Pocatello 2014

I told you I’d either be celebrating or making excuses this week.  Turns out I’m making excuses.  I prefer to think of it as deep analytics.  First let me set the table by giving you what I wrote the day before the race.

Travel Day

Time to think, time to dream

I’m sitting in the airport waiting on a plane.  This in itself is not an unusual place for me to be, but today is different.  I’m not jetting off to the home office to work on processes. I’m not parachuting into a client to save the day.

Today I’m traveling to Pocatello Idaho from Boston Massachusetts for my goal race; the Pocatello Marathon.

It’s an all-day flight.  I’ll have plenty of time to read and write and compose myself.  I’ll get in later after flying all day just in time to pick up my registration and make my way off to bed. The race is in the morning.

I have trained hard for this race.  I’m tempted to say that I have trained harder for this race than any previous race but I’d have to shade that declaration with the realities of age.  I can truthfully say I’ve trained as well as my body, my age and my lifestyle allow.

18 years ago when I first qualified for Boston I was able to train consistently for 7 days a week with relatively high volume for an amateur.  I’d be up into the 50-60 miles a week range with plenty of quality.  But even then I had a career and a life to lead that kept me from giving a true 100% effort.

Over the last few months I have safely traversed a 4-day-a-week schedule with the other 3 days devoted to strength and stretch.

I still did the work.  I did the speed and the tempo.  I did at least 4 runs north of 20 miles.  I trained through the heat of the summer and suffered with purpose.

I am tempted to say that I have trained harder for this race than any previous race.  I can definitely say I trained better.  I kept my strength up.  I changed my diet to lose 20 pounds.  I focused on my mobility and stretching.  I did not miss a work out.

I have never executed a training cycle with this much technical precision.

I sit here in the airport 20 pounds lighter.  With no injury.  With very little tendonitis.  I have done what I can do.  I have done my part.  Now it is up to the marathon Gods in their fickleness to deign provide me a propitious race.

I am confident, but I am nervous.

I am nervous because, in a sense, I am looking to run a personal best in the marathon tomorrow.

I have qualified for the marathon many times, but not under the new qualification standards.  My personal best in the marathon, set in Boston in 1998 was a 3:06:42.  The qualification standard at the time was a 3:10.

If I age grade the tables today that 3:10 would be a 3:05.  That means in 1998 I would have missed the new standard by 1:43.

Last year I ran 13 marathons.  At least 2 of them would have met the old standard for my age group.  None of them made the new qualifying standard.  The closest I came was at last year’s Pocatello Marathon where I missed by a little over 2 minutes.

That’s where we stand.  I need to run a PR tomorrow and I am ready to do so if the fates allow.

The past two weeks during my taper I have worked hard to stay sane. I have found myself grumpy and snappy for no reason.  I have had to work very hard to focus on anything else beside the looming contest.

I feel like a man walking around with some sort of great secret.  I feel like shouting “How can you talk about such petty things when I have a race to run?”

They would be shocked to see the turmoil in my brain.  They would wonder how I was able to interact and survive with the nervous knot pushing constantly against the inside of my solar plexus like some strange alien incubus.

Each day I sit and meditate on my taper and my training and my race.  I visualize gathering up that nervous energy in a great golden ball.  I visualize forming it into glowing golden ball of energy, compressing it into a small ball and I put it in my pocket.

You can be sure I will be reaching into that pocket for this golden energy sometime tomorrow.

Every day I have visualized how I want the race to play out.  I know what my strategy is.  I know I can get to miles 18 and 20.  The challenge, the unknown is what happens in those last 6 miles.  That’s the race.  That’s the fight.  That’s where I will use my golden energy.

I have had the wackiest and most lucid dreams during my taper.  I don’t typically dream and if I do I don’t remember them other than random images and sensations.  The dreams I’ve had this week were fully formed vignettes with colors and visuals and fully formed dialog.

This was that nervous energy pushing its way out of my subconscious.  You would think that after all these years the marathon would no longer have the power to craze me like this.

The harder you train, the more you commit, the larger the bet you are making.  I have pushed all my chips into the center of the table and tomorrow I get to see the dealer’s hand.

I am grateful that I still have the ability to make these bets.  I am grateful that the marathon still has the power to chafe my soul.

I’ve trained well. I’ve prepared well.  I’ve managed my subconscious and kept the right attitude.

I’m ready for my test.

Analysis:

What happened?

Nothing seemed to go sideways that I can point to as a big cause.  I went into the race well trained, well fueled and hopeful.

I got up and out to the start well enough.  I ran the first 14 miles with the 3:25 pace group guy and he was right on pace – so right on about a 7:50 pace.  The first 14 miles drops about 3,000 feet down from a mountain through a canyon.

The weather was cool and it wasn’t as dry as last year because I noticed that I was sweating.  Very good racing conditions.

At one point, I think it might have been 10 miles Ryan, the pace group leader, hands me the flag and says “Chris, just hold this pace. I’ll catch up, I have to go to the bathroom.”  And, even though I considered this a really bad decision on his part, I held the pace well enough until he caught back up a few minutes later.

I was fueling well enough with UCan and drinking water.  I felt like I was working a little too hard for that pace on that downhill, but nothing serious.

When the course flattened out at 15 miles I just felt my legs go.  I didn’t have any power in them.  I couldn’t hold the race pace.  Basically muscle fatigue.  Effort level felt ok in terms of heart rate and energy level, I just didn’t have the leg energy to keep the turnover going.

So I slowed down.  My issue was the mile 15 is too early to be struggling.  I was perfectly willing to battle the last 3-6 miles to the death if necessary but there’s no way I could push it all the way into the red for 11 miles.  Just like that it was over.

Since it really doesn’t matter to me whether I miss my time by 2 minutes or 20 minutes I just shut my race down and dropped the pace way down.  I added in a bunch of walk breaks and mosied slowly to the finish.

That’s a pain in the ass too when you’ve got 10 miles to go and your legs are dead.  Now you’re looking at a couple hours of suffering.  You really just want it to be over and you have to keep moving.

A bunch of the pace groups passed me and for the most part they had lost all their people.  I saw one pace leader leave the course alone, break his flag in half and stick it in the dumpster, then turn his shirt inside out.

I was a bit grumpy during the last 10 miles of the race.  I did yell at a photographer who was snapping away as I walked up the hill at mile 18.  What was the point?

Analysis.  What happened?

Well, form the way my quads felt this week I’m pretty sure that long early downhill ate me up.  I didn’t a lot of track work and strength training but I didn’t do any hill training and my quads continue to be my weak link.

I felt a little over trained. That last 24 miler might have been too much.  Coach assumes I have a big base but I may not have been in as good aerobic shape as he thinks.

If you look at my heart rate during this cycle versus previous cycles you can see that I did a lot of this tempo and speed work in the red zone.  I opted to do the work that was necessary and not worry too much about my aerobic fitness.  I crammed a lot of high quality work into a 12 week training cycle.

To do it right I probably should have dropped back and done a preparative cycle of just zone 2 aerobic runs to get my efficiency up more before dropping into the hard stuff, but I was working with a deadline!

Most of my long runs were suffer-fests as well.   I got all the mileage in but I took a lot of breaks in those runs.  All my long runs got super slow towards the ends. This isn’t unusual and I’ve often found that I crush a race been when all my long runs were struggles.

Other factors could have been lifestyle related.  I have been traveling like crazy but I always have so I’m not sure how much jet lag was involved.  But, as Eric reminds me sleep is not a determining factor ini long distance running!

I think it was smart to go into the race light, but maybe I lost something by dropping 20 pounds in 4-6 weeks.  Could have been a factor.

The only other thing I couldn’t control was the altitude.

Who knows?  I had an awesome 10 mile tempo run on my last outing 6 days before the race and felt super fit, but on race morning I only had 15 miles in me.

Live and learn.  That’s precisely what I love about the marathon and the qualification standards.  The effort and the knife’s edge of success and failure.  That’s what makes it worthy.