the totality
Dang, what a weekend and a Monday!
Between Sunday’s hot Chicago Marathon (been there, done that, a few times over – it sucks, but dang, ya’ll are tough for finishing in the swampy and toasty temps!) and then Monday’s hopefully one-off Boston Marathon on the second Monday in October (not the third Monday in April), just as I said in last week’s entry, it sure is hard not to feel all jazzed right now with all things running.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone had great races so far this fall or even that everyone is hitting their training runs out of the park; certainly not. Running is far too mercurial, far too flaky for that. All most of us can do is hope that on the day when we decide that it matters most — typically, race day — that all the pieces fall into place and that we can effectively control All That We Can. We can only do so much. It sucks — truly, deeply, blows — when race day doesn’t materialize in the way that we’ve envisioned it for weeks (months, years), and it sure stings like hell in the immediate aftermath, especially when we’ve pored All That Is Available From Our Buckets into the race, our goals, and the experience.
(goes without saying, but yeah, been there, done that, a million times over)
The same goes for training runs, too. Not everything feels miraculous or even goes necessarily all that well; I think most runners would say most of their runs are decent. Nothing more, nothing less. Just fine.
It’s hard not to put a lot of hope (or despair) at the heels of our training runs — that is, it’s hard not to get excited when things are clicking more often than not, and it’s also hard not to despair when quite the opposite is happening. Our best performances are a teeny, tiny blip in time. So it is for our worst (or our sub-par) performances. It doesn’t necessarily account for the totality of the running and training experience.
We can have extraordinary training and a pretty crappy race day.
We can also have a rough go of a training cycle and surprise ourselves on race day.
The unpredictable nature makes all of this really frustrating and really, strangely exciting and attractive.
Putting in the work as best as we can, and then throwing the dice and seeing where it all lands on the day, is reason enough for so many of us to keep showing up over, and over, and over again, no matter how distorted our heartache-to-happiness ratio is.
Last week was a planned down week in my 50k training, the first in quite a long while, and I couldn’t shake this off-feeling that I had pretty much all week long. I wondered if it was because it was the week after my kids were off school for fall break, and in our off-week, we all had tried to sleep in as much as we could all week long, so naturally last week we’d probably be feeling a bit groggy as we recalibrated to our normal schedules. That made sense.
I thought maybe it was because I had several consecutive nights of volunteer obligation meetings, some several hours long, and that, in combination with the aforementioned, was making me feel like I was digging myself into a hole I couldn’t get out of.
Or hell, maybe it was all related to the previous week, almost like a delayed-onset fitness adaptation, wherein the week before I had run and climbed a whole bunch and so maybe last week my body was finally absorbing the totality of it. That also made sense.
Who knows? Maybe it was all of it; maybe it was none of it; maybe it was some weird combination to which only the running gods and goddesses themselves are privy.
I just know I felt really meh, sub-fine for most of my runs last week and ultimately even bagged my 16 mile cutback LR over the weekend five miles into it (after pushing it from Friday to Saturday, and then again from Saturday to Sunday), just because I felt so crummy. Weird, right?
This week at least, so far, so good (though I’m still sleeping a bit more than usual. Good for my recovery efforts, bad for my 60’ I usually spend with the NYT and my tea and breakfast before waking up the kids).
My point is that when it comes to looking at people’s race performances on the day or their training, I don’t think any one day is IT when it comes to predicting success (or that similarly, success isn’t predicated on runners doing one specific thing in training). Having a breakthrough marathon or a really strong workout isn’t entirely dependent on one specific long run you did or the one day you fuelled and slept like a boss. It’s the totality that matters.
As humans, I think we tend to want to simplify life as much as possible — especially these days, with the additional stresses that COVID has thrown into all of our lives — but I’m guessing that realistically speaking, it’s the sum of our best efforts that will help scootch us along toward realizing our goals, whatever they are.
At earlier points in my decade-plus of doing this long distance stuff, I have absolutely no doubt that my last week’s training and non-absolute-subscription to my training plan would have mentally derailed me and made me count myself out of my race before I ever stepped foot anywhere near the starting line (hell, I’m not even in race month yet!). These days, fortunately, with a lot more experience under my belt and a lot of sagacious insight from some incredible friends and mentors in the sport, I know that last week was but a blip. Nothing more. Nothing less.
If you’re in the throes of training for something and have similarly experienced a “non-adherence event” to your training plan for whatever — barring injury or catastrophe — it’s ok! The relative success of your future race isn’t hinged on the one time things went sideways.
You’ve got this. Keep grinding!
4 weeks and change