s failed attempt by Canada to buy Ely and move it north.

In technology, Google has launched Gmail Autopilot, an automatic email response system that, as the first product of Google’s sophisticated new CADIE artificial intelligence project, is the perfect complement to Gmail Paper. (Check out CADIE’s impressive homepage for another example of its power.)

And in business, American whale farmers are doing quite well despite controversy over the ethics of cetaciculture and an inability to figure out how to use the whales’ blowholes.

Hustle and Bustle

A guy can get a lot done during the long spring break at Carleton, but the campus is much more pleasing with the students hustling and bustling about. The trickle of suitcases started already last Friday, but today the riptides of backpacks were very strong all day. It was nice, after working in a very quiet building for two weeks, to hear the happy din of kids – they call themselves that! – trooping up and down the steps, catching each other up on their spring breaks, complaining about their classes…