After my fund raiser in January for Camp Sunshine, I had a fair load of miles under my belt but no speed. I ran a 50k on January 31st, and then 1 week later ran a 10 mile race in less than 60 minutes. It was my slowest race there for 3 or 4 years, but I felt the same at mile 9 as I had at mile 2 despite my lack of speed.

Since then, my training has been a bit haphazard as I wasn’t training for anything specific. I haven’t cracked 200 miles in a month since then, and this week has been the first time in a month that I’ve run over 50 miles. I ran a total of 3 Fat Ass races this Winter, beginning with that 50k in January and followed by 26 miles in February and 15 miles in March. Most of my long runs have been 13-15 miles at most, often with an 8-10 mile run on the day before or the day after.

Out of curiosity more than anything else, I ran a Jeff Galloway “Magic Mile” on Friday evening in the rain after I got out of work. It wasn’t on a track, but I managed to squeek out a 5:14. I doubt that I had a sub-5 in me even had I been on a better surface or had somebody to chase so that 5:14 is probably pretty honest for an effort.

According to Galloway’s calculator that 5:14 mile translates to a probable 2:58:15 marathon given my current level of fitness. I tend to think that I’ll be able to run a little faster than that, although I recognize I won’t come close to my PR from when I won the Cox Sports Marathon 2 years ago. The calculator also claims that I could run a 10k in 37:19, a 6:01 pace, and I have already run a faster pace over 10 miles so far this season.

My best guess is that I will be somewhere in the 2:53 to 2:55 range next Saturday.

Since I know that my lack of speedwork means I’m not in the kind of shape to run 6:00 or 6:15 miles over the course of the entire marathon, it gives me the freedom to experiment a little and do something that I’ve just not had the time or opportunity to do over the past few years.

My race plan is to use Jeff Galloway’s Run-Walk-Run method during the marathon. I have been practicing it on some of my runs and will count steps rather than sticking to a specific number of seconds, mostly because anybody running right behind me is likely going to be running too fast to dodge if I suddenly stop to walk. By counting steps, I can take the walk breaks when they are convenient and won’t be beholden to the watch.

The general plan will be to take a 15 second(ish) walk break every mile. I can usually make 38 steps in 15 seconds, but I’ll probably round it to 35 to give me a little deceleration and acceleration time and still stick to that 15 second window.

I’ve been able to stay pretty comfortable under 7 minute pace for 10 mile runs using this strategy, so I will hopefully be able to maintain a 6:30-6:40 pace using the run-walk-run for the first 20 miles. For the last 10k, I will theoretically be able to pick up the pace and finish strong.

This should be a fun experiment; if you are going to be racing or spectating, don’t get too discouraged if you see me walking. Instead, cheer me on and then check back afterwards to see how well it worked out. If all goes well, maybe I’ll actually get myself into shape and use this strategy to finally get that sub-6 pace in my next marathon…

This year didn’t quite go as planned. I was off to a great start, but my training was thrown a bit off between breaking my foot in July, totaling my car in November, and getting a nasty case of bronchitis in December.

This year I ran 339 times for a total distance of 2002.3 miles in 14 days, 6 hours and 43 minutes. That is over 600 miles fewer than I ran in 2008, although total time on my feet was about the same, and was far short of the 3000 to 3500 miles I had planned on running this year. It was still over 100 miles further than I ran in 2007 and over 600 miles further than I ran in 2006.

Technically, I ran in 17 races this year. Realistically, I raced 8 times, once you take out the fat ass and Back Cove races. I only ran 1 marathon this year, but I also did 2 ultramarathons. Unfortunately, only 1 of them was in a state I had not yet run.

I began the year in the desert outside Vegas with the Running From an Angel 50 Miler, which is now officially the furthest I have ever run. It took me just over 7 hours and 47 minutes, and I placed 6^th out of 45 runners (and was the first runner in my age group.)

After recovering from the 50 Miler, I started to concentrate on a return to the Cox Sports Marathon, which I won in 2008. I ran my race plan perfectly, going through the first half of the race on a 2:35 pace which I knew was going to be needed to win again. Unfortunately, I don’t think I got the best training in leading up to the race, because I started to fade fast after 15 miles and while I still did well with a 2 hour and 46 minute 7^th place finish, it was still a bit of a disappointment.

Fortunately, I was able to redeem myself a few weeks later at the Pineland Farms Trail Challenge, where I ran a 36 minute 50k PR with my 3^rd place finish in 3 hours 51 minutes. My goal for this race was to run up front as long as I felt good and was having fun, and then to just slow down and continue having fun. After 18 miles I had to slow down, but it was a good time all around and I am looking forward to the 2010 version.

I didn’t really do any racing after I broke my foot in July, instead spending most of my time recovering (with 45 days completely off plus an additional few weeks of very low mileage or walking only.) My weight was about as steady as it has been for the past 4 years that I’ve been weighing myself daily, although you can certainly tell by the dips in my weight when I was taking time off:

This year, I wrote only 149 articles, which is less than half as many articles as I wrote in 2008. Traffic to the site was up by about 28%, however, and those numbers don’t include the articles I wrote only for my newsletter subscribers or the traffic to them. Most of that traffic came before I hurt myself, so in the coming year I am going to have to stay healthy and motivated to continue writing regularly on the site.

The two most popular articles were the same this year as last year, although 9 Things To Do The Week Before A Marathon swapped places for the number 1 spot over What is a Tempo Run?

I expect 2010 to be a vast improvement over 2009. I have some great plans for this January, and will have more details up about that tomorrow. It’s going to be very exciting.

Granted, she can’t practice law until she’s admitted by the bar…

But, she has graduated!

I’m very proud of her.

Now back to our regularly scheduled running articles…

The race report itself should go up this evening.

Last year, I won the marathon in 2:43:27, which was pretty exciting.

Going into the race this year, I have 3 goals.

1. Break the course record.
2. Set the course record.
3. Run faster than 2:37:00.

I admit it; I’m a bit single minded.

First, breaking the course record is actually impossible given that it’s a different course. But I want to run faster than that anyway. Saying that I want to break the course record is the same thing as saying that I want to set a personal best. (Breaking the course record sounds better though so that’s what I’m going with.)

I’d also like to set the course record, which is different than breaking it. Setting the course record means that I win the race again. Technically, I can win the race without setting the course record, but in that case I’ll go off the prior argument that new course = new record. I just want to win. (After all, my site isn’t called Run to Dawdle for a reason.)

My actual time goal is to run faster than 2 hours and 37 minutes. I’ll need to average a 5:59.5/mile pace throughout the race in order to do that. (Ideally, I’ll run faster than that.)

A few weeks ago, I discussed the difference in elevation between the old course and new course. Here’s the profiles:

Here is how I ran the race last year (on a slightly different course) and a projection of how I might do this year:

If I run that, it will bring me through 26 miles in 2:34:34, which is about a 2:35:45 marathon if I run the same average pace for the last 385 yards. Here’s where the contest comes in.

In the comments below, let me know what you think my finishing time will be. Last year, it was about 51° and it rained at the start, remaining overcast. I don’t pay any attention to weather forecasts this far out, so you are welcome to check into that to see how you think it might affect me.

My personal best is that 2:43:27 that I ran last year. I won’t be upset if you think I’m going to go out too fast and then crash and burn, nor will I be super ecstatic if you think I’ll carry forward a strong early pace into an unrealistically fast pace. Make a guess for what you think my time will be, be it honest or pulling a random number out of a hat. You know what I’m going to attempt to do.

What’s the prize going to be? Well, I have no idea. Bragging rights? A little running trinket? A running DVD or gadget? Leave a suggestion for what you think the winner should get; this is pretty informal so I don’t promise anything. Then again, I might just surprise you and award something cool.

Entry Rules

• 1 guess per person, and it must be left in the comments below by Saturday night, EDT. If the comment is left on Sunday (even if it’s right at midnight EDT) then it won’t be eligible.
• If your comment doesn’t appear right away, it probably got moderated, and I may not check the computer to approve it until Sunday night. Don’t worry; I’ll get it.
• You must leave a valid email address in the comment box. It won’t appear on the site; don’t worry.
• Valid entry must include a predicted marathon finish time including hours, minutes and seconds. Optionally, you may also include a prize suggestion for the winner. (Extra imaginary points if it’s creative or funny, but must be something a runner might like to receive.)
• No prize other than recognition is guaranteed, but if there is one I’ll be contacting the winner by email. If it’s something that needs to be shipped, I’ll obviously need a postal address, but I’ll just ask for that in email if it is necessary.

So – guess away! How do you think I’m going to do? Feel free to guess what place I’ll come in, and commentary is also welcome.

Leave a comment in the box below:

I resized, rescaled, and merged together the split elevation profile that they are providing so that you can see a side by side comparison between last year’s course and this year’s course:

You can click on the image for the full size version for comparison.

This year I expect to do a bit better than last year. I am confident that I’ll run faster than 6 minutes per mile for my average pace, although I fully expect to run a few minutes faster than that even.

As I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t done any racing to see what sort of marathon shape I was in until last week’s half marathon.

I felt pretty comfortable with a long warmup (4½ miles) and then a couple of quick miles at the start before settling into what will be my marathon pace. I picked it up again for the last mile or so and then did a 4½-5 mile cool down. This gives me a lot of confidence going into the Cox Sports Marathon in 3 weeks.

Yesterday I followed up last week’s run with a little over 20 miles continuous. I ran 10½ miles on the hills trying to keep it between 7-7:30 pace (which I managed for the first 9 miles then I snuck under 7 minute pace finishing that loop), and followed that up with another 10+ miles at sub-7:00 pace. I had 1 mile sub-6 and would have had 2 except I was halfway through mile 18 before I remembered I needed to pick it up so that one was only a 6:10. Good enough.

I think I’m ready. The 50 miler gave me a great base, and I’ve had some good training since recovering from it. My mileage each week has been consistently higher than last year, and I avoided getting sick at the beginning of April:

Now the trick is not doing anything stupid in the next 3 weeks. I plan on doing more of the same over the next couple of weeks except with shorter long runs. I’ll probably be around 60 miles the next two weeks and maybe run 45-55 the week of the marathon (race included.)

If you are going to be running the Cox Sports Marathon, Half Marathon, or 5k, then good luck and I hope that I see you there!

I was on vacation at the New Year this year, so my look back over the past year was delayed by a week or so.

In 2008 I ran 390 times for 2612.9 miles in about 14 days, 22 hours and 7 minutes of running. That’s an almost 38% increase in the number of miles that I ran in 2007, and a bit more than the 2300-2500 miles that I had predicted. I also averaged about 40 seconds per mile slower than I averaged in 2007, which I think has had a lot to do with my success and my relative lack of injuries. I have almost doubled my annual mileage since 2006.

I ran 2 marathons last year, both of them in new states. First, after taking a course to get my coaching certification, I treated ING Georgia as a training run and ran in with at tempo pace at a bit over 3 hours. I followed that up 5 weeks later with the Cox Sports Marathon in Rhode Island. I not only ran a personal best 2:43:27, but I also won the race by a minute and 10 seconds and set the course record.

My goal for the rest of the year was concentrated on running a fast 5k, but I never got my training exactly where I wanted it to be despite training through a very speedy 34:08.1 Beach to Beacon 10k.

My training got back on track after the 5k season ended, though, as I got ready for an ultramarathon just after the new year. My mileage was pretty steadily in the mid-60s, peaking at just over 100 miles before Thanksgiving. I also did something new in my training, which was to run 3 runs of at least 20 miles within a 5 day span of time.

My weight has pretty much stayed the same as it has for the past few years:

It rarely varies by more than a pound or two, and over the year stayed within a 7 pound total range.

This past year I wrote fewer articles here at Run to Win despite writing quite a bit more in total. I wrote 334 articles, almost 300 fewer than in 2007. However, I added an email newsletter at the end of 2007 to which I wrote quite a few articles, as well as quite a few special reports and ebooks that are available for purchase or download. I began getting more into video and audio than I have been in the past, and I expect to improve my skills in that area in 2009.

In the past year, my most popular article was one from May of 2007, What is a Tempo Run? My next most popular article is a perennial favorite, 9 Things To Do The Week Before A Marathon (My first book is an expansion on that article that gets into all of the nitty gritty details about how to not only prepare for your marathon but also how to run and recover from it!)

What has been your favorite content here at Run to Win from the past year? How has your health and training gone in 2008? What sort of goals do you have for 2009? Shoot me an email or leave a comment below; I’d love to hear about it.

Now that I’ve covered my training schedule for my first 50 miler, here’s what I did in the week or so leading up to the race.

I tapered very aggressively. I basically just did not worry about how much I was going to run from Christmas through the New Year (the race was on January 3^rd.) Any training benefits that I was going to get were achieved well before, and my priority was recovering as much from my training as possible. After a few brief runs after the Christmas holiday, my wife and I flew to Las Vegas which involved a 2 hour bus ride and a 6 hour flight. We arrived in Vegas around 10:00 p.m. which was more like 1:00 a.m. for us. We were relatively tired, given that we normally turn in pretty early.

When you fly into Vegas, you can see the lights from the city (especially the strip) but you can’t see much else at night. Our drive to our resort was similarly unenlightening for what we could expect when we woke up in the morning.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we wake up and step outside for a short run and we see this directly in front of us:

Las Vegas is basically a big bowl. There are mountains all around the city. Erin and I went out for what was supposed to be a short 3 to 4 mile run. We basically just made turns as traffic dictated or where the view improved.

We saw a hot air balloon early in the run, and it didn’t take long for us to realize that it was coming down so we ran after it. We managed to catch up to the balloon just after it touched down and got to watch them take it in and put it away, which was really neat. Of course, we then had another 3 miles to run back to our room so our run was a bit longer than we wanted.

After that run, I knew that my original goals for the race weren’t realistic. I was having a lot of trouble running and thought that the altitude was causing me all kinds of problems. Granted, Vegas is only around 2000 feet, but I do live and train along the Atlantic Ocean. (I later discovered that I didn’t have any trouble from the altitude; my problems came from the smog.)

I ran a couple of more times throughout the week, and I spent most of Tuesday hiking out at the Valley of Fire (which is an awesome park if you are ever out that way.)

It is about an hour outside of Vegas and gets you away from all of the noise and the bustle. There are plenty of cool rock formations, lots of hiking, some interesting desert plant life, and more scenic views than you can shake a stick at. And yes, I tried.

Speaking of hiking, we also got plenty of hiking accomplished while we were in the city as well. Doing anything on the strip requires one of two things, usually both: Time and Money.

Driving on the strip is a fool’s errand. It’s the worst place in Vegas for traffic. They have a monorail behind the casinos, but it is difficult to get to and isn’t very convenient. (It’s also relatively expensive to use.) Walking anywhere involves going through the casinos and the slot machines, and if you follow the directions on any signs then you will take a very roundabout trip to get where you want to be that will bring you past as many slot machines as possible.

The downside to all of this is that it makes it very difficult to eat. There are a lot of places that serve food, but you wind up spending so much time commuting or waiting or standing around that it is very easy to miss meals. When you are somebody like me that needs to eat constantly, this isn’t such a good thing.

Everything in Vegas is over the top. They have recreations of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, they have live lions and flamingos on display, everything makes noise and flashes at you, and it all leads to intense overstimulation. I can’t imagine how people actually manage to sleep if they get a room right on the strip.

You can do actually head out to Vegas relatively cheaply, but every amenity involves an additional charge and they add up very fast.

As we were out there for the New Year, there were about 300,000 people in the streets. That’s a lot of people. My sleep schedule was really out of whack, since being on the strip for their fireworks show meant that we didn’t get back to our room until 4:00 a.m. by the time we could leave. (If you are ever in Vegas for the New Year, skip the fireworks. There are too many lights that get left on to see anything other than smoke, and fireworks really don’t compete with some of the light, water and fire shows that happen every hour anyway.)

By the end of the week, we were pretty tired. We’d ate pretty well (if not as regularly as I’d have liked) and we planned on checking out the Hoover Dam and then switching to the host hotel for the race.

Unfortunately for us, it took about 2½ hours to travel the last 11 miles to the Hoover Dam, so we missed the last tour by about 3 minutes. Okay, it was 10 minutes by the time we parked the car. After about 2 hours, I had her stop the car so I could root through the trunk for the last of my pretzels and apple leathers just so we’d have something to snack on. We never did have lunch that day.

The Hoover Dam is what I like to call not quite small.

We walked around and took some pictures for an hour or so, and thankfully Erin had an opportunity the next morning while I was racing to return and take the tour. Hopefully they’ll have finished building the bypass bridge before I ever visit again so that there is somewhere for the thru-traffic to go instead of bottle-necking at the dam.

Checking in for the race went smoothly, although we later learned that some friends that were at the dam with us got pulled over by the police because they were suspected of having murdered somebody.

The host hotel itself didn’t really impress me, and the next time I do a race out that way I’ll definitely consider staying elsewhere. The casino was pretty run down and the staff definitely seemed as though they had better things to do than to cater to their guests.

It served well enough as a place to sleep, though, and their wake up calls were reliable. For a change, I got to sleep relatively early the night before the race, and on race morning had no trouble waking up. Other than catching our flight home, there was only one thing left to do on the trip.

Run 50 miles…

This Autumn I concentrated on running a fast 5k, a goal that I was only moderately successful at (given the times that I wanted to run versus the times that I did run.) At the beginning of October, I switched my training over to get ready for my first 50 mile race which was at the beginning of January.

My first week was a recovery week from my Summer and Autumn training schedule, and I only ran a couple of times that week. Then I began to build up my mileage in preparation for the race. I did very little speed work outside of a few tempo runs. You can see my weekly mileage for the latter quarter of 2008 here:


After one good week of training (53 miles, about on par with what I had been doing in my 5k training) I got pretty sick and took 5 days off in the third week. I felt really good from there though and built my mileage up into the 60s and 70s for the bulk of my training.

There were a few races thrown in, but none of them were at full effort. I ran the Windham Lions 5k in the middle of a 15 mile run, I ran the Wicked Creepy Halloween Trail Run on an unfamiliar trail in the dark, and I mostly just ran with my camera filming the Blackstrap Hell Trail Challenge. I still got official times for them all, though.

My general philosophy was to get a mid-week long run in as often as possible and to run back to back medium/long to long runs on the weekends, building up as the weeks wore on. I did really well with my mid-week runs, with a lot of double workouts to get mileage in on some weeks (including one triple) and with a straight up 12-15 miler on the other weeks.

On the weekends, I didn’t do so well. I wanted to get at least one 30-35 mile run in, but my longest run wound up being just over 24 miles. I also never got any back-to-back 20+ mile runs in. I think that having those would have helped me in the 50 miler.

I did try to get as many hills into my workouts as possible. The race looked like it was relatively hilly when I first checked out the elevation profile:

There is 4,277 total feet of ascent (with a net of zero as it was an out and back) over the 50 miles. It looks intimidating, until I realized that some of my long runs at Pineland Farms were getting me around 2300-2500 feet of total ascent over less than half that distance. The actual grades of the road were only about 6-8%, so it’s actually a pretty easy course in terms of the climbing. I still tried to integrate as many hills into my long runs as possible, though, especially my mid-week runs on the roads that were 12-15 miles and anything that I did on the trails that was over 10 miles.

I had 2 weeks that I think were the cornerstone of my training. The first 7 weeks were basically training for these 2 weeks worth of workouts, building up a good enough base that I was able to accomplish them.

The first cornerstone week was reaching 100 miles in a single week for the first time since I graduated from college. That week I just had a huge volume of mileage with 4 individual runs over 10 miles and only 2 days during that week where I (barely) didn’t run at least 10 miles.

The week following that was scheduled as a cutback week, where I intended to run about 50 miles, but between Thanksgiving and some sore legs I only ran a little over 20. That let me rest up and recover from some of the damage of putting in a 100 mile week.

The second cornerstone week was actually a 5 day span of workouts that started at the end of week 10 and ran into week 11, where I ran 3 runs over 20 miles.

• Saturday: 20 miles on trails followed by a 150 minute nap.
• Sunday: A 90 minute nap followed by 7 miles on roads.
• Monday: 21 miles on roads.
• Tuesday: 5½ miles on trails after working a full day.
• Wednesday: 24 miles on the roads (my longest run leading into the race.)

So in 5 days I ran 77 miles, 65 of them in 3 of the runs. Individually, none of the runs were particularly difficult, but that last long run certainly had my legs feeling pretty similar to what I could expect around 35 to 40 miles into the 50 miler.

From that point forward, I was concentrating on recovering from as much of the damage that I had done to my legs as possible. The Monday following that 5 day streak I did a short 5 mile tempo run, which felt nice for stretching my legs out. From there my mileage dropped off pretty fast. I only ran about 45 miles the week before Christmas and about 30 miles the week of.

As my friend Ian reminded me, you aren’t going to improve in the last few weeks before an ultramarathon, you can only sabotage your race by doing more work than you need to.

Yesterday, I ran 50 miles. At once. Yeah, strange thing to do, but it seemed like a good way to finish off a vacation.

At a very rough estimate, I probably burned around 5500 calories or so in the 8 hours that that took. Here is everything that I consumed before and during the race:

Pre-Race

• 1 banana (105 calories)
• 2 wheat rolls (~85 calories ea / ~170 calories)

Breakfast total: 275 calories

Race

• (Lots of) Water (0 calories)
• 2 pouches of Hornet Juice – start & @ mile 19 (60 calories ea / 120 calories)
• 12(ish) cups (2oz to 6oz) of Heed (100 calories per 16 ounces / ~300 calories)
• ~70 Black Forest Gummi Bears (120 calories per 17 bears / ~500 calories)
• 6 Crank Gels (150 calories ea / 900 calories)
• 12 pretzels (24 calories ea / 288 calories)

Race Total: 2108 calories

Consumption Strategy

In all, I consumed less than 2400 calories, which gives me at least a 3000 calorie deficit by the end of the race. That would explain why I’ve been so hungry for the past day or so, I guess.

My general strategy was to eat what I had available for breakfast, and to make sure that I had plenty of water during the run. I wanted to eat gummi bears regularly throughout the run every 15-30 minutes and a gel packet every 45-60 minutes. Since Heed was available, I took a cup of that at most of the aid stations, being careful to space out my gel packets and my Heed consumption since I didn’t think those would mix too well. I also grabbed a few pretzels from the aid station tables on 4 separate occasions, 3 at a time.

I also started with a water bottle full of Hornet Juice which I refilled at mile 19. I meant to refill my sandwich baggy of gummy bears at mile 36, but I got busy reapplying sunscreen and forgot to grab them. I only ran out of water once, but I knew that there was an aid station coming up within a quarter mile so that worked out fine. I did dump quite a bit of water on the ground, though, because “1/3 to half full” apparently meant “so full you can’t screw on the top” to most of the volunteers at the marathon aid stations. That was fine, though, better too much than too little.

This strategy kept me going. The majority of the calorie consumption came early in the race, since there was way I was going to be able to process everything late in the run and I knew I wouldn’t be able to take in as many calories as I was using. I just thought it would be interesting to find the specific deficit, especially since I could still remember everything I ate during the race and thought to jot it down.

Specific details on the race will be going up over the next few days, including plenty of pictures. I carried my cell phone with me and snapped photos of (almost) all of the 50 milers as well as plenty of the beautiful surroundings that are to be found at Lake Mead, although I did not get any photos of the coyotes. (They sounded like they were just on the other side of the hill that I was running around, although they were actually across a river that was on the other side of it.) The crows didn’t excite me enough when they came visiting late in the race for me to take the energy to get the camera out.

Thus ends the bulk of my training for the Running From An Angel 50 Miler on January 3^rd. This will be my first race that is longer than 50k, and my goal through this training period was to get as many back to back long runs on the weekends as possible with a long(ish) run mid-week as time allowed.

I didn’t get quite what I wanted, although I did bump my weekly mileage up to levels that I haven’t run at since college, hitting over 100 miles the week before Thanksgiving. This week I wanted to do the 3 runs over 20 miles every other day as the last tough training that I was going to get in before starting to taper and letting my body recover. I now have 3 weeks and 3 days before the race to do so.

Next week, I may run as far as 15 miles in one go, but no further. Christmas week, I am going to limit myself to 10 miles in any one run. New Year’s week, I’ll have 1 run that is 50 miles long but otherwise will try not to go over 5 miles at any given time.

That said, does anybody have any good running suggestions for while I am in Vegas?

Well, maybe not everything, and you may not have been afraid, but Amy over at Runner’s Lounge took the time to ask me a dozen questions about my running so if you are interested in taking a peek, you can do so here: RunnersLounge.com

The interview covers some running history, gets some of my favorite tips out of me, and lets me get on a pulpit and remind people to volunteer at races.

How would you describe your running 10 years ago?

Ten years ago this month was wildly different than 10 years next month; I was on the cusp of a level of training that I had never even considered or dreamed of. I was training through the Summer months between high school graduation and my freshman year in college, and I had no direction and no idea what to expect when I got there.

My main concern was to get my mileage up. In high school, I doubt that I ever ran more than 35 miles per week, and I have no doubt that I usually ran much less than that. I had not yet become obsessive compulsive about tracking my training at that point.

I knew that 35 miles per week just was not going to cut it, so my goal was to raise my mileage up to around 60 to 65 miles per week. By late July or mid-August, I was consistently getting that level of training in, as well as working full time in Sales Promotions for Merrill Lynch and getting over to the bowling alley for a few rounds after work most days.

Once I got to college, I only ran 85 miles the first week because I missed a few workouts due to freshman obligations. I spent the next few years running between 85-95 miles most weeks, topping out a couple of times at just over 120 miles and not infrequently running 100-105 miles, especially early in each season.

That high mileage built a great base for me, but my college coach had a completely different style of coaching than I was used to from my high school coach.

What is your best and worst run/race experience?

My best running experience is a lot easier to choose this year than it would have been last year. Breaking the tape at the Cox Sports Marathon gave me my first course record, for which I am very proud.

The race left a lot to be desired, and I ran alone for a good chunk of the race, but I had a lot of fun and have many fond memories from the race. I knew 2 miles into it that I was going to win, despite there being no real evidence to that effect at that early point in the race. It was great to validate my confidence in myself and to follow through with my goals.

More importantly, the training for that race was by far some of the best winter training that I have ever done, and was the heaviest workload that I’ve managed since graduating from college. I’m actually looking forward to next Winter and running the snow for months on end again.

My worst experience running is a little more difficult to decide. Even when I’ve been completely miserable during the run, I have learned something and had a story to tell in my training log afterwards. Even times when I was frozen solid are now looked back on with fond memories.

If I had to choose one, though, my worst experience would have to be one of two worst injuries that I’ve had.

Tendonitis and a stress fracture in college left me unable to walk for about a month, and while I raced my way back onto the varsity squad by the end of the season I had no emotional investment in the team that season and that was hard to take. I did get a lot of good cross training in, though, and I used that as a base for my first marathon.

My other major injury was a few years earlier, when I fell down the side of a mountain during a cross country race and broke my ankle. The meet fell between the conference and state championships, and was an annual race where we competed against a few of the much larger schools in the state. It rained all morning, and my coach told me that he’d sit the varsity squad if it didn’t let up so that we don’t get hurt. No sooner said, and the clouds went away.

We got to the park, and the race course was great. Lots of steep hills on trails through the woods. Unfortunately, I stepped on a leaf that must have been hiding a twig or a hole or something, I never knew what.

The next thing that I knew I was sliding down the trail on my face, which I decided was a bad idea so I got my shoulder down and rolled the rest of the way. One of my teammates hurdled me, but 2 or 3 of the guys on the other teams managed to get me with their spikes before I rolled off the course and waited to be taken the rest of the way down the trail.

The worst part of the whole ordeal was that I was looking forward to chatting up a girl after the race that I knew, but she was on the other side of a creek and I couldn’t walk.

I refused to admit the ankle was broken for the next few days, since I was convinced that I’d be able to race in the state meet. My elephant foot belied that belief, though. A childhood friend of mine from the opposite end of the state was also injured, so at least we got to hang out and hobble around cheering on our teammates with our crutches.

Why do you run?

I explored why I run a couple of years ago, and the answer basically boils down to 2 things.

First, running is an addiction and I get antsy any time that I have to take time off. I have tried tempering my withdrawal symptoms through cross training, but even that doesn’t prove to be 100% effective. Any time that I stop running I also stop eating, which means that I very quickly shed weight that then takes me months (and sometimes years) to regain.

The second reason that I run is because I am a competitive person, and this is a safe and effective way for me to feed that side of my nature. I find it physically and emotionally painful to lose a race, especially when I am racing somebody that is at or near the same level as myself.

I am constantly looking for the next challenge. I have historically been a mediocre runner at the levels that I compete at, so as I begin to find success I am constantly searching for a more competitive atmosphere.

Thankfully, I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, because many of my current teammates are much more talented than I am. There is a good mix of youth and experience, with guys that can beat me handily who are 5 or 6 years younger than me or over 20 years older than me. They give me good role models that I can learn from and compete with.

What is the best or worst piece of advice you’ve been given about running?

The worst piece of advice is directly related to the best piece of advice about running. In my early and formative years, I was often told that long, slow distance makes for long, slow runners and for 2 years that meant that I was in some of the best physical shape that I have ever known.

Then I got injured. Then I got injured again.

The best advice I’ve been given is that every workout has a purpose, and the purpose of most workouts is to run slow in order to force adaptations and encourage recovery without overly stressing my body.

What is something surprising about yourself that not many people would know?

I met my wife at a small park here in Portland, Maine while I was running an 800 meter workout and she was stretching on a park bench. I stopped and chatted with her for a few minutes and invited her to join the workout, and it wasn’t until after the second repeat and I saw her milling around in the crowd that I realized that the woman that I had been talking to was actually young and very cute.

I don’t know why I was so preoccupied that I didn’t notice when she was stretching on the park bench; maybe she had her hat over her face and didn’t look up much, or maybe the sun was in my eyes, or maybe I’m just a moron sometimes.

When the workout was over, though, I’m glad that she just happened to continue her run in the direction that she saw everybody cooling down in. It gave me a few minutes to chat with her and things went well from there.

That meant that it was time to try running again this afternoon. I ran a few miles easy with my wife, then picked up the pace when we got to a place in the road where we couldn’t run next to one another safely anyway. I wound up adding 4 loops to the normal route that we were on, which turned an 8 miler into a 12.5 miler. My neck actually felt much better after the run than it did beforehand, which is a definite relief.

I didn’t make my weekly distance quota (95.5km ran of a minimum 100km in store and a preferred 110km penciled in,) but I came close enough and I was so exhausted all weekend that I’m sure the multiple naps helped me heal. This evening’s run leads me to believe that I can get back to my normal running routine tomorrow, although I am going to take a week off from any weight training.

I don’t feel that my training plan has been impacted at all by this minor injury, and I am looking forward to moving closer to my sub-16:00 5k goal for this Summer. I have also made some plans for my next goal race after the 5k races throughout the Summer and Autumn, a 50 miler on January 3^rd.

I didn’t hear any cracks today, and it isn’t nearly as painful, but I managed to tweak or pull something when I started my run today. I was all of about 22 seconds into the run. Now that it is 10 or 11 hours later, it hurts just as much so I don’t expect to run much this weekend, but hopefully it will have improved to the point where I can resume training again next week.

Now that my goal marathon for the Spring is out of the way, my next goal is to finally run a sub-16 5k this Summer or Autumn. I have 3 races targeted starting in late August, so my priority for the rest of this month is to recover from a relatively tough training schedule over the past 6 months. It has been one of the most strenuous winters in terms of how much work I managed to get in since I graduated from college, and was well worth it. Now, my body needs a little break.

To that end, I have taken it pretty easy this week. I went for a pair of 2 mile walks with my wife when she needed a break from studying for her law school exams, and took Tuesday off completely from working out.

I originally planned on going for a swim on Wednesday at lunch time, but a migraine late in the morning caused me to change my mind. I think I’ve figured out what caused it, and I blame voo-doo. When I got out to my car that afternoon there was half of a snake up on the roof. Actually, it’s still there. About 5 inches of it (including the head) were right over the driver’s side door; no idea where the other half is.

I got out for a 4 miler last night with the coaching group through Maine Running Company. I led the group that is racing this weekend on a tempo run, and just let myself fall back to folks running at slower speeds so that I wouldn’t be tempted to pick up the pace myself. I felt pretty good for the most part, although both achilles were aching by the end of the run. I’ll have to monitor that.

I did finally get into the pool today at lunchtime, and despite not swimming for 6 or 7 months I don’t seem to have lost much. I swam 1250 meters in about 29 minutes, with at least a minute standing around in the pool convincing everybody to circle swim as more people kept showing up. It left me pretty tired.

This weekend I am going to take it easy. I’ll be volunteering at the Sea Dogs 5k in Portland on Sunday morning, so if you are in the area and want to race then say hi. I’ll be at registration at 6:30 and then watching traffic during the race itself. The only exercise I plan on getting this weekend is to mow the lawn after I get home on Sunday afternoon, although I might take the bike out for a short spin. It’s been even longer since I’ve ridden than it has been since I swam.

Looking forward, the Back Cove weekly 5k series begins again next Wednesday, so I will be running those again every week. I don’t expect to start doing any real speed work until July, so I will probably take at least the May ones easy and then maybe put a few pickups in throughout June.

I do not plan on doing a lot of racing this year. Right now, it looks like I will be doing a 6 mile trail race in June, a 10k and 5 miler in July, and of course the Beach to Beacon in early August. The first 3 races will serve to tell me what sort of shape I am in and to make sure that I am where I want to be fitness wise at that point. I’ll be racing Beach to Beacon all out, but will aiming to start my peak in late August. Once I get past those 5k races through September, I will figure out what other races I want to do in the Autumn and whether I want to run another marathon this year or not.

Thanks again for all of the kind words this week.

My plans for the weekend originally called for staying with a friend and his brother down in the area. My friend decided to buy a house today, though, so he didn’t really want to go down. Not a problem, because I had another friend that was running the marathon and I was going to split a hotel room with him. Unfortunately, he got injured. So I was back to staying with the original friend’s brother, but he is now going to be out of town this weekend. I found that out tonight, so I got a hold of my injured friend and he canceled the hotel room this morning. It made for an interesting start to my evening. I did sort out my hotel arrangements eventually, though, and I’ll be staying at the original hotel after all. Hopefully I can still take advantage of the 3:00 checkout time.

If anybody is going to be in Providence this weekend and wants to try to meet up, send me an email or leave a comment on this article. I will try to check it before I leave tomorrow morning, and will probably check it tomorrow afternoon or evening after I get to the hotel.

I do not have an overly specific race plan for this weekend. My original range of goals involved an 8 minute span, but since one of my teammates did so well in the Olympic Trials that I now have about a 2 minute goal span. I am going to aim for running at around 6:00 to 6:10 pace and hoping that if I do wind up blowing up in the latter stages of the race that I at least run a PR. That shouldn’t be too tough, and if everything breaks well for me then I’ll make my goals.

As you can see from the elevation profile, there’s a few good climbers but the course never gets over 150 feet above sea level. I’m hoping that my winter hill running through the snow will make this seem like a flat enough course with just enough variation to keep my muscles from getting overworked.

I had a couple of good weeks at about 60 miles since I ran ING Georgia, but my cold came back in the past week and I have been fighting off my cough. It is mostly gone now and I don’t expect it to be a factor during the race, but it did cause me to taper a little more than I would have liked to have before this race. Better to be a little undertrained than at all overtrained, though, so let’s hope I feel nice and rested come Sunday. There have been plenty of phantom and taper pains over the past week or so, but I don’t expect any trouble from my legs on Sunday.

Wish me luck!

The Road Runners Club of America is the national association of running clubs, running events, and runners dedicated to promoting long distance running as a competitive sport and as healthful exercise. RRCA’s mission is to represent and promote the common interest of its member clubs, events, and individual runners through education, leadership, programs and other services.

My immediate plans and goals for this Summer are to assist in the coaching programs through the Maine Running Company in Portland, Maine. Once we determine what role I am going to play and how many people I will be coaching, I will decide how many private clients I can take on and will set up some online coaching options for the Summer and leading into the Autumn marathon season. If you have any interest in personal coaching from myself, then send me an email and let me know.

If you are interested in pursuing a career in coaching yourself and are interested in taking a class through the RRCA, they have released their Summer and Autumn schedule for courses. The instructors for my class were Janet Hamilton and Mike Broderick of Running Strong, and they will be offering courses in Orangeburg, South Carolina on July 19-20, in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 22-23, and in Arlington, Virginia on October 24-25. Patti and Warren Finke will also be teaching a class in Portland, Oregon on October 3-4.

The class takes 16 hours spread over 2 days. You can read more about the upcoming options in their latest press release: http://www.rrca.org/news/index.php?article=2282

The flights down to Georgia were uneventful, and it was quite hot when I got there. I managed to get in 7 or 8 miles or so Thursday afternoon and learned my way around the town that I was staying in. I got out to Wes‘s restaurant that evening and got to hang around with him and Dee Dee. They are both wonderful folk.

Friday and Saturday I spent sitting on my butt in a classroom learning what I needed to know to pass the RRCA coaching certification test. I would say that about 80% of what they taught were things that I had picked up on my own already, maybe a little more. I really enjoyed the class, especially in the second day when we generated some workout plans for “Joe Runner.” The class had a lot of experienced runners and coaches in it, though, and it was difficult to get to a consensus within the 6 and 7 person groups for how best to structure the workouts.

On Saturday, I ate some grapes in the class that I don’t think had been washed, and I had an acidic taste in my throat from there on out. Saturday night I changed hotel rooms, and the room I got was a bit dusty and caused me to start coughing a little. It was really close to start and finish for the marathon, though, which was quite nice.

The temperature dropped and it began raining Saturday night, which left mostly ideal conditions on race day. There was a lot of wind, but the temperatures were pretty steady in the mid-40s all morning. The race did a pretty good job of setting up the course, although the start and finish were less than ideal. Atlanta got some pretty serious tornadoes a few weeks ago that forced them to change the course a little.

This was probably one of the more challenging marathons that I’ve run. There were a lot of hills, and once the marathon and half marathon courses came back together there were a lot of walkers to dodge around. The finish area involved five 90 degree turns and had a brick surface, so add that in to how narrow it was and having to get around the half marathon walkers and it was difficult to get to the final line.

I treated the race as a long tempo run. When I laid out my training program, I thought that at this point I should be able to run and recover from a 3 hour marathon pretty easily. My watch had me running about 26.5 miles in 3:00:46, although my official time is about 3 minutes slower since I stopped multiple times to relieve myself in the portable johns along the way. I felt very comfortable the entire time, and don’t feel any fatigue from the run today.

Unfortunately, after running the race and then spending all day in airports or on airplanes yesterday, that acidic taste in my throat has blossomed into an all out sore throat and nasty cough. I feel okay otherwise, but I’m taking a few extra days off so that my body can fight whatever it is that is bugging me. My lymph nodes don’t seem too swollen, so I probably won’t bother going to a doctor unless it doesn’t clear up within the next day or so. Having 3 different hotel rooms in 4 nights probably didn’t help me out very much.

I am expecting good things out of the marathon this weekend. Based on the reviews that I read last year, everybody really liked the race except for a few major problems with it, such as not providing enough water. The race directors seem to have learned from their mistakes based on their preparations, so I am expecting things to go pretty well as long as they get the route cleaned up from the recent tornado that attacked Atlanta.

If you are going to be in the area, then keep an eye out for me at the expo on Friday night. The expo is free of charge both Friday and Saturday, although it has been moved to the Georgia Dome due to the storm damage downtown. If you are at the race as either a runner or a spectator, then feel free to come up and say hi if you spot me. I will be wearing bib #129 and expect to be running at a pretty even 6:50-6:52 pace throughout the entire race.

My goals for this marathon are pretty simple; it’s going to be a long tempo run. The idea is to get in 28-30 good miles, with 26 of them taking me to the finish line in about 3 hours. I want to be able to recover quickly from the race so that I can get back to my normal training next week as I prepare for my goal marathon on May 4^th in Rhode Island.

If you are running and want to run a sub-3 hour race, then I’m more than happy to provide the pace for you. I’ll warn you that I sometimes don’t shut up when I’m running, especially when running marathons, so I might talk your ear off. Of course, that could provide you with the motivation to stay ahead of me and meet your goals, since you’ll hear me coming up behind you!

The race is Sunday morning at 7:00 EDT, and if you are interested in such things you can track my progress at this web page once the race begins:

You can find out more information about the race at their website:
http://www.inggeorgiamarathon.com/

The run began great. Despite having not charged the batteries in my headlamp, I had no trouble seeing as there were very little clouds in the air and the moon was quite bright. I thought that the moon looked a little funky, so I knew the eclipse wasn’t too far away. The next time that I glanced up, though, it had begun!

By the time that I got home, it was pretty dark. I ran inside, collected my camera and my wife, and you can see from the photo how long I had until the total eclipse.

I thought that the eclipse would start at 10:00 and be total at around 10:30. The photo was taken at about 9:30. I think that it was a good thing that I didn’t wait to run.

I took a dozen pictures or so, playing with different exposures. I don’t have a remote shutter for my camera, though, so it is impossible to avoid a little camera shake at night. The photo above is at the maximum resolution. I just cropped it into a square.

If you would like to download my original images, then you can do so by clicking on the picture. The pictures are compressed into a ZIP archive that is about 4MB in size. Most of them aren’t any good, but they are interesting to look through. This photo was #26.

When I got home, I was amazed to discover that the GPS worked inside!

Not particularly well, since it thinks that I was running around the infield at an average pace of 42 minutes per mile instead of 4 minutes per mile, and it thinks that I ran through the walls a few times, but the map was great:

The point of the workout was to get my heart rate elevated so I could get an idea of what my max heart rate is. After a 3+ mile warm up in the beautiful weather outside (and horrendous rush hour traffic) I came inside and met a man doing a 200 meter workout. Since chasing somebody down is always preferable to running alone, especially when running intervals, I did 200 meter repeats instead of the 4-6-8 ladder I had planned on.

The workout was more fun, but I’ve had my heart rate elevated higher just by starting a run in the cold by going up a hill than I did from running this series of 28-31 second 200 meter repeats. I decided to run a pair of 400 meter repeats afterwards, but on the last turn of my first 400 I tweaked my calf. Going from marathon base training to 200s on a small track isn’t usually the best idea, after all, so I called it good and cooled down at that point.

While I was working out, I discovered a few things about the Garmin. First, the chest strap doesn’t bother me on long runs or tempo runs, but it was very constricting after a 200 meter sprint. It wasn’t so bad after I loosened it a little but I think that it will be difficult for me to actually wear it unless I am trying to do a workout based on my heart rate.

I also discovered that having a lap button next to a start/stop button is going to take a little getting used to. I didn’t hit the wrong button during the workout, but I had to really think about what I was doing at the end of each repeat. That is a learned behavior, though, and can be fixed.

It was very nice to have the tenths of a second spelled out in Garmin Training Center for me when it came time to record the workout. That was much easier than trying to flip through my normal watch on each lap to record my times.

All in all, it was a successful test of the Garmin as a heart rate monitor, but a failure in terms of what I wanted to accomplish. I had fun, though, even though the workout reminded me why I hate running indoors. (full workout)

Photo by ezioman

I have a very good sense of direction, so I pointed myself towards where I wanted to go and it wound up being right.

After a few steps, though, I decided to give the map functionality on my new watch a try. It is a Garmin ForeRunner 305. I haven’t had it long, so I don’t know all of the cool things you can do with it yet. I mostly use it for mapping my runs after the fact.

It turns out that I was going in the right direction and would soon have gotten to a spot of open water that I would have remembered running around on the ice. It makes me very comfortable knowing that the map was there, though, because now I can run trails wherever I want and at least have an idea of what direction I need to go to get home. Once I was back on the path I wanted to take, it even started to warn me about 15-30 feet before every turn that a turn was coming. That was pretty neat, but also a little annoying.

Photo #59 by Don Penta
The run itself was a lot of fun. I ran 15 miles on snowmobile trails, with about a third of that on the surface of the lake. Anytime a snowmobile came near me I had to jump off to the side, where I would sink into knee deep snow. I also got some strange looks when they got close enough to realize I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Hey, it was hot out! It was at least 35 degrees.

Speaking of running without a shirt, the pictures for last week’s Resolution Run are now available. By the time it started snowing during that run, I had stripped down to just my singlet. You can see all of the pictures from the run (the photo to the left is cropped from #59) over at the Maine Running Photos website.

This year, I ran just shy of 1900 miles, which is half again what I ran last year. I attribute that to my lack of injuries this year, with a short stint of achilles tendonitis that I managed to nip in the bud. I did not realize that I was well on pace for a 2000 mile year until right before I took 3 weeks off in November, which killed that goal.

My official total came to 1894.5 miles, but I decided to take today off from running so I will stay a little short of the 1900 mark. Next year I expect to run between 2300 and 2500 miles, helped by the number of trail miles that I plan on running to help hold off injuries.

I ran 2 marathons along with my first ultramarathon this year. I ran the Boston Marathon even though it did not bring me any closer to my 50 states goal. The race was held during the tail-end of a Nor’Easter that caused me to sabotage my race by wearing too much. I still had a good race, but I did not meet my minimum goal of setting a new PR. I registered early for the Marine Corps Marathon, where I did manage to set a new PR and had a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Through the Summer, however, I felt that I was in good enough shape for two marathons, and I settled on running the Pisgah 50k Mountain Race in New Hampshire. The race was a lot of fun and introduced me to racing distances longer than a marathon while still keeping me on pace for 2 new states per year. I have now run 11 marathons (or ultramarathons) in 10 different states.

I failed to bring my times down for the 10k and 5k races that I competed in this year. I did very well in the Back Cove 5k Race Series and actually won this year. The series was much closer this year; I only won by 6 seconds. I was over 30 seconds slow for my time goals in the 5k, though, so in 2008 I am going to need to make the shorter races a priority. I say that, but I am already trying to decide between running 1 or 2 Spring Marathons…

My weight was even flatter this year than it was last year. My weight trend never varied more than a pound or so away from 144 pounds, and my daily weight never got more than 4 or 5 pounds away from that trend. I do not expect any major changes in 2008.

I wrote about 630 articles here at Run to Win, a 12% increase over last year, and have seen some huge increases in the amount of traffic to the site. I also began an email newsletter and am giving away an 18-page special report on effective workouts, and I expect that 2008 is going to be very exciting. You can see more detailed graphs of my weekly running and weight by clicking on the charts above.

Merry Christmas!

Table of contents for Marine Corps 2007

1. Preparing for the Marine Corps Marathon
2. Tapering for a marathon with Broken Socks
3. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – Pre-Race
4. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – The Race
5. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – Post Race

I felt pretty strong in the last few hundred yards. I waved for the crowd, got them pumped up when my name was announced over the intercom, and hammed it up as I sprinted in. And by sprinting in, I mean picking up the pace a little bit over what I had been running. It is an uphill finish, after all.

The Finish Line

After I passed the bulldog mascot and got into the finisher’s chute, I hung out near the finish line area to congratulate all of the runners that came in after me that I had passed over the last few miles. I was waiting for the marine and for Paul to finish running so that I could chat with them.

A Navy runner finished and had a little trouble after passing over the line, so a couple of marines put his arms over their shoulders and walked him over the medical tent. He was in heaven. “First I run a marathon,” he said, “and then I get escorted around by a couple of lovely ladies.” They just smiled and kept leading him away.

After catching up with a few folks, I advanced through the food tables and headed up the hill to the road. From there, everybody was going left so I followed them. Of course, going left when you get to the top of the road brings you right back to the finish line, so I was where I started. I chatted with some folks that had finished running in the mean time, and then headed up the hill to try my luck going right.

The second time was the charm. I easily found my wife and friends, and we headed over to get my baggage and to find a secluded area that I could strip down, baby wipe the salt away, and put on some clean and dry clothes. There was an ice cream truck nearby, but both Beth and Erin were disappointed because it was just parked and there was nobody selling ice cream out of it.

Post Race Thoughts

The water stops were not quite as frequent as I would have liked, and the places where they had food stations or gel packets were usually not within a mile of the next water stop. Food in general and gel packets in particular need to be taken with water so that the stomach can break them down and make them usable. If you do not drink any water, then you are going to just have a lump sitting in your stomach.

The only food that I took along the course was a water bottle from my wife around mile 14, and subsided the rest of the time on what I had brought with me. I did not even wind up using all of the gel packets that I had, but I did not feel as though I needed to.

Every aid station had quite a few marines at them, and it was pretty cool getting cheered on by them as they handed you water and yelled and screamed at you. I made it a point to thank every one that I could, which led to a lot of them “OohRahing” at me.

Very few of them left garbage cans where it was easy to throw your cups, though, which meant that I had to drop them on the ground in most cases. In the places where I could see the garbage cans, they were too far away for me to accurately toss the cup and I only made it in a couple of times. There were a few garbage cans by the side of the road in the parks, though, that I was able to reach easily.

The monuments were pretty cool to run by, but I honestly missed most of them. I got to see the Washington Monument over and over again, since you turn on a regular basis and you can see it from almost everywhere. Other than the National Mall, though, I really did not look up often enough. The next time that I run, I am going to aim to slow down a little bit and to let myself get distracted a little more easily from the task at hand.

I do appreciate the speed at which I run, though. With frequent out and backs on the course, I often got to see what the crowding looked like 4 and 5 miles behind me. I much prefer having everybody around me nice and spaced out with plenty of room to maneuver.

Marathon Aftermath

Post race, I felt really good. The last couple of miles I was struggling and my pace shows that, but as soon as I stopped running I recovered and felt as though I could go for another run. I think that I felt even better than I did after New York City. We made our way to the Metro, which was crowded with people trying to get to the finish line, and then walked around half of the city. I was a little sore after sitting down for an hour at brunch, but not too bad.

The real problem lay in ignoring the first rule about marathons that I learned all the way back in 2000. Because my wife had classes on Monday, we had to come home the night of the marathon. Standing in line at Dulles for 90 minutes because they had closed the security check point and then taking two flights with a long layover really killed my legs and knees. The altitude combined with the compact area that I needed to fit myself into were not conducive to adequate blood flow. At least I got to watch the Red Sox win the world series.

Monday morning, I was back to normal. And not only back to normal, but there was no soreness whatsoever. I spent 2 hours raking the lawn without any trouble other than a bit of fatigue towards the end, but raking leaves is exhausting even when you haven’t run a marathon the day before. In the few days since then, there has been no soreness and no real fatigue.

Other than raking leaves, I have not been working out so far this week. I have been too busy catching up on chores that had been neglected while I was training and have been taking the opportunity to rest. My lack of running is most apparent in my weight, as I have been losing about a half of a pound per day since I got home. I weighed in on Monday morning at the same weight that I left at on Friday.

I am planning on swimming at lunch time today (assuming that I have the cash to get in anyway) and then going to the gym to lift weights tomorrow morning. This weekend I will decide on an exercise regimen for the next month, and will be heading to the weight room 3 or 4 days per week starting next week. That should leave me hungry enough to stave off the weight loss, and when I start running again in December I will hopefully be right back where I belong.

I do plan on running the Marine Corps Marathon again. Next time, however, I will wait until I can spend more than just a weekend in town. Other than the friends that we stayed with, I do not feel that we got to spend enough time with the people that we know that live down there, and we did not really get to do very much in the way of touristy activities. My wife used to live in DC, so she has already been to all of the museums, but I had not been down there since I was a kid and would like to revisit them. The race is a lot of fun, and the course is probably one of the easier ones that I have run to date.

Table of contents for Marine Corps 2007

1. Preparing for the Marine Corps Marathon
2. Tapering for a marathon with Broken Socks
3. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – Pre-Race
4. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – The Race
5. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – Post Race

I was about 4 people away from the starting line when the gun went off.

It took all of about 1 second for me to cross over the line. My goal was to run between 2:40:00 and 2:45:00, and I was hoping to be at 2:45:00 pace halfway through and then run negative splits. Any sort of a PR would make my slowest goal, so I needed to run faster than 2:51:37 at the very worst.

Mile 1: 7:37 / 7:37 (+1:19)
The first mile was long; I have no doubts about that. I imagine that I was running at about a 6:30 pace, possibly a tiny bit quicker. I did not pass the mile marker until 7 and a half minutes in, though. As I was running, I looked up and saw somebody wearing an Eden Athletics singlet, so I picked up the pace a little bit to catch up to him and discovered that it was Matt Hougan running his first marathon. (He ran an impressive 2:54:58.) I ran with him for about a mile before letting him take off. We both had a similar goal of 2:45, but I did not want to be going at that pace this early on.

Mile 2: 5:17 / 12:55 (+0:19)
The second mile was (appropriately enough) as short as the first mile was long. The folks that were around me were all laughing at your low 5 minute mile we had just run. As far as I could tell, though, mile 1 was the only marker that was in the wrong place.

Mile 3: 6:29 / 19:24 (+0:31)
My friend, Ryan Pancoast, caught up to me shortly after the 2^nd mile marker. I had failed to meet up with him before the race, but we got to run together for 4 or 5 miles. He ran the race last year in 3:31:38, so he ran an amazing race this year where he managed to cut almost 20 minutes off of his time. He finished in 3:12:17 this year. I have never cut that much off of any of my PRs in one go, although I have hopes of doing so in the 50k the next time that I run one.

Mile 4: 6:10 / 25:35 (+0:24)
Mile 5: 6:30 / 32:06 (+0:37)
The next couple of miles were downhill and fairly easy. I spent most of the time chatting with Ryan about the race and encouraging the wheelchair athletes that passed us as we moved along.

Mile 6: 6:32 / 38:38 (+0:52)
Mile 7: 5:58 / 44:37 (+0:32)
Being 52 seconds over my goal pace at mile 6, I felt that it was time to start picking up the pace a little. The 6^th mile saw a slight climb, and technically the 7^th mile was pretty flat. However, there was a pretty good drop midway through the 7^th mile that I used to pick up the pace and pass a few people.

Mile 8: 6:06 / 50:43 (+0:21)
I kept on a strong pace through here despite the climb. I enjoy running hills, when all is said and done. I passed Paul Epstein and another Running Wild runner through here and zeroed in on catching up to a marine that I saw up ahead. It was tough work, though, and it took me a good mile and a half.

Mile 9: 6:12 / 56:56 (+0:16)
Mile 10: 6:02 / 1:02:58 (0:00)
My goal had been to catch up to the marine that I had been chasing and to keep on at the pace that I was going, but when I caught up to him I realized that we were going at about the pace that I wanted and got to chatting. Sometimes I talk too much during a run. He said that his name was Jeff, but the results list him as a Thomas. I’ll just refer to him as the marine until he emails me and lets me know what his name actually is.

When we passed the 10 mile marker, we were exactly at 2:45:00 pace again, so it was time to dial back the pace to a more reasonable level for the time being. It was around this time that Paul caught up to us, and the 3 of us ran together for the next 12 miles or so with various other folks joining our pack off and on. We kept the pack between 5 and 8 people until the later miles when we began breaking up.

Mile 11 & 12: 12:29 (6:14.5 pace) / 1:15:28 (-0:03)
I completely missed the 11^th mile marker, which is fairly tough since they had all of the miles well marked and there were always marines with bullhorns at each one. Nobody else in the pack saw it either so there is always the possibility that there just wasn’t one. We ran a fairly consistent pace through here, though.

One of the wheelers passed me around this point, and we had been passing each other back and forth throughout the entire race. I cheered him on and he stated that I’d catch up to him soon enough. I didn’t think so, though. I told him that I better not since the course was mostly flat the rest of the way, and I was right. I never saw him again. He had had a lot of trouble navigating the hairpin turn in the 7^th mile as we went down the hill.

Mile 13: 6:14 / 1:21:44 (-0:06)
My split at the halfway point was around 1:22:20 or so; perhaps a few seconds higher. My official split was another 30 seconds higher than that, which was definitely not the case, but I am not convinced that the timing mats had their times synchronized very well. They were all about 30 seconds slow except for the 5 mile split and the finish line split.

Mile 14: 6:22 / 1:28:07 (-0:01)
I saw my wife and friends for the first time in the 14^th mile. They were actually at the 12^th mile as well as I went around the northern side of the Mall, but I did not spot them in the crowds. There were very few people on the southern side of the Mall at this point, though, so I got to see them as I went by this time. It is great to see family and friends when you are running.

Mile 15: 6:19 / 1:34:26 (0:00)
Mile 16: 6:17 / 1:40:43 (-0:01)
The next couple of miles were pretty consistent with our group. We had some fun waving at the cameras and just pushed out the miles one after another. One thing that I noticed was that you could constantly see the Washington Monument during this race. On the eastern side of the Potomac, it just seemed to appear in front of you every time that you changed direction.

Mile 17: 6:20 / 1:47:04 (+0:02)
Mile 18: 6:22 / 1:53:27 (+0:06)
Mile 19: 6:23 / 1:59:50 (+0:12)
The next 3 miles were really hard. The wind was not too bad for most of mile 17, but once we got near the mile marker and moved into mile 18, the headwinds became pretty fierce. It was here that running in a pack really helped out, because everybody stepped up to the place to break the wind. We would all take turns for a couple of minutes at a stretch to take the lead, with the pack breaking up a bit at the water and food stations and then consolidating again once we were through. Our consistent pace through here is a testament to our teamwork.

Mile 20: 6:17 / 2:06:08 (+0:12)
The bridge, which is normally a tough part of the course, was pretty easy for me. We did not exactly have a tailwind as we crossed over, since the wind was more at our sides than behind us, but it did not hinder us at all so that was almost as good as a tailwind after the past 3 miles. Our pack began to break apart as we crossed it, with Paul taking the lead and most of the rest of the guys falling off of the back. The marine and I stuck together for another 3 miles or so. I passed Matt Hougan through here as he struggled to break through some new territory in his running.

Mile 21: 6:23 / 2:12:31 (+0:17)
Mile 22: 6:36 / 2:19:08 (+0:36)
Mile 23: 6:46 / 2:25:54 (+1:05)
Through here I spotted my wife and friends again, and gave them a good wave as I ran by. My wife was hopping about 3 feet into the air as she cheered me on; she was so excited that she even forgot to unfurl her sign that she’d made up.

The Crystal City miles are supposed to be easier for most people than the bridge, but I found the opposite to be true. Especially at the turn around, where you run along a brick road, I began to hurt a bit and my pace began to falter. Somehow, my road id came unlatched and I felt it bouncing around on my stomach. Thankfully, I’m a firm believer in tucking your singlet in or else I would have lost it. I pulled the chain off and stowed the two pieces in the pockets in my shorts.

These miles are an out and back, so my buddy “OohRah”d at a lot of marines that were ahead of us as they came back the other way. The marines had a great showing this weekend; I think that they had three guys in front of the first Royal Navy runner. Shortly after the course split off again I began running by myself.

Mile 24: 6:53 / 2:32:48 (+1:40)
Mile 25: 7:01 / 2:39:49 (+2:24)
I passed Paul in here somewhere, and shortly thereafter I was really wishing that the group was still together. The headwinds were not as fierce as they were in Boston earlier this year, but they were pretty strong and it is much harder to break them by yourself than it is when you only have to worry about it for a few minutes at a time. I managed to keep moving at a decent clip, but I was falling off of the pace fast. The only reason that I was not worried about that was because I knew that there was no way that I would fall so far off that I’d fail to beat my personal best.

Mile 26: 6:52 / 2:46:41 (+2:58)
The last mile saw a reprieve from the wind, which was nice. The race directors decided that they wanted to be cruel to the runners, though, and make them run past the finish line, do a hairpin, and then run up a hill to come back to the finish. Actually, they make them do another hair pin and go up a steeper hill right at the end, but that one isn’t as bad.

Mile 26.2: 1:21 / 2:48:03 (+3:03)
I felt pretty strong in the last few hundred yards. I waved for the crowd, got them pumped up when my name was announced over the intercom, and hammed it up as I sprinted in. And by sprinting in, I mean picking up the pace a little bit over what I had been running. It is an uphill finish, after all.

Table of contents for Marine Corps 2007

1. Preparing for the Marine Corps Marathon
2. Tapering for a marathon with Broken Socks
3. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – Pre-Race
4. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – The Race
5. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – Post Race

I am not a big fan of traveling, and getting down to Virginia this past weekend has not made me a fan of it. The only flight that was on time was the one that left Portland for JFK. I’ll leave it at that.

When we arrived in DC, it was raining pretty hard. We met up with my friend, went back to his place, and had a great dinner that him and his wife prepared for us. We did not even bother trying to get to the expo since the plane had been late getting in.

The rain had not let up the next morning when we went into town, but we got to the Armory just after they opened the doors so we did not have to wait out in the rain for very long. The whole packet pickup situation left a bit to be desired though. “There’s a right way, there’s a wrong way, and there’s the marine corps way,” to bastardize the popular saying.

They line you up in a snaking corral, where one person verifies your ID against your registration sheet. Meanwhile, there are a dozen booths where you can pick up your number and there is nobody at them. I do not get why they didn’t just let a few people through at a time and have the individuals at each booth check your identity. The volunteers behinds the booths were very nice, though.

Heading into the expo, I managed to pick up everything that I went in for and a few things that I hadn’t. I got some new sunglasses and some new socks, and my wife picked up a new pair of running shoes and some super feet. We also got quite a few freebies, starting with a bowl of cereal that was handed to us when we walked in the door. I skipped on the free pint of beer, however.

The expo was not too bad for about a half hour, but once the people started to pack in they packed in fast. In the blink of an eye, there were about 6 times as many people as there had been, and we got out as quick as we could after that. The sun was shining when we left, and it stayed bright for the rest of the weekend.

My wife and I spent the day wandering the city, visiting the American Indian museum, and meeting up with some friends for lunch. We were both pretty tired and foot sore by the end of the day. Dinner, packing up my bags for the next morning, and a good night’s sleep were in order.

The next morning I was on an early train to the starting line. A friend of mine that was also running had suggested that I get there early. Next time that I run, I think that I will not bother. I hung out at the runner’s village with Paul Joseph, who is pictured with me to right. I never did find my friend before the race, not even when I went off to the starting line.

The morning was pretty chilly, but perfect temperatures for a race. I went through my closet looking for the most hideous sweater that I owned to keep me warm and to donate to the starting line charity of choice, and it did a good job of keeping me cool before the race.

While waiting for the start of the race, I learned exactly how horrible the turning radius is for wheelchair athletes. I also chatted with a few Royal Navy runners and other guys that I met on the line, and watched a pair of osprey helicopters do a fly by before getting ready for the gun.

I was about 4 people away from the starting when the gun went off.

Table of contents for Marine Corps 2007

1. Preparing for the Marine Corps Marathon
2. Tapering for a marathon with Broken Socks
3. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – Pre-Race
4. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – The Race
5. My Marine Corps Marathon Experience – Post Race

Last night I only got a bit over a mile in for a run because one of my socks broke; it kept falling into my shoe under my heel. This is disappointing since it was one of my favorite pairs of socks; oh well, that’s what I get for keeping them around for a good decade.

This actually worked out well in terms of pre-flight strategy, as I needed to go to the bank last night or this morning. I took the opportunity to run there this morning, which means that I didn’t take today off but instead got a good 6 and a half miler in. Unfortunately, the majority of that was in rush hour traffic, but the last few miles were not too bad once I got off of the busiest street in town. Still, running as a means of transportation is a viable option and should be used when readily available.

My taper for the Marine Corps Marathon is a little different than usual. Normally, I start 2 and a half or 3 weeks before the marathon and start steadily decreasing mileage. This Autumn, I used the Pisgah 50k as a pseudo-training/experimentation run, so I didn’t really taper much. I only reverse tapered afterwards. I haven’t really tapered much at all these past couple of weeks for MCM. My mileage has been flat for about 5 weeks straight, including this week after the race on Sunday.

I think that this will work out well for me. I feel well rested, and this week will only be similar mileage because the race is so long. I do not have any nagging injuries worse than some bug bites from raking last weekend. This will be a good race, and will lower my personal record by at least a few minutes if not 10 or 12.

Good luck to anybody else that is running this weekend.

The general goal was to keep up with 50 miles per week through this week, and then workout as normal through Wednesday or Thursday. My mileage this week may have been near 50 miles, but only if you count a couple of miles of hiking and lugging sign posts around the woods after getting done with my run. Of course, whether I cut back on the mileage or not is a moot point, since I followed up the run and hike with 3 or 4 hours of raking about 2/3 of my lawn. Maine foliage is beautiful at this time of year, but raking up after a storm is less than easy.

I was out on the Bradbury Bruiser course today, and it is looking great. The race directors spent a lot of time raking anywhere that the course was not obvious and it is looking good. After running the course today (I skipped the “O” trail loop given the marathon in a week) they divided the course up into sections and sent people out to leave sign posts and flags to mark the trail.

The trail is in great shape. Where there are leaves down, it is still obvious where the trail is. It is relatively dry despite the rain that we have had recently. Jamie Anderson wrote up his thoughts from the day and included an elevation profile for those who want to see how flat the course is. Bear in mind that the scale of the profile only goes from 240 feet to 400 feet above sea level at the two extremes.

For anybody running next weekend, good luck and have fun. I would love to be there if I had not already made plans to be out of state for the Marine Corps Marathon. I’m looking forward to reading race stories, so feel free to send me a link or an email with your thoughts on the day.

Table of contents for Pisgah 50k 2007

1. Breaking the Marathon Barrier
2. Pisgah 50k Trail Race (2007) – Pre-Race Review
3. Pisgah 50k Trail Race (2007) – Race Review
4. Pisgah 50k/23k Trail Races – 2007 Race Results
5. Pisgah 50k Trail Race (2007) – Post-Race Review

Update: Click here for the 2007 race results of both the 50k and the 23k.
Well, I ventured beyond the marathon today. I was 5th place at the Pisgah 50k Mountain Trail Race in 4:27 and change. My watch had 4:22:38, but I stopped it while I was jawing with the aid station workers and refilling my water bottle a few times. The winner was about a half hour ahead of me. He pulled ahead of me in the first 7 or 8 miles or so and I never saw him again.

I had no idea what to expect, given that I’ve never run more than 28 or 29 miles at once, only gone over 30 miles a few times between two runs, never raced more than 10k on trails (that were generally easier and flatter), never run more than 15 miles on trails before, was sick Friday night, and had a migraine the morning of the race.

The goal was somewhere between 4:00:00 and 4:30:00, since I did not think I’d be able to run faster than that. The longest that I have run for the past few months are a couple of 14 and one 15 miler; I didn’t really have time to build my mileage up after deciding to run this and didn’t taper for it at all.

Since the first 30 minutes were in a torrential downpour, I am surprised my feet are not more beat up than they are. I didn’t get any blisters until after the aid station at mile 25. I got some wicked chafage from the wet shorts, but my muscles feel fine. They were really sore when I finished the race, but after eating and stretching and walking around they started feeling fine. I drove about a third of the way back to Maine without any trouble. I guess that’s one of the advantages of trail racing.

I definitely need to work on my hill ascension and descending on technical trails, though. It is much much different than doing it on roads or on easy trails without rocks or roots. I now see what the guys I run with mean when they talk about your toes jamming into the front of your shoes. I did run a few of the descents hard; one in particular where I was chasing somebody that had just passed me was scary as hell since it was full of rocks and roots and loose dirt. Thankfully, there was no bridge at the bottom. Those bridges on the course were wood and wet, and may as well have been ice.

There were 15 trees blocking the path. This doesn’t count any that I could run under (ducking the head didn’t count), that were not fully blocking the path, that had had any part cut out of them, that had had the trail routed around them, or that I didn’t have to break stride to get over. At least 9 or 10 of them were in the first hour.

I will have a full race report in the next day or two; those are just the quick impressions I can think of off of the top of my head from the race. More details to follow, most likely once the official results are available online as long as it doesn’t take too long.

Now we will see how quickly I can recover and whether the strength that I hopefully built from this race gets me to my Autumn race goals. Those include running sub-17:28 5k on Wednesday (just because I want to see if I can and see if I can improve my near certain chances of winning free shoes for a year), running a sub-16:00 5k at Elliot in 3 weeks because I haven’t done it yet, and running a sub 2:40 marathon at Marine Corps, also because I haven’t done it and I’m pissed that I screwed up my race in Boston this past Spring. The only other race I plan on running is a cross country race in mid-October.

So how were all of your weekends?

Table of contents for Case Study #1

1. Choosing a Race Plan: Back Cove 5k Case Study
2. Choosing a Race Plan: Back Cove 5k Case Study Results

Back Cove 5k » May 2007

Photo by Erik BoucherThis morning, I published a case study detailing how I decided upon a race plan and what I hoped to accomplish in this evening’s Back Cove 5k race.

The race results are in, and we can now see how closely I followed the plan. I did a pretty good job at following the plan, but not quite as well as I did when I ran the Eastern States 20 Miler this past Spring.

Race Results

I did not win tonight, since Ethan Hemphill was there and ran about a minute faster than everyone else as an easy training run. Chris Gatchell, Scott Gorneau, and I ran in a tight pack the entire race. I was mean and made Chris set the pace for the first 2.5 miles; his first 1.25 was a consistent 80 seconds per quarter. The second mile was run in around 5:40 pace, and I started to run off of his shoulder rather than right behind him at this point. At about 2.5 I picked up the pace and took over, even though my race plan said to keep at least one of those guys in front of me the entire time.

Scott came with me, but he was having some problems with the gravel dust in the air and kept coughing. It did a good job of masking what Chris was doing, since I did not know that Chris had come up on me until the final sprint in the last 100 yards. We all finished 1 second part in 17:02, 17:03, and 17:04 (Me, Chris, Scott.)

Analysis

My overall time for the series is 1:42:29, an average pace of 17:04. Scott will have his work cut out for him if he wants to win the shoes. His slowest time right now is a 17:37, which would drop off if he runs anything faster than that. He only gained about half of a minute on me this week, and is still behind me by 1 minute and 14 seconds. He would have to run faster than 16:23 next week in order to win.

Chris still has an easier job to win the shoes than Scott does, but only slightly. He has only run 5 races, and would need to run faster than 16:33 in his last race in order to have a faster overall time. While he is certainly capable of running in the mid-16 range, the Back Cove tends to add at least 20 seconds to your time over a comparable effort on the roads.

1 Week Left

This race served as an insurance race. I increased my lead by 43 seconds, and I mostly stuck to my plan and certainly finished right where I wanted to be. On Sunday I will be running the Pisgah 50k in New Hampshire, and then next week will be the final Back Cove 5k race of the series for 2007.

I will definitely be at the final race, and will probably run. If I do run, then I would like to try to bring my time down even further, which would mean running a sub 17:28. I do not think that I will be able to do that 3 days after a 50k, though, and will be happier with a more reasonable goal of a minute slower.

Last time that I did a 5k 3 days after a marathon (on this same course) I ran a 19:03.