12 Weeks to Baystate. W01.

11 weeks left until Baystate. 2014 has thus far been an uninspiring year of racing for me so this cycle will need to rival the buildup for Maine Coast in 2013.

This was the plan for W01:

Monday: Rest. Recover from the achilles issue that ended my overly ambitious attempt to win the Around the Lake Marathon last week. (Dropped out while in second place due to the achilles issue. Winning time was slower than both Maine Coast 2013 and Manchester City 2013 but faster than my Boston 2014).

Tuesday: Track. 2 Mile Time-Trial fitness test. I wanted 10:40 which would have matched the fastest I’ve ever run 2 miles.

Wednesday: Easy Recovery. 6 miles.

Thursday: Easy run, keep from tightening up before the flight to Korea.

Friday: Rest. No way around taking the day off. Taxi shows up at 3:30am and I’ll be in taxis, in airports or flying until ~5pm on Saturday.

Saturday: 3 Mile Shake Out. Sitting for as long as it takes to fly to Korea isn’t easy on the legs. I need a nice easy shake-out before trying to log any real miles. Planning to run this on the treadmill at the Shilla Stay. I don’t know the neighborhood well enough to adventure out yet.

Sunday: 9 Mile Long Run. It’s embarrassing to call 9 miles a long run but that’s where my training is today. Better to swallow my pride and work my way back up slowly. My best shot at <2:50 at Baystate is not the get (or stay) injured.

Here’s how the week actually shook out:

Monday: Rest. When you’re not running well it is easy to keep your rest days. Got the stick and worked on my right calf and down into the achilles to try to break apart whatever’s causing the pain.

Tuesday: Warm-Up: 2 miles in 14:47. TimeTrial: 2 miles in 11:04. Cool-Down: 2 miles in 14:56. Set off at 80 sec/400m pace which is what I typically use for 800s and mile repeats. Came through the first lap a few seconds hot which probably took a toll later. Splits were 5:26 and 5:38 so not a strong way to get to 11:04. Running 17:10 for the 5k trying to stay on Scott’s heels was easier than this essentially solo time trial. I started lapping others at the clinic before I finished the first mile and I had to work hard not to adapt to the pace of the packs of other runners as I tried to pass. I’m not as confident on the track as I once was; hopefully this clinic will help with that.

Wednesday: 6.29 miles at 7:52 pace. Took my normal 5.96 mile loop of Pine Banks Park but started up-hill from my house rather than down-hill because my ankle hurts a lot more on the down-hills than it does on up-hill or flat. Starting with the up-hill let me take a more gentle route down to Washington Street and kept the ankle feeling OK throughout the run.

Thursday: Skipped this run to go out to dinner with Sarah and then come home to play with Freddie. I can run in Korea (I hope), I can’t have dinner with Sarah or play with the puppy from the other side of the world.

Friday: I made my flight. That’s about all I can say. I would be lying if I said that every flight to Korea is exactly the same but none of them are interesting enough to say anything about.

Saturday: 5 miles on the treadmill in 33:38 as soon as I got to the hotel.

Sunday: Missed my long run. I had the traditional second-day-in-Korea hangover.

Total Mileage: 17.29

Total Time: 2:03:52

Mean Pace: 7:10

Injury Status: The right heel seems to be recovering fairly well. I've got some sharp pain along the outside of the left knee whenever I put lateral pressure on it but it isn't a bother while running.

Estimated Fitness (what marathon I think I could run right now): 3:10-3:15

Next Week’s Plan:

Monday: 6 Easy in Dongtan Park

Tuesday: Intervals (Probably doing my track work on the treadmill)

Wednesday: 6 Easy in Dongtan Park

Thursday: 3 at MP (plus 1 up, 1 down)

Friday: Rest (Hopefully fly back to Boston)

Saturday: 8.5 Easy (2.5 mile lap on Pine Banks at MP if I’m back home)

Sunday: 11 LR

Plan subject to change pending feedback from Coach Toomey. Actual may look quite different pending how things go with the customer this week.

Cheers!

Here's a picture of a dog wearing a raptor costume just because this post has been all text...and our neighborhood apparently has a pets-in-costumes parade coming up in September.

By the way, there's a "Super Typhoon" scheduled to hit Korea tonight so we'll tonight's run might move inside to the treadmill.

The Boston Marathon 2014

What can I say about the Boston Marathon? Not much that hasn’t already been said. The story of how I ran from Hopkinton to Boylston has been told the same way a hundred thousand times. I coasted out of the start line through the half feeling like I controlled the world and then everything came crashing down on the hills in Newton. The turning left onto Boylston put the spring back into my step to cross the line slower than the time I qualified with but happy to have been a part of the Boston Marathon. Every word of my experience out on the course is cliché so I won’t bother going into more detail.

What I can say though is that I did not earn a Boston Marathon finisher medal on Monday. That belongs entirely to Sarah. While work disrupted my training in December, January, February and early March, my obsession with this race could not have been easy to handle and my constant exhaustion and pain could not have helped either. Somehow, Sarah held everything together around the house, got me to the start line in one piece, organized both sides of the family for race day and our post-race Easter lasagna dinner, has taken care of our new puppy (Freddie) and helped me through the agony of the oozing blistered shoulders I brought home as a memento of not putting on sunblock before the race.

To my ears, saying that this finisher medal belongs to Sarah sounds insultingly trivializing of how much she has done. All else I can say is I love you and thank you.

Boston 2014

I set the goal of qualifying for and entering the Boston Marathon on the 4^th of October in 2003. I was crying, I was bleeding, I was shivering, I was disoriented and I had a freshly minted 4:57:39 marathon PR. To anyone who has run a marathon, I do not need to explain why I was crying: the emotional investment into finishing a marathon is enormous, especially for a new runner. Not everyone cries at the end of their first marathon but I would wager that 9 of 10 runners feel something overwhelming at the finish line of their first marathon.

Why I was bleeding is a bit more difficult to explain. Despite what one might expect, I was not bleeding from my nipples. I was not that first time marathoner. I was bleeding from my right shin. About three weeks before the race I had been hit by a shard of glass from a Molotov cocktail that someone had tossed off of the roof of my fraternity house. It happens. You get your stitches and go on with life. Unfortunately, my doctor had recommended I not run for at least 4 weeks so that the gash could heel up. The glass had punched through to the bone so all I had was the skin tied together by the stitches with nothing behind. I was no smarter back then than I am now. I took the next couple weeks off from running (which wasn’t really that difficult because I hadn’t really been training for this marathon) but then ran the race. About 8 miles into the race I twisted my ankle missing the edge of the road’s shoulder while moving out of the way of a car. When I found my way to my feet I noticed that the gash had torn open again.

I figured that if I turned around and went back to the start that I would have gone 16 miles with nothing to show for it. If I kept on going then it was only an extra 10 miles and I would have finished my first marathon (and incidentally, my first run longer than 15 miles). I was still running when I got to the half marathon mark but by then runners were already streaming by me like…like…well, like runners who know what the hell they’re doing running past a 20 year old kid with a bum leg who thought that running a 6 minute mile for the first mile of his first race which happened to be a marathon would be a good idea.

It was a cool but not cold day for October in New Hampshire but I wasn’t generating the heat that I needed. I had skipped breakfast and was soaked in sweat from the start of the race when I had burned myself out. The sweat had rapidly cooled and between the hunger, the dehydration and the exhaustion I could not stop from shivering. I began to forget a time before the marathon. I began to forget that there was anyone else running this race. It was just me, trudging along somewhere between a limp and a jog, slowly inching toward a finish line that I no longer believed existed.

I didn’t own a watch or an mp3 player so I had no concept of time but as eternity gave way to more endless road I somewhat suddenly came upon downtown Bristol, New Hampshire. This told me that the end was near but it never seemed to come any closer. I cannot describe the eternity of agony that I endured between the Mile 26 marker and the finish line. Surely there had never been a longer 0.22 mile long piece of road.

Looking back at the standings I see that there was someone only 4 seconds ahead of me at the finish and someone just 26 seconds behind but I have no recollection of either of them. I don’t have any memory of crossing the finish line. I recall the endlessness of the tarmac and I recall standing in the field near the finish line, wrapped in my parent’s blue car blanket with my finisher medal around my neck. There is no time in between those two times but in that gap the tears had welled up and I could not speak.

Thirty people finished that race slower than me so the course was still open but there wasn’t that much going on around the finish line more than two hours after the winners had come through so we got back into the car. I still could not speak, the best I could manage was to nod or shake my head, and I was still shivering but I had a slice of pizza and I had a new goal: qualify for and run Boston before I age out of the Men’s Open division.

On that day there was no real indication that I would ever run the 3:10:59 that I needed to qualify for Boston but I had 15 years before I turned 35 and the qualifying time would get slightly longer. A year later I went back to Bristol to run the New Hampshire Marathon and surprised myself with a big PR of 3:51:01. Of all of my marathons, this is the only one that I have no specific memories from. It just sort of happened. I recall joking with my college friends after that if I kept cutting 1:06:38 off of my marathon PR every year I would qualify for Boston in one year, break the world record the year after and quite soon break the speed of light.

Your improvement is never linear. It may be for a very small time (in fact it always is if you only look at 2 races) but it doesn’t stay that way for long. The next year I went back to Bristol for my third race and clocked 4:12:00. In 2006 I returned to the New Hampshire Marathon for my final crack at this running thing. I had finished three marathons already, I didn’t have anything to prove to anyone else, I just wanted to go out with a sub 4 marathon and call it a running career. I finished in 3:33:00, 19 seconds later the Women’s winner crossed the finish line.

“Damn, I’m actually pretty fast,” I thought to myself. I got a flyer in the mail for the Feaster 5 and decided that since I was so fast at the marathon I should go try to win this little 5 miler. I had just run a 3:33:00 marathon, how hard could a 5 mile race be?

I ran 37:03. It was faster than I thought people could run a 5 miler. It was faster than 7:30/mile pace for god’s sake! If you’re reading this blog then you know as well as I do now that this is not that fast. I was beaten by 301 runners and very nearly threw up on the course. I was over a mile and a half from the finish line when the race was won. It didn’t matter. I had run faster than 8 min/mile for a distance race and had placed in the top 20%. I wanted more. Again, I wanted Boston.

The 2006 Feaster 5 gave me my first race photo!

I ran my 6^th, 7^th and 8^th races in 2007 but didn’t take a crack at the marathon due to injuries from soccer. My next year was pretty crazy (I ran 49 races that year to bring my lifetime total to 57). Five years to the day after my first marathon I was out at the Sports Page bar in Beverly. I was a bit drunk and someone mentioned that a friend was running the Maine Marathon the next day. I thought it was a great idea so at 4:30am my alarm went off and I drove to Portland for race day registration.

I was lucky that they had race day registration. Despite the hangover I crossed the finish line in 3:24:05. I was really starting to think that Boston was a possibility soon. I only needed to shave 13:06 off of my time to qualify and I had already cut over an hour and a half from my first race.

After that race, the marathon changed for me. I now expected to qualify for Boston and wanted to do so in sub 3 fashion. A month later I ran 4:45:16. Then I had a DNS at Hyannis 2009, a DNF at Rotterdam 2009, a DNS at Outer Banks 2009, DNS at New York City 2010, DNS at Cape Cod 2011, a 3:48:32 at Napoli 2012 and a 3:40:31 at Cape Cod 2012. In that same time span the qualification time for Boston had tightened to 3:05:00. My confidence of qualifying in the Men’s Open division was at an all-time low.

Well, it eventually happened last spring. I got a qualifier with a BQ-2:13 and the cut-off to get into Boston for 2014 turned out to be BQ-1:38. I got my email saying that I was in during a process characterization meeting. I read the email after the meeting and texted Sarah: “In”.

I did not yet know how to sum up my feelings about getting into Boston so all I sent were those two characters. Days later, I still don’t think that I can sum up my feelings any better than: “In”.

It has been a long road for me to get into Boston. I have run 6026.10 miles (that I know of, I started keeping a log in December 2009) and completed 180 races and have 2 DNFs and 6 DNSs. (One could argue that there were many more than 6 races that I have not started, but I define a DNS as a race I paid to enter and then for whatever reason did not run).

Almost everyone who runs has a deeply personal connection of some sort to the Boston Marathon and this year more so than any other year. I do not “deserve” to have one of the 36,000 numbers that will be handed out for this race. I did not get in because I ran a qualifier; I got in not because of what my time was at the Maine Coast Marathon but because of what other people’s marathon times were relative to a somewhat arbitrary standard based on their gender and age.

When I was young, the first two Super Bowls that I remember watching pitted first the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Dallas Cowboys and then the Green Bay Packers against the New England Patriots. These games were events unto themselves; they were greater than just football games. There were fireworks, there were rock concerts, and they were really something. The next year I watched the Denver Broncos beat the Green Bay Packers. Looking back on those three games now; the best football game was the third. The Packers and the Broncos fought it out right down to the last second of the game but at the time I found myself disappointed with that Super Bowl even before it started.

I stole this photo from somewhere on the internet. I do not have express written consent from ABC and the NFL

When the Packers played the Broncos it was an outdoor game in southern California. The sun was shining, the flags were waving in the wind and I realized for the first time that the Super Bowl was just a football game. When the superfluous pageantry was stripped away from the game it was still a 100 yard long by 50 yard wide bit of turf and the clock still ran for 60 minutes just like in the regular season. At that moment I felt like something was stolen from me. I felt like this thing, this event, the “magic” of the Super Bowl was gone forever and I would always see it just as another football game.

Now I understand that it wasn’t something that was stolen from me. It was something that was given.

Perhaps I would have called it a moment of clarity if I was a drunk, but being a high school freshman at that time I was neither drunk nor aware of the phrase “moment of clarity”.

The Boston Marathon is no different.

There are qualifying standards to get into Boston just as there are playoffs to get into the Super Bowl but when you strip aside the media attention, the advertising dollars, the awards, the internet discussions, the medals and crowd along the side of the course what you are left with is 26.22 miles of pavement just like every other marathon.

I have heard some people say that the marathon is just another long run. I have heard other people say that the marathon is just a celebration of your hard work. Yet others have been heard claiming that the Boston Marathon is a victory lap for your qualifying race. The marathon is none of these and yet all of them.

What the marathon IS depends far less on the race course, the race director or even the history or pedigree of the race. What the marathon IS depends solely on the runner.

For me the marathon is agony and ecstasy. It is fear, aggression, rage and calm contemplation. It is every human emotion that exists in life condensed into one infinitesimally small blip in my life. It is a race. The swag doesn’t matter. The media coverage doesn’t matter. The crowd vanishes from my view no matter how close they stand or how loud they cheer. It is only me and 26.22 miles of my old friend: public road. It is a race and that next singlet in front of me is either getting closer of farther away. All that matters is closing the gap on that singlet and moving on to the next one.

Since I have been accepted into Boston, I will have to filter out all of the meaningless noise that comes with the Boston Marathon so that I can focus on training and racing. Had I not been accepted into Boston, the only difference is that I would be racing against a different field.

So I will not celebrate my acceptance into Boston. I will not celebrate finishing Boston and if I PR at Boston I may not celebrate that PR. Boston, like every other race, is just another step in preparing for the next race to come after.

Whether you are training for Boston or some other race; best of luck training injury free!

Why I think "that guy" got it all wrong:

Okay, so by now everyone has read the article about how the “color run” is killing competitive running or is at the very least indicative of a general lack of competitiveness among younger runners. I am clearly oversimplifying the article. This is a bit of a challenge as I felt that the original article was oversimplified to start with.

Here is the link: Some guy grubling about kids these days...

The article starts our bemoaning that the author placed at about 15% in the Men’s 50-59 age group and that his AG outperformed the field such that he finished 11% deep into the field. The knee jerk reaction is to say that he has made the incredible discovery that men run faster on average than women. The more concerning issue is that from this limited data he draws the broad conclusion that the competitiveness of younger runners is gone.

“They're just not very fast. "There's not as many super-competitive athletes today as when the baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s," said Ryan Lamppa, spokesman for Running USA, an industry-funded research group.”

I have heard this before but I still don’t believe it.

I think that a 4 minute mile is a good measure of being a "super-competitive" runner.

What is that I see? The top runners in America aren’t getting slower? More people are breaking the 4 minute mile than ever? What about the lack of competitiveness in younger runners?

The 4 minute mile is a measure of the most competitive runners. Maybe the author of the aforementioned article might argue that he was not referring to elite runners but rather to the runners at an average weekend race. Perhaps the elite runners are supposed to be excluded when discussing “super-competitive athletes”?

What we do see over the past 20 years is a serious explosion of interest in racing. In 2012 there were 15.5 million race finishers, 44% of finishers were male. In 1990 there were about 4.75 million race finishers, 75% of which were male.

If we assume that the distribution in terms of racing speed across the entire American population is roughly normal it would look something like this:

What we should expect is that most of the people who fall into the >2 standard deviations faster than average were already racing 20 years ago. What we see now is that these people have not stopped racing. American records are getting faster; more people are breaking the 4 minute mile and there are still epic battles at the USATF New England championship races around here. What has happened is that more of us from the rest of the distribution have started racing and there are now >3x more race finishers than there were in 1990!

The shift from 75% male to 56% female has also helped to change the average finish time at every distance. It is not a controversial statement that men are on average faster than women.

So what does all of this mean? To me, this means that runners are as competitive now as they have ever been if not more. Some of us take the starting line knowing that we are not that fast yet and don’t care. We race the people around us and lay everything on the line to beat everyone we can. We race for PRs and we race to push ourselves. The average finishing time at any given race is slower but now the probability of the average person taking on the challenge of a race is much higher.

If you don’t see the competition at the local level then you’re not looking in the right place. Visit the New Bedford Half Marathon or the Lone Gull 10km. Look at the USATF New England Grand Prix site and come run one of these races. If these are not competitive enough for you there are Club Nationals both at XC and Track to try out.

“Of course, there are countless super-elite young athletes. And only because the young have no need to prove they're not old was I able to outrace so many of them last month. Still, apathetic competition offers little comfort to some aging athletes.”

I'm not a super-elite athlete, but sometimes I will pick a shorter race like a 10k or Half Marathon to run at MP to practice the pace and practice taking liquids at race speed. My 6:30 pace might let you beat me and you will think that I am apathetic but it is not my job to comfort “aging athletes”. It is my goal to run my target races as fast as I possibly can.

In take away; while the author is worried about a lack of competitiveness from the new runners who take on the challenge of a race even though they are slower than an experienced senior runner, I will not be worrying about how many people are behind me. I will be worrying about how many people are in front of me and what I can do in my training to get faster than them. But then I’m 30 years old and us kids just aren’t that competitive anymore.

Back to a bit of running...

Talk about a long slump! It’s the 22^nd of August today and since I last posted on the 27^th of June (57 days ago) I have run just 160 miles. I raced only once in that span (on the last day of my 20s) and clocked a 17:53 for the 5k, nearly a full minute off of my PR. While my running life hasn’t been remotely interesting over this period I have done some stuff in my non-running life (what? I have one of those?) Here’s what’s happened since I last posted.

1)      Sarah and I bought a house.
2)      I turned 30.
3)      Sarah and I went on vacation to Ireland and Northern Ireland.

First: the house. It is small but we’re right by Oak Grove in Malden so Sarah can walk to the train to get in for work (this cuts ~30 minutes off of her commute each way). We’re also up on a hill so every run I do (though there have not been many yet) ends with an uphill sprint. From our front door it is only a 3 minute jog to get into the Fells (or Oakdale Park?). Even if it is Oakdale Park instead of the Fells, I can pick up the Cross Fells Trail (blue blazes) and get just about anywhere in the Fells I want.

Sarah gave me a BBQ!

We have a TV but so far have only connected Netflix. The lack of new programing has helped us to be productive with setting up the house. We will either get cable at some point or I’ll actually start getting more things done once the house is sorted…who knows which way this will go.

Second: turning 30. Shit. Now I have to race against Bash and Bui…no more AG awards for me for a while. It was nice running in my 20s where you can get a medal at almost any local race just by showing up and running <6 min/mile (you can still do this in your 30s for half marathons, full marathons and so forth but not 5ks).

I was 20 years old when I ran my first race (10/4/03 New Hampshire Marathon 4:57:39). Yes, my first race was a marathon and no, I had yet to log 1000 miles in my life when I ran it. I set the goal of qualifying for Boston before I turned 30. At the time I needed to run 3:10:59 to get in. My first “brush” with qualification came in 2008. I ran 1:33:34 for the first half of the Maine Marathon before falling apart over the last 6 miles and walking it in for 3:24:05. I had no business running 1:33:34 over the first half because I had run a Half Marathon PR one week earlier at the Wicked Half Marathon. That PR was 1:35:46.

At my next 2 marathons (2012 Napoli, Italy 3:48:32 and 2012 Cape Cod 3:40:31), I ran the first half progressively faster (1:31:41 at Napoli, 1:29:33 at Cape Cod) without getting any closer to actually qualifying. A week after Cape Cod, I ran the first half of Manchester City in 1:37:00 to see if a slower first half would produce a faster finish. It did. I came home with 3:17:30 which was a PR but not a whole lot closer to qualifying than my 3:24:05 had been because the standard had been tightened to <3:05:00.

After Sarah and I got back from Machu Picchu I started training with Mike Toomey and took another stab at the marathon. At the Maine Coast Marathon I went through the half in about 1:25, faded and finished in 3:02:47. I got the qualifier before turning 30 (yay) but when Boston rolls around I will need to run a much smarter race.

The joy of qualifying and the disappointment of dropping from 3^rd place at the half all the way back to 8^th place at the finish were hard for me to process together. I could make excuses about how my mixed emotions played into my lack of running over the past ~2 months but in reality it was mostly that I was (a) busy buying a house, cramming work in to be ready to leave for Ireland and then on a 2 week vacation all over the island and (b) lazy. It was mostly the lazy thing.

While my mileage hasn’t gone up I have check off some more Massachusetts cities and some more countries in my goal of running in all 351 Massachusetts cities, all 50 US states and all 197 UN recognized countries. I am now at 62 MA cities, 13 US states and 12 Countries.

Third: Ireland. It was awesome. We saw ruins. I drank many stouts and a bunch of whisky. I ate a LOT of stew, brown bread, pie and chips and a lot of carrot cake. I really need to work on getting my base back in place for my next racing goal.

 

 

MY NEXT RACING GOAL!!!

I haven’t really had one of these in a while but now I finally do!

I am going to race the mile over the winter.

I have my eye on 5 meets. The plan will be to run the 800m at the first two meets as a tune up and then race the mile at the last three. Dates have not been released for the meets yet but here is my tentative schedule based on when the races were last year:

12/14/13: BU Mini Meet #1 - 800m
12/21/13: BU Mini Meet #2 - 800m
12/28/13: BU Mini Meet #3 - Mile
1/19/14: GBTC Invitational – Mile

12/28/13: BU Valentine Meet – Mile

I’m meeting with Mike Toomey early next month to put together a training plan and a set of goals for these meets but for now I’d like to cut 1 second off of each quarter for my first 800m race. That makes my goal 2:14 for the 800 at Mini Meet #1. I’m also planning on changing from a Monday – Sunday running week to a Saturday – Friday running week with 6 days of running and my rest day on Sunday.

I will plan on starting up weekly training updates again with the hope of putting out an update every Saturday. I hope this thing keeps me honest to my training so I can actually get some speed going this winter.

And finally, I can’t keep hiding from the start line just because my fitness is gone. Racing is a skill and I need practice so I’m off to run the first USATF NE XC GP race of the year this Saturday. Cheers and happy running!

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...