Starting over

It's been a while, eh? Five months. Five months ago, complaining about only finishing 14 of my 20 mile long run. What's happened since then? Well, I decided I didn't want to run Grandma's. The week after my terrible long run, I was made a supervisor at work. Running never stands up well to my life changes. Becoming a supervisor didn't equate to that many more hours of work each week, but the stress of extra meetings and being responsible for more than just myself added up pretty quickly. Keeping a consistent running schedule would have helped with that, but alas, I let it fall by the wayside.

Since my "failed" long run of 14 miles in May, I've averaged *gulp* 7 miles per week. I joined an ultimate frisbee team this summer, and that was tons of fun. Sprinting around during frisbee games actually kept me in pretty good shape. The two or three additional runs I did per week felt okay, and my pace didn't suffer from my lack of mileage.

In August, frisbee ended, and so did my fitness. Three miles is doable, but my easy, I-can-breathe pace is now a miserable 10:40+/mile. I did a marathon at 10:38 pace! What is this crap?!

As you can imagine, my newly discovered lack of endurance and speed is hard to accept. Anything under 7 miles used to be a short run, and now I'm elated when I do more than 3. Sometimes I don't even make it that far. I've done 19 miles at a faster pace than my easy 2.6 mile run the other day. Woe is me!

All that being said, I've learned an important lesson. The saying "Use it or lose it" is true. And although I'm complaining about how far I've fallen, the fact is that I can still do a 5 mile run, albeit slowly. Better to step in now and accept my shortcomings, rather than deny there's a problem and let the 3 mile run wither into a 1 mile walk. And the flip side to all this is that I can regain what I've lost. I'm not injured, just lazy. As long as I'm consistent and smart about training, I can reclaim and even surpass what I once had.

soul searching

Today I did something I've never done before. In the middle of my long run, a negative thought crossed my mind, and I abruptly stopped running, called my husband, and had him come pick me up. I was at mile 14 of a 20 mile long run.

That thought? "This sucks. Why am I doing this to myself? Running is supposed to be my hobby." Now that I'm back at home, warm and cozy, I'm still having very negative feelings about marathon training. The run itself wasn't going that badly. The weather was bad (low 40s, drizzly, and windy), but not that bad for running. I was keeping a decent pace. I know I could have made it all the way. But I didn't want to.

And I still don't want to. Runs up to 10 miles? Awesome! Runs up to 15 miles? Tolerable! Sometimes enjoyable! Anything longer than that? Crap! I don't want to spend 3+ hours of my Saturdays running. After that amount of running, the thrill is gone, and it's all about mental toughness. It's all about pushing the negative thoughts out of my head. I failed at that today.

To be honest, I'm okay that I failed. Running is my hobby. It relaxes me. It makes me feel good about myself. After a long week at work, I don't want a hobby that forces me to devote a weekend morning to more mental toughness. And I don't want to end up resenting running because it can (and does) bring such joy to my life.

This is a hard realization to make, though. I've always been in love with the idea of running marathons. I believe part of that is innate, and part of it is the idea of being able to achieve glory, even if you're not the best. I'm not sure why running a slow marathon seems much more glorious to me than running a fast half, but it does.

Anyway, I've been naive. When I think of running a marathon, I think of a single day, a single race, a single 4.5 hour chunk of time surrounded by cheering fans. Getting to the point where I can run a marathon at a pace I deem acceptable for myself is a whole different beast. It's (theoretically) running 4-6 days a week for 18+ weeks. Alone. It's saying no to drinks with friends because of training that should have been done earlier. It's making the decision on Saturdays to devote time to the race I've committed to, rather than the husband I'm devoted to. It's paranoia about injuries and guilt about missed (or shortened... ahem) runs.

This will be my second marathon, and it's harder this time around. Last time, there was always the joy of reaching a new distance. This time, there's no, "Yay, I ran 18 miles! I've never done that before!" There's only, "Thank God that's over. Why hasn't my pace improved since last year?" Today I contemplated not continuing training, but my husband encouraged me to just recharge and try again next week. Finish what I started. So that's what I'll do, and then I'm not signing up for another one. Not until next spring, at least. :)

I'm alive

Hello, world! I'm alive. I haven't posted since January, eh? I thought about posting once or twice but didn't want to have to admit that this round of marathon training is eerily similar to last round of marathon training. What does that mean? Well, that means that I've been slacking. Or perhaps the word is inconsistent. I've had a few 40+ mile weeks. I've also had a good number of weeks in the single digits.

After a 42 mile week, a 30 mile week, and an amazing 15 mile run at medium effort at last year's marathon pace, my right knee started giving me issues. My family has a history of joint problems (my dad's hip replacement in his 40s, for example), so I made the executive decision to take a week off. I realllly didn't want to, though, because the hardest part of running for me is making it a habit. And sure enough, taking a week off of running broke my habit. But after a month of mediocre weeks, I'm back in the game now! My knee feels stiff sometimes, but it's not painful, and (I think) I'm not altering my stride. Lesson learned: cheap running shoes and crazy mileage increases will destroy you.

I've set a more realistic goal for Grandma's Marathon: 4:15. Okay, that's still going to be quite the challenge. But oh well. I'm not getting so bogged down with times lately. My friend Nicole has magically (errr, through consistent hard work) gotten speedy, and here I am, still poking around at about the same paces as last year. I'm confident that I'll at least PR, and honestly, what more can I ask of myself? I want to keep improving, keep striving to be the best that I can be.

Emphasis on the I. The best that I can be, considering the crazy weeks at work I sometimes have, the friends and family I don't want to neglect, TV shows I want to keep up with, sleep that I like to get. I want to keep running a healthy part of my life, not something that makes me feel guilty if I don't do it, and not something I do while sacrificing the quality of the rest of my life.

And so, with that said, my revised Grandma's Marathon goals:
Gold star goal: 4:15
Tinfoil star goal: PR (sub-4:38)

And if I don't make either of those, whatever. It's the journey, not the destination.

And I would like to point out that a 4:38 marathon is a 10:37/mi pace. I was disappointed with that. But as I'm doing my long runs now, I think, "Damn! That's kinda fast! How did I manage to pull that off?"

week 1 summary

Most marathon training programs start 18 weeks out from the date of the marathon. I started mine last Sunday, which gives me 21 weeks to prepare. Why start now? Well, I need more time to build a good base. Since the Lakefront Marathon in October, I've only been running an average of 15 miles per week. Plus, my half marathon was last Saturday, so last Sunday seemed like a good starting point.

My general plan for training for Grandma's Marathon is to base build with ALL slow miles until I reach ~75 miles per week. Then, the first week of April, I will start to incorporate some marathon-pace and tempo runs. Depending on how I'm feeling, in May I'll do a couple weeks of long intervals. And then it's tapering time!

I got Daniels' Running Formula from Amazon, as I heard it had some good info about marathon training. It has some tables with various race times and corresponds that to training paces. Based on my half marathon time of 2:09:41 (I know, didn't even get close to my goal...), all of my runs until April will be at an 11:09 pace. 11:09! I only run that slow when doing crazy long runs! Even my 19.5 mile training run was a little faster than that!

But I decided to trust in the guy with the exercise PhD. And guess what. 11:09 (or 11:06, as that's what 5.4 mph is on the dreadmill) makes runs enjoyable! It's easy in the sense that I probably COULD actually hold a conversation, and I'm not dying a half mile into the run. But it's still exercise, and I can tell it's going to work. I'm still dripping with sweat by mile 2. I still feel amazing afterward.

All that being said, I only got in 25 miles this week. The goal was 38. But I suppose 25 is okay for having raced the past Saturday. I did 4 on Sunday, 6 Tuesday, 8 Thursday, and 7 yesterday. All slow, all on the treadmill. I cannot motivate myself to get outside in this weather. :-/ But I've been using the hill interval program, which should make transitioning to outdoor running less awful once I grow the courage to do it.

Goal for week 2: 41 miles, with a long run of 13 on Saturday. And I WILL make it outside for that one.

BQ B4 Babies

I am here to admit that I have caught baby fever. A decent number of my friends from high school have had children. And it seems like a quarter of my co-workers are pregnant. And those who aren't pregnant are parents to cute little babies. Ahhhh! BABIES!!!

"Well," you might ask, "You have a good job and a nice husband. Why don't you just make one?" I definitely could. But there are extenuating circumstances. My husband is from Tanzania and didn't receive the best education there. He is working on getting his GED, and then he has at least 4 years of college ahead of him. So that, in addition to all the usual excuses such as money and freedom, are preventing us from having babies now.

I have come up with something else to keep my mind off babies in the meantime. A goal. Before I have children, I will qualify for the Boston Marathon. This is a fantastic goal because I figure it will take at least another two years to do it. Plus, ideally, I'd get to run the marathon for which I qualified before getting knocked up. So that's like 2.5-3.5 years! HOoooray!

This may seem like a trivial, lofty goal to some. But it's working for me! I could hear the biological clock ticking in my brain as I got ready for work this morning. The "Babies! Babies! Babies!" chant did start, but only repeated a few times before the goal popped into my head. Babies later! Running now!

I think the reason that qualifying for Boston works to distract me from my child-rearing desires is because of the nature of child-rearing and the nature of training for a fast marathon. Both are extremely time intensive. Although I hope I continue running once I have children, I'm not sure I'll be able to devote hours to it. So Boston nowish, babies later.

Berbee Derby 10K race report

I had run this race last year in 57:50 (a 9:18/mile pace), so obviously I wanted to beat that (hopefully easy goal). My medium goal was to run it all under a 9:00 pace. And my ridiculously hard goal was to run it at an 8:26 pace, because race calculators would predict my next marathon time at 4:00. I pretty much knew that that wasn't going to happen, since 8 weeks ago I ran my marathon in 4:38. And I've taken it fairly easy since then.

So off we went. I didn't have too much of a strategy besides to run at whatever pace below 9:00 felt manageable. There were 1540 other people running the 10k, and I had lined up near the back, so the first mile was spent dodging people. The first mile felt good, and I think I did that in about 8:40. By the second mile, I could definitely feel that I was running harder than normal. But that's okay, it's a race! My 5k time was 26:54, which I was very happy about. I decided my goal at that point was 54:00.

I was still passing people, but I couldn't tell if I was maintaining/increasing my pace or if others were just slowing down more than me. Once I reached mile 5, I could hear the announcer, so even though I desperately wanted to slow down at that point, I knew it was almost over. And yet, it seemed so far away. I remembered that the final 1.2 miles seemed awfully difficult last year, and the same thing happened this year! There were a couple of decent hills that I remembered, so I thought I was in the clear after that. But then there was one more big one. My watch said 50:00, so I knew that if I met my goal, there was just 4 more minutes of this to go. I pushed. I passed an 11 year old boy who was running with his dad, begging him to slow down (they did for the hill, and then they still beat me by 20 seconds :)). Mile 6 came and I gave it all I had, which didn't end up being a sprint, but something faster than what I had been running. I had to dogde 5K walkers who were finishing at the same time, which I found very annoying. And then, I finished!

Final chip time: 54:19 (8:45 pace).

I'm pretty pleased with how I ran this race. Although I had positive splits, the second half's pace was just 10 seconds slower than the first half. Considering the hills and the strong headwind, I don't think that's too bad. AND, I'm happy that I had raced hard enough that I didn't have the energy to sprint the last bit to the end. Even in my marathon, I sprinted to the finish. I'm glad that I had given it my all during this race and had nothing left over. And it's pretty awesome that I shaved 3:30 off my time from last year. :) Next year's goal: sub-50:00.

I should also note that my non-running husband and younger brother ran the 5K in 24:31. Must be nice to be naturally gifted... :-P And I did not end up kicking my older brother's/SIL's butts, as they wussed out (slept in; they got in from Boston around 1am the night before).

Indoor half training plan

Well, the indoor half that I'm signed up for is in a little more than 8 weeks. That means I have 8 weeks to uh... get my butt in gear. So I'm publishing my training plan here in hopes that I will actually stick to it:



Basically, it's 3 weeks of base building (SLOW miles), 1 week step-back, 3 weeks that include speedwork, and 1 quick taper week before the race. I haven't decided quite yet what my speedwork will entail. Yasso 800s? Tempo runs at 10k pace?

If I can stick with this, I'll be golden to run under 2 hours. I analyzed my marathon training a bit further, and I came to the shocking realization that the average mileage of my 18 weeks of training came out to... 22.7. Yeah. 22.7 miles. No wonder I didn't have any injuries to deal with. No wonder I didn't lose any weight. (I do wonder how I didn't gain weight, actually. It was the summer of junk food.)

Anyway. That number makes me feel bad because, well, it's pitiful. I wasn't even busy at work this summer. I had plenty of time to run. 22.7 miles per week is no way to train for a marathon. On the other hand, it gives me lots and lots of hope. I ran a 4:38 marathon on awful training. What can I do on 40 mpw? 50? 60? Ooh, the possibilities!

Now I need to go to bed so that I can get up and run the 10k! This is the first time I've raced a distance previously, so there's a little added pressure to destroy my old time. I'll let you know how I did tomorrow. :)