Burlington Kickoff!

Miles Run This Week: 3.0

Days until Burlington: 110

Monday morning I (officially) kicked off my training for the marathon! It was an easy 3-miler at a 11:15 pace – more like a recovery run than anything.

Sunday I ran the Super Sunday 5 miler, and PRed with a finish of 47:49 (a 9:34 pace). My last 5 miler I ran at a 9:58 pace, so I was pretty happy about the results. It was about 30 at gun time (seem to be the trend for my races this season – train in mild temps, race when it’s tits cold) and the first mile was BRUTAL. My fingers lost feeling and my feet started to get numb, which made it feel like I had bricks at the end of my legs – but I tore out of the start with an 8:36 mile – I think it was my body trying to warm me up, and had nothing to do with actual running (fight or flight!). The course was nice and straight forward – down to Harvard(ish) and come back down Cambridge Street to Kendall. 

I noticed that the GPS on my MapMyRun had that same weird discrepancy as the St. Pete’s Beach 10K – 0.16 miles. Seriously, I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it threw off all my paces and dashed some hopes and dreams to run the whole thing in sub-9s (OK, my legs actually dashed that dream, but let’s blame the technology instead).  Looks like I’m going to have to start subtracting 0.16 from all my distance runs, and recalculating my pace from there, which in theory, defeats the whole purpose of running with the GPS and pacing on my phone.

The good news is that the same thing also happened in this race as St. Pete’s Beach: I passed more people at the end than people passed me. This is kind of a big moment for me – I’ve been working for almost 3 years to learn how to race; to pace and to finish strong rather than burn out with a half mile or mile to go.  I saw a few girls in front of me the first couple miles, and the pride in my head started nagging, “They shouldn’t be beating you. Look at how big her ass is. She shouldn’t be beating you. Is that girl wearing Sketchers? She definitely shouldn’t be beating you.” But I told it to shut up; this is my last “fun run” for the next 16 weeks, I wasn’t going to get hung up on proving something to…nobody. Who knows? Maybe those girls work a hell of a lot harder than I do, and deserve to be in front of me. One thing I’ve learned in running is that it doesn’t matter what it looks like while you’re running – you get out of it what you put into it. If you do tons of work and still have a big ass – maybe you’re running 8:30s and have a big ass. Maybe you’re thin and can only run 10:45s. Doesn’t matter in the end; running is still just for you.

So I passed the 5K mark and registered a 29ish “split” (which is about my 5K PR in October). So I started focus on my cadence and breathing. And then, on a hill, I caught the girl with the big ass. We ran next to each other for a little bit; I could tell she did not want me to pass her. This game is essential to racing and pushing yourself. So she played tag with me for about half a mile, but eventually she dropped off and I didn’t see her again. My other target had bright pink Under Armour and had shoulders like a linebacker. I didn’t speed up – that’s always my fatal mistake. I figured if I catch her, I catch her. If I don’t, at least I ran hard to chase her. I caught her at the water stop at 4 – she didn’t even stand a chance. With about 0.8 to go, I saw the girl with the Sketchers and she had a Brady jersey on. At the turn to go back to Kendall, me and my Giants shirt smoked her. SMOKED.

And then I started to crank. I started chanting “turnover turnover turnover” to focus on my legs. At the last turn to get to the finish, I started sprinting. Sprinting! I usually want to puke by that time. I passed 5 more people – FIVE!  - and only had one girl come of nowhere to pass me right before the finish mats.

It was a great race to run right before I start focusing everything towards Burlington.  Even though I didn’t really want to get out of bed Monday morning, I’m glad I did. I debated – with the ole “Well I’ll run after work tonight” – but even I knew I was bullshitting. So I logged 3 miles on the treadmill while I watched all the sad Patriots fans whining about how Tom Brady should be able to glue the ball into wide receivers’ hands.

This week, I’m supposed to run 15 miles, with my long run at 5 miles. Last week, I ran 11.8 miles, with my 5 mile race as my long run. I am getting so excited thinking about how prepared I am to start training, and how all the preparation – dating back to April 2011 – is going to translate into a marathon time that will reflect all this hard work!