Only When Chased — Twenty Weeks In — I Have A Cunning Plan — Or Do I?
The Pace Remains the Same
For those who have been following along — and we know you have (never gets old), we are about ten weeks on from the last “running report card” around training for GFNY Marathon Florida, the overall race calendar for 2021 is starting to take shape. It may sound strange to consider the race calendar at this point but I am happy and grateful to be able to do so. In that time, we have the GFNY Florida #DoubleDouble — marathon and bike race, GFNY La Vaujany — the French Alpes what could be better, and potentially GFNY Santa Fe if I can make the worm hole appear one more time.
But to be sure the reason we are here is because, the marathon is on, the bike race the following week, and the racing and training in between that contribute to the process of transforming a doughy-middle-aged-age-grouper into something resembling a competent, all-around, endurance athlete. Yeah, good luck with that.
Looking back at week 11 where we left off, I was true to my word in taking the running part of my training calendar seriously. There was an anxiousness about running further. At the end of week ten, I forced myself through a tough first crack at a half-marathon distance. Having used my own half-baked secret formula (read: cunning plan) for building distance in the long run, I had started it up with 10km and built ten percent on the distance each week until I was staring down the barrel of the half-marathon distance. Week over week, 6.2 miles became 7, became 8 became, 9 became 10, became 11.
The triathletes at the GFNY Group Rides had informed me directly — the rule is “never miss your long run”. But as I had amped myself up, gotten to the 11-mile marker, and anxiously awaited the opportunity to do the half distance, life got in the way, as it has a habit of doing. And so I missed the long run with the sinister plan of making it up on the brick after the group ride that Sunday. With decent weather on tap, it would be an easy feat. Or so I thought. And as we got off the bikes and I informed the brick group of my plans, I cited the rule. “Never miss your long run, right?”.
Wrong.
Apparently, there’s another rule in play here. “Never try to make up a missed workout — that’s how you get hurt”. And so sensibility intervened and we did a lovely 8km brick, that made me feel good about being able to keep up and allowed me to plan the following week with a renewed sense of anticipation and a shrinking sense of shame. (The beauty of the brick runs, is that Billie and Tom, both accomplished triathletes are constantly providing great perspective on their training, and it’s a chance to learn and understand where I am in the process).
…And Then it Got Cold
Winter was setting in for real. But as a friend once told me “time is a tyrant, it knows only its agenda of moving forward”. True story. No matter the cold, both the Winter and the time until the marathon would continue to move forward regardless of my activity. That half distance had to happen. And so on a cold and windy Saturday morning, I got out to the beach and set about the work. This would be a war of attrition. As the ultimate optimist, I loaded a 4-hour playlist for what would hopefully be a two-and-a-half-hour run. Within the first mile, the dream of a musical run was shattered by the ancient curse of the dead battery. Probably, I shouldn’t have been wearing headphones anyway, but on a beach path, it seemed harmless. But I would now need to carry the burden of the headphones with no return on investment for the next twelve plus miles. And we were off.
Bridging the gap via streets from one beach area to the next, I had arrived at the beach road where I could relax and just run. Running along a slightly cobbled section referred to (I laugh now), as the “Roubaix” by the local cyclists, I realized that I would have to come back through this featureless windy doldrum one more time on the way back. There was constant math ticking away in my brain as I tried to hydrate myself with SiS gels, and push on to the halfway mark.
Finally making the turn back, I understood that the 2.5 mark was probably out of the question but I could be close, and could still be under a 12:00 mile for the entire distance. Not too shabby, but this was putting a consistent marathon time in the 5–5.5 hour mark overall, which sounded downright daunting. As I made my way back I began to think of it in the number of minutes I would have to press on. Can I do this for another hour, another 40 minutes, another 20 minutes, just 10 more, can I keep running, finally making the distance and understanding that I can indeed run a half-marathon again.
Looking back, I realized that I was 20 minutes behind a younger, fatter, beer-swilling me that did the Brooklyn Half in 2:18. How could this be? Well, it be. There was work afoot, and I would need to figure things out to get faster.
But as the section title would indicate, then it got cold. Running fell off as the snow fell and the ice built up. As I looked at the forecast temperatures over the next ten days, and well into February I thought that the snow may not melt until May. The roads were crap, the sidewalks either unshoveled, icy, impassable. I refused to move my car for fear of losing my carefully dredged out parking space. It was a full three weeks of mostly indoor cycling workouts to try and hold on to my fitness, (with something other than shoveling) as I began to worry about how I would recover the running form. As I finally wrote the first ten weeks report card, I was able to put time into perspective and resolve to begin anew, and started to re-add the running workouts to my training plan.
Am I jumping the gun, Baldrick, or are the words ‘I have a cunning plan’ marching with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of this conversation? E. Black Adder (circa 1800)
With Black Adder and Baldrick firmly planted in my mind arguing the merits of my cunning plan (believe me, I was working with Baldrick’s plan for sure), it was time to get moving again — regardless of the merits of the plan. There were few. It was at this time that I had begun to really embrace cycling-training logic into the running program. “If you want to run a marathon,” I thought, “just keep running longer”. This logic assumes the knowledge of the positive results gained from riding 120-mile distances in the lead-up to a 100-mile bike race. With the lower impact that cycling provides this logic actually works very well. You build fitness, you build expectations of what you can/can’t do, you learn to measure your effort properly, you learn where and when to pick your battles. Most of all, you learn the attrition that comes with time and distance. You settle in and understand the nature of the fight. Well dang, should be the same for running. If I am going to be out there for five plus hours in October, I had best learn to love the suffering that goes with that.
The toll on your body at 54 years old, however, is different. Surely you will hate yourself in the last hour of a long ride if you did it right. But you will forget soon after the first sip of iced coffee passes your gums and you soak in the grandness of your accomplishment.
Running is different. It hurts differently. You don’t always feel it in real-time. When you really feel it is post-run. That first trip up the stairs to the only bathroom in the house. Getting the left leg over the side of the tub to get in the shower. Getting off the couch later that day. You’ve just punished your body for 2+ hours, and now your body wants to punish you back. Question of fitness — probably — but things hurt differently, and you have to respect it. But more on that later.
The runs began to amp up, with a mix of morning and evening runs. My personal experience has been that making things happen in the morning has an amplifying effect on being able to manage anything the day may throw at you. But it doesn’t always work out. The key to consistency is getting it in. Getting it in means finding the time. Finding the time means hacking life. Figuring out how to make an evening run or workout work in your favor. Don’t give up on it until midnight passes and you can still get it in. And so armed with the neon belt my wife bought me I was putting in hours at night, extending my short-run 5km routes to just over 6km (doesn’t sound like a lot), but the pace was still slow and low. I was regaining some consistency, and adding some distance, but I really wasn’t increasing my volume enough to be making a difference, and I certainly wasn’t gaining any speed that would not also be gained by just repeating the same activity over and over again. Eventually you get a little better at it, but unless you change how you do what you do, nothing really changes. (I had around the same time stumbled on a blog post of a multi-sport coach I follow on Twitter @Orion_coaching) who described what was happening like this (paraphrasing):
If you are training consistently at 15mph on the bike, you shouldn’t be expecting to race at 18mph.
True story, and I had seen it in cycling. Wash/rinse repeat of the same things only longer, never led to any gains in speed and only small gains in fitness. It wasn’t until I embraced what coaching could bring that I was able to really raise my fitness levels and overall competency on the bike.
But I digress. I was picking the long run distance back up. First to an Easter Sunday 11 miler, and then the following week to another half-marathon distance at a slightly faster pace. I was also picking up the strength training to start to build the tolerance and strength I would need in my core — and had been lacking — in both my cycling and running. Maybe not consistently at first but it was in the plan. With several group rides cancelled due to an unending pattern of bad weather, the bricking had fallen off and the runs were down to one short and one long one per week. It was time to get epic, and to start proving to myself that I could make this happen. Cunning plans were in the offing. And we all know how those turn out.
The Prove-It Reflex
There are some of us that have spent so much time without confidence, so much time lacking in the belief that we can do something, that we have developed what I like to refer to as a “prove-it reflex”. My cycling coach has me focus on changing the beliefs that limit me and stating the proof-points and actions that will help me reach beyond those beliefs. But sometimes you just have to prove it.
Casting my mind back to GFNY Mont-Ventoux in 2015, it wasn’t enough that I was about to take part in an epic race 5,000 miles away, up a climb that had confounded even the most skilled riders. I am not a “climber”, and at the time, I was barely a cyclist. In seeing the Giant of Provence from the car on the drive into town, the first thing that came to mind was “I can’t climb that F**ing thing”. I was instantly afraid, and instantly intimidated by the prospect of doing something even professionals found difficult. I would wallow in self-doubting agony until I knew what I was in for. I wouldn’t enjoy anything else on offer in Southern France until I knew for sure that I could find a way to manage. And so with my bike built and time on my hands I was off. On the road toward Bedoin where I would find Kilometer 0 and the toughest route to the top. I had to prove it. Failing on race day would not stand. If I was going to fail, I was going to fail on Friday (anonymously), and and own it. If I succeeded, my prove-it reflex would be satisfied, and I would head into the race on Sunday with some amount of confidence that I would survive.
So why regale you with tales from the days of yore! I can assure you, I have a point. The point is, I don’t have enough belief in myself to actually stand on my own at the moment of truth without knowing I can do it. It’s a sickness, and it’s stupid, but it’s the truth. So, lean into it, right? By giving myself an anonymous chance to fail, I remove the pressure of anything that will happen on race day. It’s a sad but authentic reflex that can be debilitating at times, and exhilerating when it works. That’s the thing. How to harness it for good? Well as it turns out you really can’t. Here’s why:
It is an outcome. That is all. It is a moment-in-time performance that is based on mentally preparing yourself not to fail in that solitary moment. Probably, a stronger person could summon enough adrenaline to succeed like that without preparation or a process in almost any single endeavor. But, lest we forget, endurance athletics is a never-ending journey. Those moments in time should be reflective of what is put into the process over time, and not the solitary performance that you feel may define you. Your preparation should define you. What happens on race day — well, once you show up, it’s mostly out of your control.
Do You Feel Like I Do? I Doubt It!
The build up of the distance was now bound to take me to a place that I had never been. 2/3 the distance of a marathon, and running without stopping for over three hours. I had prepared myself mentally, and was out to prove that I could stick it out for three hours, and make the sixteen miles up and down the Eastern Coastline of Staten Island, from Gateway to the Verrazano bridge. I calculated my distance, brought the headphones with wires, my reflective belt, and four SiS gels. I was about to embark at 18:30 Eastern time on the run of a lifetime, after a full day of work and into a miserable drizzling and cold rain, and tough side wind.
As I ran, I had the voice on my training app telling me where I was every twenty minutes. It was, so far a dulling grind of mental math, weather, and what was setting in as the reality of long set of steps ahead. All in, it was grueling. As I passed through South Beach I was approaching what I thought was the turnaround. I did some quick math for how far it was back to the car, and decided to go another mile — uphill — to extend it and make sure I wouldn’t have a distance let down when I got back. As I turned around, my digital companion told me I was at the ten mile and two hour mark (or just over ten miles), I was slightly under 12 minutes per mile, and knowing I had another hour to go seemed achievable and something that I could break down into segments. But something was amiss, now I felt like I was too far from the finish, based on running this area many times before. I sucked down a gel, ran by a nearby trash can, and tried to pick up the pace.
But I couldn’t pick it up. For better or for worse, I seemed locked into the pace with the wind now coming straight at me, and now bringing enough rain to make me cool me off in all the wrong ways. While I had dressed appropriately for the weather, sometimes being miserable can bring out your best. And sometimes it wears you down. I was closer to the latter, as I came back through the “Roubaix” section along New Dorp beach where the wind was at it’s most fierce. I decided to walk for the length of two park benches, I was now at a full half-marathon distance, and still had a ways to go. As I took walking steps, my calves begin to tell me that I had better start running again or it was over, right here, right now. We will shut you down mother fucker and we will do it with extreme prejudice. So get moving.
Turning back up to the streets, to get back to Gateway, I passed New Dorp High School (a land mark for the home stretch), and started to set myself up for stopping. Could I go another mile, can I go three hours, can I go the full 3:10 that I had planned. As I hit a stoplight, the answer came to me. It was the three hour mark, and a song came on my play list that I knew was the limit of what I had left. A song I had known since before I was a true rock and roller, it was an anthem at one time, and it’s length, very close to another mile. ‘Nuff said. I knew every note, every nuance. It was the right song to carry me back or carry me to 3:10. I enjoyed every bit of it, savored every note, and as the live audience that saw it recorded began to shower the band with adulation, it was time — three hours, ten minutes, fifteen miles, one mile short of the pace. I was a mile from the car. I couldn’t run anymore. I was exhausted. I stopped the clock and started to walk. My legs were so cramped I could barely put one foot in front of the other.
It was getting colder, and I felt like I was getting no closer. I decided to try to run again. That lasted five steps. (quoth my calves “never more”) And it was back to grinding it out. I had accomplished the goal, but I was no closer to the right process. It was time to get help if I was going to make this happen.
Up Next — Enter the Professor! Until then, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Peter Frampton: (I hope it gets you that last mile!)
