Running with Jack

Jon gently reminded me yesterday that the golden rule of recovery is a day of recovery for every mile you race (thanks Jon). I have ignored this rule of thumb for the entire year, as I have ignored a lot of other running advice, rules and common sense. I suppose that I could be more competitive (e.g. faster) if I would strictly follow recovery and training rules, but I was a rebellious kid in my youth and some things don’t change easily ;-)

I did concentrate on slowing my pace down considerably last night, at least in comparison to my normal training pace of late. This morning I am thankful that I did this, I feel really great, although I can tell that my legs are not fully healed from the marathon.

But anyway last night while practicing some wife-support (e.g. doing the dishes) I was thinking about what Jon said. I promised myself that I wouldn’t dwell or make excuses for my latest marathon performance because, well, because it really was not that bad. However it still nags me in the back of my mind why I seem to hit the wall so badly during a marathon. Before the marathon I played around with various race calcuators, formulas etc. and they all pointed to a sub-four hour marathon based on my HM and 10K races. I just want to know how I can gain control of the marathon, not let it control me.

Anyway, back to wife-support and meditating on recovery. I ran a 25K run on August 6 and took the next day off from training, then it was back to rigorous marathon training. On September 4 I ran a half-marathon, set a PR no less, took 2 days off and was back to training. Granted it was Taper Time and I was doing much less running, but still recovery was way too short.

So September 18th rolled around, I had tapered, but technically did not really recover from the half, and the runs that I made between the 4th and 18th were at full intensity. Then I get this brilliant idea that I am invincible and can run a marathon in 3:45:00 and set out to prove it. If you read the race report it is obvious that I am mere mortal and probably can plead temporary insanity for this decision.

But I will leave any negative vibes about the marathon for when I am 90 and reminisce about the days when I was a “kid” learning to run.I thank the good lord that I did not damage anything outside of my pride and am looking forwards towards the horizon and my next race.

Now I have promised myself that the rest of the runs this year are going to be less stress fun runs. I have my PR’s for the year, I need to get over this “need for speed” until Spring fever hits next year.

So I am totally looking forward to my Brandenkopf 10K Mountain Run on October 9th. It will be challenging, it is impossible to maintain the pace that I have been trying to do, and it is a totally different kind of race. An advertisement suggested it is a cross-country race up the side of a mountain. I can’t wait, this is just what I need in the moment!