Hitting the training again
There is something pure about marathon training. It’s a seasonal thing for me. Like those people who embark on New Years resolutions every January 1st. I drop into training, in my case for the Boston Marathon. It’s a bit of a clean slate feeling. A raw feeling. A time of new beginnings.
New beginnings for me, means starting to train. It means long runs, speed work, tempo runs, core routines and every other thing that is a part of a successful training campaign.
In my life this generally means January 1st I point my body, mind and soul at the next 100 days towards the Boston Marathon.
This means leaning into the freezing temperatures, the dark days and doing quality work. Not just showing up. Not just surviving. Doing the work on the plan and doing it as well as I can. My days and weeks circle around that schedule.
I look at it one week at a time. Where will I be? When I can focus on those workouts so that I squeeze the most benefit from them that my life will allow? How can I prepare to get the most out of it?
To some of you that might sound awful. To be driven into the cold and dark pushing your edge day after day, unrelenting. But, to me it is a normal rhythm of my life for over 20 years. There is a certainty to the work. There is a comfort in the cadence of the effort. There is a worthiness to it that I can’t really explain.
It makes my life focused and meaningful. It gives my life, not so much a rudder, as a keel. Something to hold me true in the journey.
Truthfully, it starts well before January 1st. Truthfully, it never stops.
This year I started thinking about my spring training cycle in October, right after I DNF’ed in my fall race. It wasn’t the outcome I was planning for but that’s how it works. My abbreviated transition from the 100-miler training and racing back to the marathon did not turn out as well as I expected or hoped.
I thought about it. I thought about where I am with my finish times and my current capabilities. I though about the new qualifying standards. I knew I couldn’t just show up for this training. I couldn’t rely on experience and past work. I would have to do the work. I would have to do the little things. I would have to be honest in my training.
At my age it is not just working harder. When we are young, we can load on more volume and intensity. That volume and intensity will make up for many sins. When we get older, we can’t do that. Most of us have new limits. We can’t just work harder and longer. We have to fine tune. We have to work with what we have.
You see, what we discover is you can’t get to the finish line unless you first get to the starting line. And all the conditioning in the world doesn’t matter if you’re broken. We have to find that edge. That edge is absolute.
If you are limited in the amount of volume and intensity you can handle what else can you do? Where is the leverage?
The leverage is in the nuances. The leverage is in the things that support the volume and quality you can handle.
First there is nutrition.
Everyone talks about nutrition. But most of that talk is good intentions and lack of execution. In October I committed to clean up my diet. No processed food. No alcohol. No dairy. No processed sugar.
When January rolled around, I was in a good, healthy place. For the first weeks of the year I’ve been slowly squeezing the calories out.
This sounds simple and straight forward, but this is an important change to my standard operating procedure.
Normally I would go into the winter months not caring about my weight or diet. This means starting the campaign heavy and poorly fueled. When I was younger, I could use the volume and intensity to burn it off. I would tell myself that going in heavy made me stronger because I was working out weighted, and would be that much stronger when the weight came off.
I can’t do that now and expect to perform. What really happens is my training suffers. I don’t get the full benefit. I give up on workouts or struggle through them because I don’t have the energy or I’m dragging too many pounds.
I looked at my races over the last 2 years and the good ones have been when I was eating clean and light. This year I’m not only going in to the race lighter I’m training lighter. It means my workouts are better and I recover faster.
Let’s not forget, Boston raised the bar on us. Our qualification times are 10+ minutes faster than what it used to be. 10 minutes in a marathon where you are already at the edge of your ability is a big chunk. If I age grade that backwards my PR at Boston, which at the time was 9 minutes under the standard, would now leave me out in the cold.
We are 11 weeks out and I’m already 10 pounds lighter than where I normally would be. I’m hitting those distances and speed work sessions well. I’m gaining strength.
Instead of fighting the training I am enabling the quality and getting the most out of my machine. Getting the most out of what I have.
The other place where I can find some nuanced leverage is in my flexibility and core strength. I go through a stretching routine every day. I’m probably not going to River Dance any time soon nut I can feel the flexibility in my workouts. The consistency of stretching every day means my quads aren’t seizing up at the end of workouts.
That’s my plan for running a qualifier at Boston this year. My 21st run down this rabbit hole. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.
It’s all in the nuances. It’s not just doing the work this time around.
It’s enabling the quality of the work.