Faithful blog readers, let’s play a fun game I like to call, “Let’s All Pretend There’s Not a Global Pandemic Shattering All of Our Senses of Well-Being and Keeping Us All on Edge.” Shall we?
If you live near me, this winter you may have seen me running around town with two beer cans in my hands. I told my lovely wife Jen that she should prepare for comments from co-workers and neighbors: “Was that your husband I saw with a Schlitz in one hand and a Truly hard seltzer in the other?” To clarify, I did indeed have two cans in my hands, but not for personal consumption.
First, some backstory: Around the time my older brother joined cross country in high school, my dad started running. There was a private country club in our town, and my dad would run on the street along the chainlink fence outside the golf course. (This is of course a metaphor for how close we were to being members there.) After every run, he would come home and exclaim, “You won’t believe how many golf balls I found today!” He would have balls in his hands or his pockets with random logos: Harris Bank, Schmerler Ford. He would place them on the kitchen counter, where they would roll all over and annoy my mom. Then he would pile these into his golf bag and use them when he golfed. My siblings and I would be like, “Can you believe Dad does that? Just leave the balls there and buy new ones! I hope nobody recognizes him as our dad!” I swore that I would not grow up to be the type of oddball who grabbed stuff from the roadside on his runs.
Flash forward 35 or 40 years: Because of all the winter snow and ice on the canal towpath I frequent, I ran most days on paved roads. You have to be careful of black ice and other hazards, but I feel safer doing it. The main route I took got me quickly out of the city and into the country. I run against traffic so that I can step off the road quickly when vehicles are coming toward me.
Here I am on a long winter run, before injuries wiped out my spring running plans. Oh, happy day!
Anyway, the particular route I took is, I’m guessing, the perfect dumping ground for teenagers who don’t want to get caught with beer cans. I have a neighbor who takes his aluminum cans to a recycler for cash, so I started collecting the cans for him. Each day, if I was wearing a jacket, I could stick one or two cans in the pockets, but at the very least, I would have two cans in my hands. Which made it awkward to wave to drivers: “Hi there! It’s just friendly old me, hydrating on my long run with a Four Loko and a White Claw!” Like an oddball. Or my dad.
One day, I counted the number of cans I saw on the side of the road. Really only a 3-mile stretch was in the country on my run. Do you know how many cans I saw? Take a guess. Higher. No, even higher. I saw 186 cans! Ridiculous! That’s about 62 cans per mile! That’s just crazy. So I picked up 2 to 4 cans per run, but I never got close to gathering them all, and more were added every weekend. To be fair to teens, it could be anyone of any age throwing cans out their vehicle windows. (Looking at you, White Claw-loving thirtysomethings.)
Also on this route is the Catholic cemetery. To add mileage to my runs, I would go in there and run on the paved path. There were a few headstones for people I know who are still alive. I guess it’s a thing to prepay for a plot and have everything but the end date added to your headstone. Um, creepy!
Some of you might recall that late in the fall of 2018, I injured my hip while “Griswolding” the crap out of my house with Christmas lights. That little niggling injury turned into a major setback from which I didn’t fully recover until September of 2019. I ran two marathons in the fall and wanted to use them as a springboard for more: more running, longer winter runs, possibly longer races.
The main problem that I have is that I’m not a high-mileage guy. Whereas elite marathoners average 70 to 100-plus miles per week, and runners at about my level average around 40-60 per week, I usually struggle with injuries if I exceed 30-35. But there’s that little voice in my head that keeps telling me that I should ignore my own experience and bump up the mileage. So every year, typically after my last fall marathon, I try it, and every year, I develop a new injury, probably related to my increased mileage.
So here’s what I did: I increased my mileage, eventually averaging 43 miles/week. I sometimes ran on ice and snow; the towpath is well marked and relatively straight, and I didn’t want to run on country roads on my longest runs, which were 19 and 21 miles.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when an old injury flared up: my iliotibial (IT) band became excruciating on March 6. By March 11, it was clear that I should shut things down for a while. The IT band is a fibrous band runs from the top of your hip to the outside of your knee; when the pain is worse, your knee kills and is tender to the touch. It hurts to run, it hurts to walk, it hurts while sitting. It’s difficult to sleep; it loosens up after about half a day of movement, so it is worse in the morning. What causes it? Lengthening or altering your stride (typically, in winter while on ice or snow); running on unstable or uneven surfaces, which causes your leg to be unsteady with every step (ice or snow); and not being careful while gradually increasing mileage (I thought I was).
I swear I was even deliberate with my physical therapy, but now I know that I need to add some extra exercises to help it. What helps in the recovery? Rest is the most important step. When I first injured my IT band, in 2013, I had to take 2 solid weeks off, and then limit my runs to 2 or 3 miles a few times a week. It took 9 weeks (yikes!) to get back to normal. What else helps is strengthening your glutes and your core. (It seems that everything goes back to the core when it comes to injuries.)
When it first flared up, I decided to use a foam rolling tube. I was lying down on the tube on my left side, rolling my leg up and down the tube. Jen walked in and was like, “What are you doing?” It hurt a lot, and I said, “I’m (argh!) rolling out my (grr!) IT band because (ouch!) I read on some guy’s website that (ow!) rolling is beneficial (aagh!).” Jen said, “That doesn’t look good.” I said, “Trust me (argh!). I know what I’m doing (grr!).” The next day, I read on an actual medical website that maybe you shouldn’t roll it while it’s flared up. Oopsie!
(This might be a good time to mention my shoulder injury. Last September, I was digging out the rootball of a dead peach tree in our yard. I kept jamming the pointed blade of my shovel into the thick roots, over and over again. The next day, my shoulder killed. It felt, oddly enough, the same as when I tore the labrum in my left hip. It turns out I tore the labrum in my left shoulder. Instead of going for physical therapy or surgery, I chose to rest it. Seven months later, it’s better, but I still have limited range of motion. Take your left hand and reach it behind your right shoulder; you can probably touch your back, right? I can only reach over to the top of my shoulder. There go my dreams of being a major-league pitcher.)
So, no running for a while. Time to heal. I had signed up for 4 marathons this year, and so far, one of the spring ones has been moved to the fall; no word yet on the other one, but I would be shocked if it gets staged in early May. Which, as sad as that is, means that my rest time corresponds with this pause on all my planned races.
If you see me around town now, I’m the guy on the bike, riding alongside my daughter or Jen as they run. And definitely no beer cans in my hands. At least not yet.
I ran into an old running buddy a few weeks ago. The first thing he said to me was, “Where are your blog posts?” I was like, “Oh, crud, somebody noticed that I’ve been in silent mode with the blog!” I gave him about 99 reasons why I hadn’t been writing, and even tossed in a few health problems to throw him off my scent, like my hip impingement, and the tinnitus and hearing problems I’ve developed.
He shut me down with a recounting of his life at the moment: working 10-hour days driving a truck; commuting 2 hours one way, so he’s gone 14 hours most workdays; an adult child boomeranging back into the family home, this time with her spouse and a Siberian Husky whose shedding is so prolific that the cloud of fur trailing it looks like Pigpen from “Peanuts”; knee and back problems that ended his running days; and, in case I thought I was special, tinnitus and hearing loss. Oh, and he’s a living kidney donor who was literally on death’s door from complications after the surgery. (He’s a regular Mother Teresa, this guy. Jeez, and I feel like a saint when I let my lovely wife Jen eat the last piece of mushroom pizza.) “So tell me again,” he said, “what’s so important in your life that you haven’t been writing?”
In my head, I was quoting the late, great Carrie Fisher from her role as Marie in “When Harry Met Sally…” when her friends would tell her that her affair partner was never going to leave his wife: “You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right.”
Time to dust the cobwebs off the blog and start anew in 2020. Let’s look back at my 2019 running, shall we? Every year since 2013, I’ve kept a running journal, a little notebook in which I scribble my daily mileage and time, notes on how I felt or what I wore for future reference (you would not believe how easy it is to forget how to dress for spring weather, say, the first 50-degree day of the year: “Do I wear pants or shorts?”), and I map out my training schedule so I know when my races are and when I should be doing long runs, speed workouts, etc.
And yes, Mr. and Mrs. Smartypants, I am familiar with a little thing called the internet and Strava and all the web-based training sites; I just prefer the little journals so that if I take trips, I can pack them along and not worry about web access.
I use a Garmin GPS watch to track mileage. Specifically, a purple Forerunner 220 that I won at a local 5K. It’s a little clunky on my dainty bird-boned wrist, which is why I used to wear the women’s version in lime green, but when I won this one, I decided to upgrade. (Also, I saw a picture of Meb Keflezighi wearing one, and he’s my size, so why not?) For each run, I write down distance, time, average mile pace, and mile split for every mile. I then add up weekly, monthly, and yearly mileages to see how much I’ve run. (I keep a running tally of how many miles I’ve put on my shoes so I know when to retire them as well.)
Me, when I am adding up my yearly mileage.
The yearly goal is always a minimum of 1,000 miles. That works out to just over 19 miles a week, which should be easy peasy lemon squeezy, considering that I run about 30-35 miles a week when training for marathons. Faithful blog readers (looking at you, Dave) might recall that I run very few miles for a marathoner; most marathon experts will suggest 50-70 miles if you are serious, and elites will put in over 100 miles a week. But they are also a little “insane in the the brain,” as the guys in Cypress Hill sang back in 1993 (“Insane in the membrane; crazy insane, got no brain!”).
Before I added up my 2019 mileage, I looked back at the previous years:
2013: 879 miles (approximate; I didn’t wear a GPS watch yet)
2014: 1,144.19 miles
2015: 814.59 miles (missed the first 2 months of the year with anterior tibialis tendonitis on both feet; ouch!)
2016: 1,593.45 miles
2017: 1,546.77 miles
2018: 1,214.28 miles (and this was with missing all of December with hip pain)
Knowing that I had not run at all in January and February of 2019 with my hip issues, I was still hopeful that the rest of my year made up for it and that I broke 1,000. My lowest weekly total, obviously, was zero miles. My highest was 41.06 miles, which is a little misleading: it was the third week of September, and I ran the Fox Valley Marathon that week, so if you remove the 26.2 from that, I only did runs of between 2 and 4 miles on the other days.
Anyhoo, the total. I knew it was going to be close, and as I calculated the sum on my phone, I realized it was going to be really close. Really, really close. Keep in mind that, on almost every run, I start from my house and finish on the corner of our street. Some days, I tell myself that I have to make it all the way to the street corner and finish the run as preparation for finishing races strong. Some days, I think, “Screw it! I’m tired and I will stop half a block short and walk home!” Well, those days came back to haunt me.
2019 total: 999.59 miles.
ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!? 0.41 mile short of 1,000?!? That’s about three blocks in my neighborhood. If I jogged to my daughter’s school just once, I would have surpassed that! If I ran to the fast-food joints down the street from us, I’d be good. When we went on a 2-week vacation last summer, I said to Jen, “Remind me to bring my running shoes so I can run.” And did I run? Of course not! We were on vacation! Aargh!
Lesson learned. Finish the run. I know 1,000 miles is an arbitrary number, but it sounds a lot cooler than 999.59.
Literature nerd’s side note: I titled this “The Best Laid Plans,” which is of course the beginning of the saying, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Which is itself an English-translation paraphrase of the original Scots-language quote, from the poem “To a Mouse,” by the Scottish poet Robert Burns: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” I find that things frequently gang aft agley for me. Especially when I don’t finish the run!
I was already nervous about returning to marathon shape after having injured myself so severely that I couldn’t run for 3 months (more on that later). Then things got weird.
This is me the last time I ran the Fox Valley Marathon, September 2017.
About 4 weeks out from my first marathon in a year, I was gearing up for my last long run, a 22 miler that would give me an idea of what kind of condition I was in and help me practice my pace and other race-day logistics. A few days before the long run, my lovely wife Jen said casually, “Have I ever told you the story about how my friend convinced her boyfriend to shave his armpits because he had bad body odor and shaving your armpits keeps BO at bay?” I said, “Huh, no,” and she said, “Yeah, and here’s the kicker: Even after they broke up, he thanked her for that piece of advice! Isn’t that funny?” Then, a few days later, Jen said, “I was just laughing to myself about that story I told you, about my friend who convinced her ex-boyfriend to shave his armpits. And he thanked her for it after they broke up!” And once more, the next day: “You know my friend, the one who convinced her ex to shave his pits?” I said, “ARE YOU ASKING ME TO SHAVE MY ARMPITS BECAUSE I STINK?!? IF YOU ARE, JUST SAY IT!!!” She said calmly, “Oh, I mean, sure, if that’s something you’re interested in doing…”
So I found myself slathering shaving cream on my armpits and taking a razor to them that day. (Mind you, Jen and I first met in our teens on our high school cross-country team, and this issue had never come up in the ensuing 30-plus years. Maybe I should check if I have bad breath while we’re at it.) Now, I don’t know if you remember the first time you shaved a part of your skin; I have a hard time recalling because the only thing I’ve ever shaved is my face, and I was 13 when I started that. It’s been a long time. Anyway, what I wasn’t ready for was how freaking painful it was. Ouch! I cut myself pretty badly.
So then I ran the 22 miler. Oh, the chafing! It was not fun. But now I find myself a few days out from the race, and it’s too late to let my armpit hair grow back out to its natural, luxurious length. So I am stuck shaving. I said to Jen, “How often do I have to do this?” and she said, “Oh, not much, only every couple days.” “EVERY COUPLE DAYS?!?” So here we are.
Anyway, my injury. Last year, I ran three hard marathons, two in the spring (cough cough, Boston qualifier here), and one in October on a flooded course that messed with my stride as I high-stepped through multiple waterlogged parts. My recovery was fine, though. And then I did something stupid.
Actual photo of me getting the lights ready for Christmas.
My son was coming home from college the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I thought it would be fun to surprise him by Clark Griswolding the crap out of our house. To get to the high peak above our garage, I decided to step out of a second-floor dormer window onto a sloping part of the first-floor roof. As soon as I did, I felt a twinge in my left hip. (Handy tip when listening to runners talk about running: when they use the phrase “I felt a twinge,” nothing good follows.) I scooted out to the edge of the peak, did the lights, then spent another 2 or 3 hours finishing the lights on the roof, some bushes, and a few trees. It looked great at night when the timers kicked them on.
The next day, I had to drive 8 hours round trip to get my son at college (Go Green! Go White!), and my hip felt sore after the drive. The next day, I ran 10 miles. The day after that, Thanksgiving, I did another 8 miles. And then my hip was so sore that I couldn’t run more than 5 miles without pain. I had trouble lifting my left leg, and when I ran, I slightly turned my knee outward to compensate for the pain. I was limping by the sixth mile each day. The limping became constant, and I couldn’t sleep at night because of the dull, aching pain. It felt as if something was out of place in my hip socket. There was also groin pain, rear-end pain, calf-muscle pain, and hamstring pain. So I decided to shut things down for a while.
“A while” went from 5 days to 2 weeks to the rest of the year. When I couldn’t start running without pain on January 1, I started to get concerned. By February 1, I was alarmed. By March 1, I said to Jen, “I think I need to see an orthopedic surgeon.” I was still eating a high-calorie diet in the winter, since I usually burn it off with running, and I gained some weight, too. It wasn’t like I ballooned up, but it was all in my belly to the “I can’t button any jeans, so I guess I will wear sweatpants everyday” point.
We have neighbors whose son had a similarly described injury when he was in high school, and they had told me, “As long as the doctor doesn’t say it’s a hip impingement and a torn labrum, you should be okay.” Their son had surgery for it, and it was awful: the hip had to be immobilized for a month, then physical therapy was challenging, and he wasn’t able to run at full speed for 12 to 18 months.
The surgeon examined me, took some x-rays, and said, “Well, I have good news and bad news.” I said, “Give me the bad news first; that’s the kind of guy I am.” He said, “You have a hip impingement and a torn labrum.” I said, “That’s terrible! And the good news?”He said, “You’re too old for the surgery to work!” I said, “I’m tooold? That’s good news?” The surgery is effective up until age 45 in men, and after that it causes degenerative issues that lead to an earlier need for hip replacement surgery. Ugh.
Basically, the hip joint is a ball and socket, and the labrum is this material that stretches around it to keep it together. My labrum was partially torn. Usually, you’ll hear of torn labrums in the shoulder socket, like with baseball pitchers and football quarterbacks. It’s a repetitive motion injury. Obviously, pitchers and quarterbacks don’t run as much as marathoners, so they don’t typically tear their hip labrums. (If a QB is running a lot, it’s because his offensive line is bad; that’s another issue altogether!) And the hip impingement is sort of like the ball is partially popping out of the socket (and as I put this all together, I could feel my labrum then slipping into the socket and getting caught).
Actual photo of me receiving physical therapy.
My best course was physical therapy and hopes and prayers. So I went through a month’s worth of physical therapy. If you’ve never undergone PT, picture the torture machine from the film “The Princess Bride.” PT was only slightly less brutal. I’m exaggerating, of course; my physical therapist was a lovely guy whose goal was to help people get back to their normal range of activities, and the fact that he enjoyed watching us suffer through his exercise routines was beside the point.
Armed with these routines, I was released from restrictions on my running, and I slowly started building back up to my normal speed and weekly mileage (emphasis on the “slowly”). I brought those PT routines home, along with some large rubber bands to help with the exercises, with the promise to do them at minimum twice a week. And how many times a week have I averaged doing them at home in the last 5 months? Zero. I’ve done zero. It’s pitiful, really. I like to do the running, but I am not a faithful stretching or workout routine guy.
Jen and I do a yoga-and-light-weights workout twice weekly, and I have had to drop a few of the yoga positions and stretches because of the stress they put on my hip (looking at you, Downward Facing Dog). And even moving the weights is a problem: I can do the shoulder presses and lat pulls and curls with the free weights, but when I put them back down on the floor, I have to be careful to turn my left leg so as not to pop the hip out of place again. (I don’t mean to brag, but I’m working with 17.5-pound weights here. I’m a regular Arnold Schwarzenegger.)
But there was a problem: before I injured myself, I had signed up for two fall 2019 marathons, a full year ahead of time. And they are nonrefundable. There was no way a cheapskate like me was going to miss out on running them. Plus, I need to run three more marathons to get to 20 overall. So I cranked up the training, but I have done hardly any speed work, and I have run literally no shorter races. I typically fit in several 5K races to test my speed and keep things fresh.
Here’s the schedule: Fox Valley Marathon, one I have done twice already, this Sunday. Then a local 5K, which I have won twice, 6 days later. Then the Chicago Marathon 2 weeks after that. This will be fun.
I am currently in the carbo-loading phase of my runner’s diet. (And by “carbo,” I mean m&ms, chocolate chip cookies, and ice cream.) I had been eating lots of protein these last few months, with the goal of (in the words of the writers for Men’sHealth magazine) getting “ripped!” and “shredded!” and “jacked!” I don’t think it worked. But I did lose the belly fat. And my armpits are shaved like all the men in the magazine’s photos.
On Sunday, I go for it. The plan is to run a steady 8-minute-mile pace for the first 20 miles, and see how I feel in the last 6 miles. Unfortunately, I may have done some yard work that exacerbated my hip issue this week; I felt a twinge. Or maybe I am just paranoid. Either way, I am running this sucker. If you see me limping around town next week, you’ll know why.
A week before the 2018 Boston Marathon, I started checking the weather forecast for Boston: 100% chance of rain the morning of the race. “Come on,” I said to my lovely wife Jen, “how can weatherpeople be 100% certain of rain a whole week out? They can’t even predict the next day’s temperature correctly, amirite?” Jen said, “Still, you might want to pack your rain jacket for the day of the race.” (Editor’s note: Stop with the blatant foreshadowing!)
Leading into Boston, I had an amazing streak of my first 14 marathons without having bad weather. “Bad weather” being a relative term: I’d run in extreme heat, wind, cold, and slight drizzle, but never rain. Every marathon, I’d prepare for rain but hope for sun. Actually, clouds; for me, the perfect race conditions are about 40 degrees with a cloud cover.
This would be my third Boston Marathon. My first, in 2013, was all kinds of bad, namely because of the horrific bombings. My second, in 2016, was relatively uneventful as big-city marathons go. Jen’s brother had moved to Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston, so we stayed near him and had a good visit.
A little background on Boston: It’s the oldest continuously run marathon in the world, dating back to 1897, and also the hardest to get into. You have to run a qualifying time, based on your age and gender, that works out to about the top 10 percent of marathoners in your age group. Then, you have to get an entry: over the last few years (especially since 2013), the entry standard is actually stricter than the qualifying times because so many people are trying to get those entries. This year, for example, you had to run 4:52 or faster than your qualifying time. That’s ridiculous. It’s getting harder and harder, so they just moved the bar and tightened the standards for 2020 by 5 minutes.
Some other unique things about Boston: It’s run on a Monday, specifically, Patriots Day, celebrating the beginning of the American Revolution and a Massachusetts state holiday. It’s a good thing schools are closed that day, because all those yellow school buses are needed to transport the runners on race morning: the Boston course is basically a west-to-east line, starting in the suburb of Hopkinton and going through several other towns (Ashland, Framingham, Natick, Wellesley, Newton, and Brookline) before getting to Boston. The Boston Marathon only spends 2 miles in the city of Boston. Consequently, runners board school buses in Boston Common to be bussed out to Hopkinton, where they camp out on the high school football fields at the “Athletes’ Village” and have free snacks and drinks.
Because of the logistical challenges of getting everyone out there, the buses start leaving at 6 a.m. Another strange thing about Boston: the race starts at 10 a.m. and the runners get sent in waves every 20 minutes or so. Potentially, you could arrive at the athletes’ village 4 hours before your start time. (Also, the athletes’ village is a 0.7-mile walk to the starting line, so have fun with that extra distance!)
Are you following so far? Monday 10 a.m. start, 26-mile bus ride several hours before you race, athletes’ village quite a distance from the starting line. Oh, and it’s a really hilly course.
My Boston Marathon “celebration jacket,” from the 2013 edition. Note that I had the other two years I ran embroidered onto the jacket. Fancy!
Jen and I flew in on the Saturday before the race and were taking the free public bus to the marathon expo (the place where runners have to pick up their race packets; they make you wade through literally hundreds of sponsor/vendor booths to get to the packet pickup, so I always end up buying extra commemorative gear). Boston is famous for its celebration jackets, issued every year in different colors. It’s common for someone to buy one in their first year and then embroider subsequent years onto the breast and back of the jacket, so people can see how many times they have run it at a glance.
I was wearing my 2013 jacket (in its garish blue-and-yellow color scheme) when a guy on the bus gave me a head nod. It was a safe bet that most of the people on this bus were going to the expo, so he introduced himself as Allan and struck up a conversation with us. The typical “how many have you run,” “where you you coming from” questions. He mentioned that he was returning from a work conference but lived in Cambridge. We said, “Oh, really? We are staying in Cambridge, at a bed and breakfast.” Allan said, “Which one?” We told him, and he said, “I live half a block from it!” It turned out he was a professor at Harvard, in a field that we were familiar with, and Jen and I had all kinds of questions for him. (I also dropped my little “my 10-times-great-grandfather Thomas Dudley was a founder of Harvard College” tidbit on him; that went over better with him than it does with most people.)
Here we are at the marathon expo! Let’s go spend some money! (Question: Does this photo make my nose look big?)
We went to the expo together and waited in line to go through security. Just before we entered, Allan wished us luck and whipped out his business card. He said, “My wife and I usually host a few other runners at my house on Monday morning, and then we catch a cab to the starting line. We’d love to have you. If you are interested, give me a call.” Then we parted ways.
“Wow!” I said to Jen, “that was generous of him!” She said, “Or creepy. Let’s check this guy out to see if he’s legit before you commit to going to his house.”
The dreaded Porter Square escalator. The trip to the top takes approximately 17 hours.
We took the Boston subway system (the “T”) Red Line up to Cambridge to check into our bed and breakfast. We exited at the Porter station, which at 105 feet below ground is the deepest in the T system; there’s a frighteningly long escalator ride to the top, wherein when you get on at the bottom, you can’t see the top of it. It’s scary; it’s common to see whimpering little toddlers clinging to an adult’s hand with their eyes closed the whole escalator ride up. (And by “whimpering little toddlers,” I mean “me.”)
We walked to our B&B. It had your typical B&B features: whimsical yellow exterior, creaky floors, antique doorknobs, excessively large and heavy keychains, cramped rooms. One exception to the rules of B&Bs at this one, though, was the unusual number of children running the halls. And at breakfast the next morning, we found out that most of the guests were European. Ooh-la-lah! (Actually, they were from Belgium and Germany. Ich lieben!)
We crashed in our rooms for most of the rest of Saturday, venturing out only for food (it was cold). Checking on the forecast, they were now calling for 100% chance of rain the morning and afternoon of the race. Aw, come on!
This must be a sign!
On Sunday, it started raining. Jen said, “So, let’s see that raincoat you are going to wear for the race.” I said, “Um, I didn’t bring it.” “What?!?” I explained that I was so focused on packing the celebration jacket and the gear that I had used for the previous 14 marathons, which I would like to remind everyone included no heavy rain, that I didn’t think it would be necessary. I also had my trusty black baseball cap that would keep my head dry. Jen about went through the roof. (Which wasn’t hard; the B&B’s ceilings were low.) So we turned on the TV to check the local Boston weather folks. Now they were calling for 100% chance of heavy, driving rain from midnight Sunday to midnight Monday (remember, the race is run on Monday morning), sustained 30-mph headwinds with gusts of 40 mph (remember, we run in one direction the whole time, which in this case would be “into the wind”), temps in the upper 30s, and generally dangerous running conditions. I believe the words “squall,” “monsoon,” and “historic in a bad way” were bandied about.
Our room at the B&B had the coveted blowhole. Hang on, my editor tells me the word I am looking for is “porthole.”I believe the correct architectural term for the interior floor plan of the B&B is “hodgepodge.”I roam from city to city, running races and drinking smoothies. They call me Nomad. (Incredibly, this store called “Nomad” had a sign in the window that said, “We’ve moved 2 blocks north.”)
We had noticed a Goodwill store a few blocks away, so we went to look for throwaway clothes that I could wear to the starting line. It’s traditional at big-city races to wear extra clothes/jackets to keep warm before the race, and it’s especially important at Boston if you are sitting on the football field for 4 hours. When we got there, it was packed with like-minded runners. We picked through the men’s, women’s, and children’s sections (I have no shame) and cobbled together an outfit that included an outer layer ski jacket that would keep me dry and warm, a vest for extra warmth, another light jacket, and a pair of relatively water-repellent pants to cover my legs before the race.
The only thing we couldn’t find was a pair of tights; even though I’d never run in them, Jen thought they would be useful in the cold and that they would shed moisture in the moments when the rain would let up. We headed over to Jen’s brother’s place, and he happened to have a pair of UnderArmour tights that he was looking to jettison. “You’re kidding,” I said. “No, why?” he asked. “Well, for starters, you are 1 foot taller than me.” Jen said, “Just try them on.” So I did, and amazingly, they weren’t completely ridiculous.
Getting ready at 5 a.m. on race morning! This would be the first of what I assumed would be many pictures Jen would take of me throughout the day, as she traveled the course getting action shots of me.
Jen added one last item to my gear: her lime-green women’s lightweight rain jacket. I really didn’t want to wear it, but she insisted. One reason I had always hesitated to bring a running jacket to a race is that you have to wear the race bib on the outermost layer, which would mean zipping up a jacket and then pinning the bib over the front, which would mean I wouldn’t be able to easily remove the jacket in case of rain. We solved the problem on the morning of the race: I also had a lime-green tank top, so we put the bib on the tank top and then pulled it over the outside of the raincoat. I looked strange, but it would (hopefully) keep me dry.
That afternoon, I decided to call my new friend Allan. I told him that I was in and that Jen would come with me to his house for the prerace visit. (We had Googled him and saw that he was quite well-known in his field and in the running community, so Jen wanted to chat with him some more.) Allan said that we were welcome but that now it turned out that perhaps only one other runner would show. Also, his wife wouldn’t be there. Neither, it seemed, would his college-age daughter. In addition, I’d be welcome to look through his closet for any clothes that I needed. We set a time and commiserated about the weather; he assured me that we’d be fine. “I’ve run it for the last 8 years; the 2015 race had rain, so it will be manageable.”
I got off the phone and filled Jen and her brother in on the next morning’s plans. Jen said something like, “Aww, look who’s got a new best friend. Do I need to walk you to your playdate?” Also, she did not want me to raid his closet.
That night, we chilled and had my usual prerace pasta dinner. Jen’s morning plans were to walk me to Allan’s by 6 and then go back and have breakfast (the “&B” part of our B&B that I would unfortunately miss out on). Then her brother and she would watch for me at Heartbreak Hill (about 20 or 21 miles into the race; there’s a convenient T stop near it) and at the finish line. When we went to bed, it was pouring hard.
When we woke up at 5 a.m. on Marathon Monday, it was pouring hard. Things did not look good. I got dressed and decided at the last minute to wear a throwaway pair of running shoes that I had brought instead of my nicer, newer ones. The race organizers had announced that everyone could bring a pair of shoes to the starting line to change into, but I figured whatever shoes I had would be soaked within 5 minutes of stepping outside, so having dry shoes at the start really wouldn’t matter. (As it happened, I was off by about 4 minutes and 45 seconds; it took 15 seconds outside for my shoes and socks to get drenched.)
As we walked down the block to Allan’s, I told Jen that I was really nervous. I don’t like surprises on race weekends. I have a system that seems to work: same clothes, same meals and snacks, same waking and arriving times, etc. This was all new: unusual clothes, unusual weather, and now I was about to go to a stranger’s house and meet other strangers instead of just relaxing and thinking about the race. (Boston is already a routine disrupter with the bus rides, but at least I had done those twice before.)
Actual photo of how Jen spent the rainy, windy, freezing marathon day. Remember, at this exact moment I was braving 30-mph winds, torrential downpours, and bitter cold. I understand tea and snacks were consumed while I was gone, too.
When we got to Allan’s, it was just him. I turned out that all his other friends decided not to do the early-morning meet-up routine at his place. So he offered us food and drinks and we chatted while he got ready. He showed me his triple-tying method for his shoelaces; guaranteed not to untie, he said. He told me that a student of his would be meeting us at the bus, and that he had a friend in Hopkinton whose house we could hang at before the race. This is one of those mythical things about the Boston Marathon: you gather in the sleepy New England town of Hopkinton, which comes alive one weekend a year for this race, and if you are lucky enough to know someone in town, you can go to their house for prerace festivities. I couldn’t believe my luck!
Allan had called us a taxi ahead of time (yes, some people still haven’t transitioned to rideshare apps), and we said goodbye to Jen. We got into the cab from Allan’s home; he reiterated, “In 2015, we ran in the rain. This is doable.” He told me not to worry about the cab fare; it was his treat. (Which was convenient because I didn’t have any money or credit cards on me.)
It was a quick ride from Cambridge to Boston Common; when we got there, however, traffic was a mess. We kept trying to get the cabbie to just let us out anywhere, but he had a particular stop in mind in front of a hotel. Finally, when we got there, the fare was only $5 or something. Allan handed the cabbie a twenty. “Oh,” the cabbie said, “I don’t have any change.” What?!? He said he could leave us in the cab and step inside to make change. After discussing with me (the guy with no money), Allan just decided to give him a big tip and leave. The cabbie was overly thankful and promised to name his firstborn after Allan.
As we walked over to the buses, Allan said, “Eh, not bad; in 2015…” We met up with his student, Gus, at the bus. Gus was 20 and had run only one previous marathon; his time, 2:59, was about 25 minutes faster than Allan’s and mine. Gus said that he would stick with us for most of the race, but Allan made him promise not to drag himself down by hanging back with us two middle-aged guys. Gus was nice enough (or concerned about his grade in Allan’s class enough, one or the other) to say he didn’t plan to drop us too soon. Allan admonished Gus and me to triple-tie our shoes; he was worried that our shoes would come undone and slow us all down.
The bus ride was uneventful. The most common topic on that 45-minute ride to Hopkinton is how many marathons people have run. Even at 14, I was on the low end of the scale. (My first Boston was only my third marathon ever, and the people around me on that bus had run 50, 100, and even 150+ marathons; there’s definitely a little OCD in marathoners.) The driving rain continued all the way down the highway to Hopkinton.
When we got to Hopkinton, the buses let all of us runners out behind a fenced-off area around the high school. When we stepped off the bus, the rain was so hard that I could barely keep my eyes open, and it was so loud that I could hardly hear what anyone was saying. I had been living and dying on Allan’s assurances to me that everything would be fine because of how everyone handled it in 2015. After standing in the rain for 15 seconds, he turned to Gus and me and said, “Oh, this is much worse than 2015!” Crap.
We entered the Athletes’ Village because they wouldn’t let us walk back out the bus entrance to get to Allan’s friend’s house in town. There are two football fields that each have massive tents that cover half the field, so runners can gather (on sunny years) in shade or in the grass if they want, while they wait for their starting waves to be called. This year, everyone was crammed under the tents. The fields were complete mud; just to traverse the 10 yards from the paved path to the tents would have meant instantly caking our shoes in mud. People were packed like sardines against each other; the unlucky ones on the edges of the tents were still being drenched by the rain. It looked like Woodstock without the music. Or drugs.
There was no way we were going to wait in the tents with the masses. We went all “Hogan’s Heroes” and looked along the fence line for places we could slip through to get to Allan’s friend’s house, without luck. “Come on,” Allan yelled, “let’s go to the exit.” The way it works is, you can’t leave the village to walk the 0.7 mile to the starting line until your wave is called. Allan and I were in the second wave; Gus was in the first, but he was going to start with us. As we walked toward the exit, there were all kinds of volunteers telling people to show them their bibs; if your bib wasn’t the color of the wave being allowed to exit, you had to stay back.”How are we going to get through?” I yelled to Allan. “Don’t worry!” he said. When we got to the exit, he gave me a grin and covered his bib, and I realized that his plan was to just hope that the driving rain would allow us to sneak past the hundred volunteers trying to prevent this very thing. Bizarrely, it worked. We just bent over as if the rain was so heavy that we could hardly stand up (which it was) and plowed through.
Of course, there was a fence the whole walk to the starting line, but we just found an amenable volunteer to let us out along the way. We walked another half mile to Allan’s friend’s house. As we approached the house, Allan said, “I hope they are here.” “What do you mean?” Gus and I asked. “You see, I don’t actually know the people who live here, but some friends of mine told me to come here and they’d be here.” Hmm…
When we knocked, an elderly man answered. “Is Bob here?” Allan asked. “You just missed him,” the man said. Dejected, we turned to leave, but then the man said, “Come on in and get out of your wet clothes and warm up a while, guys.”
The man and his wife were well prepared for the conditions and had towels laid out on all their furniture. We stripped off our shoes and socks and outer layers and relaxed for a half hour while they plied us with hot drinks and snacks. It was the strangest prelude to a marathon that I had ever experienced. Then, too soon, we put on our soaked gear (Allan triple-tying his shoes) and headed out for the start.
When we got to the start, Gus, who was wearing short-shorts, said, “Can I ask you a weird favor?” I said, “It depends. How weird is it?” He explained that his hands were frozen already and that he couldn’t get his phone to fit back into his (really tiny) fanny pack over his shorts, and would I mind pushing it in for him? So I struggled mightily pushing his phone into his groin to get it into the pack. After a few minutes, he said, “Another favor. My fingers aren’t working and I can’t press play on the phone. Can you press against my fanny pack?” So I got intimate with Gus’s groin area again to get his playlist started.
Then the race began. It was as bad out there as the forecasters predicted. If you have seen “The Perfect Storm,” you know what I’m talking about. Have you ever been driving and it starts raining so hard that you have the windshield wipers on full blast and you still can’t see, so you have to lean forward to look out the windshield, and you think “it can’t possibly rain harder than this”? Well, it would do that, and then rain harder. The whole race. Every step of the 26.2 miles. Amazingly, Jenny was right about the tights; they would get soaked, somehow feel as if they were wicking moisture away, and then get soaked again. And her lime-green jacket worked like a charm.
About 2 miles into the race, Allan said, “My shoes are untied! I have to stop and re-tie them.” Oh, the triple-tied irony! Gus and I couldn’t believe it. Also, I had rocks in my shoes, so we went to some random person’s driveway and fixed our shoe situations. Gus said, “Are we seriously stopping this early in the race?” I told him, “If you’re going to take a trip with two middle-aged men, be prepared for frequent stops!”
I was surprised at how many spectators there were along the course. Boston is famous for its vibe: people put their grills in their front yards and have parties while the runners pass. It’s not uncommon to be offered food, drinks (alcoholic and otherwise), and other random things along the course. And there they were, a little wet but still cheering us on.
About 5 or 6 miles in, I noticed that Gus was having a problem with his short-shorts. It seems that he couldn’t tie the drawstring tight enough to keep them from falling down. Periodically, he would have to use both hands to pull them up (like, literally pull them up because they were sliding down his waist and legs). By mile 10, he was in full-blown crisis mode and ran the last 16 miles of the race, I kid you not, with his right hand clinging to the waistband of his short-shorts. I do not recommend this one-armed running stride.
Racing up Boylston Street to the finish line in Jen’s jacket, soon-to-be-discarded shoes, my brother-in-law’s tights, and a ridiculous grin on my face.
Finally, we arrived in Newton, the suburb that is home to the “hills of Newton,” a series of gradually larger hills from mile 16 to mile 21, leading up to the infamous Heartbreak Hill, the longest and steepest. At the top of each hill, Allan and I would regroup, look back, find Gus, and forge on. When we got to the bottom of Heartbreak Hill, I said, “I can’t see Gus!” Allan said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave him and his falling-down pants behind.” So regretfully, we moved on. I looked on the sidelines for Jen and her brother, but I never saw them, which is common in these big races.
The last 5 miles were a soggy slog. We didn’t talk but continued side by side. That last stretch is always half a physical battle and half a mental battle. Physically, you are destroyed, so the only thing that is going to get you to the end is your mind. You just have to keep positive thoughts, which in this case for me was, “When I am done, I can get out of these clothes!” repeated over and over in my head. Allan and I crossed the finish line near each other, at about 3:42, not bad considering the conditions. Then we got to meet up with the medical director of the whole race, who was a friend of Allan’s. We were not surprised to hear that they were seeing a higher-than-usual rate of hypothermic runners. About 2,500 runners, including 25 elite athletes, had to seek medical treatment.
Allan and I waded to the gear check area, where he had a change of clothes. There was an insane crush of runners at the gear check; I was pinned against a security fence waiting for Allan for a long time. At one point, Gus stumbled past me in a daze; he had finished about 15 minutes after us. Allan and I said goodbye, with the promise to meet up if I ever run Boston again, and I went to find Jen and her brother.
They were standing under umbrellas at Boston Common. “Where were you at Heartbreak Hill?” I asked. They both looked at each other sheepishly. Jen said, “We decided to stay in and watch it on TV.” Oh well. I couldn’t blame them; I would have done the same.
I Frankenstein-walked back to the nearest T stop and we headed back to our B&B. After a quick shower, Jen’s brother picked us up and took us out for pizza. Getting into his car, it was raining so hard that we got soaked. Of course.
A month later, I ran another marathon, the Chicagoland Spring Marathon, and the start was delayed by 30 minutes as we huddled in a parking garage to avoid the heavy rains. It rained on and off during the race. Later that year, I ran on a flooded course at the Des Plaines River Trail Marathon. What I’m saying is, I’m prepared for the rain now. But I still don’t bring my raincoat.
Before I ran my most recent marathon, I was reviewing my last several marathons’ training plans and their outcomes to see what I could learn from them. (Lesson 1: When grabbing a Gatorade and a water at the same aid station, dump the water on your head and drink the Gatorade, not the other way around. I made that mistake around mile 20 of a hot race when my brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, and I spent the rest of the race wiping the Gatorade from my eyes and feeling sticky in the head area.)
My original goal with marathons was a general notion that I would attempt to run a marathon before I was 40 years old. I worked with a guy who had done one for his 40th birthday, and I thought that if he could find the time to train for it, I could too. Then my lovely wife Jen and I started to have children, and I figured I should try it before the family was too big. I ran my first when I was 32. It was such a difficult experience that immediately after the race, I told Jen, “I am never going to run a marathon again.”
However, I was running a 5K several years later, and this guy showed up wearing a Boston Marathon jacket. I was only somewhat aware that Boston was unique because of its qualifying times, but I didn’t really know what that meant. So I looked it up and saw how fast I’d need to go, and I thought, I might be able to do that. (Boston’s qualifying times are age- and gender-graded; broadly speaking, if you are in the top 10% of runners in your age group, you will qualify. The times are listed at the Boston Athletic Association website.)
Because the Boston Marathon has a 10 a.m. start time and starts 26 miles west of the finish line, the participants have to be bussed out to the starting line, starting at 6 a.m. On the 45-minute bus ride during my first time running it, I was talking to a group of runners who were asking everyone how many marathons they had run. One runner: “This is my 25th.” Other runner: “I’ve done over 70.” Third runner: “I have completed 152 marathons.” Me: “I’ve done 2.”
So I started to think about long-term goals and the whole “Why do I run?” question. The short answer about why I run marathons is twofold: 1. Because I can. I don’t mean that glibly; I know people who can’t or won’t run, and I am truly grateful that I’m able to get out there and do something that I enjoy. I don’t take it for granted. 2. It’s gotten me through some pretty low points in my life. Recently I was talking with someone who had a bad marathon experience, and we were marveling at how you learn more about yourself and your character from your worst races than you do from the easy ones. And I’ve had to lean on “this isn’t as bad as the time I had to walk-jog the last 12 miles of that one marathon” several times in my life.
I told myself I’d finish 10 marathons by the time I was 50 years old. That seemed reasonable enough that I could justify the time and expense to Jen: “I’ll only be crabby about 16 to 20 weeks per year if I spread it out over a decade!” Then I started accelerating the timetable (and controlling the crabbiness). Now I’m working on new goals; nothing super-crazy like Dean Karnazes‘ 50 marathons, 50 states, 50 days plan, but a teeny bit of crazy sounds about right.
Here’s a quick look back at my first 10 marathons:
1. 2003 Chicago Marathon, 3:28:00. I always have about three levels of goals for a marathon. For this initial one, I had two: first, to finish, and second, to break 3 hours 30 minutes. It was a relatively warm October day, I had no idea what to expect, and at the end, I was seriously dehydrated. Jen found me after the race with blue lips and lethargy (“Blue Lips and Lethargy” sounds like the name of an early Cure album) and nursed me back to health with chocolate and gummy candy.
Yes! I’m in 1,940th place!
2. 2012 Chicago Marathon, 3:14:14. Note the 9-year gap between marathons. We went from one child to three, and it was getting harder to find the time to train. This was a cool October day, and I was attempting to reach my Boston qualifying time of 3 hours 15 minutes. I “banked time,” wherein you run a little faster at the beginning to build up a cushion (no one seriously recommends this method). I had a cushion of about 2 minutes with 6 miles to go. Then I ran 10 seconds slower than I should have. Then 30 seconds slower. Then another 30 slower. It was panic time; for a fleeting moment, I had the thought that it would be okay if I didn’t reach my goal, but I refocused and pulled myself together for the last few miles. Incidentally, this is still my personal best.
I was told that it would be cold. Turns out it was sunny and 50 at the starting line; I was hot the whole race.
3. 2013 Boston Marathon, 4:02:17. In the weeks leading up to the race, I had a nagging injury in my right hip that I couldn’t pinpoint. The whole Boston experience was great, and I was enjoying the first half of the race. Somewhere around the Wellesley scream tunnel (Google that), it felt as if someone stabbed me on the outside of my knee. The immediate, severe pain caused me to stop. It turns out I was dealing with iliotibial (IT) band syndrome; the IT band runs from the top of your hip to the outside of your knee, and it’s a very common running injury. I’ve since dealt with it on multiple occasions, but that first time is the worst. I ended up walking and jogging for the last 12 miles with a guy who owned a shoe store in California. If I had known how close I was going to be to 4 hours, I would have pushed it harder at some point.
They were handing out toasted ravioli, cracker-crust pizza, and frozen custard at the finish line. That’s St. Louis style.
4. 2014 Go! St. Louis Marathon, 3:28:30. St. Louis was our home for 7 or 8 years, and the marathon ran right past our old hangouts. After running in two of the largest marathons in the world, I was surprised by how mentally challenging it was to run a smaller marathon: there were 11,000 runners in the combined half and full marathons, and around mile 10, the 8,000 half marathoners split off and headed for the finish line; there was an immediate vacuum of energy and crowd support after that. It really felt as if I was running alone for the next 16 miles. I would periodically latch onto people, but I didn’t really know how to run a marathon without a large group around me. Plus, there are tons of small hills throughout St. Louis, and I faded in the last few miles.
Look at the grit and determination on that face! (I had to go to the bathroom.)
5. 2014 Chicago Marathon, 3:20:10. This was the first time I attempted two marathons in one year. I was going for another Boston qualifying time; I had moved up to the next age group, so I was shooting for 3 hours 25 minutes. In the days leading up to it, I told Jen, “I feel good, as if I could go for 3:10.” She said, “Why not go for 3 hours?” So, casting aside all of my training and mental preparation, I decided on a whim to latch onto the 3-hour pacing group. (Many large marathons have pacers for certain time goals.) So I fell into a 6:52-per-mile pace for the first 13 or 14 miles and felt great. At mile 14, I slowed for a second to take in some GU gel and water; when I tried to catch up with the pacer, I had nothing left in me. The rest of the race was a slog; I ran the second half a full 20 minutes slower than the first half. Amateur hour. But I still qualified for Boston.
6. 2015 Naperville Marathon, 3:27:18. This small race had very few hills, but they came at inopportune moments. The last one was a steady rise coming out of an underpass, and it kicked my butt. I was starting to accept that I was a mid-3:20s marathoner, and that the one sub-3:15 was an outlier.
Jen made me wear the shirt so that she could pick me out of the crowd. The whole race, I heard, “Go Captain America!” from the spectators.
7. 2016 Boston Marathon, 3:28:53. An acquaintance who had done Boston several times told me, “Just take it easy and enjoy the sights and sounds until after Heartbreak Hill (mile 21), and then see what you have left.” So I decided to try that, and it felt much better than running at breakneck pace. Perhaps my most enjoyable marathon to date.
8. 2016 Starved Rock Country Marathon, 3:27:53. This was 26 days after Boston, and I signed up because a friend told me the race organizer was considering not holding it anymore (which turned out to be untrue; he was looking for bigger sponsors and found them for the next year). Strangely, this course was hillier and harder than the famously difficult Boston course. I handled it well, though, because the hills are over by mile 15, and the last 10 miles are truer to Illinois’ flatlander reputation. By far the smallest race I’ve run: I came in 10th place out of 100 runners total. Talk about running alone out there.
9. 2016 Fox Valley Marathon, 3:24:38. Definitely the hottest marathon I’ve completed. A few thousand runners take part in this mid-September stroll along the paved path that lines both sides of the Fox River. The one part of the course that threw me off was from about mile 7 to mile 15, when runners are going in both directions of the out-and-back part of the race. Passing becomes a near impossibility. I had hoped to get under 3:25, and I barely held on during the last few very hot, very sunny miles. I did not order any of the official race photos because some dad invited his kids to run with him for the last 50 yards to the finish line, and my photos show me appearing to struggle keeping up with a 5-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy.
Probably the most relaxed I’ve felt at the finish of a marathon. And yes, that’s the same hat in each of the pictures; it’s pretty disgusting by now and should be burned.
10. 2016 Naperville Marathon, 3:17:11. Note that this was the fourth marathon I did in a 6-month span, and the fastest of the four (my 2nd-fastest overall). Sadly, this was the last running of this fan-friendly course. Serendipity helped me at this one: at the starting line, I bumped into my childhood best friend who grew up across the street from my parents’ house, and he asked me to pace him to a 1:40 half marathon. We ran together until he turned toward the finish (he broke 1:39), and I continued on. Frustratingly, some young runner wouldn’t let me catch up to him around mile 16; every time I tried to run next to him, he sped up. I settled in behind him until he started fading at mile 23, so I picked up the pace and ran my first successful negative-splits marathon (in which I ran the second half faster than the first). I thought I’d be around 3:19, and I was surprised to be nearing 3:17 at the end.
Now that we are moving on to spring here in the Great Midwest and winter’s worst sting is over (am I jinxing myself on that one?), I can stop worrying so much about my long winter training runs. See, the problem with running a spring marathon is that I do all of my running outdoors. I prefer to run on this canal towpath near our home, but snow tends to linger on it, and snowmobile tracks that freeze over can be ankle breakers. Plus, do I have to mention the dog poop hidden under the snow cover? (Four sentences in and already I am using the word “poop.” My college writing professors would be proud.)
I run outside in winter for two main reasons: 1. I am a tough guy (have you seen me? I thought this one was obvious), and 2. I have a horrible treadmill. It is about 40 years old and is “manual,” meaning that it only moves if you slide your feet on it. This leads to an unnatural running stride. (And please don’t tell me to join a gym or buy a new treadmill; you obviously haven’t read my “I Am a Notorious Cheapskate” blog post yet.)
That’s my breath and not drool that froze on the ski mask, I swear. Note the knit cap on top of the ski mask; that’s so my brain doesn’t freeze.
If there is a lot of snow on the ground, I am better off running on city streets, although that means I have to deal with traffic. I try to run against traffic, make myself visible by wearing clown clothes, and make eye contact and wave to every driver. (If you’ve seen me, I’m not so much waving “hi” as waving “thank you in advance for not putting me through your windshield.”) Because of the ice and snow, I have to run by “feel” rather than by time. I tried training at specific time paces one winter, and it was a disaster: knee problems and IT band injuries led me to fall far short of my marathon goal time.
The hardest part about winter running, though, is developing that “whatever it takes” attitude and not allowing the weather to play too big of a role in my training. Whether it’s 0 degrees or snow is falling or the plows have already come and it’s icy, the running has to be automatic. If I waver and think, Maybe it will be nicer outside tomorrow, I’ve lost the mental battle.
The number one way to deal with outdoor conditions is to dress properly. I’ve gotten to the point at which I am usually overdressed. Not suit-and-tie overdressed; that would be weird. Rather, I wear extra layers and can strip some off if I need to. I have a rainproof windbreaker that I can wear in all kinds of weather; it’s the most important item in my closet. I also like to keep my neck warm, so I wear an ear warmer headband around my neck. If it is 20 degrees or nicer, I go with one thin pair of gloves. Anything colder, and I have two warmer sets of gloves that do the trick.
During a typical marathon training cycle (about 20 weeks or so), I try to get in four runs of 18 miles or longer. Many training programs will have you run just once at 20 miles, on the theory that if you can make it 20, you can make it 26.2. But I have struggled with those final 6.2 miles, so I try to do a step-up plan where I add 2 miles to my longest run every third week: 16, then 18, then 20, 22, and 24. (Coincidentally, I am supposed to be doing my 24 today, but it is raining with potential lightning outside, so here I sit, typing.)
A few winters ago was historically cold for this area. I remember forcing myself to run, pretty much so I could humblebrag about it on Facebook (e.g., “Went running while it was 8 below! Time to use a hair dryer to unfreeze my contact lenses from my eyeballs!”). On my longest training run that winter, I planned on doing 20 miles, but the snow was falling, it was 10 degrees out, and there was deep packed snow on the towpath already, so I did a circuitous route around our town’s streets. I was wearing my hydration belt, which has two water bottles and a pocket for gels. (I use Gu Gel; my favorite flavors are vanilla and root beer.) I also carried a Gatorade bottle.
About 10 miles into the run, a few things came to a head: First, the snow was accumulating around the bottom of my running pants and then freezing, weighing down my pants and forcing me to stop to retie the pants so they wouldn’t fall off. (That would have been a sight.) Then, my water bottles started to ice up. Initially, I could shake the bottles to break up any slushy parts, but it got worse until they completely froze on me. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the chance to run with two freezing-cold bottles of ice bouncing up and down on either side of your groin, but I wouldn’t recommend it. (Unless you’re into that kind of thing; I don’t judge.)
My cold groin and all the bouncing made me have to go to the bathroom really, really badly. Anyone who has taken a road trip with me knows that I have the world’s tiniest bladder anyway. Usually, I can sneak off into the woods next to the towpath; the whole forest is my bathroom. (Hey National Forest Foundation, here’s your new slogan: “The whole forest: it’s your bathroom.”) But on this particular day, I was running on city streets. I quickly calculated two options for public restrooms open on a Saturday morning: the library and the hospital. I settled on the hospital, mostly for logistical reasons: it was about a half mile closer to where I was than the library. I practically sprinted to the hospital and went through the front entrance. A volunteer at the information desk asked me if I needed anything (besides the obvious shower after a long run) and quickly pointed me toward the men’s room. I waited around for the water bottles to thaw, but it was taking too long.
By that point, my run had completely fallen off the rails, so I walk-jogged home. It would probably not surprise you to find out that I did not meet my goal pace in the marathon that I ran in the spring. My point is, I have been much more consistent with my training this winter, and Mother Nature has cooperated. Any failure to meet my goal this year is on me. At least, until I can think up something else to blame it on.
My lovely wife Jen and I were out on a walk, talking about the marathon I was going to run that weekend. I was going over my clothing options for race morning. Dressing appropriately for a race that will take (for me) 3½ hours is tricky; typically, the marathons I run are in the spring and fall, and the temperatures can rise 20 or more degrees during the course of the race.
“I am definitely going with the shorts,” I said. “Maybe a short-sleeve. Weather Underground’s website says it will be 39 degrees at the start and rise to 51 by the finish; maybe I should go with a long-sleeve shirt and a T-shirt over it. Then the gloves, a baseball cap, and maybe my neck warmer. But then again, I might not need the long-sleeve. What do you think?”
Jen said, “I think you’ve crossed the line and gone over to Crazy Town. Just do what you always do and stop obsessing about it!”
She had a point. But in my defense, I haven’t gotten this far in life without a few side trips to Crazy Town.
I was running in the Naperville Marathon, a relatively small race. My previous ones were all big-city marathons, and consequently, they had big marathon expos at convention centers. A marathon expo is where you have to go to pick up your packet with race bib, free shirt, gear-check bag, etc. If you’ve been to an industry expo or a college fair, you know what these things are like: vendor booths, free samples of frozen yogurt or another trendy food item, people generally harassing you into visiting their booths. This one was similar but with one big difference: it was teeny-tiny. The first clue was that it was being held not in a convention center but in the back room of a health club.
The health club was about an hour from my house, so I drove there 2 days before the race. I wanted to do a quick get-in, get-stuff, get-out trip, but first I needed to ask some questions at the Information desk. The nice lady at the desk said I could ask her anything I wanted.
“Great,” I said. “I notice that there are parking garages a few blocks from the starting line. How soon before the race do they fill up? I’m trying to avoid having to use the remote parking.”
“Good question,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?!?”
“This is my first time volunteering at this marathon. I’d guess 6 a.m., maybe? Any other questions?”
“Um, no, I’m good.” I did have other questions, but seeing as my guesses would be as good as hers, I saved them.
Flustered, I went to the packet pickup table and got my goody bag. The guy at the table looked at my packet, yelled, “Men’s small!” to the volunteers behind him, and grabbed the shirt they handed him. Into my bag it went. I had already seen a photo of it online and decided it wasn’t really my style, so I hadn’t planned on keeping it; but hey, it was a free shirt. (Editor note: obvious foreshadowing ahead.) Usually, I would spend some time looking through my packet and verifying that everything is there and that the shirt is the correct gender/size, but I was in a hurry.
When I got home, Jen was back for lunch. Like a little kid showing off Halloween candy, I said, “Look at what I got!” I took out the marathon shirt and held it up for her to see.
“Oh my,” she said. “It’s kind of big.”
I am pretty sure this is not my size. Please note: I am actually wearing shorts. As far as you know.
“What the?” I looked at the tag: Men’s XXX-Large. “Are you freaking kidding me?!?” This thing was a dress on me, and my arms flapped in the too-long sleeves, like when Tom Hanks’ character turned back into a 12-year-old boy at the end of “Big” and he was still wearing a man’s suit. (Sorry to ruin the ending of that one for you.)
Jen said, “Don’t get upset. You had already said you weren’t going to keep it. And don’t drive back to the expo for a replacement shirt.”
She was right, but it was the principle of the thing that ate at me. I mean, seriously. How did they get this one wrong? Plus, is there really that much of a demand for XXXL shirts at a marathon? I didn’t see any 6-foot-5-inch, 400-pound runners out there on Sunday morning. And did they accidentally give my small shirt to that guy? (“Hey, why did they give me a handkerchief instead of a shirt?”)
On race morning, we got there around 6. (Guess what? There was plenty of parking in the parking garages.) It was freezing; Jen didn’t want to hang around the starting line, so I wore some throwaway clothes. We have a “donate” box in our bedroom, and anyone who is retiring clothes in our family knows to throw them in the box; then I run it to goodwill when it’s full. Anything that remotely fits me ends up in my “marathon throwaways” pile. At the starting line of most major marathons, spectators aren’t allowed near the runners, so it’s best to have clothes that you throw out just before the gun sounds. The marathon organizers then collect them and donate them.
There was plenty of space for spectators at this race, but Jen went to stake out a spot a few miles into the course. Unfortunately, the only long bottoms in the donate box were pink flamingo-covered pajama pants. (I’m pretty sure Jen retired them just to see me wear them to a marathon. And no, I didn’t allow her to take a picture of me wearing them.)
This was how ugly they were: 5 minutes before the race started, I took off my ripped-up old sweatshirt and put it on the fence around the starting corral. I then took off the pink flamingo pants; when I went to put them on the fence, the sweatshirt was already gone. I placed the pants down and moved further into the crowd. For the next few minutes, every time I glanced back, the pants were still there on the fence, crying out, “Take me! I am in need of a loving home!” As far as I know, they are still sitting forlornly on a sidewalk in downtown Naperville, waiting for a brave (or color-blind) citizen to claim them.
I won’t bore you with the details of my race. I wanted to run somewhere around 3:20 to 3:25; I went out at 3:20 pace for the first 20 miles, then faded in the last 6 and ended up at 3:27:12. (Sorry, I actually did bore you with the details.) The course itself was great, and the people of Naperville (Napervillains?) deserve a lot of the credit for supporting something that disrupted their Sunday morning for 6 hours. For a small race, there was great fan turnout, a beautiful course, and ample water stations throughout. If you are insane enough to run a marathon, you could do worse than this one. Bonus: Because there were so few people in the race, I came in 85th place. That’s the top 10 percent, about where I usually finish in a marathon, but much more impressive than telling someone that I finished 3,500th in the Chicago Marathon: “Not to brag or anything, but I was in the top 100. And what have you accomplished with your life?”
The Naperville Marathon. Correction, the “Healthy Driven” Naperville Marathon. I don’t know if the phrase “healthy driven” follows any rules of grammar. But it sounds cool.
Dressing like today’s hip, fashion-forward runner is easy. First, a few questions: Are you a circus clown? Are you a school crossing guard or a highway construction worker? Do you dress in the dark? Basically, you know that you are properly dressed for a run when you step outside your door and your neighbors glance your way and start screaming, “It’s too bright! I’m blind! Blind, I say!” Good job, you!
When I first got into running, practically everybody wore plain cotton clothes. Cotton tees, cotton shorts, cotton sweats. If you were really hip, you layered cotton shorts over your cotton sweats; don’t ask me why it was hip because it was like wearing underpants over your jeans. This was about a decade after the so-called “running boom.” (We were so unhip that we still called running “jogging.”) On my high school track and cross-country teams, other than the school-issue blue and gold sweats, you were considered flashy if you wore red. We mostly stuck to shades of gray and navy.
And running shoes were not yet the technicolor wonders you see today: my first pair was dark gray. My second pair was dark gray with white piping. My last few pairs of running shoes are so bright and multicolored that it looks like one of my kids vomited up a confetti cake on our laundry room floor. (Sure, blame it on the kids.)
I can almost pinpoint the moment that really bright clothes started becoming the norm for runners: I have a cotton T-shirt from a hometown 5K in 1988 that is light gray with block letters that are black. Classic and classy. Three years later, same race, different design, this time the shirt is polyester and the letters are cursive and in neon green. Welcome to the future, runners!
Nowadays, I have trouble getting dressed for a run because it’s difficult to match neon yellow shirts with electric blue shorts with purple and green shoes and pink hats. Send out the clowns.
On the bright side (see the clever pun I did there?), my kids won’t want to borrow my clothes. Unless there’s a “Look Ridiculous Day” at school next year.
When I was in college, I ran cross-country for one (injury-riddled) season. I used to show up to practice wearing my favorite Air Jordan shorts, baggy, knee-length, and double layered. I’m not saying the other runners were faster than me solely because of my baggy pants (there may have been a talent gap), but I spent a lot of time on 90-degree August days lost in cornfields with the other freshman runner about 3 miles behind the rest of the team, ruing my fashion choices.
I get it, though. There are good and valuable reasons for loud running clothes. First and foremost, for those of us who run on city streets, it’s all about visibility. Taking a page from bicyclists, we runners want to be seen by drivers. Bright clothing could literally save our lives.
From a race director’s standpoint, I can see why a bright shirt would be beneficial. No one wants to open the goody bag just before a race and say, “This shirt is ugly!” (I have been known to do that. I’m pretty sure I even posted a derogatory comment about the gunmetal-gray shirt I received from the 2014 Chicago Marathon in one of my blog posts. The joke’s on me: my lovely wife Jen likes the way I look in it. Thank you, Nike!)
If you’ve ever been to a marathon, you know that the starting area looks like the crowd on Day 1 of the Electric Daisy Carnival. (And the finish area looks like the crowd on Day 3, after having ingested whatever was being offered by random strangers in the parking lot.) There’s a reason for that: I don’t know how many times (one, actually) that I’ve showed up to a big race and told my wife, kids, or whoever came out to cheer for me, “I’ll be the guy wearing the blue shirt.” Good luck with that. Now I try to differentiate myself: “I’ll be the guy wearing the neon blue shirt with the pink sleeves, the shiny white capri-length tights, and the purple hat. You can’t miss me.” And I’m right: they won’t be able to miss me as I run by and wave, although they might want to deny that they are related to me in any way.
I am learning to accept that, as a middle-aged runner who is okay with change, I might have to look like George Michael (or, more likely, Andrew Ridgeley) in the video for the Wham! song “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Specifically at the 1:10 and 2:35 marks.
Q: Is this a music video from 1984, or the start of a local 5K in 2015? A: Yes and yes.
Besides, fashion comes and goes. My middle child’s school recently had an ’80s Day, where kids were encouraged to dress like—get this—people who lived through the 1980s. Conveniently, I still have a closet full of polos and button-down shirts similar to what I had back then (old habits die hard), so she raided my closet and wore a polo with a popped collar layered under a button-down; she was going for the “rich guy who is always the villain in John Hughes movies” look. Anyway, my point is that the pendulum sometimes swings back my way. The last race T-shirt I got was a gray polyester shirt made to look and feel like a soft cotton shirt with letters so light blue and faded that one can only assume this is a throwback look. I loved it, but alas, it was too tight on me. It’s been a perfect addition to Jen’s stable of running shirts, though. I’ll stick to dressing like a clown.
The other night, I prepared my version of an egg muffin for dinner: two locally sourced eggs fried on a toasted, buttered whole-wheat English muffin (extra gluten, please), topped with Wisconsin pepper jack cheese and placed in the oven just long enough to make the cheese melt, with a little salt and pepper. (This is a go-to meal on days when I don’t want to use my brain to come up with a dinner plan.) It was great, and along with sliced apples, some citrus, and a salad, it was all we needed for a fulfilling meal.
An hour later, my lovely wife Jen found me eating a bowl of Cinnamon Life at the kitchen table. “Um, what are you doing?” she asked. “Eating cereal. I wasn’t full,” I said. She raised an eyebrow and said, “You do realize that you’re not training for a marathon now, right?”
For the first time in 3 years, I am not actively training for a big race because I am battling an injury. And by “battling an injury,” I mean “sitting on the couch watching Season 4 of ‘Portlandia.'” Jen noticed that I hadn’t cut down on my caloric intake since I stopped running (I noticed, too: my innie belly button is deeper and I’m having trouble buttoning some pairs of jeans). As with most of my running injuries, this one was self-inflicted. After my last marathon, I was so disappointed in my preparation and/or effort that I actually increased my mileage in the months after it. I’m a low-mileage guy anyway because of long-standing knee problems, and I knew that every time I increased my mileage in the past there were repercussions, but I thought I could be smart about it this time.
Not so much. I developed anterior tibial tendinitis. That’s a fancy medical term for constant throbbing pain on the top of my foot that also extends up past the ankle. Initially, I wouldn’t notice it until the middle of the night, when the pain woke me up and I could not find a comfortable position to put my right foot in. I tried resting for a few days, but it returned when I ran again. Then I took off a week and tried running; it showed up on both feet after that. Now it is sore even if I only wear laced shoes. So I decided to shut things down for a month to 6 weeks.
That’s the important thing to know about the vast majority of my running injuries: if I have pain, I stop running for a while and it will get better. Over the years, I’ve dealt with tons of different types of injuries that have all improved with rest. I have tried running through injuries, but that almost never works. The problem is that I picture myself as Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride,” absorbing the six-fingered Count Rugen’s stabs only to get stronger and screaming ever louder, “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father! Prepare to die!”
“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
If you’ve ever suffered through a conversation among runners, you’re familiar with how they try to one-up each other with their running-related injuries: Runner A: “I’m running a 5K this weekend with a broken toe.” Runner B: “Oh, is that all? I ripped my Achilles tendon in a 10K last week and still won the race.” Runner C: “You guys are lucky. My last marathon, my groin literally fell off at the halfway point, and I had to carry it to the finish line.” Runners A and B: “We have no idea what that means. But we are impressed.”
I don’t want to bore you with that type of litany of injuries that I have had over the years. Okay, actually I do. Here is an incomplete list: heel blisters, sprained toes, dead toenails (if you are thinking of marrying and/or sleeping with a runner, keep the lights off in the bedroom or make them wear socks), calf strains, glute strains, low back pain, iliotibial band syndrome, shoulder and neck soreness, bloody nipples (yes, bloody nipples), plantar fasciitis, and all sorts of knee pain (patellar tendinitis, loose cartilage, “runner’s knee,” bursitis, chondromalacia).
My collegiate running career ended prematurely because of a stress fracture in my left leg. Well, that and my idiotic plan to recover from it: I was so afraid to sit out practice and fall behind in my development as a freshman that I decided to run through the pain for a week, until I ended up on crutches for 2 months. I didn’t fully recover from the injury for a few years.
The plantar fasciitis and knee pain are like old friends. Old friends who I hate. I wear shoes all the time for the plantar fascia pain, and my knee soreness, although nearly always there, is not bad enough to warrant any sort of intervention.
A lot of these injuries, I have learned, have to do with a weak core. Strengthening my glutes, abs, low back muscles, and hips, along with cross training and reduced mileage, are a pathway to pain-free (or at least reduced-pain) running. Otherwise, I’m forced to take extended timeouts from running.
A few years ago, I ran into an older relative of mine at a wedding. I hadn’t seen him in quite some time because he was on the wrong side of a divorce. He asked me how my marathoning was going. I knew that he had been a runner and a more adventurous type than I was (think “running with the bulls in Pamplona” adventurous), and I asked him if he was still running marathons. “No,” he said, “I overtrained by running a half marathon daily for years and years, and now my knees can’t sustain any sort of exercise.” And then he added, as if he saw the gears turning in my brain, “And don’t you do the same thing as me. Protect your knees. Reduce your mileage. It’s too late for me, but not for you.”
Sage advice; I just wish I wasn’t sharing my “I crossed the finish line carrying my groin” story with him at the time.
I have seen “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” somewhere between 50 and 9,000 times. That’s a conservative estimate. Anyone who has been forced to watch a movie over and over and over (and over) again with a small child knows what I am talking about. Along with two thirds of America, I recently went through the same thing with “Frozen.” (“Let it go, let it go…”) After the first 10 viewings, my ability to critically analyze the SpongeBob movie was worn away. I can now reflexively recite lines from it, even though it has been a few years since our family’s last viewing. (There was a period when the DVD disappeared for TWO WHOLE YEARS, but miraculously, one of my kids found it deep in the bowels of an oversized green chair in our den, and then we got to watch it hundreds more times before my kids outgrew it. My lovely wife, Jen, never fully explained her role in its disappearance.)
Anyway, there is a scene near the beginning of the movie when Plankton, the rival restaurant owner to SpongeBob’s boss Mr. Krabs and his Krusty Krab restaurant, is agonizing over how to finally steal the heavily guarded Krabby Patty secret formula. In talking with his robot wife, Karen, Plankton complains that he has tried everything from Plan A to Plan Y. Karen asks, “What about Z?” Plankton says, “Z?” Karen says, “Z, the letter after Y.” Plankton looks into his file cabinet and says, “W, X, Y…Z. Plan Z! Here it is, just like you said! It’s evil. It’s diabolical. It’s lemon scented. This Plan Z can’t possibly fail!” And off the movie goes with Plankton’s Plan Z.
In the weeks leading up to a marathon, people stop me and ask me this question more than others: “So, what is your goal?” (That’s a lie. People generally avoid eye contact with me when they see me coming, and only after I track them down in store aisles or at the library do they say, “Oh, hey, guy, I didn’t see you. What’s new with you besides your running?” Then I talk about my marathon training, and they feel obligated to ask me something about it, so they usually ask about my goal.) I feel the need to come up with a specific time. Since my personal record (PR) is 3:14:14, I stick close to that and say that I am aiming for something close to my PR.
Secretly, though, there is a more fully developed plan in the back of my mind. I have several levels of goals mapped out, each one a step back from my long-shot dream time all the way to my last-ditch effort to salvage the race.
The 2014 Chicago Marathon shirt, for those people who dislike clothing that is colorful. Or attractive. Actually, it kind of works in that “Urban Bike Messenger Gray” way. But it seems as if they just wanted us to buy the more colorful (and attractive) shirts available at the marathon expo.
Going into the Chicago Marathon this fall, I had a fairly successful training season. I had been doing long runs with regularity, my speed work was consistent, and the times that I was able to run shorter races were all pointing toward a time that would be slightly better than my PR in the marathon. There are websites devoted to converting your race results in one distance to a potential result in another, using complicated algorithms and results from previous runners. Or maybe some guy in a singlet and running tights is sitting at a computer randomly typing numbers on his keyboard. Whatever the method, some of the sites are fairly accurate with their predictions. (I particularly like HillRunner.com, but Runner’s World and McMillan Running also have decent converters.) And my predictions were coming in around 3:05 to 3:10.
These were my goals, then:
Plan A: 3:05, or 7:03 per mile
Plan B: Around my PR at 3:15, or 7:26 per mile
Plan C: My age-group Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:25, or 7:49 per mile
Plan D (my Plan Z, really): Just finishing the marathon
The night before the marathon, Jen and I were talking about my race-pace goal. She said, “But what about your ultimate fantasy?” I said, “Do you mean the one involving Keri Russell, America’s sweetheart from the WB Network’s ‘Felicity’? I’m not sure how that applies here.” She said, “Um, no, I was talking about the marathon. And yuck.” “Oh, that,” I said. “Ultimate fantasy: Run a 3-hour marathon.” “Then why don’t you just go for it?”
Not having had trained for that particular goal, I thought it was a reach. A month before, I had run a half marathon in 1:29:02, or 6:48 per mile; a 3-hour marathon requires twice that distance at roughly the same pace, or 6:52 per mile. But the more I thought about it (the marathon thing, not the Keri Russell thing), I wondered what was holding me back from crushing the marathon in under 3 hours.
So on the morning of the race, as I was standing at the starting line with 45,000 other runners getting ready for my wave to start the race, I saw the 3:00 pacer standing there with his sign. These pacers run with a sign on a stick that must be balsa wood to be so light, and you can follow them the whole race to meet your target pace. (But only if they are good at pacing: in that half marathon that I did, the 2:15 pacer was running all by himself a few yards ahead of me, at 1:29 pace.)
On a gorgeous October morning, with temperatures a marathon-perfect 45 degrees, with a light wind and a mixture of clouds and sun, I found myself running with a massive army of 3-hour dreamers crowded around the pacer. Every mile we clicked off, I felt more empowered. “This could be the day,” I’d think. “I can do this!” At mile 5, as we ran through Lincoln Park, the crowds of spectators along the course cheered loudly as we passed. As the miles wore on, the cheers kept going. I could hear people say, “What does that sign say? Oh, these are the 3-hour marathoners!”
One of the 3-hour dreamers was a guy dressed in a Minnie Mouse outfit. I have no idea why people wear costumes to marathons. I get the idea: they want to lighten the mood and entertain the crowd. I just don’t know why they choose certain costumes. A person in a cop costume chasing a person in a robber outfit, okay, that makes sense. But in one marathon, I got passed by a guy in a hot dog costume. Why? And why, 30 seconds later, did I get passed by a guy dressed as a hamburger? So along with Minnie Mouse was someone dressed like Alien. Not an alien, mind you, but Alien, the character portrayed by James Franco in “Spring Breakers.” And yet the crowd cheered more wildly for him than for Minnie Mouse.
Anyway, I approached the halfway point (13.1 miles) on pace. I couldn’t believe I was where I was. The crowd is particularly large and loud here, as the marathon course makes a famous right turn at Franklin and Adams Streets. Jen was going to be near the 14-mile mark with one of our children, and I was nearly in tears as I got nearer to where they would be. When I saw them, I gave them a big thumbs-up and pressed onward. Just after 14, I slowed to take a Gu Gel and drink some water; when I went to pick the pace back up and catch the 3-hour pacer, I thought, “Uh oh.” I didn’t have anything left in the tank. I kept trying, but I watched the massive gang of 3-hour dreamers pull away from me. And just like that, I hit the proverbial wall. Way too early.
I had hit the wall in previous marathons at miles 18, 20, 22; heck, in the one Boston Marathon that I ran, I had an injury flareup at mile 14, but I managed to walk-run the last 12 miles. This, though, was a shock. It reminded me of that Ernest Hemingway quote from “The Sun Also Rises”: “How did you go bankrupt?” “Gradually, then suddenly.” I then realized my mistake in trying to race faster than my training would allow. But all the should-haves in the world were not going to help me in those last 12 miles.
I have a lot of mantras that I try out in the more difficult parts of long runs. They are mental cues to keep me going and to make sure that my mind does not convince my body that it’s time to stop. Sometimes I have said, “Find another gear,” until I actually do. Sometimes it’s, “Fight and scratch and claw through every step.” Sometimes I dedicate each mile to someone in my life who means something to me. This time, though, my brain was too focused on the negative. “How am I ever going to hold on for 12 miles?” I thought. Then it was, “Well, there are 10 long miles left; what now?” But I kept going, even as my calves tightened and my quads ached. And even as everyone passed me.
By mile 18, I thought, “At least the 3:05 pacer is still behind me.” And then he passed me. “Okay,” I thought at mile 20, “I’m still in front of the 3:10 pacer.” And then he passed me. “All right,” I thought, “I still have a lead on”—then the 3:15 pacer swept by me—”are you freaking kidding me?!?”
So it was down to Plan C and Plan D/Plan Z. Get the Boston qualifier (BQ) or just finish the race. A few times, I stopped for hydration and found myself lingering near the aid stations. “It would be so easy to sit here for awhile,” I’d think before starting up after 15 seconds passed. My 6:52 pace fell to 7:30, then 8:30, then 9:30. But then I got to mile 23, which is around the point where the course turns back north almost 3 miles straight up Michigan Avenue to the finish, and I thought, “This is it. Right here, finish strong, or at least finish not-weak.” Not exactly by best mantra ever, but I like to say that whatever works for you in a marathon is what works. So “finish not-weak” it was.
And somehow, despite everything that I did to thwart my own efforts to get that BQ, despite ignoring what my training told me, going out too fast, forgetting my mental cues, and turning all negative at the least opportune stretches, I managed to avoid Plan Z and finish not-weak with a time of 3:20:10. That’s under my BQ and hopefully good enough to get me into the 2016 Boston Marathon (the 2015 one is already full).
