RunRunLive 5.0 - Running Podcast

A quick update from the trails with Ollie. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 5-484 – the one about the tree Introduction: Hello and welcome to episode 5-484 of the RunRunLive Podcast. I’m calling it 5-484. That’s as good a number as any. At this point we are beyond the specificity of rational numbers and, some would say, rationality in general. Today I’m going to tell a story about a tree. I’ll give you the update on my current entropy challenge. Because it’s always something, isn’t it? And I have an idea to start a new segment called “Stupid running questions.” And, maybe I’ll talk about mortality. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

RunRunLive Episode 5483 – The one about 5K’s and Relay races and retirement … Hello my running friends. How are you doing today? It’s winter here in New England. The shortest days of the year are upon us. The seasons change and so do I. Which is a lyric from a song by the Guess Who called “No Time”, from an album called “Canned Wheat” released in 1969. The Guess Who was an influential Canadian rock band from Winnipeg of all places. Randy Bachman from the band went on to success with Bachman Turner Overdrive. Apologies for not getting a show out. I have ideas in my head. I just don’t have the animation to write them down and record. Something is better than nothing they say. But, the older I get, the more I understand the value of nothing as well. Today I’m going to catch you up on a few races I’ve run and some other stuff as I work my way into shape for my next race, which is the Napa Valley Marathon in March. Now that I’ve put Boston aside as a goal race, I can add more fun stuff and travel races to my calendar. This year my wife and I will head out to Napa Valley to run the race and then hang around in wine country. Because, my friends, life is short. Memento Mori. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

RunRunLive Episode 5483 – The one about 5K’s and Relay races and retirement … Hello my running friends. How are you doing today? It’s winter here in New England. The shortest days of the year are upon us. The seasons change and so do I. Which is a lyric from a song by the Guess Who called “No Time”, from an album called “Canned Wheat” released in 1969. The Guess Who was an influential Canadian rock band from Winnipeg of all places. Randy Bachman from the band went on to success with Bachman Turner Overdrive. Apologies for not getting a show out. I have ideas in my head. I just don’t have the animation to write them down and record. Something is better than nothing they say. But, the older I get, the more I understand the value of nothing as well. Today I’m going to catch you up on a few races I’ve run and some other stuff as I work my way into shape for my next race, which is the Napa Valley Marathon in March. Now that I’ve put Boston aside as a goal race, I can add more fun stuff and travel races to my calendar. This year my wife and I will head out to Napa Valley to run the race and then hang around in wine country. Because, my friends, life is short. Memento Mori. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

5-482 Hello my friends and welcome to episode 482 of the RunRunLive Podcast. Today I’m going to gift you with a long screed entitled “Zero to Hero, How to go from zero miles and injured to a marathon in 6 months.” But, before I go there let’s do some business. I went back to the old RunRunLive 4.0 bumpers, because I like them. I didn’t like the new ones that I had done for me. The old ones are voiced by members of our community. That opening bumper about squeezing the life from lemons is by old-friend John. The strumming guitar and singing are the styling of Adam Tinkoff. The ‘move you to the exit’ is Steve Chopper. And the harmony on the last bit of the outro is Adam and Eddie Marathon. If I ever do interviews again, the ‘featured interview’ bumper is a young version of my talented daughter Katie. They make me happy and hopefully make you happy too. Secondly I spent some time last weekend loading old shows into the new ACast feed. I got all the way back to 250 – which would be some time in 2012, I believe. This is why episode 251 errantly dropped into your feed as a new show. I have to back date them to get them in the right order. That show was from January 2013, I must have missed a save button. I have fixed it. But- in all seriousness, that show is probably a good example of the format that I used to have back then. I have not listened to it, but if you have, that is an 11-year time travel into the past. If you liked it there are plenty more of similar size and shape. At some point I’m going to go back and listen to all of these from the beginning and learn something about myself. Other than that – enjoy this essay on training around our constraints. On with the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We have a great show for you today and we have a lot of ground to cover so strap on your yaktrax and hang on to your running buddies and let’s get to it. It’s a cold Massachusetts Friday afternoon in my life. I’m finishing up some tasks on my task list so that I can burst forth from my home office and into the trails for an easy 7 miler with the wonder dog. I’ve got a set of live Grateful Dead on the headphones that my friend, that inglorious bastard of a demented genius, the Zen Runner tipped me off to. Today we will enthrall you with an interview o fJon Metz who is a professional Triathlete coach. I chat with him about how he helps people get it all done. We will also assault your senses with a piece on how we internally value our running efforts – that I’m calling ‘My Best Run”. Lastly I’ll hit you directly in your pouty lips with a tactically instructional piece on how I think about the structure of life balance. I was really excited about this piece until I wrote it up. I found it a bit lifeless when I focused more on relaying information and less on storytelling. I think my gift, if I can call it that, is storytelling. Like that wild-eyed shaman decanting tall tales in front of the crackling primeval bonfire. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Introduction: Hello my endurance athletic old friends. Welcome to episode 5-481. How are we on this fine fall day? Up here in New England we have set the clocks back and it is now officially dark at 4:30ish, which makes me want to stab myself in the eye with an olive fork… Is there such a thing as an olive fork? We like to tell ourselves up, with puritanical zeal, and righteous fury, that all this lack of sunlight and crappy weather makes us harder and more able to transverse this fickle world filled with chaos. We say things like, “I was doing hill repeats in the freezing rain,” – wearing that suffering like holy stigmata. But, what if it’s all a lie? What if all the adversity just makes us grumpy and hard to live with? I don’t know – but I do know the best policy is to take it one day at a time, do what you can and embrace what the universe brings you because time is short! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello my friends and welcome to the RunRunLive Podcast. My name is Chris and I am your host. Here is a quick introduction for anyone listening for the first time. I have been an amateur runner my whole life. I got serious in the late 90’s and it changed my life, like many obsessions will. I started this podcast in 2007 to share all the wonderful things I had learned. It has been a gift to me and I‘ve met so many great people who have enriched my life. There are close to 500 episodes that span a decade or more of training and racing marathons and mountain bikes and triathlons and so much more. I am sifting though my archives and will attempt to post them all here in sequence. I interview famous and not-so-famous people from the sport. I give advice and tips. I tell stories and entertain. The first 50 or so episodes have some audio challenges as the technology hadn’t really ripened yet. After that I hit my stride and the show’s are fun and consistent through around 250, where I take a break and begin a new format. After that there are highs and lows, as there are in any life. Currently I’m working on finding time to keep the show going into the future as I am now an older runner. Feel free to sample your way through my journey, our running life. And enjoy. I’ll see you out there. Chris, Outro: That’s it folks you have found your way back to the end of yet another RunRunLive podcast. If you’re new to the show go back and sample some of the history. If you’re one of my old friends Rech out and say hi. On reflection I find that friends are the most important thing we carry with us. Bear with me as I sort the technology out. And wish me luck in DC. I’ll see you out there. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

4-16-2023 Update Well my friends. Tomorrow is Patriots Day in Boston. And we all know what that means. That’s right, it’s the Boston Marathon. I’ve got a few friends running. The weather looks pretty good. Sara Hall is running and Des Linden. The fastest man in the world, Kipchoge is looking to complete his sweep of the majors. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see a sub-2-hour finish from him! That would be something. I am running a bit again. I have spent the last 2-3 month slowly trying to get myself back into shape. The knee seems to be ok as long as I don’t work it to hard. I’m still trying to see where the edge is. I worked with Rachel and took 15-20 pounds off. And I got through the first 30 days of the Body Building for Beginners program. I’m going to stop that right there. I repeated weeks 3 and 4, but I’m not going to go deeper. It gets very specific in the second two months and is probably more complex than I need. And, the big news is that I have signed up for a race. My friend Ann who we have talked to a couple times here on the podcast has a charity that she is heavily involved in called “Burgers and Bands” which is a teenage suicide prevention program. She got 50 charity slots for the Marine Corp Marathon. So, jokingly, I said, if you run it I’ll run it. And she called my bluff. I am fund raising and I’m going to try to blog about the process of getting back into shape. I’ll put a link in the show notes, at the top so you can donate. Then my coach, who was in the mix, said “Ok if you two run I’ll train you.” And the rest is, as they say is history. I am going to toss in some audio from before my run today. I am going to start podcasting more. I have some interviews. I’m trying to put less pressure on myself. I’ve got a lot of ideas and a lot of content, but less time to execute. I have been plugging away at my other, After the Apocalypse podcast. I’m just about to finish up season 3. I’m getting somewhere around 22,000 downloads a month. There’s 20 episodes in a season, and I plan to make each season into a book. As I creep ever closer to retirement I’m setting myself up to have a bunch of evergreen publishing content going. At some point I’ll circle back to all the posts on RunRunLive and try to consolidate them into some sort of order and edit them up into some books. There are literally millions of words worth of content out there. Anyhow, figured I’d check in let you know I’m still out here. A little slower, gimpy-er and grey – but out here none the less. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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10-28-2022 Intro: Hello and Welcome to the RunRunLive podcast. I have some incredible updates for you today. As for format, heck, who needs format? But as a semi-pseudo-format I’m going to keep dropping these short pieces on self-improvement, and especially how to navigate out of a dark place. I’ll do an intro with a little commentary, Then In section one, I’ve got a piece about self-worth. Then I’ll give you my updates in the outro. … Remember last time we talked about navigating the highs and lows of life? Why? Because I know that a lot of you get the seasonal blues this time of year when the days get cold and dark. (For you folks in Australia or Brazil; just set this aside and don’t listen for 6 months) I get these low points too. And the way I have learned to work my way out of them is to practice daily self-attention. I hesitate to call it self-affirmation, or self-love or even self-development. It’s hard to find words that don’t carry baggage of some sort. So let’s just say self-attention. This self-attention is important. When we find ourselves in these low or challenging spots in our lives we need to systematically focus on ourselves. It may very well be that one of the reasons we are in this low point is that we have neglected self-attention. We thought we were safely sailing calm waters and we forgot our practice. As I said in the first piece, these highs and lows come at us throughout our journey. We tend to enjoy the highs and suffer through the lows. If you have a good self-care practice you don’t have to suffer through those lows. You can see those lows as a gift and an opportunity to reassess, reset and replan. Even when everything in your world, our world, seems topsy turvy and out of balance, you are still you and the one thing you have control over is yourself. This is the gift of self-attention. The bonus of this self-attention is that it makes you better able to deal with the outside world. … Unfortunately, needing to do some self-work is commonly seen as weakness, especially in the western cultures. At least for my generation. I’m happy we seem to be evolving beyond that. Because this stigma on intelligent self-care is a lie. 80% of successful people start their days with some form of self-care. Those successful people see it for what it is, the daily sharpening of the saw. I think we can recognize that we have these cycles of emotion and energy throughout our lives that are natural. Feeling guilty or bad about these natural rhythms just compounds the problem. When I get into these troughs I have learned to get back to basics. To return to the basic truths of who I am and what my values are and what my purpose is. Then I work with that every morning as part of my routine. This allows me to show up with my best self for the people who need me. You are not doing yourself or anyone else any good by showing up incomplete with bad energy. Being in these low spots can be overwhelming. That’s why it is so important to let everything else go for a moment and commit some specific time on your own needs and go back to the basics. You build yourself up day by day and step by step. I have often heard people say “Life is a marathon, not a sprint” – To which I laugh because what the hell do they know about marathons? I know about marathons. We know about marathons. Remember that first marathon when you got to mile 18 and thought you were going to die? Hell. I bet more than half of the 70+ marathons I’ve run ended that way. The first time you hit that wall it’s awful, but eventually, with training and practice you learn how to deal with and overcome the wall. It’s still awful, but it is a familiar awful that you have the tools to manage. That’s how these cycles of highs and lows work. That’s why self-care is important because you can develop the tools to work your way through it. To summarize, carve out some quality time to focus on yourself and go back to basics. For me, the quality time for this kind of work is in the...

Update: Hello my friends, perhaps even my running friends. Welcome to another episode of the comically directionless RunRunLive Podcast. I think we’re about 14 years into this podcast journey. It’s funny how time flies… There really weren’t that many of us back in 2007. It was a small family of runners talking about running with other runners. It was me, Steve, Nigel, Nic and Dan, Kevin with the extra-milers and Chopper. And a few others. I bet, if you asked any of us we’d say we never expected to make money or become famous from it. But secretly, we all probably did. Steve probably came the closest. I think runners were early adopters of the technology as a community because we all spent so much time alone out on the roads. This meant we not only thought too much, but also needed something to listen to. The perfect storm for running creators. When I recorded my first show in June of 2007, I had just run down Mount Washington, after running the race up Mount Washington. I pulled out my little Sony audio recorder and talked about it. That Episode One would go up over the July 4th weekend that year. I interviewed my running buddy Frank, who I still hang out with. I met Frank on a training run with a bunch of marathoners from Boston in the 90’s. His story, like mine, and like so many others was coming to running later in life, discovering the marathon, then discovering Boston, then getting hooked. And here we are 20+ years later. I started an interview show because some of the business podcasts that I was listening to at the time had that format. From the start I diodn’t want the podcast to be about me. I wanted it to be about the listener. I wanted to add value. I wanted to share everything I’d learned, at that point almost a decade into my journey. I wanted to share the joy of the adventure. It wasn’t about me, but ironically, I was the target audience. I gave myself tips and tricks, I gave myself inspirational speeches, I practiced my writing and presentation skills on myself. Some of you just happened to be along for the ride as well! I didn’t even know there were other running podcasts when I started. Really, it wasn’t until later that I met everyone. I remember going on the Runner’s Roundtable and being so nervous. It was like standing up in front of a big audience. It’s still a bit strange to me that I have talked into the ears of probably 2-3 million people at this point in time. By the way, all that content, 400+ shows, we could feed that into an AI now and have a very good representation of me. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. It’s a tremendous training data set. Anyhow, enough reminiscing. I’ve got an few things for you this episode. First I’ll give you an update on what’s going on in my athletic life. Then I have a book review I wrote for my other podcast – After the Apocalyspe. Finally I’ll share an inspirational piece from a series of articles I’m working on for those of us who get stuck in low points and want to grow out of those. … First for the update. I think last time I told you that I had thrown my back out lifting weights. Well, that is still hurting me. I think because I do a fair amount of chair sitting in my line of work. I decided to not push it by trying to get back to the gym. Let it heal. Instead, I’m doing a daily lower back stretching routine – which seems to help. I’m willing to share it with you if you like. Very simple. I believe I also mentioned that I went back for my follow up with the knee doctor. I’m 18+ months into this knee injury. It was first diagnosed as a bruise on the knobby part of my bone. The knee itself was in reasonable shape, but there was this stress bruise on the bone that showed up on the MRI. I went back to the doctor a couple weeks ago and he did his poking around and sent me for another MRI. He made sure I didn’t go to the cheap MRI place that my insurance company recommended, because it has a larger diameter machine designed to accommodate the more...

Bike Report… Here is a slightly more scripted version of my 2 day ride across Massachusetts. I scheduled it as a 4-day adventure. This is one of those things that you learn from doing long or hard or ultra-type events. Give yourself some buffer time. I have always violated this rule. Partly because my life has always been busy, or I have convinced myself that it was, and I had to rush to get to events and then rush back. I have always tried to not be that guy who talks too much about this stuff at work. I realized early on that this is my obsession, and the rest of the world may or may not give a shit. I’ve been more than willing to talk about it in depth when asked, or in this purpose-built forum for that outlet, but I have always taken pains not to be THAT GUY in the office. As a result, most of the people I’ve worked with know vaguely that I train all the time, but seldom have the gift of knowing exactly what or when I’m doing an event. That vagueness allows work activity to crowd around the events and I find myself running a marathon in the morning and jumping on a plane in the afternoon. I think it also fits that egoistic self-image I have had of being the indestructible man that can pop in and out of events that other people can’t even fathom. Even my acts of humility are ego-centric! There are advantages to not buffering time around an event. If you show up just in time for the event it doesn’t give you time to think too much about it. You can get much more adventure in the day by not being prepared and not knowing the course, etc. Just show up doesn’t fit many peoples’ brains but I enjoy the adventure of it. If you jet off after the event you don’t have time to wallow in your misery. But the disadvantages of this cramming in events, especially big events, are manifold. You can make mistakes that you could have avoided by being just a bit more prepared. Like, for instance, not thinking about how the temperature drops below freezing in the mountains at night. And, most regretfully, you don’t really get a chance to let it sink in. Many of those races I’ve run are just blurry memories of a fast weekend spent somewhere doing something hard. I’ve found that no matter how good shape you’re in, a multi-day event will mess with your thinking ability. It’s best to take a day off after because you’re going to be useless anyhow. For this ride, I took 4 days off to ride around 250 miles in 2 days. I enlisted my wife to crew for me. I suppose this is one of the advantages of having a long-term relationship. You can just casually drop something like this… “Hey, take Friday and Monday off we’re going out to Western Mass and you’re going to follow me while I ride across the state for 2 days.” And that doesn’t end the relationship. … Day one was Friday. We got up and I took Ollie down to the local kennel when it opened at 9AM. This was Ollie’s first time being kenneled – so it was a bit like first day of school for your kids. I had a pang of sadness driving back to the house in my truck with the passenger seat empty. I had done my best to make sure all my stuff was organized. We drove out a pretty section of Rte 2 west into the Berkshires and the Mohawk Trail. Western Mass is a pretty place. All hills and farms and little; towns. Those same little towns that you’ll find in Vermont or New Hampshire. A bit of a tourist trap but really pretty without being entirely off the map. We took the new truck with my bike in the back. I prepped my bike earlier in the week. I washed it and cleaned the chain and derailleurs as best I could. It’s a messy and dirty job. It requires using a degreaser and a toothbrush. Kids, this degreaser chemical is very dangerous. Remember to wear rubber gloves and safety glasses when you’re cleaning your bike chain. Once you get it all sparkly clean then you can rub a little bike grease back into the chain and sprocket. This really helps the efficiency of the drivetrain and keeps the shifting action clean. You can...

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