Today was a painful reminder that in marathon training, it's tough to have your cake and eat it too. I traveled with the Bull City Track Club for an indoor meet in the brand new JDL Fast Track indoor track center in Winston-Salem. Because it was a short race distance, my plan beforehand was to slip on flats immediately after the race and jump into a marathon-pace tempo in the neighborhood of a half hour.
I'll call the 3k a disaster of a race (I literally limped in, as I'll explain, for a 9:13). I'll quickly break the event down, first by whiny excuses, and then by positive takeaways.
Whiny Excuses
- We were rushed to the line. The starters called us 15 minutes early, leaving most of us to scramble to put on our spikes immediately after we finished warming up. So that meant no stretching, strides, or pre-race poops of any kind.
- I was going into this race dog-tired. I wanted to see if I could run under 9:00 again on tired legs, coming in on my highest-mileage week since July 2010. It wasn't meant to be today.
- My left foot again turned to hamburger. I tried to remedy the problem that I had at Liberty (and really every non-banked indoor track I've ever run on) by wearing thicker socks. That clearly didn't work. I felt like a hot knife was stabbing the outside of my left foot around every turn. I sat down off the track, took my spikes off in frustration, and saw that the still-healing callous from Liberty had a new, golfball-sized bloody blister. The straightaways were fine, but every tight turn put me in a ton of pain.
Positive Takeaways
- I stuck to the plan afterward. Instead of sitting and sulking at my misfortune and my foot, I slipped on my flats, jogged for a half mile to test out my foot. It felt not-great-but-OK, so I commenced into what felt like marathon pace down the road to a junior high that had a dirt track. I recorded two miles on there in 5:34--right on target--and then hammered back home to the track for a solid 35 minutes at marathon pace. In a sense, I took what could have been a crappy day and made up for it on the second half of the workout.
- My inner common sense is usually right. The real reason that I wanted to race today is because I knew that there would be competition and I wanted to support the BCTC team. This alone does not mean that I should be racing. I felt tired all week, including during the workout on Wednesday, and I should have listened to my own intuition. Coming off of Uhwarrie, I probably got a little greedy here.
- The team ran well. Alex and Monk put up some big times. It's hard to be upset with that
When I got home, my stomach was a wreck, which took some Pepto and time in the bathroom to shake it. I drained and cleaned up my mangled foot, and applied some moleskin that I bought on the way home.
Overall, I'm fine with calling this a blip on the radar and part of the ups and downs of trying to get ready for a fast marathon: "Sometimes you eat the bear, and, well, sometimes he eats you."
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