Liftoff

AM: 10.5 miles, with 6 mile AT wave tempo. Target was 3 alternations of 1 mile @ 6:10, 1 mile @ 5:40. Splits:

1. 6:09 / 5:39
2. 6:09 / 5:40
3. 6:06 / 5:37

I’ve held off on my Twin Cities post-mortem. At first, I wanted to let the dust settle. It settled, but not into neat boxes, and I haven’t had the desire to rake through it all. I need to though, before it gets away from me.

What Went Right – This was my best marathon buildup yet. I wouldn’t always block out five months, but I started when the weather began heating up. From early May on, there is little else to do racing-wise in FL until October.

With five months, I was able to do three distinct periods: ~6 weeks of base where I was running 120-140 miles per week. That went great. It was all slow running, but I felt super strong by the end. After that, 4-5 weeks of intervals and sharpening. I ran a lackluster 5k in mid-June a little under 16:30, and by mid-July I was sharper, running 9:58 for 3200 meters.

The combination of base, speed training, and a couple months of running in the humidity made it possible to start marathon workouts in late July/August and complete them. There is no way I could have done those workouts in humidity in early June.

Overall, the marathon workouts went well. I got stomach flu for a couple weeks, but that was probably a wash, with getting some additional rest. I knew I was in a good place 4.5 weeks out when I was able to run 16 miles @ MP.

What Went Wrong – About 4 weeks out from the race, when it started to feel more imminent, some of my decisions suffered. One workout that I did not complete a couple weeks before was 10 miles MP+1/10 miles MP. At 3 weeks out, I took another swing at it, and nailed it. Unfortunately, I haven’t felt that strong since. I don’t think it was necessarily a mistake to attempt that workout again – in isolation none of the following things were crazy – but I was walking further out onto thin ice, and that never ends well.

Even though the 10/10 workout went great, I struggled to recover. Mon-Wed of the following week was a drag. On Thursday, I re-attempted the other workout I hadn’t managed to pull off, which sounds pretty dumb as I’m writing it now. This was a 6 mile LT wave tempo alternating 10k/MP.  This is a tough workout, but I was surprised by how difficult it was for me at the end of my marathon-specific block. I’ve done the workout without too much trouble before – but in those cases I was still in winter racing mode, when 10k pace feels somewhat comfortable. In the future, I would still do this workout in a marathon-specific block, but only early, and if I felt familiar with 10k pace.

At any rate, I failed again at the 6 mile LT wave tempo. Also in this week my wife had to travel for a couple days of work. I missed a few runs, and made the biggest mistake of the entire block. Friday, the day after the wave tempo fail, I met Quint for a run, which should have been easy, and convinced him to run descending ½ miles with me. It wasn’t a hard workout, but I ended up with 2 miles under 6:00, and wasn’t recovering. On Saturday, I spent a lot of the day at my daughter’s swim meet and had 1 hour to squeeze in a run in the afternoon. So naturally, I ran too hard again to get in enough miles. The next morning, I ran 18 miles on the Clearwater  bridges – mostly reasonable pace, but a few bridges full-on. By Monday, my legs were starting to feel like junk. So naturally, I convinced Mike to meet me at track on Tuesday to do 8x800 at sub-5k pace. I usually do 800s about 12 days out, but at 10k pace.

In retrospect, when life required me to back off, I wish I had not tried to cram in quality - in the future, I will try to just relax and have faith in my past training. The approach that works for me is hard workout followed by very easy days. Instead I was running low quality workouts, accomplishing little but failing to recover.

By Wednesday, I developed a sore left hip and hamstring. I kind of sobered up at this point and tried to get off the crazy train. For the next 1.5 weeks I did a lot of stretching, rolling, icing, etc. I hoped the soreness I was feeling was just taper madness. But by the 4^th mile at TCM I felt fairly uncomfortable, and it just got worse as the race went on. Which was unfortunate, because it’s a lot more fun to race against your fitness rather than managing leg pain for 20 miles.

Overall I feel that I learned a great deal from this cycle, and made real fitness improvements. I am a little frustrated that I felt that I had to cram in the last month. In looking back at the race itself, and my training, I feel that my fitness was in place, but self-inflicted wounds brought me down to earth.

 Was this a Good Race, a Bad Race, or What?! – This is a question I’ve been wrestling with, since it was kind of both. Most races I’ve run are quite a bit one way or the other.

During the race, I wasn’t a very happy camper. I was sore and slowing down. In contrast, at Grandma’s my splits were mostly seconds apart. That’s how I want to run marathons. Not like TCM, hanging on to an ugly draw.

When I finished Twin Cities- I was elated. Even though I only ran 14 seconds faster than my PR, I was very proud that I hung on when I wanted to let the race go.

As the days passed, I felt more frustrated than happy, though. I felt that I had built an engine that could hit 2:35 on a flat course, 2:36 or 2:37 at TCM. I finished at 2:38:46, which doesn’t sound like that big of a miss, but it did feel like it to me. The slower time is part of it, but racing sore, or even semi-injured, especially when it was so unnecessary is hard to swallow.

What’s Next – I've been thinking about this a lot, of course. Frustratingly, my legs have been slow to bounce back. My left hip and hamstring are still an issue, impeding serious training, and I picked up a right calf sprain around mile 17 or 18 at TCM that has joined the party. To be fair, I haven’t done a good job of rehabbing. I’ve had the problem in my left hip/hamstring surface on and off for five years, and I know how to get it better. Lately though, I’ve just hit the couch when the kids go down. I haven’t had the focus or the fire to roll, stretch, ice. Instead I’ve been eating junk, drinking beer and not sleeping enough. I guess that's not so horrible 2 weeks after a marathon, but I’m ready to move on and be a healthy, responsible citizen again.