Quitting while you’re ahead
So yesterday was the 2008 Seafair Marathon. I had hopes that it would be my second marathon and one I’d run with the 8 minute pacing group from my running club which wouldn’t be easy but should have been perfectly doable and provide me with some training I hoped would prepare me for some solid marathon this fall where I could hopefully qualify for Boston.
It didn’t happen.
I started having concerns on Tuesday or Wednesday the week before the race when forecasts indicated that it could reach the 80’s over the weekend. Then it looked like it would get to the 90’s. Then it did. So it was hot. This was probably the first and biggest problem for me and should probably be the key lesson I learn which is (at least for me) heat makes a tremendous difference in the effort and experience of a race.
Second, the course really is not easy. This year was a new course starting at Husky Stadium, going across the 520 floating bridge, and winding down through Bellevue and then up to Kirkland before coming back to finish in Bellevue. Judging from the elevation profile, the first half of the course really *should* have been the easy part. The second half starts with the biggest climb of the course (something like 300′ or about like climbing up Queen Anne hill but with a shallower gain) and after a long rolling descent, the final couple miles of the course demand about another 200′ of climbing before the finish.
I have no idea which factor was more influential but I found the combination brutal. After 10 miles at an 8 minute pace I found myself feeling pushed just to maintain the pace, and this is after a long run three weeks earlier where I did 20 miles at an average 8 minute pace where most of the run was conversational and felt fine or even good. Either way, the effort was considerably greater than I anticipated and I knew given how tired I felt, what the remainder of the course looked like (from the elevation map) and that the day would only get hotter, I had nothing but a brutal day of increasingly compromised goals ahead of me. It would almost definitely not help me build either the physical or mental foundation that would help me get to my fall goal and would probably be detrimental, and so I decided to call it a day and slowly walk/jogged back to the course and eventually back to the finish where I asked for a half finisher medal.
One other note on muscle preparedness. Last week (my last taper week leading up to the race) I noticed some occasional soreness in my right calf. It wasn’t constant and after I would get a few minutes into most of my runs it tended to feel OK again but after I stopped in Seafair this muscle actually started cramping. I don’t exactly know where the threshold here is, but in hindsight I was in a “this may seem OK, but it’s really not prepared to get through a marathon” range and may also be a lesson that if there are any problems in training leading up to a marathon and close to the marathon date, there’s probably a good chance that it will be a problem in the race.
So overall, it was a pretty tough call to make and it’s hard now not to be disappointed. After training for this for a long time, having set what felt like scaled back goals, and then feeling like you’ve fallen so short of even those goals, it’s really hard not to be pretty disappointed. On the other hand, I did experience and hopefully learn some lessons in preparation that should be more helpful next time around. My training all felt basically right on (whereas before Portland I didn’t start with and appropriate base), my nutrition felt basically right (whereas before Portland I experimented with a carb loading technique that may have been my key problem), I figured out something about my muscles (the sore calf), and I definitely got more insight into what heat and elevation can do to performance.