Calm Yourself!

Hello!

Recovery Week -- that time in the training cycle when you think about race day goals, scare yourself shitless, and then try to calm yourself back down and then think about how your training cycle fits into them.

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I set out for a recovery run this morning with the intent of thinking about my goals for Santa Rosa. If you've been following along here for any point of the last 5.5 months, you may remember that my marathon goal is to break 3 hours. Ah, the elusive 2:xx marathon... It scared me shitless before Newport, and it still scares me shitless. I can't help but wonder, "Am I ready to crush that goal?" So before I start to spiral into a web of self-doubt, I'm going to just take the rational route here and think about my training.

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I can't say that I had any major catastrophes this training cycle (knock on wood). I still had some aches and pains (e.g., piriformis), but that's nothing new. I didn't end up doing as much core and strength work as I said I would. The first few weeks were good, and then I moved, and suddenly, everything went awry on that front. Simply finding the time and energy to run seemed like a miracle.

You know what else didn't happen? Sleep. Old habits die hard.

I didn't focus as much on speed as I should have. But between the superhero 5K and a workout of 5x600m intervals at 5KRP that I ran 20+ seconds faster than 5K pace, I think the speed work that I did do went quite well.

But what did happen? Well, I made a more conscious effort to eliminate gluten and dairy from my diet, and my GI system has been happier. Maybe not happiest (refined sugar seems to also send my GI system into distress), but happier. And that's progress.

I did at least one of my long runs at 6am. Yes, it required me waking up at 3am, but I did it. And I survived. And it went well.

I ran an ultra relay at altitude (4000+ feet above sea level), and over a span of 29 hours, managed to run 35 miles at an average pace of about 7:30.

So my overall point here is that while some things didn't go right, some things did. And focusing on those is keeping me calm from freaking out.

It's hard to believe that this will be my 10th marathon. If you asked me when I started this marathoning business if I'd do 10 marathons, I would've looked at you like you just took some crazy pills. And now, I feel like the one who's taken some crazy pills. It's hard to believe that the 5.5 months that I spent in continual training for two different marathons are about to come to a close. Part of me is expecting to deal with the post-marathon blues, and to be tempted to sign up for another marathon as a means of coping with them. But we shall see...

Celebrating Training Victories

When we last spoke (or rather, I spoke and you potentially listened), I had just moved and hadn't trained as much as planned over the prior two weeks. Unless daily stair climbing counts. Because I moved to a 3-story townhouse, and the only bathroom is on the top floor. And let me tell you, climbing these stairs about 58 times a day is no joke. I think after two weeks though, I'm finally used to it.

For this week, my main goal was to make sure I ran more miles than the previous week. The forecast called for more super-hot days, so my secondary goal was to beat the heat.

Of my seven runs last week (Monday was my only rest day, and I doubled up on Saturday), two were early morning (before 8am, during the week), one was mid-morning (9:45am), one was lunchtime, two were mid-afternoon (1:30-3:30pm), and one was early evening (7pm). Operation stay reasonably cool was accomplished. And I was able to see on my early morning runs that the heat had definitely been slowing me down.

I managed to log 51 miles this week, which was more than the 44 that I logged last week. Therefore, I accomplished my mileage goal too!

Another huge milestone was that I raced my first 5K in nearly two years! On Friday, one of my coworkers asked me if I wanted to run this superhero 5K with her on Saturday (the next day) along the waterfront (one loop from Hawthorne to Steel Bridge). I was all over this, even if it meant having to go to Target to buy a superhero T-shirt.

Assuming the course was mapped properly, my goal was to break 20 minutes (6:26/mi). We started, and I just booked it. Maybe I started out too quickly, but like I said, I hadn't raced a 5K in a while. I hit the first mile in 6:16, which was way faster than goal pace. (I did pass Batman though.) The second mile was along the east side of the Esplanade. I passed some more people, but felt like I was significantly slower than the first mile. My mile split was 6:28 though, so I guess I wasn't as far off as I thought. The last portion involved going up and over the Hawthorne Bridge, and then back to the finish. I stopped my watch and hit Save before I could even process that the course was 0.5 miles short. Had I been thinking, I might've just kept running along the waterfront until my watch hit 3.1 miles. Coulda, shoulda, woulda though, right? Anyway, my final time was 16:38, which amounted to a 6:23 pace.  I was a bit disappointed that the course was short, but I was stoked to run all of that faster than my goal pace (and run my first race in a sub-6:30/mi pace). After the last few weeks of running, I needed that confidence booster.

The next day, I had "15M with 12M at goal marathon pace" on the plan. However, as a result of the 5K (and the 4 recovery miles) the day before, I decided to change this to a 2M warm-up, followed by 6 x 1M repeats (with 1M of rest in between), and then a 2M cooldown. My legs felt good until speed interval #5, and then they just felt like lead. But I found some kick for the last interval.

Both of those stories reminded me of a very valuable lesson. In any training plan, you have to celebrate the small wins, because it helps you remember that something's going right in your training. And the sum of all of those small wins is a huge victory.

Do you celebrate your small wins? And if not, will you start doing that?