#KiloMay

My running club, the Libertyville Running Club, is never dull.  It is full of fun, creative people, which leads to a lot of silly inside jokes and crazy spontaneous events.

(For starters, Jill and Trisha write these entertaining blogs about running and life.  I call this my Serious Journal in contrast.)

When our leader went out of town to run a marathon (again), he left the club in the hands of one of his friends and regular runners.  Jeremy was left to do the map…and accidentally ended up writing it in kilometers instead of miles.  He corrected the map, but after he posted it on the Facebook group—and several people, including our fearless leader, noticed.  With it being the last day of April, at a point where most of the club was between marathon training plans, KiloMay, the celebration of kilometers in the month of May, was born.

(He’s left me in charge a couple of times to lead runs.  The first time, it started to thunder, and I just said, “don’t get hit by lightning.”  Why he trusts me to do anything, I have no idea.) 

Of course, the next step was to switch our Strava accounts to kilometers.  It’s been an interesting adventure to try to keep clicking the seconds off the mileage pace when you have to convert your mileage to…kilometerage?  Kilos? 

Another aspect of running a bit blind is that I’ve been tracking how I’ve been doing with 2016 miles in 2016 using a calendar.  6 miles a day is about 10 kilos, but how does this translate?  How many miles have I done this month?  Am I on pace or have I fallen behind? 

Okay, yes, I'm woefully beyond pace...but I marathon train in the summer.

It has been a fun change of pace, as well as keeping myself from overdoing things.  You can’t stress about pace or mileage when you are running a bit blind.  However, let me say how glad I am that it is June, that I’m back to mileage, and pushing forward towards my 2016 miles in 2016…

Mind Games Part 2: Attitude Adjustment

Of course, just one recovery run isn’t enough to erase doubt and boredom.  The next Saturday, I missed the club run, so I had to go out later in the day to run. 

I do think the end of winter running season is the hardest time of year to get motivated.  You’re sick of the cold, sick of the ice, and sick of doing laundry of all those layers.  I decided to take the opportunity and run in an area I hadn’t been in a long while, to distract me from how much time this run was going to take.  It’s a town that has a plethora of bike trails connecting the subdivisions, and part of the fun is getting lost within the various backyard trails.  However, it was Easter Weekend, so my mind was wishing I was enjoying the fun of family and celebration rather than running.

The start didn’t bode well, as I ended up back near the start on the first trail and a dead end at the second.  Soon, I was at one of my favorite forest preserves and decided that running the trail around it, then heading back to the car, was good enough.

While doing that loop, I had an epiphany.  According to our club leader’s training plan, these long runs weren’t about logging miles as much as pushing them at a pace, something I wasn’t doing.  I decided right there and then that I needed to pick up the pace on the Saturday runs so that Sunday’s runs were true recovery, where I was going to be tired from Saturday’s effort. 

I picked up the pace and ran back to the car.  Of course, when I stopped my Strava, I noticed that it had paused about right when I started going faster.  Well my legs would remember what my phone neglected to record.  The important part, to pick up the pace and really work on mentally pushing myself, had happened.

What has surprised me, more than anything, is how much faster I am running just by having a positive attitude.  By keeping myself focused on the task at hand and having a can-do attitude has taken serious time off the clock.  (Of course, so has running all the miles I’ve been doing.)  I’m now thinking that anything is possible again.

Mind Games, Part 1

I’ve been running mile after mile after mile, but it doesn’t seem like I get any faster.  It’s what makes running—actually, any athletic endeavor—a challenge:  your mind.  Mine is more that my brain moves at the speed of light, but my feet struggle to do a mile under 10 minutes.  Long runs are both a constant stream of conscious and a constant feed of “I’m bored.  I’m so flipping bored.  How much longer do I have to be bored?”

Of late, I’m disappointed with my slow, slugglish pace when I upload my run.  It’s very discouraging when I’ve done so much speed work and run my recovery miles, yet rather than improve, I am still at 12+ min pace, rather than the 10:30 pace I’m trying to reach.  I don’t have a choice here; to qualify for Boston I have to be able to run a marathon near 9 min pace, and even if I’m wearing a charity bib, almost all the runners finish before five hours.

It’s always been a struggle to get motivated to do the longer runs of marathon training because they take hours, and then I’m spent all day.  Add in winter where I’m not running as much during the week, and I feel even slower.  I had started dreading the long run, the time, the boredom….and I wanted a distraction.  Of course, I’m the type of runner who when distracted, slows down even more.  Not helpful. Also not helpful…not having a big race on the horizon because there’s no PR for me to chase.  I needed a reboot, a way to push myself through, to maximize my limited time with mileage.

About a month ago, I started out on my Sunday recovery run, feeling sluggish and slow, tired and battling a headache.  While it was a recovery run, I did have a deadline:  the sunset.  My route would take me on trails that closed at sunset, 7:05 pm, so that was the cutoff.

After about a mile and a half, I hit a stoplight and checked my watch:  6:34 pm.  I thought about the route and guesstimated that I would really have to push myself to finish the trails in a half hour.

The trail coursed through the local high school’s athletic fields and then followed some power lines.  It seemed like I could not get out of the high school area, but as I turned onto the trail at the power lines, I could see the trail all the way to the golf course.  “Oh, that’s not so far,” I thought.  “Maybe I can do this.”  I coursed down the hill, and as I crested the hill by the golf course, I checked my watch again.  6:47 pm.  18 minutes is totally doable.

I ended up leaving the park at 6:58 pm, about seven minutes ahead of schedule.  My next deadline was to finish in under an hour, or 7:15 pm.  It was about two miles, so well under my usual pace.  I pushed onwards and hoped for the best.

As I made the last turn towards home, I was surprised again.  7:08 pm.   I had reached two goals I didn’t think possible on a day like today.  It’s amazing what happens when you make up your mind to do something…..

(to be continued)

Think It’s Easier for Those 7 Min Pacers? Think again…

One of my favorite runs with my club is Tamarack 800s.  We have a street in town that not only is exactly 800 meters, but is shaped like a semi-circle, so it is around 400 meters to get back to the start.  Perfect to do repeat 800 meter intervals.  We do them in winter, at night, so it’s often dark and chilly and snowy.  Of course, the street is a mile from a bar, so that’s our warmup and cool down.

There was a blizzard south of Chicago a few weeks ago, so a lot of people were expecting bad weather and decided not to show up.  As usual, that meant that I was the slowest runner who did. 

For a lot of people who can’t easily do a sub-10 min mile, watching someone who can run a mile under 6 minutes cruise by can feel discouraging.  On the Tamarack run, I’m often lapped by our faster runners, since my full speed is slower than their easy jog pace.  It’s not discouraging to me, however, because I can see they are working just as hard as I am, and it’s the effort, not the pace, that makes us a “real runner.”

One of the first lessons I learned in running is:  “fast” and “slow” are relative.  My first year of high school cross country, our top runner qualified for state.  My junior year, the top seven qualified for state.  I was nowhere near qualifying for state, but I had a different focus:  my personal best.  It’s something that has carried me through many, many tough workouts, getting lost, and being lapped.  I compete against the clock and my Strava account, not what everyone else is doing. 

It didn’t matter that I was slower than everyone else.  A couple of people decided to skip the speedwork and run Tamarack Street backwards, so I never felt alone or unsafe.  I enjoyed the beauty of the evening and the comradery of everyone pushing themselves to their limits.  I had fun!  When I came back to the bar, I was treated like a runner, not a has-been.  But….going out and running, regardless of pace, is going to make me faster than sitting at home.

So don’t feel discouraged if you aren’t super-fast.  You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.  Runners are welcoming and generous and encouraging.  We’ve all had those runs where we’ve gotten lost, where it’s taken much longer than we expected, where our heads are faster than our legs.  We admire the runners who take 6, 7, or 17 hours to finish a marathon just as much as we admire the ones who can do it in less than 3 hours.  Focus on your own improvement, train hard, and have fun.

Training Miles are Not the Same as Race Miles, but so Important

A couple weeks ago, what I thought would be an easy Saturday long run was unexpectedly exhausting and slow.  Since Fat Tuesday was that week, we were doing a new route so we could visit a Polish deli and eat paczkis.  Given that the total mileage was lower than previous weeks, and the weather was unseasonably warm, I was excited to do the run. 

As always, the first few miles are the easiest, since everyone was running together and generally chatty.  We got to the first water stop, about 2.5 miles in, and I realized that I would be running the rest of the 13 by myself; most of the people at my pace were turning around, done for the day.

After taking some of our much appreciated club Gatorade, I pushed forward, surprised at the chill and wind in the air.  Even though the sun had come over the horizon, the wind kept blowing every bit of heat I could generate away.  I just plowed on, back to the water stop, where I discovered the deli was closed until 9 am.  No matter to me, because it was just about accruing mileage.  The paczkis were just a bonus.

I had a long time to think as I plodded along, and the one thing that kept going through my mind was that training miles are so much harder than race miles.  It’s not something that is talked about much, but a race is the culmination of the training.  Even in high school and college, where we raced every weekend, the goal was to peak at conference or Regionals or Sectionals or State or Nationals.  If you prepared all year, that last race was a breeze.  If not, it was the end of a difficult season.

All of my marathons have been challenging, despite being mostly prepared for all of them.  I can’t possibly imagine what it would be like to not be prepared for that effort.  Even so, I hear people talk in corrals about being less than prepared and read blogs about people who struggled to find the time to do that last long training run.  Why?  Because training for a race is nothing like that cute montage in the movies.  When you’re a 12 min marathoner, running a marathon is an all-day event, so doing those long training runs can be an all-day event.  It’s long and slow and boring and tiring, and in this “shiny object” sort of world, it’s so much easier to fill one’s time with fun instead of boring.  Perhaps, though, my marathon experiences make me appreciate all those training runs because I’m not needing a race to motivate me.

On today’s run, I was talking with a friend about training.  I have learned by watching successful figure skaters (even in the “recreational” adult ranks) that to get results, you truly have to treat training like a part time job.  Training has to be a priority in your schedule, as does recovery, and sessions need to be organized in a way to balance with the rest of life.  In addition, making sure to get enough sleep at night and to eat a healthy diet are key components as well.

Last night I was frustrated over having to do 14 miles because it was going to take all morning to complete.  It would be so nice to be faster, to not have to schedule all day for a long training run.  How quickly I have forgotten that “fast” and “slow” are relative terms, and that no matter what pace, a long training run can be difficult and boring.  (And often, a faster runner just adds miles to the run rather than make it shorter.)

Epilogue:  I spent the entire next week sick with a bug, so I’m guessing it was why the paczki run was so tough.  I’m falling a bit behind with mileage in February so hopefully the weather will warm up and I’ll be able to add some miles in soon!