Pre-Portland: Fall 2017 Season Recap

After a few crazy weeks and a nearly-missed flight, I am finally in Portland . . . so I guess it's time for the annual pre-marathon self-pep-talk/season-review.

Posting a goal time (that I will fail to achieve) at the Strava mile.

The Challenges
The biggest challenge this season has been adjusting to a new coach. Trusting someone brand new is hard, and no matter how badly I want to fast forward to the point where I blindly believe everything he says, I'm simply not capable of that . . . at least not yet. But looking back at my previous coaching relationship, I recognize that I am capable of that level of trust, it just takes time, and certainly more than one full training cycle. So as impatient as I feel, I have to accept where I am and how far I have to go, and give it the time it takes.

The long and lonely road . . . crossing train tracks
on my 3hr long run in Portland.

The next big challenge has been learning how to fail, although truthfully, I don't think I've learned this lesson yet. I failed in my last two long runs leading up to this marathon, and I'm not talking about just running "off pace;" I'm talking about quitting entirely. The hardest thing about these failures has been knowing, even as they're happening, that the stumbling blocks are mental, and succumbing to them anyway. The perfectionist in me wants to scream, Weakling! How will you ever get through this race if you can't even finish a workout? But I'm (hopefully) learning to reign in that voice, and to keep the punches from flying when I'm down.

The final challenge this cycle has been (re)learning how to train alone. When I ran my first marathon, I trained pretty much by myself; I had just moved to New York City and didn't know very many people, never mind runners. Now, things are different: I know tons of runners and have had the luxury of running with many of them for my last few training cycles. This year, however, that luck ran dry. My old training partners were taking breaks, and my new ones were focusing on the mile, meaning that they had zero interest in doing a ten-mile workout on Tuesday and another twenty-mile run on Saturday. Having had company for so many previous seasons, I kind of forgot: training alone is hard. There's no one to inspire you to get out of bed, no one to pace off of, and no one pull you along when you're having a crappy day. If nothing else, it makes me that much more grateful for runs where I do have company. Silver linings, right?

The Triumphs
If most of my challenges this season were mental, most of my successes were mental, too. For starters, I consider it a success that I finally stopped worrying over whether I was doing "enough" training. Frankly, it's scary to go from increasing mileage every single season to suddenly scaling it back, yet still with the goal of running faster than ever before. It's scary to abandon track work altogether when I've gone to that same oval every single Thursday for the last three years of my life. But sometime in the midst of training, I decided to put my own fears aside and just do my best with what I was being given. My new coach's approach to preparing for a marathon might seem gentler, but I chose this coach, with this approach, for a reason. I owe it to myself to see it through.

Teammates really are the best

The other triumph this season was learning to read my body. I've had to face a hard truth this year: I'm not 25 anymore. I can't just roll out of bed, throw on some shoes, and expect to start running at 6am. I also can't expect my body to recover like it used to. Case in point: about a month ago, I took a trip to the west coast for a wedding. While I was out there, I was scheduled to do my longest run of the training cycle. The next day, I felt fatigued, but certainly not "wrecked," so I was pretty upbeat about the workout I had coming up. However, two days later, I found myself a mile into the workout, straining mightily, and still not coming close to the pace I was meant to hit. At that point, I had a decision to make: try to grind through this workout feeling like crap and very obviously failing, or throw in the towel, jog back, and attempt the workout again the next day. I went with Option B. The next day, I found a middle school track and did all nine miles there--and nailed them. Now let me be clear: this is not a triumph because I nailed the workout. It's a triumph because, instead of berating myself for "failing," I recognized that my body had not yet recovered and gave it a chance to succeed on another day. I showed myself compassion and, by doing that, was able to make a smart choice. This is not something my 25-year-old self would have been capable of doing, but my 31-year-old self did it, so I am ready to call that progress.

The Bottom Line: I know I can do this. I can run this marathon the way I want to. Whether I do or not remains to be seen. But I did everything I could to give myself the best shot, and really, that's all any of us can ask of ourselves.