finish the drill

I had a sweet 20 mile run this morning with Katie and Denise. I woke up a little after 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so after playing with the puppy for a while (he didn’t mind waking up) and eating breakfast, I was more than on time to meet them on campus at 5am. Since I was early, I trotted across the parking lot to my building to use the bathroom there, armed with my banana-covered pepper spray. Our building is full of too many freaky noises at night.

We headed out a little after five and cruised out College Station to a gas station on Lexington Road where we bought some water at 6.33 miles. The guy running the gas station was like, “walking, huh?” Sir, if you think I sweat this much from walking…I chowed my Shot Bloks and was glad to not have to carry them anymore. We followed the same route back, which is a little more forgiving since you are running more down than up on College Station, and Denise peeled off around mile 11 so she would get back to Dawson Hall at 12 miles. KP was going to run 12 as well, but is either a good friend or just plain nutty because she continued with me for the remaining eight miles. They’re both running a marathon in California in two or three weeks, but I am not sure…I listen, but usually half of what I think about while running blanks out afterward. I know it has something to do with wine (the marathon, not my memory). It’ll be Katie’s second and Denise’s third. We hit my fave Golden Pantry at 12.66 miles for water and the bathroom. I took a Hammer gel here and drank Gatorade.

We continued with a pretty uneventful loop past Bishop Park and returned down Milledge. I felt good today; there were many times I thought I was about to be feeling it pretty hard, but it more or less held off until mile 17 and by that point, there just wasn’t that far to go anyway. The second ten miles was a bit faster than the first. I would say most talking had ceased around 16 miles and it was just time to get it done. I was glad to have Katie as a little rabbit to keep up with. I thought a lot about how hard it is in races to keep going when I am tired and just want a little walk break or whatever which will invariably turn into many slowdown breaks or walk breaks if you let it and it’s better to just keep moving and shut up about it. My two longest runs this time around have been with them, so it is going to be difficult to do another 20 by myself.

Since my thesis defense date was set for the week following Ridge to Bridge, most of my concerns for the race have taken a back seat to how I am going to finish my data analysis and write my thesis and defend in essentially the same time period. I have put the work in to finish the marathon well, even if not as well as I’d like, but I still have a lot to do on my thesis and it’s not as simple as taking a few hours a week to do something I enjoy doing. I think it will mostly come down to my “mental toughness” on race day, anyway. Like I said, the hardest part for me is pushing to do more than I feel like I can do comfortably, especially in the last hour or so on the course. It’s a couple of hours you just have to deal with being uncomfortable and being uncomfortable is okay, so.

To me, finishing a marathon is fine, but it is the culmination of all the hard work you’ve put in over 6+ months to get there that is the real accomplishment. If you didn’t do the work, well, congrats on spending a few hours running on one day, but I’m so impressed with people who put in the time to do it right and I feel like I’ve put a lot of time into this one, even if I don’t end up finishing as fast as I might’ve thought a few months ago. I hope to run Ridge to Bridge as stress-free as possible and then hopefully run Thunder Road again with a little more ambition when the weight is off my back.

radio silence

I ended up catching one of the colds lurking around me last week and things were pretty uneventful with only two days that I ran. My mom’s birthday was on Friday and I drove up there Thursday after a full day of class and a web seminar, so it would have been kind of a wash even if I could breathe at half my normal capacity. I took it easy again on Friday (baking and eating birthday cake) and then on Saturday plunked back out on the road for my last long run before ING Georgia in [now less than] two weeks.

The weather was great and I felt surprisingly good even though my breathing was noticeably shallower than usual. I decided to try to stick to a 10:00 pace, which felt like my “I can do this all day” pace when I started and ended up with an overall pace of 9:58. The run was actually supposed to be 20 miles, but I was running a loop of 7.xx miles so it added up to exactly 22 by the time I made it back to my parent’s house. Absolutely nothing notable happened over the course of several hours, other than I kept running. My dad was in the yard when I got back. He asked how far I went, and then did that thing where you kind of shrug your shoulders and say, “Eh.” Lest you think you are just a little bit badass for running 22 miles for fun…I took a shower and then fell asleep on the floor laying next to my dog for the rest of the afternoon. It feels SO GOOD to have the last long run done!

On Sunday, we drove to Greensboro to get my mom some workout clothes/a race day outfit. Shopping is brutal work. We were there for hours, but she is now outfitted in up to date clothes, mostly in the color pink. My quads were s-o-r-e. I went out again on Monday afternoon for 7.5 or so miles (one loop). First I took pictures of myself in the bathroom mirror to see if I looked as weird as I do in pictures of me running. I don’t know why, I had a new shirt on and wanted to see what it looked like, I think. I think I need to acquire and learn how to use makeup.

Then I walked another loop with my mom when she got home from work – she is walking the half marathon in two weeks and I feel somewhat personally responsible for her preparation, which so far has consisted of me bugging her to go get fitted for decent shoes (she got a pair of Brooks Glycerins at Off’n Running), giving nutrition advice, and checking to see if she’s doing her long walks. We walked at a 14:33 average pace for 7.4 miles. I think I pretty much went off the deep end after that. You know when you are so drained that you all of a sudden feel all sad and pathetic like you’re four years old and need a nap but don’t want to sleep? That was me eating dinner.

I drove home for most of the day today, so I hope to hop back on the horse tomorrow for some taper running and maybe a swim!

Last week:

3/3 wednesday – 3.13 miles, 28:33 – 45:00 spin class
3/6 saturday – 22.00 miles, 3:39:27 (avg 9:58)

total miles run: 25.13
time run: 4:08:00
total cardio time: 04:53:00
total time spent eating cookies/cake/chocolate: incalculable

how not to “recover” from 26.2

My legs felt pretty good yesterday (read: solid two days of not having to death-grip anything while sitting or rising) so I went for a four mile jaunt on the treadmill which was actually not so jaunty. Here’s a hint: don’t go to the gym at 2pm, there’s nothing good on TV and you will have to watch Rachael Ray stuff chicken with pimento cheese, fry the hell out of it, place it next to some frozen green beans and SWEETENED sweet potatoes, and call it a nice square meal.

I followed that up with 3 hours of volunteering at a mobile food pantry over in Winterville; empty a tractor trailer truck full of food (I didn’t do this, a forklift did), pack it into boxes for 300 families to pick up, and slide it down the line. There was already a line out onto the road an hour before the actual start time for giving out the food; if you need something to make you feel grateful (or at the very least, non-homicidal) while standing for 20 minutes in the self checkout line at Kroger, how about that you aren’t waiting in a line of hundreds of people for hours because you can’t afford to buy enough food? I did approximately one bazillion squats while moving 800 or so one-pound bags of frozen blueberries from their boxes into the distribution boxes. I’m not quite back to death-grip status today, but it’s close!

charlotte thunder road marathon

Long time, no post. Not much has happened running-wise in the past few weeks. On Thanksgiving, I ran the Dallas YMCA Turkey Trot 8 mile. In typical family fashion, we arrived late (though everyone else was doing the 5k walk, so technically they were on time, while I was late. awesome.) and my first couple of miles were very slow (11-ish minute miles) while I slogged through walkers, dog leashes, etc. I picked it up a little the rest of the race to finish in 1:14:18, with about an extra quarter mile on my Garmin from the dodging.

On Friday, I took a final exam, took a nap, and took a ride up to Charlotte for Saturday’s Thunder Road Marathon. I signed up for Thunder Road a couple of days after the Marine Corps Marathon, a combination of that vulnerable “let’s do it again!” post marathon feeling and also being bummed about my finishing time and kind of wanting to give it another shot without going through another several months of long runs, etc. I didn’t run too much in the past month and my longest run was 13.1 at Pinehurst a couple of weeks ago. For the most part, I’ve stuck to an hour or so of running and have been doing spin classes. Sometimes you just need a break from the same stuff, although arguably the time for that break might not be right before a marathon.

I made a quick detour to the Whole Foods in Greenville for some snacks and made it up there by around 4pm. The hotel I stayed in was the Westin, which was really nice, but also kind of sucked. They didn’t have free internet, except in the lobby. Who wants to go down to a lobby to use the internet? It was $13 or $18 for a day of internet access in your room. Even the Days Inn can do better than that! My room wasn’t too expensive, but when you tack on $18/night parking, charging for wireless access, etc that’s kind of getting up there. The location was good, though, with the Charlotte Convention Center next door and the starting line right in front of the hotel. I walked to the convention center to pick up my race packet and cruised around there for a minute, but there wasn’t too much to see and I was back in my room by 5:30. Easy peasy.

Less easy peasy was the sleeping, which is still giving me trouble. I vowed to give up caffeine after Saturday morning, but I couldn’t find any decaf at the grocery store today so those bets are off (you know I looked really hard). I grazed on food all evening and drank water and climbed into bed around 9pm, but didn’t fall asleep until a little before midnight. There was some tossing and turning, but no worse than a regular night and a bonus nightmare about being late for the race in the pouring rain. I was stoked to wake up around 6am and just be glad that dream was over and it wasn’t raining. I continued cramming food in my maw since I usually end up hungry from not eating enough, so in went half a wheat bagel, most of a blueberry muffin, a banana, a cup of coffee, and more water. Got dressed (tank top, long sleeve, vest, 3/4 length tights, and gloves) and headed down to drop my things off in the car before going to the convention center.

The latest the hotel would allow checkout was 1pm, so I figured I’d drop my things in the car and if I had enough time, come back up and shower. I got in the elevator, remembered my car being parked by a column painted with B1, and “mashed the button.” Got out, and no car. Okay. Crap. Crap crap crap. I went back to the elevator, really confused because I was sure I was not on B2 or B3. Checked those levels, and nope. Then I elevated to sh*t, sh*t, sh*t. My car ended up being on B1m, some mysterious parking level like you might find in Sideways Stories From Wayside School. Happy dance.

The start line was right outside the hotel and convention center. I made it out there around 7:30 or so for a 7:50 start time and no one was inside the fenced off area yet. People were mostly either milling around outside or in the convention center. It wasn’t as cold as I expected (upper 20s, but comfortable for whatever reason) so I opted to hang around outside, figuring warming up inside wasn’t going to do me much good. When we started moving into the starting area, the pacers for 4 hours, 4:15, etc were very close to the front for some reason, with only about 20 feet between them. That was one of the few valid complaints I read on the Active.com reviews. It wasn’t leaving much room for people running faster than that. We started a few minutes late, but it seemed to go pretty smoothly; not super crowded for the first couple of miles, although sometimes the pace groups made things a little dense.

I’m not much of a mile by mile person, so I’ll spare you. The first half was much nicer and mostly run through residential areas. Kind of Anytown, USA and nothing that really stands out, but pleasant. There were pockets of people cheering, most notably the lone older man sitting silently on his bumper, semi-leering and holding a wooden paddle that said, “smile if you need a spanking.” Woah! Awesome. The half runners split off at mile 12, so the course thinned out considerably there and the miles ticked by. My best “bad encouraging comment” of the day came here when a volunteer, presumably thinking I was running the half, told me I was “almost there.” HAHA NO! I hit the halfway point at 1:57:xx. I think the course started heading back into the city and less residential areas around this point and I was passed on a hill by three guys wearing red union suits with the flaps open. Semi-demoralizing, but funny. Drum players under a bridge were awesome and insanely loud (mile 15?), ran through a wooden cutout of “the wall” around mile 18 (I think), some kids with signs for someone else named Beth that said “Beth is hot,” tons of super rowdy people drinking at a house on a corner around 23 or 24 and being crazy, terrible little hill at mile 24. I ran up one last sloping uphill to the finish, love some blonde lady who was standing in the middle of the street holding a sign that said “you did it” or something to that effect and cheering for everyone who passed her (I could never just be standing there and cheering like crazy for random people, so I love that other people actually do because it’s so gratifying at that point), high fived some sort of furry mascot thingy, and finished in 4:12:00 (chip time). Obviously, I was a lil’ slower in that second half. Or a lot slower. Either way, I was stoked to have improved my time by about 13 minutes since it was kind of a gamble after not being too serious about preparing for the past month. I tried really hard to stick to what I knew I should do; start slower in the beginning than felt normal, drink mostly water so I didn’t feel over-sugared, and take gels whether I wanted to or not (20 minutes before, mile 5, 10, 15, 20). I took Hammer Gels until mile 20 and then it was a vanilla orange Gu Roctane they gave out somewhere on the course. It was so disgusting and chunky from being cold, even though it was in my pocket for a couple of miles before I ate it.

Anyway, the weather was perfect, the course was pretty decent with rolling hills and incline that’ll add up but is not intimidating or scary hilly, people were friendly, and the volunteers and aid stations were very well organized. I’d run this one again, but I’m ready to not think about marathoning for a little while. My next will probably be ING Georgia in March.