This is less about the Austin marathon and more about the trip. And really just an excuse to practice writing. I like writing. I like reading what I have written. I like remembering a feeling or an idea years later. In my dotage I will read this blog and remember the pain, effort and disappointment of being able to run a marathon and be happy that I once did so.
Why Austin
Long story. I've marathoned 39 times in the last ten years, averaging 4 per year until last year. Last year I developed a coffee habit, which I guess I can blame on my son in a roundabout way. Not really. You see, Joe has been doing great at college, getting on the dean's list in a very tough major, and generally making really great decisions. So when my daughter, Elaine, mentioned that he really wanted a teardrop trailer, well, I thought that was an excellent idea, and of course I wanted to use it to. Here is a link to the blog of that project: http://bzprojects.blogspot.com.
About halfway through that blog you will find a picture of a small stovetop coffee pot. I did a fine job of searching the web for good quality, inexpensive accouterments for that trailer, including the coffee pot. That little sucker makes the finest cup of coffee from even crappy beans. I even went so far as to buy a small burr grinder. It made such grat coffee that I tossed the drip machine and brewed my coffee every morning on the stove right next to my eggs. I had the timing worked out perfectly. It was the highlight of my day. Unfortunately . . .
The combination of the caffeine (and I only havd one cup a day) and tensing certain chest muscles all day, sitting at my desk at work caused the pectoral muscles both inside and out my rib cage to strengthen and lock up, the result tightening my paracardium, the facia around my heart, to tighten around my heart until it found little room to beat. This caused stabbing pains in my chest when running fast and inability to run longer distances. It took me a month or so to figure it out with the help of my massage therapist, then four months to loosen. For a while there I could not run. I gave up coffee, of course. Except for the Yakima marathon I missed the 2014 season completely. But when biking season ended, I went back to running with my remade chest cavity.
I have had a printed list on my cubicle wall, of the 50 largest marathons in the US, for the past 6 years or so. Chicago is first with 42000 finishers. Boston is in the top 6 with 25000, but of course you know that that marathon is self-limiting. Many more would enter if they could. I have crossed off 8 or 10 of the list. Austin is 23 at something like 4500 finishers.
The reason Austin is interesting for a marathon destination, for me, is mostly the date. I give up bicycling in mid October due to the declining temperature and hours of daylight at the latitude where I live, so I must have some exercise and that is running. Not less than 35 miles a week will keep me from falling victim to middle age weight gain, so I run 5 miles in the early morning darkness of each weekday throughout the northern winter. Come February, I've usually expanded my mileage to an average of 40 miles/week and am casting about for a suitable marathon.
Only three fit the bill: 1) Olympia, 2) Lost Dutchman, and 3) Austin. Olympia loses out mainly on its prosaic nature. Who wants to go to Olympia in February? And my parents live there (normally a draw, but not enough to compel me to go there for a marathon). The Lost Dutchman almost got me for a couple reasons. It begins in the foothills near the Lost Dutchman Mine east of Phoenix. It has near legendary status among runners for the Beaty and serenity of the course. It only has about 500 entrants. And it's near Phoenix, where Garmin has a development center for aircraft avionics. I could take a resume and interview. Austin, though, has music, an SEL office, where I can work for a week while acclimatizing without taking much vacation, and I know three musicians there. Maybe we can get together and jam. Austin it is
Penny wise and pound foolish
I like to wait until three weeks before a marathon to register and buy airline tickets. Marathons require six months of injury-free running and hundreds of miles to prepare for, and so many things can go wrong. But three weeks before the marathon the final long run, a twenty miler, culminates the bulk of the training and then I "taper". So if I survive the training to the point of the taper, I feel very confident that I can spend money on registration and travel that won't go to waste. This practice eliminates hard to enter races like Newport OR and St. George UT, but most races are still in play. This also is just long enough lead time to get me reasonably low airfare, usually on Southwest.
Modern software tools on mobile hardware, we currently call them "apps on an iPhone" allow me to efficiently search all flights to and from Austin for the best rate. And it's easy to minimize the cost by choosing less-busy travel days. So without even checking for hotel prices or availability, I extended my trip to eight days, midweek to midweek, because that was the cheapest and I wanted time to acclimatize to the area. I've been running for months at 38 deg and 0 humidity, and Austin will be as high as 70 and 80% humidity. Better let that sink in a bit.
I called a friend and past bandmate and arranged to stay at his home for the first three days of the trip and then I would rent someplace much closer in as the race approached. He lives about 10 miles out in the hill county to the west. Plus I subscribe to the old saw:
"Company is like fish . . . After three days it starts to smell."
Unfortunately I failed to find a room before I left for the trip. My first few days were secure, and I thought it wouldn't be too difficult, and sometimes I'm just lazy (says the marathoner). As it turns out, Austin hotels are $300 a night! So once I arrived I hit the computer hard looking for alternatives. I tried out airbnb for the first time. I looked cool, but I found out later why the most oft-repeated review compliment was "responded in a timely fashion". I located a waterfront condo on ladybird lake and applied Wednesday to stay for four days starting Thursday. Then I found out that the renter has 24 hours to respond. And my credit card my be charged the full amount until the 24 hours is up. So I waited. And the owner never responded. So I was out 24 hours and still needed a place to stay, now tonight, for both me and my brother in law, Ken.
On Priceline I found a hotel within a half mile of both the start and the finish of the marathon and it was $229 a night if I stayed the whole six nights. Double queen. I was out of time so I took it. With parking and other incidental fees this marathon is costing me something like $3k. I usually like to keep my marathon costs under $500 for anything within 500 miles (local) and $1k for any trip requiring airfare. I sure blew this one. The 8 day thing just didn't work out.
Austin
Austin is a funny little town trying to be big. It has no real history other than being the Capitol of the state of Texas. No industry, except what the high tech stuff that has moved in north of town in the last ten years. No Alamo. No famous battles (see the picture of the woman lighting off the cannon below for the sole exception). Despite that, the town has managed to portray itself as a forward thinking cultural center. It takes credit for all music within an 800 mile radius. And it likes to think of itself as "green". I would say that only 10 to 40% of its reputation is true.
True, there are bike and walk paths aplenty win 3 miles of downtown. But you cannot in any way ride a bicycle to work up by the arboretum, where SEL has an office. Impossible. You will die. The music I heard was decent, though I never had a chance to listen to any really good shows--the kind you must get a ticket for. To be fair, though, I wasn't really there long enough to see any good shows.
The town is arranged on a SSW facing slope down to the edge of an artificial lake made from the Colorado River (no, not that Colorado River). It's a somewhat nice setting.
6th St.
The Food
Texans sure know their BBQ, but that's not all. They're amazingly good a flavor combinations, peppering to precision, and hot for good reason, not just to be hot. Seriously, I enjoyed so many wonderful, inventive, experimenting flavors this week. If I truly want to learn to cook, I must spend some time here and other places south. These people care deeply about food.
Here's a menu snippet from a place that only serves hot dogs. I think it was called "Franks". Funny. I ordered the Carolina Pork It. Just look at it. A top grade dog, wrapped in bacon, deep fried with a topping "grilled" cole slaw? Who thinks of grilling cole slaw? Ok, in fact, the coleslaw was great, with nice heavy mayonnaise flavor, slightly horseradish spicey. But I noticed no hints of grilling. It was a really awesome dog, though.
Wow! Amazingly flavorful shepherds pie at a local Irish pub. Here's what I texted nan while I was eating at Fado's Irish pub:
Salad chock with just the right combination of nuts, craisins, pickled beets, arugula (lots of that here) and a wonderful oil-heavy raspberry vinagrette. The tomatoes are so acidic that they attack the roof of my mouth.
But the pie!
Top notch ingredients in the stew almost minced into a thick brown sauce that is flavorful, wonderfully textured, and well seasoned, even salty but with almost no hint of salt. Worcestershire?
The spuds are smooth, with just a hint of graininess, and baked so that the ridges are just browned. Incredible. Wish you were here.
Every chance I got, I tried something new. The BBQ places were amazing. There was one -- "Rudy's" -- that was at a gas station. That's what Carl said but I saw no one pumping gas. Actually, the place looks more like a KOA. It's a large log A-frame as e center part which contains the smoker, tellers and customer line, with surrounding large porch roofs attached to the main building. Under the porches arelarge log picnic tables. Normally open air, in winter there are vinyl windows zipped over the openings and the large, ducted heat vents deliver a surprising amount of warm air down to the customers via oscillating fans, which in summer, cool.
One thing I learned in Austin was that BBQ is about the meat, not the sauce. The sauce is nice, and added by the customer when dressing the meat either plain or on a sandwich. The meat varies, but is most often beef brisket. Some turkey. Some sausage. Some of the brisket is cooked most, some lean. This place had a 16 ft wide smoker, about 4 ft deep and 3 high. The fire is mesquite, stoked from the customer picnic table side of the wall.
Six teller positions take orders across a single counter. Each has a scale and paper ("Texas fine China") and what looks like a Pepsi crate is the basket. The single file line snakes up to the left side of the counter around a 20 ft long ice chest full of bottles of beer and soda. Bottle openers are mounted all along the side of the chest to encourage customers to drink while they wait in line.
The tellers are talking a mile a minute, each to his own customer, asking details about the order. You order the meat by the pound. The teller walks back to the smoker, cuts off the desired weight of meat and slaps in on the "China" on the tray. Ask for bread and sides of cole slaw, cream corn, etc and it too is dropped into the tray. If you've never been there before, they send up a cheers that is echoed behind the counter. If you're from out of state, they give a state cheer, each teller Cherring "Idaho ho" in the middle of dealing with their own customer.
The meat is smoked over mesquite for 8 to 12 hours prior to serving. The meat is rubbed with spices, mainly pepper prior to going in the smoker, and a thin rink of the flavor resides on the edges of your cut. Brisket, which is the tough chest cut of beef comes out of this process so tender that you barely have to chew it. You can break it apart with your tongue against the roof of your mouth and it dissolves succulently on your tongue. Wow. Great BBQ, from a gas station.
The marathon
I didn't take my phone with me so I have no pictures of the marathon. So here is my prose description of he event.
I was really trained up for this one. I had miles. Not enough speed work, but plenty of miles. At the end of the bicycle season I found myself light on the number of commutes for the year. I like to get a minimum of 74 commutes, or 1/3rd of my yearly work commutes (yes, you only work 224 days a year, what with vacation, sick leave and weekends). And I was short because I got lazy early on rainy days in June.
So I biked 5 days a week from sept 21 thru oct 14. The first two weeks I felt like a zombie. Then the third week I felt like superman. So I figured I'd try that running: I would work up from 3 miles a weekday to 5 per, in half mile increments, and then a long run on Saturday. After I leveled off at over 40 miles a week I did feel like superman once every 3 or 4 weeks, but it was pretty sporadic. I ran in snow and rain and friggin cold. Every damn day.
I've been working through the heart problem I mentioned before, so I was just going for a base. No speed. I only did 3 days of intervals (4, 6 and 8) late in January, just when I decided to run Austin. It wasn't enough, but I wasn't going for speed on this one. I was just going to plod through at 9s and finish strong. But it was not to be.
I didn't even look at the course or elevation before the day of the run. Even though it was only 500 ft elevation, it was surprisingly hilly. Who knew? Everyone thinks Austin is flat. It's not. Rollers. Small undulating hills of 50 or less are awesome on a bicycle, but heart rate raisers for runners. Me especially. I don't get enough rest on the downhill to make up for the effort required for the up. Tbd look up total elevation gain on that course. I bet it's over 1000.
The race starts at 2nd and Congress, 10 blocks below the largest Capitol building in the US. The first hill was soco (south congress), right out of the gate. 300 ft over 3 miles. It's not a steep hill, but enough to keep my heart rate at 155. Too high too soon. The course comes back into downtown on Lamar, then out around Tarrytown.
By mile 10 we're 3 miles west of the capital and the half marathoners split off to return to the start/finish. Marathoners head north for 3 miles of rollers until tbd military base. We then cross to the east side of the MoPac and head north 4 more miles. At 17, the course goes east for a mile and then wanders around just south of 183 until mile 20, when it finally heads south, finishing through the campus of the university of Texas and the Capitol.
I suppose it's meant to be a scenic course, but the only decent scenery is congress, lady bird lake and the Capitol. Even the stint through UT only goes by the stadium. Same view cars on the street get, down in a hole dwarfed by the foundations of the stadium. And the arrangement makes the worst use of all of the Jill's. The uphills hurt a lot and the downhills rarely help.
The second problem is temp/humidity. It was mid 60s on the second half, low due to overcast, but the humidity was in the 90% range due to a coming wet cold front. Too much cooling work for my poor heart. I'm used to 36 deg and 0%.
I held to 9s for the first three miles at too high a heart rate, then 2 minutes up on 9s coming down Lamar, which only dropped me into the high 140s, a number I would seldom see for the rest of the race. At my best, around mile 10 I had an 8:44 average, and it went to 8:48s through the rollers and mile 13. I started to struggle with my heart rate at 16, having to pull back on effort every now and again to keep it under 160, then it blew up at 17. I had to start walking the top of every mile at 18 just to bring my heart rate back under 150. Any slight hill sent it to 163 (max). And when it hit that it would hurt a bit and send me gulping for air. Clearly, something is still wrong with my heart. Not sure who to have look at it.
I finished at a miserable 4:14. Not bad considering I was shooting for a 4:00 but a whimpery run and my second worst time ever.
Night-seeing the Capitol and the university
The hill country
I wanted to take one or two days to drive around the country to just get a feel for how people live. The lay of the land, etc. I thought I would drive down to the gulf coast, only 3 1/2 hours away, but I couldn't arrange two days away from the Austin hotel. And 8+ hours of driving prior to a 5 hour flight and then 2 hours more home from spokane was just too much to contemplate. So I took Rene's advice and went to Luckenbach in the hill country to the west. Only an hour and a hour each way and lots of time to get out of the car and walk around.
I left the hotel at 10 after a leisurely lay-in and by 11am had wandered my way 45 miles west 7 miles off track to Pedernales State Park, on the Pedernales River. It look like just the thing. I had given up all my cash the at Uchi's the night before, so I had to find a teller in Johnson City and then back track to the park.
It was just what I was looking for. It was a beautiful, sunny, cold clear day, like spring in Idaho, and I sat in the car with my eyes closed for 10 minutes before heading down to the falls. Very interesting falls, these. The channel is about 50 yards wide, 10 yards deep and scoured limestone. The uplift angle here is about 20 degrees pointing toward the oncoming water and it got to be the way it is from the flash floods. Warning signs abound saying something to the effect of "If the water starts rising, get thee to higher ground. A flash flood is a comin'!".
At low water, very little water runs in the course, and 10ft deep lakes rest in large holes carves out of the rock by previous torrents. I walked upstream a ways, and by walk, I mean walk upstream 10 yards up a slight incline, then scramble down a 3 to 6 ft angled wall, then repeat. It look the the roof of a dog's mouth, only upside down and much larger in scale. I goofed around the park for another half hour and then headed west.
Further west on 290, I ran into LBJ's ranch.
Wait a minute. I had better back up and describe the hill country. Firstly, I don't understand the geology or the soil. I don't understand why the terrain east and south of Austin is flat, and that to the NW is higher, and hilly. I know not what underlies the flat, but limestone -- layers and layers of it, underlie the hill country. It varies in color from banana cream to a nice creamy off white. It usually lies in flat layers, but can wriggle in swerving shallow uplifts, as I saw exposed at Pedernales Falls.
The limestone itself is beautiful stuff, when well quarried from select locales.
Take a look at the photos I have included of a building on the UT campus. This stone was mud millions of years ago, and it has preserved the remains of hundreds of mussels, now exposed on the petrified walls of this building.
Back to the hill country. The hills rise and fall at no more than 50 feet per mile and 300 ft from peak to valley. But it does so in such a comfortable and creative pattern. The slopes are gentle so the contour lines are only followed, while hiking, for their aesthetic appeal. Ridges are high enough to hide and exquisitely reveal views but not high enough to intimidate the hiker.
The soil is shallow and the grass must be manipulated to achieve anything even remotely green, with either water or replacement with a variety more suited to the locale. The trees, mostly live oak are at once large and small, encroaching and sparse, creepy and becoming. The trees are tall enough to make a good view from the road rather occasional, but they don't seem tall from a car. I'd say they average between 20 and 30 ft tall, which is large enough to park you car beneath low hanging branches. When given adequate room, say a 100 foot radius free from other trees, the achieve a beautiful semi-spherical shape. Some have branches the grow from 10 feet high on the trunk, down to the ground and out to the outer perimeter of the tree, allowing a sure-foot woman to walk up into the tree on a sort of ramp.
Areas left natural have an assortment of brush and scrub cedar trees that make walking difficult, but where man has ranched for any length of time, especially monied cattle or horse ranches, and now vineyards, the scrub has been cleared and grass grows more lush, but not tall enough to require cutting. I can only imagine these tree-arched glades as one of the most idyllic moonlit settings I could imagine. I can definitely see the appeal of this place. It is quite romantic, in a redneck sort of way.
Ten miles from Luckenbach, on the north shore of the Pedernales River, I found LBJ's ranch.
It is an unassuming two-story ranch house of about 3000 sf, set beautifully on a small rise above a man-made pond. A concrete causeway with a 3ft dam on the upriver side allows water to trickle over the wall and across the entire length of the road across the river to the house. The road is now closed, but it creates a beautiful setting for a lovely little working ranch.
To get to the house, you must drive a mile downriver, and along the way back on the north side a small cabin sits among a grove of pecan trees on the right, away from the river, and a low stone wall encloses the resting place of president Johnson and his ancestors. Within the enclosure, five large live oaks spread their low branches to form a most appealing canopy. I am a conneseur of cemeteries -- I often walk among the headstones of the older ones I've found, reading the names of the deceased in a strong, warm voice so that the spirits my once again hear their names and remember -- and this is just about the most serene setting I have ever seen.
