AUDIO: DAVE MCGILLIVRAY—BOSTON MARATHON TO COVID VACCINATION

RUNRUNLIVE

Hello my friends and welcome to episode 4-448 of the RunRunLive Podcast. How we doin? Here we are flipping the page to February of 2021. How about that?

Big news from my side of the world, that being New England, is the cold. Cold, cold, cold. It was zero degrees F this morning.

I just got back from 7ish miles in the woods with Ollie. We waited until after lunch and the temp came up over 20. Nice day, sunny, windless, cold. It’s really good running in the trials right now. With the freeze, the ground is nice and hard.

We got a couple of light snowstorms earlier in the week, maybe 3-5 inches of fluffy snow. With so much traffic in the trails these days it’s all packed down and hard and fast. It’s only icy where the spring come up.

I had a pretty good week of running coming off the end of the infected toe. The antibiotics cleared the infection up. I took about a week off, but was back on it this week. I bought some silicone toe caps, to protect that toe while it heals. They work really well for me. For some people, they fall off, but for my big toe, they fit great and keep the toe safe.

I got back to training. Had a pretty good weekend, despite the cold weather. Friday I did a set of long hills in the cold, which were awful while I was doing them, but when I looked at the data were a decent effort.

Yesterday I did a long 16 miler in the trails. Most of it was pretty sucky, but that’s how ultra training is supposed to go. You run until it sucks and then you run more. That’s the name of the game. And Ollie and I knocked out another 7 just now so that’s close to 30 miles in 3 days. That’s encouraging.

I didn’t take Ollie yesterday for the long run. I thought it might be too cold for him. I didn’t want to chance him hurting his feet. For myself, I had to figure out how to carry water. The challenge with this weather is that your bottles freeze in under an hour in any handheld. And the bite valves freeze even faster on your packs.

What I ended up doing was wearing my Aonjiie vest with the two 500ML bite valve bottles under my outer layer. I had my phone in an inner layer as well. That worked well. The bite valves didn’t freeze and I could unzip my outer layer to get a drink.

I brought an old spring energy recovery gel from my ultra-bag; that bag where I keep all the ultra stuff, for fuel. But when I opened it up at the halfway point it tasted like it had gone bad. So – basically 3 hours in the cold with no fuel. My balaclava froze to my head. But I got it done and felt fine today.

After the antibiotics and taking a week off I was noticeable chubby so I’ve been watching my food this week and have already knocked 5 pounds off.

Today we chat with our old friend, director of the Boston Marathon, Dave McGillivray. He is a case study in resilience and the power of a positive attitude. This pandemic knocked his business of race directing right out from under him. He had to pivot. And he did. He’s now running the vaccinations at Fenway and Gillette stadium.

Of course, we also sneak in some Boston Marathon talk.

In section one I’m going to talk about what to expect and how to counter the effects of aging as an athlete and in section two I’ll talk about work stress.

Because I’ve had a really stressful week of work. And I got through it. Next week might be worse or better – but I’ll get through it.

I try to show up with a positive attitude, have empathy, and lead as best I can. I also know I’m not going to get everything done and I make choices about what to not get done based on what’s important to me.

Getting my workouts in is important to me. Writing and communicating is important to me.

You, you’re important to me.

We’re in this together right? That’s what they keep telling me anyhow…

On with the show.