Wicked Half Marathon

Well what I learned today is that I don't seem to be a cold weather runner.

It was 37 degrees when we left the house at 5:30 AM for Salem (race start at 7:00 AM). Other than the cold, it was a beautiful day and a beautiful course. The race start is at the Salem Willows park right off Salem Harbor. Here is what the harbor looked like as dawn broke:

Aware of my traditional slow starts, I did a 3/4 mile warmup as well as the usual stretching. Nonetheless, I only managed a 9:30 mile pace for the first two miles and didn't break a 9 minute mile until the fifth mile, when my pace dropped by nearly a minute per mile. It wasn't until I got up the first serious hill in that fifth mile that I felt truly warmed up. Finally around mile 6 I settled into a steady race pace.

The rest of the race felt pretty good but as planned I didn't push it as hard as I had the Triple Threat Half Marathon in August. Especially since the very slow start put paid to any hopes of a half marathon PR. I cruised in the last few miles and, unlike the Triple Threat Half Marathon, I was not thrashed on finishing the race. Here I am finishing up:

 

I ended up running a 1:53:17 at an 8:38 pace, about 3 minutes slower than my time at the Triple Threat Half Marathon. Naturally part of me was hoping for better given the easier course than the run in Rockport and the cooler temperatures, but it turns out the cooler temperatures worked against me, making my start even slower than usual. (And as usual, I spent miles 4 and beyond passing people). Also the missed training in August and my recent illness didn't help. The slow start doesn't concern me much because it's not going to matter in a 26.2 mile race at Disney, and neither will it likely be 37 degrees at race time in Florida.

Where to from here? I'm done with racing until Disney, except for maybe the odd 5k for kicks. I didn't lose as much weight since early August as I hoped (only a couple of pounds). 186 is still a lot of weight for a runner - only 4 lbs short of the Clydesdale division - and I definitely feel "big" when I run, in the sense that I know I'm really working hard to run at race pace (compared to when I was younger and weighed 160 lbs and felt like I was gliding along).  Obviously those youthful days and certainly 160 lbs isn't going to happen again, but I still think I have something like 15 lbs I can take off, and I'm convinced I will feel much different running with a weight in the low 170s than 186.  And I think I can take if off if I get truly religious about avoiding carbohydrates and cheating with Coke. That's the whole point of this exercise in any case - to motivate me to take off as much weight as I can.

The true marathon training is going to begin as well, as I've been planning to follow a three month training plan from Hal Higdon that I'll talk about in a forthcoming post. Up to now I've been building a base from which to start this training.

Wicked Half-Marathon Pregame

The Wicked Half-Marathon in Salem is this Saturday morning. The weather looks good but cool, in the high 40's. Shortly after the Triple Threat Half-Marathon in early August, I had high hopes for this race, but fortune put some roadblocks in my path. These included a few injuries in August and, the last few weeks, a nagging cold that isn't bad but won't seem to go away. The injuries impacted my training in August and the cold, while it hasn't slowed my training down or prevented me from running the half marathon, does make it much harder to control my eating. I'm just not interested in being hungry while miserable from a cold. Worse, a Coke in the afternoon makes me feel a lot better and is difficult to resist. The bottom line of all that is I haven't lost all the weight I hoped in preparation for the race. My pre-race weigh-in this morning was 186.5, a three pound loss since the Triple Threat race and a lot less than I hoped, but I suppose I should be grateful that I am still losing, if more slowly.

In any event, I'm not going to push it as hard as the last race, the August injuries having taught me a lesson. But the course is easier and it won't be as warm, so we will see what happens. It's an interesting course as well, through historic downtown Salem and out through the upscale neighborhoods on Marblehead Neck.

Dodging A Bullet

So I planned to only blog concerning the major events leading up to the Marathon, but some sports fans have indicated they want more content. I'm more than willing to write more posts... who doesn't like to write about his favorite person?

Had a bit of a scare in August. The week after the Triple Threat Half Marathon, I pulled a calf muscle while running an ordinary training run and ended up taking a week off. During that week off, my left knee started to hurt in an ominous way that was reminiscent of how it felt before I had surgery on it seven years ago.  Probably this was all the result of pushing it too hard at the Trip Threat Half Marathon. The week after that, I began starting some mild training again, but the knee didn't seem to be improving much. Naturally I got depressed thinking I might have done serious damage to the knee and blown the Disney Marathon.

I set up an appointment with Dr. O'Holleran, who did my two knee surgeries, and it turned out the knee is structurally sound and I only had a mild strain. By this point, I'm back to full training and did 11 miles last Sunday on my long run of the week.

The lack of training for those couple of weeks, and some inconsistent commitment to restraining my eating, probably killed my hope of weighing 180 lbs by the Wicked Half Marathon on Sept 20. I weighed 186 at my last Monday weigh-in, which is a 3 lb loss since August 4, but I'd need to lose 6 lbs in two weeks, which isn't going to happen.

In any case, I learned my lesson, and I'm going to take it easy and cruise the Wicked Half Marathon.