Basic Training, Week Two

Monday, 11/1/2021

Rest day.  I don't feel too bad after yesterday's 3 miles, which is positive.  On the downside, a cold front has swept into the area, which doesn't have me super excited for the next few mornings.  But then, when you start a running program the last week of October, what do you expect?

Tuesday, 11/2/2021

31 degrees this morning.  There's really nothing to psych you up for a run like scraping off your car, which I had to do for the first time since returning to Chicago in May.  The 1.5 miles was not the easiest but I got through it.

Wednesday, 11/3/2021

26 degrees this morning!  It actually wasn't too bad on the trail with no wind and the sun out (it was funny by the end of the run to see "frost shadows" on the grass - spots where the sun had melted the surrounding frost into dew, but the grass in the shadow of a tree was still frost-covered).  The run itself was probably worse than the temperature - not that it was so super terrible, but by the end my legs had pretty well had it for the day and I developed some sort of stitch in my lower back on the left side just for good measure.  Hoping this is a temporary thing.  The last time I tried to kick back into running shape after a period off, I feel like it started more smoothly than this - but on the other hand, that was 15 pandemic pounds ago, so there's that much more pressure on my legs with each step.  Hopefully I will lose a bit of weight doing this and the problem will resolve itself eventually, but it might be a little rough for a while longer here.  Quite looking forward to Friday and Saturday at the moment.  Tomorrow might be pretty unpleasant.

Thursday, 11/4/2021

I had mentally prepared myself for the possibility that at some point there might be an injury that would hamper the process, but I have to say I didn't expect it this soon or where it ended up being located on my body.  The "stitch" that I mentioned yesterday turned out to be some sort of oblique injury - I don't know if it's a strain or an actual tear (hopefully the former and hopefully a mild one), but I was in substantial pain by Wednesday night.  This morning it had backed off a little, which is hopefully positive as far as severity goes, but deep breaths still cause that tell-tale sharp pain.  I'm honestly not even sure how exactly this happened - oblique injuries are generally caused by some sort of twisting, but this seems to have just happened in the middle of a run.  At any rate, I'm obviously not running today and tomorrow is a rest day, so that's a start for recovery days.  If things aren't noticeably better by Saturday I'll probably see what the doctor has to say.  This should be a recoverable injury that doesn't completely derail my hopes, but I might be doing a lot of walking for a while.  Maybe if I can lose a few more pounds during the hiatus, the running won't be as tough when I get back to it...

Friday, 11/5/2021

Rest.  The pain in the oblique has been kind of coming and going, though at no point has it been as bad as it was on Wednesday afternoon (you can tell that I wrote the Wednesday entry not long after getting back from the run, since things became much worse later in the day).  I've added some shoulder soreness which I think is probably acutely from awkwardly reaching across my car to scrape the windshield - probably need to invest in a longer scraper.

Saturday, 11/6/2021

This was supposed to be a 30-minute walk, but after an unscheduled rest day on Thursday and the overall plan severely in doubt at the moment, I decided to try putting a bit of distance on my legs - walking only - and seeing how they held up.  The answer so far - although let's give it a day - is relatively well.  Better yet, the oblique has been nearly pain-free so far today (I'm writing this at 3:15 pm), which hopefully indicates some sort of spasm or minor pull and not a tear or anything really significant.  I'm definitely still going to baby it for a while - I read that oblique injuries can stop being painful well before they're fully healed and thus are easy to re-aggravate - but at least my overall quality of life is going to be better without wincing every time I have to make a substantial movement or intake of breath.

The question is, where do we go from here?  I definitely don't want to rush back to running and even when (if?) I shift back to it I'm going to want to take it pretty slow.  This isn't that big of a deal for the half marathon target, since the half marathon in question doesn't have a time limit and also because 13.1 miles, while a lot, feels like something I could complete even right now if I had to.  (Heck, I did more than a third of one today!)  The same cannot be said for a marathon, and certainly not within a 6.5-hour time limit.  The good news on that front is we're still more than nine months from the potential marathon.  As of right now, I'm thinking: take the rest of the calendar year as a walking period.  I'll try to keep putting distance on my legs but more gently, along with some other stretching and strengthening exercises, and then after the new year - hopefully with a few pounds lost in that time as well - see about starting to pepper some running back in as long as I can hold up to it.  If it keeps being an issue I can at least walk the half marathon and fall back on the fact that I did do a marathon once in my life.

Sunday, 11/7/2021

This was supposed to be a 3.5-mile run, but instead I did a pretty easy 3-mile walk.  After yesterday's distance, I still felt pretty tired at the end of the day, so that might tell you something about my current levels.  Next week is definitely going to be an adjustment from what is "supposed" to be the training plan, but we'll see if I can make this work.

Basic Training, Week One

Monday, 10/25/21

In the Higdon plan, Mondays are rest days, so it almost feels like cheating to include this, but that's what's on his website!  Anyway, this was the day I labeled all the days in an Excel sheet, printed it out, and stuck it on the fridge.  So that's something.

Tuesday, 10/26/21

1.5 miles - 0.25 walk, 0.5 run, 0.25 walk, 0.5 run - in one of the local forest preserves.  13:37 average pace, which would be just under six hours over a marathon distance!  Kind of silly to think about that now, but on the other hand, unless I plan to do Honolulu again (which I don't, in large part because by the time of the 2022 version I'll be 40 already), pace does have some relevance.  In the end, though, I think this will end up being more about distance tolerance.  Yes, technically I tolerated the distance in 2011, but not really.  If I actually get to the point where I can "run a marathon" I'm pretty sure I'll be able to do it fast enough not to get timed out of other courses.

Wednesday, 10/27/21

3 miles in the forest preserve, again alternating between 0.25 walk and 0.5 run.  This time my average pace was 12:46, which was pretty good considering - nearly a minute faster than yesterday even over twice the distance (especially considering it was 12:39 until I had to walk 0.05 miles back to the car), and I feel like I was taking it fairly easy.  I did gas out kinda hard on the last quarter mile, but if this were easy from the start I wouldn't need to do it.  The next three days are much lighter before the next 3-mile run on Sunday, so we'll see how things feel by then.

Thursday, 10/28/21

1.5 miles, with the same 0.25 walk/0.5 run pace.  I'll probably keep doing that for at least a couple weeks unless I have a particularly good reason not to, so from here on out let's just assume that's what I did until I say otherwise.  My legs were not especially fond of me this morning, but I got through it, and the next two days are basically both rest days (30 minutes of walking on Saturday isn't nothing, but it isn't running), so let's see how things look on Sunday.

Friday, 10/29/21

On October 17 I did a 5K, my first in nearly two years (though I did do a virtual 10K in May of 2020).  For most of the next week, my ankles were pretty darn sore.  This week, things have not been nearly that bad during my down time.  So that seems like a positive.  This was a rest day and it was fine.

Saturday, 10/30/21

The next-easiest thing to a rest day is a 30-minute walk.  As I said on Thursday, that's not nothing, but it's certainly a lot easier to tolerate than anything involving a run.  I did a very straightforward 3 mph pace and it was no problem - definitely wasn't too sore or anything.

Sunday, 10/31/21

The training plan calls for the longest runs on Sunday, so this was the long run to cap the first week, another three miles.  (The Wednesday run was the same length, of course, but that run stays the same length throughout the duration of the 12 weeks while the Sunday run steps up to 6 miles.)  Things got a little tough energy-wise about halfway through, but I ate some Clif Shot Bloks during the 1.5-1.75 and 2.25-2.5 mile walk sections and that was enough to get me there.  Annoyingly, while my legs mostly feel not too bad in the wake of the first week, I'm starting to notice a suggestion of pain around the sesamoid bones at the base of my big toes, which in the past have been one of the more prominent pain points during my running.  As of now it's not painful so much as "the existence of that area of the body is registering on my nervous system," so we'll see how that develops.  It's not an unmanageable thing but boy would I rather not have to deal with it, although between that and, say, knee pain, I will take the former any day of the week.

Last Chance Saloon

On December 11, 2011, I finished the Honolulu Marathon.  I posted about it here.

On May 8, 2013, I posted that I would run another marathon.  I posted about it here.  In fact, it's easy to find if you want to read it, because it's literally the next post down.  That was nearly eight and a half years ago and although I've finished quite a few races since then - seventeen 5Ks, four 4-milers, a 5-miler, thirteen 10Ks (including two virtually), and even a 10-miler - I have yet to run another marathon.  Or even a half marathon.  At one point, I announced the intention to run a marathon during the week of my 35th birthday.  That was in 2017, and suffice to say it did not happen.

Which brings us to now.  I turn 40 in less than a year.  I wouldn't intend to suggest that the age of 40 is some sort of death sentence, but I do know that I feel like I am rapidly aging beyond the point at which I can just have some zany idea like "do a marathon" and then get myself somewhat quickly into acceptable shape for it.  40 is also an obvious milestone age and going into my 40s without being in terrible shape doesn't sound like the worst idea.  So maybe this isn't truly "last chance saloon," but if I'm ever going to run another marathon, at the very least I ought to start working on it now.

This morning I did the first running day of the Hal Higdon "base training" program to try and get into basic running shape.  That's 12 weeks.  Then, there's a 12-week half marathon training program that culminates in early April.  After that, it's the 18-week marathon training program.  And then, with any luck, a marathon - before my 40th birthday.

I doubt anyone is even reading this, but it's helpful to have some sort of accountability.  I'm thinking weekly recaps.  Whatever works.

Begin again

As you will no doubt be aware (and if you're not, just read the post before this), in 2011 I ran the Honolulu Marathon (though I use "ran" in about the loosest possible sense there).  I trained, rarely as hard as I should have, for six months, and then I did it.  It was arguably one of the largest accomplishments of my life to date which, frankly, is sort of pathetic.

When I committed to run the marathon, I weighed in the mid-180s, which at the time was more or less the least I had weighed since college.  I was working out regularly and dieting pretty substantially (in the sense that I was on a mostly paleo diet, not in the sense that I was cutting the hell out of my calorie intake).  That changed when I began running; I felt like I had to add carbs back into the mix, and lo and behold I let any diet lapse - and started to put weight back on, because while I was running, I was not doing the amount of running necessary to eat any old thing I wanted.

By the time the marathon came I had probably put back on ten pounds.  Whether or not this contributed to my knee issue on the last few miles isn't clear, but it can't have helped.  After the marathon I basically didn't want to think about running for a while.  So I didn't.  I didn't really think about exercise either.  I continued eating whatever.  And within less than a year of the marathon, my weight had gone back up to 210, only about ten pounds shy of my all-time high from 2009.  My legs did not like this at all.  Neither did my lower back, which began to ache almost constantly.

I changed.  I had to.  It was inexcusable for a 30-year-old man with no health problems preventing him from exercising to wake up in the morning feeling like he could barely move from back pain.  Since December 1, 2012, on which my official weight came in at 209, I have lost 33 pounds, two-thirds of the way to my goal of losing 50.  Progress is steady.  As far as I'm concerned, I will NEVER again in my life weigh 200 pounds, or even within spitting distance of it.

Anyway, you probably know all that if you follow me on Facebook, and if you don't follow me on Facebook it's amazing that you found your way here, but that's cool.  The point was to give a little backstory, just in case, before I launch into the reason we're here again: marathons.

To be perfectly honest, I don't even remember what motivated me to do a marathon in the first place.  Ads for "Team 2 End AIDS," the training program I worked with in Chicago, were plastered all over the El, and I had been seeing them for months before one day I just said "Sure" and decided to do it.  I guess at the time I was in something resembling shape, and was looking for a challenge, and I think a lot of people kind of idly have "Do a marathon" on their bucket list.  So I guess that's why.  I do know that when I finished the marathon (as I've written before) I was of two minds.  Half of me said, "Well, check that off the bucket list, and now I never have to do it again."  The other half of me said, "I really want to do that again."

The other half of me - the half that was sick of putting up with treating my body like garbage, the half that motivated me to lose 33 pounds and to keep going - won.  As it should have.  It's about time I found some damn willpower.  And so that's where we are right now: I'm officially announcing that I will run another marathon.

There are a few caveats to that.  First of all, I don't have a specific marathon in mind.  When I started thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that targeting a specific date was not ideal - while in theory that seems like a powerful motivator, one thing that I learned from the Honolulu experience is that it encouraged me to do just enough to get through it (and at 8:42:12, I really did just get through it).  There are a variety of reasons this isn't really good enough, but key among them is time.  If you're going to take nearly nine hours to finish a marathon, the Honolulu Marathon is virtually the only major race that won't kick you off the course.  I've been somewhat idly going through a list of major marathons that I find interesting, and almost all of them close their courses at seven hours or less.  Many close at six.  The Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in DC course, which is one of the most interesting to me, closes at five and a half.

The point being, getting "just there" isn't really enough.  I need - well, I want, anyway - to get to a point where I can really run a marathon, not just drag my butt over 26.2 miles, which is part two of the caveats.  (Plus, if you'll recall, I might not have managed to finish last time without the mental pickup from one the T2EA coaches, and certainly if I do this any time in the near future that won't be an option.)  I'm certainly not there now, and I don't know how long it will take.  There are training regimens that suggest you can get ready in a few months, but I really want to build steadily.  And, ideally, get myself to a point where I don't just do one and collapse, but am in sufficient shape to at least consider doing more.  I don't know that I'm going to turn into a "50-stater," but let's just say it's not something I'd be averse to.  If, and only if, I can actually get into the right kind of shape.  And I do mean the right kind - at the very LEAST I want to break six hours the next time I run an actual marathon.  If I can't do that, I probably don't have much business wanting to run one.

Third and finally, "will" is of course subject to health.  As of right now my legs seem fine - especially after having lost 33 pounds, and you'd think losing another 17 (or more) would only help - but if it turns out I'm just not built to hold up for long distance running, this whole thing will obviously have to be abandoned.  But I won't know if that's the case until I try.

So, here we go again.  Still losing weight, starting to run again.  I did a 5K with Alma last weekend; it was definitely more in the "just getting through it" camp, but I didn't want to die afterwards either.  I'll certainly keep posting on Facebook about things, and I'll try to make sporadic longer posts here when I actually have something (semi-)interesting to say about the whole ordeal.  At some point, maybe, I'll have actual, legitimate, interesting race stories to publish.  But for right now, let's just see how it goes.

The whole story

So, I ran the Honolulu Marathon last Sunday, 12/11/11.

It was quite the experience. I do think choosing such an "interesting" first marathon was probably a good idea, because I am still in nothing approaching actual marathon shape and it took me a long time to finish - eight hours, 42 minutes and change - and so at least I had stuff to look at during that time. I love Chicago, but suppose I did that marathon and had a similar physical result - limping along at mile 24, instead of coming up Diamond Head and being able to look out over a shimmering Pacific Ocean, I would have been staggering up Michigan Avenue - and not the cool part of Michigan Avenue either. (Mile 24 of the Chicago Marathon is on South Michigan a bit north of 31st Street.)

Either way, the marathon was really a tale of two halves. I felt pretty good for most of the first 13 miles - even going up Diamond Head around mile 8 didn't pose much of a problem. Here were my times for the first 13 miles:

Mile 1: 16:49
Mile 2: 16:37
Mile 3: 17:53
Mile 4: 27:58 (this time was more like Mile 3, but I lost at least ten minutes waiting for a bathroom)
Mile 5: 14:58
Mile 6: 14:29
Mile 7: 22:27 (again I lost at least five minutes in a bathroom line)
Mile 8: 15:04
Mile 9: 13:57
Mile 10: 14:42
Mile 11: 16:39
Mile 12: 16:09
Mile 13: 17:41

If you could pretend the 15 minutes or so of bathroom waiting didn't exist, I did the half in about 3.5 hours - by no means speedy, of course, although those 16 and 17-minute miles are a couple minutes slower than what I can do, but I was trying to pace myself for the second half.

Not that it ended up mattering. Pretty soon after the halfway point, I started tiring and pretty soon gave up on running almost entirely. Here's the rest:

Mile 14: 24:09 (this did include another short bathroom wait)
Mile 15: 19:55
Mile 16: 21:52
Mile 17: 21:01
Mile 18: 23:53
Mile 19: 17:51
Mile 20: 22:37
Mile 21: 23:45
Mile 22: 31:19
Mile 23: 23:54
Mile 24: 22:57
Mile 25: 21:13
Mile 26: 18:45
Final 0.2: 4:02

A couple things probably do jump out here - the 17:51 on mile 19, the 31:19 on mile 22, and the 18:45 on mile 26. During mile 19, a brief rainstorm sprang up; I gamely attempted to run a little more in the hope, I guess, that I could make it pass faster, but it wasn't long before I gave up. It's interesting how much faster a mile goes with even a brief amount of running, though. Mile 22, my right knee had started to hurt to the point that I was limping significantly, and so we stopped at the medical tent to get it iced for almost ten minutes. As for the 18:45 on mile 26, that was aided by the downhill off Diamond Head (and, probably, the fact that I could picture the finish at that point).

The marathon was physically exhausting, to be sure. As I said, my knee started hurting quite a bit on the last few miles, and by halfway through I had already pretty much exhausted my ability to run. In addition, I did the entire thing on sore feet, which for whatever reason were really hurt by my Saturday morning combination of two-mile warmup run with the T2 group (it probably did not help that the whole thing was done on sidewalks, which I had sworn off in May as too punishing on the feet and knees) followed by a two-mile round-trip walk from the hotel to the Hawaii Convention Center to pick up my packet (including bib and timing chip) at the marathon expo. One of the two probably would not have been fatal, but doing both in fairly quick succession really wore my feet out. By mile 4 on Sunday I was already commenting to one of the other T2 marathoners who was near the back of the pack with me that I hoped I hadn't ended up with a stress fracture. (Time will still tell but my feet do seem to be improved as I write this, on Wednesday, over Monday and Tuesday's condition.)

But even more so, it was mentally exhausting. To some extent this came from the physical exhaustion - once I started walking, the sheer amount of time left really became daunting. (At three miles an hour - which I wasn't even averaging - the last thirteen miles would have taken well over four hours, an insane amount of time to think about just walking. As it is, the back half of the marathon - or more accurately the final 13.2 - took me just a couple minutes shy of five hours to complete. Even factoring out the breaks it was still around 4:45, which is a huge chunk of time. It probably didn't help that the entire portion of the course between miles 11 and 22 was an out-and-back from the end of the H-1 freeway to the Hawaii Kai neighborhood and then back to the H-1. This enables you to see the mile markers on the opposite side of the road and realize exactly how far you are from being back to the same point, only going the other way. In addition, the main T2 cheer station was set up at the underpass where H-1 concludes since it was the 11-mile mark on one side and the 22-mile mark on the other - this meant I briefly got to see Alma at the 11-mile mark, which was nice. But as soon as I ran back onto the course, I immediately started thinking about how I wouldn't see her again until I did another 11 miles, i.e. the full distance I had already done. I would have been in good shape if this were a half-marathon. But of course it wasn't.

By mile 18, walking at not much more than a 2.5-mph pace down Kalanianaole Highway, I was starting to lose it - choking back tears, wondering why I had signed up for this and if I could just quit. Sheer embarrassment - I would have been the only T2er to drop out had I done so - was keeping me going, but only just barely (the fact that I have no idea how I would have even gotten off the course at that point also helped). When the rain swooped in heavily, if briefly, on mile 19, I wasn't feeling any better, but just after that I was caught by Kerry, one of the coaches from the Los Angeles chapter of T2 who was performing the role of sweeper - basically walking in the course to make sure everyone was finishing. I had seen him a couple miles earlier and already was feeling pessimistic, but this time I just outright started crying when he asked how I was doing. It was kind of embarrassing, but I couldn't really help it at this point (it turned out, unsurprisingly, that I was hardly the first person he'd seen break down during a Honolulu Marathon). With roughly seven miles to go, he promised to walk me the whole way in.

And thank God he did, because I don't know if I could have made it alone. I was often alone during my training runs - we started in pace groups, but on the longer runs these tended to splinter and, anyway, once the Chicago Marathon was over and the group was much smaller, there wasn't always someone in my usual pace group there on the training day. My longest training run, the 18-miler I did on November 19, was done alone, but I had run most of that path before, certainly on the back end, and was familiar with the surroundings. While Hawaii was nice to look at, it's a bit more mentally challenging when the only way you really know where you are is seeing the actual mile signs. (Even with much of the course being an out-and-back, which helps, you're just not familiar enough the first time to have a good sense for where the miles are, which tends to make them seem longer.) With Kerry walking next to me, I had someone to talk to, to pump me up a little and, perhaps most crucially, to tell the people at the 22-mile cheer station not to leave yet. Alma told me later that - obviously - she was the last one there, and the bus was preparing to leave with or without her. Had she left and I'd gotten to 22 to find no one, that would have been brutal. But had she stayed and been stranded - short of having to either call a cab to somehow find its way through traffic to this point or walk the last 4.2 miles with me on one ACL - I would have felt so guilty that I don't know what I would have done. As it was I started crying again. Alma told me she would support whatever I wanted to do, and I told her I had to finish.

By this point, as I've said, my knee was quite sore, and we stopped at the medical tent around the corner where they iced the knee for a few minutes. When we restarted, the knee felt good for a bit... until the ice wore off. At this point I was basically just limping in anyway, although having to go back over Diamond Head in this condition seemed unappetizing. But it actually wasn't that bad, and we coasted down it as mentioned earlier. Entering Kapiolani Park, I knew there was basically nothing that could stop me now, and I even somehow managed, perhaps on sheer adrenaline, to break into a pain-free jog for the last 30 yards or so, crossing the finish line at, officially, 8:42:12. (My watch says 8:42:33 but obviously I didn't stop it the second I crossed the line.)

Immensely grateful, I hugged Kerry and then we made our way through the park - in my case on legs that were barely still functioning and felt like they had been poured in concrete - to the tent where I picked up my finisher's t-shirt and medal. (They apparently only offer these for the first nine hours, so I just made it.) Then I limped over to Hula's Bar, site of the post-race party. Walking across the last stretch of grass before Kapahulu Avenue, I could see the other runners, coaches and supporters already hanging out on the second floor - and I cried again, just a tiny bit, this time not from frustration but from happiness and relief.

So that was the marathon. It was long, it was tough, it might have beaten me if I hadn't had support. But then, if I hadn't had support, I probably wouldn't have been there in the first place. I had a goal - break nine hours (so as to get a shirt and medal) or, somewhat facetiously, finish in less time than the flight from O'Hare to Honolulu took (nine hours, 20 minutes) - and I set it. I also didn't die of heat stroke (the weather was pretty favorable, and it only got sunny and hot on the last six miles, at which point I did get a small sunburn on the left side of my face), nor did I ever collapse, throw up, or anything. If my feet turn out to be fine I'll have gotten out of this with really no significant damage to speak of, although that is an open question right now. But either way, I made it, and if nothing else, I can say I did it once.

And yet, strangely, I find myself tempted not to stop there. As I've said to a couple people, and suggested on Facebook, I find myself a bit torn between two sides - the "Well, now I never have to do that again" side and the "I can't wait to do that again" side. I may have spent hours on the course hating it and wanting to quit at any opportunity, but as soon as I crossed the finish line a switch flipped from "This SUCKS" to "That RULED!" I'm hardly revising history - I think this entry tells the tale of how brutal things were for a while there - but there's such a sense of accomplishment that goes with finishing that it fuels a desire to run more, just so you can finish them, too.

The current plan, then, I think is this: first things first, I need to make sure my feet are okay. If they still hurt in a few days I'll probably need to check in with an orthopedist. But let's assume that they are, or at least that they eventually heal and I'm not told "Do not ever run long distances again under any circumstances." I need to lose weight - as it stands right now, at least 30 pounds, and possibly, if I were really out to get into major running shape (like four-hour marathon running shape), as many as 50. (Which would take me down to weights not seen since about my freshman year of high school.) Once I've done that, I can try to start running longer distances again and see how I take it. And if it seems like I can handle it, then maybe I start to run some marathons.

Now, maybe I don't. It wouldn't be the first plan I felt good about but never ended up following through on. But I need to lose weight and exercise more anyway, so it's not that much of a stretch, and having a real target attached to those things might help make them more achievable. At any rate, it's something to think about for now, and we'll see what happens later. But if I never run another one, well, at least I finished one.

T minus six weeks

It's Saturday, October 29; the Honolulu Marathon is Sunday, December 11, which means we're six weeks away. Yikes.

Positives

* I don't appear to have any actual injuries; I'm sore following today's run, of course, but that's just going to happen. I still have shin splints, I think, but I didn't notice them while running today, so that's good.

* Today I ran 14 miles, more than a half marathon.

Negatives

* 14 miles is, to date, the longest I've run - and let's be real, I didn't come anywhere close to running the whole thing.

For that matter, I was supposed to do 15 miles and it just wasn't happening. I was doing all right through the first... ten, maybe? But over the last few miles I hit a massive wall, and then the wall fell on me, and then the entire building collapsed. I brought more food than usual so I don't know if it's attributable just to that - although I've been home about an hour and I am starving - or if it's just a matter of my muscles being like "Yeah, we think you've used us enough today." My quads started actively cramping a bit around mile 11, and I walked most of the last four miles, including absolutely all of the last two. I tried a few times to break into a light jog, but my legs weren't having it; over the last mile I couldn't even really walk faster.

So I finished 14 miles in 3:56. That's... okay, I guess. Over 26.2 miles that comes out to around 7:25, which isn't great but at least puts me ahead of that 100-year-old guy. All told it breaks down to almost 17 minutes a mile.

But here's the thing. That's obviously an average. And if I hit a massive wall during the actual marathon, to the point where I simply cannot do anything but walk, it is entirely likely that I will do much worse than even that.

Here were my mile times for today:

Mile 1: 13:21

Mile 2: 17:29

Mile 3: 15:34

Mile 4: 14:21

Mile 5: 16:44

Mile 6: 14:52

Mile 7: 15:17

Mile 8: 14:29

Mile 9: 14:09

Mile 10: 16:41

Mile 11: 18:32

Mile 12: 20:31

Mile 13: 22:37

Mile 14: 21:21

We're told to keep the clock running during things like bathroom stops, which accounts for some of the higher earlier totals (I definitely stopped during miles 2, 3, and 5). Factoring out the bathroom, I was pretty well on my training pace - around 14:30 - until the last few miles. But if during the actual marathon I get to a point where the absolute best I could possibly do is 20 minutes a mile, and I still have twelve miles to go at that point... then we're looking at eight hours, best case. That's assuming I could even walk twelve more miles; I barely got through the last two today.

There's still some time, of course, but I need a better showing at the final pre-marathon long run in three weeks. I'm scheduled to do 18 that day; if I can manage to strengthen my legs in the next couple of weeks, maybe it'll happen. I mean, I can probably finish 18 if I had to. But I'd sure like to get as close as possible to that number without reaching a point where I can barely even walk the rest of the distance. Dragging myself over a full third of the marathon course in 80-degree temperatures is not going to be my idea of a good time come December 11.

Back on the horse

Between an ear infection, my wedding and honeymoon, and then a case of bronchitis, I missed five out of six weeks right as the mileage was really starting to ramp up in the training program, which of course is unfortunate. Two weekends ago I did seven miles and it wasn't that bad; this past weekend I did 12 miles and it was that bad. Although actually, it's Monday now and the overt soreness is already way down, so that's probably a good sign. The real key is going to be doing good maintenance runs during the week - I haven't really done any of those since July, which is surely part of the problem. Now that we're settled in Lake County, it should hopefully be easier to find the time if not necessarily the space. I haven't decided yet whether to just try to do them on a treadmill or if I want to run around the cul-de-sacs of the apartment complex.

The 12 miles took about three hours and ten minutes. Considering how much walking I did in the last three miles or so, a pace of just under four miles an hour is actually pretty good. The first six miles, from Foster down to Chicago Avenue, where I turned around, weren't that bad. It was the second six, and especially the last four, that were really rough. But hey, I still finished a distance that's nearly half a marathon!