Trying to avoid as much of a let down as this might become:

Despite missing my goals of (a) winning and (b) breaking 3:00:00, my Boston Qualification at the Maine Coast Marathon was an enormous emotional event for me. I would say that countless miles and hours of training went into this race, except for the fact that the actual count is 981.31 miles in 119:46:00 over the training cycle that started on 12/4/12 and ended on 5/11/13 (does not count the race itself).

As with my PR at the Madison Mini Marathon in 2009 (dropped my Half Marathon PR from 1:35:46 to 1:23:21), the effort and the instant sense of accomplishment has led to a huge drop in motivation and training.

On my way to cutting ~12 minutes off of my 1/2 Marathon PR

In 2009 I basically stopped running after the Madison Mini and took 17 days off before starting again with an appearance at the Danvers 5k. After shaking the rust off at Danvers, I went to Lynn the next evening to race the Central Square 5k. I ran an 18:08 (which at the time was only 37 seconds slower than my PR) and thought everything was OK because I finished in third place behind Doug Chick and Mike Toomey who had an interesting photo-finish…

Who's going to win???

I took a day off and ran an 18:01 at the Rowley Poker Run 5k. Feeling good about myself that I hadn’t lost much I took the next 27 days off.

 On 10/27/09 I decided to head to Melrose for the Allan Morrison 5k to get back into running. With nearly a month off I had most certainly lost a step. I finished in third place, but it took me 18:52.

What place you finish in has less to do with how you run and more to do with who shows up.

I completed my loss of fitness over the next week and clocked a 20:25 at the Witch City 5k for the third slowest I’ve ever run a 5k. After sliding out of shape over that two month stretch, that 20:25 finally made me realize I needed to start training again. November was a bit hit-or-miss and finally in December, I started the new training spreadsheet which has evolved into the 24 tab 500KB behemoth that I now use to track everything running related.

One would think that after going through this kind of experience once before (and then taking another 2.5 years to get back into good enough shape to break my 5k PR from 2009) I would be better equipped to avoid this kind of let-down after the Maine Coast Marathon. I wasn’t. Fortunately, I logged a Personal Worst less than a month after Maine Coast and that’s got me moving again.

May really wasn’t that bad. I ran 172.76 miles in 20:49:16 but didn’t have any solid workouts in that mileage after the marathon. The bottom really fell out when I went to Las Vegas with Abe, Bryan, Bryan and Jeff.

I'm not a huge fan of Las Vegas the city, but riding ATVs out in the sand was a lot of fun.

I don’t do well in the heat to start with. My lowest mileage months are always June through September. Las Vegas is hot. The temperature may have dipped into the double-digits while we were there, but if it did no one told me. The mercury hit 113°F on the Saturday.

I could have woken up extra early to run before the sun came up or I could have paid $30.00 per run to go to the Planet Hollywood gym but I didn’t. I ran 4 miles on the strip over the entire trip; bringing my lifetime mileage in Nevada to a whopping 9.09 miles (or 0.1611% of my total miles…yay for my overly complex training log)!

I came home from Vegas and was sleepy so I took 5 days off. By the half-way point in the month I had run 5 times for a grand total of 30.11 miles. I ran my “things are okay” race on 6/20. It was the JP Morgan Corporate Challenge; a 3.5 mile road race that features a field of 12000 runners all in one giant starting corral. I led the way for my company with a 20:02 (beating my Personal Best for the event by 27 seconds) and finished in 62^nd place. I focused too much on the PR and the placement and not enough on the fact that my 5:43.4 min/mile pace was almost 17 seconds per mile off my 5k PR even though the course is only 0.4 miles longer…

Team Axcelis cut ~4 minutes off of our team time from last year!

Two days later I got my rude awakening about how much fitness I’ve lost. I was at the Tufts track in Somerville to run the 21^st leg of the Club Challenge Marathon Relay for the Greater Lowell Road Runners. The event is one of my favorite racing events: 26 runners each run a mile on the track as Boston area running clubs compete to see what club can finish a marathon the fastest. Many thanks to the Somerville Road Runners for hosting this awesome event!

 

SRR won the event...again. GLRR's coming for it again next year so you guys better not slow down!

I was a part of one of the Greater Lowell Road Runners’ teams and thanks to some truly impressive performances by the rest of the team we were able to capture third place in 2:22:41. I thought that with my fitness from March (I think that I peaked a little early for Maine Coast) I could have run a 4:48. I adjusted my expectations to a 4:56 (0.5 seconds slower per 100m) and set out on pace for the first 200m of the race. I didn’t have the fitness that I needed. I was just on pace at 400m and already feeling like it was going to slip away. I went through the 800 in 2:32 which was only 3-5 seconds faster than I was doing my 10x 800m repeats over the winter. At 1200m my split was 3:50. I’ve run plenty of <70 quarters, but not this time. I ran as hard as I could for the final quarter but it took me 76 and I finished with a 5:06.

A mile on the track with Melissa? What is this, a race or a Toomey Clinic?

That 5:06 (while only 3 seconds off of my fastest mile, excluding the Millennium Mile which is heavily down-hill) was the slowest mile I’ve raced and only 10 seconds faster than the miles I was ending my 5x Mile workouts with over the winter. (Also, strictly speaking, this was a 1600m race rather than a Mile. If you extrapolated out we’re probably talking 5:07-5:08 for the full mile).

That was enough motivation for me. I’m looking for redemption at the Derby Street Mile in Salem, MA. The race is Friday 8/16/13. I started with 16x 200m this past Monday at an average pace of 4:48 min/mile to get the legs used to the speed again and I’ll slowly be ramping my track and hills work back up over the next couple of weeks. This goal race does mean that I will need to stay on top of my training while Sarah and I are on vacation in Ireland at the end of July and beginning of August but I’d hoped to do that anyway.

Finally, regarding the Boston Marathon in 2014, I have come to terms with the fact that while I have a qualifier I might not get in. It is what it is and I don’t think that I have time to rush another race in between now and registration. Instead of focusing on the marathon in the fall I am going to have an XC season and then transition onto the track for the winter. If my time holds up and I get into Boston I will get after it starting in the New Year. If I don’t get in then my training schedule won’t be significantly different but I’ll choose between the L.A. Marathon and the Eugene Marathon.

In the short term, the next one up is the FORR 5k on 7/18/13. I turn 30 a few hours after the race so I'll bring cupcakes. Come race, eat drink and be merry!

http://www.forr5k.org/

 

Happy running!