coffee grounds

2:59:03

Chicago marathon, 2:59:03. 1:25:11 through the half, which makes a shade under 1:34 coming home. A little disappointed, but reasonably satisfied. Calves really tightened up from 31km, which has never happened to me, and which I'm attributing to wearing flats. Better to learn that lesson in this race than when I'm in better shape. Longer self-indulgent report follows.

As it happened, some of the things I predicted could happen did happen. Specifically, these things happened:

Put it on the line for sub 3:10, 3:00, 2:48:47, 2:37:20, 2:30:00, 2:22:00 or whatever you're going for, and you'll come a cropper one of these days. Just the way it is. Just the law of averages ....
if you get to this point of searching for a reasonable goal to keep going you'll probably be changing them mile by mile ... That's been my experience.

So, I put it on the line for low 2:50s. This implied trying to ease through the first half in 1:25 and then bring it home. 1:25:11 through the half was pretty much where I hoped to be, and it felt good. Not much to say really about the first half, other than that I missed the first mile marker, saw mile 2 was 10 seconds too quick and successfully eased off just the right amount. And that when there are huge bunches of people the wind is not really an issue. If you're Brian Sell, however, and you're marooned between people doing 1:03 and people doing 1:06 for the first half, the wind was probably more of an issue.

Things continued feeling pretty good through about 29km. I can't see intermediate place information on the results site, but my impression is that 24-29 was a good stretch where I passed quite a few people (it was nice to have the kilometre markers, and the chip mats every 5km provide useful information, so useful I didn't bother taking my mile splits). I took a Gu at 13.5 miles/22km, and that probably kicked in a little later. Some of the people I passed were the women who took a tilt at 2:46:59 and were now fated to shuffling home in well over 2:50. "Nothing venture, nothing win," I thought as I noticed them.

Aside on Gu: A couple of years ago I got in the habit of taking Gu on nearly every long run, even the easy ones. What I noticed was that once I was used to the Gu, the effect of it was more immediate but less sustained. Now that I'm back in the habit of only taking Gu on some long runs where I'm doing marathon pace or faster (enough to practice taking it, and to know that I won't have "GI" issues with it) I notice that the effect doesn't noticably kick in for at least 5, and sometimes 10 minutes, but that it is then sustained for longer. This, to me, is consistent with the idea that by training with less calories than you'll race with you do teach the body to be sparing with glycogen. Conversely, when you get used to taking calories in training your body becomes greedy and inefficient with the available glycogen. Just my slow-poke 2c worth.

Although most things felt good from 24 to 29, including the important things like breathing, perceived exertion, mental attitude etc ... I did begin to wonder if I'd made the wrong shoe choice. By 31km it was quite clear that I had. My calves were tightening up a lot, and it wasn't getting better. Since I was slowing for reasons unrelated to fuel I felt quite alert, alive and energetic—it was just getting more and more painful on the calves to run. What had been 5km splits just a touch over 20 minutes became 22 minutes from 30 to 35, and then 24 from 35 to 40.

Now, if you define "hitting the wall" as a quite sudden thing in which you finally exhaust your muscle glycogen, your quads get really heavy, and your brain (which runs on carbohydrates) gets really discouraged, then I didn't hit the wall. If you define hitting the wall more broadly as anything [unrelated to elevation and wind factors] that causes your second half to be more than a minute or so slower than your first half, then I hit the wall. This was a very gradual wall, however, in which my alertness and enthusiasm held up quite well even as my pace slowed and the effort to shuffle 7:40s with rapid turnover got higher than it "should have."

So, it was the shoes, or more responsibly, my decision to wear the shoes. I've never had a problem with sore calves in a marathon, and tight calves are totally consistent with wearing flats that are too thin. Two days later my calves are still sore, and my quads feel like I ran a downhill race. It's a subtly different feeling than when you race all the way to the end. Lesson learned. Was it foolish to wear flats (even relatively heavy ones: Adidas Response Comps) in the marathon? Yes, in hindsight. However, I'd done two 22 milers with 15 miles at [goal] marathon pace in my second pair of the shoes (which I picked up cheaply precisely for marathon training) and a bunch of 16-18 milers. In none of those workouts did I feel more beat up than doing the same workout in more cushioned shoes, and I didn't have any issues with my calves. That is, I'd done about as much, if not more, research on the shoe choice than is conventionally recommended and it still didn't work out. Obviously (obviously!) 30km, let alone 42.2km at marathon pace was too much.

So, in sum, I think I prepared as well as I could given my "pre-cuses" of the iron depletion and glute strain in spring and summer, excecuted pretty well on the day through to about 30km, and through my own mistaken choice of footwear never gave myself the chance to put it on the line in the last 10km where you really find out what you've got.

From here, it's a week completely off running, though I'll probably hit the pool for some aqua-jogging, then a slow climb back up to 100km/week by Thanksgiving. It's been two years since I took some sustained downtime after a marathon, and now is the time to refresh and regroup. I then hope to put in a good month through to Christmas, after which I'll think about a winter marathon, a spring one, or concentrating on shorter distances for the spring, and a marathon again next fall. Who knows? Without overstating the difficulties there are some complications of trying to do a winter or early spring marathon coming out of the long Minnesota winter. There's also the issue that spring marathons in North America have much more variable weather (it's not for nothing that all the major competitive spring marathons, except Boston, are in Europe and Japan). But variation is variation, you could get the freak 80° day, or you could get the ideal 45° day. If I'm serious about chasing the PR substantially down from where it is I may have to take some chances with the variable North American spring ...

Posted by eroberts at October 24, 2006 01:37 PM | TrackBack