"Walk it off!"

For the first few years of high school, I had a gym teacher who had one answer for anything that happened to you in gym class.

Hit in the face with a volleyball? "Walk it off!"

Body-checked into the bleachers during floor hockey? "Walk it off!"

Ruptured your spleen during football? "Walk it off!"

OK, that last one didn't happen, but it could have. "Walk it off" was his stock answer for everything, to the point that it was jarring when we got another gym teacher later in high school who was all, "Do you want to switch teams so that you're not skins? Are you not feeling well, and just want to walk the track today? Do you want to help me referee? Maybe we need three or four refs for this," it was mentally jarring to have a teacher in gym who actually seemed to acknowledge that high school is a terrible time that couldn't always be walked off.

During our few years together, I imagined a number of things happening to that first teacher. I imagined him on fire. I imagined him crushed beneath the wheels of a school bus. I imagined him having a heart attack while screaming at someone in the middle of the gym, and all of the students running for help while I stood over him and whispered, "Walk it off", but I never imagined that, later in life, I would hear his voice in my head, and somehow find it inspirational.

Friday night, as part of the Great Smoky Mountains Half Marathon weekend, I took part in the 5K. When I did the half marathon last year and the year before I didn't do the 5K the night before, but I was unhappy with my performance last year and decided that if I was going to do this again this year, then I was going to challenge myself, and do more than just complete a half marathon. If you do the 5K on Friday and the half marathon on Saturday, they call it the Black Bear Double, and I signed up for it.

(Let's take a moment to recognize that over the course of a few years I've changed from a person who couldn't complete a half marathon to a person who feels that completing one isn't quite enough of a challenge. Holy shit. Who am I?)

Some people were pushing themselves on the double, which followed a lollipop-shaped course: there was a straight mile, a circular loop for a mile, and then you retraced the straight mile back to the starting and finishing line. I was between the first and second mile marker when the first runner heading toward the finish came back heading the other direction, but most of us were not pushing ourselves hard. Much of the back of the 5K was people who were doing the Black Bear Double, and we were all talking to each other about how we wanted to get an OK 5K time but not use up too much energy before the half marathon tomorrow. Everything was going according to plan, and then we got to the loop.

The loop was in a field.

The 5K was not advertised as a partial trail run, and the field didn't even have a trail. It had a path where a lane had been cut into the grass, and we had to follow it for a mile. At first I thought maybe I had just missed that part of the course description, but then everyone around me started complaining about it, too, especially the guy pushing someone in a wheelchair. I've never trail run before, but I've hiked, and I know that there's always a hole or a root or a rock waiting to trip you the minute you let your guard down. Sure enough, the second I realized that I was twenty feet from finishing the loop and getting back on the paved walkway, I looked ahead instead of at the ground and gave my ankle a good, hard roll.

It hurt.

It hurt a lot.

I staggered for a moment, and the two women walking with me both asked if I was ok, since they'd both seen me almost go down. Before I could answer, I heard a voice in my head.

"Walk it off."

I still had a mile of 5K to go, and then 13.1 miles in the morning. I could decide I was too injured to do either of those things, but I knew in my heart that was a lie. I've twisted my ankle before, and I knew it wasn't sprained. It would be sore, but I was not unable to finish. There was a guy behind me pushing someone in a wheelchair through grass, for Christ's sake, and I was going to crybaby about my sore ankle? I walked it off.



Then, the next morning, I walked again. Since my ankle actually was still sore in the morning, I changed my goal a little. While my original thought was that I wanted to beat last year's time, I decided that due to the injury I would just set a goal of finishing while favoring my ankle, and let my speed be my speed. Fortunately, the race rules have changed a little, and the sweeper at the end is a four hour pacer, rather than 3:30, like my first year, and I figured the extra half hour was enough of a cushion that I could walk at a normal pace, not jog on the downhills, and could baby the ankle a little while still finishing. Resigned to my slightly new goal, I shifted myself back from the 2:30-3:00 hour starting wave into the 3 hour plus starting wave, and that's where I met Gwen and Dennis:



They're a married couple from California who started doing half marathons for fun, and we walked together and talked for the entire race. We discussed our jobs (Gwen's retired), Tennessee (it was their first trip to our state, and they were pleasantly surprised by most of it; the exception being the Confederate flags they saw in a few places), food (they like the ribs here), classic horror movies (Dennis feels that Adrienne Barbeau was cast in so many because she was good at screaming, while Gwen and I agree that she was cast for something on her chest that wasn't quite her lungs), and pretty much anything else that popped into our heads while we made the slow trek from the high school to the finish line. At Mile 12, Gwen decided she wanted to jog the last part, so she went ahead and Dennis and I walked the rest of the way in together.

I got my finisher medal, and an extra medal for doing the Black Bear Double:





Overall, it was a very pleasant experience, except for my foot. Right around Mile 9 I thought, "Jesus, I think I have a blister." The same thing happened to me during the same part of the course last year, and sure enough, right around Mile 10 I felt intense pain in my foot, and then it slowly diminished through the rest of the race, meaning that the blister had probably exploded. When I finally got back to my hotel room, it turned out that I was right, but rather than show you a picture of my foot I'll just show you one of my sock:



It hurt a lot. Yesterday, after the race, I could barely walk on it. Overnight, the swelling has gone down quite a bit, and it's stopped leaking blood and fluid (whatever that is inside of blisters), but while I was thinking about it I realized that the problem is not, as I suspected last year, my shoes or how tightly I lace them. It's this specific course. I do eleven and twelve mile training walks without this happening. I've done another half marathon twice without this happening, but two out of three times that I've done this one on its terribly canted course surface and come away with a terrible weeping foot blister.

I haven't made a final decision yet, but I think I'm not going to do this race again.

Or I might just accept the blisters, and walk them off.

Last Place

I had a half marathon on Saturday, the Asheville Half Marathon at the Biltmore Estate, but it's taken me a couple days to write about it because I was waiting to figure out how I felt about it. See, unlike last year when I did this race and set a personal best, this year I did it and set a personal worst, and not just in regard to my finishing time.

I came in last place.

I'm not being overly dramatic, either. I was the last male finisher. Twenty women finished after me, but I was last for the guys.



I was so last that the photo above was taken by my friend Lauren's dad, because the official race photographer had already left the finish line area. Apparently if you are not at the front of the race you may as well not have been racing at all, and it doesn't matter if you finished because your achievement isn't worth being photographed. I've never before wanted to go find someone and scream the Starfish Story at them quite as much as I do the photographer right now, but that's not the feeling I've been trying to sort out for a few days. I've been trying to figure out how I feel about it.

The honest answer is that I feel fine.

I knew going in that this was going to be a hard race for a couple of reasons.

First, it's a hard course, as far as hills are concerned. I remembered this from last year, but since you probably haven't done the race yourself, feel free to look at the elevation changes chart at the bottom of this page. The hills are at the beginning, and the stretch between Mile 4 and Mile 6 is brutal. I slowed down a lot in that part and honestly thought about quitting, and another lady who was walking beside me for that stretch gave me kind of a pep talk about how she was struggling, too, and how we would both get through this and finish and everything would be ok. I pulled past her at Mile 7, and she was swept from the course for being too far behind just after Mile 8. I felt guilty about this for several hours, because she helped get me through a rough patch and I felt like I should have done more to help her, but other than offering encouragement I'm not sure what else I could have done.

She and I were struggling for the same reasons besides the hills: we were both heavier than the last time we did this race. I mentioned when I did my last half marathon in September that I had put some weight back on. I didn't get rid of that extra weight over the winter, but instead put a little more back on to go with it. I'm working on turning that around again (I've lost seven pounds since January, which is great, but I could definitely be working on that a little harder, and will, rather than working on fitting All Dressed chips into my mouth; why do they have to be so good, like Salt and Vinegar chips and BBQ chips had a delicious baby?), but in the meantime being bigger means being slower, and that's a concern on this race since they are very strict about the time. There are certain checkpoints, and you have to be above a specific time when you pass them, or you are removed from the course. Last year I didn't even see the sweeper, a man on a bicycle with a black broom across his handlebars, but this year I did: at Mile 8 there was a brief out and back (this is where you walk out to a point, turn around, and walk back) and he was coming into the out and back just as I was leaving it. I swore, sped up, and put him mostly out of my mind. The lady who talked me up the hill was entering the out and back just before he turned in to it, so I believe this is where he got her.

The last reason we were all struggling was the cold. The temperature was somewhere between the high twenties and low thirties Fahrenheit the entire race, and when I passed the house it flurried for a minute or two. Sure, we bundled up:







but there's something mentally draining about walking in cold weather for me. All of my cold weather races are always my slowest ones, and it's not because I have extra layers on. Instead, there is a constant refrain in my head of how cold it is, how I could be on my couch right now, how cold it is, how I want a hot chocolate, how cold it is, how sane people are inside right now, how cold it is, etc. Walking in the cold pulls my focus, so I never reach that moment where I forget that I'm walking at all and just truck along. It could have been worse, though. The people doing the full marathon on Sunday had to deal with snow:











I hope they all stayed warm.

So, I had a race:



I finished:



and I celebrated my victory:





like I wasn't the man in last place:



Mentally and physically, I'm in a much better place about this than I was after that half marathon in September. I'm not in pain, I only needed a day or two to recover, and I only got one small blister, from wearing the wrong socks. I discovered on Sunday morning that I actually had packed the correct socks, but I somehow couldn't find them in my bag on Friday night when I was laying out my race clothes. When I finished the race on Saturday and got back to our room I calmly told Laura and Bernadette, "There's some kind of situation in my shoe. I might have a blister, I think," and when I pulled off my sock there was a quarter-sized circle of blood on the bottom, but it had already burst sometime during the race and didn't hurt.

Now it's time to hang up my medal:



and focus on the next race.

Which is in two weeks.

Because I might be insane.

My Heart Will Go On

In considering yesterday's race, it's possible that I may have been too hard on myself.

This is a typical problem for me. If I do a presentation and receive five positive comments and one negative one on the evaluations, I only remember the negative one. I've never in my life walked out of anything I've done, a play or a presentation or a workshop or a training, and not dwelled on something that I could have done better.

Now that I've had a good night's sleep and some time to think about it, I wondered if this might be the case. Just this morning, I asked my good friends Angelina Jolie:



Dolly Parton:



and Jennifer Lawrence:



if they thought I was being too hard on myself, while my friend Orlando Bloom asked to see my finisher's medal more closely:



Those two jerks from "Twilight" tried to see it, too, but I pretended not to hear them.



Angelina, Dolly, and J-Law suggested that yes, maybe I was dwelling excessively on the negative. Yes, I was unhappy with my race time, but that was partially my own fault, and I was definitely overlooking the fact that I finished at all. Lots of people wouldn't have.

Thinking about that, I asked a few more friends what they thought.

Brad Pitt wanted me to hit him, as hard as I could.



I wasn't really down for that.

James Dean thought self doubt was tearing me apart.



Maybe he was right. After all, Katie Perry thought I was a firework.



And Dale Jr. thought I was a champ.



Adam Sandler was slightly skeptical of this whole exercise:



Cameron Diaz was bored by the whole thing:



and I didn't really care what Shia LaBeouf had to say:



but Taylor Swift advised me to just shake this off:



and Tom Hanks reminded me that races are sometimes like a box of chocolates, and you never know what you're going to get:



I had a bad race, but it's not the end of the world.

As Channing Tatum and I stared off into the distance, contemplating the race after this one:



Jack Dawson reminded me to never let go:



and I decided that yes, my heart will go on.



There's another race after this one, and I'll do better.

But I also completed this race, and that's also an achievement.

The Mystery Finish

I did the Great Smoky Mountains Half Marathon today, for the second time. Unlike the first time, though, I don't really know how I did. The published finishing times don't include me, which would not be terrible if I had noted what time I crossed the starting line.

I, of course, did not do so.

I was at the start line:



I was actually at the start line well in advance, before daylight was at the start line:



but they start us in waves depending on when our projected finishing time is. I was so focused on getting in my wave and starting in a good mental place that when I finally made it over the start line I didn't think to check the clock. I did think to take a photo of every mile, though, and by adding up the time in between them I have an idea of how I did.

The answer to that question is "not so good".

I finished somewhere before the 3:30 pacer, but I have no idea how much before, since I finished and immediately headed to the car, because my feet were killing me. I was also mentally drained, since I did this race by myself, and wasn't really thinking anything other than "Shower, chocolate milk, I might be crippled, shower, I have a medal, chocolate milk, shower..." on endless repeat through my head.

So how did the race go?

Mile 1



I was mostly fine here. A little cranky, as I usually am at the beginning of races, but moving at a good pace.

Mile 2



No matter where I am walking or racing, there is always someone pushing a baby stroller who manages to be faster than me. You can't see the stroller in that picture, but right around Mile 2 it went past me and I never saw it again.

I was walking a solid 15 minute mile pace at this point, based on photo time stamps, and managed to do so for five or six miles. Overall, I managed to keep on a 14-16 minute pace the whole way, except for a weird blip about 2/3 of the way through where I dropped down to a 19 minute mile, then must have realized I had slowed down, and did the next mile in 13 minutes.

Mile 3

I have no memory of Mile 3.

It is a thing that existed.

Mile 4



Mile 4 also exists. While I don't remember anything specific about it, it was around this point that the road really started to tilt. It's a very winding road, so it tilted one way and then the other, and the uneven walking started to loosen one of my shoes.

This will be important later.

Mile 5



I was in my zone at this point. Around the 5 or 6 mile mark, I can usually forget that I'm walking, and just move forward automatically.

That blonde in the light blue shirt next to the girl in the orange shirt? I stayed with her almost the entire race. She was doing a run/walk thing, so she would run ahead, then when she slowed down to walk I would pass her. We did this until Mile 12, when she finally passed me for good and I did not catch up.

Mile 6



Mile 6 is where I lost track of reality for a minute.

Somewhere after Mile 5 I decided that we had actually already passed Mile 6, and that the next mile marker, Mile 7, would mean we were over halfway done. So there I was, happily trucking along, and then I came around the corner and saw that we were at Mile 6, not Mile 7.

For a second I thought, "Why did they put up the six mile marker twice?" and almost said something to the people around me, but then I realized that no one else thought it was weird, so I wisely did not say anything.

Mile 7

This is the best photo I have of Mile 7:



I was really trucking along at that point, I guess, because all three photos of the Mile 7 marker are blurry.

Note that the road is still slanting.

Mile 8



Mile 8 is also slightly blurry, but it's because we were going downhill for a second. Not only that, but there was also suddenly a breeze at Mile 8. I don't know what happened there, but for a minute or two, it was fantastic.

Mile 9



Mile 9 is where I realized I had a problem with my shoe.

The tilting, uneven road had caused one of my shoes to loosen a little, so now instead of a snug fit, my left foot was rubbing back and forth on the bottom of the shoe with every step, and my sock was in between my foot and the shoe, rubbing and bunching and chafing.

I should have stopped for a second to re-tie my shoe, so that it would be good and tight again, but since I was making such good time and I was probably getting a little exhausted, I decided that I should just finish instead, because four miles is nothing. I walk four miles after work all the time. I'd just power through those four miles, and then my foot would be fine.

Mile 10



At Mile 10, I could feel a blister forming on the foot with the loose shoe.

I convinced myself that I only had a 5K left, and I walk those all the time, so fuck that shoe. Fuck that blister. I am a warrior, and I walk through the pain.

I really should have tied my shoe again.

Mile 11



Sometime during Mile 11 I realized that I had a problem in my other shoe, too.

At first, I thought there was a rock in my shoe. I don't know how one would have gotten in there, eleven miles in, but there was definitely a small stone-like object in my right shoe. On each step, I tried to shake my foot around a little, so that it would end up between my toes and not right in ball of my foot (the same spot where a blister continued to form on my left foot), and when I did get it up by my toes I realized I could feel it with my toes.

One of my toenails fell off inside my shoe.

After the race, I discovered that it was my pinky toe nail, and that it will grow back. During the race, I was filled with uncertainty.

"Do I need that toenail? Will it grow back? Did it cut the bottom of my foot, or is my foot just sweaty? I can't tell, but what if my shoe is filling up with blood? How many miles are left until I can take this toenail out of my sock?"

Mile 12



I slowed down here. People that I passed early in the race started to pass me now. My left foot was killing me, since the blister wouldn't burst for some reason, and every few steps I had to shake the toenail in my right shoe back into place.

I'm going to say right now, though, that these are not the only reasons why I slowed down. The God's honest truth is that I was not in the shape that I should have been for this race. I took a bunch of rest days all summer long, and ate a bunch of garbage. I have put some weight back on, and my speed is down because I have become a slightly larger person who didn't train enough.

This is my own fault, and I admit that.

These are problems that I will remedy.

In the meantime, I hit Mile 13:



I was almost limping at this point, definitely favoring my right foot over my left, but I was still ahead of the 3:30 pacer. Someone called my name, someone gave me a medal:



and I gave myself a chocolate milk and a donut.

Now, I'm waiting to hear back from the race management, to find out what my actual times were.

In the meantime, I've resolved to do better next time.