Final Thoughts Before Running 50 Miles

Tomorrow is race day. 50 miles. And for perhaps the first time in a race I'm less concerned with my finishing time than I am with simply finishing. It's not since my very first half marathon, back in September 2009, that I have been more unsure of how a run was going to go. I've spent time working out various run/walk ratios for each lap (8 laps total), estimating how much my pace might decline in the later miles and trying to figure out how to replenish my energy stores on the go so there's something in the tank after 20 miles, and still I have zero idea what's going to happen tomorrow afternoon as I push past 25, 30, 40 miles.

I know I can run 25. No problem, especially with regular walk breaks early and often. That covers the first four laps. Two in the dark and two as the sun comes up on what should be a near-perfect morning to run.

I trust that I'll be able to handle the last two laps (miles 37.5-50). My buddy is going to run them with me and has been given cart blanche to do whatever he needs to do to keep me moving. As I told him a few days ago when I was going over my race plan with him, his one and only job is to make sure I don't quit.

That leaves laps five and six, miles 25-37.5. This is the great unknown. This is the portion of the race where I'll find out if my early-lap refueling has been effective or not. No idea what to expect here.

A few other quick thoughts:

My wife walked into the kitchen the other day and (obviously referencing tomorrow) asked what I was worth in terms of life insurance. She was joking. I think. But she seemed satisfied with the answer. Uhh...

I'm hoping to have my little sister tweeting updates throughout the day tomorrow. Check back for those. I'll put the twitter gadget at the top of this page so its easy to find.

Finally, I occasionally come across things that I either wish I would have written or had the ability to write. The following, from Jeff Edmonds at The Logic of Long Distance, is both. How do you prepare to run 50 miles? Like this...

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This is how it works:

Training is doing your homework. It's not exciting. More often than not it's tedious. There is certainly no glory in it. But you stick with it, over time, and incrementally through no specific session, your body changes. Your mind becomes calloused to effort. You stop thinking of running as difficult or interesting or magical. It just becomes what you do. It becomes a habit.

Workouts too become like this. Intervals, tempos, strides, hills. You go to the track, to the bottom of a hill, and your body finds the effort. You do your homework. That's training. Repetition--building deep habits, building a runner's body and a runner's mind. You do your homework, not obsessively, just regularly. Over time you grow to realize that the most important workout that you will do is the easy hour run. That's the run that makes everything else possible. You live like a clock.

After weeks of this, you will have a month of it. After months of it, you will have a year of it.

Then, after you have done this for maybe three or four years, you will wake up one morning in a hotel room at about 4:30am and do the things you have always done. You eat some instant oatmeal. Drink some Gatorade. Put on your shorts, socks, shoes, your watch. This time, though, instead of heading out alone for a solitary hour, you will head towards a big crowd of people. A few of them will be like you: they will have a lean, hungry look around their eyes, wooden legs. You will nod in their direction. Most of the rest will be distracted, talking among their friends, smiling like they are at the mall, unaware of the great and magical event that is about to take place.

You'll find your way to a tiny little space of solitude and wait anxiously, feeling the tang of adrenaline in your legs. You'll stand there and take a deep breath, like it's your last. An anthem will play. A gun will sound.

Then you will run.

I woke up in a panic sometime around 1am Saturday morning. One week away from an attempt at 50 miles, a few hours away from my last real run before that race (two 5-mile laps around my neighborhood) and two days after my boss (also known to me as "Dad") and multiple clients walked into our office visibly sick, I awoke with an acute pain in the back of my throat. Oh no, I thought as I jumped out of bed to guzzle some water, here it comes.

 

And came it did: the dreaded head-cold.

 

For the last 48 hours I've been working through this cold. Fortunately, I think I've done enough to speed it along as quickly as possible and this morning (Monday) I feel about 80%. It also hasn't been one of those energy-sapping colds with a fever attached that takes weeks to recover from. So that's nice.

 

I'm no doctor. But really, it shouldn't matter here, because a doctor can't do squat for a cold anyway. Anyway, here's my last 48 hours in a nutshell:

 

1. Lots of rest/sleep. 9-10 hours each night, a nap during the day and generally just taking it easy. (It helps to have a supportive wife)

 

2. Minimal eating on day 1 and very simple foods on day 2 (fresh fruit, vegetable broth, dry whole-wheat bread). Why force the body to digest food when it could be busy fighting off the cold. I still ended up eating about 1500 calories on Saturday and around 2000 on Sunday (about 1/3 to 1/2 of what I'm usually taking in on a daily basis), but it was all food that digested quickly and didn't require much energy.

 

3. A piping hot epsom salt bath each day. Sweat it out, baby.

 

4. As much water as I can handle. All of the time.

 

5. No medications. Again, why try to cover up the symptoms to simply feel good in the short-term while getting in the way of the body healing itself?

 

Yes, I felt horrible. But only for a few hours. I progressed through each part of the cold rapidly and now, 48 hours later, have the thing beat. I won't be running much this week, maybe a few miles on Thursday, and my preparation for Saturday will be much like the last two days: lots of rest, lots of water and lots of good wholesome food. And maybe a viewing of Rocky IV.

 

Marathon #9: St George Recap

Let's start with the positives: I just finished my 6th marathon in the last seven months and my 9th in the last 16 months. The other positive was getting to spend the weekend with my good friend and his wife, who were running their first marathon. Boarding a bus in the wee hours of the morning and then spending two hours in the dark at the starting line is far more tolerable with friends and seeing them as they crossed the finish line together was awesome.

 

Unfortunately, weren't very many positive things going on once the race actually started. It was a rough day all the way around. One that caused me to reflect and evaluate if running marathons is something I want to continue to do.

 

Maintaining proper nutrition is always difficult for me when traveling. Sometimes I'll bring my blender with me and make my smoothies but not when I'm flying to a race. This leaves me concerned with getting enough calories in the hours leading up to race day. I'm apparently not disciplined enough to go to a grocery store and buy tons of fruit and keep me going, so instead I went to Olive Garden Thursday night (horrible service, slightly less than horrible food), pancakes and eggs for breakfast and the pasta dinner at the expo Friday night. I did have some bananas in my car but it was so darn hot that they were not appetizing at all. So no fruit and way too much stuff that I usually only have sparingly. Doesn't make for a quality pre-race diet.

 

Then there was the weather. Freaking hot. One of the lead volunteers at the finish line told me that in the 35 years of the race, this was the hottest day. Whether that's true or not I don't know, but the sun was relentless all day and there was no where to hide from it.  It's so dry there anyway (especially compared to where I live here in the Willamette Valley) that I was drinking as much as I could handle at every aid station but still felt like I had a mouthful of chalk just a few seconds later. Dehydration was an issue during the second half of the race.

Veyo. Volcano and all.

 

The course itself was definitely scenic. From the Veyo volcano to Snow Canyon to St. George itself it's really a very pretty course. Friends of mine (who I'll get to in a minute) and I drove the course on Friday afternoon and felt pretty good about what we would encounter the next morning. For whatever reason though, I could have sworn I was running a completely different course. All of the course maps (and even my Garmin) shows the second half being almost completely downhill. My Garmin only measured 20 feet of elevation gain in the whole second half actually. Out there on the course though, on a long, hot day, it seemed like every time I came around a turn there was an incline in front of me. And every time I got to the crest of those inclines it seems like I would look out and see another one right in front of me. I can't explain it. But it was tough.

 

Proper rest is also difficult on the road. I've run races in other timezones before, but for some reason this one just kicked my butt. My friends and I loaded the bus at about 4:15am (3:15am my time). Before that though, I had been awake from basically 2am on (1am my time). By the time the race started at 6:45, I had been awake for nearly five hours. Tack on 4 1/2 hours for race time and it was a really long day by the time the last few miles came around.

 

So I finished in 4:30:59. Certainly not my best, but not my worst either. There was no excitement at this finish line though. Mostly just disappointment. I had higher expectations for this race given the course, the way I've felt in training and how I felt when I got on the plane Thursday afternoon. I spent some time Sunday thinking whether or not I wanted to continue to do this or if it was time to look for something else to do. I spoke with my friend to see how they were feeling and offered some encouragement, reminding him that they were marathoners now and that the muscle pains would start to subside in a day or two.

 

On Monday morning, still feeling a little depressed, I got a call from my friend. Usually we just text back and forth, so to receive a phone call was a little bit curious to me. The first words out of his mouth were, "I can't even walk down the stairs in my house I'm so sore today, so why do I have the urge to sign up and run another one? There was an enthusiasm in his voice that was infectious.

 

And with that, we spent the next 15 minutes talking about what race we could do next together, narrowing it down to Ogden in May, Utah Valley in June or possibly the Seattle Rock 'n' Roll at the end of June. I got off the phone and my outlook had completely changed. I was excited to look for my next race. The enthusiasm my buddy had had on the phone, despite the soreness he felt, reminded me of the excitement I had had after other races, when I couldn't wait to sign up for the next one. It reminded me that even though we hadn't run the race as quickly as we had hoped, we had still finished a freaking marathon and that we were doing things that the majority of people will never even attempt.

 

There have been people and experiences at various points along this road that have kept me interested, motivated and determined. Add my friend to that list. It came at a good time too because the Autumn Leaves 50 mile ultra marathon is now only 3 1/2 weeks away. It scares the dickens out of me and is the first time since I signed up for my very first half marathon that I really don't know how it will go of if I can actually do it. But I'll be there at the starting line prepared to find out.