Saturday, October 28, 2017

Chicago Marathon and so on

I ran the Chicago Marathon three weeks ago and am just now getting around to registering that fact on my now rarely updated running blog. It was on the whole an underwhelming race experience. On a warm day, I ran 3:10:57, which is not a fast time for me but at least will get me back to Boston in 2019.

After running a warm and very humid marathon earlier this year (Houston), as well as a warm and very humid tune-up half-marathon a few weeks before Chicago (the Navy-Air Force Half-Marathon), I was not pleased by the weather forecast for Chicago predicting race temperatures mostly in the 60s. It ended up being in the upper 50s at the start and probably around 70 by the time I finished. At least it wasn't too humid, and I had done much of my training in far warmer conditions this past summer in Greece (which is not humid). But I've come to regard weather as nearly determinative of my performance in marathons: basically, the cooler, the better. My PR race was in the upper 40s and breezy, so overheating was not an issue. Although I've run poorly in cool weather before, I've never run very well in warm weather. The temperature in Chicago was not warm enough to make trying to run a decent time pointless, but it was definitely not PR weather. My coach and I agreed that I was in shape to aim for 2:55 in ideal conditions, but neither of us was quite sure just how much the forecast dictated that I should scale back my ambitions. The night before the race he reluctantly gave me permission to go out at 3:00 pace for the first half, but it was clear that I'd need to monitor carefully how my body was handling the conditions and adjust my pace accordingly.

As it happened, I had little idea how fast I was running during the first half of the race because the tall buildings and underpasses in Chicago threw off my GPS. By the finish, my Garmin thought I had run 28.4 miles and set a world record of 3:25 for the mile midway through (in mile 14). I could have hit the lap button at mile markers or just calculated splits by looking at the elapsed time, but I didn't because I figured that in the warm weather I was probably better off running by feel anyway. I went through halfway in 1:30:39, and that's pretty much the time I expected by that point, so my ability to judge pace by feel is apparently surprisingly accurate. But I was already feeling warm by then and knew that I was going to run a positive split. The only question was by how much. A little past halfway the sun started bearing down on us as we moved away from the tall buildings downtown. I slowed down preemptively, rather than wait until I had no choice a few miles later. There's no point in killing myself for a mediocre time, I thought. Since I had bombed at Houston earlier this year, and didn't run a marathon in 2016 due to injury, I had no Boston qualifier for the 2018 race and wasn't able to register. The Boston qualifying standard for my age group (40-44) is 3:15, and these days you need to run at least "BQ-5" to be confident that you'll get in. So in Chicago, by 18 miles or so, I just wanted to make sure to run a 3:10 so that I can run Boston in 2019. To do that after a 1:30 first half, I didn't need to run the second half fast but basically just needed to keep running. In the last 5km I did have to stop a few times, for perhaps 15-20 seconds each time, to avoid throwing up (which ended up happening after I finished anyway). I guess the heat was getting to my stomach, or maybe it was just the previous night's dinner not agreeing with me. If I had been on track for a great time, then I might have gotten to find out whether I'm badass enough to puke while continuing to run (probably not). But by that point my GPS was working well enough that I knew there was no need.

I suppose it's possible that going into Chicago I wasn't really in the sort of shape that I had thought I was in. Because of my injury-filled 2016, our primary goal for the build-up was to stay injury free. That meant scaling back my peak mileage (to 65 miles per week) and spacing out hard long run workouts to every other weekend. Also because an early October race meant that all my training occurred in warm summer conditions, and it was especially hot this past summer in Europe where I was for most of this build-up, I ran much more slowly on non-workout days than I ever have in the past. For the first time, I went by heart rate instead of pace, keeping my heart rate below 140 on all non-workout days, which often required me to run 8:45 pace when I might have run 7:45 pace in the past. I'm not really sure what effect this had on my fitness, but at least I didn't get injured, and that was the main goal. In hindsight I think it was a good idea to have very slow recovery days, but I should not have run so slowly on every non-workout day. Since I only do two workouts per week in marathon mode, I should distinguish the remaining 4-5 days into recovery and easy days instead of effectively making them all recovery days. Anyway, perhaps I wasn't really in 2:55 shape under ideal conditions - I'm not saying I wasn't, but I don't know whether I was or not since the conditions were far from ideal. I think that's what was most frustrating to me about this race: it didn't even give me license to mope around feeling like I didn't train hard enough. It just didn't really tell me anything at all. Well, it did tell me that I want to steer clear of warm weather marathons in the future.

It has been three weeks since Chicago and I'm back running regularly again, apparently injury-free and beginning to slowly get back into things. After working with a coach for three years, I'm also back to "coaching" myself now. My plan is to do several club races in the next few months from 5km to half marathon distances, starting with a 5 mile turkey trot on Thanksgiving. Then in January I'll decide whether to start training for a Spring marathon or stay focused on shorter stuff. Either way, I've registered for a small club race on rail trails in early April, the B&A (Half-) Marathon with the Annapolis Striders. I registered for the full marathon but can choose to switch to the half, which cost only $5 less anyway. I'll train toward that as a goal race whether I end up choosing the half or the full. If I choose the B&A half as my goal race, then I'm tossing around the idea of possibly doing the Vermont City Marathon in late May as well, not as a goal race, but just so that I don't have to wait a year before doing another marathon. We'll see. I'm pretty sure that the Richmond Marathon is going to be my goal race next Fall.