Pain

Well, my training program for the 17 Oct. Abdingdon marathon, which is 7.5 weeks from now, has been derailed by injury. I didn't see this coming. It started as a minor bruise-like pain on the bottom of my left forefoot. I hadn't been training particularly hard - it started hurting 3.5 weeks ago during a 15-mile run at the end of a 40 mile week - so I initially thought that I'd just stepped on a rock wrong or something trivial like that. I ran about 30 miles in the following week, but ended that week's long run early because my foot started to hurt significantly after about four miles. In the last 2.5 weeks I've run only about four miles total. In an effort to cross-train, I tried a gym workout two days ago, on the stationary bike and cross-country ski machine, that I thought would not irritate my foot. Surprisingly it really did irritate my foot, which has since then been hurting worse than ever. So, after 2.5 weeks of essentially no running, my foot feels worse than ever.

I think what I have is called bursitis - an irritation in the padding of my forefoot. I'm just taking it day by day and hoping I can still run Abingdon, even if not in the time I'd been hoping for. I guess there's a lesson to be learned from this experience, which is to be more wary of seemingly minor aches and pains, and to try and build up my training more consistently and gradually. Although this injury occurred at the end of a moderate training week, the preceding weeks had involved irregular and inconsistent mileage (e.g. I had been tapering for a half-marathon 3-4 weeks before being injured, and then I ran a lot after the half-marathon, including a 28 mile long run one week before being injured).

Wycombe & 28-miler

The Wycombe Half Marathon was last Sunday. It went fine. I was aiming for a sub 1:30 and got a 1:29:09. This was 5:37 faster than my time in the same race a year ago, so a substantial improvement. I wasn't taking this race all that seriously - only a half marathon, after all - so I was relaxed and went at a comfortable pace from start to finish.

My son enjoyed the 1.5 mile fun run and we were proud of him for finishing it and receiving the medal at the end. A great start to his running career.

I finished the training week yesterday with a 28 miler, from Uxbridge to Windsor Great Park and back again.  That's the furthest I've ever run. My pace was not extraordinary (7:38) but distance was the main goal. I find the challenge of these very long runs to be more psychological than physical. I'm OK with not drinking any fluids during these runs, even when it's relatively warm out (I think yesterday it got to about 75 F / 24 C), and I don't feel sore today. But I can't say I found the latter miles of yesterday's run to be exactly pleasant. Still, I love the feeling of accomplishment that I have after a really long run, and I hope that as my body gets more accustomed to running these distances, I'll be able to enjoy these runs more. I'm aiming for about 30 miles every other Saturday.

July update

I didn't run for a week after the Edinburgh Marathon. I'd had a lingering, slight pain in my left foot for weeks, and I wanted to see if I could finally get rid of it by staying off it. It didn't work, the slight pain is still there today, it never gets better or worse. I only feel it when I flex my foot. I'm hoping it will eventually just disappear.

Since this brief hiatus, my training has been focused on building a steady mileage base for my next marathon (Abingdon, 17 October 2010). I've been on the road a lot so much of this training has occurred in the USA (visiting family in Chapel Hill, NC and Fredericksburg, VA) and Scotland (I returned to Edinburgh for a conference -- had great runs on Calton Hill and up to the Salisbury Crags). I've been averaging 41 miles per week over the past five weeks and yesterday my long run was 24 miles. I've been feeling a little sluggish, which is one reason to take it easier over the next couple weeks -- the other reason is I'm running the Wycombe Half Marathon on 18 July (two weeks from today) so I want to taper a little bit. I ran this race last year (in 1:34:46) and enjoyed it. As it's not a full marathon I'm not taking it super-seriously, I see it as halfway between race and training run. A big incentive to do it is that they also have a 1.5 mile fun run that my four-year-old son can participate in. It'll be his first race, he's excited about it, and he'll be thrilled to get the medal at the end if he finishes (1.5 miles seems a little long for him but I think he can do it).

My long run yesterday was along the Grand Union Canal, the Victorian waterway that goes from London to Birmingham and passes through Uxbridge, very close to my home. Actually all of my runs last week were along this canal. It's a beautiful place to run, green and peaceful, generally well-maintained trails and no roads to cross. I'm so thankful for this canal -- if it weren't there, my Uxbridge runs would involve much more asphalt and traffic-dodging.

I'm excited that my 'Good-for-age' entry form for the 2011 London Marathon arrived yesterday, so it looks like I'm really in. I'll post it on Monday.

Race report: 2010 Edinburgh Marathon

I didn’t get the sub 3:00, but I did get an official time of 3:05:30, which is a marathon PB by 10:32 and good enough to qualify me automatically for the 2011 London Marathon. So it was a good day. Acording to my Garmin 205, I was on a sub 3:00 pace (6:52) until around mile 20-21, and then I started to fade. So the wall got me, and the 6:52 pace was probably 8-10 seconds faster than I should have been going, in order to maintain an even pace throughout. On the other hand, even if I had maintained what Garmin said was a 6:52 pace until the end, my official time would actually not have been sub 3:00, because according to Garmin, I had to run a good bit further than 26.2 miles to get across the finish line (see below).

I love Edinburgh, I lived there for six months as an undergraduate in 1994 and have returned several times since, and it was great to take part in their marathon. You don’t see much of the city itself during the race, the course is mainly along the coast of the Firth of Forth, because that’s much flatter terrain than the hilly city centre. In other words, to get a faster course, you have to sacrifice running through one of the world’s most beautiful cities. This trade off was worth it for me last Sunday.

I’m not a fan of abandoning my wife and two kids for a whole weekend in order to run a race, I’d have preferred it if they could have come up with me. And I don’t plan on doing this kind of thing very often – my next planned races will be closer to home and my whole family will attend. But I wasn’t all alone in Edinburgh, because I did get to visit with some good friends up there who were kind enough to let me stay with them. So on balance it was definitely a good experience.

My favourite moment after the race was when my nearly four year old son asked me on the phone, “Daddy, did you win?” I laughed and told him I didn’t win but I did pretty well. “Did you get a medal?” he replied. I said yes, I did get a medal, and he seemed satisfied with that.

If you read any media coverage about the event you know that it was an unusually hot day for Edinburgh – temperatures hit 77 F (25 C), and this made it tough for those who weren’t used to that kind of heat, including, sadly, one 52 year old runner who collapsed and died. The heat didn’t bother me so much, I think because I grew up in the American South where it gets a lot hotter than that. I did get a bit of a sunburn, which I never would have expected from Scotland.

I’ve embedded my Garmin 205 results from the race below, and as you’ll see, Garmin thought the distance I ran was actually 26.43 miles. This is the second marathon in which I’ve worn the 205, and in the first (Luton 2009), it was nearly precisely the same story: Garmin recorded the distance as 26.42 miles. So I’m beginning to think that these courses are measured such that 26.2 miles is really the minimum distance you could cover on the course, and even though I try to run the shortest route (taking the inside track, the straight line from A to B, etc.), it’s very hard to avoid exceeding this minimum. As a result, my pace in these marathons as measured by the official clock has been four seconds per mile slower than my pace as measured by Garmin; for example at Edinburgh, my official pace was 7:05 and my Garmin pace was 7:01. What this means in practical terms is that in order to run an official sub-3:00 marathon, I need to run not at a 6:52 Garmin pace, but at a 6:48 Garmin pace. Nothing to do about that except train accordingly.

Sub 3:00 for Edinburgh?

This morning I ran 5 miles at a 6:15 pace (route map below). According to the race time predictors at www.runningforfitness.org, this means I could run a marathon in about 3:01. As my marathon PR (set 5.5 months ago at Luton) is 15 minutes slower than this, I've been hesitant to attempt a sub 3:00 in Edinburgh, but I'm thinking now that I'll go for it. The downhill section at the start should help me out, and I'm hoping that the headwinds along the coast won't be too strong. While a sub 3:00 would be incredible, I'd be happy with anything faster than 3:10, as that would qualify me automatically for the 2011 London Marathon.

About the sign at the top of this blog

The rusty sign in this blog's title banner is located along the High Street in Eton, England. It's an original route marker from the legendary 1908 London Olympic Marathon, the first official distance (26.2 mile) marathon in history. One of my favorite long runs is a loop from Uxbridge (where I live) to Windsor, a route which overlaps for many miles with the 1908 marathon course.

A great thing about running to Windsor is you get to run in the massive and beautiful Windsor Great Park. It's about nine miles from Uxbridge to Windsor town centre, so 18 miles round trip, and you can easily add on to that by running as long as you like in Great Park. The roads in the park are virtually traffic free, although you may have to dodge some deer on the 'Long Walk' en route to the park. There's a steep uphill section, crowned by an equestrian statue of George III, but the altitude affords great views of Windsor Castle, and of a good stretch of southern England for that matter.

I recently ran the below 26-mile loop (7:10 pace) that took me through Windsor Great Park for several miles:

A blog is born

Welcome to the first post for my new running blog. I've been running off and on for about 20 years, but I've been a lot more serious about it since late 2008. I ran my first marathon (Los Angeles) in 1999, but didn't run my second (Luton, pictured) until 2009. My next marathon, Edinburgh, is in less than two weeks.