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A hospital for iPods

After weeks of hemming and hawing, wondering whether my 3-year-old, first-generation iPod Nano might magically heal itself, I have sent it to what I hope is the equivalent of a hospital for iPods. A helpful comment on this blog earlier this week led me to Milliamp, which promises to replace your iPod's battery — something I hadn't even known was possible — for about $50, once you factor in shipping and other random fees. This is a heckuva lot better than the 10 percent discount on a new Nano promised my Apple if I traded in my old one.

Though I was originally sketched out by the directive to send my iPod to San Antonio, Texas, for the operation, I realized this morning that my iPod is basically worthless to me as it is. It lasts maybe 20 minutes now before crapping out, and I'm going to need a LOT more than 20 minutes to cover 13.1 miles in a couple weeks. Plus, I found stories in papers like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The San Antonio Business Journal to confirm that this is a real business with a storefront and employees and Chamber of Commerce membership.

I FedExed it this morning. Milliamp promises a one-day turnaround once it arrives in San Antonio, we my hope is that I'll have it back by March 21. Keep your fingers crossed, would you?

Who's hungry?

I know. Stupid question. You're a runner. Of course you're hungry. When runs get longer and appetites get larger, eating can practically become a second workout each day. Who hasn't heard about carbo-loading before a big race? And have you seen those post-race spreads?

The thing is, for all the eating we do, most of us struggle to find the perfect pre-run snack or post-run meal. My friend Meredith, a lifelong swimmer who's just getting back into running, asked for some suggestions for pre- and post-run snacks.

We'll save long-run fuel, with its complicated protein-carb ratios and 30-minute refueling windows, for another day. Same goes for Gu, which shall not be addressed in this blog post. The beauty of eating before and after a shorter run — somewhere in the 30-minute to hour range — is that you can pretty much just go with whatever feels good in your stomach. The hard part is, it can be tricky to find a snack that feels good in your stomach once it's all jostled around from running.

My favorite pre-run snacks, which I usually consume an hour or two before running:
A Luna bar (or Fiber One bar, or Kashi GoLean bar — you get the idea)
A cup of yogurt with a little Fiber One
A fruit salad with bananas, strawberries, blueberries, lemon juice, vanilla and Splenda
A low-fat muffin (I'll include my pre-marathon chocolate-chip banana bread recipe below)

After a run, it's all about what seems appealing after the aforementioned jostling. The single best post-run snack I've found is chocolate milk. I first tried it after reading this amazing study in which researchers found that plain ol' chocolate milk helped a group of male cyclists recover their glycogen stores faster than Gatorade, a high-protein recovery drink and other fancy, expensive brews. It supposedly has the perfect ratio of simple carbs to protein. I dunno if that's the case, but it's REALLY yummy. If the end of a run coincides with dinnertime, like after a Tuesday-night Pacers run, I almost always make a quesedilla, or something else that's quick to prepare and easy to digest.

Speaking of easy to digest (not to mention easy to eat several servings of in one sitting), I find that this chocolate-chip banana bread hits the spot just about any time: pre-run, post-run, sans-run ...

2 cups whole-wheat flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 c sugar (you can substitute Splenda for some of this, if you like)
1/4 c applesauce
3 ripe bananas, mashed
1/2 c egg substitute
1/3 c plain nonfat yogurt
1/2 c semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine wet ingredients and sugar; set aside. Combine flour, baking soda and salt in a separate bowl. Add dry mixture to wet stuff, mixing gently (or on a low speed) until the batter is just moist. Add chocolate chips. Bake in 8 1/2 X 4 1/2-inch loaf pan covered with cooking spray for roughly 1 hour, 15 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick comes out clean.

Got any favorite running snacks? Share 'em by posting a comment below.

Taking my medicine

Imagine a small child, lips pursed, nose wrinkled, eyes tearing up, head actually moving backward in disgust, as her mom tries to give her a spoonful of nasty-tasting medicine.

This is roughly the attitude with which I set out to do my speed workout this morning.

There are only two training weekends left before the National Half Marathon, and I've committed myself (in my head, at least) to running part of the course on a 10-miler next weekend. Which left me with only one real choice today: hit the treadmill, hard, for one last speed workout.

Oh, the excuses I thought of! I told myself it was too beautiful and sunny to run inside. Then, I told myself I'd have to find a good speed workout course outside. Then, it was back to Plan A, but I told myself I should mix things up and find a new treadmill workout. Then, after sucking it up and putting on my running clothes to head downstairs, I watched at least 15 minutes of "Balls of Fury" with Steve to stall even longer.

Finally, I sucked it up, made like a Nike ad and just did it.

Guess what? It was great! The kind of great that makes you wonder if the treadmill needs to be recalibrated or something. I had set out to do four one-mile repeats — one more than my standard three — at something like 7:30-minute-mile pace. I ended up doing more like an average of 7:15-minute miles, with long spurts of 6:58-minute-mile pace (superhuman for me, if I have to do more than one mile!). And check this: My iPod ran out of juice after the first three mile repeats. I went upstairs, recharged it so it would last another seven minutes, then WENT BACK DOWN and did my last one.

As hard as it was getting off the couch today, the feeling of "I ran four fast miles this morning, I can take on the world" is totally worth it. This all leaves me wondering why we spend so much time and energy resisting things that make us better, healthier and stronger.

Finding a sense of community

I've always embraced the solo nature of running. I love being able to head out for a long run to clear my head, loosen my muscles and enjoy some peace and quiet. I've never understood runners who do it for the sense of community — until now.

After a fun, chatty run with two Pacers friends last night, we all headed to Eggspectation in downtown Silver Spring for a late-night happy hour. The restaurant gave us happy-hour prices on drinks, and let a group of almost 20 sweaty, red-faced runners occupy its back room for a couple hours.

It was SO much fun. I talked to a 5-minute miler training for the Boston Marathon; a 10-minute miler who ran 5 miles to work yesterday; and a group of runners planning to do one of those crazy all-night, 178-mile running relays from Upstate New York to the Bronx (click here to check out the Ragnar Relay series); a former college runner who had a pulmonary embolism last fall who's planning to run the National Marathon March 21 (you KNOW I'll be thinking of her when I get tired in the half). I also saw a running friend who's been injured, who came just to enjoy the feeling of being in a community of runners. Which now, I TOTALLY get.

A fast, cold run provides an ego boost

I had a fabulous run last night with Pacers. We did the hill route that haunted me in my first weeks in Maryland, and it was hard in the best way possible.

Only a handful of runners showed up on account of the blistering cold. It was chilly — something like 20 degrees when we left —but nowhere nearly as bad as I expected. Since there were so few of us, we decided to all go out in the same amorphous pace group. I knew ahead of time I was one of the slower runners in attendance, but all the speedsters in the group seemed content to just chat and take it easy.

About a third of the way through the run, it occurred to me that the majority of the runners had fallen back behind me and two fast dudes I had no business running with. Then, one of the fast dudes fell behind, leaving me and my new friend, Marco, who seemed to barely be out of breath as we chugged up the rolling hills.

As it turns out, Marco is also training for the race on March 21. He's doing the full marathon, and is attempting to beat his previous time of 3:30. Despite being clearly out of my league, he waited patiently as my gasping, expectorating self caught up to him, and carried me through what proved to be a few very fast miles for me. We finished the 5.39-mile route in 43 minutes — about 8-minute miles (and did I mention it was hilly?). I left Pacers feeling like I'd just won the Boston Marathon.

In other news: My fear of commitment has led me to miss yet another race opportunity. I'd hoped to run the Run to Register 10K to get my spot in the Marine Corps Marathon a couple days early. Registration for the Run to Register 10K is closed, leaving me stuck duking it out with the writhing masses online the morning of April 1. (Sigh). But I took it as a lesson and officially threw my hat in the ring for the George Washington Parkway 10-miler in April.

Finally, just wanted to pass along a tool suggested by my friend Kaveh. It's the McMillan Running pace calculator, and you can use it to figure out a goal time for a new distance based on your time for a past race. I've used a less comprehensive version (see the link on the right side of this page) to set unrealistic goal times and to waste hours online. I've also used it to stretch my brain to accommodate exciting new goals after a good race — say, to set a more ambitious half-marathon goal after a solid 10K performance.

The sacrifice of the long-distance runner

Screw loneliness. As I enter the last month of training for the half marathon, it's the sacrifice that seems the hardest thing to manage about long-distance running.

It's not self-sacrifice I'm talking about so much as the sacrifice of those around us. Every Runner's World feature about "regular" marathoners includes some sort of shout-out to the marathoner's neglected spouse and kids. My friend Whitney has blogged about her husband biking beside her on 20-mile runs through 17-degree weather.

Today, I'm nominating Steve for sainthood for giving up a ski trip to Tahoe to give me a better chance at running my best on March 21.

Cliff's Notes version: We were tossing around the idea of an impromptu ski at Lake Tahoe. The only week our schedules would accommodate the trip was March 13 to March 20. For weeks, I felt conflicted about shoving my feet in ski boots, skiing hard, flying cross-country and generally wearing out my body leading up to race day on March 21. I'd ended up putting so many qualifications on the trip ("I could ski hard for half the day, then do groomers in the afternoon!" or: "I could drug myself up for the red-eye flight home to make sure I get a good night's rest!") it hardly seemed worth it for me. Note: That's for me, not for Steve.

Here's the thing about this: It means I'm taking the race seriously. Which feels kinda funny for a middle-of-the-packer for whom there's no prize money on the line, no promise of greatness, only a T-shirt and a finisher's medal. And, you know, the whole sense-of-personal-achievement thing.

Steve TOTALLY got it. Among other things, I told him that if we didn't go, but I had a crappy run anyway, I'd feel really bad. His response: "Everyone has bad running days. You can't control those. What we can control is whether we take a trip that's going to affect the way you run."

Awww.

So we're not going to Tahoe this year. But don't cry for us — we have two ski weekends left at Whitetail, and are planning on a trip to Monterrey in May, timed for my birthday. This new schedule lets us spend more time with the friends we're visiting out there and gives us a chance to do a bunch of things we probably wouldn't have time for in the winter, like visiting a winery or six.

To take the self-applied pressure off myself, I'm employing a trick suggested by my friend Michelle. She suggests making three goals: One that's pie-in-the-sky crazy-good, one that's realistically good, and one backup goal you'd still be OK with achieving. My three numbers at this point: I'd be cool with coming in under two hours (or really, just finishing).I'd like to beat my previous best time of 1:56. And in my crazy-good running dreams ... well, that one's a secret.