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November 2018 training recap and pre-CIM thoughts

November 2018 training recap and pre-CIM thoughts

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Goodbye, penultimate month of 2018, and hello December (and very soon, CIM).

Staring down both the final month of what has turned out to be a weird-as-hell year, in addition to the last few days pre-marathon, makes for a great existential exercise. It’s just bizarre how both fast and slow this year has gone by. It doesn’t seem like the SF Marathon was all that long ago, but here we are, an entire other marathon training cycle behind us, and the Big Day is greeting us all on Sunday with open arms to come and get it.

blurry pic, blurry month. deep!

November is always a sentimental month for me, between my birthday, my wedding anniversary, and Thanksgiving, and this year was no different. I celebrated my 35th birthday by having (wait for it) … a baseline mammogram! Thirty-five is a pretty young age to get your knockers smooshed between a vice, but my family history sorta necessitated it (grandma’s diagnosis was at 65 and mom’s at 55, though nope, extensive genetic testing shows that we don’t have BRCA1 or 2). It wasn’t painful or anything — uncomfortable and kinda weird, sure — but I think I’d take that any day over another MRI of my head. ::shudders::

first mamm, first pair of specs. hello, 35.

My in-laws visited at different points of the month, which was quite lovely, so C and I were able to get out for some nice quality time a bit, too.

anniversaring at the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz

And in keeping with our every-other-year tradition, the fam bam and I spent Thanksgiving with all our favorite Disney friends in Anaheim. On the whole, it was a good month.

we’re going through that awkward stage where G sorta kinda always smiles like a bulldog

 

I *almost* had it. Sorta.

 

fambam wide-angle selfie at Disneyland

And then, of course, everything went to hell once the wildfires began. The Camp Fire, nearest to us here in the Bay Area, was still a good 200+ miles away, but holy hell did it wreak havoc on our air quality for nearly two solid weeks. The destruction and devastation that inferno brought further field, up north, seemed purely apocalyptic, and for days, every.single.time I read the news updates about it, I just wept out of powerlessness.

It was so profoundly sad and tragic, and strangely, though the towns most affected by the fire were pretty small in population, numerous friends of mine here knew someone, personally, who lived up there and who lost their homes. So many lives lost and so much property destroyed; knowing what the AQ was like here, so far away from it, I cannot fathom how bad it must have been in the immediate surroundings. It hurts my heart.

With the AQ tanking for nearly two weeks, naturally, my running in November took a hit; that was to be expected. Instead of closer to 200+ that I would have likely posted, I was closer to 158. No matter. Shit, for two weeks, all types of outdoor events were cancelled or postponed multiple hours north and south of us, including a couple of A’s swim meets and the PA XC championship race. It’s pretty hard to complain about not being able to run outside for a while knowing how devastating and damaging the fire was to so many people’s lives. I mean, that goes without saying. A little perspective goes a long way.

In the wake of the fire, I missed a couple long runs — a 22 miler and a 14 — because I wasn’t keen to do them on treadmills out of trepidation more than anything; running that long on a treadmill relatively close to my goal race wasn’t a calculated risk I was comfortable taking. Fun fact: prior to the Camp Fire, I hadn’t run on a treadmill since I was pregnant with A back in 2011 (it was the day of the “Groundhog Day blizzard”), mostly because I don’t like how broken my body feels after running on them.

Way back in the day, like over a decade ago, when I first began training for marathons, I used to run on treadmills a lot, and it never bothered me. Then, for whatever reason, something happened, and anytime I ran on a treadmill, afterward I just felt like absolute garbage, like every part of me just felt broken. The remedy: never run on a treadmill again. Always run outside or don’t run at all. Done.

treadmilling with some teammates and not impressing anyone with my “countries of the world in alphabetical order” trick (PC: Janet)

The unsafe AQ during the Camp Fire meant that if I wanted to run at all, I had to suck it up and hope for the best on the ‘mill and just do what I could. Fortunately, by Thanksgiving, the rain arrived and helped to send the trapped, smoke-filled air out to sea. Right around that time, the fire had been fully contained, and our skies have since returned to their lovely hue.

Anaheim running over Thanksgiving and just being thrilled to see blue skies for the first time in nearly two weeks

So here we are, right before CIM, my second go at this particular race. When I compare notes from last year’s CIM training to that of 2018, it’s almost laughable how different everything is and importantly, how different (read: how much better) I feel this time around. That, by itself, is a huge win to me.

The tl;dr version: last year, for an indeterminate amount of time, my liver was fucked, though we didn’t learn about it until my birthday in early November, a month before the race, at my annual physical. I was running hard and training hard last year, but post-SF marathon, I felt pretty bad — extremely fatigued — a lot. When it was all said and done, my then-GI determined that I was likely experiencing a rare-but-documented side effect to the medicine he had prescribed me for my microscopic colitis (which, another fun fact, my current GI doesn’t believe I have. Cool).

I went into CIM ‘17 hopeful for a great weekend, trusting in my training but unsure about how my body was going to respond (thanks to that excessive, suffocating fatigue and all). Just a couple weeks prior to CIM, I debated whether running it would be a good idea because I had felt so awful during a half marathon; how in the world was I going to run twice the distance and faster!?! Magically, I managed to eke out a three-second PR at CIM, despite feeling like just about everything was stacked against me for the better part of the quarter. (In addition to my liver nonsense, during that quarter, my husband had pretty bigtime surgery and was recovering from it; my eldest’s teacher up and quit before the first month of school was over; yadda yadda yadda. When it rains, it fucking pours!). Anyway. Three seconds in a marathon isn’t much, but to have pulled that off despite the shitstorm that was September-November ‘17 just floored me. It was hard not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all.

from CIM ’17. my heart swells with love for Connie and Meg (PC: Meg’s IG)

 

This is minutes before the end of the race, and I look like I’m talking about dinner plans. What the hell, self!? (I remember working very hard here, as hard as it may be to believe from the photographic evidence!) So fun that Tiffany picked me up at mile 21 and ran me in dressed up like a slice of pepperoni (PC: CT)

 

and my heart swells for my team. lots of love to these harriers. since CIM is the US marathon championship race and on the PA circuit, there will be lots of us out there again on Sunday. (PC: WRC)

Regardless of the time I post on Sunday, race day, race weekend is going to be excellent. 

Anything can happen, — alas, that’s the exhilarating and heartbreaking speciality of the marathon — but I know that the totality of my training has prepared me.

I am immensely looking forward to toeing the line with tons of friends from all over the country and to seeing friends on the sidelines, too.

What great joy and fortune we all have to be physically capable of doing this hobby for no real reason other than because we can.

seriously, we are so lucky and fortunate

It’s so, so easy to romanticize the marathon, to think that this brutal distance somehow owes us something after we’ve committed weeks and months of our lives to it. The fact of the matter is that this distance isn’t for the faint of heart. It owes us nothing, though we (I) may feel like we (I) owe it quite a lot, in fact.

It is through training for this behemoth distance — training to not only cover the distance, period, but also to cover it as quickly as we can possibly sustain — that we are given numerous opportunities to learn about ourselves and our capacity for growth, change, you name it. A lot goes down, both mentally and physically, in all those training and racing miles we post in advance of The Big Day. 

For being something intangible, something inanimate, something insentient, this distance sure makes for a powerful teacher.

It’s something for which I am profoundly thankful.  

who knew that one foot in front of the other, repeatedly, for very long distances, as fast as you can possibly sustain, could be such a game-changer

When it comes down to it, the marathon will test every ounce of us and expose any vulnerability we have.

We will have superb patches, miles where we’re convinced that we’ve got so much latitude still to work with and tricks in our belt to pull out.

And like that, practically without fail, there will also be patches that are just insufferable and that leave us grasping for anyone, anything, to help us and save us from this self-imposed tribulation.

It’s likely that we won’t understand why we do this in the heat of the moment, but when we finish, we will.

The reasons, the meaning, will be crystal clear.

We’ve trained for all of these moments, all this facilitative stress. / let’s go

Trust yourself and in your training. / it’s there

Believe in the process. / journey > destination

—–

Racing: The only November race on my plan originally was the XC champs, but it got postponed a week because of the fire. The new, postponed date was just after Thanksgiving, once we returned from Disneyland. I wanted to do a LR after not doing one for two weeks, so I didn’t partake after all (sad face). Also, belatedly, I received a very nice award from the BSFM for placing fifth in my AG at that race in July. (Quite unexpected that they created awards five deep, but many thanks!).

Reading: I re-read Peak Performance this month and finished reading The Sun Does Shine, which was very powerful and very, very disturbing. 

Listening: Nothing out of the ordinary here, though I enjoyed binging on just about every NYC Marathon-related podcast I got my hands (ears?) on. Man, I love NYC. Maybe I’ll go back one day… Oh, and I recently rediscovered my love of Juanes. Lots of Juanes.

Watching: Again, nothing comes to mind here except for when the fam and I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet right after Thanksgiving. C and I are going to start listening to this podcast about the top 100 movies of all time … or something … and then watch the movies they talk about, but it’ll probably take me decades to make it through the first five at the rate I watch movies.     

Running: I’m queueing up my 2019 racing schedule… what’s on your list?!

Speedy vibes, fellow CIM racers!!!

 

October 2018 training recap

October 2018 training recap

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…and here we are, early November, with CIM less than a month away, and not too much left of the year 2018, either, as a matter of fact. I know I say this with every monthly recap and probably with every marathon training cycle, too, but damn. Time sure is going by quickly.

October was one of those months wherein if I could have four of me, it’d make things easier, but alas, the laws of nature as yet still prohibit that, so here we are. The month was rife with lots of good stuff, things that had been in the pipeline for months and that had finally come to fruition. That’s not me being purposefully vaguesauce; it’s just me not wanting to bore y’all to tears over the inner-trappings of all things Girl Scouts, PTA, and the like. (You’re welcome).

in the throes of our sleepover at the Oakland Zoo (which was awesome and I’d highly recommend it, local GS families)

It’s always so gratifying to spend weeks and weeks, if not months and months, planning something and then have it all come together. I think that’s part of why I like marathons: because they necessitate so much planning and so much in the way of contingency plans. You’ve got your Plan A or Goal A, of course, but then you also cover your bases and get down to Z, too, if need be. The flip-side, of course, is that if things don’t go well on marathon day, it’s pretty difficult to easily turn around and do another one, but the build-up is an excellent practice in delayed gratification. Plus — which kinda makes no sense whatsoever to me — even when the training goes by fast, it forces us to slow down and take in the miles as we experience them. I think that’s a great lesson that we can apply to daily life. Remember to breathe and to take time to look around every once in a while.    

Getting recognized for swimming a mile for charity

 

C as Beetlejuice with our neighbor and friend, Vivi

 

Princess Poppy (or Lady Glittersparkles), with a tiara, wearing a Sofia the First pendant, in my prom dress from 2001 or 2002

 

BB8 & Maleficent with a little Juju avocado on the side

Aside from the all the many “life” stuff that October brought, it also brought running hot and heavy, to the tune of around 220 miles. The month was filled with lots of quality miles, some solid, hard workouts, and a *lot* of racing between the Aggies XC Open, the Water Dog 10k, the East Bay 10k, and the Oktoberun half marathon. While not all of these races provided a reliable glimpse into my marathon fitness (due to one reason or another), they did, however, all give me great excuses to see friends from near and far whom I otherwise don’t see. Color me thrilled. I was really lucky to shoehorn these races into pretty packed weekend schedules all month long, too, and for that I am super grateful (S/O to my husband here; this really is a team effort).

cheesin’ hard somewhere on a downhill during the Water Dog 10k (thanks for the very nice and complimentary pics!)

 

when in doubt, throw your hands in the air and hug it out

 

Aggies XC open

 

As we head into November and arguably the thickest part of the CIM training block, I can’t help but be inspired by how people use running and goal races — such as CIM — in their lives in very different but very meaningful ways. Obviously, people begin running at different times in their lives, ranging from childhood to adulthood, and for many different reasons, anything from “I got dumped and I needed to cope” to “I lost a bet” or whatever else. I’m always so intrigued to hear people’s “whys” and what they do, the decisions they make, to keep going with their running day after day. I mean, after all, it’s exponentially easier to quit than it is to keep going; that’s true for just about everything. The gamut of emotion underpinning all of these experiences related to running is deep and rich, and it makes me both appreciate and view my own running “journey,” if you will, differently than I otherwise would. It’s enlightening.  

I was reminded of this sentiment last month when I was volunteering with Wolfpack at the Rock n Roll San Jose half marathon. It was a warmer-than-usual day (and it’s a hot course in the first place), so I think by and large, most runners suffered a bit more than usual. I was hanging on a corner around the 8 mile marker, and toward the end of the race, perhaps around the 3-hour finisher group, a woman dressed in purple walked over to me. At first, I asked if she was okay — since the EMTs were also on that same corner with me — and as we got into conversation, she told me that she follows me on IG (small world) and knew my stroke story from earlier this year. We got to talking, and I learned that just recently, just a week or two earlier, she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and would be starting her chemo and radiation at Good Sam the following week, just days after RNRSJ.

Suffice it to say that when she showed me her chemo port near her clavicle, it took my breath away. I was so grateful to be wearing dark sunnies. She was young for that disease, probably early-to-mid 40s, and said that she had been in great shape training for RNRSJ when she got the diagnosis. Doing — and finishing — the race was going to be her last hurrah, of sorts, before she began chemo and really began dealing with her illness in earnest. I was so impressed with her candor the whole time she was talking and her absolute bravery toward this disease, a type of cancer that typically has a pretty dire prognosis. She could have been anywhere else that morning, doing literally anything else, yet there she was in the thick of a road race. She was struggling to finish the race but at least wanted to show up and try because not trying wasn’t an option for her. My heart goes out to her, and I obviously am hoping for the best for her as she deals with the insidious disease that is cancer.

This story exemplifies something that I find so powerful about our sport, too. When we’re on the starting line, preparing to compete, we have no idea what it took for all of our peers around us to get there, to stand next to us on that day. Even if we’re all on the line because we have similar goals we want to destroy — like a PR, a BQ, or whatever — we have no idea about the stories and experiences that our peers are bringing with them to the starting (and eventually, the finish) line, the fuel they’re throwing on the fire that’s propelling them from Point A to Point B. Everyone’s journey is different, of course, but everyone’s dealing with something. Sometimes, it’s a little easier to jump to conclusions and understand, even if only a little, what’s making someone compete, particularly if that person is wearing a singlet for a specific charity or advocacy group.

What’s more often the reality, however, is that when we toe the line at a race, we put on our singlets and encase ourselves in a cloak of relative anonymity. Our running and racing becomes about something that is greater than ourselves, greater than us as individual humans. We can both run towards, and away from, something if we so choose. At its heart, running allows us to suffer, yes, but it also allows us to see through, and make sense of, our suffering. I don’t know of many other sports that offer its participants that type of experience. It’s pretty impressive that something so basic and innate can be something so (mentally and physically) transformative.

…and therein lies the beauty of our sport.

—————————–

Reading: Oh man, have you read Bad Blood yet? I started it and finished it in early October, and holy crap. It’s pretty incredible. After I finished, I found myself going down the youtube rabbit hole to watch interviews that Elizabeth Holmes had done over the years (partially because I wanted to hear her voice, which is … yeah), and man. What a wild story. After that, I shifted gears and read The Power and left feeling somewhat… uneasy. If you’ve read either, please let me know your thoughts. I was so intrigued by both.

Listening: My husband turned me on to the “In the Dark” podcast, and I finished season 1 over the course of the month during my easy runs. I didn’t listen to “Serial” in its entirety, but that’s what it reminded me of. Season 1 was really hard to listen to at times, due to the content, but it was really well done. My usual IVF podcast of choice is still going strong, and of course, like most of the world, I binged on the “A Star is Born” soundtrack because I love Lady Gaga. (Still haven’t seen it yet, however). Oh, and “Sample of my Pasta” (Bad Lip Reading) and “IDOL” (BTS) are both huge in my house right now and have piqued my kids’ and my interest in k-pop.

Anticipating: Well, I’m writing this on Election Day, so…

Watching: Nothing comes to mind, per yoosh. I started watching “The Tick” on Amazon as a silly show that I can watch with the kids, and it lives up to that expectation. Otherwise, I haven’t seen much. (Now that I say that, I realize the fam and I went to see “Small Foot” this month, and I fell asleep during the back half of the movie. -_- )

Family: Last month, I wrote a lot about my eldest’s swim program going up in proverbial flames. She has since decided to commit to a different program, and fortunately, all seems to be working out well. She participated in a “swim a mile” charity fundraiser in Oakland after a Girl Scout overnight we had with our troop at the zoo, and she loved it. She also participated in a two day swim meet in October and will do it again before the end of the year. Otherwise, the kids and the fam are all doing well.

Racing: Like I mentioned, October was pretty stacked in the racing department. I always say that it’s always a good time of year to be a runner, but like I said last month, the fall racing season is just magical. In November, I’m only planning to do the XC championship meet up in SF before CIM in early December, so ye olde racing sched should be a little quieter this time around. Hard to believe that there’s just a little XC meet left and then it’ll be the big day.

again: when in doubt, throw your hands up

Less than a month now til CIM!