Training in Montana

Muddy roads outside so treadmill at home. Legs were tired but not too bad. Fastest paces hit were 7.5 at the end.

6 X hills on the home treadmill. Roads outside still muddy and nasty and my hill is 2 miles away. I'm still tired from my weekend run, so didn't want to wake up early enough to get to my hill. This is the 3rd 20 miler of this training cycle and I know realize that the long effort wears me out for most of the next week. It's probably my age more than anything.

1 mile warmup at 10:00 pace, then 1/2 mile hills. 7 mph/9% incline for the first quarter, but that was a bit much. Walked 1/2 mile at 4 mph and 0%, then 7 mph/8% for the remaining hills. On one of them I forgot my math and I should've been done at .25 miles but my addled brain continued on and when I got to .35 and my legs were dying I realized I had gone too far.

Looking forward to April 19th. I'm ready to get this marathon behind me and return to a more normal schedule.

I am fatigued and I don't know what's going on. I got good sleep the last two nights, no run on Thursday, and I just couldn't do it this morning. Meant to do 4 pace miles, so warmed up with a 10 minute mile then upped the TM to 7:24 pace and the first mile was so tough. Like running in concrete. After 1 mile I slowed the TM to walking pace and walked for 1/4 mile, then back to MP and it was still tough. I figured my body is really tired and no sense pushing it 2 weeks from the race so I threw in the towel. Packed it in. Got on my bike and went home. Quit. Hmph.

I'm pretty sure I'm not fighting a sickness so I'm baffled at feeling this tired in the middle of a low mileage week. Hopefully I get some good rest this weekend and feel better Monday as today's run was definitely not a confidence booster.

Thanks to Camille Herron's blog about heavy legs during tapering I stopped feeling sorry for myself and my fatigued heavy legs and went for my run. I told my wife last night that I needed to test out my birthday present so I charged up my new garmin 110 and used it on this run. Ah... so nice to once again know my pace as I run. Went up my Veyo hill and I felt great. Not sure my total pace up that hill but I think that mile was 8:40 or so. Awesome. 

Average pace for entire run was 8:05. Last half were in MP range. This is the confidence booster I needed. 

8:53, 8:42, 8:28, 8:37 (241 ft incline), 8:55, 8:30, 8:42, 7:29, 7:04, 7:13, 7:31 (114 ft up), 7:18, 7:18. 

Got out the door late so cut my 6 miler to 4. Decent run, nice temps.

Could NOT wake up this morning, so I was able to take an early lunch and run outside in beautiful weather. I might even make the news, as today is the first day in the 70s in 7 months and I was outside wearing shorts and a St. George Running Center singlet. I see some guy kneeling down on the sidewalk ahead of me looking into some gadget and wonder "what the...?" By the time I realized it was a local news crew I just kept on looking like a dork and running. I hope they caught me doing a farmer blow.
It was a solid run. Warmed up a bit first mile and towards the end of that mile I picked up the paces (cameraman was during this stretch) and kept it up. New watch only shows the pace of that current mile so I'm not sure where I was but I think 7:15 range. Kept that up for a bit then slowed down. On the turnaround I picked the pace back and up and kept it fairly strong. Last mile was 7:00 flat.

I love allie's approach of a 5K warmup to the marathon but we have few 5Ks in my city so I've been planning the past few days to do a time trial at the high school track. A couple hours ago I saw a flyer for a 3.75 mile race this Saturday morning, $25 entry fee. Sawheet! Signed up and I'm ready to roll. I sure wish it was a certified 5K but beggars can't be choosers. Well, they can be, but it just isn't right. Also don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

AP: 7:36

30 tempo minutes early on the home TM as I had an early work meeting. Started at 6 mph, gradually moved up and at 12 minutes I did 5 minutes at 9.5 mph. That was pretty awesome as I didn't know if I could maintain that pace. After 5 mins I bumped down to 8, then quickly lower until I ended at 6 mph the last 2 1/2 mins. Good workout.

Excited for Kam to join me and pace me at the SLC Marathon. Bring it on!

4 miles this morning from home. Beautiful out. 38 degrees with wispy clouds. Shorts, long sleeve tech shirt and thin cotton gloves. Felt really good. I kept it nice and slow the first 2 up miles, then a steady pace on the return. Looking forward to tomorrow's 3.75 mile race. Should be a great "tune up" as the great allie likes to say. Left hip is slightly bothering me but I'll roll it out and ignore this taper niggle as it's a new in the last couple weeks.

Warmed up with 3 laps around the 1.25 mile course then got ready. Started out behind one guy and a kid but was trying to run 6:15 pace so passed them.  Another guy popped up at .25 miles and he floated along. I stuck on his tail until about .75 then let him go. I was not in 6:15 shape today. Not sure if it was the undulating course or what but not my day. Thankfully nobody fast ran this so I easily held 2nd the entire race. I only saw 3rd place once and I upped my pace a bit.

Won a $30 gift card for a dozen cupcakes at the downtown cupcake shop. I'll save it until after the marathon....

4 X 400 on the TM at the Y. Warmed up 1.5 miles, thankfully was able to move to a TM near a fan. Ran the 400s at a 6:00 pace. Felt good and as I've been doing Yasso's every 3rd week my mind and body were expecting to keep going, so the short 400s were a nice leg stretch.

2 miles tomorrow, then 2 on Friday. Traveling to Utah Thursday afternoon, playing with the family on Friday, Marathon in the morning, Mother-in-law's 70th birthday party in the afternoon and my first Real Salt Lake game on Saturday night, Easter services then dinner on Sunday, travel home Monday. Looking forward to this week.

Running 2 miles doesn't take much time, but that's what the schedule called for. My legs will be properly rested on Saturday.

Thanks Kam for calling me yesterday on the drive home and talking me off the ledge. I've put in the work and now it's time to go use all those training miles and bring home a BQ. Kam is planning on joining me the last 16-18 miles of the course which will be awesome. Please send a prayer or two for cool weather. I'd prefer 50 degrees max for the entire course but it's looking like it will warm up a bit more than that. I just need to finish quickly. Thanks to all of you for your support through this process. It makes it so much easier knowing that other runners have my back.

Short run near Bingham high school as I'm staying in South Jordan at my sisters house. Got a good 6+ hours sleep, hopefully get a nap today as well. Bring on 4/19!

I haven't had a chance yet to upload my mile splits but I'll give a shot at a report. First off, huge thanks to Kam for pacing me the last 16.219 miles. We grew up in the same neighborhood and were good friends and it's really cool that he would give up his Saturday morning this year and last to help me go for a BQ. I feel badly that I wasn't able to do it either year, but we tried.

I stayed at my sister's house in South Jordan then rode Trax to the start and it worked well. Got up at 4:20, cleaned up and took care of business and headed out the door at 5:00. Got to the 80th & Redwood Trax stop at 5:09 which was 14 minutes early. Perfect. The train was right on time, chomped on a bagel and drank a Propel during the 50 minute ride and got to the start 45 minutes early. Made an immediate pit stop then got my drop bag ready, then hit the POP a last time then took off my warm clothes and moved into the starting line. I moved through a lot of people but still was a minute back from the start. 7:00 came and went as the last Trax train had just come in and a few hundred people were trying to get from the platform to the starting line. Finally got started 7 minutes late. Got past the start line finally and started running, then after 1/4 mile there was a funnel due to a weird road and that slowed me down a lot as we headed up the first hill. Got out of there and hit the first mile 30 seconds behind schedule. Cruised along feeling good but had to hit the first POP at 3 miles for a quick urine stop, but thankfully my only stop. Figured it was better to do it with a downhill in front of me. Cruised along, passing groups of people, especially the pacing groups. Those clumps were tough to pass. When we turned East up a hill I knew that would be a toughish mile and it was.

At this point in my write up, I'm bored writing out the details so I'm going to skip around. Nutrionally I determined to take a gel every 30 minutes and a Salt capsule every 60 minutes. I was able to do that pretty well. Pace-wise I was trying to run a 3:13:30 and I used the splits from Tazrunning.com to give me my per mile paces. I bought a tattoo from that site and put the first half on the inside of my left forearm and the second half on my right arm. That was really useful.

As I cruised through Salt Lake I was feeling pretty good and was doing a pretty good job hitting the prescribed paces. Frustrating, though, was my new Garmin as it shows my pace for the current mile but it wasn't super accurate. I tried to hit my tangents but not sure what happened. Frequently in the first half the pace would say 7:33, then when I hit the mile marker the total time would be 7:39 for instance, probably because the mile measured long compared to the Garmin? I know the miles are correctly marked so I'm not blaming anyone, but it was mentally challenging to deal with the discrepancy when I thought I had been doing so well on that mile.

Mile 10 was supposed to be the slowest mile due to elevation and it certainly was. As I ran up the last hill before Sugarhouse Park I said to one guy in front of his house, "Someone needs to level this hill!" He smiled. I panted up the hill. Kam met me at the entrance to the park and this was also the first place I saw my family. It was awesome to see them. At this point I was feeling pretty good but about 1 minute behind schedule. Kam ran next to me or led me the rest of the way. After mile 13 I remember feeling like I wanted to walk, so the mile-by-mile mentality started then. "I can make it to 14". I was breathing way too heavy at that point so I knew I was likely not going to BQ. I'll never know how much my lack of running prowess is self-fulfilling prophecy, lack of proper training, or lack of the right physiological characteristics, but I'd venture to guess it's a combination of the three. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, though, to figure out that a person laboring halfway through a marathon might not hit their time goal. I carried on to the next mile marker, then the next, and after hitting 45th South (furthest South part of the race) I was doing okay until sometime around 17. Running up a slight hill I felt very winded, my head started feeling really tight, and I felt light headed. I yelled to Kam that I felt dizzy and needed to walk. It took a few minutes of walking to feel better. Some nice people handed out sliced oranges and I took a few and that felt great. My family had reloaded us with a new water bottle at mile 16 which Kam carried for me, and I doused my head, front, and back. After a few minutes of walking we started running again, but never broke 8 minutes again. I was done with my Boston dream and at that point all I cared about was finishing. Kam did the math and he told me I could still break my 3:25:03 PR but I didn't care. I wasn't being negative at all, in fact, I was very positive, and I just didn't care. It was actually a huge weight off my shoulders. I was running a marathon, I was doing okay, and I was going to finish. I wasn't going to finish strong, but I would finish solidly. From that point on I tried to maintain a sub 8:20 pace but that didn't happen too often. I just ran. I walked a couple more times, but mostly just carried on. I got passed by a lot of people but I didn't care. I was still running.

As we ran I evaluated my last two bonks and I came to the conclusion that some people can qualify for Boston on sub-par mileage (40-50 mpw) but most of us need more miles than that. I'm in the second category and I'm okay with that. I also realized that I'm much too busy right now with my church responsibilities and will be for the next 4+ years so I won't have time to commit to running 50-60 mpw for a couple months solid. I'm okay with that. In 4 years I'll be 45 and will get an extra 10 BQ minutes. I can run a 3:25 on my limited training. I'm convinced that if I had been aiming for 8:00 miles in this race I could've hit it, but because I was aiming for 7:24 miles I went too fast and burned out. I'm okay with that. I'll focus my sights on 5K to half marathon races, and probably some longer mountain races. I can run far but not fast.

I coasted through Liberty park then down the long street with the Finish line in the distance and Kam peeled off just before the barricades. My 10 yr old boy and 8 yr old daughter were there, waiting to run with me. They ran and I grabbed my daughter's hand and she held her brother's hand as we crossed the finish line. That was really sweet to me. I loved that they could share that moment with me.

Props to Kam for doing a great job as a pacer/mule, carrying water and gel. It was awesome to see my family 3 times during the race then ran with my 10 and 8 yo holding hands the last 50 yards. Well organized race, great city support, awesome aid stations. I definitely recommend the race.

1st half: 1:38:19 7:29 pace

2nd half: 1:53:31 8:39 pace

Major positive split! Woot woot. :)

No watch, no radio, I just ran a little bit. I planned to go to Boot Camp as I've been missing it, but when I got there and saw the exercises they would do my body physically ached and I knew I wasn't up for it. I've been sick with allergies or a cold the last few days so that plus the marathon was not a great combo. Then tried the elliptical but after 3 minutes I wasn't having that, so I headed outside. Fairly cool and windy but perfect running weather. Legs felt pretty good and by the end I was moving okay, in the low 8s probably. Nice short run but good to be back at it.

Lots of regrets from the race. Once I got dizzy and the A goal was gone I should've switched to my B or C goals, but I hadn't created any. It was an A goal or bust and now I feel a bit busted. All that training should've gotten me a PR, and I could've done it but I didn't listen to my coach (Kam) during the race. I switched to just wanting to finish and be done with the whole training cycle, and that goal was accomplished. I'm just left wanting a bit more now.

2 miles this morning from home. Nice and cool with a South wind. Felt good to stretch the legs. Feeling more and more ready to run.