The Best I Can As The Runner I Am

 Ah, there’s the feeling I remember: that feeling of exhaustion and despair soaked into every aching fiber of my body.

It’s the feeling that everything I once called me has been drained away. No personality, no sense of humor, no intelligence is left. All that remains is the automaton, numbly carrying out its cruel orders to keep going and ignore the suffering.

Don’t break now. Not until the finish. Only then are you are allowed to break and break utterly. You can drink a million gallons of water; you can lie on the carpet for the rest of the day like a useless glob of jelly and not exert an iota of effort.

I squint down the miles of asphalt I still have to cover for this 17-mile training run. The paved ribbon weaves over the dried-up landscape of Campbell County, the strange buttes and grazing cattle, the big-ass hill I’ll have to get up somehow.

It feels like the damn marathon.

I have two of the 26.2-mile races under my belt now, but it’s been over a year since I went the distance.

That was the Vermont City marathon in Burlington, which I did in 2:52:57. I hadn’t trained as well as I could have. As I went home from that race, I vowed to train more and get to the shape I needed to be in to beat my 2:46:04 P.R. from my first marathon.

Unfortunately, a strained Achilles heel put the brakes on those plans.

Now that I have built up my miles again I’ve gotten reacquainted with going long. The Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in Denver is September 22.

As I pound along the hot pavement, I remember the heat of the Vermont City Marathon.

 Man, those last eight miles had been hell. I had wanted to stop running and crumble somewhere by the side of the course, just like I really want to walk up this hill now.

It reminds me that these training runs are psychology exercises as much as they are physical conditioning. If I stop now, it will make it easier for me to stop during the marathon. But if I can look back on this run and remember that I pushed through, maybe I’ll be able to grin and bear it when I’m actually on the racecourse.

My arms feel weak and floppy as I try to get up the hill.

Damn…this sucks. Maybe if I just had a minute to catch my breath….

It is enticing, this siren call of weakness.

I am ready to give in, but then I reach the crest. A wind has picked up behind my back. I lengthen my stride and let gravity pull me towards home.

I finish in just under two hours. If I had run the marathon at that pace I would have finished in about 2:57.  Of course, I would have needed to hold on like that for another nine miles.

No problem, I think as I lie on the floor of my apartment, heart still thudding in my chest, sweat crawling into my eyes. Except, I’ll have to run it faster to get the time I want.

Self-delusion can have some painful consequences, I’ve learned. Last year, I raced my best 15-mile race on Martha’s Vineyard. The problem was that the race was actually 20 miles. I had let myself think I could hold a sub-six minute pace way further than I actually could. Over the last five miles, I paid for my folly with interest.

The problem is that I need to be a little delusional to run my best.

I ran my first marathon much faster than I thought I could, in part because I didn’t listen to common sense and slack my pace for the first 10 miles.

I delude myself today by not keeping track of weekly miles and by eschewing conventional speed-work on the track. Instead, I do fartlek: “speed play” in which I will run hard for a random distance. I take a break for a random period of time and then pick up the pace again.

If I used a stopwatch on the track, it would give me a better idea of how well I can run. But I don’t really want to know how good I am. I am afraid I’ll find out that I am not as good as I think. That could mean cutting myself short on race day.

Instead, I have been training based on feel. I run as far as I think I should run, go as hard as I think I should go. Within that model, I try to get in one long run a week and to do some speed-work.

Because I haven’t been training by the clock, I can’t rely on the clock to tell me how fast I should be running the marathon. I will have listen to what my body is saying it can do, and be honest enough to run the right pace.

I hope that the watch tells me that the pace I choose is fast enough for a P.R time, but if it isn’t fast enough, I would do better to accept my limits early than run into them face-first with 10 miles left to go.