Boston Marathon

The Truth:

Sorry for going silent. Every time I sat down to write a post about Boston, I just couldn't do it. I'm not an overly emotional person, but writing about the my race seemed impossible when other people's lives were irrevocably changed forever. I think part of it is that I work in the same building as Captain Davis. Both Captain Davis and his wife were injured in the blast. His wife lost her foot. The week before Boston another co-worker had a heart attack. He had a bad reaction to a medication he was given and lost both his legs below the knees. Needless to say being at the office has been tough, and I just haven't felt like writing.

The Race:

Here goes...the race was a bit tough. From the start, I had a stabbing pain in my right calf. It was strange given that I had no calf issues going into the race, but you know, it happens. I can only hypothesize that standing outside for an hour or so prior to the start made my legs tight, but that's just a guess. I actually ran the first half at what felt like a very easy pace. My heart rate was low, but my calf continued to get worse. By the time I got to the hills, my whole right leg was having issues. And then I sort of just gave up, or at least that's what I thought at the time. I knew I wasn't going to make my goal. I knew I was having some major leg issues.  And so I gave myself permission to just relax and get to the finish. 

Once I had finished, I was grateful that I had taken a cautious approach because I didn't feel well. I was limping, cold, and nauseous. Sometimes when I'm running I don't really know how bad things are until I stop. The next day I took off my compression socks to find my lower calf and ankle all black and blue. It actually looked worse than it does in the picture, and even after 15 days my right ankle is still black and blue. After 10 days, I went to the doctor to make sure it wasn't a blood clot. She told me I tore some muscle fibers that caused the bleeding, and the bleeding seeped into my ankle. She doesn't think it's anything serious. I am definitely not fully recovered though. Besides my ankle still being discolored, I have trouble running much more than 6 miles. Partly I don't feel like running right now, and that's okay.

My 5K splits are listed below. I know some will think that I went out too fast, but I don't think I did. My recent 18:34 5K and 1:25:59 half marathon both predicted a marathon time of 3:01. I purposely ran slower than that pace for the first half, but it didn't matter because my leg was simply having issues. And I'm okay with that. I'm glad I ran as well as I did under the circumstances.       

                                                                                            

5K:	0:21:52
10K:	0:43:38
15K:	1:05:29
20K:	1:27:37
Half:	1:32:26
25K:	1:49:59
30K:	2:13:08
35K:	2:39:10
40K:	3:06:56
FINISH:	3:18:27

The Good Parts:

While there was heart wrenching tragedy at the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon, there were some nice memories before that tragedy struck...Some of the things I'd like to remember include:

I saw little kids so excited to hand out orange slices and give high fives that it was impossible for me not to smile. I did high five several little kids. They were so cute in their excitement. I saw one runner do a cartwheel because he was so pumped up by the crowd, and the crowd responded with screams of enthusiasm. I saw runners stealing kisses from the ladies in Wellesley, and it was adorable. My co-worker, Liz, swapped out my water bottles at mile 16, and her husband Steve jumped in the race and ran with me through the Newton hills. Steve has never met me, but was amazing. He'd urge the crowd to cheer for me by throwing up his arms and screaming "Let's hear it for Katie!" I remember running by Newton-Wellesley hospital, where I was born. My friend Ana-Maria jumped into the race for a bit around mile 19 to cheer and say hi. When I finished, fellow runners were giving congratulations, a volunteer wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and another volunteer placed a medal around my neck. My parents found me in the crowd in the family meeting area and gave me a hug. When I got home I got a huge hug from Nick, and some big squeezes from my little girls. Those are some of things I'd like to remember about April 15, 2013...

The Reality:

It wasn't until Tuesday that I realized we were still within 300 meters of the blast when it happened. I was watching the video and race clock read 4:09. My parents and I were heading towards Fenway, where their car was parked. We had to pass by the finish and then by the 26 miler marker. I remember the 26 mile marker clock reading 4:30 and thinking it had taken so long to pick up my bag and find my parents...but we were on the opposite side of the road and crowd was so crazy thick there that we couldn't really see or hear anything. When we got to the car around 3:15ish, people were already calling and texting. We were lucky, but I still get choked up when I think about the people that weren't so lucky...

"Normal"

I am the worst blogger. I love reaching out to other runners, but as I get closer to an important race the less likely I am to blog about training or running or share what my goals are or other things that "normal" bloggers blog about. I love reading about all that stuff when other people write about it, but I like to make like a clam and close my shell. ;)

I don't think I mentioned this previously, but I was picked to blog about the Boston Marathon on Boston.com. I've done a few posts. My most recent post can be found here if you're interested...I found blogging on another site more challenging than I would have thought. I don't feel like I know the audience. I feel like most of the people who read this blog are probably people relatively similar to me, you know, running is just something we do (all the time). I'm not sure that's the case over on the other blog. Or at the very least, I just don't know what the general experience it. When writing posts I would find myself wondering if people would think an 80 mile week was excessive, or would they be really grossed out by the fact that I'm constantly losing my toenails? And for whatever reason, people can't seem to leave comments, so I have no idea what they might be thinking. 

I love when you guys leave comments. I think the best aspect of blogging is the dialogue that might come after a post. It's interesting to get other people's thoughts on various subjects. 

Well, Boston is 11 days away, so I guess I should mention the highlights. (If you're super interested in my training you can always see what I'm doing on DailyMile.) I'm in full on taper, and yes, also full on crazy mode. In true tapering fashion, my right hip started to bother me on Saturday, so I took Sunday and Monday off. 

During my peak week I ran 80 miles, last week I wound up with 53 (but had planned to run 60), and this week I'll probably wind up with 42-50 miles. All typical. My hip bothers me when I sit or lay down, but not when I'm running, which is also pretty typical for me. I'm so weird...

I have my ride to Boston with the GLRR all set, and my parents are picking me up at  the finish. My mom is so cute. I think she's been to the finish just to figure out where to park and such. I've been studying the course, and reading all kinds of "advice" for the Boston course, but honestly a lot of it seems random and not backed up by evidence or experience. I'm planning to call my college friend this weekend and get her take on the course. She's run there at least twice successfully. I'm predicting that when she eventually gets back there that she'll run sub-3:00. 

Feel free to throw in your thoughts on the Boston course (or if you'll be at Boston). One of the sillier things I read was to go out 25 seconds slower than MP for the first 5 miles...there was no explanation for this (other than you'll feel better at the end). I don't get it, though. It seems to me that it may actually take more energy to slow down that much if you're running down hill. Perhaps I'm missing something crucial.

I'll leave you with this gem from Calvin and Hobbes that Nick sent me last week. I'm not sure if it's Kosher that I copied it, but I got it from: http://www.gocomics.com/. It. Is. AWESOME! As an aside, Kaylee is a lot like Calvin sometimes. One day she asked me if she could pretend her pancakes were "grubs and slugs". 

New Bedford HM RR (1:25:59)

New Bedford wasn't on my racing plan, but the Hampton half was cancelled due to poor weather. Even then, it wasn't necessarily the next half I would have chosen, but it turned out my parents were running it. And I love going to races with my parents. Also, they bribed me with promises of a St. Paddy's day dinner at their place afterwards, and who could say no to that?

In honor of it being St. Patrick's day and all, I decided to paint my nails, which only happens for particularly special races...you can see the result over on the left. (As a side note, I honestly don't know how people can paint their nails all the time. I do it maybe three times a year, and every time I find it extremely annoying.)

Race day was great. I met my parents at their place, and then we went down to the race together. I found one of my best running friends from college, Amy, almost by accident and was able to run a warm up with her and her teammates from Whirlaway, which was awesome. I find running a warm up with a group to be relaxing before a race. Maybe it reminds me of college cross-country. We finished our 2 mile warm up about 10-15 minutes before the start. We dropped off our layers and only waited maybe 5 minutes before the race started. This was a fairly sizable race, and we couldn't quite push our way to the front, but after about 400 meters or so we were moving at a good clip. We passed the first mile at 6:12. Too fast. A race start like this is difficult though. Sometimes it's almost better to go out a little faster, rather than going out at your designated pace where you'll spend more energy weaving around people. Somewhere around here Amy had to drop over to the side to tie her shoe. She eventually caught up to me (and finished a minute ahead of me). The girl is like the energizer bunny! Anyway, the first mile wasn't my fastest, so I don't think I necessarily went out too fast.

I never quite felt in control of the race though. You can see my splits below, and they're all over the place. Some of that has to do with the hills. I'm sure if you looked at my splits against an elevation map you'd find that that the faster splits were downhill. During some miles the wind was irritating, but then the course would turn down a road and the the wind would be gone. So it wasn't constant. After mile 7, I was really having trouble hanging tough. I vurped a few times...going off track here, but have you ever seen "Wreck It Ralph"?

It's a cool ode to video games movie. There's a go-cart racer in the movie named Vanellope von Schweetz. At one point she's getting ready to race and she tells Ralph that she's "so nervous she's thinks she's going to vurp, you know when some vomit mixes with a burp and rises up."

Somewhere around mile 7, I started vurping my gel, which has never happened to me before. I decided against taking a second gel. Also, I didn't wear my hydration belt, but I still can't actually get water from a cup into my mouth while I run. I did attempt it at almost every water station, and failed miserably. It's sort of embarrassing, and borderline ridiculous. Around here, I also wound up with a side stitch, but nothing that I couldn't run through. I'm not sure if it was poor hydration or poor spirit, but by mile 10 I was starting to wane. The picture to the right is a fair depiction of how I felt...

When I crossed the 10 mile mark I was running an average pace of 6:28. The next 3 miles were tough, as they always are in a half marathon, but I don't usually slow down so much. My mile 11 and 12 splits were awful. 12-13 was awful too, but there was a fairly long hill there, so I can cut myself some slack for that.

The mile 10, 11, and 12 splits are bothering me. Something wasn't right there. Either I went out too fast, something wasn't right with the hydration stuff, or I let myself give in...I'd like to study my HR splits, but I wore the Polar HR strap and I can't get my HR splits unless I connect to their site and download the data from my watch. I haven't been able to do that yet. It's a little frustrating because you can view your HR splits on the Garmin without having to connect it to a computer. Anyway, I'd like to get that information and see if I glean something from it.

I did get my average heart rate from the Polar watch, which was 162. The watch is claiming that 162 is 87% of what it calculates my maximum HR should be. So now I'm wondering what percentage of your maximum HR is one suppose to be at when they run a half marathon? (Feel free to throw in your 2 cents if you train by heart rate. I'd love to know what others think on the subject.)

While my 10, 11, 12, and 13 mile splits were bad, my last 0.1 was fast. I saw the clock, and knew there was still a chance I could break 1:26 if I hauled it in. My official chip time wound up being 1:25:59, which is a ginormous PR for me. And so, it was a great day. Not to mention that I got to see so many running friends, and many of them ran well too. Another college friend, Justin, ran a PR. My co-worker, Rachel, ran a PR. And, of course, Amy, who wound up with an official chip time of 1:25:01! And she stopped to tie her shoe!

The rest of the day was awesome. I ran back to find my parents on course, and ran with them to the finish. I wound up with 19.5 miles for the day. I had wanted to run 20, but we also walked almost a mile to and from where we parked the car, and I was standing from 10:00 to 1:30, so good enough.

Back at my parents place, Nick and the kids were waiting for us. We ate our corn-beef and cabbage, and whoopie pies, and just had a great time. Overall, a great day! Huge thanks to Nick for watching the kids all day, and to my parents for driving me to the race AND making dinner!

Now there's Boston to think about...

NB HM Splits

Mile 1: 6:12

Mile 2: 6:31

Mile 3: 6:44

Mile 4: 6:33

Mile 5: 6:17

Mile 6: 6:17

Mile 7: 6:08

Mile 8: 6:29

Mile 9: 6:30

Mile 10: 6:39

Mile 11: 6:47

Mile 12: 6:45

Mile 13: 6:54

Last .1: 5:40

A bone to pick with Hanson's Marathon Method

My thoughts on Hanson:

I've been hearing murmurings of this "training plan" that doesn't go above 16 miles for a long run. And hearing things like "Hanson doesn't believe in 20 milers" and "20 milers are excessive". Finally, one of my old high school assistant coaches started preaching the praises of the Hanson method, and I could no longer ignore all the hoopla. I went out last week and bought the Hanson Marathon Method book. .

I don't subscribe to any particular type of marathon training, but I will confess that 20 plus milers are my least favorite part of marathon training. Mostly because of the time requirement. When I have the opportunity to run with someone like AM, I find the actual run fun. But most of the time I'm relegated to running on my own, and being completely honest, I find it boring after 15-16 miles. The promise of only running 16 miles is appealing.

What's my problem with Hanson? First of all, Hanson believes that the 20 miler is an arbitrary distance chosen by many training plans with no evidence to support choosing that distance. The book points out that there is evidence to suggest that running longer than three hours doesn't provide additional physiological benefit to the long run (and it take many people longer than three hours to run 20 miles). The book also points out that when training for any other distances the general rule of thumb for a long run is 25-30% of a runner's total weekly mileage. So say you're running 40 miles a week, then a 20 miler is 50% of your weekly mileage...All of that sounds reasonable to me. And notice none of that focuses on only running a 16 mile long run. Except all I keep hearing about from other runners is how it's not necessary to run more than 16 miles for a long run! Of course, that could be because there are only two training plans in the book (beginner and advanced), and both only have three 16 mile long runs. The peak mileage for these plans is between 57 and 63 miles a week. It seems to me that there are enough runners out there that peak at 70-80 to miles a week that there could be another training plan in there, and THAT training plan would probably have 20 mile long runs, you know, because of that whole 25-30% of weekly mileage rule.

It could just be an issue of runners reading what they want out the book too. Hanson admits in the book that the elite runners in the Hanson project do run 20-22 milers, but they also run 100-130 miles a week, so it fits. I guess I'm more irritated that others have taken the program to mean that Hanson doesn't support runs longer than 16 miles, because it simply isn't true.

All that 16 miler business aside, I did like the book. The program focuses on cumulative fatigue. Basically when you run long the program is trying to simulate the last 16 miles of the marathon. As a result, you generally run your long runs harder than traditional plans and on tired legs. I like the idea. Though, I might like it because a lot of my training has been focused on the same idea. He outlines a number of different, but simple workouts, and has a chart for each workout to let you figure out what your pace should be based on what your goal marathon time should be. It's done well enough that you can create your own plan, which is what I like to do.

The biggest downside to the book (for me), is that it's focused on runners who run 3-4 days a week, and trying to get those runners to run 6 days a week. Essentially getting people who are running 35-40 miles a week to run 55-60 miles a week. Now I completely agree that getting runners to run 6 days a week and upping their 35-40 miles a week to 55+ will greatly improve their marathon times, but I've already done that. Since my body seems to be handling the slightly higher mileage of 70-80 miles, I don't think that I would decrease my mileage to follow his lower mileage plan (especially when he's not suggesting that one's overall weekly mileage should decrease, but increase).

Moving beyond Hanson, and jumping down the rabbit hole:

Deviating from the Hanson topic, I did notice something interesting when reading the book. I've run a number of workouts mentioned in the book (like the 6x1 mile repeats), and my paces are faster than suggested for my marathon goal time. This got me to thinking about how I have to train harder than suggested in many training plans to meet my goals...I really don't think I'm doing anything wrong. My workout paces simply have to be faster than suggested, or I won't be able to run my goal time for my race. I've noted this in the past, and have changed my training accordingly.

A few weeks ago, my co-worker's husband ran a 3:11 marathon. It was a significant PR for him. He's a recreational runner, and he's been running for at least 10 years. His training peaked at maybe 50 miles. He ran his long runs at MP, but didn't really run any structured schedule. He didn't do tempo runs or interval runs. When I ran 3:11, I peaked at 76 miles, ran tempo, interval, and MP runs. I know, I know, guys run faster than girls, BUT now I'm wondering about all these training plans out there. If you have a guy and a girl who have the same time goal, would you give them the same training plan down to the same paces for the workouts? Are most of these training plans actually designed for men? Should it not matter? Obviously in this case it mattered. There's no way I would have run 3:11 on his plan, and if he had run my schedule he would have certainly run faster. Maybe it's not necessarily a difference between men and women, but a difference in running potential? In either case, it brings up some interesting questions about training. It seems to me that cookie cutter training plans are probably only good for your first few marathons when you're trying to figure out what works for you. After that, you probably need to create your own plan or get a coach...

Any thoughts? Am I completely crazy?

On the homestead:

We went sledding this weekend in our backyard. It's funny we have two sledding tubes. Kaylee sleds the whole time, and Emily fills her tube with snow. She's quite happy just filling it with snow. And there she is doing just that...two year olds...they're so weird. ;)