As I mentioned in an earlier post, last week I completed my first marathon. (The Austin Marathon, woot woot!). I detailed my race experience, but hinted at how the journey leading up to the race was the real reward. Really, the race was just the icing on the cake, even though it stands as my longest continuous run to date. (I've done 30 miles in a day before, but at separate intervals.) In this post I plan to debrief about the year leading up to the race, about my training plan(s) and how life happened in the midst of it.
Am I Crazy?:
It's a question we've all asked ourselves from time to time. If you haven't then you probably are indeed, crazy. Flashback to December 2013. I'd just been released for Christmas break. My wife was in the hospital awaiting the birth of our daughter, Olive. There were severe complications, I'll spare the details, but in a nutshell we were planning on being camped out in the hospital for 10 weeks so Olive could be monitored in the womb and be delivered safely when the time arose. I was re-reading McDougall's Born to Run, (which is a must-read for any athlete. If you haven't read it, you're doing yourself a disservice,) and something woke up inside of me. "I don't know why." I told myself. "But doing a 100 mile race on foot one of these days sounds like a lot of fun." I figured I'd start with a marathon and go from there. My training began the next day. I had little idea what I was doing, training mostly by intuition when I first began. Two days later, I did a seven mile run, a distance I hadn't run since high school almost ten years prior, and didn't feel completely crippled the next day. I wanted more.
Training Phase I:
I hadn't trained much for anything in almost 2 years up to this point being that I worked professionally on a landscape and lawn crew. After mowing, weedeating, or digging irrigation lines for 12+ hours a day, you really don't feel like doing anything physical after work. But when I secured my teaching job, the lack of physical activity in my workday left my body and mind screaming for engagement. With energy to burn, I spend two months weightlifting 4 times a week, and supplementing short runs (3-4 miles) on the days I wasn't in the gym. After two months of this I began doing 7 mile runs four times a week with two days of weight training in between and one day of rest. My body felt strong. And overall I felt more confident in my ability "to go the distance".
Phase II: How Many Miles
I continued the cycle for about a month and then got to where I knew my body (and mind) needed a challenged to make it to the next level. After doing a bit of research I developed a build up plan that would fit into my schedule. The idea was to see how many miles I could put on my body in one week and be able to do it all over again. The progression was interesting to say the least. A couple of highlights: Planning my first ten miler on an unseasonably hot day in brand new shoes with no water. 22-mile unaided solo-midnight run that had me in tears by the end of it. (I had also run 8 miles earlier that afternoon). Discovering that walking every once in a while did not mean I'm a giant wuss. All in all, but the time the summer hit, I was doing 70 miles a week, but had missed marathon season. I felt like I was about to hit a plateau.
Phase III: Intuition
At some point I felt my running was getting stale. I could go and knock out 10 miles in 1:20 with relative ease. It was a good feeling, but I started getting bored. I got tired of checking my watch for mile splits. I was getting tired of the same old routes. So I put my watch on the shelf and went adventuring. This is what my current training plan has evolved into and what I used to train for the marathon:
1. I make sure I do at least two days a week of strength training (usually crossfit cycles with 2 mile run at the end, or some type of weight lifting. I usually to do circuits with a 4-5 minute run at the end of each circuit.
2. A speed workout. My go to here is doing 400-meter repeaters. High intensity increases both recovery time and running economy (aka how efficient your foot strokes are). If I don't do 400-meter repeaters, I'll do hill repeats.
3. A long run. I consider this anything 10 miles or longer, but really for me the determining factor is the 2 hours window. At two hours, the body will have depleted it's glycogen stores and this is where you really begin to see what you're made of.
4. I include one full day of rest, the other two days are what I call adventure runs. I don't have a specific time limit or distance in mind. I'll run as fast or as slow as a feel for as long as I feel. I've found that on average I go for usually an hour and do something between 7.5-8 miles depending on the terrain. These types of runs work well fro me because they engage the therapeutic side of running, the freedom of being out on the road or trail by yourself. Just you and God and your own two fit.
All in all, I would say, getting in shape and developing a healthier lifestyle are fringe benefits of the running life. (My diet also changed significantly as I found that if I cut the crap out of my diet, I recovered faster and thus could run more. I also had way more energy day-in and day-out on the job.) For me the key discovery with all of the training has been the mental training that occurs. I'm convinced that the physical engagement to any endurance task comes secondary to the mental fortitude required to complete it.
Life Happens:
So I have my optimum training plan developed. It should be easy. Just follow the formula and you'll be in great shape for the race? Right? Nope. Work meetings. Family emergencies. All kinds of unexpected things occurred. The lasts two months before the race I did not have the time to do any long runs. There were even a couple of weeks where I only ran two days those weeks. When things go ka-put with the training it's easy to get down on yourself. To top it off, two days before the race, I started coming down with some upper respiratory crud. But...enter the mind. If you're committed to it, you will reach the goal, regardless of how well you've stuck to your training program. I made the commitment that I was going to cross the finish even if I had to crawl. At about the 17 mile mark, I asked myself the question that had stuck out in my mind more than a year earlier sitting in the hospital. Am I crazy? Why am I doing this. I didn't know. But I had to finish. And when I did a flood of everything that happened to get me there washed over me. All I could do is cry with happiness.
