For Whom the Dogs Bark

31F, calm and dry.  4.84 miles in about 58 minutes, a 12 minute pace.  Can't beat this weather for running.  My Garmin was dead when I picked it up this morning, so I had to measure this route the old fashioned way, Gmap-pedometer.com.  It reminded me of how I did my runs before I had a GPS device.  Truthfully, this Google Earth application does the job just fine, the only differences are no immediate feedback on speed and no heart rate monitoring. 

This week I am going to run 5, 4, 3 and 2.  Today was the 5.  Tomorrow I will run one hard mile, everything else slow until the marathon on Friday.

35F, calm and cloudy. 4.00 miles  Two easy:  11:49 (122 bpm) and 11:14 (129 bpm); one hard:  8:01 (155 bpm); and one cool down:  11:40 (136 bpm).  After the marathon I am going to do some more runs like these.  I feel like I need to improve my mile time quite a bit in order to continue to improve, and it is interesting to watch my heart rate at different speeds during the same run.

43F, rainy, wind NNW at 9 mph.  Ran 3.04 easy miles, average pace 11:20, low heart rate.  The third mile was a low heart rate best of 11:07.  It is interesting that even the easy runs are more efficient when my legs are not fatigued.  Hopefully for the upcoming race that means I will get an improvement over my training times.

My son and daughter-in-law's Texas open house is this Saturday evening, at our house.  I have spent the last two days stripping and re-finishing the entryway.  It was hard work with all the bending and kneeling.  It didn't do any good to argue that I'm an athlete now so we should hire somebody to do it.  Cross-training, I guess.

47F, calm but foggy.  Ran a couple of easy miles, didn't time it.  I feel fine.

Forecast for tomorrow morning is 38F at race time, going up to 49F at noon and clear, so pretty much ideal. 

I still have not decided on a pace for tomorrow.  The two choices are 9:30 and 9:10.  On December 12, almost 3 weeks ago, I ran 22 miles at a 9:30 pace.  I was strung out at the end, but it was the finish of a hard 64-mile week.  I ran a similar pace last Saturday for a 10-mile run and felt better than I did on the front end of the 22-mile run.  So I think 9:30 is very doable unless I am miscalculating somewhere.  With the benefit of a reasonable taper it gives me a high probability of finishing strong, something that hasn't happened yet on a marathon.  Lots of family and friends will be there, and no one would fault me for a 50-minute PR.  Plus I don't plan to enter another marathon until the fall, so it would be nice to have a solid effort tomorrow. 

The other approach is to go for it and try to run at a 9:10 pace, which would put me right at 4:00.  This approach is no different than what I have been doing almost every Saturday this fall, which is to push myself regularly.  It has been a little scary staring out into the darkness early in the morning knowing the task ahead, but the rewards of running at unknown speeds, including the occasional failure, have provided me with enough courage to keep up what has been a successful fall training season.  Not sure the race itself is a good place to risk failure, though, so there you have it. 

Today was a big day, difficult to capture all of the flavor of this race.  The Texas Marathon is held on New Years Day every year in Kingwood, Texas, which is northeast of Houston.  It runs along a jogging parkway that leaves a community center and extends out to Lake Houston then back to the start.  The race is four laps, and even that is generous, as each “loop” is really an out and back with a small half-mile loop at the far end.  As a result many people pass on this race because they can’t fathom the mental stress of going out on the last out and back just as the bonk begins.  Nevertheless, in recent years this small race has sold out several months in advance.  About 2/3 of the 450 runners run the marathon and 1/3 run the half, which starts a few minutes later over the same course.  The course is mostly flat, my favorite kind.

Weather at the beginning was 42F and cloudy, with a 10 mph north wind that continued throughout the race.  By the end of the race the wind had blown out the clouds and it got sunny.  The forecast of 32 at race time never materialized, but it stayed cool enough throughout the race that temperatures were never a noticeable factor.

I decided to try for a 9:10 pace, which would put me at about 4 hours.  My other competing plan was 9:30 pace, which would put me at about 4:10.  While not out of the question, I knew that 9:10 was a long shot for me, but I decided to try it anyway for a couple of reasons.  This was a goal race but it was not going to be my Boston qualifier no matter how well things went, so I could afford to overextend myself and hopefully learn a lot more that way.  I also decided that I would be able to take my foot off the gas pedal and run slow if things started to fall apart.  Both assumptions turned out to be correct.

I drove to the course with a friend, my former bishop, who was running his first marathon.  He is more talented than I am but was apprehensive of what would happen after 20 miles.  I think it is good to be afraid of that.  He planned to run conservatively, opposite of me, planning to break 4 hours by a comfortable enough margin that he could still achieve it if the wheels fell off late in the race.  We discussed briefly running together for a couple of laps, but even with the differences in our approaches it was apparent that my aggressive strategy was still slower than his conservative plan.

The race is run on a walking trail, 4 abreast at best, so we edged our way up toward the front in order to avoid too much congestion at the start and lose 20 seconds in the first mile.  That worked well, I had to step around a few people but managed to get my first mile at 9:06.  My friend was long gone -- he ended up beating 4 hours by about 2 minutes, but I haven’t gotten the details from him yet.  The first couple of miles seemed a little hurried but I soon settled into a rhythm and the pace didn’t seem overly aggressive.  I noticed that my Garmin was measuring the course short (it is USATF certified and a Boston qualifier).  Before too many miles I was being greeted by runners coming back the other way.  Runners always have a high degree of sportsmanship, but I was amazed at the number of “nice bib number” type of compliments I was getting.  It wasn’t until halfway through the third lap that I realized the connection between bib number 262 and the marathon distance.  Boy did I feel dumb.  Even with my GPS measuring the course short, I was holding to a 9:10 pace or better through most of 3 laps without much trouble.  After two laps I had a 3-minute cushion on a 4-hour time.  Starting in the third lap it was harder to make the splits but I was still making them most of the time and had hopes through much of that lap for achieving 4 hours.  The first hint of trouble came at about mile 17 (last year’s bonk location) when I got a severe pain in my upper left groin.  I have never had any issues like that before and I was astounded at how debilitating it was.  I thought my race was over right there, but thankfully the pain subsided enough after a quarter of a mile that the overall effect on my time probably turned out to be minimal.   I knew Plan A wasn’t going to happen toward the end of the third lap when I popped a 9:27.  I “picked up the pace” and popped a 9:33.  I was hemorrhaging seconds at an alarming rate.  I kept going as best I could until halfway through the fourth lap but then intentionally slowed in order to be able to bring it in.  My pace ballooned to the 11s and the 12s.  I was hurting but I knew from a couple of my long runs that I could run through the pain.  I even picked up the pace a little bit in the last mile or two, hurting all the way but never getting worse.  A host of family and friends were there at the finish line and I’m telling you I was very emotional when I saw them. Here are my splits, without adjustment for measuring the course short: 9:07, 9:02, 9:20, 9:08, 9:06, 9:00, 9:10, 9:05, 9:11, 8:58, 9:06, 9:18, 9:11, 9:11, 9:10, 9:27, 9:33, 9:53, 9:42, 9:55, 10:09, 11:09, 11:46, 12:46, 12:33, 12:25

So Plan B worked.  I learned a lot and I only missed the 4:10 “safe” goal by less than 4 minutes -- and who knows, if I had run a 9:30 pace I might have bonked anyway.  A couple of bad things I noticed:  My speed was fine, at least for the speeds I am running right now, but I ran out of gas.  I need more stamina, which will only come through continued training.  I have to run 8:30s to qualify for Boston, but that now seems achievable.  The other bad thing relates to hydration and calories.  I drank only half a bottle of water through the whole race.  I was trying to avoid that sloshing feeling that has caused nausea in each of my first three marathons.  It worked but I had salt on my face after the race and my legs felt like logs through the last lap, probably because of no calories.  I still have to work on that one.

On the good side, I learned a ton and got a 45-minute PR off of 2-1/2 months of training.  (I threw up on the lawn at St. George, so I can’t be accused of dogging that race.)  I couldn’t be happier about how my training has gone this fall.  I am convinced, at least for now, that our bodies are happiest going hard for 6 days then taking a day off.  I did that every week beginning two weeks after St. George and coincidence or not I got a big PR.  For now, I see no reason to train any differently, legs permitting I plan to run lots of low heart rate miles to build endurance and continue working on speed to a lesser extent.  My next goal race will be St. George or some fall equivalent, which is where I hope to qualify for Boston.  I may run some other stuff in the meantime, but I won’t interrupt my training schedule to do it.  As we rotate into our Houston summer I will have lots of opportunities to work on hydration and calories.