Third marathon a week away: summarizing training lessons learned, hopes for redemption, reasons for running

It’s been about 8 months since I had to drop out of the Hyannis Marathon at mile 23 with an IT band so messed up I could barely limp.  And it’s been about a year since I finished my first marathon, the Maine Marathon in Portland, at 3:19:25, euphoric despite being a bit shy of my best-case-scenario goal – a Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:15:00. A week from today I’ll run the Baystate Marathon in Lowell, Mass. The training’s pretty much done for this race.  The last week of taper includes short, easy runs, a little bit at race pace, and trying not to get a cold between now and then. I feel good, better than I felt before Portland, a thousand times better than I felt before Hyannis.  We’ll see what happens.

Here are a few observations about what went right at Portland, wrong at Hyannis, and feels like it might have gone right again with this current training cycle.

Portland (3:19:25 – click for race summary)

I trained hard and consistently, steadily increasing my long runs over a good long stretch of time, beginning slowly in May. I peaked at a 50 mile week; the majority of my high mileage weeks were in the mid-40s.  It was a good program for a first timer, and I think if I’d tried to do any more I would have started breaking down.  I ran the marathon as hard as I could – at a fairly steady pace for the first 20 and then at a decreasing pace over the next 6, and I think my time was perhaps a little better than my fitness or training level would have predicted; I ran on hope and on naivete.  I did not listen to music during this race. It was very hard at the end, but wonderful, a transformational experience.

Hyannis (DF – click for race summary)

The training went bad for this early, and I think it all comes down to overestimating how soon I’d be ready to run again after Portland. One marathon’s experience and I thought I could somehow bounce right back into training mode for a February race, and not only match but beat my first marathon time. I was chronically tweaked on this. Minor injuries moved up and down my legs, with the worst being a return of the recurring plantar fasciitis in my right foot.  I started stuffing inserts in my shoes, experimenting fruitlessly, trying to find some relief, and in the process screwing up my gait, causing me to under-pronate and I think leading to the IT band issue that would knock me out the race.  Weeks early on when I still had the time and latitude to back off and rest, I pushed too hard, ran long runs too fast in the worst conditions, made all kinds of foolish choices. Then when time was growing short, I started cutting down mileage in a desperate attempt to heal up in time for the race. Which maybe would have been fine – if I had revised my expectations for the race pace.  I went out at my original goal pace, held it for the first half, then at mile 16, started to feel a weird ache in my right knee. By mile 19 I couldn’t run, could only limp-walk.  I made it to mile 23 in that condition, short stretches of slow running, then more limping, each time worse until I felt like my right leg was going to buckle under me entirely. I took the ride when the course official offered it. Unlike Portland, I had listened to music during this race. I hated it. I like music during long runs, but not races; it felt like a distraction, never again.

Baystate (???)

I took my time healing up after Hyannis. My knee (IT band) seemed to be able to stand any intensity of workout, but not distance. A mile at 6:45 pace? Two miles at 7:15 pace? No problem. 4 miles at any pace – bad news.  I’d spend another week not being able to walk down stairs without holding the banister with both hands. I took a few weeks off, then ran about a month of 6-18 mile weeks, increasing the longest distances slowly and steadily, listening hard to that knee, stretching and massaging the IT band daily.  It took months to get back up to my normal miles, and I didn’t start doing medium long runs again until June, but by the end of June I was back to my full base mileage of about 40 miles a week and had turned in a 12 mile run with no IT band issues.

So around Fourth of July weekend, out visiting family in Ohio, I crossed the 13-mile long run mark on those long, straight farm roads, and formally began my training schedule. I followed the 55-mile per week schedule (the easiest of the three schedules offered) from Advanced Marathoning, by Peter Pfitzinger. This 18-week schedule broke the training into four mesocycles (phases), each focused on a different element – endurance, lactate threshold and endurance, race preparation and tapering. The program included little high intensity track speedwork, but plenty of moderately fast running over longer distances. I ran a good many back-to-back midweek runs between 10-14 miles, with one of them a tempo run, so that 12 moderately fast miles began to seem like a normal, day-to-day kind of run and 16-20 mile long runs (with many of those miles at marathon race pace) on the weekend seemed much less daunting. Which was the point, I suppose.

Another interesting side effect of this schedule is that I really learned to love running at night, after the kids went to bed, which is the only time I could squeeze in these longer midweek runs. I tried briefly running these in the very early morning, but my feet and legs are so stiff in the early mornings that I don’t feel like I get in the same quality workout. And the one time the plantar fasciitis threatened to recur during this training cycle was after two 5 a.m. mornings of 10 and 12 mile aerobic and tempo runs, back to back. That part of the foot is especially stiff anyway early in the morning, and with my history, I knew that if I wanted to avoid ending up with the full blown plantar fasciitis again, I’d have to avoid mornings except on weekend long days.

Which illustrates another good difference between this training cycle and Hyannis. When I got tweaks (which I did, from the plantar fasciitis, to a strained calf muscle after trying to run a medium long run too soon after a 10-mile race, to a tweaked hamstring), I backed off, right away, though usually in intensity, not mileage. And I iced a lot.  Most nights when Kris and I would sit down to catch a bit of television or read before bed, I’d have a couple of ice packs on different parts of legs, or be rolling my foot on a frozen water bottle.  After she started training for the half marathon she’s running Nov. 1, the two of us were quite a pair, sprawled out on the couch icing our aching legs!  But it worked and none of the tweaks turned into injuries so serious I had to fall off the program, or back off intensity for more than a few days.

Now with a week to go before Baystate, my legs feel good. I hit the weight goal I’d set for myself (10 pounds lighter than I was at Portland, 15 pounds lighter than I was at the start of this training cycle).  I ran all the miles I’d planned to run, every long run and every tempo run at the speed goals I’d set for it – and in some cases much faster. I hit my time goals for the 10-mile trail race I ran in August and for my legs of the Reach the Beach Relay three weeks ago. I feel as ready as I could be. I’ve run the Baystate course, twice. It seems reasonable to aim for that 3:15 Boston Qualifying time. Or maybe, based on the way things went this past month, a bit faster than that.

And yet, with this last week to go, it’s still hard not to wonder. Because no matter how well you prepare, or how carefully you set your goal pace, the marathon’s humbling. Like Bill Rodgers said to me when he signed an autograph right before Hyannis, it’s “a weird race.” So here’s to hoping high, but not taking anything for granted.

The Reason For It All

And in the end, if it all goes right or it all goes wrong next Sunday, I realize that for me, the purpose of the training is not the marathon; the purpose of the marathon is the training. The reason to run a marathon a couple of times a year is to train – for mental health during stressful times, for physical fitness to keep up with the kids, for spiritual growth and reflection. It’s to keep weight off and my brain turned on. It’s so that I can take a 12-mile run like yesterday’s – on a beautiful cool fall day in the peak of foliage season in New Hampshire – and be able to chit chat through it with a buddy and feel rejuvenated instead of wrecked at the end of it. It takes a bit of training to get someone like me who tends to heaviness and is perhaps not a natural athlete, into that sort of condition. And having a marathon somewhere up ahead on the calendar has proven useful in keeping me there.

But all that said, BQ, I’m coming for you next Sunday.

Tags: Baystate, Hyannis, marathon, marathon training, portland

Related Posts

• May 31, 2010 -- Second marathon in six weeks is a fun one; Vermont City Marathon is a fantastic event in a great city!
• October 26, 2009 -- Belated Baystate Marathon summary, training notes
• February 23, 2009 -- Hyannis ends for me three miles before the finish