Oh Everest, My Everest

This weekend's 20-miler really highlighted how far I have come since last year at this time. The first indicator of the difference was my ability to walk around, squat, and ride my bike without an extraordinary amount of pain. I didn't even take any NSAIDS to kill the swollen knees! (And they didn't even swell until after I stopped running!) The cold shower took care of that in a jiffy.

Despite not putting as many miles in the bank in preparation for the big marathon withdrawal, my fitness level has been far above where it was at any other time in my life - with the single possible exception of when I was studying karate. I did some mean stuff in those three months, strength-wise, but even then I had nothing close to the endurance I have now. Aside from being in a general fitness arc that's on the rise, I believe I can thank riding fixie all over town since the end of last semester, working for the park service in a job where I had to hike around the sides of the highway carrying a GPS unit on my back, and continuing to run even if it wasn't as regularly as I would have liked. All of this really showed during every step of those 20 miles I ran on Saturday morning.

For one thing, I didn't feel significantly different in the second ten miles than I did in the first. That is pretty unusual for me, with the last five often feeling worlds worse than the first five. Yet it felt to me like a steady forward effort from beginning to end, instead of the game where I guess at which mile my nice day in the park degenerates into never-ending torture. (Yes, it really used to feel that way.) As I have always known about the marathon but perhaps not kept in mind nearly enough, running 26.2 miles is more of a mind game than anything.

The mind game of which I speak is not magic shoes or what do you think will happen if I put my foot in this blender. I am talking about the challenge of getting into the right mindset, of arming yourself with the right tools to succeed. The first step is always to begin with the end in mind (hat tip to Stephen Covey). I think this is where I really let myself down last year (and again in LA). My only goals were to have a good time (what does that even mean in a marathon?) and to finish. Finishing is a worthy goal, but why not finish and also push your limits? Why not see what you are capable of? This never occurred to me while training for MCM'07 because I think the idea of running a marathon was still sort of untouchable to me, and I inexplicably clung to the image of concerts and ball games where the people in the very back are having the best time despite having the worst seats in the house.

This year, my goal is pretty clear. I want to run it a lot faster than last year. Exactly how much faster is not as important because I have a second goal - to cover the distance with more or less a continuous effort. I'm not deluded, because I know things are going to get progressively harder and more painful as the miles add up, but I know that there is a vast difference between last Saturday and one year ago. I want this marathon to be more like last Saturday.

I am going on at length about all of this because I wasted a lot of time on unimportant things during this run, but I did manage to maintain a steady sense of forward momentum while I was running and avoid excessive walking. This was reflected quite accurately by the numbers. I had once again forgotten to turn off the auto-pause function so the timer stopped for every pit stop and loss of satellite reception, and that conveniently separated my short GU breaks (walking) from my getting lost and waiting for people breaks (standing). Leaving out all of the map checking and waiting for people fluff, I finished in 4:07:48 with an average pace of 12:23. This is a pace I can not only live with, but be quite happy about for a marathon finish. That would mean breaking 5:30, which is a significant improvement over my first two marathons.

The really encouraging news is that the actual time for this 20 (when I factor all of that wasted time back into the equation) is 4:40:14, which is a 14:13 pace. (As a reminder, my average pace at MCM'07 was ~14:35.) That means that the worst case scenario is that I continue to waste lots of time by hanging around at the aid stations for way too long and still I am better off than last year! Of course, I am NOT planning to waste so much time again, and am instead figuring out the best way to run with people who are slightly faster than me. There is one candidate in the group this year (my saint from the 18-miler), but she may turn out to be too fast on race day when she has no incentive to wait around for me. My other alternative is to sign up with a pace group. Either way, there are options. I am trying to con some friends from school into showing up on course to pace me for a while, too. This feels like a recipe for success.

Labels: blue powerade, GU, knees