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Monthly Summary – June 2015

(Pre-travel to States taper run at Runyon with Billy. photo: Billy)

June was a really fun month. If I’m not going to run any big races this year, I can at least participate as a crew member and pacer for friends. At the beginning of the month, I went out to San Diego 100 to help Elan. His race started fantastic and he held on for about 90 miles despite running about 40 of that with awful IT Band pain but finally succumbed at mile 93 and had to drop. It was a bummer, but given the amount of pain he was in right before he dropped, it was the right call. Check out his race report.

In the middle of June, I took a quick weekend trip to Wainscott to hang with Elizabeth (who spent a week there) and my in-laws. The weather was nice and we had a chill couple of days.

Mark and I took the dogs to the beach two evenings for long walks. Gus alternated running like a mad man and hiding next to my legs. The boys loved having a big back yard at the house to run around too.

Then, last weekend, I closed out June by crewing and pacing Billy at Western States. I had a blast the whole weekend, especially during the race. Billy had a fantastic race. He struggled through some wrecked quad muscles but still managed to finish strong. I paced him from about mile 62 (Forest Hill) to mile 79.8 (Green Gate) and he kicked ass through that whole section. I was trying to keep count and we passed at least 30 runners during that stretch.

(photo: Jimmy)

He hasn’t done a race report. Yet? The rest of the weekend was fun too. On Friday evening a group of us did a great run up the Escarpment in Squaw Valley and then down this rad single track on the Western States Trail (not part of the race).

After Billy finished at 6:5o on Sunday morning, we hung out at the finish for the rest of the day, watching people come in, including Gunhild Swanson, the oldest female finisher at the race ever, who finished with just 6 seconds to spare before the race cut-off! It was an exhausting weekend and we didn’t sleep between 3:45am Saturday morning and 9:15pm Sunday night, but it was worth it. Even if I still don’t feel recovered from the lack of sleep.

As a preview, July is not going to be nearly as “fun”. And, as a result, the second half of 2015 is probably going to be very different from the first half of the year. I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but last fall I found out that I have a new growth (read: benign tumor) in my spinal column. I thought that I might be able to get away with just radiating it, but it turns out that I have to have surgery. Thankfully, I’m not having any symptoms, but if I don’t take care of it now, I probably will start having symptoms soon. And that would be really bad. If you haven’t been reading this blog for all the years, this will be my third time (2003, 2010 and now) having this type of surgery. The prior two were for a growth in a different area, slightly higher up my spine. I’m going under the knife on July 13. It will put me out of commission for a little while. I’m not particularly looking forward to it and I’m mostly just pissed off that I have to have the surgery. More to come on this topic soon.

For now, here’s my tally of my “performance” this month against the six goals I’ve been keeping in mind recently. The red is my evaluation of how I feel I did in June. Getting back into running has helped me with all six of the goals; it makes sense though, when I’m running well, I eat better and sleep better and feel more positive:

1. Eat better. I ate pretty well in June, but travel always disrupts my diet. I inevitably end up eating more processed food and lots of stuff that I wouldn’t normally eat. I did my best and feel like I treated my body fairly well.   
2. Focus on getting better sleep. Travel and otherwise being out of my routine is disruptive to sleep as well. Three weekends in June – crewing/pacing Elan at SD100, traveling to NY and crewing/pacing Billy at States – I didn’t get much sleep. And with my schedule and the fact that I’m almost always automatically up really early, it’s very difficult to make up for lost sleep. On the other hand, when I did sleep, I slept hard. I could have just used more of it. 
3. Continue swimming, yoga and strength training on a regular basis. My streak of “biggest month swimming ever” ended in June. Between the travel and the fact that both the Culver City and West Hollywood pools switched to reduced hours for the summer, it was much more difficult to even get to the pool during the times that it was open. 42,000 meters is still a big month compared to any month in any prior year, but it’s a fair amount less than I’ve been doing recently or than I’d planned. I didn’t make it back to yoga, but at least I did at least one strength training session every week.
4. Run easy. Maybe hit the trails for some easy training. Another good month of fun running. Pacing Elan at SD100 and Billy at States were the running highlights of the month for sure. I ran up Mt. Wilson with David Daley a couple weeks ago and struggled mightily, but still mostly had fun. I did a couple harder runs as well and even though I’m not as fast or strong as I was a year ago, I do feel like my running is mostly back. If not for surgery in 2 weeks, I’d be thinking pretty seriously about racing something this fall.  
5. Be positive.  I was generally positive and optimistic in June. A busy Josh is mostly a happy Josh and I was busy! 
6. Read at least one book, hopefully two. I read four books in June; three non-fiction, one fiction. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, by Erik Larson was fine, but too long. The story of the actual sinking of the ship was great and I found the politics and policy decisions in the US, UK and Germany fascinating, but for me, I would have preferred more of the politics and less of the vignettes about individual passengers. Then I read, The Melon Capital of the World, by my friend from the pool, Blake Allmendinger. The book is an interesting memoir about growing up in small town Colorado and then returning there decades later. Third, was I Am Pilgrim, by Terry Hayes. This was my favorite of the month. I used to read a lot of spy/thriller novels, but this was the first in a long time and I really enjoyed it. Smart, exciting, with some decent twists and good suspense. Finally, was Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, by Jill Leovy. A few months ago when the book came out, the author was making the rounds on radio and TV and interview with Scott Simon on “Fresh Air” was fascinating. Unfortunately, it’s not a book I walked away from with much optimism about the future for young black men in urban America, but, especially in a time when police are getting so much heat for their treatment of minority suspects, it was nice to read about a few detectives who are really trying to make a difference in a place as tough as South Central LA. Connect with me on Goodreads!

I still haven’t finished my #100FewerThings. Will I ever? It’s all there for the doing, I just need to find/spend the time to finish it up. I sold my Rudy Project Wingspan aero helmet, cleaned a bunch of stuff out of my car  and put a bunch of things in a duffle bag for probable donation. I’ll count that as +2 because I won’t count the stuff in the duffle until it’s actually gone. On the other hand, while up at States, I got a bunch of new (free) stuff: rad hats from Tailwind and Nike, a t-shirt from Nike and a bunch of socks from Stance. That puts me at 80 + 2 – 4 = 78. I’m moving in the wrong direction here…

Here’s June by the numbers:

Swim: 42,038 meters
Cycling (outdoors): 0 miles
Run: 134.2 miles
Total Run Elevation Gain: 21,013 feet
Strength Training/Yoga: 5 sessions
Approximate monthly total training time: 43 hours
Weight: 161-ish