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| Self Portrait after the Denver Marathon |
A lot of months
of work are riding on 26.2 miles.
As soon as
I got my 2013 calendar from Union College, I started scribbling my daily
distances and times in the boxes, adding up my weekly running mileage, the days
I felt strong, the days I felt like crap, days when the sun was shining or the
snow was blowing.
There are
only a few more boxes to fill now before the April 15, the day I will run in my
first Boston Marathon.
I can flip
from January, through February, March and April and take in the full scope of
my training. It is not the portrait of how to run a perfect marathon. There are
days I skipped that I shouldn’t have skipped, workouts that I could have run
harder. I usually ran between 60 miles and 70 miles a week, awarding myself
equivalent credits in miles for days when I chose to work out in the pool or on
the elliptical trainer. I’ve covered (almost) 900 miles since January 1.
The top
week in 2013 was a 76-miler (counting a 45-minute pool session as six miles)
and the slimmest week was a paltry 39 miles in February when I hit a wall of
physical and psychological exhaustion and took three days off.
I remember
how I had been gearing up to run a 20-mile out and back run from my apartment
in Gillette, Wyo. and watched as a pleasant morning gave way to hellish
blizzard conditions.
It’s a
test, I thought. If I can do this run, I can tackle worst that the marathon can
throw at me. I bundled into my rain jacket and balaclava to render myself
impermeable to the flakes that whipped down the wind like throwing stars. The
roads were covered in ankle-deep slush puddles that cars splashed up at me as I
tried to navigate the semi-white out. Even with my face covered up in the
balaclava the flakes were still hitting the narrow slit I’d left for my eyes
and they stung like hell. I realized that my form sucked and I was moving
really slowly, that I felt drained and that I was making myself suffer for no
good reason.
After two
miles of struggle against the teeth of the wind, I turned around. The next day,
the weather was much nicer, but I had work. I thought about running 17 miles in
the dark, thought better of it, cooked dinner and had a beer. The next day, I
decided to wait one more day, and decided I didn’t want to pay catch up.
These kinds
of days are dangerous. If I copped out once, it would be easier to cop out the
next time. On the other hand, I was getting to the point where I was feeling
totally burned out. Somehow running in the cold and dark after work had lost
some of its zest. I made a deal with myself. I’d give myself three days to
totally slack and then commit myself fully to training right after that. For
the most part, the deal has held up.
I’ve
logged many miles in the dark after work, bundled up like a space man against
the wind. There has always been a nice period of procrastination before I’ve
headed out the door, giving myself
plenty of time to contemplate the icy road margins I would soon be running on.
In that
way, I’ve been grateful for the calendar and for the running guidebook that
I’ve been using. Having a training program written down ahead of time has taken
away some of that inner wrangling:
Should I go out running or should I stay in? Well guess what fool? The schedule says you’re running twelve
miles today with five 1000-meter repeats. Looks like you better lace up those
shoes!
The
guidebook I’ve used is “Advanced Marathoning” by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott
Douglas.
The book
is the reason I went on a gut-busting 20 mile run with 10 miles at a 6:14
“marathon pace” (the wind was at my back) or a 18 mile run with a 14 mile
pick-up at 6:29 pace (I was being too easy on myself.) I also ran a bunch of
10K time trials, a pack of runs with short distance repeats, and several runs
with 100-meter bursts of speed. The 100-meter reps and the marathon pace time
trials were both new staples in my training regimen and I hope that they will
pay dividends on race day.
In other
words, if I don’t P.R. it will be entirely the book’s fault and I will invite
Pfitzinger to pay me back the money I wasted on the race entry.
Some other
factors that may play a role in my finishing time include the fact that this
will be my first time running Boston. The course is a net downhill with a
couple of gnarly hills around the twenty-mile mark. The fact that the race is
in April and in New England means that the weather could be just about
anything. Last year, runners got screwed by 80 degree temperatures, and in
other years, temperatures have been well below freezing. April storms are
another possibility. This year, it looks like it the mercury will be in the 50s
under clear skies. Here’s hoping.
While I
would like to believe that my training will give me the strength I need to beat
my personal record of 2:45:44 from the Denver Marathon, I’m not going to assign
myself a pace. Instead, I’ll do what I’ve done for previous races, which is go
by feel. I’ll use my stopwatch to tell if I’m running way slower or faster than
I should, but mostly I’ll go by the feel of my stride and my breathing. I’ve
tried to be more scientific about running these past couple of months, but I’m
still miles away from making it a science.
Meanwhile,
the elite guys will toe the line Monday with 100+ mile weeks under their belts,
unfathomably fast speed workouts, perfect diets and a stony discipline that
make my dedication look laughable by comparison. I bow to their perfection. It
honors me to follow (quite literally) in their footsteps.
The
training will determine just how far behind those footsteps I will be when I
cross the line.
Oh yeah.
For all of you guys out there interested in following me on race day, my race
number is 685. You can actually follow my progress online and get text alerts
about when I’m crossing the lines.
I mean,
I’d be flattered enough if you just wanted to know my finish time. But if you
want more than that, the Boston Athletic Association has a ton of info on ways
you can follow the event, from watching the coverage on TV or going online.
Since I am
in Wave One, the race starts for me at 10 a.m.. The Boston Marathon is always
on Patriot’s Day —April 15 this year.
A free app
for tracking runners is available here.
When you
want the full story afterwards, I’ll sit my tired ass down and write the blog.
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