Yesterday, I ran my fifteenth marathon . . . and it didn’t go so well. You’ll have to excuse me for a minute while I use this space to break down just what happened.
So I ran the York Marathon — normally, this event would have been a huge *nope*. You see, just two-weeks prior, I ran the Four Way (with Extra Cheese) challenge in Cincinnati1. Two marathons, in two weeks . . . well, I haven’t yet worked my body to the point where a marathon is “just another run.” A marathon is something for which I need to rest ahead of time, and recover afterward. I knew, two weeks after some serious running, I’d still be recovering.
But York is less than an hour’s drive from my house. It happened to be scheduled on a day for which I wouldn’t be needed as the church organist (there was a major festival at the church – while they still had services, so many people make themselves more-available to the festival than to the services, so we forego having choir, as we’d have minimal attendance, and when there is no choir, we have no organ music). It was a super-early start time, so I’d be able to mostly have a regular day. And it was a pancake-flat course.
So I chose to run it.
Ow.
I’m not a big fan of “there & back again” races2 because you can’t distract yourself with new scenery when you’re struggling to just fucking get to the finish line. But I was feeling pretty good to the turnaround point – I was chatting with runners, and felt loose & light on my feet. I certainly felt that I had a lot more in me. But I started to notice something amiss with my left foot. It felt that, maybe, some silt had worked into my Vibram Five-Fingers and was rubbing against my foot. But, well, I was running, and running good . . . I didn’t trust myself to stop, clean out my shoes, and get going again.
And by mile marker 17? I wasn’t noticing much amiss at all.
But then, as mile marker 20 came into sight, my left hamstring, kind-of, seized. I stopped & tried to work things out . . . but the cramping was bad. Every time I put any weight on my left leg, my hamstring just turned into a pretzel. It took me a LONG time to get running again. But, eventually, I was going again. Only to stop four miles later with the same problem.
Eventually, I stretched/massaged out the cramp, got back on my feet, and ran/limped across the finish line, a good 2 minutes per mile slower than I had hoped.
Looking over things – there are very specific reasons for why this race wasn’t a success.
- I haven’t been training. I can give any number of excuses for this, but I haven’t been training properly for a marathon. Take your pic: I’m overly-committed, the kids have too much going on, the weather has been rotten, I don’t have a shower at work. All of them are true — but if I want to run marathons, I need to keep myself running regularly, adding in regular long runs.
- I changed my running style. I can tell you this now, but my left foot feels precisely like both of my feet do, during my week at the beach, where I run miles along the beach. Simply, pushing against sand, when I’m used to running against the road, causes chafing — and chafing on the bottom of your toes HURTS. At the beach? I seldom run more than 6 miles in a day . . . but I felt something amiss around mile 14 – considering my cramping only seemed to come to my left-side, and I really feel like I have an old injury, I think I know the root cause.
- The conditions were far from optimal. While I run on a rails-to-trail fairly often, whenever I do, the weather is near perfect – it’s dry and cool. The run in York? While it didn’t rain, it had rained, extensively, the day before. Portions of the trail were absolutely swamp-like (how I suspect trail dirt got into my shoes) and slippery. And the heat & humidity were at such a level that I’d not found myself in any training to this point. The day was muggy — and my body did not react to said mugginess well.
- As I said, I was still recovering from the run two weeks ago. While I watched Ultra-Marathon-Man, where Dean Karnazes runs 50 marathons in all 50 states over 50 days, leading up to the race, I am not Dean Karnazes and Dean Karnazes is not me. If I had more time to devote myself to running, I’d *love* to attempt races like that . . . . but, for now, if/when I need to run a marathon, I need to allow my body to heal.
- There is more of me than there was last fall. From September to December, I ran a series of three marathons (the Maritime Marathon in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; the New York City Marathon; the Rehoboth Beach marathon) each in under four hours. While I’m eating *mostly* healthily, I’m eating a little more than I was, then (especially when you consider that I’m not regularly running). And I’m drinking more than I should. While some try to tell me that I’m too-skinny as it is, the simple truth is that carrying around 15 pounds of extra John over 26.2 miles would take a lot out of anyone.
So, how do I fix things?
First, I’m about to run into a magical time in my schedule — the kids wrap up school a week from Thursday. I’ve conditioned myself to wake up early – during the school week/school year, I wake, walk the dogs, make lunches, dress the kids, and ensure everybody is out the door in time. I won’t need to . . . so, assuming I don’t touch the time my alarm goes off (I have the most-effective backup alarm, in my dog, Benji, known to man — once my alarm goes off, he’s not letting me go without his walk), I’ll find myself with zero responsibility at 5:30 in the morning. That’s prime run time, assuming I don’t let myself go back to bed.
I’m not really sure how to combat the trail-dirt problem. It might be that I need to wear actual sneakers when running on any sort of trail, including a rail-to-trail. Or it might mean that I need to wear toe-socks in my silly toe-shoes. But I’m not so sure this is a real issue — aside from my run along the beach to get REAL secluded so that I can do yoga, naked, at the sunrise early morning vacation jaunts, I’ve never had blisters like I’m dealing with, right now.
If I run like I would like, I’ll be far more used to regular body exertion — two weeks should be PLENTY of time between long runs, I think, if I’m running regularly & managing a long-run a week (and, as I wrote before, as choir attendance is sporadic during the summer, choir is dismissed, so John doesn’t have his regular Sunday gig . . . so “church time” can lead me to worship by pounding pavement).
Lastly – if I’m running regularly? Hopefully there will be less of me around. Less of me to carry means an easier time over any distance.