Friday, June 20, 2008

Poor Marathon Preparation

Two things never to do when preparing for and running a marathon:

1) Use the La Jolla Half Marathon as your only training run over 8 miles this year.

Really that's just dumb. You can see I ran a pretty solid half marathon practice back in December when I was ramping for the marathon. Granted this was in snow on icy roads, but still I was EXHAUSTED at the end. My 2:25 in the LJ Half Marathon also seemed brutal, but the weather and hills had something to do with that. I ran the first half of the RnR Marathon in 2:07 with ZERO Taper and felt GREAT at that point, and continued pushing a solid 9:45 pace til mile 19 when my foot started hurting like crazy, which brings me to:

2) Use fancy new Newton Running shoes for a full marathon. (Disclaimer: I LOVE my Newton running shoes, and they WARN you to take time with them. I had run 50 mi. on them but see 1 above)

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid. I think the two problems go hand in hand. Had I had a couple more training runs I would have either adapted muscularly (I think my form got sloppy when I got tired), or realized I should use regular shoes for longer runs.

Basically those two issues compounded to ruin my race. All things considered my fitness is GREAT as I was still about 207 on race day but really the first 17mi. markers just seemed to fly by. As soon as I got serious pain in my foot I stopped, and pretty much walked the rest after a couple attempts to jog gave me bad pain in my foot. On the bright side my timely halt to running left me able to run a nice tempo run 2 days later (I finished, and still did a tempo run two days later?) with minor pain, and was totally fine by Thursday.

I haven't even begun to train hard, but I can see my run endurance is PLENTY capable for my 70.3 races this year. I'm predicting Sub 2:00 Splits for both races.


Winter Snowing Half Marathon in Portland:




Rock and Roll Marathon (First 24 mi.):