Dear Mr. and Ms. Everyday Running,
I sure wish ya'll'd go do a lap of the Rocky Raccoon course and file me a report, particularly in regards to its degrees of ascent and descent. I'm wondering whether any of the courses available to me come close to satisfying my specificity-of-training index.
Yours,
Rockamundo
P.S. I jogged and walked two laps of the Burns Park Basketball Court Loop this morning and early afternoon in 2:41:07. That's pretty fucking close to 9.6 miles. It was easy. My lap splits were 1:20:20 and 1:20:47.* On the first lap, I alternated three-minute jogs with two-minute walks, except I did not run uphill. Instead, if the uphills came during the first three minutes of each five, I would make up for not running during those three-minute segments by jogging during the two-minute segments. It wasn't long before I realized I needed to start banking minutes, or, in other words, jogging whenever the course was downhill, and also when it was level—or close to level—according to feel. This was particularly true as the rout ascended toward the Boy Scout Trail parking area (also known to the Little Rock Hash as the Grassy Knoll. That blonde-headed college girl named Sarah made her last run there, a couple of days before ya'll flew to get married). By the time I finished the first lap, I had a total of five running-minutes banked (which is to say that on the second lap I could've walked five extra minutes). The most significant advantage of this way of proceeding is that it serves as a nearly perfect blood-glucose gauge. As I think you both could imagine, it requires the conduction of a considerable amount of elementary math (i.e.; "OK, so you were five minutes, twenty-two seconds over, and you just walked for forty-eight seconds up that hill during an otherwise required running segment, so now you're four-minutes, thirty-four seconds over. ...Fuck, man, wait; are you sure?"). The problem is, the math eventually consumes me; consequently, on the second lap, I walked the ascents and jogged the descents, and played the levels and slight ascents-descents according to feel (ultimately, as I proceed through the final eight weeks of preparation for the Rocky Raccoon 50, "according to feel" will apply to every degree, I think). It surprised me to see that my lap splits were so even; I clearly felt better after the second lap than at the end of the first. That would be hard to explain. I think I might try four laps this Saturday morning, probably alone. I don't think I'd want to subject the Gimblet Group to my idiosyncratic analism (I write "idiosyncratic" because I'm sure that everyone has at least something about which they are anal. For me, of course, thousands of things tragically fall into that category). My blood glucose when I got home, after eating one PowerBar Energy gel—roughly forty-five minutes into the first lap—was at 113, or in that roughly 90-120 perfect zone.
P.P.S. This evening I jogged and walked about three miles with the Humpin' Hash on a circuit which began and ended at E.J.'s. I felt great, wonderful in fact, jogging almost every step of the way. The only problem was that my blood sugar dropped off the chart and the fucking dickhead Richard Short Ladder called an ambulance, and an embarrassing scene ensued when all I needed was half a fucking glass of Coke. ...No, wait. I'm fine. I'm no longer embarrassed. I don't like Short Ladder, but it really has nothing to do with his calling an ambulance. He didn't know better. I'll tell you sometime.
OVERHEARD
"These guys are just like fucking bugs. You stomp 'em, and they come back and you got'ta stomp 'em again." —Green Bay Packers Coach Raid Ant & Roach®, commenting on Russellmania III, whom his team defeated 115.16-102.71 in the Democrat Football League regular season, and will face in the DFL playoff semifinals this weekend. The Packers are slightly more than thirty-point favorites
*you might want to quit reading at this point; trust me, really, because I'm about to expose the depths of mankind's potential for anal reasoning
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