Week 9 - Marathon Training

In the film Bull Durham, rookie pitcher Ebbie Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh says this in his first professional interview: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”

Let me add to this: sometimes you get sick. 

You can feel it creeping up on you a few days before a race, that fatigue feeling, that cruddy sensation, that goop that collects in your tear ducts, and then the dizziness and dehydration—and no matter how you fight it or deny it, the bug sets in and makes itself welcome in the warm confines of your bloodstream, coursing your veins like an unwanted houseguest through the hallways of your home. 

Failure to suffer the bug renders a longer stay.  This is the lesson I have learned from being ill in the midst of training.  And when I experienced the annoyance of vertigo on the day before Sunday’s scheduled 10k race, I knew I had a choice to make: race poorly and pay the price of prolonged suffering, or skip the race, suffer the lost registration fee, and find myself better willing and able to train once finally rested. 

I chose the latter.  And I am glad of it. 

The saddest part of it is I was leading up to running a pretty strong effort.  My mile repeats at tempo effort on Tuesday were strong.  Five times mile with 90-second recoveries—6:59, 6:55, 6:50, 7:02, 6:48.  Thursday’s easy run turned into a marathon goal pace run without so much as my trying to do so.  I wanted to run without looking at my splits on my watch, and it was not until after I finished the run that I realized my average pace for eight miles was 7:40.  I did not feel that way to me. 

So maybe this weekend off from running will further my adaptation to training.  I hope so, because the hard work starts now.  The past nine weeks have been a precursor, a base-building phase, to the next sixteen weeks, and these next sixteen weeks is when the real training begins.  My target mileage for this week is 52-54 miles.  That includes two workouts (3 x 12-15 min tempo intervals on Monday and 5 x long hill repeats on Wednesday) and a long run of 14-15 miles on Saturday with the last 40 minutes in a progression effort to the finish.