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A reflection… and some admittance of fear

A reflection… and some admittance of fear

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Since the Chicago Marathon is inching closer and closer, I find myself reflecting more on my training these days… and comparing it to that of last summer.  Some things I’ve noticed:

  1. Quality.  This summer’s quality has been much better simply because I’ve been more diligent about mixing it up – going long on the weekends, doing some sort of speed each week (hills, tempos, or 800s), and doing the standard “run how you feel” jaunts.
  2. Quantity.  Thanks to a much more forgiving summer schedule this time around, I’ve had way more time to devote to running.  Last summer, I was in the throes of grad school and consequently juggling FT school, an unpaid, PT internship, and FT employment, so my days were quite long, and only sometimes included running.  I haven’t checked last year’s log to officially know, but anecdotally, I think I’m least a hundred or so miles ahead of where I was last time around.
  3. The enjoyment factor.  Closely related to #1 and 2, I enjoy running when I do it often, in no small part because it is not obnoxiously taxing.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good challenge, but it’s nice when “easy” runs are actually “easy” and not “death-defying.”
  4. Mixing-up the race calendar.  Like many, I tend to be a creature of habit, and in the running side of my life, this often means doing the same races year in and year out, just for the hell of it.  Since winning the Chicago Athlete contest earlier this year, I’ve been fortunate to not have to pay for many race entries (since I’m mostly only running what they’ve paid for me to run!), and I’ve also ventured out and have tried some new ones like the Sunburst Marathon or the San Francisco Marathon.  I’m still eyeing some other races later this summer and into the early fall, but suffice it to say that variety is the spice of life.
  5. Additional camaraderie.  Last summer, typically Jack and I were chugging out the miles together most Saturdays.  This summer, we’ve added my Boston Bound buddies to the group, and this additional camaraderie has been great.  Now I have a whole group of people to keep me accountable and on my toes (especially during speedwork!).   Running with a core group of buddies has also been fabulous during the summer because even though there will almost always be someone unavailable to run (due to vacation, work, whatever), chances are, there will almost always be at least someone ELSE who’s willing to run at 5:30 a.m. on a Saturday to beat the Chicago humidity 🙂 Kristin Armstrong, over at Runner’s World, recently articulated these very same sentiments as she wrote about how humbling it is to train—hard—alongside running friends.  I encourage you to check it out here.

It’s a bit exciting, and also slightly terrifying, to think that we’re <50 days to the Chicago race.  I say “exciting” simply because that’s what I think races are—usually, tons of fun, and a great way to explore a city (be it your hometown or just somewhere you’re visiting for the week)—but also “slightly terrifying” in that, at this point, I’m about 90% certain I want to go for it and hit 3:35 this time around.  3:35 seems doable, given my training this summer, but is still a good 2 minutes faster than my marathon PR… which is enough to make me second-guess this… but if we don’t push ourselves outside our comfort zones, we don’t know what we can accomplish, right?

On that note, I’ll leave you with a few bits of sage wisdom that I’ve read lately that resonate with this “hunkering down” portion of my fall training schedule:

“You have to wonder at times what you’re doing out there. Over the years, I’ve given myself a thousand reasons to keep running, but it always comes back to where it started. It comes down to self-satisfaction and a sense of achievement.”

&

“A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways they’re capable of understanding.”

–Steve Prefontaine

“You only ever grow as a human being if you’re outside your comfort zone.”

–Percy Cerutty, running coach (courtesy of RW’s “Daily Kick in the Butt” email from 8/24/10)

Super San Fran

Super San Fran

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Blame the late post on vaycay. At least I remembered to write a race recap, albeit about a week late.

The San Francisco Marathon (the ‘the’ is important here, folks… think The Ohio State University) was going to be my tenth state—and thus, get me into the 50 States Club—and my fifteenth marathon. I was pretty floored by that latter distinction, and on some of my final pre-marathon runs, I went through all my marathons in chronological order to make sure that SF was, in fact, number 15. Sure was!!

Anyway, getting to the race was a bit of a ruckus, thanks to wild and thunderstorm-y weather at Midway, but once I got there (a day late and by way of San Diego), it rocked. I spent hardly any time at the expo, since it was pretty crowded on Saturday morning and smelled like a barn (not sure why). I got to meet up with a college friend and her family (hi, Cecy!), go out on their boat for a bit on Saturday night, and walked about 15 minutes to the race start, at the Embarcadero, on Sunday morning before my 5:45 a.m. Race take-off.

You read that correctly… 5:45. It was dark while we were waiting for the race to start, and the temps were a much-welcome change from the holy humidity of Chicago.

To summarize the race in a quick phrase, it was super. Seriously. People made this race out to be something larger than life– “ohmygosh, you’re running on THOSE hills????” – when, in reality, I’m sure the RD spared us the worst of SF’s acclaimed hills. For the first few miles, we ran alongside the Embarcadero and the bay, then jutted over to Fort Mason, went through a little park-y area, then climbed up to, and went over, the Golden Gate bridge not once, but TWICE! By this time, it was still pretty early (maybe around 7am?), and the fog was thick, so I didn’t get the luxury of taking in any SF cityscapes from the bridge. Just running over it was BA enough though. After the bridge, we made our way over to another section of the city where we had some serious potentially quad-killing downhills, then spent a good portion of the second half (miles 12/13-19ish) over in Golden Gate state park. I wasn’t expecting to encounter any wild buffalo in my treks through SF, so you can imagine my plesant surprise when I did 🙂 After the park, we traversed over some more major downhills on Haight St. before jutting east (I think) for a bit, and then finishing our final miles along the water and over by the Giants’ ballpark, putting us right back where we started earlier that morning. It was a very efficient way to discover SF on foot, suffice it to say!

The RD really did a nice job of taking care of the runners on this marathon adventure. The shirts were nice (a very cool tech shirt), the medals were enormous (not necessary, but always a nice touch), and the fluid stations were strategically placed every 2 miles, which was fine considering the very mild temps of the course (50s, perhaps, with virtually no humidity to speak of… at least nothing like the humidity of the midwest at this time in the summer). The volunteers were chipper and cheery, and though the spectators were a bit sparse, I was always in the company of other runners, many of whom were doing either the first or second half. The finish line area had a TON of food for the participants, and picking up my gear and heat-sheet was a breeze. I think I paid about $110 or so for my race entry, and I think it was a good investment, especially for someone who had never been to SF before and wanted to see as much as possible in the short time I was there.

Were the hills as fearsome as the WSJ made it out to be? Ehhhhh… not really. This course really made me think of Boston, in that the hills, themselves, aren’t necessarily killer; it’s just their placement. I think people may have a guaranteed fear of a SF road race going into it because they think they’ll be running up the cable-car hills featured on the rice-a-roni commercials. None of ’em were THAT dramatic. They were challenging, but for the most part, they were short, and once you just hunkered down to conquer them, they were over. Really.

Now don’t get me wrong, I won’t claim the SF course was easy, but it was very fair. Had I not done any hillwork this spring, leading up to my Boston race, or this summer, leading up to this race, I surely would have suffered. The same thing goes for speedwork. The second half of the course was remarkably fast—so fast, as I explained to C and my in-laws over vacation this past week, that I was genuinely surprised that I didn’t trip over my feet and wind up rolling down Haight St. (or others). I could definitely see why people would come to run a PR on the second half’s course.

I’m very pleased with my 3:53 finish, especially since I was aiming for a 4-4:30 and because I didn’t really know what to expect, having never done the course before. Immediately after the race, I met C and my in-laws down in SoCal to vacation in Orange County for a week, so thanks to a 13-hour day on my feet at Disneyland, I have recovered remarkably well, and fast, from this marathon. It’s Sunday, and my legs feel like they ran a race a MONTH ago, not just a week.

Bank on the SF race. You won’t be disappointed.