Final Long Run!

Saturday was my final long run before the marathon! It was 20 miles, and once again, my totally awesome little brother did it with me on his bike. There were a few minor trip-ups, however....
So I arrived back home the night before at about midnight, after a six our roadtrip home from Montreal, and I really did NOT want to be waking up at 7:00 am to run for 3.5 hours, but I decided that I could suck it up one last time. So on Saturday morning, I woke up and opened up my suitcase to get out my running gear. I grabbed my water bottle belt, headphones, sneakers, and went downstairs. When I sat down to put on my sneakers though... I realized that I had two left shoes. I brought the left sneaker from each of my pairs of running shoes from Montreal. I could NOT believe it. I was so angry... how could I have POSSIBLY done something so STUPID!??! It would've been a little less stupid if I had at least brought a right and a left shoe. So after I was done yelling and swearing about my shoe situation, I went to my room and found my old Asics that I ran in during my senior year of high school cross-country. I reluctantly put them on and went outside to start my run. Then, my one and only hair elastic broke... and then I realized that the tiny sharp pain I'd been feeling on the bottom of one of my toes was actually a tiny piece of glass that I'd stepped on and had gotten lodged in there.

So... after jumping over all of these hurdles... I finally hit the road to start my run. It was a gorgeous day and the first seven miles that I ran by myself could not have been happier. (sidenote -- Janelle Monae: wherever you are and whatever you're doing right now... I just want to say that your music is one of the most amazing things in the world and not only makes me happy day-to-day but also really gets me through some of my tough runs.) I tried to start out faster than I did my last 20-miler, and I held up pretty well.
Sam met up with me in the Devens Army base like last time, and we chatted for the rest of the run. The only downside to talking to Sam while running is that sometimes he makes me laugh so hard that I can't run!!

The old shoes definitely did a number on my feet, and I could feel hot spots as early as mile 10... which turned into popped-in-my-socks blisters... gross.

But... after ALL OF THAT... I ended up running my LONGEST RUN EVER -- 20 miles -- in 12 minutes less than I did 19 miles 3 weeks ago!!! YAY FOR GETTING STRONGER! I'm so so so happy with myself, and although it's now Tuesday night and I'm still sore, I'm READY FOR THE RACE.   :o)

Winding Down

So this past weekend was my last long run in Montreal before the marathon. I was supposed to do 20 miles this weekend, but decided to switch two weeks around so that I can do my last 20-mile run at home again, with my brother when I go back for vacation.
This past weekend, though, my brother was actually visiting me here, in Montreal, and I have to say that I probably made a mistake by doing my long run on Sunday, after he left, because the weekend with him really did a number on my legs and made me feel not ready at all for 15 miles on Sunday. On Saturday him and I rented Bixi bikes and rode around the city, went to the Farmer's Market, and through the plateau quite a bit. I also did a short 3-mile run afterwards, so by Sunday afternoon, when he left, I did not want to run 15 miles. I dropped him off at the bus station and started my run from there. When I was standing in line with him at the station I said, "Sam... I really don't want to run right now. Like, I've never wanted to run less I don't think in my entire life. Well, maybe except for that time at my high school league championships when I knew I was set for last-place out of about 100 girls." Sam laughed and said "Just don't go then. You'll probably be fine if you don't go, you've already done 20 miles before." I thought about it for a while... and his offer was so tempting. I could so easily just hope back on the metro and curl up in my bed and watch the Sopranos and make up for the hours of sleep I'd lost staying up late that weekend, and avoid the looming thunder clouds.
But then... I thought of something. Back in May, when I had a 12-mile run only 3 weeks into the training program, I remember having this thought: "Oh my god. I trained ALL SUMMER for this distance last year. I'm never going to be able to follow through with this for the whole summer. I'd better not tell too many people that I'm 'running a marathon' ...'cause I highly doubt I'll be able to go through with this whole thing." And then, that weekend, I ran 12 miles. And 10 the weekend after that, and 14, 16, 15, 18, 12, 20, 12, 15..... and as I stood there in the bus station, looking up at my 6' 4" brother while wearing my dorky water bottle belt and Red Sox hat... I thought "Wait a second.... I haven't skipped a beat yet." and it's true. I hadn't missed a single day all summer and there was no point in starting then.
My run wasn't even that bad. I was really really sore afterwards, more so than normal, but I did it. And I never have to run for hours in the city of Montreal again (besides the actual race) if I don't want to. But I probably will want to, and I'll probably look back one day and say "hah. that program was easy." But right now... It wasn't easy to me, and I'm proud of myself because I did it and I didn't give up.
I have one more week left of serious training, and then two weeks of tapering... and then the race. I've run around the world 0.02 times, burned enough energy to power 988.5 TVs, and burned the equivalent of 203.45 donuts. So, thank you, dailymile.com, for putting my grueling work into real-world information for me, so that I can grasp it with reason a little more tightly, and not just feel like a monotonous running machine.

New muscles?

I think my legs have new muscles. Or my legs were mysteriously replaced with someone else's (which can run 12 miles at an 8:40 pace and feel nothing) overnight. I seriously cannot believe how effortless my run felt today, and was especially not expecting it with small amount of sleep I was running on. 

But yeah... my 12 mile run today was a piece of cake and I find it funny that it was the end-goal of last summer's entire training. 

Awesome things about my run today: 

1. I ran up the mountain, which I haven't done in a long time, so I find it a small feat in itself that I started this long run with a 3-mile uphill. 

2. At the bottom of the mountain there was a group of bagpipers having their own little concert together in the park. 

3. When I got to Parc LaFontaine, there were so many artists and musicians everywhere -- cellists, violinists, french horn players, painters....

4. While running the last mile back to my apartment, I looked up at the top of the mountain and it seemed so far away and I could not believe that I had been up there only 90 minutes before. 

Great run.    :o)

Numbers

By the end of the week, I will have run 400 miles during this training period. WOO!

The marathon is also exactly one month from today. I'll do almost another 150 miles before then... I just can't believe how short of a time it sounds like, yet how many miles I have left to cover in 22 runs. Nerve-racking...

Oh yeah, and dailymile.com also just informed me that I have now run 0.02 of the distance around the earth's equator (since May). That's a small number... but the earth is pretty big....

I have the best little brother ever.

So... I'm home, back in MA for the weekend, and it's the weekend of my first 20-miler. I was really nervous last night, and my dad made me eat a hamburger AND spaghetti.... I thought I was going to explode. Anyways, I mapped out my route last night, into town center, down the bike path to the neighboring town, into the old army base, 6-mile loop, and back home on the bike path again. My little brother, Sam, goes to school in the old army base and helped me plan out the route. Then, he told me that he'd wake up this morning, bike out to meet me at the 7-mile mark, and bike around the 6-mile loop with me. So anyways, I downloaded Harry Potter 7, started out at an easy pace, and by the time I got to the end of the bike path I was already dreading finishing the run. I was just so... alone. And sort of bored. So then I see my brother and dad in the car, and I felt a bit better. Sam had on his backpack full of bananas and water bottles for me. I told him that he didn't need to stay right next to me, considering that I was running so low that he almost had to WALK his bike... but he did. He stayed next to me, biking right alongside, chatting me up, for the whole 6 mile loop. And then the next 7 miles back. SAM BIKED NEXT TO ME FOR THIRTEEN MILES ON A SATURDAY MORNING. He was so awesome. And I didn't listen to Harry Potter at all once we'd met up. We talked the entire time. The surprising thing was, I was ABLE to talk that whole time while I was running... and that helped me to keep pace. It was so awesome and Sam was my hero today. Maybe for the next month even.

I ended up running really really slow today. When I started my run, I decided to go at it with this mindset: "This is all I have to do today. I just need to finish, there is no rush." So I tried to run at (what I thought was) about a 10-minute-mile pace. It ended up being more like 11-minute miles at the end, which is really slow-sounding to me, but I'm so glad that I did it now. It was a great learning experience, because at the end I didn't feel nearly as bad as I'd anticipated feeling, so now I know that I can definitely do that distance faster than I did today. The only thing I feel a bit disappointing... is that we took a little detour and I ended up only doing 19 miles... OH WELL!! Great run. Great, great run.

Minor Scare...

So I say that this was a "minor" scare, but I was pretty freaked out when it happened...

To preface this story: On Saturday morning I woke up feeling too weak (both mentally and physically) to do my long run, so I decided to switch Saturday and Sunday's workouts, and do 5 miles at the gym on Saturday. I ended up doing part of it on the elliptical, which I haven't done yet through this whole training program, and honestly, cross-training felt kind of good.
Anyways... so on Sunday I woke up feeling bit better and decided that 12 miles was doable, so I strapped on my water bottle belt, plotted a map through the plateau, and set off. It wasn't hot out at all, so I didn't end up drinking too much throughout the run. The run itself was fine, not particularly difficult, but I've got some nasty blood blisters forming.
After my run I sat around my apartment, read, showered, watched TV, for the rest of the afternoon. After dinner I started to feel strange... the muscles in my torso really started to hurt -- like that feeling you get on Thanksgiving after eating too much and you're just stuffed. I didn't feel nauseous, just.... in pain.

So I went to bed, woke up Monday, still felt pretty bad, had breakfast, went to work. Around about 11:30 I had to go home.... I felt so bad. Pain, dizzyness, weakness, a touch of nausea... but I couldn't think of any reason why. I fell asleep for about four hours, woke up, had some gatorade (I thought it would help with the weakness 'cause I didn't feel like eating yet) and sat around some more. A few hours later I felt a very strange painful feeling in my abdomen, but realized I just had to pee. And there it hit me.... my pee was dark and thick.  I freaked out. I called my dad, thinking I had some crazy kidney problem. But... after rethinking the previous 24 hours since my long run I realized how little I'd had to drink during and after that run. I looked up "dehydration" in my running handbook... and there was an anecdote written by the author about his biggest scare with dehydration: "Once, after a 20 mile run when I'd barely drank anything, I had one of the biggest scares of my running life.  I felt very weak, and several hours later I went to the bathroom and my pee was purple! I freaked out at first and then remembered that after my run I'd chugged two grape sodas, and my body must've been so dehydrated that it didn't even have time to filter out the artificial coloring."
So... I can only assume that this is what happened to me with my dehydration and red gatorade.

Feeling a bit better now, had a lot of water last night, but still a bit sore and tired. Moral of this story: after running, drink 'til you pee.

Daunting Week

So this week will be by far my biggest challenge, I think.
I have three 6-mile runs in a row, and I've only got one of them down so far. My long run coming up is only 12 miles, so that's not too bad... it's just the wear-and-tear that I know will build up over the course of this week that I find daunting. It has started on a good note though! I came home from work in a not-so-great mood and really really didn't feel like running (which I usually WANT to do when I'm in a bad mood...) but I went anyways, and it was hot. The funny thing is, that despite this whole mind-game I'm playing with myself about how hard this week will be, the 6 miles just passed. They were started and over just like that, in the blink of an eye. I think I'm going to have to re-listen to the chapters of Harry Potter that played on my MP3 player today because I really just zoned out. The run didn't feel particularly long or hard or anything. It just.... went. 
There is this whole branch of thought about running and how it is a form of meditation, and I think I am only now just touching on what those people are talking about. Your mind really does leave your body sometimes. An hour that I spend sitting at my desk at work feels ten times as long as that 55 minutes of running did. 
So what does this mean? I'm not sure. Have I hit some new level that you can only get to by experience? Do casual joggers feel this and I am just far behind the crowd? I'm not sure, because I've definitely felt "in the zone" or whatever you want to call it before... but this is something new. 


I'm reading a book right now called "Once a Runner" by John L. Parker Jr., which is supposed to be the best novel ever written about running, and the main character is a track runner whose life-goal it is to run a mile in under 4 minutes. He runs over ten miles every day, but doesn't buy into the whole zen-meditation running idea, and his only true motivation is to be faster than his fastest. One of the chapters is a long, internal monologue that he has while running at night, about the loneliness of running and why he sill does it, and as lame as this sounds.... it spoke to me:

"The true competitive runner, simmering in his own existential juices, endured his melancholia the only way he knew how: gently, together with those few others who also endured it, yet very much alone. He ran because it grounded him in basics. There was both life and death in it; it was unadulterated by media hype, trivial cares, political meddling. He suspected it kept him from that most real variety of schizophrenia that the republic was then sprouting like mushrooms on a stump.

Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free."