Solitary Confinement: Or, How I Spent Last Sunday

  

Six hours is a long time to run. It's an even longer time to run by yourself, especially if you are not particularily enamoured of your own company. Three hours is usually about the limit of time I can put up with myself...

I put off posting Sunday's run because I had such a dim view of the whole experiece, both prior to and for the first half of the run itself. The last half my brain was numb, so I'm not sure that counts...

My first aggravation was the fact that my Polar S625X Heart Rate Monitor was on the fritz and acting up. My heart rate data was basically useless for the first three hours, so in essence the monitor was useless. I almost chucked it into the ocean on a couple of occasions...

I ran the first few hours over-lapping the Running Room's 32K long run in preparation for the Vancouver Marathon. Long time readers of this Blog will know I have a festering highly dysfunctional love-hate relationship with the Running Room marathon clinics (why should the Clinic be any different than the rest of my relationships, I ask you?).

The clinics are wonderful in theory and nothing short of a brilliant corporate strategy. Look at all those potential in-store customers! That being said, it sticks in my craw that the Running Room's head honcho, John Stanton has essentially ripped of Jeff Galloway's run-walk program and is passing it off as his own. He has even gone to the trouble of largely plagiarizing Galloway's book in flogging his own book in his store - you never fail to see literally hundreds of copies towering on a shelf in a prominent position somewhere in a Running Room store.

It wouldn't be so bad if the Running Room clinics were well taught, but they're not. Actually, that's not a fair nor an accurate statement. Rather, MOST of the clinics are poorly managed and taught. There is a shortage of exceptional clinic instructors, so when on occasion you do get one, the majority of the rest of the clinics are glaring in their ineptitude.

On Sunday I started passing people at about the 25 K mark - I was averaging a 12:00 pace as instructed - who were beginning to falter after three hours of running. Most of them were breathing too hard, so their pace was all wrong and when I chatted up a few to offer some encouragement, a few queries revealed that most of the folks in trouble had only had one or two gels after three hours of running! Proper pace and fueling are the kind of knowledge that first time marathoners get from a clinic instructor who knows what they're talking about. I can only imagine what these poor bastards are going to look like at the 22 or 23 mile mark in the marathon...

It was at about this point in time that what I took to be a 3:45 group passed me on the way back to the store. I recognized a few folks, and boy, from the red faces and the grim expressions you would have been hard pressed not to assume that they were going at pretty close to race pace. Once again, you can only imagine what it is going to be like for these folks in the last ten kilometres of the actual marathon.

Me, I'm a pussy. Which is actually an insult to pussies everywhere. Honestly, I am a total wimp when it comes to training. I will go to almost any lengths to avoid pain and suffering and do the absolute minimum I think I can get away with in order to meet my goals. I prefer to do short, intense, extremely painful work-outs over drawing out my suffering for the long periods of time that a long Sunday run usually entails. Why would you want to beat yourself up for that long, and then afterwards, take a week to recover?? It seems so nonsensical and counter-productive to me. How can a runner not understand that on at least an intuitive level? And that is if you actually do recover before your next intense work-out.

My other complaint about the Running Room clinics is the utter lack of running ettiquette they teach. Hey you morons out there, share the fucking road! I would say that on Sunday about sixty percent of the running groups had broken up into single runners and small groups of two to five people (never mind me going off on pace group leaders who don't keep their group together). No problem sharing the road with those people. But there were several hundred people participating in the 32K run, and there were still extremely large groups of twenty to thirty people.

These groups were moving juggernauts that were catastrophes for any poor pedestrians that happened to get in their way. On numerous occasions I moved as far over on the sidewalk as I could to avoid them and yet on three seperate occasions I was run into, twice hard enough to get bruised the next day. As it was one of the first nice sunny days in Vancouver after weeks of rain, I had to wonder about how many other people sharing the sidewalk had taken their lives in their hands just by venturing out on to the sidewalk?

All my whingeing aside, it was hard to maintain the pace that Jeff had suggested. Twelve minute miles! And two and ones? My God, it felt like I spent six hours just looking at my watch. About three hours in I got so bored that I stopped at Starbucks for five minutes for a double-espresso and a low-fat fruit bar!

At this stage I have no idea whether or not I am ready for Boston. Not even a clue. My weight is 184 and everyone says I am the leanest I have been since last year, but I have no real sense of my speed nor my strength. Of course by ready I mean to re-qualify and perhaps run a personal best. In the end, I can only take what the race and the day yields up...

I am so ready to taper it hurts.

The non-runners in my life don't seem to have a true grasp of the toll that training 65 or 70 miles a week extracts. It takes a momumental effort on my part to want to roll off my couch these days. Throw in a full days work and by sundown I am ready to fall into bed - make that collapse.

Not quite the glittering little social gadfly I once was!