Just One Marathon

Bright Lights, Long Run

Here is how it happens.

You see other runners on the road and think bitter, angry thoughts. They’re all, like: “Look at me – it’s 5 p.m., raining and cold and I’m out on my run. Enjoy your commute home, slacker!” You hate them.  Your own short runs start to get harder and your pace slows. You persevere, but you feel like you’re logging meaningless junk miles.

 

Then a day comes when everything goes right. You have time to run, you feel healthy and strong, and all you need to do is put on your shoes and step out the door. But you procrastinate, finding one thing or another to do (fold the laundry, answer the phone check your e-mail) while your window of running time gets smaller and smaller. That’s when you realize you’ve lost it: the will to run.

 

Now you’re at the crossroads. You spent years and years as a non-runner. You remember how much free time you had back then, how good it felt to laze around all Sunday morning or spend your lunch hour eating with friends, or be tucked warm in bed on a cold weekday morning. Those were good times.

 

But you also remember how you used to run out of energy part-way through the day. How stairs made you huff and puff. And how envious you were of ordinary people who set and achieved what seemed to be incredible athletic goals (Run a marathon! Complete a triathalon! Ski the Rockies!). You also know how hard you’ve worked to make yourself as a runner, and how easy it would be to make yourself a non-runner once again.

So, you lace up your shoes and venture out, telling yourself you’ll just run for 30 minutes, and see how it goes. You can even walk, if you want. The first 5K are awful … you really pay for weeks of low mileage. Then you notice that you’re half-way to a 10K run. The sky is blue, the air crisp and cool and the world full of shiny, happy people playing with their children raking leaves, walking hand-in-hand. For a few minutes, you actually forget you’re running. At 7K, you start to set goals for yourself – your next distance, a new time goal, an upcoming race. At 10K, you mentally compose a blog post about your experience and decide to get all Jay McInerneyand write it in the second person. You hope this won’t be too annoying.

 

Before you know it, you’ve run 12K (when’s the last time you actually ran longer than you intended?) and you know that the runner inside you has emerged again. And you vow not to let her go back into hiding.

Beauty and The Feet

Eighteen more sleeps until the marathon on May 25th. Well, 19 if you count the night before, but I expect to spend most of that evening tossing and turning (how’s that for a self-fulfilling prophecy?).

Last Sunday was the final 32K run in our training schedule. The Running Room organized a big training run for all its marathon clinic participants across the city. Over 200 of us met in mid-town Ottawa and took a bus out to the west-end suburb of Kanata. We then ran from the west end back to the mid-town neighbourhood called The Glebe.

If you have to run 20 miles on a Sunday morning, this incredible route certainly makes it more bearable. My beautiful adopted city (I am originally from Toronto) has a largely-unbroken ribbon of green space winding through and around it. We followed the “green belt” from the west end, along the Ottawa River, behind Parliament Hill, beside the intriguing lock system which skirts the gorgeous Chateau Laurier Hotel, and along the Ottawa Canal system to Lansdowne Park, our football stadium.

Here’s some of what I saw (these are images I … um … borrowed from others’ websites):

 

And here’s how my left foot looked afterwards. Not quite as pretty:

It didn’t actually hurt much, but it looked gruesome. By adding a slight limp and a few strategic moans, I was able to garner a lot of sympathy.

And the run itself? Well, I can’t bring myself to say it was fun but it was … not excruciating. Or only intermittently excruciating. I’m saving the unbroken agony for race day. Kidding. Really. Let’s just hope that’s not self-fulfilling prophecy number two.

Another Brick in the Wall

How do I get myself into these things? That’s what I started thinking part-way into my 32K training run this morning, and haven’t stopped thinking it since. It started out well, but at about 24K, I lost a lot of energy. I fuelled the remainder of the run with iPod tunes (thank you, Bruce Springsteen) and fear of humiliation.

By the time I finished (it took 3 hours and 30 minutes), I was wiped. And I haven’t recovered since, despite a nap, several dozen visits to the bathroom (damned energy gels), lots of sympathy from my family (who really deserve more from me on a Sunday afternoon), and a constant diet of foods that are probably not doing anything to aid my recovery, since they consist mostly of white flour and refined sugar.

Can I be honest? At this point – and I know it’ll change – I don’t know how I can possibly run an additional 10 kilometres in order to complete a marathon distance. I’m not even sure I want to. Is this what The Wall looks like? Because right now, I can’t see over it, under it, or around it. Simon Pegg is not standing on the other side beckoning to me.

I know I’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep and a day of rest. But I’m low-down right now. I’m not writing this to garner sympathy (although, if you’ve got any, bring it on!) but because my purpose in writing this blog is to chronicle all the highs and lows that an inexperienced, slow, barely-committed runner experiences in training the marathon. In fact, I think I’ll bookmark this entry for re-reading, in case I ever have delusions of running a second marathon.

That Hurt

When I started training for a marathon, I didn’t think it would be much harder than running a half-marathon. After all, 21K is a long way to run and I did that with relative ease (at least that’s how I remember it now). So doubling that distance would be more challenging, sure, but basically the same thing, right?

Wrong!

On Sunday, I ran 26K – the first time I’ve run substantially longer the half distance. It was the toughest run I’ve ever done. At 20K, my brain just stopped talking to my body. I used my primary muscles, the back-up muscles and then just lurched through the last two or three kilometers, swinging my legs forward from the hip like Frankenstein.

What kept me moving? Ralph did. He’s one of my running buddies from the marathon clinic I’m attending. He ran with me for the entire distance, setting a pace that was, for me, challenging but not impossible. Once or twice, I encouraged him to go ahead if he wanted to run faster. That might have been nice. Then I could have just given up – laid down in a snow bank and waited for spring. But Ralph would not hear of it. He just led the way, occasionally slowing down while I caught up and sometimes increasing his speed a little to keep me from slowing to a pace somewhere between a hobble and a shuffle (not sure which is faster – I will have to check the Garmin).

In addition to thanking Ralph for his support, I should probably apologize for the laser beams of hate I occasionally directed at the back of his blue running jacket during the last 5K of our run. And also say how sorry I am for the evil thoughts I had about him when he told me that it was mostly downhill after 18K, when there were actually several more (albeit small) hills to come.

That wasn’t me thinking those thoughts, Ralph, that was my screaming muscles.

When we got to the end of the run, I realized that although I'd gone far, I’ll have to add another 20K in order to make a marathon distance – essentially, run another half marathon. I wanted to weep. But I’m feeling better now for a couple of reasons. First of all, my body bounced back remarkably quickly. Nothing was too sore. Secondly, I don’t have to log another really big distance for two more weeks. Next Sunday’s long run is 19K, followed by 29K (!) the following week. Right now, I’m not thinking that far ahead, just putting one foot in front of the other, the way I did last Sunday.