• Buy candy that you like...in case you only get 8 (so far) Trick-or-Treaters.
• When your cute friend says she's going to dress up as either a naughty policewoman or a sexy pirate...go to the party with her.
• I have a lot of flirty friends.
• There isn't a lot worth watching on TV on Halloween - especially if you've already emptied your DVR.  Thank goodness for Hulu.
• There are a lot of princesses in my neighborhood.  Well...5.  So far.  Mostly girls.
• My new ConAir foot massager tub thing doesn't heat the water...it just maintains the temperature of already hot water.  Sort of.  O.K., so the heat thing is a bit disappointing, but it's still nice.  The vibration setting is nicer (and quieter) than the bubbles setting.

Quote of the Day

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

-Bertrand Russell-

-B-

Due to surprisingly high demand I will finally get off my duff and write this up... :)

As many of you know (well, everybody who reads this blog does; o.k., both of you) on September 14th I ran the Maui Marathon.  It was my first time doing Maui and I had some concerns about the course and the race: primarily the heat and the hills.  However, coming off my very strong race at Disney two weeks earlier I had high hopes for a strong race in Maui.

The Heat

Because I was concerned that the temperatures could climb into the 80s for much of the race I decided that I would carry a water bottle of my own with me on this time.  I carefully noted the locations of the aid stations but still...I had a nightmare of trudging down the highway under a blazing sun, vultures circling and still a mile to the next aid station.

The Hills

Maui's course is the hilliest Marathon I've done and the most pronounced of these occur between miles 8.5 and 12 as you climb up and over the Pali heading towards Lahaina.  According to the elevation map the rest of the course is relatively flat or even downhill...but as I discovered that's a little misleading.

The Trip

I love Maui.  Maui no ka oi.  (that means "Maui is the best" in Hawaiian).  So I flew over on Friday afternoon, picked up my rental car and meandered towards my hotel in Kaanapali.  The arrival was relatively painless, though Avis "upgraded" me into a Chevy van.  Last time I let them do that when I'm traveling by myself.  Not that the vans aren't nice, but they're just too big and heavy for me to want to wrestle around the island when I'm traveling by myself or with just one other person.

Got to the hotel and was pleasantly surprised to remember that I had reserved a 1-bedroom suite.  It was gorgeous and one of the biggest hotel rooms I've ever had.  A large living and dining room, large balcony, laundry room, full kitchen, nice bedroom.  I could almost live there.

The Expo

Like the race itself Maui's expo is fairly small.  There's a nice energy, but only a handful of "booths" - the most active of which were selling the usual collections of shirts, hats, race gear and the other was selling race merchandise.  Got my packet picked up and was surprised to discover I'd been given bib #38.  I've never had a two-digit race number for a marathon before; those are usually reserved for the elites and I'm far from that.

Last Minute

My last minute preparations were fairly unremarkable.  I adhered to rule #10 and laid out my gear the night before.  I had dinner at Giovanni's in Kaanapali, then on Saturday went out to lunch at the Four Seasons in Wailea.  Lots of pasta, salads and lean proteins as well as lots of fluids.  I felt about as well-prepared as I could be, I wrote out my race plan and was looking forward to a strong race.  Maybe I was overly optimistic.

The Race

My wake-up call came way too early, as usual, I got my gear on, drank some Gatorade and headed off to the Westin to catch the shuttle bus to the starting line.  Maui is a Point-to-Point marathon, which means it starts in one part of the island and finishes somewhere else (as opposed to a loop course that starts and finishes at the same place).  It starts in Kahului (not far from the airport) and finishes right in front of Whalers Village, next door to the Westin, in Kaanapali.

On the bus I met Sherrie and Betsy - two lady runners in town from the mainland to do the race.  It was Betsy's birthday and Maui was going to be just her second marathon.  Sherrie is a veteran runner and Maui was going to be her 8th or 10th.

Once we got to the starting area we milled around with the other runners, utilizing the porta-johns, making our last minute preparations and waiting for the start.  The crowd was surprisingly small, only about 800, easily the smallest marathon I've ever done, but there was a nice energy in the air.  After a curiously long walk from the start area to the actual starting line, there was the singing of the national anthem, followed by a Hawaiian chant, and then we were off and running!  Maui starts in the dark, which is a good thing, so the first few miles were spent cruising along with my fellow runners, just following the course under the street lights.

Finally out of Kahului we start off across the island on the highway that cuts thru the cane fields.  Around mile 5 we started to see the sunrise over the cane fields.  Beautiful!  Ominous...but beautiful.

At mile 8 the hills started...luckily I was mentally prepared for them, because they were somewhat daunting.  Not super steep, but continuous for the next 4 miles.  A healthy climb, followed by a slight rolling down, followed by another climb, then a bit of a down, then a climb.  Finally around mile 13 we started down onto the relatively flat sections for the rest of the course.  I say "relatively" because even though the course elevation map seems to show the course as flat or slightly downhill for the last 13 miles the truth is that there are lots of what Alan calls "Little sneaky hills."  The road is almost always at some kind of incline, up or down, and it's deceptively tough.  The sun is also up at this point and it's starting to get hot.

At the half-marathon point I was actually a bit ahead of pace.

The problem that confronted me wasn't necessarily hills or heat though, rather I was having a tough time absorbing water and calories.  I didn't feel like I drank that much, but my stomach felt like it was filling up with water and I didn't feel like I was able to absorb anything.  By mile 14 it was extremely uncomfortable and it had slowed me considerably off my pace.  My energy was starting to flag and my gels didn't seem to help at all.

At mile 19, out of desperation I suppose, I tried some of the Sport Beans I had tucked into a pocket.  Those did seem to help a little, and by the time I got to Lahaina I was able to manage a slow steady jog.  Nonetheless by this point any thoughts of a PR or even a particularly good time were gone.

In Lahaina I hooked up with a really nice lady who was struggling too.  The two of us walked and ran side by side the last 4-5 miles before managing a reasonably strong finish.  WAY off my goal time.  A beautiful, but disappointing race.

-B-

O.K., reports of my death have been slightly exaggerated.  The blog lives, it's just gasping a bit.  A few random thoughts for the weekend...

• Zig Ziglar, whom I do enjoy, had a recent podcast about the power of words.  Unfortunately he had two pretty major logical errors in his otherwise good message.
• He said there is an African tribe where nobody in the tribe stutters.  And he said that was because there is no word in their language for "stutter."  I think he's got it backwards though...there's no word for stutter in their language because they don't need one...nobody stutters.  A tribe that is completely landlocked and has never seen the ocean wouldn't have a word for "ocean."  The ancient Greeks had no word for "Automobile" I'm sure.  But it's not for the lack of the word that the tribe hasn't seen the ocean or the Greeks didn't have cars.
• He took issue with the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words" and used the Declaration of Independence as an example.  But first of all not all words are created equal and second the phrase isn't intended to say that you could replace ANY thousand words with a picture.  Rather that a picture of something, such as our running group at morning announcements today (right) would take at least a thousand words to describe it.  In other words, I could give you a long rambling description of the trees, and the grass and the dirt, and the sky, and the people...or I could just show you the photo.
• It occurred to me that I am, in this blog mostly, a journalist of sorts.  Not so much in posts like this one where I'm mostly offering random ramblings and thoughts, but in some of the more factual posts - like my race reports.  I know, because I've done it, that some day somebody will Google for "Maui Marathon" in order to read the experiences other people have had with it were.  And my post (well, the one I'll be posting in the next day or so) will be one of the hits that comes back.  I'm telling a story of what happened there.  I don't have a real point here, except to say that had occurred to me and I suppose on some level makes me take what I post (at least on some level) a little more seriously.  I feel maybe a little responsibility to convey good information and make it useful to that person who is thinking about doing the race - or just did it and wants to see how their experience compared to others.
• Book News: I heard a week or so ago that the book has sold out of it's initial printing, so they're doing a second, larger, printing this week.  Cool!  Thanks everybody who bought it -- hopefully I don't go to my Mom's house and find 800 copies stashed in a closet. :)

O.K., that's enough for now.  More pressing matters call.  I'll try to be better about keeping up the blog and, yes, a Maui Marathon report (long overdue) will appear in the next day or three.

-B-