Running Ft. Sam Houston

Ft. Sam Houston, occupying a considerable piece of San Antonio, Texas real estate, is one of the oldest military bases in the country. The present site went into service around 1876, building on the original 92 acres given the Army by the City of San Antonio. Ft. Sam now occupies around 3000 acres. The facility itself is a mosaic of parade grounds, supply depots, athletic fields and numerous historic buildings. The more than 900 historically significant structures led to the post being declared a National Historic Landmark in 1975.

It is unfortunate that one of the post 9/11 consequences was the closing of Ft. Sam Houston to the civilian public. When I first came to San Antonio in the mid-70s, it was possible to walk, run or bike through the grounds of the base. The San Antonio Symphony would give an annual outdoor concert there, attended by a mix of military and civilian music lovers. San Antonians loved Ft. Sam and still do. It's an important part of our community.

The fond memories I have of Ft. Sam Houston and my love of running are what bring me to Ft. Sam at least once, sometimes a couple of times per year. John Purnell organizes and directs a collection of triathlons and road races annually, including several 10 mile races which are part of the national series of Army 10 Milers. These competitions are open to military and local athletes alike and afford us civilians a wonderful chance to spend some time running through the historical grounds of Ft. Sam.

Needless to say, 10 miles is a substantial distance. Testament to the size of Ft. Sam Houston is the fact it is possible to lay out a 10 mile race course which is essentially without loops or repetition. In its present configuration, the course turns back into itself in only a couple of places, allowing the mid-pack runners to get at least a glimpse of the faster competitors. However, even this did not allow me to observe the winner of yesterday's 10 miler. I saw him at the starting line, but my pace of 10 minute miles could in no way keep up with his 6 minute pace. Nevertheless, I had good company with the true "soldiers" of San Antonio running, those who run for the love and challenge of the sport, knowing they will never be on the winner's stand at the finish. We run for fitness, we run for the endorphin kick, the so-called runner's high, we run because we want to run tomorrow, next week, next year. We want to still be running marathons when we're 50, 60, 75, even 80 years old. Come join us.

The Soda Debate

National Public Radio (NPR) recently offered a two part series about the ongoing debate regarding soft drinks, or soda pop as some say. I listened in indignant consternation to the rebuttal offered last week by a spokesperson for the soft drink industry who said "a full-calorie soft drink has 90 percent water, and a diet soft drink is 99 percent water. Water is the most important nutrient that we have..." By implication we are to believe soft drinks to be of some nutritional benefit. Dr. Maureen Storey, representing the American Beverage Association, went on: "Of nutritional value, there is either high-fructose corn syrup or sucrose, and that does provide energy or carbohydrates. And if we are active and need a refreshing beverage after a nice, long walk or a run, you can have a beverage and quench your thirst and stay hydrated."

Roll over Gary Erickson, founder of Clif Bar, a full line of nutritional products for athletes, or Brian Frank of Hammer Nutrition. Both Gary and Brian have invested in research and product development with the athlete, whether the weekend variety or a professional, in mind. Yes, you will find sugar in their products, but most often sugar derived from sources markedly different than those used by the mainstream food industry, including the manufacturers of soft drinks. Granted, the arguments pro or con regarding the health risks or not of high-fructose corn syrup are ongoing and thus far not absolutely conclusive one way or the other; nevertheless, the research produced by Hammer Nutrition and to some extent by Clif Bar indicates a soft drink, whether full-calorie or diet, is far, far down the list of athletically and nutritionally significant preferences.

Finally, the aforementioned Dr. Storey, in conversation with NPR's Michele Norris, argued that a sugar-laden soft drink is often the right hydration choice for children. Said Dr. Storey: "I don't think it's nutritionally unsound. There are some studies that show that particularly with children, children who have been exercising may not drink enough water to get back to the hydration point that they need to be at. So with a little bit of flavoring and a little bit of sweetness, they will drink enough, then, to get back to where they need to be."

Thankfully, some semblance of truth and skepticism returned a few days later when a listener laughed out loud regarding the soft drink industry's assertion of "the benefits of reaching for a refreshing glass of what is essentially a sugar-laden diuretic for post-exercise rehydration."

How about some good old water, or even Gatorade in its lower sodium modern formula. Better yet, make my preference Heed, the hydration product out of the Hammer Nutrition laboratories. We each will find the "water" which works best for our needs, but please take some time to understand the nutritional labeling and issues while making the most effective and health conscious choice.

Getting the Distances Right

Here's a quick primer on some of the standardized race distances. I'm going to ignore the mile and the 1500 meters (sometimes called the metric mile). These are distances most often, but not always, run on a closed track. However, once you begin to talk about street or trail racing the standard distance most often begins at 5 kilometers, usually abbreviated as 5K. Translated to miles, this is 3.1 miles. Of course, this would make a 10K 6.2 miles. Both of these are good starting distances when a runner begins to feel the need to run a "race."

There are obviously infinite increments possible both metrically and in miles, but the next big step up brings one into the realm of endurance racing. The half marathon is 13.1 miles and is always a road race. (At least I know of no half marathons run on quarter mile tracks.)

The longest standard distance challenge is a marathon, 26.2 miles. The original distance comes from Greek mythology. It is said that the Greek soldier Pheidippides, a messenger from the Battle of Marathon (the namesake of the race) fell dead when he completed his "marathon" to Athens. He had been carrying news of the Athenians' victory over Persian forces in Marathon. The marathon race became an official event in the Olympics in 1896, but it was not until 1908 that the distance became codified. Previously, it was approximately 25 miles, the distance from Marathon to Athens. For those interested in the somewhat convoluted story of how the marathon became 26 miles 385 yards, please read the Wikipedia article.

If a marathon is not distance enough for you, there are always the ultra-marathons. Nothing is set in stone here. An ultra (as it is usually abbreviated) is anything beyond 26.2 miles. Nevertheless, the most often organized ultras begin at 50 kilometers (31 miles), with the next challenge being 50 miles.

As for me, my next couple of distance challenges will be the Chicago Marathon in October, a distance of (repeat after me) 26.2 miles. In January 2011 I will run the Big Bend Ultra in Big Bend National Park, a distance of 50K through spectacular wilderness. I've run the Big Bend Ultra before and can attest to its being an unforgettable experience. Registration has just opened. Find more information about this event here.

Capitol 10K Eve - 2010

It's an annual rite of spring in Austin, the city many regard as Texas' running capital. It's the Capitol 10K and it's tomorrow morning. I'm not perfect in my attendance; after all, it IS an out of town race for me since I live and do most of my running in San Antonio. On the other hand, this is a chance to run with a huge pack and for me that is fun. I understand why some runners prefer a small field, but I guess it's the gregarious in me which thrills at runners as far as the eye can see. The mass of 18,000 runners and walkers flooding Congress Avenue from the entrance to the Capitol grounds all the way back to the Congress Avenue bridge never fails to leave me breathless, though admittedly the first mile of the race will already have my heart and lungs pumping.

As I said, it's a rite of spring, a ritual, the Cap 10K. The elite runners come, looking for a payout and maybe a grudge competition with other of the "professional" runners. Other fast runners come to test themselves against the elites. Sometimes a dark horse will outsprint the favorites. The majority of the runners run the Cap 10K as just another run, perhaps to test themselves at the distance. That's me. I see the Cap 10K, really any 10K, as a measuring rod of where I am in terms of conditioning. For many years I have regarded the 5 or 10K distances to be runs for which I am not particularly well suited. I don't run particularly fast and I am reluctant to invest in speed work which would likely lower my 10K time. Nevertheless, I sure do like to break one hour, maybe even turn in a 58 something finish time. I'm not sure tomorrow will be one of those days.

Running is an ideal cooler weather activity. That's why the racing season here in Texas is November through March. April is a pivot month as the temps go up and the humidity follows. A couple of mornings ago it was 41 degrees in San Antonio. That would have been a wonderful day to race a 10K. Tomorrow promises a low in the 50s and somewhat soupy humidity. It will be a challenge and takes some of the fun out of this rite of spring. However, it is still going to be a good time.

In addition to the elites, the other fast runners and then the recreational runners like me, many observe the Cap 10K with a leisurely walk. Whole families will come out and you see many parents pushing strollers, sometimes even running with the high tech jogging strollers. A few will pass me and I wish them well. There was a time when this might have violated my machismo, but there's little of that left these days. One has to train too hard to play that game and, besides, it's a fool's game.

Another ritual of the Capital 10K revolves around the costumes. There are always some inventive as well as quirky minds at work here. The running Elvises show up (they are present at every race), and I am certain there will be at least a few running University of Texas towers on the course. Like the running strollers, some of these will pass me too. Superman is more than welcome to take his right of way. I draw the line at the runners who dress in suit and tie, running with briefcases in hand. Or are those the Capitol bureaucrats, "running" our state government? Whoever they are, I will sometimes quicken my pace just a bit to keep myself ahead of these runners, though normally they end up, along with the strollers and UT towers, passing me by, especially on that famous Enfield Road hill.

So I go to bed early tonight, at least for me, maybe before midnight, and maybe I'm not too miserable when the alarm clock goes off in the morning. This is a rite of spring which I look forward to and it's also the catapult which kicks us year round runners into the gear which is necessary to continue training and racing through the hot months ahead. See you on Congress Avenue. I'll be the one with the running costume on, mostly Nike. Maybe you'll say hello when you pass me by.

Finding a Place to Run

Have you ever found yourself tired of running the same old routes day after day, week after week? Or maybe you are on the road and find yourself in a city you don't know. You can take off on a follow your nose run, and sometimes those are very interesting as long as you don't get lost. Unfortunately, my sister will never let me forget the time I went running late in the afternoon in a park near her home in Garland, Texas. The route was partly on sidewalks, but also along some heavily wooded trails. When night fell, it didn't creep, it just got dark. I ended up lost, turned around and made dizzy by the experience. When I sheepishly walked through my sister's front door an hour past due she was on the phone filing a missing persons report. Yikes!

Thankfully, MapMyRun.com can now take the guess work out of finding a new place to run. An internet connection, seemingly everywhere these days, is all you need to find a match between where you are and how far you want to run. Check it out the next time you are on the road or are simply bored with the same daily route. Oh yeah! It beats the heck out of the treadmill at the hotel or a short indoor track at a health club.

You can also share your own routes with other runners via MapMyRun. I guess I ought to do that with a couple of runs I did last week while I was back in my home town of Victoria, Texas, but instead I'll just tell you about them. I grew up in Victoria, but was never really a runner during those years. However, I spent a lot of time walking and much of that walking was in Victoria's Riverside Park. This is a maze of pecan groves, picnic tables, public grills, baseball diamonds and river bottom. There's no spit and polish on this park. It would never hold since flooding on the Guadalupe River is practically an annual ritual. Nevertheless, Riverside Park offers some great running. I followed my nose and invented a nice 4.3 mile loop which could easily have been made into a 5 mile loop.

Riverside Park works fine as long as there is natural light. However, after dark I believe it might be a bit risky since lighting is not especially generous. That's why I took my one evening run on the track at Victoria Memorial High School. Things have changed since I was a student there. At that time it was the only high school in Victoria, it was known as Victoria High School (VHS), and we were the Stingarees. Now it's the Memorial High School Vipers. Another major change is the quality of the track. In my day at VHS, I'm not even sure they had a track. I seem to recall that the runners were bused over to one of the junior high schools, where there was a quarter mile track. Now, one finds at VHS a wonderful Tartan surface track. My feet thanked me that night for taking my 6 miles on the track and that was almost thanks enough to make me forget how much I dislike logging my miles on a track. I would much rather pound pavement, as we say, and next time I find myself in Victoria, needing a night time run, I will probably look up someone's running route on MapMyRun and run the streets. Either that, or do speed work on the track, and that's something I always hate to do. Yeah, yeah, I know if I ever expect to get faster I need to run wind sprints, but I would much rather jog for 10 miles than sprint for a quarter mile. Just me....

Don't Turn Back: A Cautionary Tale

According to a study published online Aug. 20, 2009 in Current Biology, our human navigation systems are woefully inadequate in situations where absolute landmarks such as the sun, moon, or a distant geographic landmark are not visible. Absent these bearing markers, we almost all tend to wander in circles, even unintentionally backtracking. In other words, get lost in a dense forest on a cloudy day and there's a good probability your travel track will describe a circle. In extreme cases, the test subjects wandered in a circle as tight as 66 feet in diameter, about the length of a basketball court.

Says Jan Souman of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany: "People cannot walk in a straight line if they do not have absolute references, such as a tower or a mountain in the distance or the sun or moon, and often end up walking in circles."

At the recent running of the Texas Independence Relay, a couple of runners on my Mid-Texas Symphony team committed momentary navigation bobbles while on the run. One runner took a wrong turn, went about half mile off the course, then turned around to correct his error. The other runner was not so lucky, ending up running an additional 3 miles on what should have been about a 6 mile leg. Running in the twilight of early morning on a trail, rather than a street, the runner panicked when she failed to see route markers. At that point she made the mistake of turning around, thinking she had missed a turn. This, of course, made it even more difficult to see course markers. Finally she encountered another runner who got her turned back around and eventually to the end of her leg. (This comedy of errors, not so funny at the time, was the result of the low light conditions, some problems with the signage, and the fact our team was running well ahead of the pack; essentially runners were on their own in finding their ways.)

Both of the above stories serve as parables regarding making a fitness commitment and sticking to it. From the first we learn the importance of establishing from the beginning a goal, better yet a sliding goal which is always pushed ahead as we become more and more fit. There is no finish line here. Failing to keep one's eye on a goal, your regimen will diminish into a circle.

A common lesson from both of our parables is that once you lose your way or, worse yet, backslide, the way back can be painful. Think of the sometimes steep curve one must climb in the early stages of reclaiming your fitness. Let's not put ourselves into the Yogi Berra loop of "deja vu all over again." For that matter, it is best to avoid as well Yogi's driving directions: "When you get to the Y in the road, take it." Set your bearings on a goal and stay the course!

The second parable, losing one's way and then turning back, can describe so many journeys of the will. How many alcoholics have struggled to sobriety only to fall off the proverbial wagon, perhaps with as simple a mistake as a social glass of wine or a beer with friends? Similarly, how many diets have been destroyed by a dessert binge or the thought that "surely this burger and fries won't hurt me." And finally, how many have invested in the long road to running a marathon, or riding the MS150 from San Antonio to Corpus, only to lose sight afterwards of the more important element of regularity of exercise. We should all remember that once the backslide begins, there is not only the task of checking one's tumble, but also the grit necessary to begin anew a fitness regimen. Better, by far, is to set your sight on that horizon landmark and never circle back.

Keys to Success

As with most everything in life, it is important to stay within the moment. That certainly applies to running and also to the weekend of extreme racing accomplished this past weekend by the running team which represented the Mid-Texas Symphony (MTS) at the Texas Independence Relay (TIR). This is a race which is ever in motion. Once the starting cannon is fired (it is a jolt!), feet are on the ground and moving forward until the finish line, over 203 miles away, is reached. There's no point in reflecting back, not can a runner look any further ahead than the next step, the next few feet ahead. Be here now could well have been coined for just such situations. Contrary to the notion often expressed by those who detest running, every step is not an endless repetition of the previous. The course ebbs and flows in what runners call rollers. And then there are other runners, strung out for seemingly endless miles. Now and then there are encounters and a race might occur within the race. I am infinitely satisfied by these competitive bursts and must fight back emotions when I see the runners congratulate each other at the ends of these footraces. "Great running," they will say to each other. The sportsmanship is incredible.

Running is largely a solitary activity, at least for many runners. Yes, I encounter quite a few runners who have running partners and there are even instances of running groups which go out together once a week on the "long run" which is part of every distance runners regimen. Nevertheless, the concept of running as a team, especially within a relay structure, is quite different than an individual runner competing against a marathon, or half, or a 10K. Admittedly, when I first formed the Mid-Texas Symphony running team I thought it might be a one event experiment. First, someone has to take the proverbial bull by the horns and organize the darned thing. That first team of 6 runners came together as an easily built team of 5. Getting the 6th runner was a challenge. In the end we fielded 6 runners, but only 5 bonded into a team. It's an experiment in evolution and chemistry. Three years ago, when we were challenged to expand the team to 10 for our first TIR, we were plagued by recruitment problems which almost doomed us from the start. A scant week and a half before the race I had only 7 confirmed runners. Others had said maybe, but had then dissolved into the ether. If not for miraculous intervention, I would have pulled our Mid-Texas Symphony team out of the inaugural TIR. That miracle came in the form of a couple of runners from Houston signing with the team and then another last minute email from a runner in Caldwell. Bingo - 10 runners. But of the 10, only 4 of us had ever run together. How much trust could one put in strangers known only via email?

We gathered part of our ragged team at a motel in Seguin the night before the first race. Holly, from Caldwell, was a band mom and a devoted, if sporadic, distance runner. Marie and Alan, from Houston, were chemists who liked to run and welcomed the adventure of an ultra relay. Liz, one of our original MTS runners, myself, and my sister Brenda (brought on as the designated Wrunner Wrangler) met Holly, Marie and Alan for the first time over dinner. Ready or not, we were about to be thrust into a weekend of running which would require not only endurance but also a great deal of trust. It seemed like it would work, but only the rigorous days ahead would truly prove whether we had a team, or not. We met our other runners the morning of the first race. Brian and his wife Denise were new and unknown to me. I knew their cousin Maeve only by reputation as a fine runner and the daughter of the Mid-Texas Symphony's librarian Ethne. Rounding out the team were Steve and his son Jonathan. They were part of the original MTS racing team. So.....here's what we had: 5 old friends (including Brenda the Wrangler) and 6 perfect strangers. We would get acquainted over the next 32 hours and see if we had a real team when we crossed the finish line at the historic San Jacinto Monument.

Anyone who has ever been part of team knows there are a lot more things which can go wrong than can go right. Thankfully, we got it mostly right that first year. By the end of the race, we were 12 friends, 10 runners, one wrangler and one other driver, Dorian, whom we knew as one of our original MTS runners. "Was the chemistry right?" I asked of Alan and Marie. "He's making a joke," said Marie and we all laughed while pledging to be back the following year to renew our newly made friendships.

In 2009 I added 2 more runners to bring us up to the maximum size of a 12 runner team. The "new" runners were Dorian and Fred, the husband and wife who were already part of the core MTS running team. Once again, the chemistry was great. Although we hadn't been together as a complete group since the year before, it was like a reunion of old friends. We laughed together and cried joyful tears together when Holly revealed at the end of the weekend that she had just beat an horrific brush with cancer. Let's do this again in 2010! It was unanimous.

The 2010 team had to be revamped slightly when Denise and Brian moved to Germany. Like the first year, finalizing the new team came to the last minute. I called on Arturo, whom I knew only through mutual friends and from talking to him on the phone about classical music, which he loves so deeply. David, a bassoonist who has played in the past with the Mid-Texas Symphony, finally became the 12th runner on the new team. Again, we had a group which was untested as a team. Would it work? We had set for ourselves a goal of breaking 30 hours in the 2010 race. On paper, it looked possible, but as every General Manager will tell you, the proof is in the pudding (strange phrase, isn't it, said to have been stated long ago in Cervante's Don Quixote as "the proof of the pudding is the eating"). Amazingly, we navigated around a couple of speed bumps and complications as the team gelled. The rookies quickly took to the challenge and in the end we achieved our goal of a sub 30 hours race. Our official finish time was 29 hours, 42 minutes, 48 seconds. "Shall we do this again next year?" I polled our ecstatic if weary team at the finish line. "Count on me!" came the unanimous response. It's times like this you are glad to be the captain.

So.....embedded in this narrative are a few keys to success, not only in building on fitness goals and achievements, but also in cementing friendships which will last long after the lactic acid has settled out and the muscles are no longer sore. What we do in keeping ourselves fit should be part of a whole life process, and that includes friendship, trust and respect annealed by the fire of accomplishment.