So how do you finish 18 weeks of training, race a marathon, and then turn around and race another just as hard just 6 weeks later? I’ll tell you when and if I’ve finished the second one, this Sunday. Maybe you (or I) don’t. But I think maybe it’s possible, and here are a few observations on getting to the starting line, mostly in one piece, for the second marathon in six weeks.
First, I made it a point to say race a marathon, since I think many long distance runners could manage a 26-mile long run at an easy pace every month, or even more often than that. What requires major recovery time (about five weeks) is racing the marathon – running it as fast as you possibly can while still finishing. I ran Boston as hard as I could. I think I could have spent six weeks just recovering from that.
I wasn’t planning on trying this experiment this year. I figured after the Boston Marathon in April, I’d lay back and run easy miles for a month or two before gearing up for a fall race. But through my friend Dan from the New Hampshire Athletic Alliance running club, and who works at Stonyfield Yogurt just down the street on Londonderry, I got an opportunity to run Vermont City Marathon in Burlington on May 30 in a Stonyfield singlet as part of their marketing effort up there. I’m a big fan of Stonyfield as a company, Burlington as a city, and Vermont as my home state. This was impossible to pass up!
I basically ran two weeks of recovery mileage, with shorter distance speedwork thrown in (which I probably overdid). Then I went back to peak mileage for two weeks. This was tough. Much tougher than the five or six weeks of peak mileage I ran during the original training. I was hitting the target miles, and the target paces for my long runs, tempo runs and intervals, but I was paying for it. For once, I not only ran recovery pace runs at a real recovery pace, but even slower than that. And not by choice.
I felt like I was right on the edge of breaking down physically, and I hoped I could stay balanced there, pushing the hard workouts hard enough so I could feel confident going into this next race, but still resting enough so that I wouldn’t fall apart entirely or get injured before I got to the start line. I ate lots of yogurt (yes, Stonyfield, plug!) and almonds to try and pack in protein and good fat to rebuild damaged muscle.
By the end of the second week of peak training my legs were tired but okay, but my abs and core were deeply sore. I often get sore abs after a tough long run (not enough core workouts in between), but they go away in a day or so. Sometimes, I’ll misstep off a curb or into a pothole and wrench my abs during a tempo run and that’ll hurt for a while as well, but heal quickly. This time, the soreness got worse and worse as I stacked up hard training miles on top of a marathon, on top of more hard training miles. I began to wonder if I’d torn something.
By the time I did my last peak mileage week long run, a 16-mile hill workout, my abs were sore all the way through, and definitely cutting into my ability to run fast. I rested for two days going into taper week one, and then ran an eight-mile tempo run. I was fast again, and hit the speeds with no problem, but at mile six I landed wrong in some uneven terrain and wrench; twisted my core again so hard I winced. By the next day my belly hurt enough so I scheduled a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t think he was going to be able to fix me, but I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t torn something and didn’t have a sports hernia or something that could make running the marathon in less than two weeks not just painful, but also dangerous.
And here’s why I think our family doc is great – he’s a cyclist and athlete, and he totally gets it. After a complete exam, he told me nothing was torn. Just a bad strain, stacking up miles on miles, just as I’d thought, exacerbated by that last twist during the tempo run. But I can run, right, I wanted to know? It’s not going to do any permanent damage? ”I’ll tell you what I tell my other athletes when they come to me with an injury like this right before the last big game of the season,” he said. ”You can do it, but it’ll hurt, and you’ll pay on the other side with longer recovery time.” Nice!
I finished out the first taper week pretty well, then this past week. The last two workouts on my schedule were a five-miler today, a four tomorrow, then the marathon on Sunday. And for the first time in a long time, I bagged today’s run. My legs are feeling decent again, but my abs were still achy, and I thought, what’s this five going to do? I’m either fit or I’m not. I think a second full day of rest will do me better. Somehow this willingness to thumb my nose at my schedule pleased me. Kris’ mom is at the house to watch the kids, and she made a great dinner so at least I was able to assuage my guilt at having skipped the run (ha! not guilty at all) by carbo-loading with some herb roasted chicken and potatoes, good bread and seasoned oil, and a tasty Malbec. Strawberry shortcake for dessert. Perfect cure for whatever ails you.
So tomorrow morning an easy four miles, and then Kris and I head off to Vermont. A weekend away without the kids, touring around my home state a bit, then a race expo, early Mass, dinner, and the next day a great 26.2 mile run through a beautiful city. The run might go really well. Or not. Maybe it’ll be too hot, maybe it won’t (forecast has been all over the place). Maybe I’ll run a PR, or maybe I’ll find out that I’m even more tired and beat up than I thought I was and end up running my slowest marathon ever. I’ve got no sense of it either way (though I’m pretty sure either way I’m really going to hurt a lot on Monday); it’s all a fine and interesting experiment. I can’t wait to find out how it turns out!
Tags: Boston Marathon, marathon training, vermont city marathon
I can’t wait to see how it all turns out, too! Woo-hoo!
Said it elsewhere and I’ll repeat it here. Have a good solid and fun VCM Ernesto as part of an overall great long weekend. Thanks for sharing — and I hope you can fight through the AB issue without too much discomfort. I’ll be tipping a couple of cold ones in Wells, toasting yours and others’ success this weekend, and looking forward to reading about the race later on. Enjoy …
I wish I could come cheer you on. Do you think Kris’s Mom can watch my kids too?
[...] two-weeks each of recovery, back-to-peak mileage, then taper for this marathon finished rough (you can read about that here). I was still wrapping my abs with ace bandages to help deal with a bad strain on race day. In some [...]