Cobblestone Classic

Race Report.
Yesterday morning I ran the Cobblestone Classic 5 mile run. Tag line "Where Tanks Once Tread" (To find out why, read the Tangent below). A Five mile course from Patch Barracks to Panzer Barracks along Panzerstraße.

Warning: Long Historical Tangent Ahead.
(A tip of the hat to Blunoz for format)

Patch Barracks was originally called Kurmärker Kaserne and was constructed starting in about 1936, by, you guessed it, our good old German friends...


Panzer Barracks (originally Panzer Kaserne) was built around the same time. Kurmärker Kaserne was the home for the 7th Panzer Regiment...


...it had the headquarters area, offices, barracks, support facilities and the like...


...and Panzer Kaserne had the training area and shooting ranges for the Panzers.

To get from Kurmärker to Panzer Kaserne, they needed a road. Just any old road wouldn't do. Tank treads tend to be a little rough on asphalt, and they'll turn dirt roads to mud. So they came up with a solution:

Cobblestones

Great for tanks not so good for knees and ankles!

The bases were needed to support the newly re-arming German military during the run up to the Second World War. They played a supporting role in the military re-occupation of the Rhineland.

Kurmärker Kaserne didn't make it out of the war too well:(Nice bullet holes above)

The combined USAF and RAF gave it a bit of a plastering.

The 7th Panzer Regiment didn't do that well either. It surrendered in Tunisia and finished the war in POW camps back in the U.S.

(Source note: all of the above photos came from a EUCOM history brief about Patch Barracks. I cannot attest to the status of copyright on any of them).

End Tangent.

This is at least the 3rd running of the Cobblestone classic (which I know only b/c I saw a 2006 Cobblestone Classic T-shirt).

I've fallen off the wagon the last week. I did 11 miles last Saturday, and due to an equipment malfunction (sock position) ended up with some nasty blisters on my right foot. I ran again on Monday, only 4.5 miles and really regretted it. So I took the rest of the week off. (Which has some implications for my half-marathon training plan but in the short term really made my legs feel heavy when the race started. But it did give my blisters enough time to heal which was really what I needed.)

The race started alright. I made a conscious decision to start nearer the front this time. In past races I've spent a lot of time and effort at the beginning of the run playing dodge 'ems with slower runners, walkers and stroller pushers starting near the front. That worked out better than my past starts. (No, there were no starting guides or any order at all really to the start. Just "line-up and go". Very un-Armylike.)

The problem was I felt miserable pretty much from the start. Legs heavy, lungs weak. To make things worse the course was not easy. Pretty much immediately after leaving Patch Barracks it enters the woods, where it remains till the end, so the scenery is nice.

But there are the cobblestones. And there are the hills. It's pretty much just a series of hills for the entire 5 miles. With a nice long one at the beginning. (see the profile below). I'm not a hill running champion, I tend to slow down quickly, and get very slow as they go on.

I did have the advantage of having run almost all of the course before. I've explored most of the woods through which the course wound during my weekend long runs, except for the last half mile or so.

Needless to say, my "good start" stopped about mile 1 1/4 when the first real uphill began. I continued to trudge up the hill passing the 2 mile mark near the top of the hill at 16:16, a bit of quick and easy mental gym: 8:08 pace. Not exactly scorching.

Finally at the top, I sped up a bit as the course leveled out for a little bit and then began a slow relatively steady descent. I was able to maintain that pace, running next to a co-worker who had a GPS watch. It said we were running sub 6:00 pace. It lied. No way. We were holding an on/off conversation, which I cannot do at a sub 6:00 pace. Besides, we were maintaining pace for waaaaay too long for me to be sub 6:00. Even counting the downhill.

If you look at the elevation profile below, it was the second to last hill that really did me in (the one that starts at mil 4.3 or so). I think I pushed the pace a little too hard going up, trying to run with the same guy. Consequently, I didn't have much left.


To make matters worse, I started hearing a slapping footfall behind me. Getting closer. And closer. Soon enough, a scrawny little 11 year old boy just screams by. Very disheartening. About 5 miles in and passed by an 11 year old.

Then came the coup de grace to my race. Where was the finish? I just felt I had to be nearing the 5 mile end. We turned off the main trail that I'd run before onto a side trail I was unfamiliar with. As we curved around in the woods, I was really needing that 5 mile end point. My legs felt dead. My lungs weren't much better.

Then around the corner!

(Commence inner dialogue)

A sign! 5 miles!!! Joyous day!

But...wait....where ...(pray tell) is the finish line??? Refreshments????? The END??!!!!

Ahhh, [expletive deleted] race organizers!
Can't even advertise the real [expletive deleted] length of the [expletive deleted] race!
Yeah, but they sure can find a [expletive deleted] hill to make us run up.
Must have been a [expletive deleted] Marine again. [expletive deleted]

(End dialogue)

Well, eventually I did see the end, around a corner up a hill (of course).

Finish time: just over 42 minutes. Pace actually slower than my PB 10k time.

But honestly, with the hills, I'll take it. And it was fun. Just wish they'd said it was 5.something miles, not "5 miles".

Call me Corrigan

It all started a few weeks ago. I went for a long run on a new route. I was going to meet the LW and Little Man for his soccer game. I wanted to do about 8 or 9 miles, but the field is only about 5 miles away. So I went to a convenient online mapping service, scouted out a route. Looked simple enough, and I ran it.

It started well, but I'd run most of the beginning of it in pieces before. The trouble came when I entered new territory. You see, it wasn't on roads, but trails. There are plenty of trails around here. Most of them are probably better described as forest roads, because they are so wide, they are however, closed to traffic which makes it a very attractive place to run.
But they're just not marked very well. So needless to say, I went a little astray. My 8-9 mile run turned into a 9.5 mile run. Not too bad. Except it was cold and rainy.

(And his game ended up getting canceled:

• Name at end of alphabet
• last call on roster
• didn't get the call before LW left the house
• Glad coach wasn't there, I'd have been bailing LW out of prison.)

Fast forward one week. I'm in North Carolina for a conference. I ran the first morning (it's great to be time zones ahead so you can wake up early and go for a run without the misery of waking up early.) It was a nice short one. No problems, just a little drizzle at the end. Over the course of the next two days I find a running route map outside one of the conference rooms. Eureka! It's perfect. I take a look that night and find a nice 6ish mile loop to run the next morning.

Great plan. 6ish mile loop. On trails. In the dark. In an area I've never run in before. Can you see where this is going? I think the best thing that can be said about that run is that I couldn't find the trails in the dark, therefore I didn't get miserably lost trying to follow them. My 6ish mile loop became a kinda 4ish mile loop with spokes shooting off it! Here's the loop, you just lose a bit of the frustrating "shoot, dead end!" aspects of it.

Fast forward to this morning. Not wanting to repeat my past mistake, I took a very close look at the route online. I saw where I'd gone wrong: I needed to take a left immediately after the house by the train tracks, last time I'd gone straight. So armed with that, and a list of the names of the three trails I needed to hit, I was off.

Yeah. Well little did I know, there were TWO left turns, only one of which was marked on any map, and you just couldn't see the other on any overhead imagery I could find. (Anyone think of asking Google if they could do a winter global overlay? No pesky trees to block trails.)

So needless to say. I got to do a bit more exploring. Due to my natural sense of direction (LW suppress that snicker), I found my way back to the main cobblestone trail and finished up. Nine miler becomes 11 miler. But....I didn't miss the Little Man's soccer game, or my name would be Mudd.

The good thing is, I've found quite a few neat paths through the woods, and with the summer coming it will be just lovely to explore some more.

Kit notice:
I bought an Amphipod Hydration belt online. I figured with running longer distances in the summer weather I'd need something more than the single 20 ounce Ultimate Direction bottle I had. (I'd gotten that one free a couple of summers ago in Hawai'i when the Ultimate Direction sales rep was in the shop when I went in to buy some new shoes). I really liked the bottle in the Ultimate Direction set up, but holding it in my hand just got a little annoying. So I bought the belt and ran with it this morning. It was great. I was worried about bounce, but there was none. I had to do a little tweaking with bottle position, but luckily that's not too hard. Over all very satisfied after one run. We'll see how it goes as the summer progresses.

Hmmm

I have a couple of routes I rotate through at lunch. But most of them pass by a small parking lot near some foot paths through the woods. Frequently (usually more than once a week) there are the same two cars parked there. Standing between the two cars are the same too people: one man, one woman probably about 40 years old or so. They are usually in some degree of embrace. I'm not sure what they're up to.....

PT Test

Friday morning was the dreaded Navy Fitness test (The Physical Readiness Test or PRT). I can imagine what you may be thinking: "Navy? Fitness? Give me a minute here, I need to stop laughing..." Seriously, it is far harder than you think to climb 4 ladders with a cup of coffee a donut and a lit cigarette without dropping / spilling / extinguishing any of them.


Okay, so maybe that's not it. The Navy test is (I'm ashamed to say) very similar to the Air Force test, and shorter than the Army or Marine Corps tests. It's just push-ups, curl-ups and a run. There is also the "sit and reach." Sit on your rear and touch your toes with your legs straight. The sit and reach is obviously the most important, because if you can't touch your toes you get some gentle encouragement to try harder next time.

Anyway we did the run, 1.5 miles on an out and back course. This was the first PRT I've run in
Stuttgart, and it's the first organized one I've run since leaving the U.S. in 2004 so I was a little unsure of how the run would go. After doing less than stellar on the push-ups and sit-ups I took a look at the numbers to figure out how fast I needed to run. Based on what I saw, I needed 11 minutes.

So after a short walk to the start line, and wait for "the turn around guy" to make it out to the turn around, we were off. There were about 20 of us.

We started off and it felt awful. Legs of cement, lungs of mush. I managed to stay near the front of the "pack" to about the 1/3 mile point or so and I started feeling a little better. I was using the "try to stay up with the guy in front of you" method.

We got to the turn around, and "turn-around-guy" says "5:08." "Drat" says I (or something similar). I've got to pick up 30 seconds or so on the return leg! So I shifted to the "try to pass the guy in front of you" method. Well, I managed to quickly pass the guy I had been keeping pace with leading up to the turn around, and started closing in on another guy. And as I do so I think. "Wait a minute here, I was 30 seconds AHEAD of my pace at the turn around!" (yeah, brilliant for the guy who does mental gym while running...).

To keep this overly long story from growing any longer, I finished in 10:15, which was my fastest time since I was a Midshipman. It also meant I ran a slightly negative split (by a second). It also means I was aided by the down hill return leg!

New Shoes

Yes. The old ones were dead. 270+ miles (so even at ridiculous UK prices my shoes ended up costing just under $0.50 per mile).
I strapped on my new shoes for a nice muddy run today.

Holy cow. I had a new spring in my step. So, now my nagging achey hip needs to go away, and all will be good with the world.

(Of course, the lovely and supportive wife calls it "oldgeezeritis")