Impact A Hero 5K

Today I ran in the Impact A Hero 5K, which raises funds to assist our severely wounded veterans coming home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After the first mile, I had to take a walk break because once again, I had gone out too fast and hit my Puke Point. After resuming my run, I noticed that Gary Kubiak had caught up to me. The NFL Houston Texans head coach has been the honorary chairperson for the Impact A Hero 5K for a few years now. He and some of the players were out there this morning to lend some "star power" to the morning's activities.

For a couple of miles, I was keeping pace with Coach Kubiak, who once again was wearing bib #1. To my credit I refrained from lamely asking if we were going to the playoffs this year. He's been a self-professed treadmill junkie in the past, but today he confessed that he only goes running only every other day now. As the Mile 3 marker drew near, Kubiak obviously had more left in the tank than I did, and he pulled away and left me in his wake.

The first time I ran this event in 2007, he pretty much did the same thing to me. The old QB can still scramble, I suppose. I think one of my future goals should be to beat Kubiak to the finish line in this race. But with summer weather here, I'll accept the sub-:30 time and move on!

Mile 1: 8:43
Mile 2: 9:42
Mile 3: 9:21
5K elapsed time: 29:06, per Garmin Forerunner 205

Chip timing was an option for this event, but I declined. Instead I had opted to register as a "non-competitive" run/walk participant. This meant that the part of the fee that would normally go to the timing company -- just under two dollars, if I recall correctly -- would stay in the hands of the charity.



Event T-shirts aren't normally worth a comment, but I think they did an especially good job with this year's edition:



On a side note, I broke a streak this weekend. In 2005 the Astros Race for the Pennant 5K was my first running event ever. I had made a point of going back every year since until it was scheduled up against the IAH race.(Darn you race directors for making me choose!)

Even Eden had a serpent....

Whose idea was it to live next to a gazillion acres of parkland again? Oh, yeah -- that was mine!

I was crouched down, tending to the bean plants on my patio when I heard a faint hissing. Looking down, I saw a tan-colored snake just inches away from my leg. I reacted by springing up and back, and then quickly ducking back inside the patio door.


Once I reassured myself that I was out of danger, I grabbed my camera and took the photos above. As I prodded my unexpected guest off the patio with a broomstick, a funky odor filled the air. I thought a sewer line had backed up somewhere, but after a little online research, I found that this was the "calling card" of the water diamond back snake. It releases a stink when it feels threatened. While this critter wasn't poisonous -- this area's venomous snakes are the copperhead, the cottonmouth and the coral -- it did do a good job of startling me!

Just earlier in the month, I came home to find a migrating colony of bees swarming around the same patio. Yup, living closer to nature has been interesting!

Otherwise, the patio garden itself is chugging along with production. The swiss chard is producing its first broad leaves, which I used as the foundation for a salad. Atop the chard and baby spinach, I piled on apple slices, strawberries, and raisins:

And green bean production is in full swing. Here's the season's first harvest, sauteed in olive oil and garlic before being paired with a cajun blackened salmon filet:

The only crop that hasn't made it to my plate yet is the roma tomatoes. They have some small, green fruits on the vine, though. So far they seem to be requiring a lot of effort to tend and water, so I'm interested to productive they turn out to be.

Beach to Bay Relay Marathon

I've been wanting to try a relay race for more than a year. So before dawn, I found myself standing on the sand with a baton in my hand.

Today I covered the first leg of the Beach to Bay Relay Marathon in Corpus Christi, an annual event that celebrates Armed Forces Day. Leg number one of the relay is an out-and-back completely on the beach of Padre Island.

It was a memorable run. Remember the opening scene of Chariots of Fire? (cue dreamlike movie soundtrack here) Well, imagine that, except it wasn't a dozen Briton dudes, it was an overwhelmingly Texan crowd of a couple thousand men, women, children all surging in a long pack southward on the beach after the horn sounded. After a couple of miles, we reached a turnaround point marked by a couple of ribbon-wrapped barrels next to a pickup truck and then doubled back to the north.

Since impact cushioning wasn't a real concern, I decided to recall an old pair of Saucony Trigon 5 Guide from retirement and use those and not my current Brooks Adrenalines. Honestly, it as if my feet had returned home to shoes they should have never left. Perhaps I ought to check out Saucony again to see if they've returned that feel to anything in their current lineup. Anyway, while it was nice for my feet to not feel pounded, they definitely had less traction versus the road. I had shortened my stride and was depending on swing-forward motion to propel me rather than push-off. The extra effort demanded by the surface quickly sapped my energy, and it's reflected in my splits:

Mile 1: 9:49
Mile 2: 10:20
Mile 3: 10:53
Mile 4: 11:25
4.19-mile elapsed time per Garmin Forerunner 205, including handoff: 45:12

Along the way I passed and was passed by so many. There were the gazelle-like guys who looked like they probably ran for their collegiate or high school track teams. There was the Danish lady running barefoot. There was the entirely-too-enthusiastic brunette who recognized my "Houston 26.2" finisher shirt and tried to encourage me to sign up for another full marathon. There was the old guy who lumbered forth in an unsophisticated shuffle -- and yet he was moving faster than me.

As I approached the end of my leg, I passed a volunteer who was rapidly muttering our bib numbers into a two-way radio. I entered the handoff chute and frantically looked around for RW forumite "ta_tx," who was going to be running leg number two. It was pandemonium in that chute, with finishing runners looking left and right at the throngs on either side, holding batons aloft and yelling names and numbers, hoping to make a connection. Meanwhile the public address announcers took turns with the rapid-fire delivery of our numbers in a near-hopeless effort to keep up with our arrivals. It was like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, except more spandex was visible. After a nervous minute or two passed, ta_tx got my attention from outside the chute. I relinquished the baton to her and watched as she took off to advance it another four miles or so towards the mainland.

I did have a great time chatting pre-race at dinner and post-race at lunch with the all-Runner's-World-forumite team, dubbed "Paulette's Penguins." Paulette -- aka "kayano" on the forums -- is currently on a journey towards wellness. Having teammates that depended on me gave extra impetus to do my best and be prepared. That preparation included setting three -- yes, three -- separate alarms to make sure I was not late for the shuttle buses as I was in San Antonio last fall.

I had a lot of fun with this event and I'd recommend the relay experience to anyone who runs. Paulette, it was an honor to run under your name. During our race you became four hours and forty-five minutes closer to kicking that MFer cancer to the curb.

Berry fresh

With the transition from spring into summer, the apartment garden is definitely looking productive. My previous worries about what might grow on my half-day-sun patio have melted away as the mercury is hitting the upper 80s on a consistent basis. It seems so obvious now, but all the plants were simply waiting for warm weather to truly thrive.

I picked my first two fruits from the Quinalt strawberry plants. They were luscious, tender and had a really nice fragrance. The roma tomatoes are developing small green fruits of their own. Down on the pavement, the Contender bush beans have sprouted their first pods and the Swiss chard is finally starting to resemble some real eating greens. I look forward to sampling these in the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, to celebrate the first "harvest," I had a little ice cream. I took some scoops of Breyers vanilla and topped them with sliced almonds, banana, and the just-picked berries. After drizzling a little maple syrup over the top, it was perfect!

Pear Run 10K

After sitting out running events the entire month of April, I figured Pear Run be a good one at which to step back in. So when my alarm clock went off at 5 a.m., I got dressed, ate a large Kit Kat bar and drove over to Pearland for a 10K this morning:

Km 1: (Ignored. Waiting for mile marker to hit lap button.)
Km 2: 12:29 for both kilometers (Where are the mile markers? Is the race now managed by Canadians?)
Km 3: 6:09
Km 4: 6:00
Km 5: 6:01
Km 6: 6:45
Km 7: 6:38
Km 8: 7:15
Km 9: 5:50
Km 10: 6:16

My Garmin recorded my 10K elapsed time as 1:03:26, several minutes off my PR pace from March, and even slower than last year's Pear Run. But I'll take it.

Right on schedule, near the 8-km mark (5 miles in American-speak) I could feel the twinges starting in the left achilles tendon that had been bugging me all spring, so I stopped to walk and give my calf muscles a good stretching before going on. It was here that a tall, young-looking guy struck up a conversation with me, telling me that this was only his second marathon, and it was much farther than the one he did in March. Yup, I agreed that this would be a farther "marathon" for him than that Stride4Stroke 5K around Rice University. I just smiled and nodded before picking up my stride again.

I identified one "bandit" on the course, because I recognized her race bib as being of last year's design. Can we blame that behavior on recession-induced desperation?

This is the fourth year in a row I have been at this well-run event, and it's the fourth year in a row that no pears were to be found at the after-race. Perhaps they should at least consider giving them out as awards? Speaking of which, no official results are available yet because the timing people's laptop got fried by a power surge. We'll see if they can recover the data, because they won't know how to distribute the age-group awards otherwise.

My own private highway

On Tuesday, northwest Harris County got pummeled with rainfall that rivaled anything that Tropical Storm Allison or Hurricane Ike gave us. So once again it was the job of the 1940s-era Addicks Dam and its reservoir to slow down the floodwaters before they washed over central Houston. Since the 1940s, however, suburban development has boomed behind the reservoir, and one of the consequences was the flooding of the Bear Creek neighborhoods. State Highway 6 in that area took on high water, prompting officials to close the entire section all the way to the Katy Freeway.

This inconvenience to commuters gave me a truly rare running opportunity. I took a run of 6.6 miles that was an out-and-back along the Highway 6 viaduct. Ordinarily, such a run on this major traffic artery would be virtually an application for roadkill status, but today I had all six lanes to myself, and I was crisscrossing them all at will. I got a good look at the floodwaters which were just below the level of the bridge, along with a lot of trash . . . and snakes. You probably couldn't pay me enough to take a swim in that drink!

It looks like the highway will be closed at least through the weekend. We'll see if the water recedes enough for drivers to take over the blacktop again for Monday morning rush hour.