Race Day
Mile 15. “I wonder if someone will take me back to the
finish line” I thought. I gazed longingly at the spectators and those awesome
moving couches they call cars. Five miles earlier I was seeing spots and almost
threw up after definitely taking the biggest hill on the course waaayyyyy too
hard. Judging from the way my lungs were trying to exit my body, I knew I had
gone anaerobic and gone into an oxygen deficit that I could not recover from. I
had burnt all my matches at Mile 11, and I was running on fumes.
Mile 15-Mile 21 was a six-mile long negotiation with myself
not to quit. I have DNF’ed (Did Not Finish) before and the poignant post-race
feelings of regret and disappointment had lingered for a very long time. However,
this time was different. I had already been so mentally checked out by then
that, when I thought about how I would feel about DNF’ing a week post-race, I
knew it would only be with relief and acceptance. Perhaps the only thing that kept
me going was the thought that, with a point-to-point race, waiting in the cold
drizzle in wet, thin race clothes was worse than just walking it in.
At mile 21, the dreaded butt-clenching clouds of darkness
descended upon me. My race had gone to shit… literally. I had to poop really
badly. With 5 miles left and several aid stations between me and the finish, I
did not figure it would be a big problem. Unbeknownst to me, I had just left
the last aid station with porta-potties. I had to slow down to a shuffle as it
is really hard to run when you have to poop (that has literally been the title
of several of my Strava runs). There was not much foliage to duck into by the
roadside and I would have been an easy spot with my bright race gear. This was
just the final straw atop the big pile of hay-crap that broke my spirit and I
just sighed at the absurdity of it all. I shuffled it in with a time of 3:22:21,
a mediocre performance for me at best. I was just glad to be done and looking
forward to the recovery.
So what had happened?
Stress is Stress is Stress
There is a saying that “There is no such thing as overtraining,
just under-recovering.” and the ability to train and recover is limited by
stress, both mental and physical. It is easy to be cognizant of the physical
stress but the mental stress is equally, if not more, debilitating and insidious.
There is an endless list of the sources of stress but here are the ones that I
would like to acknowledge affected me the most during this training cycle for
this race and the ones that I want to talk about.
1. Work
2. Lack of sleep
3. Weather
4. Race weight (and fueling)
5. The lack of a solid base
6. Lack of balance
7. The pressure of achievement and past comparisons
#1 - Work
Let’s start with work. For most people, work will usually be
a source of some kind of stress. Working remotely meant traveling to the HQ once
a month, which meant missing Sunday long runs and not sleeping well/much
(flights from western Mass to Indiana usually involved waking up really early,
like 5am, and getting back really late, i.e. after midnight). A new global company
structure and being involved in a lot of various projects meant I was taking
calls at 6 or 7am and or 5-6pm. This
meant not doing a morning yoga, stretching or strengthening routine and, sometimes,
missing out on an afternoon run. As the work piled on, I am someone who dwells
on things so it was getting harder for me to compartmentalize and prevent work
from impacting other facets of my life. The work-life balance was starting to
become not so much of a balance. Maybe it is simply time management but I also
felt mentally drained as there was not much opportunity for mental downtime.
Running was not the mental outlet that it usually is (See #6 – The pressure of
achievement). I could tell from the way my breath would not release my muscles during
yoga that the tension in my body was building and it was hard to relax.
#2- Lack of Sleep
Recovery and sleep go hand-in-hand. Between allergies in the
spring (See #4 – Weather), the dog being obnoxious in bed, mentally dwelling on
work (#1) and training stuff (#6) as well as traveling meant I was getting less
sleep, and, when I did get sleep, the quality of sleep was also usually
compromised. Hence, I usually woke up tired, feeling less than optimally
recovered and not very inclined to do much in the morning. Sleepytime tea did
not really help and I was not sure if I wanted to resort to drugs like
melatonin, etc.
The night before the marathon was probably the worst I have
slept before any race. Nerves (#6), allergies and the feeling of an oncoming
cold (that thankfully never materialized) kept me up and I slept fitfully. It
was less than ideal for a prime race. I was a walking zombie.
#3 – Weather
I now know how dreadful it is to train for a spring race in
New England. This past winter was, honestly, not that bad but we still had intermittent
bouts of snow and, hence, quality running was sporadic. I looked forward to the gorgeous
spring but the relief was fleeting. Whatever I was allergic to Indiana, I was allergic
to here as well. With Spring in full bloom, so were my allergies. My car looked
worse here than it did back in Indiana, like someone took yellow cornmeal and
sifted it all over. Rain runoff dried into rivers of yellow paint on the
pavement. I have never experienced asthma so I can only imagine what it feels
like but trying to do workouts with all the pollen in the air made me feel
pre-asthmatic. I am also mildly allergic to dogs so living with a shedding dog
was just exacerbating my symptoms. Allergy symptoms most definitely stressed my
system and impaired my ability to sleep and recover.
#4 – Race Weight (and fueling)
This is where I start getting into the deep stuff. I will be
honest – weight matters (depending on your goals, of course). When you are
trying to run the fastest times at the limit of your physical capabilities over
a distance as grueling as the marathon, every pound that you carry with you
over that distance matters. Carrying over excess weight from the holidays, the
lack of base and gorging myself on good meats in Patagonia meant I was starting
my training macrocycle at 165lbs. At my best, when I hit my marathon 3:03 PR at
Monumental, I was at a (comparatively) svelte 149lbs. When I did triathlon and
set my 100-mile PR, I was also hovering in that region so I have always thought
that to be my ideal race weight. Setting a goal to lose 16lbs in 16 weeks was
probably (no, most definitely) too much of a stretch. To begin with, I am not a
svelte guy, most definitely not built to the image of the stereotypical
long-distance road runner. The table below is generated from a nifty Excel file
that I got somewhere that calculates a whole bunch of stats based on evidence
and study results from Jack Daniels and it shows how weight COULD affect
your race times.
I generated this towards the end of my training cycle, just
around the time I ran the Boston Marathon. At that time, I weighed about 156lbs
and I estimated that, on a good day, I could run a 3:15 marathon. Dropping down
to 149lbs COULD mean gaining another 7 minutes.
For a while, weight was dropping off well with the increase
in volume and eating well but it started to plateau as the stress (and muscle)
built and built. I am Malaysian and, if there is anything anyone knows about
Malaysians, it is that we love to eat. If I were to ever die from one of the
seven sins, it would most definitely be gluttony. Work stress (#1) and training
stress (#6) meant finding comfort in food, with a little bit of ice cream at
the end of dinner every day, accompanied by wine, beer and/or cider for some alcohol
to take the edge off the day’s stressed (New England has some tasty ciders. yum
yum).
Eating is fuel and training well is absolutely dependent on
good fuel. While I was eating healthy (and I don’t count calories), in an
effort to lose weight, I ran into issues with underfueling with the kind of
food that my body needed to sustain the increased volume and tempo in my
training. Salads, carrots, celery and hummus may be healthy for lunch but I
soon found that I did not have the energy my speedwork and tempo runs required.
Going back to more substantial meals gave me more energy to hit my workouts but
it also meant my weight was stabilizing at around 155lbs, which is what I raced
Sugarloaf at. The table haunted me. The lack of quality sleep probably also did
not help my weight loss efforts. A vicious cycle it is.
#5 – Lack of a solid base
2017 may have been the year I let too many things slide. I
was dealing with a series of injuries, work was stressful, we were moving to a different
state and I was trying to negotiate a new remote arrangement at work. Other
than my build-up to IT100 in April, I hovered around 30miles a week for the rest
of the year, not having a fall race to train for. To compound that, injuries
plagued me in the latter half of 2016, where I also did not run a fall race as
work was getting really busy (#1), so my decline in base mileage probably
started then. Without fall races to train for, the pressure was off for me to
train, which I thought was okay as I had other mounting pressures from other
sources to handle (#3). All in all, going into this training cycle, I did not
have what I would consider a base, much less a good one, to build on.
In comparison, when I ran my 3:03 at Monumental in the fall,
I had a solid base from IT100 training in the spring, which carried me through
the summer and fall to prep me for grueling speedwork and tempo runs. Just for
a numbers comparison, I had averaged 40-50 miles a week in the preceding 6
months before starting my training cycle for Monumental, whereas, here, I was
still hovering around 30miles a week..
In hindsight, it was probably too ambitious to build both
base and speed concurrently and it proved too much for my body and mind to
handle. The lack of base meant I did not recover from my Boston Marathon
training run well, when I had bounced back from the Mill Race Marathon relatively
easily during my lead-up to Monumental. Towards the end, while I was able to
hit similar (if not, slightly even better) splits in training than I had for
Monumental, the efforts felt much harder than I thought they were supposed to.
#6 – Lack of balance
There was definitely a lack of balance this past spring.
Previously, when training for Monumental, Sunday runs after my Saturday long
runs involved lovely easy trail runs in Brown County with BARA folks, which
were an amazing boon to the mental pressures of pace-hitting workouts and long
runs. When I was not traveling on Sundays, I would try to get in runs on the
road or rail trail to build up mileage, with the trails being snow-logged and
all. I seriously miss those low-pressure fun runs and we should not take those
for granted.
Monday and Friday climbing sessions, which were always a
welcomed change of pace and body movement, were a thing of the past, what with not
having a consistent climbing partner, the climbing gym being much further and winter
making sloths of us all. With visits to the climbing gym being of limited prime
time, using the workout room to use the treadmill to get in mileage took
precedence over climbing. Building mileage was getting to me and, with the added
logistics of getting to runnable terrain, running and hitting paces was
starting to feel like a chore.
#7 – The Pressure of Self-Expectations and Past Comparisons
You probably have noticed by now that I have mentioned 3:03
and Monumental a lot in this post. After running 3:03 at Monumental in 2015, I
had developed a new goal – to run a sub-3:00 marathon. The 3:03 had teased me
into thinking that a sub-3:00 is tantalizingly within reach. Three minutes is
only 6-7seconds per mile faster. No big deal, right? Thinking back, it seems so
arbitrary but then again, aren’t most personal goals things we set arbitrarily
for ourselves?
This brings me to my last stress which was the internal
pressure that I had set upon myself to achieve this arbitrary goal that I had
set. Did it make me a better runner or a better person? Probably not but,
similar to the 24-hour mark in 100-milers, I thought that breaking that sub-3:00
threshold would be a fitting symbol of achievement of my running “career”. Is
it appropriate to think that way? Maybe not, some sport psychologists may say,
but I would say it is probably inherent in the Type A personalities that athletes
embody and it is natural that thoughts like that would surface.
Soon, every workout became a comparison to similar workouts
I did back in 2015. My weight also became another marker of comparison. If what
I did back then worked, why wouldn’t it work again? To some degree, it did.
Through this training macrocycle, I hit 10K and half-marathon PRs. I was able
to do mile repeats at a faster pace and I was able to come close to my previous
tempo runs. My new burst of hitting milestones compounded my thinking - “I
should be able to do this! I am running equal, if not better, than before and I
still weigh more! (#4) I have wiggle room!”. Thus, I threw myself into more training,
trying to do more workouts per week, 2 + 1long run per week, where previously I
only did 1+1 long run. However, even though I was hitting (again, arbitrary)
mid-term goals, I was also equally experiencing bad workouts, as you can see
from many titles of my runs on Strava during the last few months. While these
bad workouts were not consistent, they were often enough to affect my mental
state, turning it into a teeter-totter of positives and negatives. It was only
a few weeks post-Boston, when I realized that I was not recovered as well as I
had hoped to be at that point, that I recognized my folly and scaled it back
but it was too little, too late. The hole had been dug.
It was only post-Sugarloaf, upon some deep, dark
introspection, that I realize that those thoughts, while motivating at the
time, can be very dangerous and insidious as they come naturally and seem
positive and driving. The weight of expectation can be very heavy indeed.
Equally, if not more, heavy is the price of letting that weight affect you. I
think all of this is doubly dangerous for goal-achieving distance runners as we
are often walking this very fine line between fitness and overtraining and this
just compounds the drive to do more. The slightest disturbance can easily tip
the balance into an unrecoverable spiral of burnout. From my thoughts on race
day, in hindsight, I was probably already burnt out before I even toed the
starting line as I just wanted to be done with it. I was done with the pressure
of achievement and self-expectation.
So what now?
This was a kick in the butt I needed and it showed me how
important it is to maintain consistency over an extended period of time to
build a solid base, especially for an effort, like a fast marathon, that is so
heavily dependent on mileage and strength. This was a painful lesson but it was
a lesson that I am thankful to experience as it will prove valuable for the
future. I am thankful for a relatively successful training block and, to
emphasize, in some ways, the build-up to the race was successful. I had hit
several PRs and that is still a pretty cool thing that should be celebrated.
Even though I did not achieve the goal, even though it was a
disappointing experience, the process and the journey is ultimately what is
most important and being grateful and appreciative of everything about the
process is what will keep me going. The training block was also successful in that
I came out of it relatively physically unscathed and I am thankful that I now have
a good solid base for ramping up my training for the Bear100 in September.
Boasting a daunting 22,000 ft of elevation gain, the Bear100 is my main “A”
race for the year and will be the toughest 100-miler for me by far. Luckily, I
can now get back into my beloved element of the woods and trails. I also love
100s as it is hard to build self-expectation of achievement into any type of
race that has an average DNF rate of 33% (fake statistic! but it is not low for
sure) and the main base goal is just to finish.
I did not hit my goal or achieve anything close to what I
wanted but, after this deep reflection, (think pensive scene by a lakeside with
a backdrop of mountains), I am okay with
that. This setback does not mean I should stop trying to explore what my limits
are or that I should not try to set lofty running goals, as the efforts will
only build me into a better runner. The key thing to me is that I tried. The
hardest part, but maybe the most important part, is that I keep trying.
Three (okay, maybe five) things I learnt (comments from Arielle)
1. Every training cycle and their starting point is
different: make comparisons with caution and be cognizant of
unrealistic/inappropriate comparisons
2. Casual group runs with friends help psychologically – not
having a tight, friendly running group like BARA made it tough to go out for
easy runs and fun runs
3. Communicate with partner for accountability (like “no ice
cream after dinner” or “stop buying so much discounted cheeses so I can lose
weight!” 😊 )
4. To not let my race results define me as a runner
5. Having both a spring and fall race help drive the motivation to keep up the mileage and consistency
Three (okay, maybe five) mistakes / things I would do
differently
1. Be patient and consistent. Build base before building speed, try not to do both
concurrently and MAINTAIN the base!
2. Find better balance between the types of running as well
as non-running activities
3. I need to find better/more effective/efficient ways to
relax and release tension
4. Overdoing it on the Euro/electro/dance music during
training – Use performance boosters sparingly to prevent oversaturation and reduction
of effectiveness. On race day, after everything went to the pits, I just felt
annoyed by my music, rather than got pumped up.
5. Arielle comments to “Maintain a better diet that provides
needed fuel while keeping weight down”. I’m sure that is appropriate but I think
I’m still too Malaysian for that. :P
Three things I think I did right and am proud of
1. Finishing the race - Not really a case of did right but
proud of battling inner mind demons and just not quitting
2. Putting in the hard work for workouts – I am happy about
my PRs and the hard work that went into them. I just need to be more strategic
about targeting PRs.
3. Come out of all this wanting to shoot for sub-3:00 again
someday. Will I get it or was that one day at Monumental in 2015 my
once-in-a-lifetime “blaze of glory”? I will never know unless I keep trying to find
out.
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