Owen

In my prime, I was a savage, relentless hunter. Nothing was safe that entered my yard – nothing. Rats, mice, possums, squirrels, lizards, grasshoppers – I bagged them all. I also cornered a ferret once, but my parents locked me in the house and set the ferret free. I’m still mad about it.

I was so cocky that I used to howl back at the coyotes at night.

I LOVED food. ALL kinds of food. I could finish my breakfast kibble in under a minute. If anything – and I mean anything – hit the kitchen floor, it was MINE! The only things I didn’t like much were broccoli, cauliflower, and chilies. I would help mom clean out the cat box too. Cat poop is like a Tootsie Roll with crunchy bits! I also did enjoy a few licks of beer and whiskey from my dad here and there so that was a nice change of pace.

My nose was so good that I could sniff out a single molecule of food. Once, my mom had a small bag of chocolate chip cookies in her purse upstairs in the bedroom that she was saving for the kids. Well, I just couldn’t help myself, so I ran upstairs, pulled her purse off of the nightstand, and helped myself to every bit. I even ate most of the wrapper when my mom came into the bedroom and busted me. She was so mad she scolded me and put me outside!

Another time, someone left an unattended grocery bag with a bag of chocolate chips in it. Yeah, I know chocolate isn’t good for me but dang, it’s so tasty! Well, that was super easy for me to help myself to the chocolate chips, so I ate the entire 12-oz bag! When I got caught, my parents were afraid that I had poisoned myself, so my dad Googled something and began to administer small amounts of hydrogen peroxide to induce vomiting. It was nasty. I tried so hard to keep it down, but by the third dose I had ballooned up to the point that I had to toss my chocolate chips all over the pool deck. I tried to clean it up myself, you know, by eating it again, but I was put back in the house and sadly watched my dad through the French door window scrape it up and hose it off.

Once, I also got hold of grandma’s favorite candy; chocolate covered cherries! My human left them in a bag in the office for a Christmas gift – lucky me! I ate through the cellophane shrink wrap. I ate through the cardboard box. I even ate the little paper cups that the candy sits in. My parents got so mad at me they put me outside for hours even despite my howls of discontent.

One day, my dad was cooking some pork strips on the barbecue grill. He was flipping them around while drinking a beer and one of them fell on the ground right in front of me! So, I tried to gobble it down quickly, but it was so damn hot it burned my mouth, so I spat it out and then tried eating it again and again until it was cool enough to swallow. I must have been making some funny grunting noises because my dad was looking at me and laughing pretty hard. I never had hot food before, and it was delicious!

I was also guilty of nosing through the trash whenever the opportunity presented itself. There was always something delicious in the trash and I never understood why my family didn’t eat it. It was a worthwhile endeavor and getting yelled at and put outside for a time out wasn’t so bad.

My parents had an RV, and we went to the beach and the mountains often. I liked to ride under the front seats. I didn’t like my first trip to the snow in Mammoth much. I mean, I’m only eight-inches tall, and that snow was so deep that I couldn’t see anything but snow, so I wouldn’t go to the bathroom, I just stood there in the snow freezing with my tail between my legs and shivering in my cute little snow jacket and harness. My mom said, “Owen, knock it off. There’s barely a foot of snow here!” By the second night I couldn’t hold it anymore and stood at the door of the RV crying…at around three o’clock in the morning! My mom put on her parka and snow boots, put the cute little snow jacket and harness back on me, and opened the RV door. With purpose I dove out into the cold snow and hopped over a few times until I found the perfect spot to relieve myself. It wasn’t so bad after that.

On an RV trip to Shaver Lake, my dad was driving the RV solo with only me and Charity, my yellow lab BFF from Guide Dogs of America. The rest of the family was driving up to the lake later on. We were somewhere along Highway 168 when one of the rear tires on the RV blew out and made such a loud noise that I leapt out from under the passenger seat and into my dad’s lap in one motion! Charity was there too! There we were, pulling over to the shoulder of Highway 168, my dad with us two dogs in his lap, him trying to keep his cool under pressure. When we finally got to the shoulder and parked the RV, my dad got out to assess the situation which was apparently pretty bad based on the loud new words I hadn’t heard before. He made a few phone calls, and then we waited for hours for the tow truck to arrive.

Well, I’m a small dog with a small bladder, although you wouldn’t know it if you took me for a walk because I have this crazy ability to pee on everything along the way, so I signaled to my dad that I had to go potty by walking over to the RV door and waiting there. So, my dad noticed me and started looking for my leash and couldn’t find it. He looked everywhere, and judging by more loud new words, he wasn’t happy about it. Good thing my dad has mad MacGyver type skills and improvised braided leashes for me and Charity with some cooking string. Later that night, my mom laughed about them and went over to the closet where our real leashes were hanging.

We lived in this nice house in Porter Ranch with a sloped, fenced yard. Well, the fence was good enough to keep Charity in the yard, but I was able to squeeze through the bars of the fence with no problem and go roaming in my neighbors’ backyards. I would come home with half-eaten lemons, and green, unripe stone fruits like apricots and peaches that the squirrels would drop on the ground. They were yummy! Sometimes the neighbors would find me in their yard and shoo me away. Sometimes they caught me and took me back home.

My wandering got pretty bad, so my dad put up some chicken wire to keep me from getting through the fences. This put an end to my wanderings. I was sad.

We had the same kind of fencing at a house in Simi Valley, so my dad put up some chicken wire there too, but my mom made the mistake of putting the cat food just outside the fence on the front patio. I wanted to eat that cat food so bad. After a few days, I just couldn’t take it any longer, so I chewed through the chicken wire and squeezed through the fence bars and ate all of the cat food. Every last morsel went down the hatch. The problem was that I had already put on a few inches since Porter Ranch and could barely get through the fence in Simi Valley, but by the time I gulped down that cat food, I couldn’t squeeze back through the fence into the yard. You should have seen the look on my parents faces when they opened the front door and found me standing there. It was priceless.

When Charity got sick and crossed over the rainbow bridge, I was sad that my BFF was gone and I went into a funk and started living like a fat, lazy housecat. I ate. I slept. I pooped. Repeat day-in and day-out.

The Family

We first met Owen at Petland inside the Northridge Fashion Center mall in December 2005. Petland was one of those old school pet stores where you could find rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, kittens, puppies, and live tropical fish to bring home. Pet stores in malls have fallen out of favor since then.

Owen was one of several mini-Dachshunds available and most likely came from some godawful puppy mill somewhere in flyover country, but damn, he was so cute we didn’t care where he came from! He was only 8-weeks old at the time, so he was born sometime in early October 2005. He was so small that he could fit in the palms of our hands. It was love at first sight.

We already had another dog named Charity, a sweet, beautiful yellow Labrador Retriever who we raised for Guide Dogs of America and adopted after she couldn’t advance in the training program. The folks at GDA call this “a career change.” We called it lucky because she was a great family pet. We wanted to find Charity a companion but wanted a smaller dog and Owen was a perfect fit.

He was named Owen DeVito by our son Travis after Danny DeVito’s character Owen in Throw Momma from the Train.

Owen loved to cuddle underneath the covers. He was also a great watchdog and hunter…and a mostly indiscriminate eater. Inside the house, he was always sniffing around for a morsel of anything. The kitchen floor was kept very clean due to his efforts. Anything that he caught in the yard was consumed. One morning after being let out to go potty, he came back to the door to be let in…with the back end of a half-eaten rat hanging out of his mouth. Hearing screaming at 06:30 is not the best way to start a day. He was a great family pet and always made the kids feel better with his cuddles if they were feeling under the weather. He was also a great traveling companion and loved going on road trips in the RV.

Owen and Charity loved chasing each other around the yard and Owen was almost always the instigator. Being as little as he was, Owen could easily take cover under the patio furniture which blocked Charity from getting to him. He was so clever and quick, that he could lunge out from under the patio furniture and nip at Charity’s back leg and be back under the protection of the patio furniture in a flash. In the open, however, Charity had the advantage and could easily outrun Owen, trip him, and have him on his back with her mouth around his neck and him trying to squirm out of it. It was always in play, and they never hurt each other. It was fun to watch them interact.

Unfortunately, in 2016 Charity got really sick and had to be put down. Everyone was heartbroken, especially Owen. He went into a deep funk and started living mostly like our housecat Bagheera; eating, sleeping, pooping, repeat, ad infinitum. It was sad to see him so upset.

In 2018, we got a new Aussie-Doodle dog and named her Sydney. Although she came from a questionable online source that required a cash payment and a rendezvous in a public park in another county, she’s been a great pet – and breathed new life into Owen that took him out of his cat-like funk and back into his normal self. It was awesome to see him snap back like that. They bonded quickly and Owen was back to his usual outdoor playtime antics.

Sadly, in 2022 Owen got really sick and passed away in his sleep at home and walked over the rainbow bridge at the ripe old age of 17 human years (119 dog years). He left an indelible mark on the family and his canine cohorts. We miss our beloved Owen. His loss had clearly left a hole in Sydney’s life too, but it has recently been filled with a rambunctious orange tabby rescue cat from Palm Springs named Cheeto, but that is a whole other story for another time.

Owen was a little dog with a bit impact.

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I’m not a man that shies away from a challenge. I’m an Ironman finisher. I wrote a 300-page Kindle e-book titled How to Build a Wood-Fired Pizza Oven: Using Dry-Stack Masonry Methods ASIN: B0BXFQYVCD. I’m married with children.

I have some stories to tell. Lots of them, actually. Maybe too many but once you get to be a man of a certain age the stories accumulate. To tell these stories, they must be written sooner or later but I do not yet consider myself an excellent writer. To get to that level of writing I’ll need to apply the 10,000-hour rule as articulated by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success.

I just recently re-read Fahrenheit 451 (60th anniversary edition), by Ray Bradbury and thoroughly enjoyed it – many passages are still chillingly relevant. Ray Bradbury was a fellow Angelino and reading about him renting the typewriters in the UCLA library for 10-cents for 30-minutes at-a-time to write the novel was inspiring in his resolve plus I’ve been at that very library! Digging deeper into Bradbury’s life, I visited his website at https://raybradbury.com and discovered his thoughts on writing here, and this struck me:

Start short. Don’t start out writing novels—they take too long—“write a hell of a lot of short stories,” he said. Give yourself time to improve; with each week and month, you’ll see your stories improve. He claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

From this comes the self-imposed 52 Stories in 52 Weeks challenge.

I will try my best.

If you like, you can also follow me on my writing journey on Instagram @m.snarky.

In light of Vin Scully Weekend here in Los Angeles and his upcoming retirement, I wanted to post something about a personal experience I had with Mr. Scully many years ago that only a few of my close friends and family know about.  I remember it like it happened yesterday.

Being born and raised here in Los Angeles, naturally the Dodgers are my favorite baseball team.  I’ve been to countless Dodgers games in Chavez Ravine during good seasons and not-so-good seasons.  I’ve been to day games, night games, corporate ticket games- thank you Fuji Film for the best seats I’ve ever had along the 3rd base line, four rows in- kids baseball league games and construction crew games.  In 1988, I saw the team play during the regular season on their way to the World Series where The Bulldog was having the best pitching season of his career and Kirk Gibson made history against the formidable, heavily favored Oakland A’s with the Bash Brothers Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire in the lineup and sidearm closer Dennis “Eck” Eckersley in the bullpen.  The consensus at the time was that the A’s would easily win the World Series.  Well, we know how that turned out!

Throughout all of the various Dodgers eras like the 1988 World Series, Fernando Fever, the Daryl Strawberry train wreck, Steve “Mr. Clean” Garvey, Eric “Game Over” Gagne, the Yasiel Puig drama, and Clayton “Kersh” Kershaw’s spectacular pitching, it has always been the great familiar voice of Vin Scully calling the play-by-play that makes them memorable.  The players and coaches change over the years, but Vin Scully is the one common thread.

Back in 1988, I was working in the electrical trade in Los Angeles for a low-key but well connected and respected electrical contractor that had an A-List of customers.  I’m talking about clients that ran the spectrum; nouveau riche snobs, well known celebrities, business executives, politicians, arrogant actors and polite old-money families.  I have been in homes on some of the most heavily guarded estates that would surely blow your mind.  For example, one of these estates had a semi-circular driveway with four double-door garages on either side.  Inside the garages;  a collection of a dozen old and new museum quality Ferrari’s. Plus there was a full-time Ferrari factory mechanic on staff that told me his job was to make sure that every one of the cars was ready to drive at a moments notice.  Wow.

Some of these people treated me on a level of professional respect and would talk to me directly while others wouldn’t speak to me at all.  Like the time I went to a large estate in Beverly Hills to install smoke detectors and although the owner was standing right in front of me, she spoke to me through her butler standing next to her.  “Please tell the electrician to first start on the downstairs guest bedrooms and office before going upstairs.”  The butler repeated her words to me verbatim even though we were all standing within a few feet of each other!  It was surreal.

One summer workday morning I had a dispatch for an address in Pacific Palisades for a Mr. Vin Scully- 8:30 Prompt.  I read the dispatch twice before asking my boss Joe if this was “THE” Vin Scully and Joe assured me it was.  Apparently, Mr. Scully had just had a major pool and spa remodel that included state-of-the-art remote controls for the pumps, lights, slide and waterfall, but they were not working correctly and the pool contractor went AWOL.  I was pretty good at troubleshooting electrical controls, so the dispatch was handed to me.

Back then, before the Internet, GPS and Google Maps, we had these things called a Thomas Guide in our trucks, pretty much the the state-of-the-art maps of the time.  It was a thick metal bound book with a grid pattern overlay over sections of a city.  You could find an address by looking up the street name first and then cross-referencing it with the street number range and you would get something like Page 16, F-3 and within that little square on that page was your destination.  Well, it turns out that Mr. Scully was doing alright for himself and he was living in a very nice neighborhood north of Sunset Boulevard.

I loaded up my truck with everything I thought I needed for the day and drove out to Mr. Scully’s residence, starting from La Cienega and Venice boulevards and heading to Sunset Boulevard somewhere west of the 405.  I pulled up promptly to the gate at 8:30 and pressed the button on the intercom.

“Helll000; who is this?” came a very familiar voice over the speaker.  WOW- IT WAS HIM!  It was Vin Scully’s golden voice of Dodgers baseball talking to me!  It took me a second to regain my composure and I replied with something like “Good morning, Mr. Scully.  This is Kent from [contractors name withheld],  here to work on your pool equipment.”  Mr. Scully replied, “Hi, Kent, c’mon in!” And with that, the gate hummed open and I drove up the long curved driveway to the front door, and there he was; the legendary Vin Scully, standing on the porch in his pajamas, slippers and white robe, perfect hair, freshly shaven, with a mug of coffee in his hand.  Everything about him was perfect, like there was going to be a GQ photo shoot that day.

He pointed to a spot in the driveway and said, “You can park right over there.”  I parked where he indicated and I exited my truck with my clipboard and grabbed my tool belt from the back and walked up to the front porch where Mr. Scully was standing.  I expected him to whisk me along a side walkway to the back yard where the pool equipment was located, but instead he said “Good morning, Kent,” in that familiar warm cheerful voice of his and then he extended his hand for a handshake- yes, I actually got to shake hands with the legendary voice of the Dodgers on his front porch!  “C’mon on in buddy,” he said, and he walked me into his lovely front-cover-of-Better-Homes-and-Gardens quality of home and it was filled with family portraits and innumerable Dodgers memorabilia (including a Dodgers pinball machine!) and framed pictures of Mr. Scully standing next to many of the Dodger greats throughout the years and his various broadcasting awards all lined up in a bookcase.

He walked me over to the kitchen and then asked me, “Would you like some coffee or a doughnut or a bagel?”  I declined his kind offer of food and beverage and was ready to ask him to direct me to the pool controls when he began introducing me to his wife and mother.  Mr. Scully and his family were treating me like a guest or a family member instead of the perfect stranger I was, although you could argue since he knew I was coming, I wasn’t technically a “perfect stranger.”  I was pleasantly surprised by this.

After a few moments of light talk about the weather and the recent pool construction, the conversation moved on to the task-at-hand; troubleshooting the pool and spa system.  The pool contractor set up what then was a new, state-of-the-art wireless home automation control system called X10.  Simply put, X10 allowed you to control lighting and power throughout your home with small portable control boxes like this:

Mr. Scully walked me over to one of the pool equipment control panels in the house and began explaining and showing me how when he pressed a button labeled “Lights,” instead of lights, the waterfall started.  He then pressed another button that was labeled “Spa” but instead of a steamy bubbling cauldron, the waterslide water began to flow.  Then he walked me over to another control panel inside the pool house.  Same problem, but with different labels and button locations- one of which did not do anything.  It was a complete disaster.  “See what I mean?  The pool contractor spent days on this and couldn’t get it to work right.  Do you think there’s any hope of fixing it?” he asked in a slightly exasperated tone.  I assured him there was hope and he extended his hand again for another handshake and said, “Okay, Kent- have at it.  I have a limo to catch so I’ll be leaving shortly.  Help yourself to anything in the kitchen or pool house.”  And with that said, Mr. Scully turned around and walked away and let me loose in his fabulous house.

It took me several more trips to fix the control problem which required a combination of grounding some electrical enclosures and components at the pool and spa equipment area and adding some X10 range extenders and reprogramming the controllers, but I had it working flawlessly.  When I had the chance to show Mr. Scully how the system was finally working correctly, he was thrilled and truly grateful.  “Wow, Kent, you must be some kind of wizard!  Great job and thank you!” and he extended his hand for another handshake.

The most memorable thing to me was that every single time I revisited the Scully residence during this multi-day project, Mr. Scully’s demeanor was exactly the same- always cheerful, warm, friendly and inviting.  He probably doesn’t remember me, but I remember him, and to me, Vin Scully will always be that graceful, kind, down-to-earth gentleman I did some work for, and I’m thankful I met him.

How what started out as an achievable 4:00:00 goal personal best marathon run eventually devolved into a run of survival, despair, self-doubt and godawful pain by mile 23…but with a little help from some Road Angels, I finished it anyway.

 

Six Months of Training

Training for the 2016 Los Angeles Marathon began in September 2015 with Coach Jimmy Dean Freeman when my wife Kim and I were selected to be mentors for Team NutriBullet 2016.  This would be my third successive Los Angeles marathon with Team NutriBullet, fourth marathon in total, and fifth endurance run overall (I ran the Leona Divide 50k in 2015), all within the last three years.  I knew exactly what I was getting into and most certainly understood the uncertainties of any given race day.

Jimmy Dean Freeman is excellent at emphasizing how runners must adapt during any given endurance run and how they must keep a “What can I do right now” mentality because dream races have a tendency to turn into nightmares if one doesn’t manage them well.  This is a mental check-in strategy where you need to determine if you need to fuel up, drink up, puke out or hit the closest porta-potty and, um, unload.  I’ve heard a rumor that all of these can happen at the same time.

Originally, there were around 125 Team NutriBullet marathon athletes in training this season, but by race day there were only around 107 ready to run.  The team attrition was due to combinations of personal and professional demands, lack of training commitment and various illnesses and injuries.

Personally, I was enjoying the best training season to date and I firmly believe that this was due to the combination of Coach Jimmy Dean Freeman’s epic running and professional coaching experiences, Coach Nicole Sedmak‘s painful but loving strength training classes, whipping our cores into impenetrable abs of steel, and TRIO’s High Performance Coach Gareth Thomas’ heart rate training methodology.

All of my pre-marathon races this season were personal bests, shaving, trimming and cutting significant time off  my 5k, 10k, and half-marathon race times.  I was feeling healthy, pain-free and confident of my marathon goal time this year.  I was putting in the time and effort required to be at peak performance including the optional weekly Wednesday Night Warrior Workouts (#WNWW), coached by Jimmy Dean Freeman, which were mostly a mix of hill-repeats and speed work like Yasso 800’s, plus I was also cross-training on my road bike during run rest days.

Sh!t Happens

It turns out that at the end of the half-marathon race I did something that would haunt me for the rest of my training.  I was running to the finish line as fast as I could, thanks to the encouragement of Jimmy Dean Freeman at around mile 12.5, something like “Don’t look at your watch!” and “I want to see those heels way up!”  The splits on my watch indicated that I was running at a sick (really: I felt like puking) 6:29 pace, and once I crossed the finish line, instead of decelerating into a walking pace like I should have, I did an abrupt stop to catch my breath when I felt a little pain shoot up from my right lower calf.  It hurt, but I was able to walk it off.  I assumed it was maybe a minor pulled muscle issue, but I was wrong; it was my Achilles.

From this point forward, I was an injured runner trying to recover.  The marathon was still a little over four weeks out which, at the time, seemed like enough time to fully recover, so I enthusiastically engaged in recovery mode therapy as prescribed by Coach Nicole and Chandra (Channy Chan Chan) Farnham; Epsom salt soaks, hot/cold packs and stretching.  During this time, I was not able to fully participate in the training runs and was only able to get in a little over 14-miles on the longest run.  But I was healing, albeit slowly, and the pain was fading so I was cautiously optimistic about the upcoming marathon.

February 14, 2016 Los Angeles Marathon, Dodger Stadium

This was to be the most unusual Valentine’s day I have ever experienced.  I was as prepared as I was going to be and felt that I would still be able to achieve the 4-hour time goal.  Colin Sapire, the CEO of Capital Brands, the parent company of NutriBullet and sponsor of Team NutriBullet, generously reserved the Ketle One Baseline Club space at Dodger Stadium, allowing the runners to have a private place to meet, prepare, and discuss the race before the starting gun at 6:55.  It also had a private bathroom which seemed to make everyone on the team really happy.

Liz Gonzales, one of the fellow Team NutriBullet mentors, had the same time goal as I did and so we decided to pace each other for the race.  It is a good run strategy to pair-up with someone that has a similar time goal because it helps keep you mentally engaged.  We left Ketle One and met up in the B corral along with some of the other Team NutriBullet members.

After the national anthem was sung and Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti bragged about the City of Los Angeles and welcomed all of the athletes to the event, it was go time!

Liz and I were doing great; keeping fueled up and cooled off, killing our splits far into mile 15 when I had to pull off the course to fix a shoe issue to prevent a blister on the ball of my foot from some rubbing that was going on.  I encouraged Liz to continue and that I would catch up to her, but by the time I got to mile 17 my Achilles began to throb, forcing me to slow down and ultimately reevaluate my run strategy.  From this point forward it was a monumental mental and physical challenge to complete the race.

 

I had to adjust my pace and gait to compensate for my Achilles pain which started a domino effect on my other leg muscles, forcing me to stop and stretch to fight off the oncoming cramping in my quads and hamstrings.  I have never experienced this kind of cramping in a run and was introduced to an entirely new level of discomfort!  My pace went from around a 9:10 to a 10:30 to an 11:30 mile and further descended into…walking.

 

At this point in the race, I knew that my goal time of 4:00:00 was technically out of reach, but mentally, I was telling myself that I just needed to come in sub 4:45:11 for a PR.  But as the run continued and time slipped away, even this secondary goal became seriously questionable, so I started having thoughts like “I wonder if salt pills would have saved me?” Although I have never used them and didn’t have any anyway.  “Why the hell did you sign up for this again?” crept into my mind too, and “You can’t wimp out, you idiot; you’re a fucking mentor and have to set an example!” and “I wonder how hard it would be to get Uber over here in west LA.”  I was totally deflated and honestly felt like quitting, however, I am not a quitter by nature so I fought on.

Survival Mode in No Mans Land

Moving forward slowly is still moving forward and as I painfully progressed along the route I had to take walk breaks, and now my revised strategy was to walk a quarter mile and then run as far as I could and repeat.  All the while I kept checking my watch and becoming more and more pessimistic about beating my old record.  I began to tell myself that all I really needed to do was finish the marathon; forget about the time.  And although I was actively looking for them, I hadn’t see any of my teammates for a very long time and so I starting feeling a little dejected.  Mile 19 at Century City felt and looked like this to me:

At mile 21 along Wilshire Boulevard near the VA, I was taking a walk break on the uphill when one of my fellow teammates, Carly Taylor (Road Angel #1) came from behind and checked in with me, which, in hindsight was a big boost.  I knew it was exactly 3:40 into the race because at this stage of the run I was obsessing over the time.  We commiserated for a bit and she said that she felt nauseous and wanted to barf and I shared with her my present state of physical suffering.  I then asked Carly if she happened to have any salt pills (which, like I said, I have never tried before, but by now I had become desperate for anything that may help) and thankfully she had some.  So, down the hatch one went and I was hopeful that it would kick in within the next half-hour or so.  Carly went on ahead and I started to trot when the slight downhill to Barrington came into my view.

At mile 23, I heard someone calling my name from behind me, and it was Tara Bopp (Road Angel #2) from last year’s team!  Man, it was a great mental boost to see her, and we started talking about the race and how we were feeling and soon realized that we were both basically in the same mode of degradation, and that her knee was really bothering her and it hurt more for her to walk than run and maybe she tore something.  I expressed my concern for this and suggested that she should check-in with the upcoming aid station for an evaluation to prevent a serious injury, so she did.  I’m not sure if she got back out and finished or not, but I hope she is okay.

By the time I was near mile 24 and around 4:25 into the run, I knew then that I would actually finish the race, but I also knew that I had a very narrow window to beat my previous race time and at the moment was slogging it out at a 13+ minute recovery walking pace.  I had just started to trot again when I heard my teammates Annie and George Gleason and Coach Kelley Puckett (Road Angel #3) yelling and cheering along the sideline.  Another welcome boost!

Kelley ran up to me to essentially give me a welfare check.  We chatted about topics like the various degrees of pain and suffering, and whether salt pills were good or bad, late race strategies when your original plans got blown-up and her recent 100k run experience and the next thing I knew I was running a 10-minute pace.  At this time, I spotted Coach Josh Spector ahead of me pacing I Run With Camera, (although I didn’t see his camera at the time) Ijaz Afzal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mental Boosts

Ijaz is a friend and an experienced runner and I knew that he had set a race goal somewhere close to mine, so I assumed that he was now in the same boat to hell that I was in, but I also remembered what Coach Jimmy said about late race strategies, like, “In the second half of the race don’t be a wimp!” but specifically, the part about picking out a “rabbit” and becoming a “Cold-blooded motherfucking assassin!”  Sorry, not sorry, Ijaz!

So, I picked up my pace a little so I could get within earshot of Ijaz when I yelled out to him, “I’m a cold-blooded motherfucking assassin and you’re my rabbit!” and then I passed the two of them.  Kelley was still pacing me and laughed a little, and by now my pace was sub 10 and now I knew I truly had a chance to come in below 4:45:11, so I kept up the pace even though by now I was suffering mightily.

Miraculously, I was now beginning to feel a little bit better both physically and mentally and don’t know for sure whether it was Coach Kelley changing my focus or the salt pill kicking in or finding my rabbit- it was most likely a combination of all three- and the next thing I heard from Kelley was “Better watch out!” and Josh and Ijaz were slowly, stealthily passing me up without saying a word and apparently I had now become Ijaz’s rabbit!  Now. It’s. War!

End Game

Coach Kelley peeled off after running about a half-mile with me and I checked my watch again and realized that I needed to keep a minimum 9:50 pace for the remainder of the race to PR, so I set my sights on my rabbit Ijaz again and dug deep and pushed hard.  I passed Ijaz just before the turn from San Vicente to Ocean Avenue and didn’t look back.  I started picking off other rabbits too, one-by-one, on my way to the finish line, which actually seemed like it was not getting any closer at all, and by this time I started to feel slightly nauseated and close to being gassed out.

I crossed the finish line at an unofficial time of 4:44:00 flat; 0:01:11 faster than my previous marathon best.  I couldn’t believe it at first, and kept checking to make sure that I wasn’t miscalculating something in my present state of delirium, but it was true!  My last split was actually a blistering, to me anyway, 8:50 pace.  I was done and I was spent and I was ready to celebrate with my wife, my son Dillon and my awesome teammates- woo-hoo!!

Post Race Notes

• I couldn’t have pulled this run off without the excellent coaching from Jimmy Dean Freeman (for those not in-the-know; there is no relation)
• My body is really, really angry with me today
• I’m hella hungry on the magnitude of eating double, Double-Doubles, which is mathematically something like two to the fourth power and definitely a mega-calorie bomb that Coach Nicole would not encourage consuming
• What started out as a well trained, well executed run devolved into a survival-mode don’t-die run, but I somehow survived and managed a PR anyway
• Not hitting your goal time doesn’t mean you “lost” the race, so you should really keep running.  Or walking.  Or both…
• Never, ever quit even when your common sense tries to tell you to, unless, of course, your legs fall off or something equally severe happens
• Never underestimate the power of Road Angels, which will now be the name of my next batch of whiskey
• I don’t consider myself a masochist, but apparently, endurance runners are masochists by default
• The previous bullet point doesn’t mean I’m kinky
• My running friends and Team NutriBullet coaches and teammates helped me survive and keep moving forward on this run; for this, I’m eternally grateful
• I’ll consider trying salt pills as a regular part of my long distance runs, you know, just in case
• Colin Sapire: thanks to his vision and support and love of running, Team NutriBullet has built a strong running community legacy which has brought many people together that have forged friendships that will endure a lifetime
• Yes, I am already planning more endurance runs, but this fact still does not make me an actual masochist