The Boston Marathon will be run in forty-three days...twenty-six miles, three hundred and eighty five yards from Hopkinton to Boston will be run six weeks from tomorrow, ready or not. Oy vey.
April 16th will be my fourth Boston, but while the race route and date (Patriot's Day in Massachusetts) stays the same every year, the preparation is, as always, unique.
Last year at this time I had run the MV 20 miler at 7:09 pace, was running midweek tempo runs up to 16 miles total w/ as many as 10 miles at 7min flat pace, and logged seven 20+ mile runs before the big day. I was a woman possessed with hopes of a marathon PR. I was also a woman possessed with horrific back pain who was miserable.
I didn't run a PR last year in Boston. I ran over 2 minutes slower than my PR, but I've never felt quite so satisfied finishing a race. Like someone had pulled a 300lb monkey off my back. Regardless of the time on the clock, it was over. I'd been racing my own shadow for months and it was exhausting. I could relax. I could take a deep breath. I could demand I felt physically well before I pushed myself to run again.
It's funny how differently a person can react to similar life situations. Before that day, every race I'd ever finished had left me with a desire to be better. That race just left me with a desire to smile, laugh, eat, nap, and most of all to take the "must run faster, farther" blinders off and enjoy other aspects of life. I also looked forward to a break helping me to enjoy running again.
Ten months later, I can definitely say that I've smiled, laughed, and eaten (oh my have I eaten). I've enjoyed things I didn't make time for before. I learned to swim, I learned to ride a bike down on aero bars, I tackled my first triathlon, and I nurtured and maintained a garden that for all of Mike's picking on my green thumb skills or lack there of, we are still eating the bounties of out of the freezer. I've read books and crocheted hats and scarves. And I LOVE to run.
However happier, I am (ironically) sadly slower. Sigh. In the last month's attempts at track work and tempo runs I'm hard pressed to be convinced I share legs and lungs with the girl in last year's running log. Deciding that happy running is just too important to me to let my times get me blue, this week, like a Greek mother with a bundt cake, I FIXED IT!
The fix? Watch and track be damned.
I know many will judge, but I just don't see why I need to look it in the face. I need to DO it (run fast), but do I need to KNOW how much slower my running fast is happening? I think no. Not right in this moment at least.
And so, instead of my tempo run this week with the constant eye on the pace on the Garmin - it was five miles out, five miles back my favorite route from school. Two miles easy, push for five, three miles easy. I know where the mile marks are on that run, I've heard the Garmin beeps enough times to know well. And I know what a tempo feels like. Tough, uncomfortable, but sustainable.
Instead of my planned 6 x 800 - I chose "shuffle on my ipod" (ironman training playlist). I left home with my tunes in, ran two songs easy and then the third song - fast. Fourth easy, fifth fast, etc...until I had run 6 songs total at a pace that felt just like the pace I run on the track for 800 repeats. I know that feeling well too. You feel good for about 200, and then somewhere in the next 200 your guts start to feel funny, and then toward the end you start to choke on your spit a little bit. At least that's how mine feel, and so that's what I went with. The best part of that workout was the Russian roulette of the random shuffle. 800 repeats will always be 3:00 - 3:15. Letting a song determine how long you have to run hard can mean committing to upwards of 4 minutes. Pray to the shuffle gods you don't get Free Bird.
And then there's the crucial long run. Last year's seven 20+er's culminated with a "practice" marathon at Ocean Drive in Cape May the last Sunday in March. I remember most of my long runs leaving me hobbling last year, but this run was the straw that broke the camel's back. I went from feeling fast and strong with tolerable pain to rendered nearly unable to run. I ran no more than 30 miles a week the whole month of April. I remember calling it my super taper. In reality it was my "oh my, I hope I can do this".
This morning's 20 miler was, like the rest of this week's training, a breath of fresh air. It was the end of what turned out to be my first 70+ mile week, and was faster than I had any business running at this point. I ran with a group of six for the first five miles and then my friend Chuck for the last fifteen, and while I struggled a bit toward the end, the company, as always, made the run not only bearable, but really fly by. And a little part of me would like to believe that the pace of this morning's run may have been made possible in part by the non traditional workouts working out. The good news however, is that for as mentally and physically challenging as parts of that twenty miles was - parts of all 71 miles this week actually - not one step of them was miserable.
