After last week’s travel schedule and making the decision to switch to Hanson’s Marathon Method, I was really eager to start this week new.
Monday: 6 miles at an easy 10:33 pace; 1.5 -mile walk. After an 18-mile weekend, typically it’s a total relief to have a Monday where I “only” have to run 3 miles; however, my new training schedule instead tasked me with running 6 miles at an easy pace. The weather was purely splendid– 70 degrees with a light breeze. It was literally perfect. I chose a route, however, that wasn’t particularly easy. There were a lot of hills and, midway through mile 2, I had to stop at the top of a hill when running an 11:00 pace felt like trudging through mud and my breath was going way too fast and my legs were dead, heavy, and tight. It was hard to imagine that I had another 4 miles to get through, but I pushed the pace a little harder in mile 3 and got it down to around the pace of my tempo runs and felt like the heavy feeling had been shaken off (no more treadmills for me, I SWEAR IT). But the hills were awful. I kept up my pace on a few of them, but one particularly daunting hill right before mile 5, I walked up. Yes, I feel defeated when I do that, especially because I know that it’s all a mental challenge to keep pushing, but getting acquainted with what an easy pace truly feels like is tough. I did notice, however, that my last mile of running, I was going a steady 10:09 pace and I questioned why I was able to go faster in the last mile of a run that was actually pretty tough for what was supposed to be an easy-pace day. Running really is a mental sport…
Tuesday: Rest. In a sudden turn from Monday’s beautiful weather, Tuesday’s weather was totally opposite. All day long, winds of up to 40-50 mph kept gusting through to the point where it felt like I was being pushed down the sidewalks. My drive home from work, it felt like I had a loose tire on my car because the wind was so bad. In addition, freezing rain turned to snow right around 7PM. I had a planned speed work session that day but decided to call it off. Why? Because I cannot get back on that treadmill. I can’t do it. It’s making my strides too short and giving me that dead leg feeling when I run outside and I can’t handle it anymore. So, I moved my Wednesday rest day to Tuesday and my Tuesday speed work session to Wednesday. That also means tomorrow will be an easy-pace 7 mile run and Friday I will have a 7-mile tempo run. Adjustments are not ideal, but I can’t do the treadmill any longer.
Wednesday: 1.5-mile warm-up, 10 x 400 with splits of 2:08, 2:03, 2:02, 2:04, 2:05, 2:04, 2:06, 2:08, 2:08, and 2:09; 10 x 400 recovery laps, 0.75-mile cool-down; 8 total miles at an average 10:08 pace. Ahhh, speed work. Today’s session was tough stuff. I had to battle getting lost on the way to the nearest high school, 15mph winds, and the prying eyes of high school coaching and janitorial staff as well as a practicing baseball team wondering what the heck I was doing out on the track all by myself with a “keep out” sign displayed proudly in the end zone. No one ever said anything to me about whether I was violating property and I was prepared to push back if they did with my gentle reminder of having as much right to the publicly-funded track as the students did as long as they weren’t using it for themselves. My goals for today’s speed work were to run each 400-yard lap in 2:01 and do a recovery lap at an 11:47 pace. I quickly found out how tough that is to do on legs that are still getting accustomed to outdoor running in strong winds, but I pushed every time. The first 200 yards, I always started out very strong but the back half was straight into the wind and where I got the most tired. It didn’t feel unattainable to run at that swift of a pace, but I always fell a few seconds short of my pace goals and I was worried about that. I don’t know if that means I am overshooting my goal of a 4:00 marathon (and I’ll be honest here– a 4:15 marathon would thrill me, too) or if it was my legs adjusting to a longer stride or running into a wind that, of course, stopped as I was taking my cool down laps; however, this is what I am training for: minutes and seconds. Any one of those splits could have made the difference between my goal of 4:00 or less. But I was no doubt proud of what I had accomplished and decided that I will wait for next week’s speed session to determine whether I have set an unattainable goal for myself.
Thursday: 4 easy miles at a 10:28 pace. Thursday was windy as hell— chaotically windy. Okay, so I have run through 20 mph headwinds before– ice bitter freezing cold headwinds, may I add– but there was just no escaping it– the wind was EVERYWHERE, no matter which direction I ran I always seemed to be running into it. My legs felt insanely heavy (still getting used to Hanson’s “cumulative fatigue” philosophy) and, while I was holding a steady pace despite the wind, my heart was racing because I was actually running faster into the wind just to maintain that pace. On a less windy day, I’m sure I was running a pace around 8:00 because I know by now how labored my breathing feels when I run faster paces, but I was covering only as much ground as a 10:30 average pace. I decided to turn around at 2 miles and run with the wind for as long as I could before I got too far from home to get back, just for the sake of having some reprieve on what was supposed to be an easy running day but was feeling like a tempo run day, but when I turned around, the wind seemed to be worse and I even felt it push me off the sidewalk a little. At one point, I literally felt like I was running against a wall. I decided to cut my losses and stripped 3 miles off my easy run– my heart was pounding, my legs were seriously burning, I could barely breathe to keep up with the pace let alone get past the feeling of an invisible hand over my mouth. Somehow, I need to figure out how to adapt to living in such a windy place. And pray like heck that none of my upcoming race days will have high winds in the forecast.
Friday: 3 tempo miles at an average 9:34 pace; 2 miles warm-up and cool down. I admit that I am officially demoralized with marathon-training. Today’s run was supposed to be a 7-mile tempo at 9:09 with 1.5 miles each of warmup and cool down. Going in, I wasn’t sure I could do it but I reminded myself that I wasn’t sure I could do speed work on Wednesday and then I did and I liked it. But after dealing with high winds for three days straight, I was irked beyond belief and just plain over it. After a windy mile warmup at a 9:56 split, my first tempo mile started off fast. REALLY fast. I looked at my watch and realized I was clocking an 8:03 split. I said to myself, “Good job, Sara, but slow down! You have a lot of distance ahead of you!” But slowing down was hard. 9:09 pace times usually just happened for me– I’ve never had to think about how fast or slow that felt. I finished my second mile in 9:12, feeling shaky tired and wondering how I was going to get through the next several miles. I had gone out WAY too fast in my first mile and, even though I was running with the wind now, the pace felt exhausting to maintain and I dropped to a 9:59 split in mile two. I was irritated. After a week of running under 10:00 (which for me is slow), I felt like I was regressing. My old training plans used to be full of average pace times between 8:30 and 9:30 and now I was running hardly anything under 9:30 average paces. My legs are stiff and heavy, the wind makes me panic and run hard so I burn like I am going 8:00/mile but only going 10:00/mile, and I just can’t enjoy running when I have to meet certain pace times that I know I can meet because I have– MANY times before. This is what really gets to me about running: you can practice every single day but you don’t get better. And every time I try to get better, I somehow get worse. It’s backwards.
Saturday: Rest. I woke up on Saturday morning feeling deliriously fatigued, wholeheartedly demoralized, and nauseous. My entire body ached. I knew I had to run 8 miles but– and this is how I can usually tell when my body is calling the shots– I didn’t feel at war with myself to get out and go. I didn’t have the usual “don’t want to run today; I know I need to but I just don’t want to; but I gotta go.” My body was literally molded to the couch after I slept for hours. I drank three cups of coffee and I could barely mentally conceptualize how much time I had on the trail before I had to be home, in the shower, and on my way to my parent’s house for a family event. I knew running 8 miles was not going to do anything for me, so I let my tired body have a win.
Sunday: 13 miles at an average 11:46 pace. Sunday’s run is the first time I’ve actually wondered if there is something wrong with me besides the usual marathon training fatigue. It was a colder day than usual and there was (FINALLY) no wind, I’d had a rest day the day before– the conditions for a good strong run with a goal pace time of 9:53 (nearly a minute slower per mile than my half-marathon PR) were perfect. Literally. Except I was running feeling like there was no gas in the tank whatsoever. I pretty much trudged the entire time. The first 3 miles were brutal. I felt almost as sleep as when I was running the Run for the Ranch Marathon. I was literally in pain the entire time, my legs refused to pick up and move faster than a trudge. I finally whittled my way down to a 10:36 pace (while going up a hill, no less) which gave me some encouragement and, around mile 5-6, I was actually running okay. Not at all happy with my pace, which was somewhere under 11:00, but I tried to just ignore it and keep going. But after getting to mile 7-8, which was the end of the first loop in the 8-mile trail that circles my home, I was walking. And I could barely get myself to care. I kept going, kept trying not to think about my awful pace, kept trying not tell myself negative thoughts. I tried to ignore the feeling of cars passing me and wondering if they were judging me for giving up and walking. But when I got to mile 10, I decided to keep going for another mile. And then one more. And then finally, I decided to go one more past 12 miles so I could at least show some improvement from last week’s long-run mileage. But after pretty much shuffling through mile 12, I decided not to go for another one. I just didn’t see what good it would do to run miserably for one more mile when I was thirsty, teetering the edge of a meltdown, and wondering why the bottom of my foot hurt like I’d just run a full marathon and why I was getting pinching sensations in my left butt that were similar to what I was feeling when I had to get physical therapy for being off-balance and out of alignment nearly a year and a half ago. The one-mile walk home might as well have been a crawl. There was literally nothing in my body, my mind, my soul to stand upright– there was only the fear that I would cut myself on the glass of a broken liquor bottle along the country road that kept me standing up.
Total weekly miles were 36— a whole 13 more miles than last week’s 23. My first week on Hanson’s Marathon Method was exhausting. The high weekly miles on their Advanced Plan was a huge shock, but I thought I could overcome it because the pace times seemed attainable.
After, well, not a lot of deep thought and more of a concession, I’ve decided to adjust my goal for the Minneapolis Marathon from a 4:00 finish to a 4:15 finish time. My personal best is a 4:38, so beating that by 38 minutes is a huge feat (even though I beat my first marathon PR by 29 minutes). I think, in reassessing my marathon finish goal, I’m looking at the effort that I can give each week to this sport, and I just don’t know how much I can give right now because my emotional parking lot is too full. While I’m still genuinely confused as to why I used to run so fast and so well like it was nothing and now an average 11:46 pace over 13 miles sounds like a death march through hell, I think a 4:15 finish or a new PR of 15 minutes is the most manageable for me right now. I enjoy running the most when I surprise myself. So I would rather adjust down and be proud of myself than aim high and disappoint myself.
Right now though, all I want is the spring in my step and the joy in my heart back.
The winds can be out of control here in Oklahoma!! Hope your new training plan serves you well!