This wasn't, exactly, the post I had hoped to write after the Marine Corps Marathon. I thought it would go something along the lines of my finishing time, the experience around the event itself, maybe include a couple of pictures I had taken along the route. Perhaps include a list of damaged body parts that every long distance runner at times has to contend with. (Let's just say that Vaseline and/or bandaids are a handy tool to have.)
Instead, my line of thinking lately has been taking one of two paths: either "Making progress! Last year I signed up, this year I signed up and trained, next year I'm gonna sign up, train, AND run it!" or "maybe the half-marathon is more my speed." It can vary from hour-to-hour.
Among other things, it came down to $10. I'm not kidding. After getting back from vacation in the Outer Banks at the end of September, I had one shift at one of the side jobs, and the take-home (after taxes and paying a pension loan) was a little over $10. Like everybody else, I've got certain bills that have to be paid, and a $200-400 weekend in Washington, DC, wasn't going to improve that balance sheet, and in fact, exacerbate it. And that's after figuring in that we weren't staying in a hotel, but rather with friends from my wife's high school days, and whom I worked with way back in the day. The hotel would have been another $350.
One of the ironies of training for a marathon is that you really need to have time to devote to proper training for the race, which doesn't leave you a lot of time to work to pay your bills. In the latter half of the schedule, when long runs were in the 14-18 mile range, that's 3 to 4 hours of running. Unless I really wanted to get up at 1 in the morning before work, or be out til 1 in the morning after work (and after sitting in a car for an hour or so each way, and 12 hour shifts in between), I made sure to take at least one day off each weekend for those runs. Unfortunately, the way EMS schedules work, folks like to be off on the weekends to spend with their families, so per-diems work a lot of weekend shifts.
Cutting out 50% of your potential opportunities to work is no way to make sure those bills are paid.
I'd be lying if I said that the training didn't start to suffer long before the marathon, though. Something was always getting in the way. Soccer, school events, work. In my increasingly undisciplined mind, it was getting easier and easier to justify cutting short a long run here, or skipping a short run there. The end result was that I had run just 15 miles in October, and none after the second week.
A couple other small issues popped up that had to be taken care of which, if they had happened without the other stuff, would not have been a problem, but in the end just made the decision to skip the MCM that much easier.
There have been upsides to the training, which a couple of people, including one of the Marathon Jims, had pointed out, and is that the training is never "for nothing". I'm down to a couple pounds over what has been my lowest weight in probably 25 years, and I now know that I can run at least three miles non-stop, at a pace of around 8 minutes and change per mile, without killing myself (well, maybe not in the last month, but I did, and can get back there again). I've learned to run without music in my ears, since over those longer runs the battery on my (former) iPhone 4 didn't hold up to simultaneous use of the GPS and iPod functions for more than two or three hours. (Though I do wonder how much better those longer long runs would have been, since running for that long is dreadfully boring.) And without music, you are left to your own thoughts, which admittedly I can't say that I have much opportunity otherwise to just think.
And perhaps the most heartening of all is that my nine-year-old asked my wife the other day how old you had to be to run in a marathon. Maybe the apple doesn't fall far from the tree after all, and I have a future running partner in the family.
So, what to do now? Well, the other day, a colleague of mine from UH-EMS had told me that several members of NorthSTAR were planning a group entry in to the New Jersey Half Marathon in Long Branch, NJ in April 2014, and would I like to join them. Having actually completed the Historic Half this year, and the training for a half marathon is much simpler than for the full, I'm inclined to say yes.
As to a full marathon, like I mentioned before, I'm of two minds. Lately, it's been all half-marathon, all the time...but then I was watching coverage of the NYC Marathon this morning and started to think, "well...." If I do register for the marathon, it'd likely be for the fall (since I have to work - a lot - over the next few months to pay some bills, and we know where that leads), and I'd like another shot at the MCM. Given the popularity of the MCM, I'd have to run in the Spring race, the 17.75K, in mid-April to get an automatic qualifier. On the other hand, that's a lot of running in a month and a half, between the 17.75K, the Long Branch Half, and the Historic Half, which I'm likely going to do again.
Decisions, decisions....
Finally, thanks to all who have offered words of support, encouragement, or just plan "just do it." They were all appreciated, and in each way helped me a little farther along. I'm going to keep contributing to this blog, posting updates on what I'm doing, and how I'm doing it, if for no other reason than to get the jumble of thoughts in my head out in the open, so everybody can see just how disorganized my brain is at times.
Showing posts with label Marathon Jim(s). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marathon Jim(s). Show all posts
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Days, and Weeks, Lost
I was hoping to get through this training program with little or no hitches in getting out there in doing the actual runs. Naive, perhaps, but it still is an improvement over last year, when signing up for the Marine Marathon itself ran headlong into the fact that I was utterly unprepared for sixteen weeks or thereabouts of running. At least this year, I knew there was going to be a lot of mileage put on my increasingly well-worn pair of New Balance shoes.
This year's problem isn't so much the running. I am - or I was - getting out there, four (or at least three) times a week, following the short-medium-short-long plan of training. At the beginning of the sixteen weeks, a run of three miles, even at 11 minutes per mile, meant I was done in a half hour. The long run could still be done in under an hour.
No, this year, the problem is everything else. As John Lennon said, life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. There had already been one lost day out of four, due to the way my fire department schedule worked. Last week, though, everything went completely awry. It all started with buying a car on Monday, from Auto Lenders in Lakewood. But we couldn't get there before 5PM-ish, and didn't get out until close to 8PM. So there went that day. The next day was the firehouse on limited sleep, and then Newark the next day, which killed the first half of the week. After than, in my undisciplined mind, what was the point?
I had asked that of one of the Marathon Jims, who said, "it happens. Pick up where you left off." So initially, the entire program got shifted forward one week, which meant that I would be short either a sixteen mile run or an eighteen mile run, since it's important to taper properly before the Marathon itself. Now, after reviewing the schedule in the The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer again, I may have miscalculated the start date of the program by a week, or just simply didn't enter it into my calendar as accurately as I thought I had: according to the plan, I'm supposed to have three weeks of 16-mile long runs and two of 18-miles, and my schedule as I originally had constructed it only has me doing two 16s. So, do I drop a 16 and an 18, or two of three 16s?
One of the factors I want to avoid is overtraining. "Ha!", you say, "you're already undertraining, how much do you have to do to overtrain?" Well, it's not so simple. Conventional wisdom has it that one should not increase one's mileage by more than 10% over the previous week. If I calculate wrong (why wouldn't I?) by dropping a week I shouldn't, I could well be adding more than 10% from one week to the next. And that can lead to injury.
On a programming note, Regular readers of this blog - if I might be so presumptuous as to believe that I have regular readers - will note missing entries, especially if you've been following my Twitter feed. I will be correcting that soon enough by adding the entries over the past week or so that I have completed, but not yet documented. To avoid any confusion, the posts themselves will have the date that they should have been written, in addition to the dates that the runs actually occurred. Got that?
This year's problem isn't so much the running. I am - or I was - getting out there, four (or at least three) times a week, following the short-medium-short-long plan of training. At the beginning of the sixteen weeks, a run of three miles, even at 11 minutes per mile, meant I was done in a half hour. The long run could still be done in under an hour.
No, this year, the problem is everything else. As John Lennon said, life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. There had already been one lost day out of four, due to the way my fire department schedule worked. Last week, though, everything went completely awry. It all started with buying a car on Monday, from Auto Lenders in Lakewood. But we couldn't get there before 5PM-ish, and didn't get out until close to 8PM. So there went that day. The next day was the firehouse on limited sleep, and then Newark the next day, which killed the first half of the week. After than, in my undisciplined mind, what was the point?
I had asked that of one of the Marathon Jims, who said, "it happens. Pick up where you left off." So initially, the entire program got shifted forward one week, which meant that I would be short either a sixteen mile run or an eighteen mile run, since it's important to taper properly before the Marathon itself. Now, after reviewing the schedule in the The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer again, I may have miscalculated the start date of the program by a week, or just simply didn't enter it into my calendar as accurately as I thought I had: according to the plan, I'm supposed to have three weeks of 16-mile long runs and two of 18-miles, and my schedule as I originally had constructed it only has me doing two 16s. So, do I drop a 16 and an 18, or two of three 16s?
One of the factors I want to avoid is overtraining. "Ha!", you say, "you're already undertraining, how much do you have to do to overtrain?" Well, it's not so simple. Conventional wisdom has it that one should not increase one's mileage by more than 10% over the previous week. If I calculate wrong (why wouldn't I?) by dropping a week I shouldn't, I could well be adding more than 10% from one week to the next. And that can lead to injury.
On a programming note, Regular readers of this blog - if I might be so presumptuous as to believe that I have regular readers - will note missing entries, especially if you've been following my Twitter feed. I will be correcting that soon enough by adding the entries over the past week or so that I have completed, but not yet documented. To avoid any confusion, the posts themselves will have the date that they should have been written, in addition to the dates that the runs actually occurred. Got that?
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Week Four - Day Three, Saturday, August 10th
Well, that sucked.
I know I complain about the humidity a wee bit (okay, a little more than that), but this was just ridiculous. Got out a little after 0700, and already that was too late. The sun was already out and wreaking havoc on my effort. Of course, had I actually hydrated myself properly beforehand, and brought along some water, maybe the result would have been slightly different.
Anyway, today's course took me in a slightly different direction at first. Instead of making my usual right hand turn on to OFR, I went left, to go down Walnut Street, looping around the school, then through the streets on the left side, before coming back down to OFR. Added about two miles, and changed the scenery a little bit. From there, I went to my usual segments on Chestnut and Mapletree.
Regular readers will know that I insert a one-minute walk break for every 10 of running. I'm not looking to set any speed records here, nor am I looking to prove something by running constantly on the longer trips. I'm simply trying to build endurance as economically as possible while avoiding over-use injury.
Today was one of those days where one-minute breaks - which I held to until about mile four - deteriorate into two-, then three-, then four-minutes sabbaticals. It was either that or drop from exhaustion. Maybe that's hyperbole, but it was that bad out.
Again, I fault myself for this. Hydration goes a long way, and I didn't this time.
This was actually the fourth day of the week I got out, but I only consider it the third run. Last Sunday's run was put off a day to allow for a day off before, and because it was a Sunday, I was looking at three runs in a row this week before today. Something had to go. One of the Marathon Jim's said it's best to get rid of a short day.
No Nike Pep-talker today, but the way I did it, I don't think I deserved one.
Today's tortured effort.
I know I complain about the humidity a wee bit (okay, a little more than that), but this was just ridiculous. Got out a little after 0700, and already that was too late. The sun was already out and wreaking havoc on my effort. Of course, had I actually hydrated myself properly beforehand, and brought along some water, maybe the result would have been slightly different.
Anyway, today's course took me in a slightly different direction at first. Instead of making my usual right hand turn on to OFR, I went left, to go down Walnut Street, looping around the school, then through the streets on the left side, before coming back down to OFR. Added about two miles, and changed the scenery a little bit. From there, I went to my usual segments on Chestnut and Mapletree.
Regular readers will know that I insert a one-minute walk break for every 10 of running. I'm not looking to set any speed records here, nor am I looking to prove something by running constantly on the longer trips. I'm simply trying to build endurance as economically as possible while avoiding over-use injury.
Today was one of those days where one-minute breaks - which I held to until about mile four - deteriorate into two-, then three-, then four-minutes sabbaticals. It was either that or drop from exhaustion. Maybe that's hyperbole, but it was that bad out.
Again, I fault myself for this. Hydration goes a long way, and I didn't this time.
This was actually the fourth day of the week I got out, but I only consider it the third run. Last Sunday's run was put off a day to allow for a day off before, and because it was a Sunday, I was looking at three runs in a row this week before today. Something had to go. One of the Marathon Jim's said it's best to get rid of a short day.
No Nike Pep-talker today, but the way I did it, I don't think I deserved one.
Today's tortured effort.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Week Three - Day Four, Sunday, August 4th
Because the training program calls for a day off before and after my long runs, and my last run was Friday, I had to move the long run for the third week to Sunday from Saturday. And fortuitous timing it was: Temperatures in the sixties, and low humidity. Perfect.
As has been the case with long previous runs, and in keeping with my intended strategy for the marathon, I inserted a one-minute break after every 10 minutes of running, even when I knew I could go past the ten minutes without stopping. My course stayed very local, no more than a mile or so at any time between any two points, but because the folks who laid out the neighborhood seemed to be allergic to straight lines, by taking several streets within a given development, I was able to reach the goal with ease.
The two straight roads I used, Chestnut and Mapletree, are almost a mile in length each, and the far ends of both have smaller streets off them, so I could avoid Hooper Avenue, and then return. I took a turn into Lilac, then a couple streets off Lilac. Crossing OFR, I went into a much older section, probably built in the Sixties or Seventies, and took a tour through there, then ended by where I started.
Conditioning must be getting better. Just a few months or even weeks ago, a break after running for ten minutes would have been something closer to ten more minutes, for it would have taken that long for my breathing to return to normal. Now, I wasn't even winded, and my legs felt great, at least in first half. After my last break, I felt good enough that I gave extra effort for the final mile or so, and cut off more than a minute in time from the previous mile.
I am noticing that my breathing is still much better than the fatigue in my legs. I'm not sure if this is something that will correct itself, but in time, the legs did seem to relax, though the left hip flexor seems to get irritated pretty quickly. I haven't been stretching, though I know I should.
One of the Marathon Jims I work with lent me a book of Yoga for runners. I had been considering taking a yoga, but my schedule is tight enough to fit in some runs, I'm not sure how I'm going to get yoga classes in.
For the upcoming week, I had to drop one of the scheduled short runs of three miles, because of Sunday's long run, and getting the long run back to Saturday for the next week, I'm looking at three consecutive days of running. So, on the advice of the other Marathon Jim, I felt it better to cut out a short run.
No Nike Pep-Talker today, and no records broken. Humbug
As has been the case with long previous runs, and in keeping with my intended strategy for the marathon, I inserted a one-minute break after every 10 minutes of running, even when I knew I could go past the ten minutes without stopping. My course stayed very local, no more than a mile or so at any time between any two points, but because the folks who laid out the neighborhood seemed to be allergic to straight lines, by taking several streets within a given development, I was able to reach the goal with ease.
The two straight roads I used, Chestnut and Mapletree, are almost a mile in length each, and the far ends of both have smaller streets off them, so I could avoid Hooper Avenue, and then return. I took a turn into Lilac, then a couple streets off Lilac. Crossing OFR, I went into a much older section, probably built in the Sixties or Seventies, and took a tour through there, then ended by where I started.
Conditioning must be getting better. Just a few months or even weeks ago, a break after running for ten minutes would have been something closer to ten more minutes, for it would have taken that long for my breathing to return to normal. Now, I wasn't even winded, and my legs felt great, at least in first half. After my last break, I felt good enough that I gave extra effort for the final mile or so, and cut off more than a minute in time from the previous mile.
I am noticing that my breathing is still much better than the fatigue in my legs. I'm not sure if this is something that will correct itself, but in time, the legs did seem to relax, though the left hip flexor seems to get irritated pretty quickly. I haven't been stretching, though I know I should.
One of the Marathon Jims I work with lent me a book of Yoga for runners. I had been considering taking a yoga, but my schedule is tight enough to fit in some runs, I'm not sure how I'm going to get yoga classes in.
For the upcoming week, I had to drop one of the scheduled short runs of three miles, because of Sunday's long run, and getting the long run back to Saturday for the next week, I'm looking at three consecutive days of running. So, on the advice of the other Marathon Jim, I felt it better to cut out a short run.
No Nike Pep-Talker today, and no records broken. Humbug
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Week Two - Day Two
Went out the morning after the firehouse. Mostly cloudy skies, reasonable temperatures, looked good.
Except for the humidity. Positively deadly.
Made about two miles in Gregg Park before I had to work a two-minute break into it. Also, since the first loop took me north-to-south along the water right into the wind, which was pretty stiff, I decided to run the reverse for the second loop. A great idea until the sun came out, which was a little warm in the front, while I was getting a good tailwind. I also found out that the hill on the 48th Street side is steeper than the 37th Street end. I was taking another short break at the top of the hill when I ran into my FD colleague Jimmy the Red Sox Fan/eight-time marathoner, who was taking a nice easy run around the park while waiting for a local repair shop to open so he could retrieve his car. He turned around and ran with me the rest of my fourth mile. His presence definitely made it easier to finish what was becoming a really slow run.
Walked around a bit after the run, and encountered another fellow runner who was training for a marathon in November. Called herself a Jeff Galloway girl.
The run details.
Except for the humidity. Positively deadly.
Made about two miles in Gregg Park before I had to work a two-minute break into it. Also, since the first loop took me north-to-south along the water right into the wind, which was pretty stiff, I decided to run the reverse for the second loop. A great idea until the sun came out, which was a little warm in the front, while I was getting a good tailwind. I also found out that the hill on the 48th Street side is steeper than the 37th Street end. I was taking another short break at the top of the hill when I ran into my FD colleague Jimmy the Red Sox Fan/eight-time marathoner, who was taking a nice easy run around the park while waiting for a local repair shop to open so he could retrieve his car. He turned around and ran with me the rest of my fourth mile. His presence definitely made it easier to finish what was becoming a really slow run.
Walked around a bit after the run, and encountered another fellow runner who was training for a marathon in November. Called herself a Jeff Galloway girl.
The run details.
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