Confidence restored. After a shitty marathon #16 in Cincinnati a month ago (5:24) I cranked out marathon #17 in Madison in 4:47:27. I dedicate this particular effort to my co-runner TA McCann and my sherpas Amy Batchelor and Jessica Schallock.

For the first 20 miles the weather was perfect. Cloudy and 60-ish. TA lived in Madison for several summers in college when he was a mega-swimming stud so he kept me entertained with tails of training for five hours a day, every day, in a pool, over and over again – which made running a marathon seem relatively straightforward.

The first five miles were beautiful as we ran through the Arboretum. It’s a great way to start a city race – quiet, mellow, and loads of oxygen everywhere. There were only 1600 marathoners to they spread out quickly and TA and I felt like we were on a nice long run with water stops every mile or two. We went through the half at 2:20 and it occurred to me that we were halfway done and I was feeling better than most other marathons. I didn’t really notice our time again until when I looked at my watch at 3:12. By 20 miles it was pretty clear that we had 5 hours beaten and 4:45 was in striking distance.

The rain started at mile 20. So did the bicycles – there was a long stretch along Lake Monona on a running / bike path which was the only frustrating part of the race. Usually during a marathon the running / bike paths are closed to cyclists; this time they weren’t. And the rain just made it a total mess. So for about three miles we just hammered on, cold, wet, and mildly annoyed by the bikes.

At about mile 23 the 4:45 pace guy passed us once and for all. Now we were on the hunt for 4:50 which ended up being no problem. As we ran the last mile up a nasty hill to the Capitol we were both out of gas, but the end was in sight so like every good marathoner we just ground it out.

I’m now confident that I can do a marathon every four weeks. I wonder if I can do one every other week.

This morning, as I cranked through my 5am – 7am routine (which ends at 6am today because I have to leave the house at 630am to get to CU Boulder to give a keynote at the 2011 Boulder Economic Summit) I kept thinking to myself “deep breath.” If you do yoga you know exactly what I’m talking about – it’s part of Amy’s mantra for each of us to relax, slow down, and concentrate.

I’m in a particularly intense work phase that I expect will run through the end of June based on a few things that are going on that will happen between now and then. On top of it, I’m trying to run two marathons in May (Cincinnati, which I did already – and it sucked, and Madison, which is coming up at the end of the month.) Between all the work and travel, I’d probably already be pretty tired, but layer the running and the marathons on top of it and I’m physically exhausted.

While I contemplated punting on the second marathon, there are a few things driving me to do it, including really understanding my own recovery dynamics. I have a hypothesis about how I recover from a marathon (quickly) but I haven’t tested it. By adding a second marathon on top of everything else within 30 days, I’m suddenly learning some new stuff about rest, sleep, and weight. I’m also experiencing an interesting emotional spectrum that I haven’t experienced in a while (some good, some not good) that is clearly a function of the intersection of my physical activity and my work activity.

What popped out this morning is the need for more “deep breaths.” With my normal work / life rhythm, I get these on the weekend and then once a quarter when I go off the grid for a week. But given the daily work intensity combined with the physical fatigue, it’s become very obvious that I need something different during the week to sustain things at this level. Last night I blew off a dinner with a friend to just go home and lie on the couch with Amy all evening. That helped, although I spent almost all of it with an iPad in my lap sort of watching The Hangover, sort of catching up on email, and working on a few things that I knew I couldn’t jam into today.

Tonight, Amy and I have dinner alone. I’m going to shut off completely for a few hours and reflect on what I’m going through and learning about recovery. Fortunately I have a partner who puts up with this and lets me use myself as my own laboratory for these experiments.

I’ve now put together eight great weeks of running in a row. On Sunday, I finally had a long run to town (from Eldorado Springs to Boulder). This has been a long tradition of mine and Amy’s – I run to town early in the morning and she drives in later, we have brunch with friends, and then get massages in the afternoons. I also use this as a marker to measure my running – once I cross the “run to town barrier” I can start thinking about marathons.

2010 sucked for me. I ran the Rock ‘n’ Roll Mardi Gras Marathon in New Orleans and was optimistic about the year but then hurt my back in March lifting a box when in Dallas for my dad’s birthday. It was a perplexing injury – it seemed to get better but then I re-injured myself a month later and spent then next 60 days having trouble standing up. I thought I’d rest and work through it during July when I was in Alaska but that didn’t work out either. After an MRI and some vicodin, I ruled out the really bad stuff and then relaxed enough to get a massive self-adjustment in September which seemed to fix the problem. I’ve been pain free since then.

So I’m optimistic about 2011. Following is my current schedule:

• April 3 – Knoxville, TN – Covenant Health Marathon
• May 1 –  Cincinnati, OH – Flying Pig Marathon
• May 29 – Madison, WI – Madison Marathon
• Sept 18 – Bismarck, ND – Kroll’s Diner Bismarck Marathon
• Oct 23 – St. Louis, MO – Rock ‘n’ Roll St. Louis Marathon

I don’t have any particular time goals, although I’d optimally be in the 4:00 to 4:30 range as 5+ hours for a marathon is a long time and I’m getting tired of being slow. If I can drop another 20 pounds I’m confident I can comfortably run in that zone.

If you are a runner and want to tag along on any of these, feel free to reach out to me. While I like to train alone, I always enjoy having marathon weekends with other folks, even if we are doing them at very different paces.

Fred Wilson emailed me a link to Dennis Crowley’s post I’m running the NYC Marathon tomorrow! Fred knows my obsession with human instrumentation, marathons, and social media.  And if you recognize Dennis’ name, that’s because he’s the founder / CEO of Foursquare.

As I write this from my house in Eldorado Springs, Colorado, I can see that Dennis is at mile 4.64 of the NYC Marathon via RunKeeper.  He just checked in at mile 5 on Foursquare.  And yes, Twitter and Facebook are active also.

While some people may not like this future, I love it.  Yeah, it’s kind of a pain to carry a bulky iPhone around on a marathon, but there are armbands for that and – in a decade – it’ll just be a thing you inject into your arm under the skin.  But for now, guys like Dennis are helping us create the future.

Oh – and he’s running a marathon.  He’s now at mile 5.64.  Way to go Dennis!

I had my first pain free run in five months.  And I’m very happy right now.

In March, I hurt my back.  This was my first real running injury since I started running marathons in 2003.  I’ve had some ankle twists and some knee bruises from all the trail running I do, but nothing that kept me off my feet for more than a month.  This time I lost five months ; the last time I tried to run was two months ago.

I didn’t get serious about figuring out what was going on until half way through July in Alaska when I realized I just wasn’t getting better. My pain on a daily basis never got below a three (on a 0 to 10 scale) and I often was in the six to eight range.  If you saw we get up out of a seat in the last five months, you knew I had a lower back injury.  The pain gradually settled at the very base of my spin in the middle of back – it was localized, but sharp and chronic.

So I stopped running completely, increased the amount I was swimming up to a couple of times a week, and started the process of getting professional help.  My first big goal was to rule out something serious, so I decided to get an MRI.  That took a while (doctor visit, referral, scheduling).  I had two different doctors read the MRI – each told me that there was an issue, but there was no need for surgery and steroid injections would likely be useless.  So, I started the “sign up for physical therapy process.”

In the mean time, my general practitioner gave me a prescription for vicodin.  I’m very afraid of drugs and have always avoided them.  I don’t remember if it was a movie I saw about drugs in elementary school (I saw movies on sex but never was afraid of it), my parents, or something else but they’ve just never been my thing.  I am a Vitamin I users and I used it for a while to try to manage my chronic gout, but eventually gave up and went on Allopurinol.  I’ve had other prescription medicines over the year, but I’ve stayed away from anything illegal, even our friendly herb which is basically legal in Boulder.  So the idea of taking a narcotic sort of freaked me out.

I was in so much pain after the US Open (and sitting on the stadium seats for two days) that I went ahead and took one pill.  The bottle said I could take four a day, so I figured one a day would help without being dangerous.  Amy and I flew from New York to San Diego and I took a second one.  On Friday I flew to San Francisco for the day and took a third one.   When I woke up on Saturday morning I was pain free for the first time in five months.  So I decided not to take another one on Saturday.

On Sunday when I was sitting at my computer I started to stand up and had an extremely loud “pop” happen exactly in the region where the pain has been.  Amy heard it from across the room and immediately shouted out “are you ok.”  My back then went into a spasm – something that’s only happened a few times – and for about ten seconds I couldn’t talk or breath.  But, when it stopped, I still had no pain.

I flew back to Boulder Monday morning.  I decided not to take any more vicodin until I had at least a pain level of three again.  As the week passed, the pain didn’t reappear.  On Wednesday I saw a spine specialist who works with athletes as part of the PT referral process.  I spent 30 minutes telling him the story from beginning to end and then we went and looked at the MRI together.  He again confirmed that surgery was unnecessary and – more importantly – that the MRI showed a few clear signs of distress that would explain the chronic pain, but that steroid injections would be useless.  We did a few diagnostic things and then he gave me his hypothesis.

He suggested that it’s likely that the small amount of vicodin I took broke the pain cycle I had been stuck in.  Once the pain was gone, my body was able to move in certain ways that resulted in a natural adjustment (the big pop) of an area of my back that was stuck.  Having it adjust naturally was much more effective than if I’d gone to a chiropractor.  It had never occurred to me that this would happen, but when I think about the number of times my back adjusts in other spots when it gets out of whack this made perfect sense to me.

I’ve now had a week of no back pain.  I haven’t taken anything – not even Vitamin I – in a week.  I went for a few swims this week and a short run today.  I feel great.

For everyone out there that has been patient with me, offered suggestions, and provided help over the past five months, thank you.  Who knows whether this really solved the problem or not but this is the first time in a while that I’ve been optimistic about it.