how to run a marathon - part 2

Learning to run great distances is a -DIY- do it yourself adventure. Meaning have fun and experiment with options. You will learn not only about your body and mind and spirit, but also open yourself up to a whole new universe of extreme sports. Every time I thought I had nothing more to learn, some challenge arose which caused me to discover more. Not only do you get to be outdoors in nature for hours at a time (i did exactly zero minutes zero hours in the gym), but you get to experience deeper breathing, the runner's high, and comradery with fellow runners. There's a lot of physical pain that accompanies extreme sports, so it takes a certain kinda person to subject themselves voluntarily to running a marathon. And many people think we are crazy 'cause we don't get paid. We have to cover the costs of entrance fees, shoes and equipment, yes. I had at least a half dozen perfect strangers over the past 6 months tell me I must be crazy. Haha-ha!

All I can say is I am 43 years old and probably in the best shape of my life. I rocked 26.2 miles and got a ton of love from spectators, family, friends, and other runners. I spend countless hours along the most beautiful river in northern California, which I otherwise might have wasted online staring at a computer or worse. And I have a huge sense of accomplishment which carries over to confidence I have in everything I do. Now if that's 'crazy' - please - make me insane!

I try and keep things simple or minimalist: no watch, no headphones, no camelbacks while running. Garmin makes watches which track your pace and heartbeat and distance and many runners have them, but you don't need them if you're concerned only with having fun and finishing, not with racing. It's all up to you. A flipbelt will hold up to 10 GU gels around your waist, which is all the energy you need for 26.2! You can keep stuff in a wristband, too, including S-caps and even powdered supplement mix or gatorade in a plastic baggie for when you find a water fountain. I used GU Roctane during the marathon, which has sodium, caffeine, and extra amino acids. I also took S-Caps (salt and potassium pills) to keep safe from dehydration. My method was 1 GU every 40 minutes, 1 S-Cap every hour, for 5 hours. Just before my long runs, I drank a bottle of water mixed with Apex pre-workout mix (1 scoop) and Old School's 'Vintage Blast' pre-workout (1 scoop) in lieu of GU. During the marathon I drank water and/or gatorade/nuun at every aid station, approx every 3 miles. When training on your own, you must find water fountains or hide a water bottle ahead of time, if you do not carry water. Don't go more than 6 miles without fluids! Bananas and oranges were offered along the CIM course and I always took them.

Your energy level will go in waves! When tired, shorten your stride and ease back on your pace. When energized, I say go for it and pick up the pace. Listen to your body. If you suffer runner's knee or other joint pain: KT-Tape is the bomb! Use it. Carry it. Negative splits are better than positive splits! Meaning run the first half slower than the second. I hit a wall hard after running 10min miles for the first half of my first race, which was a 20 miler one month before the marathon. My natural pace is 11 min/mile, but I had a lot of adrenaline and was pushing hard. I learned quickly the dangers of the positive split. My legs were so tired by mile 16 I could hardly continue on. But experiencing this wall over the next 4 miles was probably good for me, because I learned how to run on tired legs and finish.

You can discover your pace by knowing your distance and time, checking the clock before you set out and after you return.  Just subtract any time you took for water/bathroom breaks. You can easily map out your route distance beforehand by going to google maps, right clicking your mouse and selecting 'measure distance'. Then you divide your total minutes ran by total distance ran, to get your pace. It's that simple. I found that I consistently ran a natural pace and could chip away at it on shorter runs.

how to run a marathon - part 1

Having run the CIM 2016 (my first marathon) in 4:58, I wanna to show some love and share my experience with any runners who wish to take on the challenge. I got so much wonderful and free advice online from so many bloggers along the way! I am so grateful. Here are some things that worked for me in my adventure. I hope they work for you, too...

If you are starting from scratch, give it a 4-6 month training window. Go ahead and find a tried and true schedule and post it on your wall. I used Hal Higdon's 16 week intermediate marathon training schedule. Let yourself stray from the schedule based on your instincts. Everyone has their own personal challenges which will impact daily life. Just know that if you keep running, your legs will get stronger. 10% increases in mileage per week is considered the gold standard. Many runners alternate weeks increasing their sunday long runs to new distances, then falling back to rest the legs. I started out running totals of 15-20 miles a week, then worked my way up to 50-60 miles (with a 20 mile longest sunday run) in 12 weeks, then used the last 4 weeks to taper back down to 20-30 range, letting the legs recover before the big one. Cross-training is essential. I chose cycling and hiking. If I felt I needed a day off, I took it. If I could run 5 days straight, I did. The back-2-back concept is very helpful for learning/feeling how to run on tired legs. Hitting a wall here and there is good for you to experience the pain and try and run through it. Psychological/mental conditioning.

There is such a thing as over-training and it's dangerous! Keep to the schedule if you can. You could injure yourself. New runners can be prone to injuries because your body is still adjusting to the high impact sport of long distance running. What happens with a new runner is your body tries to acclimate to the stress of impact, and often expends energy trying to stabilize/protect your legs. Experienced runners will find that, once acclimated, the body will be able to use those energy channels towards forward momentum.

Buy quality running shoes that are made for long distances. My personal favorite shoe and the one that got me through: Brooks' Launch 3! A 'neutral trainer' that is very supportive but not too heavy, and has the kind of midsole cushioning which pushes back to help your forward momentum. Be aware of 'pronation' and have someone check your stride. Shoes wear out in 300-500 miles. Have an alternate pair and keep track. Faster runners tend to run on different shoes than they train on. Hokas are cushiony and good for recovery runs. The Pegasus 33 Nikes are good but a bit heavy. There are tons of useful shoe and product reviews all over the internet. Use them.

Use anti-chafing sticks like 'Body Glide' for surfers. Long runs will rub raw your arms, feet, inside of your thighs, anywhere there's friction. Experiment with socks. They do make socks these days which prevent blisters, but moleskin helps, too. I experienced a knee injury while breaking in my Hokas which caused me to need new shoes only days before my race, and the 'Swiftwick' socks I was offered kept the blisters at bay. If you do get blisters while training, there are safe ways to pop and bandage them and keep running without delay. Don't forget suntan lotion if you are fair-skinned. Nobody loves skin cancer and you may be out running for 3-4 hours at a time...

DIY Brain Audit

How to audit your brain this tax season...

memory # sun light strike

I remember my mom cutting my hair when I was a little kid with the same scissors we used to cut out shapes from colored paper,  long with a colorful plastic handle it made a funny sound like a metal cricket when its two sharpened legs came together, one of them cold resting against my forehead to steady her hand, the high-pitched shwee-sh-wooo, and the air in the autumn smelled of crunchy dead leaves, the smoke from the chimneys came across in the breeze, and my eyes wanted to look around cause we were outside, seated on a stool on the porch my dad built, the door behind us painted a bright cherry red when all the adrenaline rushed to my head as the cricket danced across my face, and my mom's hands loving but firm taking hair up between her fingers and licking it to make an end, like a stamp for a letter to a friend, shwee-sh-wooo, then stepping back to check her work and guiding my big head in her hands, eggs and bacon on the breeze coming off the neighbor's trees, the sound of distant lawnmowers and some petrol I can taste as she cuts behind my ears and my face, shwee-sh-wooo, and presses a thumb behind my ear, and her other hand cupping my head, saying hold still! in a firm but even tone, the old school ringing of the phone behind the door, shwee-sh-wooo, getting impatient saying sit up some more so I scoot up in the chair and try to hold myself there, but the colors of the morning and the itching of the hair, have my head following my eyes, and the metal crickets almost cut me, hold still! - I thought I was - and the now she's working on the fuzz on the nape of my neck, shwee-sh-wooo, the goosebumps come up and I giggle feeling chills, and my mom's got her allergies on her allergy pills, maybe hungover from the night before and the mischief we made, my brother and I in the night feeling brave, tiptoeing up to the attic on steps all of which creaked to play air hockey or just watch tv in the dark, feeling adventurous quite high on the lark, shwee-sh-wooo, and now I am hoping it will be over very soon, as my keeper is not happy i'm afraid, leaning into me smelling of dad's cologne and perfume, shwee-sh-wooo she pulls at my hair and shouting hold still! the tone of her voice demanding and shrill, and I picture my ear cut off on the boards, bleeding down into the planks on the porch dripping down into the ground in the soil, to sprout in the dark some ears on a vine, and then i will pick one to best replace mine, and though there is forceful aggressive hedging going on, I still cannot repress a long sigh and a yawn, for I know I am safe at my sweet mother's behest, soon in her loving arms will I rest with her fingers running through the blonde wave she has made, all the ends misplaced and bangs askew I'm afraid, but who knows and who knew and who cares I could say, lucky and kept in a rough-loving way.

K reads... 'like thunder' (original non-fiction)

'like thunder'

posted on K IS SILENT

July, 2013

All my world had puffed up like a blowfish around me, then blew a massive hole in the ocean. Like those bastards, BP. I came out like Jonah from the belly of the whale. I had found those goddamn roadflares from my truck. The ones I never had when I needed them, stranded with my hazards on halfway down an exit ramp off the great highway. Well, I took advantage of my luck. The moment the clouds gave way to the sky. I struck a match off the heel of my boot, and lit those mothers. Without hesitation. That’s when the whole thing blew wide open. Pretty close to the time the world was supposed to end, again. The impact left ink trails falling all around you and me. Poisoning my ecosystem and yours, too, for a little while. Until the great ocean diluted and detoxified, and cleaned up my mess. So life could go on again, uninterrupted. I’m sorry. I can tell you I am sorry today and I mean it. I thought about it for a long while. Days upon days, actually. There was hardly nothing to do. I had taken my usefulness out of me. Fell asleep on the couch in the dead heat of the day. My kittens stretched out wishing their fur away. The television was on. The television was off. My hold on reality was tenuous. I lost a cat out there. Just like I lost one a decade earlier. I lost alot more, backsliding and sliding. Everything I tried to communicate seemed to come out all encrypted. The more I plugged in passwords and master passwords, the less safe I felt. Probably no one but my ex-boyfriend really truly wanted me dead. But I guarded what was left of me, with all that I could. The nightmares cascaded, if I fell asleep in the silence. Only the ceiling fan spinning far above us. The Tibetan bell I hung off the light fixture was ringing ever so softly beside me and my broken ankle bracelet hanging off of me. 

When I could breathe again. When I could read again. When I could look you in the eyes again. That’s when I noticed. When I no longer wanted light, but got lit anyway. I picked up the kittens and kissed them many times. Their bodies hung limp from the palms of my hands. They trusted me so well, they could drip off my arms and melt into the air. My heart melted inside me, over this. The trust, I mean. What a fucking gift. I carried them and myself down the hall to the bedroom. Many times, every day. My eyes half burned out from so many moons and full suns. I can feel my age. The surface temperature of my skin seems to have elevated, substantially. My head aches, and my belly grows. The infertility is juxtaposed. My imagination was seen as a dove by a merchant marine long out at sea. Coming home. My spirit is the delta. The heat of the day seems to linger all night there. My kittens cannot stand to drape over me for too long. They want to. But my body, their fur, well, it’s all much too warm. All my world had puffed up, you see, an inflammation of my soul. And this wasn’t gonna let up so easy this time. Not this time. I had done alot of damage, now. I had painted over the woodwork. Restoration was a bitch. All those relationships I chose, over the relationship I most needed. Let me tell you, it is good to live alone. I hope to stretch time out into solitude. With a steady stream of social media from which to drink. With a world outside my windows waiting for me, when I cannot think. I lost alot by losing myself all the time like that. This was okay, to be worn out and all. I could remember the past, I could tell you the truth some day. But the conscious bold type is screaming grade A psychotic. Still fresh. I think it only right to be humble and patient, not slough the old skin any faster than it wants to. Not so much, but maybe a little at a time. Maybe a little like now. I am not afraid, but rather listening to my truth all alone like I should. And it’s telling me things. Important things. Nuances. Sometimes painful like hell, sometimes touching me so deep. I am so sensitive. I hurt alot. I suffer, but not always in silence anymore. I cry alot, but without shedding tears. A lot less drama. The explosion was necessary. A spiritual emergency. The difference now is the break. Allowing things to shift a little. So I can safely think. So the ecosystem can take a little ink. So I can go out and buy my rice and pasta and fry up my corn tortillas in olive oil, while the green beans are roasting, Indonesian Sumatra. My life is a blessing. Any way that it goes. My choices fall in succession, in rows after rows . The holy temple of my spirit, was always with me and protected. This was my saving grace. She almost got ground out with my Newports, under my heels. I often tried to extinguish her. But I have so much to offer, like they say. I could open a fucking restaurant and offer all day. Anyway. The moon, she is waxing, and the darkness fills around her. I can see it, feel it, know it, be it. The substance, the system, the whole damn thing rides on spoke balanced wheels. I roll them twelve miles, as I get to know myself again. I roll those wheels and the flame delivers like magic, between my forefinger and thumb. My sweet kittens, four brown eyes, two on either side, watch in wonder. In wonder.My verse drops my spirit, like thunder. Like thunder.

my friend the diy queen and killer (and lead singer for the bacon maybes)

Let me tell you about my old friend. The DIY Queen. Stitched her own clothes. She was that kinda chick. I am sure she would have homeschooled her kids, had she lived long enough to have kids. She was just that kinda wonderfully eccentric. Licked her stamps, long after stamp licking went out of fashion. She refused to buy the stickers. You couldn't tell her half of nothing! Patched her bicycle tubes with the old-fashioned patches. Thats how they got her DNA (the stamps, not patches), the detectives who tracked her down somewhere between Boulder, Colorado and Roswell, New Mexico. She wasn't able to run no more. She had broken her leg, on stage, after eloping with a clown. Such is the common result of fabricating your own shoelaces from yarn. Eloping with clowns, that is, not breaking a leg.

She was long gone just before then, long gone from California and where we grew up together. She sent a postcard to the State Fair and all its entertainers. That's how they caught her. Through those postcards she wrote to create alibis for herself, the profilers later said on the news. Selfish-like! That's the reason I decided to write this, here. Because someone needs to set the record straight. And I can tell your for damn sure! She never sent a postcard selfish-like in her all-2-short life! I know. I even have the sweet postcards she sent me, to prove it. But it's all too late for that, now. They claimed for a fact she wrote postcards selfishly, for appearances. Not to cement friendships. And she prioritized the envelopes with little sky blue Par Avion  stickers, thinking flight would hasten delivery from out of state. She conveniently forgot the extra postage required, they suggested.

She addressed the postcard in question to: 'family '. Yet those damn fool profilers and lawmen done her wrong, simply to do her wrong. Because she was the diy killer. Well, let me tell ya. She may be the diy killer to you, but she was my diy Queen!

The postcard was delivered by a truck without wings. The driver of the truck drank coffee from machines, and endlessly smoked smokeless e-cigarrettes. Just like her. Lucky for him, commonality ended there. He was simply an inconspicuous courier for the communique of a murderess, they said. That's why they could not pick her up sooner. She was too much of a yarn-laced straight shooter. An environmentalist. Contributor to the Save the Manatee campaign. No ifs. No ands. And No butts. She gave a shout out to technology, before they remotely switched the fatal dose of electricity into her (After her last request e-cigarrette with the near fatal dose of chemicals, in an e-filter she had put together DIY style during her many clocks on death row).

All the wannabe amateur tattoo artists shed an extra ink tear that day, for her. She had revolutionized the making of ink guns behind bars, among other things. The pivoting needles she made with smuggled ball bearings and button wheels, had earned her the nickname Rosie the Pivoter, which was a great promotion from her original name Suzie the Shuffler. She had not been overmedicated, however. Little did they know when they named her, she was simply effecting static electricity by the soles of her shoes.

No one at the California State Fair could remember her at first. The bearded lady finally ID'd her, with help from the psychic and a lineup, and some vague threats and from certain cops, not the least of which was to shave her face. This happened after the suggestion of near future financial windfall (not the shave, the ID). In the midst of a healthy reward, posted by an cuckolded clown. The bearded man (a detective) turned the whole thing over and over in his mind looking back. He felt disturbed. He had a strange attraction to the bearded lady. This attraction became an immense and lifelong distraction and burgeoning addiction to hirsute porn. So they say. He stuck the postcard to a lonely corkboard, with a paperclip he straightened into a pin. When questioned about his methodology by the chief of police, he suggested he was trying to live inside the head of the alleged diy killer. The chief screwed up his eyes, then called upon the local stock employee to stock the detective's office desk with pushpins.

They had the diy killer by her own confession, finally. What other way could there be? She took great pride in having taken the law in her own hands so naturally, in her vainglorious DIY-style. Her band, the Bacon Maybes, may have made their debut the following year, had she not been locked up. No one will ever know what kind of fame they would have achieved, Rosie the Pivoter and the Bacon Maybes, outside of her great infamy.

Far as I can tell, she was the first DIY Queen, I mean, she was mine. We made our own kombucha. She taught me. It was a nasty start, but it was a start. Ultimately she made good on her promise to one day have her own hens to lay her eggs she could crack in the frying pan. Plenty leftover to trade for milk and cheese at the farmer's market, or for hard boiling. Hell, if she had lived long enough to have had her own land, I wouldn't dare bet against her trafficking in just about anything the earth can turn up. Give her the sun, a hose and some dirt, and pretty much anything and everything was made possible.

But not men. She did quietly outsource them her whole life. She confided in me how she loved the adrenaline rush of a one night stand. Made me shiver. She was a modern woman. Not a feminist. Not traditional. Just a single mom by choice. She didn't hate men. She loved whomever was worthy of her love. Whom just so happened to be clowns, most of the time. Not losers, mind you. Clowns. Entertainers. Entertainers of children and families alike. They loved her, and she loved them. She could accessorize a clown with enough of her inventions to draw his act out a half hour or more. And you thought flowers that spit water and noses that honked like horns were special? Please. I don't have time to go into it, but please! We are talking about my diy Queen.

She just made her choices, with the experiences she had been given. Long ago, when she was still a teenager, she got caught up with a boyfriend turned sneaker pimp. Soon he had her pulling tricks. By proxy of another bad habit she learned from him: phenobarbital washed down with margarita mix. The storebought kind. Corn syrup with a whole tie-dye list of artificially flavored, numbered colors. The nightmare was over almost before it started. She was far from a pimp's paradise. Within a year or two, well, she was sleeping in her own bed again. He was nowhere to be found. Not just not in her bed, I mean. Nowhere. The sneakers, without the pimp.

The way I like to look at it? I guess one of them was bound to disappear, anyhow.

I choose to remember my friend, I knew. Not the DIY whore she became. We used to chew on licorice stalks, and talk serious about light things like cloud formations on an otherwise partly sunny day. She had this magic of making light of what was serious, and vice versa. We made eachother laugh. She inspired me to see things differently. We once had an benevolent kinda influence on us. Evolution of trust. if you ever heard of trust before. Trust existed way back when, before tv and sedentary life of suburban planning, when people had to rely on people to survive. Before culture began to stall like seems to do, now. Before shit got so comfortable. Before the able became the dysable. So simple it makes no sense, no more.