Marathon

Confidence restored. After a shitty marathon #16 in Cincinnati a month ago (5:24) I cranked out marathon #17 in Madison in 4:47:27 . I dedicate this particular effort to my co-runner TA McCann and my sherpas Amy Batchelor and Jessica Schallock. For the first 20 miles the weather was perfect. Cloudy and 60-ish. TA lived in Madison for several summers in college when he was a mega-swimming stud so he kept me entertained with tails of training for five hours a day, every day, in a pool, over and over again – which made running a marathon seem relatively straightforward. ...

This morning, as I cranked through my 5am – 7am routine (which ends at 6am today because I have to leave the house at 630am to get to CU Boulder to give a keynote at the 2011 Boulder Economic Summit) I kept thinking to myself “deep breath.” If you do yoga you know exactly what I’m talking about – it’s part of Amy’s mantra for each of us to relax, slow down, and concentrate. ...

I’ve now put together eight great weeks of running in a row. On Sunday, I finally had a long run to town (from Eldorado Springs to Boulder). This has been a long tradition of mine and Amy’s – I run to town early in the morning and she drives in later, we have brunch with friends, and then get massages in the afternoons. I also use this as a marker to measure my running – once I cross the “run to town barrier” I can start thinking about marathons. ...

Fred Wilson emailed me a link to Dennis Crowley’s post I’m running the NYC Marathon tomorrow! Fred knows my obsession with human instrumentation, marathons, and social media. And if you recognize Dennis’ name, that’s because he’s the founder / CEO of Foursquare . As I write this from my house in Eldorado Springs, Colorado, I can see that Dennis is at mile 4.64 of the NYC Marathon via RunKeeper . He just checked in at mile 5 on Foursquare . And yes, Twitter and Facebook are active also. ...

I had my first pain free run in five months. And I’m very happy right now. In March, I hurt my back. This was my first real running injury since I started running marathons in 2003. I’ve had some ankle twists and some knee bruises from all the trail running I do, but nothing that kept me off my feet for more than a month. This time I lost five months ; the last time I tried to run was two months ago. ...

Marathon #15 is in the bag – I finished the New Orleans Rock ‘n’ Roll Mardi Gras Marathon in a time of 05:15:05 yesterday . Here’s a video of me crossing the finishing line. It was a beautiful day for a marathon – the temperature was 50 degrees and the sky was clear. There were about 18,000 runners (most for the half marathon) and like most Rock ‘n’ Roll races it was extremely well organized. ...