Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Impetuous foolishness

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Since I was going to be in town at the same time in order to keep my brother company while he ran the Copenhagen Marathon, why didn't I just enter the race anyway? Sure, I'm in no state to run a marathon, I've never actually run a marathon before, and I've got almost exactly a month to get myself in shape for an event which most Learned Authorities recommend taking several months to prepare for, but apart from that, why not?

I could always drop out without too much shame, I thought, if it proved to be too much for me to complete. If I did manage to finish, I wouldn't have to worry about time - just getting round the thing would be enough, and next time I did a marathon I'd actually train properly and thus be more or less guaranteed a stonking new PB. So I mailed off my entry.

Then I ran my first competitive half-marathon last weekend, the Shakespeare Half-Marathon, and by God it was awful. I nearly died. I had to take a couple of walk breaks, and even with those my pace suffered badly in the heat. The entire race from about mile 7 onwards was spent cursing whoever thought that 1300 - yes, one in the afternoon - would be a good time to start a long-distance race. I'd never been so glad to see a finish line looming in front of me in my whole (very short) racing career, and my time of 1:46:27 was respectable but disappointing as I knew I could do better than that. It was very, very hot however, so that's my excuse. "If this gives me so much trouble", I thought, "how the hell am I going to do twice this distance next month? No way! Cancel! Withdraw!".

I felt a lot better after a shower (though don't ask about the chafeing, which will be with me for some time yet) and thought that well, if I at least followed the last four weeks of a reasonable marathon training programme I might be in with a fighting chance. And anyway, Copenhagen's not known for its hot, sunny climate.

And so it was that after a day off running on Monday I plunged straight into the last few weeks of one of Hal Higdon's pre-cooked training schedules, modified a bit to accomodate a couple of short races I'm entered in before Copenhagen. It's at least forced me to finally learn to run slowly, as if I'd tried doing anything at my more usual pace a mere couple of days after an arduous half-marathon I just woudn't have got anywhere. So I stepped back the pace to 5:15-5:30/km and good heavens, I could suddenly keep going for ages.

Today I ran just short of 15km at the same pace without any great discomfort other than in the first couple of km as my legs warmed up. This has made me happy, and made me feel a lot better about the prescribed 20-mile training run this Sunday - it'll be long and tedious, but at least I should be able to get around it. And if I can get round a 20-mile training run, that puts me a long way towards being able to get round a marathon. We'd still have to see, but I'm at least a little optimistic.

I feel very stupid for not having worked out what "slow running" meant before. Almost all of my running has been done in the narrow pace range of sort of 4:30-4:50, maybe 4:00-4:20 at race pace. All of a sudden, I find that if I run at 5:15-5:30 I feel as if I could just keep going forever. It's hardly rocket science, and it's something that all the Eminent Running Authorities talk about, but I feel stupid for not having paid attention to it earlier. It would probably have saved me a good few muscle-pain-related days off if I had.

But yes, as far as Copenhagen is concerned we'll have to see. The race appears to be full of lots of scary, healthy Nordic types with names like Sven and Bent and Lars and various things with the letter ø in them, and not nearly as full of people taking 6 hours to get round the course in a Womble suit as London is. Still, it's hard to come absolutely dead last in a marathon.

Posted by mpk at April 27, 2005 11:55 PM | TrackBack