Our goal this fall is California International Marathon on 12/7. I'm following a Pfitzinger-type plan that's not even really a plan. Since last winter I've taken up running with a free training group that meets in my neighborhood. Seriously. Like, the track is four blocks away and sometimes the hill workout runs in front of our house and Andy and our extremely supportive toddler ("go runners go!") can sit on the tree swing and cheer us on. And my dad goes. And several of my long-time friends go to the track workout and we come back to the house and eat popsicles and get in the pool. And the group is fun and laid-back and welcoming and supportive and all that. The group is NOT training for CIM and in fact most are not training for a marathon at all, which is why I'm just kind of making things up as I go along, running with the CIM crowd (which is remarkably similar to the Philly crowd from last year only with even MORE friends - how could I pass that up?) for the longer weekly and weekend runs.

I'm at a better starting point than I was last year: a 1:34 half at the SF half marathon, feeling great nearly the whole way, compared to a 1:40 feeling like death last year. Last year was understandably bad, however; only 8 weeks after a soul-sucking six months of relentless stress at work and very little running. So we'll see where we can go from here.

Mon. 4-Aug PFITZINGER STARTS
Tue. 5-Aug 5 EZ on Exposition + 10x strides at end
Wed. 6-Aug 11 with James Paul Ivi and Liz. Was able to keep up but was tired from trip. (~8:00 pace.)
Thu. 7-Aug 6 EZ with Mary F
Fri. 8-Aug 9 Enfield loop plus with Paul Fred Ivi Liz Kevin Lucy Bob and James (7:57 pace)
Sat. 9-Aug 6 EZ by mysellf on trail
Sun. 10-Aug 15 up through Shoal Creek and then back down Red River (7:56 pace)
TOTAL 52

Mon. 11-Aug
Tue. 12-Aug 6 1, 1:30, 2:00, 2:30, 3:00 hard with one minute rest and then back down to 1:00
Wed. 13-Aug 12 w/ Paul James Fred Liz Kevin Bob and Cindy H and Darlene (7:57 pace)
Thu. 14-Aug 5 hill workout with group: long hill short hill 800s (3:??, 3:20, 3:17, 3:18, 3:11)
Fri. 15-Aug 9 Expo/Enfield/trail combo w/ James Paul Fred Liz and Bob and some Darlene and some Daryl (7:49 pace)
Sat. 16-Aug 5 EZ by myself on trail. Weather is a little cooler. Felt great. (8:03 pace)
Sun. 17-Aug 17 Scenic Bonnell Campus Bouldin from the pool. Again a little cooler and again felt great. (7:42 pace)
TOTAL 54

My garmin says I was pretty erratic in my pacing, which is inconsistent with the way I felt I was running. But the course is hillier than advertised, which played a part in the inconsistency. It says I was pretty steady around 7:10-ish pace for the first five miles and then clocked two sub-7s at 6 and 7 and then a 7:24 at 8. But then back at 7:08 for 9 and 7:26 for a mile 10 with a good hill in it, and 7:01 for 11 and 7:15 for 12.

The problem with these splits, though, is that I was letting the Garmin take them automatically. They weren’t taken manually as I passed the mile markers, which seemed to get further and further off where the GPS said they should be. But I naively thought that at some point they would synch back up.

So despite seeing splits that seemed to indicate that I was doing really well, somewhere between 6 and 7 (I think) the 3:10 pacers caught up to me. I ran with them for a while, and then after a water stop that involved picking up a dropped gel I looked up and they were far ahead of me. I had tried to stay on top of how my overall time was comaring to where I should be for a 3:10, but was having a hard time reading my pace band (and when I could read it, I was having a hard time believing it – I just kept thinking the mile markers were off somehow.) Having them pass me took some of the wind out of my sails, and then going through the half, just under 1:36 on the clock, I just lost all enthusiasm for a p.r.; I knew I wasn’t fresh enough to pull off a 2-minute negative split.

Mentally I was in a rough place during those miles when the pace group left me all the way through the half. But after the half marathoners left us and the route followed the Schuylkill River, I had a few miles of reflective time before the rush of the faster runners started coming in the other direction to think about what I wanted to do with this marathon. This may have been a “moment of truth” kind of moment when a “true champion” digs deep and goes after that negative split. I just decided to stay strong and relaxed and see what happened.

And my second half splits are slower than my first half, but they’re steady, as opposed to getting progressively worse. And I felt strong the entire way, never fighting the urge to walk, and never fighting any true physical breakdown (there were strides near the end, though, where my leg would inexplicably twitch and go off in a slightly erratic angle.) I passed many more people than passed me. And I got to enjoy running with Janie, who jumped in with me around mle 22, rather than being oblivious to her or even possibly annoyed at the company. I did turn down her offer of a story, though; telling her that “quiet is good.”

I really truly and honestly enjoyed the second half. It was gorgeous out there. The crowds at the 20-mile turnaround were fabulous. I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed miles 14-26 as much.

I can’t help but wonder if I would have had a more legitimate shot at a p.r. if I had started the training cycle actually in decent shape. Or even just not completely out of shape! Maybe I should have chosen a marathon later in the winter to give the speed a chance to catch up with the endurance. Maybe maybe maybe. But I didn’t. And what I got out of it was pretty great, even if it wasn’t “perfect.” I had a really, really good time (with some bouts of despair early on) on a great course on a not-glorious-but-perfectly-acceptable Pennsylvania November day. With lots of friends, no less (one of whom actually got his p.r.!)

And yes, they played both “Eye of the Tiger” and the Theme from Rocky at the starting line. And yes, I got ferclempt when I heard those trumpets. Yo! Philly! Thanks for a great time!

We have a marathon goal pace run coming up shortly, and I’m dreading it. Not because it’s going to be a tough effort, but because I feel really stupid calling whatever pace I can handle for that distance right now a “goal.” My true goal is to run as fast as I can on race day. More to the point, I kind of feel like deciding on a pace for that run that’s in line with what I have been doing lately and calling that my “goal pace” is the first step to giving in and accepting that I *am* this slow (I can’t say that I’m “out of shape” when I’ve been running as much as I have for as long as I have) and admitting that 3:30 (or even 3:20 or 3:15) is the best I can hope for at the end of this training cycle. How totally depressing. Maybe I’ll insist that we all call it something else, like “turnip pace run” or “Shirley.”

November Jen has decided she agrees with August Jen. Based on my recent race McMillan seems to think I can do a 3:15. My friend who's been following this program with me and running many of my runs with me thinks I should shoot for 3:15. Both August Jen and November Jen think 3:15 is, well ... meh.

Why not go for the p.r.? If the conditions are perfect, as they're looking to be, I'm not passing up that opportunity. I think it's the only thing I'll really be happy with. I mean, how happy can you get over "well, I ran really smart and was only five minutes slower than my p.r. after 18 long weeks of exhausting high-milage training"? I have blown up spectacularly in the past (try as early as mile 11!) and not died of total embarrassment at my slow time. The spectacular blowups were spectacularly painful, of course, but then again, so were the p.r.s.

Wowee.

I need a strategy for the race. I suspect I'll come up with an A goal and a B goal, but ultimately deciding on a race plan will be difficult because my approach to this race has been so ... blind? I dunno. I started the program with a 1:40 half marathon and 7:22 pace for a 3-mile tempo, but really didn't know where I could go from there in only 18 weeks. I think it's much easier to try to choose a goal based on being relatively in shape and working from that point than it is to try to guess how long it'll take you to get in shape and whether you can get faster in any remaining time you may have. Ya know?

So I thought I'd just do the program and see where I ended up. And here I am. I have an idea of where I ended up, but I'd like to think that with some rest I could be a little faster than where I am right now. Beth used the term "undercooked," which I love. As I rest up out of the "oven" of training my body continues to get in better and better shape. It could happen! But I also know that trying to execute a race based on an unrealistic goal would be disastrous.

We'll see I guess ...

I wonder if the agressive rest, ice, ibuprofen, and foam roller was the solution in '05 when things got worse and worse until I DNF-ed the marathon.

I should be knocking in wood, I suppose; I haven't run yet. I missed a 17-miler on Sunday. But the fact that I can't make it hurt even if I flex my foot as hard as I can indicates that there's some definite progress.

Oh good. Now I don't have to write all that again. Just change the reference from "right shin" to "left shin." How totally awesome!

We went down to New Braunfels for a five-miler yesterday. I did fine, but I didn't blow myself away like I'd hoped I would. I was marginally faster than at the five miler a few weeks ago. I was hoping for some sign that I would miraculously be ready for a p.r. in Philly, but I don't think 6:38 pace for five miles will translate to a sub-3. (Did I mention that my last mile on my 20-miler last week was faster than that pace?) Oh well. Time to come back to earth.

Maybe this shin thing is kharmic revenge for griping about not being in p.r. shape, since I'm definitely in good shape and shouldn't be taking it for granted.

This is actually the third time this has happened to my shins. In my log from October of '02 I have an entry that says "hurt leg from yesterday. Stumbled on a rock?" And I remember stumbling on a rock and not thinking much of it until after the run and my shin got tighter and tighter. And puffier and puffier. No puffiness today, but at the race yesterday I had a woman catch me with less than a mile to go and she really pushed me in, and with only about a 400 left to go I stumbled on some uneven pavement. It wasn't until well after the race, while in the beer line, that I realized that it was starting to hurt.

Stupid shin!

The 20-miler yesterday was one of the best I've ever had. The weather was perfect. The company was good. The route was new and pretty. And we ran well. We started at 9:30 pace for mile 1 and 8:30 pace for mile 2, and then worked our way down to 7:45 pace by mile 10. Then we hovered at 7:30s for the next 7 miles, and then finished up (going downhill) with 6:59, 6:58, and 6:34. And I definitely had some left in the tank for more.

Rraaarrr.

Did I say it's been stressful? It's been really, really stressful. Our old house just recently went on the market, too, and there's that added stress. Seems like since we put in the offer on this house the news of the housing market has been relentlessly bad. Stop it already!

There have been so many things to do, but I have managed to get in most of my running. And I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing. It's so easy to run most of the time, because it's the first thing I do in the morning and there's no question on how to do it. With moving, there are so many different ways you can do things and different people to deal with, and unlike running, where the Garmin ticks off the miles for you, there's no telling when (or if!) everything will get done in time before the movers show up. Running is just too easy not to do when everything else is crazy.

And then there's the movers themselves. They don't make things easy for you at all. And if you don't get things right they're ready for your mistake so they can screw you. They're awful. Although I didn't know it until 8:45 pm on the night we moved, we apparently hadn't agreed to pay the guys enough to move boxes up the stairs. (I certainly told them there were stairs in the new house.) So they decided to only move a random few into the house and leave the remainder in the garage. Awesome. There are boxes stacked up three rows deep in the garage. I hate the movers.

But I can't believe we're here. It's been a goal of ours for a long, long, time to live centrally, and here we are. What do we wish for next? How 'bout a sub-three marathon? Probably not this time ...

Tomorrow is the LAST 20-MILER BEFORE PHILLY. I can't believe it. I'm barely even nervous about it, except that I had deep-dish sausage pizza and beer for dinner. That wasn't so smart. But it was really really good.

Running this week was pretty uneventful, which is a real blessing since the rest of life is way too eventful right now! We did have a really hard track workout on Wednesday. Remember I complained so much about 6x 1000 at 5K pace two weeks ago? Well, Wednesday was 6x 1200 at 5K pace. The rest was pretty substantial, though, so it seemed pretty doable. I think I was a little slow overall, but not too much so. I didn't know where the charger for the Garmin was, and my Timex Ironman went kaput a few weeks ago, so I was carrying Andy's watch in my hand and was having a really hard time seeing splits. So I just ran and decided to just run hard and look at my splits when I got home. I looked at them once before Andy erased them on me. There were a few quarters over, one or two under, and most right on.

Last night was a recovery run; a beautiful October night out on the trail with a full moon and tourists (there's a big spine surgery convention here in town this week) lining Congress Avenue to see the bats.

Crossing the 20-mile marker in a marathon gives me the chills. Finishing that last 20-miler of a marathon training cycle makes me wanna jump for joy! Hope it goes well tomorrow.

Five weeks ago I ran 12 miles out of 15 total at 7:47 pace and I felt like death at the end. (Could have been all the margaritas I’d had earlier in the week in Cancun, however.) The course we did for that run was hillier than this morning's, and the weather was warmer, but this morning I managed 14 out of 17 at 7:15 pace. At the end of a 66-mile week. And I did not feel like death at any point during the run. 7:15 is my marathon p.r. pace. I had intended to run between 7:30 and 7:40, but from the begining 7:20 felt baby-bear "just right" and as we went along "just right" got progressively faster. That's usually the way I roll when I do things right and don't start too fast.

And the 66 miles this week were no cakewalk: after racing last Sunday, we had 6x1000 on Tuesday, 15 on Wednesday, and 12 on Friday. Those 1000s cracked me up, too. I’d never realized how Pfitzinger lulls you into speedwork with 6x 600 at 5K pace with 90s rest one week, then a few weeks later he drops it down to 5x 600 at 5K pace with 90s rest, and then later, a few days after a race no less, he hits you with 6x 1000 at 5K pace with 90s rest! That’s double the previous workout at the same pace with the same rest! And it didn’t even occur to me until we were running over to the track that morning that we were going to be running 5K pace for longer than 5K. That workout wore me out. And I had extrapolated a 5K pace from my 5-miler last week, so my 5K pace was actually faster than it had been for the 600s. I was about to head into #4 when I mentioned to some friends who had already finished their workout that I might have bitten off more than I could chew with that 5K pace, and my Estonian friend with her perfect-for-coaching Eastern European accent says “Well, maybe it’s time to step it up!” It was just what I needed to hear!

So … we get a teeny tiny cutback next week, then head into the last week before the taper. Cue the Rocky theme, please. Philly here we come.

Cedar Perk Five Miler 2007: I had done this five-miler in 1998 and really enjoyed it. I think it was the first race I won my age group in. I won a coffee mug with a metal plaque on it that my mother-in-law zapped in the microwave recently. It’s ok, though. I still love that mug, even though now I’m the only one who knows that it’s supposed to say “1st place” on it. There’s still a metal plate, but it’s fried.

Of course my running felt awful before the race. I feel awful before the vast majority of races and tempos and track workouts. Many times how bad I feel beforehand and how well I run are inversely proportional. I did a 3.5 mile warmup, came back to the start and changed my shoes, found out that the race started a half hour later than I thought it did, changed my shoes again and headed back out for another two miles.

Even though this was a small race, it generally attracts some pretty fast people who live up in the Cedar Park area. The town has a phenomenal track and cross-country culture, and there were a lot of kids out for the race. I figured that most of the junior high kids would beat me! I also saw a woman I know to be faster than me, another woman I *can* but don’t necessarily beat when I’m in good shape, and another woman who’s very fast whom I knew had been out injured for a lot of the summer.

I started out fast, but noticed once the crowd thinned a little that I was pretty far behind all of the women I mentioned. That happens to me pretty regularly in races with people I generally finish with. I feel like I’m going so slow and there’s no way I’m going to be able to catch them. And then all of a sudden I was right behind them – they were all together – and I didn’t feel like I’d really picked it up at all. The boyfriend of the woman who was injured said “I think you’re going to be the first woman in a few minutes.” And I was. And I felt pretty comfortable, although passing them made me question whether I was going too fast.

So I was out in front just before the one mile marker, which I hit just over seven minutes. And then I just tried to maintain that pace, thinking the whole while that I didn’t want to pick it up and then die and have them all pass me back. That would be totally embarrassing. And I spent the remaining four miles anticipating that at least one of them would pick up the pace and be breathing down my neck. So I wanted to be ready to put up a fight. I really still don’t have (and never really do have) any kind of kick, so I wanted to be as relaxed as possible when and if I was caught so that I had something left to fight with. But there was never a challenge.

I ended up finishing at 33:31, or 6:42-ish pace. At least, that was the time on my watch; the posted results give me a 33:40 finish time with no lag time between gun and chip, but that can’t be right because I was several rows back. I had wanted to go under 7:00 pace, so I was happy with it. It’s another sign of progress. It’s still not overall progress, though: I don’t run many five-milers, so the fact that it was a p.r. (my 1998 time: 34:39) really doesn’t mean much - it’s slower than my 10K p.r. pace and only five seconds or so per-mile slower than my half-marathon p.r. pace. McMillan predicts a 3:18 marathon from that race, which would be my third fastest marathon, and not the fastest, like I’m shooting for. It’s better than the 3:31 marathon predicted from my half marathon in July, though!

After the race I headed back out on the course for a long cooldown, and since the race is an out-and-back course, several people who were still running had seen me leading at the half. So I got a lot of “did you win?” and I got to answer “yes!” and I got some high-fives. Man, that felt awesome.

Really. In all seriousness … I wish you all the best of luck. I know the disappointment and frustration that crappy marathon day weather forecasts bring for those of us who chase p.r.’s. But I also carry a real sense of pride at surviving and doing well at that race that year in Boston (that is, I didn’t completely fall apart and lose my lunch in my finisher’s bag at the finish line like my husband did).

So good luck.

We are smack dab in the middle of the biggest training cycle Pfitzinger has to offer the 18-week, 70-m.p.w.-ers. And I feel good. I feel strong. I still don’t feel fast, really, though. We still have four magic track sessions left before all this is over, though, so there’s still time to get that snap back. We did strides this morning and I was moving so fast my feet were comin’ out of my shoes. That’s mostly because it’s nearly impossible for me to find shoes that fit really well.

My 22 last weekend felt moderately easy, although I still had a low point or two in there. Then we had 5x 600 at 5K pace on Tuesday that was really easy. I couldn’t figure out at first why we were moving *down* in our speedwork miles, but at some point during one of the last 600s I couldn’t help but remember that I’d done 22 miles two days before. That Pfitz is a smahty-pants. This weekend we’re supposed to race Saturday and then go long Sunday, but I don’t really have the luxury (or the desire, to be honest) of spending both weekend mornings away from my little friend who’s been in day care all week Plus, we don’t have any longer races in town on Saturday anyway. So that throws things off a little. I’ll race on Sunday and then do a big warmup and cooldown to make a compromise race/long run. And I’m hoping that doesn’t throw me off too much next week, which is our last 70 mile week for the cycle. (I’ve never quite hit 70, though. I’m always a mile or two short.)

I can’t believe we’re only six weeks out …

This morning was the last of our tempo runs. Seven miles. I ended up doing 5.5 then 1.5 since at 5.5 my route took me by a bathroom that I could not pass up. Unfortunately, this has been happening a lot lately. This is the first time on a tempo, though, and it was disappointing. I really was feeling good and ready to pick up the pace even more than I already had. And when I started again it took me a little while to get into a groove. I ended up at 7:08 pace on average for both sets, which is the same pace I held for 6 miles and more than 15 sec. per mile faster than I averaged for 5 miles. So there’s been progress. Yay.

We have 22 miles this weekend.

And just for fun here’s a really cute MG story. Each night before she goes to bed I sing her a little Elvis, and the other night she pitched in, so lately I’ll just sing “I can’t help … falling in love with …” and she adds the “yew.” Sometimes she even has to pull her thumb out of her mouth momentarily to say it.

The other thing that’s been different in the past few weeks is that it’s become allergy season again, and I’ve decided to be aggressive with it from the get go, so I’ve been taking Benadryl on a regular basis and using the Nasonex I was prescribed last winter after I’d been coughing for two months. And Nasonex is a steroid. Am I on ‘roids?

Of course, now that I’ve written about it I’m sure it’ll all go away. I hope not. It’s been nice. Being fast would be even nicer, but running with complete ease is really, really nice.

We did 15 this morning. We ran Mt. Bonnell for one of our members’ birthday. It had been a while since I’d done it, even though it’s one of my favorites. It was good to be back.