Make No Little Plans

Work or no work, hitting 100 is always a damn good feeling.

100 miles with most of them in the low-mid 7s? You're nuts.

I wouldn't worry too much about what you're doing for your buddy. I did something similar but didn't even register... Oops. I just pulled out at mile 26 and let my friend sprint in on her own.

Things seem to be goign well Chris - yeah for that! Congrats on the mega week - that is awesome!

Gah, that's just a ton of miles! I was broken for a week after an 80 mile week.

mul21 wrote:Gah, that's just a ton of miles! I was broken for a week after an 80 mile week.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm broken as a result of all the training. I simply had to take a power nap before being able to do speed work yesterday. Got all dressed and ready to go and then passed out for 45 minutes before being able to even contemplate starting it. Not exactly the kind of "let's attack this thing" mindset you want going into a key workout but that's where I am. Sure enough, warm up miles were awful but then I seem to shake the lethargy off and the actual workout of 6 x 1,200 was a breeze. I was deliberately not killing it and just running smooth and very under control but I brought in each one at sub 6:00 pace easily ranging from 4:28 down to 4:23. 10 minutes later, I felt like I could sleep for 12 hours straight so that's the kind of see saw I'm on in terms of training/workouts/resting/recovery. I'm constantly fatigued but there's little signs of life in there at times in the workouts or runs. On the run in DC on Monday with Martin Van Walsum I was surprised he pushed it down to low 7 pace for almost all of it but then even more surprised that it felt just like a recovery run to me and no different than 8:00 pace. But in betewen all of these OK or nice runs are times when I just feel like I've been beat with a tire iron and just getting out of the car is a bit of a challenge. I tweaked my right hamstring the other day at one of the personal trainer sessions (stupid Cross Fit type exercises!) and I'd like that to clear up but it doesn't seem to be present when I'm actually running. Jim posted somewhere else that you are probably doing marathon training right if you really feel pretty crushed 6 weeks out. I hope he's right. I'll be enjoying taper when it does come but I think I'm in a pretty good place in this cycle and pouring it on now to finish it out well.



I was just tempted this morning to do the full 26.2 on Sunday rather than the 21 or so I have planned. That's a dumb idea less than 4 weeks out from Chicago, even at a very relaxed pace. Easing through 21 that day and being able to focus fully on the guy I'm pacing is a good thing and that's the plan. I need to smack any thoughts of running the full distance out of my brain.

Well, based on how wrecked all three of us have felt the last week or two, I hope I'm right too!

Are you going to be running it alone this weekend, or is there somebody around either running with you or spectating who can reel you in? Sometimes a little bit of perspective is all you need, but you can go off in a real bad direction without it (trust me, I speak from experience!).

Michael Enright wrote:Are you going to be running it alone this weekend, or is there somebody around either running with you or spectating who can reel you in? Sometimes a little bit of perspective is all you need, but you can go off in a real bad direction without it (trust me, I speak from experience!).

No, definitely not running alone. I'm in charge of pacing my friend. My buddy Scott needs a 3:35 to BQ and I'm signed up to pace him to a 3:30 or better (that's the goal). So I will be very disciplined for his sake to keep it right at 8:00 and do steady paced miles for him. 8:00 is slower than I've been doing my long runs so I briefly had the thought to just run the full 26.2 but that's dumb as the recovery from such a long run could impact my upcoming half and full marathons. So I'll do 21 miles Sunday at the Lehigh Marathon and assuming Scott can stay on track and not hit the wall, do it right at 8:00 pace.



I've been thinking about how I will set things up on the Garmin and I think I'm stealing a concept from you Michael, and I'll do manual splits that show me the full elapsed time for each mile. I'll turn Auto Lap off. One challenge will be me jumping in at Mile 5 and not knowing exactly what he did for the first 5 miles so I'll need to get some kind of info from him so that I can sync up my watch and pace planning to the goal time. Then once I know where we are at say mile 6 and I just keep doing the math (8:00 even makes that simple) and adjusting slightly as needed. See all this stressing about pacing? Only because I'm doing it for someone else do I take it so seriously! It really would be good if I was this disciplined for myself and didn't run the first 10k of Chicago a full 11 seconds per mile faster than goal pace. GRRR!!

You spend a paragraph describing your fatigue, then saw you want to run 26.2 on Sunday?

That's your coach's angry face.

Also, you seem to be speeding up a bit on your "easy" runs. Back off the pace on those if you're that beat up.

I really liked the way I had it set up like that, Chris. But make sure you choose the right option for the last lap data field - when I ran the marathon in VT, I thought I had it set up right, but what I set it up for was to show me the last lap pace (so the watch figured out what pace I ran using the elapsed time for when I hit the button, but it did it based on its measurement of the distance I'd run, which might not have been a mile exactly per the course markings). It would momentarily flash my elapsed time for that lap, but then display the pace calculation until I hit the button again at the next mile marker, and so on. This time I figured it out, and what it displayed was the actual elapsed time, so I had time to read it and base my pace adjustments on that, instead of its measurement of my pace. Much better. And, yes, turn off the autolap to do that! The watch will still record all the distance data and you can let it figure out your pace based on its measurement when you review the data later on, if you're interested.

Michael Enright wrote:I really liked the way I had it set up like that, Chris. But make sure you choose the right option for the last lap data field - when I ran the marathon in VT, I thought I had it set up right, but what I set it up for was to show me the last lap pace (so the watch figured out what pace I ran using the elapsed time for when I hit the button, but it did it based on its measurement of the distance I'd run, which might not have been a mile exactly per the course markings). It would momentarily flash my elapsed time for that lap, but then display the pace calculation until I hit the button again at the next mile marker, and so on. This time I figured it out, and what it displayed was the actual elapsed time, so I had time to read it and base my pace adjustments on that, instead of its measurement of my pace. Much better. And, yes, turn off the autolap to do that! The watch will still record all the distance data and you can let it figure out your pace based on its measurement when you review the data later on, if you're interested.

Let's nerd out on this some more....here's what I was planning on doing....



My three fields I show on my 610 are typically:



1. Current Lap Pace

2. Total elapsed time

3. Total distance



My plan was to leave those 3 in place with the GPS still running/working but to turn auto lap off. Then as I passed a mile marker in the race, I would manually hit the lap button and what will pop up should be the total time of that lap which will or won't be a mile based on how accurately the course is marked. But I have current lap pace to sort of keep me honest within miles that I'm running around target pace and with total time and total distance, I can keep doing the math to determine where we stand overall target pace wise.



Make sense? I only need to see the lap time for a second or two as I go past the mile marker and then it is on to the next one so I wasn't thinking of changing any of the fields shown above.

Chris M wrote:

Michael Enright wrote:I really liked the way I had it set up like that, Chris. But make sure you choose the right option for the last lap data field - when I ran the marathon in VT, I thought I had it set up right, but what I set it up for was to show me the last lap pace (so the watch figured out what pace I ran using the elapsed time for when I hit the button, but it did it based on its measurement of the distance I'd run, which might not have been a mile exactly per the course markings). It would momentarily flash my elapsed time for that lap, but then display the pace calculation until I hit the button again at the next mile marker, and so on. This time I figured it out, and what it displayed was the actual elapsed time, so I had time to read it and base my pace adjustments on that, instead of its measurement of my pace. Much better. And, yes, turn off the autolap to do that! The watch will still record all the distance data and you can let it figure out your pace based on its measurement when you review the data later on, if you're interested.

Let's nerd out on this some more....here's what I was planning on doing....



My three fields I show on my 610 are typically:



1. Current Lap Pace

2. Total elapsed time

3. Total distance



My plan was to leave those 3 in place with the GPS still running/working but to turn auto lap off. Then as I passed a mile marker in the race, I would manually hit the lap button and what will pop up should be the total time of that lap which will or won't be a mile based on how accurately the course is marked. But I have current lap pace to sort of keep me honest within miles that I'm running around target pace and with total time and total distance, I can keep doing the math to determine where we stand overall target pace wise.



Make sense? I only need to see the lap time for a second or two as I go past the mile marker and then it is on to the next one so I wasn't thinking of changing any of the fields shown above.

I agree with almost everything but for me the garmin distance just complicates things during the race. I typically just have lap pace and total time in 2 fields so that I can see the time down to the seconds.

Does your buddy have a Garmin, too? If so, you could always just have him tell you when he hits 6.2 and then work from there... If he's at more than 49:36, you'll need to go slightly faster. If he's less, you can take it easier.

So long as you just need it to flash the lap pace for a couple seconds, it sounds good. That was too short for my aging eyes and tired body/brain.

Mike MacLellan wrote:Does your buddy have a Garmin, too? If so, you could always just have him tell you when he hits 6.2 and then work from there... If he's at more than 49:36, you'll need to go slightly faster. If he's less, you can take it easier.

Yeah, he wears a 610 as well but he can never seem to actually read the numbers well while running. Old fogey eyes. But I wasn't going to do something as gory math-wise as what you say. I just want him at 8:00 pace. I'm at Mile 5 and I jump in with him and I will literally have to grab his wrist and read his watch while we run. 40:00 is what I want to see from him and then I adjust accordingly from there if he is ahead or behind that at Mile 5.



Now I'm nervous about the course itself. About half of it is along tow path which is not paved. With all these insane rains and flooding we've been getting up and down the East Coast, I'm wondering what the footing will be like for him up there. Really not ideal for his BQ chances if this turns into a trail race!

Just take his watch from him so you hold both his and yours. That totally makes him trust you and not think about anything except following your lead.

Success!



It was a pretty crazy and eventful day but the headline was that the pacing task went well and my buddy Scott ended up with a 3:27:54 final time. He needed a 3:35 to BQ and we were shooting for a 3:30 so it went very well from a final results perspective. But that's only a tiny portion of the story. Some highlights:



- The course SUCKED. With all of the heavy rains, the towpath that is used for about 2/3 of the race was muddy and often had uneven loose ground. I kept thinking about Dave's suggestion that even a groomed soft surface might be 10 seconds a mile slower than pavement and that seemed about right to me while out there. And the last 0.2 of the race? All uphill. I give the course thumbs down to anyone hoping to race a fast time.



- Again because of the flooding, they completely changed the last 4 miles of the course in town and although we were at least on roads then, they added a 165 foot climb hill at Mile 23 which was a nasty surprise to all the racers and I sure witnessed a lot of carnage on that hill and I'm sure people lost their BQ times in there.



- Speaking of BQ, because this race was held on the day before the new Boston cutoff, it went from a sleepy small town marathon of around 300 finishers to 800+ with the vast majority of those looking for a last second BQ. Pretty different vibe when just about everyone out there needs a very specific time.



- Pacing wise, I ended up doing 23 miles on the day but some was warmup. When I jumped in with Scott I did a little over 21 to the finish. I kept him right around 8:00 although we were often between 7:50 - 7:55. I had to pull him back many times during the early miles as he really seemed to want to run down in the 7:40s early on. He really only had one blow-up mile (that hill at Mile 23) which was a 9:04 and then his wheels were fully off from that point on but he gutted his way through to a very painful finish.....that's when things got interesting....



- He collapsed completely at the finish line. Eyes closed, flat out on his back, unresponsive for a few seconds to the medical guys there. That didn't last long and I would say after 2 minutes or so, they at least had him sitting up and he passed my test of asking him "who are the Steelers playing today?" by answering "Ravens" so I knew he at least had his wits about him. They helped him get his breathing (he was panting) under control and after sitting with some water, he was good to go and walked out of the finish chute with me. Scary but over pretty quickly. So then....



- We go get our bag from bag check and change into dry clothes and then I wanted to go back to see Vivian finish. There was no way Scott could move the 50 or so yards back over there so I set him up with some food and a nice spot to sit and went off to see Vivian.



- I don't want to completely SPOLER ALERT ruin Vivian's race report and story but she had her own adventure as well. She got the BQ! I ran the last mile in with her and, like Scott, she finished showing pure guts. Coming off a nasty late race hill and with mid 70s temps and high humidity, this was not a race set up for fast running. The fact that both of them BQed impressed me greatly. Again, I'll let Vivian tell the story of her own post-race issues but yeowtch, Scott and Vivian killed it out there but the race hit back hard too.



- So Vivian is a success and BQer and we go walking over to get her bag. Uh oh. No bag for Vivian. At the exact moment that the race people are telling her that "uh, your bag with all your keys/cellphone/money/credit cards/clothes is gone...." I look over to where I left Scott. WTF? Scott is over there but he has 3 EMTs around him and he's being loaded on to a hospital bed gurney!! YIKES!!! I sprint over there and find out that Scott had been getting violently ill and basically emptying his stomach of probably everything he ate since Friday. His breathing was going nuts, his blood pressure was wacky so they were rushing him off to the medical tent. Long story short, he ended up being fine. They got him in there and hooked up to an IV and the fluid replacement did wonders for him and I'd say within an hour he was back to normal "exhausted and 100% spent marathoner" status and not "medical emergency" status. It was my first visit to the medical tent of a race and those places are crazy. Like a MASH unit. There were people in there far worse off than Scott. Meanwhile...



- Vivian's bag is GONE. But then I check my cell phone and my last received call is from Vivian only 10 minutes before. How can that be since Vivian's cell phone is in her bag? Turns out two guys who work for Sears delivering applicances just found Vivian's bag alongside of some road in Allentown, PA. They dug through the bag, found the cell phone and just called her last dialed number which was me. It was a whole comedy of errors trying to make a plan to meet up with these guys because they are off delivering washing machines some 30 miles away (the course was point to point) and we had no way to get to them. Plus neither spoke Engligh as their first language so working through the logistics was doubly hard. Luckily, Scott's medical situation combined with the race people feeling guilty that they apparantly dropped Vivian's bag off of their truck led to the race organizers providing us a ride all the way back to Allentown (race start) to get Scott's car so we could eventually then meet the Sears guys and get Vivian's bag several hours post-race. Those two Sears guys were so nice to have seen the bag, stopped their truck, picked it up and then gone to all the trouble of trying to call my number from there and reunite her with her bag. They refused Vivian's offer of some reward money and were just two super duper nice guys doing the right thing.



- What an adventure. Vivian's adventure actually continued later with her own visit to the ER back at home in DC but I'll let her fill in those details! Marathons are crazy. It really was interesting for me to run at a comfortable pace and so be able to watch all those around me as they are hitting the wall and either gutting through to their goal time or missing it. Usually, I'm in my own private hell hole at the end of marathons so i don't watch others that closely but its pretty wild to see what goes down in the final miles of a marathon where everyone is going for the BQ. One woman I saw? Code Brown and she just didn't stop running. You could SMELL her from 50 yards away. I can't even describe how awful it was but that's marathoning - to the edge of the cliff and beyond, I guess. For her sake, I really hope she hit her goal time! Soooo gross but impressive in its own way too, no? That's dedication at least!



- Scott is going to be fine. He obviously went ALL OUT to get his time and I was and am so proud of how he did. He scared the hell out of me with the two medical dramas post-race but on the ride home he seemed fine and just plenty tired. He worked hard all Summer for this race and delivered on race day.



- The day had so many twists and turns that it ended up being far more eventful than you would desire for a race but all's well that ends well and both Scott and Vivian nailed their BQ times. As for me, a nice long run and I worked on things like drinking more fluids from the aid station. Its always good to do things in a race environment, even at a much more relaxed pace. Good practice. Truth is, I was super nervous and anxious before the race. Much more so than for my own races. I just wanted Scott to nail his BQ and I wanted to make sure I could be the best pacer possible for him and drag him through the tough spots. It went perfect from that perspective which is what i cared about. Run wise itself, it was an easy run for me. No soreness at all post-race or today so its onward towards this weekends half marathon in Philly.

Wow is about all I can say! Congrats to Scott, Vivian, and Chris! And I'll attest to the MASH unit comment having experienced it first hand more than once.

So I'm thinking we might have to ban you from Chicago with all the weirdness you seem to bring with you to races!

Crazy day! Glad everybody got their BQs!

Chris,
Your day pretty much sums up everything that is simultaneously wonderful and awful about marathoning. Seriously, I think you hit every single worst-case scenario in that recap. But hey, Scott and Vivian got their BQs and survived to tell the tale! Congrats!

Wow, that's like some kind of crazy marathon movie - I wouldn't believe all that if it was the plot of a book!

Sounds like it was a good thing you were there to reel your buddy in during those early miles, that's for sure.

Nice job sorting out the catastrophes...

The stuff of nightmares! All I can say is you are a hell of a friend to run with someone like that and help to pull them through. You deserve a big high-five for that one. And congrats on the BQs that obviously did NOT come easily. I love it - a 23 mile run at a BQ pace - ho-hum, no soreness, feel great, etc. Gives me something to hope for!!!!!!!

Man, that's some story, or actually multiple stories. Amazing day, how do you top that? It's even more impressive than going to some unknown guy's apartment in Chicago.

JohnP wrote:Man, that's some story, or actually multiple stories. Amazing day, how do you top that? It's even more impressive than going to some unknown guy's apartment in Chicago.

edited/deleted

Side note: So how many points did Brady score in last night's end to the first week of fantasy football--20+?

Sick!