Aramco Houston Half Marathon

If I could, I would rip my finisher medal into a thousand little pieces. Then I would have the whole lot distributed among all the wonderful spectators, fellow runners, musicians and volunteers that cheered me on, mentally picked me up, or otherwise helped me today. Without question, I'm a runner that thrives on crowd support and this realization has only been reinforced by my experience today.

This morning I ran my fourth Aramco Houston Half Marathon, and it's my fifth consecutive time to take part in H-Town's Marathon Sunday. Putting aside the terrible year of training that derailed my original plan to run the full 26.2-mile course, I was truly grateful for feeling good enough to attempt this shorter, more familiar path across the city pavement. I haven't been able to run consistently over the past several months, and my long runs had peaked at just the 10-mile mark. So I found myself accompanied by a confidence gap as I began my run on La Branch Street with the finish line a 13.1-mile loop away.

Mile 1: 12:05
We emerged from the corral and onto the course as George Thorogood and The Destroyers asked us, "Who Do You Love?" from the public address system. I'll tell you who I love; I love whoever set the dial for this morning's weather. The pre-dawn temperature was an invigorating 41F with barely a breeze worth mentioning, and the forecast promised to warm things just a little more towards the end of my race.

Mile 2: 10:55
I believe it was here that I saw Felix leading the six-hour marathon pace group. Felix's presence is unmistakable at races. He runs with a pole in hand, topped with an American flag that appears to be 3'x5' or 4'x6'. I gave him a "Looking good! Way to go!" as I passed.

Mile 3: 11:11
Near the IH-45 underpass, I was running behind a couple of young women who looked fresh from some sorority house. "Look," said one, pointing at the 3-mile marker. "This is as far as we've trained." I silently said a prayer on their behalf.

Mile 4: 11:27
Mile 5: 12:18
Mile 6: 11:29
I passed this really cute runner girl in a pink long-sleeve top. I turned to the tall guy next to her and asked, "Hi. Just how old is your running partner?" "She just turned nine," he replied, "and she'll be having her birthday party this afternoon after the race." "You know," I said, looking at their half marathon bibs, "someday this is going to be such a cherished memory for the two of you." He was beaming.

Mile 7: 12:23
My nomination for sign-of-the-day: "Worst. Parade. Ever."

Mile 8: 12:45
I gave a shout-out to some boys on the sidewalk wearing letter jackets from my old high school and gave them some high-fives as I ran by.

Mile 9: 12:43
The U-turn for the half marathon course happens next to the place that somehow believed I deserved a college degree. In a shameless bid for crowd support, I had pinned my number to an alumni T-shirt and managed to elicit a few cheers from the sidewalk here and a high-five from the rotund lion with fuzzy dreadlocks. (I don't know his/her actual name; we didn't have a cuddly mascot when I attended school there!)

Mile 10: 13:09
I gave a shout-out to some girls on the sidewalk wearing letter jackets from my old high school and gave them some high-fives as I ran by. I began to suspect that my long-ago alma mater sent some volunteers to help on this out-and-back section of the course.

Mile 11: 13:44
I got passed by a running couple with matching shirts. Hers: "My favorite team is AUBURN and whoever beats ALABAMA." His: "My favorite team is ALABAMA and whoever beats AUBURN." Truly, a match made in heaven.

Mile 12: 13:56
I sighed with relief as the course was embraced by the skyscrapers downtown. At the mile marker I was singing it out loud in classic Sesame Street style, "1-2-3-4-5 . . 6-7-8-9-10 . . 11-12!"

Mile 13: 11:42
Final .1: 1:12
After making the final turn on Rusk Street and what seem like the longest ten blocks in the world, I hit the chip mat like it was the last square in a round of hopscotch, then shuffled into the convention center. I'll certainly be checking the official time later, but my Garmin Forerunner lists my elapsed time as 2:41:06.

That's about a minute shy of my finishing time from the first time I ran this race four years ago, surely a sign of the struggle I've had with running this year. The good news is that was also roughly forty pounds ago, and I'm confident that I'll be waking up with a lot fewer aches and pains tomorrow morning.

I have to admit, when the marathon organizers raised the entry cap for this year's race, I wondered if the outstanding race-day organization would hold up. Not only did it hold up, but I think they may have brought it up a notch. It showed in all the details that runners appreciate in a race.

I don't make formal counts, but it felt like there were more porta-johns out there. The volunteer crew did a stellar job today, starting with the course marshals that made sure the runner herd made every turn and lane change properly. I finished with a large group of half marathoners and nowhere in the George R. Brown Convention Center did I find myself standing in line for any significant time -- not for my medal, my finisher shirt, or for the food. There were lots of us in line, but the hard-working volunteers kept those lines continually moving. In fact, it seemed as if every 20th person in the GRB was in a blue shirt and eager to point me to my next destination. As someone who has experienced a race or two with poor organization, I do notice these kind of things that makes the Houston Marathon feel like a well-oiled machine.

And once again, the "HEB Food Court" didn't disappoint. The mounds of bananas, bagels, muffins, cookies, ice cream, scrambled eggs, sausage, biscuits and potato fries guaranteed that any calorie deficit I incurred would be wiped out quickly. If that wasn't enough, the Girl Scouts were there with an seemingly endless supply of "Daisy Go-Rounds."

This race report wouldn't be complete without mentioning the public appearance by Meb Keflezighi -- last year's Aramco Half Marathon winner -- at the expo yesterday. The 2004 silver medalist and 2009 NYC Marathon champion greeted a long line of fans, signing autographs and taking pictures. I brought the September 2008 issue of Runner's World for him to sign. Below a caricature of himself, he wrote, "To Vincent: Best wishes & run to win. --Meb."

Regardless of finsh times, mile splits and PRs, being healthy and fit enough to take part in this city's great running event is always a winning feeling.

B-b-b-back inside

One of the side hobbies that sprouts from running is obsessive weather watching as race day approaches. The first ten-day forecasts including marathon Sunday in Houston started appearing yesterday. Weather.com shows showers and lo-40s/hi-50s for the weekend that I'm to run the Aramco Half.

It certainly could have been worse. I have genuine respect for the runners, volunteers and spectators that will show up at Sunday's USA Fit Marathon and Half Marathon in Sugar Land. An arctic airmass arrived yesterday and is expected to push nighttime temps below freezing for three days straight. Yikes!

For now, I've retreated to the comfort of the treadmill. I managed a ten-miler on Wednesday night. This included several breaks for calf stretches to alleviate some nagging discomfort from the same achilles tendon that gave me bigger grief earlier this year. Otherwise, I'm feeling pretty good. I think I want to sneak in one more in the double-digits before race day.

In advance of the cold snap, I evacuated my hanging pots (strawberries) and flower boxes (nasturtiums) off the patio. As far as they're concerned, this week will be a balmy one as they spend time basking in the fluorescent glow of the kitchen lights. One strawberry plant is even in the middle of fruiting.

I'm already thinking ahead to what I want to do with the patio when warmer weather returns. Part of me thinks that just sticking to flowers would make my life easier. The tomatoes did somewhat OK, but demanded daily watering. Leafcutter worms massacred my Swiss chard. The most successful food crops out there in 2009 were the green beans and green onions.

Well, the spearmint is a runaway success, too, but I'd like to find more uses for the leaves other than generating an endless supply of mojitos!

Transactional Epiphany

It took the better part of the evening, but last night I finally tackled the chore of setting up Quicken 2010 to track my financial life. In the days following my previous botched attempt at automatic conversion of my Microsoft Money data, I arrived at a simple, yet powerful realization:

"I don't need to carry everything over."

I had more than a decade of account transactions in my MNY file. I had been allowing it to accumulate in size like a rolling snowball as I upgraded to progressively newer versions of Money, never bothering to archive and purge old data. Between ringing in the new year and switching to new software, however, I knew that this was an opportunity to start over. I retrieved the December 2009 statements from only my active accounts and used only those balances to populate my new QDF file.

Manual setup forced me to think about what I really needed to see -- and not see -- from this point forward. Accounts for long-closed store credit cards would only be zero-balance clutter onscreen. The historical graph of my fund balances during the 2001 dot-com bust isn't something I needed at my fingertips every day either. Perhaps most significantly, I didn't bother to copy over data for personal loans which realistically will never be paid back. I had mentally written those off long ago, but leaving them out of Quicken makes it seem more official now.

Eric Tyson authored some really good books in the "For Dummies" series that got me started with managing my own money long ago. More than ever, I now appreciate that the opening paragraphs of his personal finance book begin with a discussion about the emotions and psychology behind our relationship with our financial life. He warns against going to extremes. It's neither wise for a person to lose sight of their basic financial state, nor is it healthy to obsess over the disposition of every penny that comes into his hands.

Sometimes, letting go of yesterday helps us take control of tomorrow.

Back outside

There's something wonderful about inking those first words into a previously blank calendar or journal. I logged my first run of the new year today -- outside for the first time in about four weeks. So there's another building block of confidence.

Last night I rang in 2010 with many hundreds of people at Sugar Land Town Square:



The wind chill at midnight had to have been around 40F. There was a pretty big guy in front of me wearing a short-sleeve cotton T-shirt, shorts and sandals. Naturally my first thought is, "He might be a runner!"

Happy new year, everyone!