The biggest day I had during my training was 25 miles. A 13 mile workout in the morning, and then a 12 mile workout in the afternoon.
I stole this from Italian coach Renato Canova. From what I could understand, it is called a ‘block’ workout and is the closest thing to simulating an actual marathon. My morning workout consisted of a two-mile warmup, followed by five miles at a steady pace (for me, one month before Boston, I ran 5:28 pace) and then five more miles at marathon pace: about 5:05. Close it off with an easy one mile cooldown, and the day was half over.
Not too bad of a workout. I mean, it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t exactly mind-blowingly difficult, either. Solid. I’d just call it solid.
For the rest of the day I mostly just lolled around. Watched the opening round of March Madness on, mourning the early death of my bracket. Of course, my alma mater was a small enough school that they never qualified for the tourney, so I had to adopt a rooting interest. Maybe that makes me a typical American, but I have always been partial to the underdog. I like seeing the lower seeds win, and my bracket reflected that.
It wasn’t the lower seeds’ day.
4:00 pm came, and with it time to mentally prep for the second workout of the day. With the recent time change, I had a little bit of extra time before twilight, so I procrastinated just a bit. By 5:00 I had mustered the motivation to put my shoes on.
Perhaps it wasn’t a lack of motivation that pushed the second workout back, but rather a sense of the impending doom this run would bring. See, I could still feeling the morning’s effort in my legs. They just felt slow and lethargic, almost like I had worked out already that day.
Which I had.
Which was the point.
How do you prepare for a twenty-six mile race when you never run twenty-six miles in practice? The marathon is the only race where it is uncommon not to run overdistance in training.
One 25 miler would be dangerous: there is an outsize injury risk going that far without that much extra training benefit, plus there is the gamble that it may take too long to recover from to be worthwhile. I mean, if it knocks me out for a full week before I can get back to real training, then it’s not worth it.
And one thing I know from college is that I have a tendency to leave my best races on the workout track. By that I mean that I often get one or two absolutely fantastic days where everything clicks and I feel great and I can run faster than I ever thought possible … in a workout. Then, when I get to the actual race, it never lives up to the hype. I struggle to recapture the magic of that workout day.
Sometimes I think we get too caught up in chasing the perfect training log and lose focus on the actual purpose of training itself: to race well. So I challenged myself to almost hold back a little bit in my build-up.
Anyway. Back to the block workout. Same deal as the first one: two mile warmup, five miles steady and then five miles at marathon pace. Try to hit the same or faster splits than this morning.
From my first stride, I could tell I was in for something rough. Things just felt creaky. And I’m young!
It took every bit of the two miles to warm up. I finally started to feel normal-ish by the start of the five mile section. Once that started, I felt like I was working too hard too early. In the morning, I had just slid into the effort like any good day. This time around, I was forcing it. I was breathing hard, my gait was labored, and I just felt generally heavy-legged.
After two of those five miles, I remember thinking to myself, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it through this section, not to mention the marathon pace portion.”
But a weird thing happened: my first mile split was 5:31. Okay, a little slow, but fine for heavy legs. My second mile was 5:27. Okay, faster than this morning’s average pace. Maybe I am pressing a little too hard. It’s okay to dial it back. Third mile: 5:25.
My legs were heavy and sluggish, but they weren’t slow. In fact, they simply locked in to the right pace. Fourth mile: 5:22. It was like my mind was thinking one thing and my legs were doing another. Fifth and final mile of this set: 5:20. And, noticing my negative split, I was trying to hold back on that one!
Well shit, that was a surprise.
I walked for a hot minute, took a deep breath, and leaned into the start of the final five-mile set at marathon pace.
It felt like starting in quicksand. Nothing responded right away. But again, that first mile was an automatic 5:04, faster than my pace from the morning.
My hands started tingling (it was a little chilly, but certainly not glove weather) and I stopped sweating, but that second mile was another 5:04. The third mile was interminable. Time started to dilate; even though every split was a consistent five-mile interval, each subsequent one seemed longer than the previous. But that was another 5:04!
The fourth mile of five was by far the toughest mentally. I was far enough in to feel the accumulation of over 20 miles of fatigue, but I was still just a bit too far away to feel the finish. The tingling slowly crept down into my quads, and then it disappeared. My legs were quite simply going numb. But they just kept churning. 5:01.
During the fifth and final mile, I couldn’t think straight anymore. No, wait, that’s not quite right; I couldn’t think at all anymore, full stop. My entire existence failed to exist beyond the next stride. And then the next one. And then the next. And one more…
I must have made a sorry sight to regular people doing normal weekend things. But I kept plowing through, churning and churning.
I stopped my watch and coasted to stop, hands on my knees and head down in the universal athletic sign of defeat. I didn’t dare look at my watch.
I didn’t cool down, either. There was nothing left in the tank. I walked one mile back home. Very slowly.
I didn’t register it until I stumbled up the steps to my front porch, but Amelia sat there, waiting.
“How’d it go?” She asked.
I said nothing. Just a pathetic attempt at a smile.
“That tough, huh? Was it as bad as you look?”
“Yes,” was all I could muster.
“What was your final split?”
I held up my watch: 4:58, it read.
“That’s scary good, Eliot. I hope you know that.”
She slid a half gallon of chocolate milk my way. I looked at it for the better part of an hour, then downed it four gulps and proceeded to lay down until morning.
***
You run enough miles during training, and your legs might be able to operate independently, overriding your brain. That happened during my block workout, and it is happening now.
For the past two miles, my head has been in panic mode. Every negative thought imaginable has crept in and I hadn’t had the mental energy to keep them at bay.
But my legs kept churning. And they still keep churning.
I had been in despair, seeing my race disappear in front of me. I was completely ready to give in. Too far from the finish line to really sense it is the most dangerous time in the race. But that one lone voice in the crowd snapped me back into the moment.
When my I could draw my focus to Gold Singlet and it clicked that he wasn’t running away from me, I was able to bring my head back into the race. For the past two hours, I had been trying to suppress any thoughts about how far I still had to go to the finish line. Sometimes they popped in my head, but I tried to dismiss them at best or compartmentalize them at worst.
But now, for the first time, I entertain thoughts of the finishing straight: more relief to just be done running than excitement. One final two-mile section to go.
We’ve made some messes / Don’t slow down.
There is still some racing left to be done. I can gut it out for two more miles.
Wait, no -- strike that. There’s the Citgo sign. For real this time. One more mile to win it.
Am I a lunatic for even entertaining that thought? A no-name, non-professional, full amateur runner who started with the masses in Corral One? They all have their names on their bibs; I am just a number.
In this extreme heat, anything can happen. But if it is going to happen today, I am going to have to close faster than the 5:00 I just ran.
**********
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