A Reaction to Prince from a Minnesotan

I went for a run Friday.

This, by itself, is nothing unusual. In fact it would be far more unusual were I to not go for a run on a Friday. But of course it was an unusual Friday.

I had "Purple Rain" stuck in my head.

This is no surprise either: Prince had died the day before. Along with several thousand others, my fiancee and I had gone down to First Ave for The Current's impromptu tribute concert featuring local artists performing covers of their favorite Prince songs. Basically, it was the "Purple Rain" album plus a couple other tracks.

I noticed a lot of purple flowers. In fact, I was literally running through fields of purple flowers.

This is not unusual either. It's spring in the Twin Cities, and many, many spring flowers just so happen to be purple. This is true from the flowers planted in gardens to the ones that spring up of their own accord in lawns and parkland.

I will admit to being surprised, in fact stunned, by how much Prince's unexpected death affected me. Neither my parents nor my siblings were Prince fans. Sometimes we thought of him as a bit of a joke (particularly during his Symbol phase, though we did not know the why of it at the time).

But I do remember the first time I really, truly, heard Prince. My friend's sister, truthfully my friend herself, as she was only a year older, put on "Seven" and walked into the room singing it along with the CD. I was floored. I'd never heard anything quite like it.

It wasn't until I had left Minnesota for a decade or so and subsequently moved back that I really appreciated Prince. Living in the Cities, you always had this sense that Prince might just magically appear wherever you happened to be. You had this sense because it happened. He'd show up at Record Store Day, or at a club, or a show. He threw regular concerts at Paisley Park.

We always had plans to go to one of those, but it had not worked out so far.

When it comes down to it, that's the essence of why Prince's death had such an effect on us: Prince was unabashedly, proudly Minnesotan. In a state that is so often considered "flyover country," where the celebrities we produce so often flee, Prince came back and lived here. He supported the community in more ways than I probably know. He made donations, anonymously or semi-anonymously, to local organizations. He debuted his music on The Current, and was a member of the station himself.

He was present.

And in Minnesota, that means something.

So as I ran through the purple flowers, I thought "thank you, Prince. Thank you for the music. Thank you for the community. But most of all, thank you for being a Minnesotan."

We will miss you.

Trail Mix 25k

I signed up for this race when I realized that, unfortunately, I had missed the window to sign up for the Zumbro 17 and it had filled up.  I had heard the Trail Mix was a good, fast race. With the strength work I've been doing due to "Training for the New Alpinism" and our Parkour process, I found my pace increasing in my workouts and was curious what I could do for a 25k.

This was not any sort of goal race for me, so I trained straight through it. Tuesday, I ran a hill workout and did Parkour. Wednesday, I ran 7 miles, did a strength workout, and went to Parkour. I ran shorter the next couple days in the lead up to the race, but still wasn't exactly rested by the time race day arrived. A 50 hour workweek and a difficult week in other ways didn't help anything.

I did, though, have a plan for the race itself. I figured I could run around 7:40 pace for the first 12.5k lap, then speed up gradually through the second lap and see if I couldn't finish in under two hours. I chose 7:40 because that's about what I've been running on my easy runs down Summit lately. I knew this was going to be a difficult run for me, because I hadn't done many long runs to this point, and I hadn't even run the full distance yet (something I like to do before a run this short).

The race itself went pretty well.

After the initial blast off the start line, I quickly settled in to a slightly faster pace than I had anticipated. I fell in with a couple high-schoolers out for a long run, and talked for a few miles until they fell off the pace. 3.5 miles in, I hit the second aid station, having run 7:33 pace for the first section.

The second aid station was also the high point of the lap, and I took up with a group of runners at a slightly faster pace (7:20 or so) for this section. I still felt really strong and smooth, so I decided to go with it. It started to get hot by this point (I'd already taken my shirt off in the first 3 miles), and I was dousing myself in water at each aid station once I'd had a little (flat) coke and water.

I ran by the half-way aid station at a little over 58 minutes.

As you recall, my plan was to up the pace a little bit the second half of the race, but I started faster than I planned. I opted to try and push the pace just a bit, but not as much as I had originally planned, then hit it hard from the second aid station. For the first 3.5 miles of the second lap, I managed exactly 1 second per mile faster than the first time through this section.

I attempted to go hard from the second aid station again, managing the low-7s and high-6s for a short while. But once I got to about 12 miles, I started to really feel the training earlier in the week and the fact that I'd been running pretty hard for an hour and a half. At that point, it became a matter of just maintaining speed and trying not to fall off too much.

I pulled in to the finish in 1:56:23, for a significant PR and a slight negative split (or so the pace on my watch said).

All told, I'm pretty happy with it. For a start of the season test, off a relatively hard week of training, it went remarkably well. I made my goal of negative splits for each lap (again, barely), and I PRed in the 25k by something like 20 minutes.

I wish I'd had a little more time to hang out after the race, as I met some interesting other runners there that I would have liked to chat with more. But the day was just beginning, so I was off and on my way within 10 minutes of finishing.

Between that, and testing for Parkour the next day (yesterday as I write this), I'm beat.