Closing in on my first marathon (Oct, 5), waiting to see how all of these many months of training and work come together, I was surprised to find myself feeling edgy about it, a bit nervous, off kilter somehow. Some runs that should have felt easy felt hard, some that should have felt hard felt… well… really hard. It made sense to me that I'd be doing some serious and sensible evaluations of my condition relative to my target goals and adjusting if necessary, but it was more than that. It didn't feel like overtraining; those symptoms weren't there. I just lost the rhythm, I guess. Luckily, the new Runner's World showed up on Friday and I took it on our many travels over the weekend. The whole focus of the issue was pre-marathon, end of peak training and beginning the taper. And it turns out many people go through a sort of weirdness at this spot. Which is good to know. The other great thing to come out of this issue for me was the description of the simulator training run. This run is a 16-miler done at race pace about five weeks prior to the marathon. The idea is that what you can do for 16 miles now you'll be able to do for 26 after the rest period of your taper. You're supposed to run the 16 at the same pace and on the same sort of terrain and at the same time of day you'll be running your marathon. I got the time of day right, but failed to find remotely similar terrain. We were traveling last weekend, first to the Berkshires for my good friend Kevin's wedding, then out to Kris' mom's place in Central Mass. And that's where, sometime around 6:30 Sunday morning, I hit the road. Managed the first three or so miles at race pace, then ran straight the first of about six monster hills. Mile-long or better hills, as steep as hills get New England – so steep they felt like the stairs in the old 1860s Vermont farmhouse we once owned. So much for race pace. But I kept at them hard, with same race pace intensity and effort, and was pleased to find that I could recover from them and hit my pace again despite the wild burn and ragged lungs I felt while I climbed. And at the end, I was able to run the last three miles at about 15 seconds faster than my hoped for race pace, the speed at which I've been doing tempo runs. I felt tired and happy for the rest of the day. And I'm paying for it today with stiff legs and aching muscles, but it was worth it. Life is wild and unpredictable, and to some degree, my running is too (some days are good, some days are bad), but this run gave me a benchmark, a measure of the distance traveled since I started running seriously last fall. The rhythm's back, the balance. I feel ready for this last week of peak training, ready for the weird deprivation of the taper to come, and just maybe ready for this race!
Tags: marathon, Running, simulator training run
