It sure did. The bright yellow sun and 40°F temperature were nice; the 20-mph westerly wind and my disturbing lack of fitness were less so. But any time spent riding is time well spent! The gravel was dry and pleasingly fast, the lack of clouds or foliage made for endless vistas, and there was plenty of fresh cold air to inhale.

And it was. On short notice, a friend decided to come along for the ride, which made the day a lot more fun than a solo half-century would have been, especially during a few intermittent sprinkles and a stiff wind at the end. I wound up riding 57 miles in five hours, which felt just right for the day. And the route itself was great: quite a few miles of gravel roads I knew, but even more on roads that were new to me – including two stretches of “minimum maintenance” road that were really glorified trails. The first was steep, but doable:

The second started easy and finished hard, with a badly washed-out section that we could not ride (but that others can!):

These tough sections were more than balanced out by a lot of rolling gravel roads that were tiring, but not brutal.

We did make a stop at the meat market in Nerstrand, Minnesota, to refuel with some beef jerky that my partner kindly shared with me. Delicious! I hope we can do some more gravel riding next year…

Facts about the Race

• 1:50:30: finishing time (about 5 minutes off my goal and about 34 minutes [!!!] behind the men’s winner)
• 82 out of 300: finishing place, overall
• 66 out of 172: finishing place, men
• 25 out of 50: finishing place in my male age group
• 8:27: average minutes per mile (about 0:27 off my target pace)
• 154: average heart rate
• 164: maximum heart rate – at the end and on the last major climb

Factoids about the Race

• 8: mile at which I started to feel like things were getting hard
• 2: uphills which I walked and actually closed gaps to runners ahead of me
• 100: percentage of abdominal muscles that were shredded by the race (abs?! from the climbs, I guess)
• 1.5 and 25%: perceived miles and grade of the last mile (actually, a slight uphill raked by a strong crosswind)
• 3: racers whom I passed when they dropped their headphones or iPods on the trail
• 2: gels consumed on the run
• 8: ounces of de-fizzed Coke drunk on the run (just before the last climb, from this very handy little bottle)
• 6:19: length of Beyoncé’s “Get Me Bodied,” which I am not (very) embarrassed to admit that I used, successfully, as my pump-up song
• 0: number of horribly chafed spots on my body which I’ll mention here
• 3: number of leaves on the great race tee shirt

I’ve been training pretty seriously since July for the Big Woods Run half marathon on October 15 – “seriously” meaning that I’ve been getting coaching advice from an Internet friend who’s a pretty fast runner/cyclist/triathlete. The regimen she’s worked out for me has been pretty tough – some two-a-day workouts, long runs that are longer than anything I’ve ever done (even in the halcyon, unfettered days of high school), and some tough speed workouts. More than anything, this training has asked for consistent effort, day in and day out. Even the rest days are carefully chosen and structured.

All of this is markedly different from the “training” that I did on my own over the past few years, whether it was for an infrequent road race, my annual ski race, or a long ride. That training – I see now – was pretty casual and haphazard, and often just plain wrong. It’s no wonder my legs would hurt for days after some crazy session – I was doing it wrong.

I’m not saying that I’m suddenly fast or anything. First, there’s no “suddenly” here: I’ve been working for months already, and have another ten days before the race itself. Second, I’m running now quite a bit more slowly than I did in high school – when I was no whippet. Third, I’m hardly physiologically gifted: exactly average height, not “built,” and 15 pounds heavier than I was in high school.

Against all that, it’s still ridiculously fun to feel and know that I’m running faster today than I was on July 4, or August 14, or even September 24 – and way faster than I was in October 2010 or 2008. One of the training exercises I’ve done is a simple test: run a set distance at a particular heart rate, then do that again a few weeks later and see if you run faster than you did at that HR and distance. I actually laughed out loud when I did this test last week and discovered that I’d gotten quite a bit faster than I had been a month before.

Faster is good, but easier is good too. When I run those tests, I feel good, like I’m pushing myself, but nowhere near the edge. When I do my long runs, I feel great, like I could pretty easily go a few more miles. When I wake up in the morning, my legs feel good – even if I’d been out running until 9:30 the night before.

Again, it’s not like I’m suddenly going to chase down the marathon world-record holder, the fastest man in my age group at the next race, or even the fastest woman in that age group. But it’s immensely satisfying to know that I’m running faster than I was a few months ago, that I’m fitter now than I was a few months ago – and that I’ll get a little bit faster before the race, and maybe a lot faster over the next year.

Maybe my embrace of all this running amounts to an early-onset mid-life crisis, or a Sisyphean raging against getting older. Even so, my training has proven that some hard work can pay off. Not always, or even often, but at least sometimes. And my training has let me feel good about getting really jacked up for the race, which is itself a pretty nice feeling.

The 15k would be the longest running race I’d ever done, but with the half-marathon looming five weeks later, my “coach” and I wanted to treat it more like a really hard training run than a lay-it-all-out sort of season-capping race – which I hope is what the half will be. With that in mind, I was pretty casual about my race prep, even to the point of overindulging a bit on Saturday evening. Come Sunday morning, I was pretty relaxed and ready to see what would happen. I lined up toward the middle of the field, where I found a colleague from Carleton similarly ready to run hard, but not too hard.

She and I headed out together, chatting, making our way through the traffic, and settling into a nice rhythm. The first three miles of the race, a long eastbound straightaway, feature three long climbs, which we ran steadily and, I felt, fairly easily. When we reached the halfway point, my companion decided to slow down a bit, and I pushed on, passing a few runners and getting passed by a few others. As it turned out, my colleague stayed just behind me the rest of the way – while I dangled frustratingly close to another colleague in front of me.

At mile five, as the racecourse turned west, back toward town, I tried to make a push to catch that colleague, but found I had no extra gear. I wasn’t so much tired as just maxed out. My pace was sustainable, but I couldn’t will myself to increase it, even for the 60 seconds I would have needed to make the catch. At one point, around mile seven, on the last major downhill of the day, a group of three runners went past me, and I managed to hang with them for few minutes, which probably shaved a minute off my finishing time. Just as I thought I could hold onto them, though, they pulled away again, on a gentle uphill that’s hardly noticeable at any other time but felt like a 15% grade to me. Making that “climb” put me into difficulty, and I started needing to really concentrate on my form. When we finally reached the city streets again, around mile eight, I relaxed a bit, feeling finally like I was in the home stretch. Still dangling behind my colleague, I made the right-hand turn that put us on the downhill straightaway to the finish line. Here, finally, I was able to find a bit of gas and speed up. The finish line took forever to arrive, but it eventually did, and I immediately sat down – then got back up and moved, to get away from the reek of someone’s post-race puke.

After a few cups of water and Gatorade, a bagel, and a banana, I started feeling like I would be able to move again. I finished, officially, in 1:15:31 – pretty much right on my target time, and a decent indication that I am doing the right stuff to get ready for the half marathon.

My race data show a pretty consistent speed and effort – a heart rate around 160 beats per minute and a pace of about 8 minutes per mile. If I can run at that pace and effort over the half-marathon distance, I’ll be pretty happy. If I can train well enough in the next five weeks to run a bit faster, even better! I can’t wait to find out.