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!

It's a post

I'm in a bit of a rest mode right now post Maine Coast and focusing more on work, buying a house and planning vacations in Las Vegas and Ireland and Northern Ireland than I am on running. While I don't have anything to update; here's a link to a good write-up by Mike about his BQ- at Vermont City:
On 6 weeks of marathon training...

The Maine Coast Marathon

It took me a lot longer to sit down and write this thing than it should have. Part of that was that I was really disappointed with my lack of discipline at the 3 mile mark. The other part of it was that after the race, Sarah and I put an offer in on a house in Malden, more on that later (maybe).

My training for the Maine Coast Marathon was a bumpy ride from my marathon PR (3:17:30) at the Manchester City Marathon in November through the absolute high of shattering my expectations at the Jones 10 Miler (1:00:30 for a PR by 6:09 over my PR set in 2012) to the lows of a calf strain, Achilles Tendonitis, my big toe splitting open on a long run and bruising the top of my left foot by running 19 miles in a pair of trainers that I had tied MUCH too tight.

My track work all winter was the corner stone of smashing my PRs at the 15k, the 10 Mile and the Half Marathon but tendon issues started hampering my top end speed in the last week of February and stayed with me through the end of March. In April I started transitioning away from the track to focus more on hitting my long runs, hill workouts and tempo runs. Some poor decisions with my footwear cut into my hill work.

My Marathon Pace runs on the treadmill were smooth and easy but Planet Fitness has the mills shut down after an hour so I could only get up to about 9.5 miles in and then had to call it a day. I was never able to transition that work to a really solid outdoor Marathon Pace run. I got up to about 12.5 miles at a 6:34 doing laps of Fresh Pond a few weeks before the race but never got a workout that pushed into the hard half of the marathon.

Of course the big news in April was the attack at the Boston Marathon. I resolved that I would be there next year. I ran the Good Times 5k the day after Boston and clocked 17:58 which was good for a weeknight fun run but was the slowest I’ve run at the 5k in about a year and left me wondering where my speed had gone.

By the time May rolled around, my 1:20:50 at the New Bedford Half Marathon was a distant memory. I had logged a lot of easy miles (234 miles in April) and had some good long runs but I just didn’t know what kind of speed I might have on race day.

Then it happened.

The Maine Coast Marathon published the list of entrants and their projected finish times.

The list was sortable by projected finish time so of course I that’s what I did. The fastest projected finish time was 2:50 for a kid named Steven McCarthy who had a marathon PR of ~2:51. Now I do recognize that 2:51 is much faster than 3:17. There were a bunch of us projecting 2:55. I was hoping that someone would sign up who could run <2:40 so that I won’t have the temptation of chasing down the leader.

I thought that my hopes had been realized the day before the race when I saw D5k legend Junyong Pak (he had too many racing accomplishments to list here, but has a <2:33 Boston Marathon PR and Bui’s first snowshoe race: http://fearthechicken.blogspot.com/2013/03/snow-shoe-is-good-shoe.html)

I figured that Pak would take off and win the thing while we mere mortals could focus on just running our time trials to get into Boston 2014. That wasn’t the case. Pak was there to cheer on Yvette Tetreault who rocked out to a >1 hour PR.

To a disciplined runner this would not have mattered. The smart runner would not have cared what the winner was doing. The smart runner would run the race that he or she had trained for. I had started training for a 2:55 and then I changed gears to chase after 2:50 until the Achilles tendonitis convinced me to back off and try for 2:55-3:00.

I chatted with Chris Hancock for a bit, gave Sarah a kiss goodbye and lined up one row back from the front to make sure I went out easy and didn’t get caught up racing.

None of that mattered. I had a bib on my chest and it was a race.

I was “good” for the first mile. I was running with two kids from the Colby track team who were also thinking 2:55-3:00. We were running easily enough that we were able to chat as we let the leader develop a lead of about 50 meters on us in the first 5 minutes. Two other guys joined us and we turned into a bonafide chase pack. We went through mile 2 in around 13:00 but all confirmed with each other that the marker was short. None of us were wearing a GPS watch but we knew that we weren’t running 6:30s, we were right on target at 6:40.

We slowed over the next mile just in case and went through the third mile in 19:22. Steven had almost disappeared over the horizon on us by this point but we could still see the flashing lights of the pace car. I was leading the chase pack at this point and decided that this mile marker was short too. Over the next half mile or so I heard the rest of the chase pack fall off so I decided to drop the hammer and try to catch Steven. I started closing the gap and was able to surprise Sarah by coming up to the corner at ~4 miles in second place hammering away at a pace in the low 6:20s to upper 6:10s.

I eventually closed the gap back down to about 25-50 meters but I could feel my empty stomach screaming about the effort. I forced down some Lifesavers and backed off the gas. By mile 8 I had company again. Timothy Mallard of the Gate City Striders had caught me and we ran together for a while. By mile 10 he had dropped me to go after Steven and I was again running all alone but was now in third place.

I went by the marker at mile 13 in about 1:24:22 and knew that I wasn’t going to be able to finish strongly. I felt like I was going to hit the wall and crash unless I back my pace off significantly. With the BQ as my number one goal at this race I didn’t hesitate to slow down. It only took another two miles for David Murphy and John Williams to catch and pass me.

By mile 16 I had fallen back to about 6^th place when I ran past where Erica Zornig was watching the race. She hopped in and paced me through the next half mile. I had been almost ready to start walking at that point but she got me past that and I was on my way towards the last 10k.

I was on my way, but not as quickly as I would have liked. I gave back a lot of time between miles 17 and 20 and fell back to 10^th place by mile 22. I figured that the past 9 miles of rest were enough and Sarah was driving along the course and cheering me on so I gritted my teeth and worked my way back up to 8^th place and across the finish line in 3:02:47.

 

A short while later Chris came in at 3:04:37 for 10^th place and an Age Group win. Almost as soon as I was done congratulating Chris, Sarah and I went off in search of some showers. For the record: the showers at the Maine Coast Marathon have really nice water pressure.

So all in all: I got a new PR by 14:44 and I got the BQ by 2:14 but missed my goals of (a) running <3:00, (b) running <2:55, (c) running <2:50 and (d) winning the Maine Coast Marathon. I’ll still happy with the result if not how I got there. I’ll take it as a learning experience and try to run a more even split next time to get the <3:00. Ending on a positive note: going sub-3 sounds a hell of a lot easier now that I’m sitting on a 3:02:47 PR rather than a 3:17:30.

Now it’s time to pick out the next one. I’m looking at the Drake Well Marathon, the Quebec City Marathon and the Lehigh Valley Marathon as potential races at the end of this summer. My shake out runs have been quite comfortable this week, including a 5.39 run at 6:59 pace the day after the marathon so maybe I can sneak a race in at the end of June or early July if Sarah and I are not too busy with potential house things.

I enjoyed a nice cold Harpoon Summer when Sarah and I got home from the race; I probably won’t be posting regularly until after Sarah and I get back from Ireland in August so until then enjoy the summer and have some beers because I’ll be back to posting useless lists of daily runs to annoy any of you who bother reading this thing.

 

Cheers!

Week of 4/15/13 – 4/21/13.

I had a lot of anger this week. I never managed to be genuinely afraid but I more than made up for that lack of emotion with fury. I channeled that rage into my training and had my highest mileage week since early 2010 and ran a <18 Tuesday night 5k and my longest ever training run. I will not discuss Monday’s events here. The news will tell you what was going on around here and you don’t need me to rehash all of that. Here is my training:

• Monday: 5.06 miles in 36:06.
• Tuesday: 6.41 miles in 43:27 including the Good Times 5k in 17:59. This was Rose Maguire’s Great Mill Girl Chase 5k which means that the women got a 2:30 head start on the men. This meant that once we caught up with the women we had to weave through traffic on the trail which slowed us down a bit but it was a fun run anyway.
• Wednesday: 12.41 miles in 1:28:53. I was unsure whether I should go to the d5k or the Wakefield lake 5k so instead I ran in Cambridge. There were tons of runners out showing that there was no fear among us runners in Boston.
• Thursday: 5.06 miles in 39:11 at lunch and 9.44 miles in 1:08:59 after work. I ran the No Rest for the Wicked in honor of those from Boston.
• Friday: 5.06 miles in 37:31 at lunch.
• Saturday: 10.00 miles in 1:12:39. This was supposed to be tempo, but I was out late raising toasts on Friday night so I just did an easy run off of about three hours of sleep.
• Sunday: 24.53 miles in 3:03:11. I woke up, put on my running gear and went out without breakfast or water for a long “depletion” run. I thought that by running on empty that I would be running 22 miles in 3:00:00 but thought I was running easier than that so I kept going until 1:35:00 before turning around. I was surprised that despite the distance and intentional hunger and dehydration this run felt so easy. I’m starting to feel the confidence that I had when I ran 1:00:30 at Jones.

I still have work to do, but I am starting to get excited to get after it at the Maine Coast Marathon.

14 weeks down; 3 weeks to go. It's crunch time!

Run For Boston.

Boston

I don't have words for today but I could not leave a trivial story about my training on top when there was such a horrific terrorist attack in Boston. I have no eloquent statements and I don't know how to edit my thoughts. So simply this:

This was not an attack on the Boston Marathon. This was not an attack on runners. This was an attack on humanity. Hold your loved ones close. If you are a praying person then pray. Donate blood. Keep running and spit in the eye of whoever was behind this.

Tomorrow is Boston!!!

Got some workouts in but missed some of the miles I had planned on running. The missed miles put me in a bad mood so I ended up spending most of the week just replying to trolls on RunningAhead with snarkey posts. Less than a month to go until the race so hopefully I'll be a little less sarcastic after that.

4/08/13 – 4/14/13

• Monday: took the day off to recover from the tendon issues that popped up late in my long run on Sunday.
• Tuesday: 2.16 miles warming up in 15:53. 2x 200m strides in 0:36 and 0:38. 5x 1000m in 3:18, 3:25, 3:24, 3:28, 3:29 with 2:30 rest. Target was 3:26-3:30. I wanted 6-8x 1000m but I was having toe issues with my DS Racers and tendon issues with my Cadence so I cut it short. Ended with 2.16 miles in 16:11. This was my first time running on the track at Danehy Park where my soccer career ended with an injury in 2007.
• Wednesday: The tendon thing still hadn't gone away so it was another day of rest.
• Thursday: 7.00 miles of Hills in 55:33. I wanted 10.00 miles on the Park Street hill, but in the morning I gave up eating mammals and started drinking an extra 3 liters of water while at work. The good news was that I felt much better by the end of the day than usual. The bad news is that I needed to cut the run short to pee.
• Friday: 5.06 miles in 39:52 at lunch time. I did not say it was okay to be cold and rainy out but it was anyway. I forgot to bring gloves so I ended up cold and soaked with numb hands but I was going over to the Depot for Eric's 30th birthday dinner after work so I needed to get through it.
• Saturday: 3.06 miles in 20:07. I picked Sarah up at Logan after her red-eye from San Francisco. Then we were out house/condo shopping. We looked at a super awkawardly laid out condo in East Boston so we aren't putting any offers. After that it was over to WholeFoods to get stuff to make gnochi sorentino with garlic pan seared chicken and talapia. I started the sauce when we got home and then darted out for a quick MP run before the Curriers came over for dinner.
• Sunday: 17.95 miles in 2:16:00. Mike scheduled 16 but it was so nice out that I ended up going a bit far. I felt strong on this run so at least I ended the week on a good note.

Tomorrow is the Boston Marathon so here's some numbers that you should be keeping an eye on:
From GLRR:

8795 Biancheri, Andrew
23248 Biancheri, Kimberly
9362 Bourne, Trish
16507 Bourque, Susan
25285 Brouillette, Ray
1031 Bui, Jason
22406 Cain, Ken
22905 Calvin, Luciana
22455 Chandonnet, Andy
23553 Coney, Aims
8855 Crane, Brian
22468 Desmarais, Ronald
5511 Faria, Fil
22419 Farrow, Chuck
7605 Flores, Carlos
10735 Floss, Peter
14222 Ford, Virginia
22948 Goodin, Ken
8142 Graham, Scott
10800 Hadley, Paul
6469 Hancock, Chris
21465 Haskell, Richard
11645 Hersey, Howard
1119 Hrynowski, EJ
15971 Jacks, Sheila
20532 Kanaracus, Steve
11643 Kasabian-Larson, Sarah
24279 Kiriakakos, Kelley
22930 Lokere, Kris
13516 Maslowski, Ally
11684 McInerny, Lori
23982 McKenney-Finn, Mary Beth
13968 Molloy, Amy
554 Morasse, Joe
7519 Mottram, Eric
25579 Murphy, Mike
20515 Ottaviano, Gerard
523 Patronick, Justin
9197 Peters, Tom
24365 Phillips, Ray
21093 Pierce, Jack
3659 Ring, Jonathan
9085 Roberts, Erin
6937 Schroth, Katie

1979 Sullivan, James
18763 Thibeault, Jocelyn
5946 Trotter, Jill
22563 Turcott, Richard
8051 Wallis, Lindsey
4101 Zaganjori, Bash

From Wicked:
F10 Flanagan, Shalane
21742 Carraro, Jason
6167 Chaves, Suzanne
21741 Hewson, Shari
5039 Paulin, Mike
23694 Tabbut, Rich
Probably missing some others but I couldn't find a list from Wicked

I'll probably be out on my lunch-time run when most of you finish but I'll be watching the results from my desk if I have time. All the best to all of you. As usual, I will not say "good luck" about Boston. It isn't about luck, it's about the hard work you've been putting in for the past months and years.

Cheers!

13 weeks down and just 4 weeks remaining until Maine Coast!!!

May your training miles be ever hilly and may all your races have free beer!

Starting to move again

My last week of training wasn’t sexy but I started doing workouts again and got in some decent mileage.

4/01/13 – 4/07/13

• Monday: rest. I ended March with a 16.44 mile run which was my second longest run YTD so a rest day was in order.
• Tuesday: 7.00 miles in 47:09. I did miles on the treadmill to start getting back into speed work. Easy mile in 7:30, mile rep in 5:45, easy mile in 7:30, mile rep in 5:45, easy mile in 7:30, mile rep in 5:39, easy mile in 7:30. This was much slower than I was doing on the track a month and a half ago but for my first speed work in almost a month I’ll take it.
• Wednesday: 9.55 miles in 1:11:00. I ran the Danvers 15k with a little add-on. I didn’t time the run right so I had too much time to cool off before the d5k started so I skipped the race and went home.
• Thursday: rest.
• Friday: 10.06 miles of Hills in 1:18:31. Ran repeats on Park Street. This was my first hill workout in a while so I was OK with it being a little on the slow side.
• Saturday: 10.00 miles in 1:13:22. First 2.50 miles were the easy run over to Porter Square where I tested out the Brooks Pure Flow2 trainers for 5.00 miles at MP (actually closer to 6:40 than 6:30, but close enough to MP for now) then ran easy for the 2.50 miles home.
• Sunday: 19.19 miles in 2:32:41. This is the farthest I have ever run without taking liquids or eating anything. It was also the farthest out west of I-95 that I’ve run on the bike path…I lost the path somewhere in Beford and turned around over by the high school. Anyone know if there is any more bike path out past the Bedford Depot? My big toe on my right foot split open ~15 miles into this one so my form was a bit off for the last 4 miles which dropped my pace quite a bit but I put a Band-Aid on so I think it is OK now. After I got home, Sarah and I went for a hike in the Fells with Sarah and Harold; I think this helped shake out any lingering soreness from the long run.

Looking over the calendar, I think that I will only have two more legitimate long runs before I have to start cutting my mileage back for Maine Coast…I’ve got to make those two runs count!

 

I'll need to actually post my weekly update on time next week so I can focus on the Boston Marathon on Monday (which I'm not running)!

12 weeks down and just 5 weeks remaining until race day!!!

May your training miles be ever hilly and may all your races have free beer!