A walk in the woods

Running path

Sometimes it takes a walk to find a good run. I'd allowed myself to take a week to recover from the NYRR Staten Island Half. I've been biking instead and I've been allowing ideas of what's next to tumble freely in my head without coming up with a specific plan.

I'd been experiencing loop fatigue. It's a common ailment among city park runners and its most dangerous symptom is a reluctance to run.

I'd managed to avoid this last year while training for the ING New York City Marathon by staying away from running the main Prospect Park loop. Instead I'd come up with a variety of street routes. This year, as I work on developing a smooth pace, I've running most of my mileage on loops that don't include multiple corner stops, hopping over supermarket crates and dodging live chickens.

Unidentified mushrooms

Yesterday I went forging for mushrooms with Jess and though we didn't find what we were looking for, as we walked through Prospect Park exploring the ground I found myself seeing the park in a different way.

Everyone knows the Prospect Park time-space continuum expands when you're running through its backwoods. It turns out the same thing happens when you're walking. Though at first we didn't see any mushrooms. After  while space expanded and we started seeing them everywhere and we found paths I'd never taken before.  I was jealous of the runners on these paths.

Other unidentified mushrooms

I went out for mushrooms and came back with a run. I'm looking forward to finding that path by the water again on my run tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Staten Island Half Marathon

Sunrise over Manhattan

This was the view at the start. Something faraway you could see only if you squinted through the fog. Like my PR.

I'd been training for what I knew was an ambitious PR - I was looking to knock twenty minutes off my half-marathon time. Between my first and my second half marathons I chewed up thirteen minutes and spit them out nonchalantly by the side of the road. I figured if I worked hard enough I could get close to a two-hour half. I'd worked hard and gotten faster; the weekend before the Staten Island Half I ran a 5k and bested my time by two minutes.

As I walked into the corral last Sunday I was listening to the muppets playing Mahna Mahna and was excited to run my best half to date. I was missing my training partner Lindsay who had gotten hurt and Samantha who had a ferry difficult time making it to Staten Island but when the corrals collapsed and we started to move, I was ready to roll.

Pacing is not my strong suit and I have a tendency to get carried away so I was trying to focus on not going faster than a 9:14min/mi pace, but also no slower than 9:30min/mi. I managed to sort of stick to that and was having a great time until about mile 8 when my stomach decided the race was over.

With a high sun on course with no shade, temperatures creeping up near 80 and my stomach being squeezed from the inside out, I decided to slow down for a couple of miles. I thought if I rested from miles 8-10 by going down to my easy pace I'd cool down, recover, then race the last 5k of the course and still get about a 2:05 for a fifteen minute PR.

Slowing down didn't do the trick. I felt my body was either going to explode or I was going to pass out if I kept running. So I started run/walking hoping I'd start feeling better and be able to go back to running. At around mile 10 Samantha passed me and urged me to join her, I waved her on and wished her luck (she went on to an amazing breakthrough PR). Later, a fellow PPTC member from my speed group joined me. I tried to keep up with her but after a few yards I knew that would not be possible.

Please let me get out of here before I puke.

For the first eight miles I'd managed to stay on target for the PR I wanted and had even managed be about a minute and half under. As I shuffled along I kept re-calculating and trying to make deals with myself. I was done racing, but if I could stick to my easy pace I could still finish with a decent time. C'mon! You can still shave 10min! You can do five! But doing the old lady shuffle was all I could handle without turning into sludge and even then I had to take walk breaks. By the time I approached the finish line and heard Jenn, another PPTC member, cheering for me I was starting to feel disoriented enough not to understand why she was calling me.

It took me two days to recover from the wicked race hangover I got from this.

My final time was 2:19:09 for a not too glorious 51second personal record.

It's a bittersweet new personal record. It's not the one I wanted but getting so sick in a race feels like a sort of accomplishment. Maybe it's a rite of passage, or maybe it's the knowledge that I gave it everything I could give it that day.

It also means I still have a huge record ahead of me.  I'm looking forward to my next half-marathon and I plan to get to the starting line with the same Mahna Mahna energy.

The Ten-Week Plan

Between placing my minimalist experiment on hold due to Achilles problems and having problems figuring out pacing, my running was suffering. I was randomly going on runs here and there. Some were fun, but many more were unsatisfying mostly because I'd set out to go for distance and find myself going out too soon, too hard and having to stop after a few miles.

I had to toss my five borough goal out the window when I realized I was too hurt to run Queens. As the last week of July drew to a close, I realized that if I didn't get my ass in gear I wouldn't reach any of my goals for the year.

With that, and an automated email from Bart Yasso, I was back in training. I'd signed up for the Runner's World Challenge and decided to go for a big goal: run a sub 2:00 Staten Island Half. An excited tweet about it led me to find a running partner working towards the same goal and off we went.

Aided by ice and a Strassburg Sock, the first couple of weeks went by without much of a hitch. I skipped some of the scheduled speed workouts in favor of speed training with my team, and I shifted the workouts around, but I mostly stuck to the plan.

And the plan was working! I was getting noticeably better. The "easy" pace with which I'd struggled at the beginning of the first week, was a breeze by the end of the second as I passed other runners on the Brooklyn Bridge. The third week had me scheduled for a tempo run, which I'd never done.

This workout called for me to warm up, then run three miles at a specific pace. The problem was that this pace was 9:09min/mi. That's faster than my fastest race and I'd have to do it without cheering crowds and without a finish line. The fear of not being able to do it almost kept me from getting out the door. Halfway through the workout as sweat flew from my elbows and I felt myself struggling to breathe, that fear almost made me quit.

I was running at a fast, challenging pace. I didn't have long to go and I was sure that even if I didn't make the exact goal, I'd be close. But it was a very hard pace for me and the idea of running thirteen miles at this pace seemed impossible. My body started tensing up, my mind getting ready for defeat, when I had to remind myself that no one was asking me to run thirteen miles at that pace now. All I had to then was three miles.

Stick to the plan is all I have to do. If I look at what the plan calls for in a few weeks, I start freaking out and I have to keep reminding myself to give it a chance. Give myself a chance. Assuming it's a good plan, as long as I focus on what I have to do each day, and then the day after, and do it, slowly, what once seemed impossible will be within reach.

Which is probably why self-help books are so appealing. Do this, and you'll get that. But outside of running and other athletic pursuits, ten week plans with clearly defined goals are probably no more than powerful marketing preying on the wishful.

Maybe so is this plan. Maybe all of my plans and nothing more than cotton candy wishful thinking that will melt away before I get a chance to taste success.

But I'd rather aim high and fall short, than not give myself a chance to fly.

With that tempo run, I got a clear taste of it.

Read the training report on that tempo run here.