Just One Marathon

Resurfacing (And I Don't Mean The Driveway)

“My work self is suffocating my life me.”—Liz Lemon to hallucinatory Oprah on 30 Rock

You’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that I have composed some incredible blogs in the past couple of months. Quirky and offbeat, yet at the same time, articulate and accessible to the masses. In my fevered imagination, I was the Tina Fey of running blogs.

In real life … not so much.

It all started around March 1, when I woke up very early one morning and realized that over the next 31 days, I would need to finish a paper, write an exam and run a 30K race. Oh, and work. And do all the other stuff most folks do to keep a home and family humming along.

Long story short – I made a plan and executed it. Finished the paper a couple of weeks before the exam. Ran Around the Bay on March 27^th. Wrote my final on March 30^th. None of it went perfectly – but it was all okay. Looking at my speed training results in the weeks leading up to Around the Bay, I let go of the pipe dream of finishing in less than 3 hours, and logged a respectable-but-by-no-means-flashy, mid-pack finish.

Time: 3:06:39

Category place: 243/494

Gender place: 1,460/2,973

I was happy enough with the result – but mostly, I was happy with setting a realistic goal for this race. I took stock of where I was, picked an achievable finish time (3:10) and managed to exceed it. Though the last 10K of the race was certainly harder than the first 10, I felt pretty good in those final kilometres.

My happiness may have been influenced by the fact that it was just a really fun weekend. My middle sister, Kathy, a gifted yoga teacher, came with me to Hamilton and served as support crew. She was an incredible good sport, staying overnight in a lovely B&B in Hamilton and actually volunteering to sleep on the hide-a-bed, even when the owner described it as, “okay, but no hide-a-bed is every really comfortable”. I owe her one.

On race day, Kath saw me off at the start line, and then met me several times on the race course, bringing along, at various points, her husband, her sister-in-law and her father-in-law. The Hamilton family I didn’t realize I had. On top of that, my Dad drove in from Toronto to see the end of the race. So, it’s true then … I AM the centre of the universe!! 

And the exam I wrote 3 days afterwards? I completely blanked out on the first question. Couldn’t remember the five immutable truths of organizational culture. This on a course titled “organizational culture”. Fortunately for me, I did fine on the rest of the exam and on my assignments. In the end, I got an A. I’m not bragging. I’m just sayin’.

Then … another month went by. A month with just one blog post. A house that hasn’t gotten any neater. A rotten cold. And one more course to register for in the university-program-that-never-ends.

Time to set a new goal and generate a little deadline pressure.  Done and … done. My next race is the National Capital Race Weekend Half Marathon. And I’m determined to break two hours, just to prove that the first (and only) time I’ve run a sub-2 hour half wasn’t a complete fluke.

List-less

Sometimes I really question my decision-making skills. Like today, I was trying to decide whether to run at lunch. In my head, I made a list of “reasons to run” and “reasons not to run”. It went something like this.

 

Reasons to Run

• I missed my 30K run yesterday because I was doing the hockey mom thing at an out-of-town tournament
• I am just three weeks away from running Around the Bay
• I actually have the time today
• I remembered all my running gear
• A good run would improve my mood and increase my energy level

Reasons NOT to Run

• I forgot my iPod

Easy decision right? Skip the run! You can’t run on a treadmill without an iPod.

In fact, the only run I made this afternoon was to the store for a candy fix. I’m thinking I need some new decision-making techniques. Here’s a motivator -- photos of me taken during the first half of last fall’s marathon and during the last 10K of the same race.

Here’s how I want to look when I’m running Around the Bay:

 
(Me during the first half of the Wineglass) 

Here’s how I don’t want to look (or feel):

 
(Me just a couple of hundred metres from the end. Kill me now.)

 

Yup, it's working. I'm feelng more motivated already.

The View from Square One

If you’ve seen me on my long runs recently, you might have a hard time believing I ran a marathon just three and a half months ago. Afterwards, I slacked off in a major way, often running only once or twice a week and sometimes not running at all. It was awesome. And now I'm paying the price.

I’m back to my regular training schedule, but there are bound to be a few sore muscles as I track down, catch up to and jump back on the running bandwagon. This morning’s 18K was no exception. Run on what I hope will end up being the coldest day of the year (-33C with the wind chill), I logged a sluggish and slippery 6:12/km pace.

My goal race is Around the Bay, a 30K event in Hamilton, Ontario on March 28^th. I did the race once before, in 2009, and ran it in 3:17. But I’ve learned a lot since then, and logged some results that make me think I can do better this time. At this point, I have three possible goals.

Goal 1: Finish and improve my time. Feel healthy afterwards.

Goal 2: Finish in less than 3 hours. Feel healthy and satisfied afterwards.

Goal 3: Finish in 2:51, achieving the 5:42/km pace required to run a 4-hour marathon. Feel healthy and delusionally-optimistic afterwards.

Here’s the thing – I don’t want to run the first half significantly faster than the second half, the way I did in The Marathon That Must Not Be Named. So in a few weeks, I’m going to have a good long talk with myself and set a realistic goal for Around the Bay. I’m going to choose a pace and stick to it. That will require some real discipline on my part, because Around the Bay features some pretty spectacular hills right at the end. I’ll need to moderate my pace in the early miles and push myself at the end, just when it’s getting difficult. Here’s the elevation map, which I … um … “borrowed” from the very enjoyable blog Run by Numbers (thanks!):

 

 

 

 

 

And yes, there’s a guy dressed as the Grim Reaper who stands at the top of the last hill. He attempts to wave exhausted runners into the cemetery conveniently located nearby. With that in mind, I'll add:

Goal 4: Avoid feeling so exhausted that I want to take him up on his offer.

Didn't It Rain!

“Didn’t it rain, children?

Talk ‘bout rain, oh my Lord!

Didn’t it...

Didn’t it…

Didn’t it rain!”

Mahalia Jackson

 

If there were Greek gods today, there would have to be a god of the iPod mix. They'd be a trio of computer-geeky deities sitting in the heavens like the Fates, tossing songs onto the iPod mixes of innocent mortals that are poignant or ironic or irritating at just the right moments. The Pod Gods could have been at work while I was running Around the Bay last Sunday.

 

I almost laughed out loud when the rollicking gospel song, “Didn’t It Rain?” popped up on my mix at the 5K marker. I was already drenched from a steady downpour that would last through the first two hours. In fact, this 30K run was really like two runs. The first was a relatively flat 18K trot in the rain. The second run was a hilly 12K slog into a cool headwind. Not surprisingly, the first race was a lot more enjoyable than the second.

 

It was momentarily dry when we started the race, but as the route wound around Hamilton Harbour and alongside Lake Ontario, the weather settled into a kind of steady but bearable drizzle. The thing about rain is that once you’re wet, all that can really happen is that you get more wet. It could have been worse.

I felt good going out and tried hard to balance between moderating my pace early on, while also banking some time for the hilly latter part of the race. Lately, I’ve been feeling weak, sluggish and dead-legged on my training runs and I was very happy that I did not have that feeling at all on Sunday. The crowd of 6,200 runners and the friendly spectators gave me a boost and I (mostly) enjoyed myself. I got a lift from seeing my sister cheering from the sidelines at 11K. 

 

In fact, the first 18K of the race really seemed to fly by. Runners, you know that feeling you have on a race when you haven’t seen a kilometre or mile marker for a while and you begin to hope maybe you passed right by the marker without even knowing it? And you know how it pretty much always happens that you haven’t missed the marker? Well, on this race, I actually missed a marker (the 3K). I ran a kilometre without even realizing I’d completed it! In fact, this is the first race I’ve ever run where the kilometre markers seemed to appear before I expected them, rather than blocks and blocks after I hoped for them.

 

That was before the race got hilly. I knew from the course description and from reading reports of previous Around the Bay races that a major characteristic of this race is its hilly final third. So I wasn’t surprised to encounter a series of rolling hills winding through the neighbouring city of Burlington. There are many (I lost count) but they are relatively gentle and there are lots of pleasant distractions on this section of the route. The houses in this residential neighbourhood are lovely, and many people came out to the end of their driveways to offer water, orange slices or just noisy support. Then (as I recall), there’s a pretty big incline at around 24K before the course levels out for a bit. I remember thinking “Wow, is that it? That wasn’t too bad.” My sister met me again just before the 25K marker and I told her I was feeling really good and making a decent pace despite the hills.

Then the course made a long descent into a ravine (that part was fun), before making a steep climb up a twisting road up to the 26K marker. I don’t know how long that hill was, but somewhere on the way up, I lost the will to run. I wasn’t alone. I estimate that almost two-thirds of the runners around me walked some or all of that hill. And here is where I hang on to a tiny shred of pride: I never walked a hill during the race. It might have looked like walking at some points, but my brain was telling my legs to run and my legs were obeying. Sometimes they were obeying with the enthusiasm of a sullen teenager told to clean his room, but they did what they were told.

 

After that, I was done in. When I encountered the infamous “grim reaper”, who stands beside the cemetery conveniently located at the 27K mark, asking runners if they are “feeling dead”, I was ready to give him my business. I did a quick Garmin check and realized I had 15 minutes to run the final 3K –- something I can't do on fresh legs, let alone after 27K of rainy, hilly slogging. So I resigned myself to my back-up goal of “upright and smiling” and tried to enjoy the fact that the last part of the race actually slopes gently downward. But I did have a few moments of sadness and disappointment.

 

Then the iPod gods served up another inspiring song to end the race: Kate Bush’s “Moments of Pleasure”, a song that has special meaning for me. To end the race, runners enter a tunnel and emerge inside Copps Coliseum. The finish line is set up in the middle of the playing field and friends and family cheer from the stands. It is the best set up for a race finish I’ve ever experienced. As I emerged from the dark tunnel into the warm, noisy and blessedly dry stadium, Kate was singing, “These moments given are a gift from time”. I remembered how far I’d come as an runner, how fortunate I am to be healthy, and how many people have done wonderful things to support me in my running obsession and it was impossible to be disappointed. I felt blessed.

 

Final time: 3:17

Place (gender/age): 273/436

Around the Bay and All Over Southern Ontario

This post was drafted Sunday on the way home from Hamilton, where I ran the Around the Bay 30K

 

I don’t think I could have stuffed more stuff into this weekend. And yet, as I sit here on the train ride home from this weekend’s Around the Bay race in Hamilton, I don’t feel tired. I feel like I have spent a weekend living life to the fullest.

 

The busy-ness started on Friday … no wait, Thursday evening. In addition to packing for my trip to Hamilton (about 6 hours drive from my home-town of Ottawa, I visited my son’s high school for parent-teacher interviews (an adventure in itself), then rushed off to attend my monthly book club meeting. I got home too late and with one too many glasses of wine in my system and woke up Friday a little hung-over and kind of keyed up. After a busy but restless day at work, I drove right to the train station for a trip to Toronto where my parents, sisters and most of my extended family live.

 

On the train, I pulled out my laptop and worked on the Classroom Assignment from Hell, making incredible progress and even feeling a little more charitable towards my professor. When my laptop battery died after about 3 hours, I was ready to rest. My Dad picked me up the train station at about 10:15 p.m., with a tray of sushi from a great place in his neighbourhood. We drove back to my parents place and relaxed, chatted and caught up for a while.

 

The next morning, I went downtown to pick up my sister Kathy. We headed to Hamilton (it’s only about 90 minutes from her place), picked up my race kit, cruised the expo for bargains and running-related novelties, and checked into our hotel. That evening, we marked Earth Hour by doing a candle-light yoga set aimed at providing a good night’s sleep. If you can possibly arrange to travel to your races with an experienced yoga instructor, I highly recommend it! It seemed to do the trick. I was asleep by 11 and didn’t wake up until about 6:45 a.m.

 

The race started at 9:30 a.m., so we headed downtown at about 8:30, which gave me plenty of time to soak up the vibe and visit the washroom facilities in Copps Coliseum (real washrooms – not porta-potties – at the start line – yay!). After running this venerable, historic – and unfortunately wet – race, I met up with my sister and her husband, who drove in to catch the end of the race. I collected my medal and snacks, changed into dry clothing (over a still-sweaty body but it was heaven to get out of my saturated clothing) and got back into the car to dash back down Highway 403 to Toronto. Dropped ‘sis off at her apartment and got back on the highway to my parents place just east of the city.

 

I arrived at their place at 3:10, knowing my train back to Ottawa left at 4:05. Thinking of my unfortunate seat-mates on the 4-hour train ride, I grabbed a quick shower, re-packed my bag and Mom and Dad drove me to the train station. We got there at 3:57. The train was over-sold and I got the very last seat. Opened my laptop and finished my course assignment, which felt just as good as finishing the 30K.

 

With just a little luck, the train should be in Ottawa at about 9 p.m. My wonderful husband has promised to save me a heaping serving of his famous rigatoni and a big glass of red wine. Then it’s off to bed and back to work tomorrow morning.

 

And the race itself? Well, with rains and a final 10K comprised mostly of hills, it was a huge challenge but a great experience. More about that in my next post.