coffee grounds

Grandma's

Grandma's was a great marathon. Lovely course. Tremendous organization. However I didn't have a great marathon. Far from it. The self-indulgent reflections on the race are below the fold.

As always the splits tell the story. You can see them in their official glory here.
Here they are with commentary.
1 6:15 6:15 Brakes!
2 12:45 6:30 Now, to average that out ...
3 19:05 6:20 Not quite slow enough, but feeling easy
4 25:29 6:23 "All" I need to do is repeat that for 23 miles!
5 31:47 6:18 Save your energy
10km 39:30 6:15 Just another 3 of those and you're at 40k!
10 1:03:46 24:15 Right on target. And I can still do math in my head!
11 1:10:18 6:32 Don't worry about losing seconds to take water and carbs
12 1:16:48 6:29 Now you are into the territory you know from the 15 mile marathon pace runs. You can do this
13.1 1:24:01 7:13 Right on target! Now to repeat that.
14.1 1:30:28 6:27 After a couple of bad minutes, felt good again
15 1:36:15 5:47 7 seconds over 6:24 pace. Keep focused!
18 1:57:47 21:31 (3 miles) 6:50, 7:10, 7:30. Things are unraveling.
19 2:05:10 7:23 People are really starting to stream past me now. But if I can just keep up 7:30s I can get under three hours?
20 2:13:58 8:48 That drop-out tent looked mighty appealing! But the B&B is 3 miles away. I can drop out there.
21 2:22:35 8:36 Someone (an elite Chinese woman) is having a worse day than me! We swap places for a few miles.
22 2:30:11 7:23 That mile must have been short! Or a little over-ambitious. I feel light headed again
23 2:38:17 8:06 That Lemon Drop Hill is not so bad!
24 2:46:37 8:20 When a medical person at the 24 mile drink stop asks if I want to continue I know that this is an objectively bad day. But I say that I think I will finish. I try not to walk in front of all the people cheering. I am unworthy of their support.
25 2:55:30 8:52 I will not run 9 minute miles! That Twin Cities run last year looks pretty good in retrospect (2:55:55)
26 3:04:02 8:32 Not far now! You can break 3:06
Finish 3:05:39 1:36 WTF?!

The first half, with a couple of minutes of the inevitable feeling that this is not just a training run, felt easy. I felt relaxed and loose. The early tunnel vision that is often a precursor of later problems wasn't there. I was looking around, I was feeling good. I took water at all the stops except 7, and gels at 3 and 11, as I'd practiced on training runs. Just after half-way I had a couple of minutes of not feeling great, but by the 14 mile mark I felt good again. I slipped back a few seconds from half-way to 15 miles, and thought this was just the point where I had to concentrate a little more to keep going. So I picked up the effort a little from 15 to 16, and thought I should have got back to my 6:24 pace. 6:50 signalled things were not going well. I started to feel light headed, so I eased off, and the pace was out to 7:10, and then 7:30. Feeling sick I skipped the gels on offer at mile 17.

The race really came apart between mile 15 and 19, slowly at first as I sunk 20 seconds a mile for 3 miles and then more rapidly in the 19th mile. This did not feel like hitting the wall because I'd gone out too fast, I felt light-headed and weak. The faster 22nd mile, and the 8:06 over the hill from 22 to 23 suggest maybe there was something there, but really they just did me in and I had to walk 50 meters on the downhill just past mile 23.

All in all, it was a long, long way from the 2:47/48 that I'd thought was realistic. After the 1:20:42 half marathon in February, and the solo 1:15:45 20k (in tougher conditions: by myself, hotter, very windy) in early April, 2:48 seemed a realistic goal. I'd done three half-marathon to 15 mile training runs at 2:46 pace, and they'd felt comfortable but I was unsure how that pace would feel at 20 miles, let alone 24. So, I thought that hitting half-way in 1:24 would put me in the position to do a good even race, and if the day was right and I was in good shape maybe even negative-split.

And at half-way it all felt on track, I'd eased off from some slightly too fast early miles and felt I'd got into a good rhythm. And then it all unraveled in the space of 4 miles. I've gone out too fast and hit a wall at 22 miles (Twin Cities 2004) or 24 miles (debut at Christchurch 1999) and I know what that feels like. This wasn't that. This was something else.

Perhaps the humidity, which was apparently relatively high on the Lake Superior shore at that time.

Perhaps I was just slightly overdone. I felt things really clicked about 5-8 weeks ago when I ran the Montreal and Wayzata half marathons as training runs. The three weeks following those I had two workouts that didn't go quite as smoothly, but in the last month the Buffalo half-marathon, and the last long run went smoothly. For Philadelphia, I'm going to do a 12 week buildup, starting in late August, a schedule that fits in well with weather and other things happening.

Perhaps I was a little imbalanced in electrolytes. It's possible I didn't get enough salt in the last few days as I was hydrating.

I had a great spring preparing for this. I felt very fit and prepared going in, and that the plan I followed (Daniels Running Formula, Plan A with a peak of 100 miles) was good. It was challenging but good. The lead-up races showed good progression -- if things were going wrong they would have gotten worse, and they didn't. The fitness is still there (I hope). After some recovery I'll do a 10 mile race in late July and possibly a half-marathon in early August. Sometimes bad days just happen. I can't easily identify what went wrong, and until I've had several bad races in a row I'm not going to say that something systematic was wrong with the training and preparation.

Posted by robe0419 at June 22, 2005 04:42 PM | TrackBack