Rubber Side Down

my Rock'n'Roll story

Wanting to write this before I get back into the workaday world... I'm really glad I went. You know, it's a long time since Sacramento and it's amazing how different the two marathons were for me. The first one: all worried about avoiding the wall which I guarded against by eating just HUGE quantities of food in the 2 or 3 days leading up. The second one: not really paying attention to this or eating even the NORMAL amount in the days leading up (due to the travel, being in a different city and not making an effort to find the food I wanted, etc, etc) but not worrying about that, thinking that I have more muscle mass than I did last Oct and also that it was more important to eat DURING than PRIOR to the race. Only, I kind of forgot to follow through. Why? I think I started out feeling like 9s would be tough. Only they weren't. In fact, they felt slow and pretty effortless. This lead me to a false sense of security that I would just keep them up and sail in, easily in 4 hours. I really got caught up in this. Endorphins? It was really a fun feeling, just knocking off the miles. This probably sounds crazy (and it will to me in a couple of months if I look back at it, I'm guessing), but I felt like the miles were really going by faster than ever before. I was thinking, "it can't already be the next mile" but sure enough it was. I started fantasizing about it getting more fun, the faster you went. Like I already blogblabbed, I really believed this was going to be easy and so didn't worry about food. Somewhere between 16-19 miles, I started to get slower and I couldn't get back the pace. Once I changed to walk just for a minute, my hips really made their tiredness known. I didn't stop to stretch but I did keep switching between walking and (much slower than 9min pace) jogging.

Lessons learned:
- Do like Sissie - force food down in small amounts, but at regular intervals.
- Continue to build endurance so that walk-breaks are not needed. For me, once I start to walk, I want more - better to just not go there until after 26.2.
- Pamper myself more when it's a unknown location. Don't push it with skipping meals, driving crazy distances, wasting time getting lost due to poor navigation while driving, delays due to traffic jams and construction. Marathon's are hard enough without these extra stresses.

The best parts:
- Tylenol-free this time, despite my new vocation as Tylenol-spokesperson (see photos). I can't say that about Sacramento ;)
- I had at least 16 great 9 minute miles and I know that was not possible last October, so this is proof of the benefit of training over the winter.
- Support from the other RSDers, Coyote and Pegasissie, and Steven!

posted by Iron Dayle @ 10:20 AM