Marathon #3 - Austin

Last weekend, I ran the Austin marathon. In... 4:12... That one is definitely going on my wall of shame. But let's go in order...

Training

To start with, this wasn't a great training cycle. I just checked my totals and in the three months before Austin I did 394 km, while for BayState (a much more controlled race) I totalled 454 km. While both are low to begin with, the difference isn't that huge. But for this one, the timing couldn't have been any worse -- training was pretty spotty in the three months before. First, November was more or less an empty month because of too many deadlines at work/school and the craziness involved with that. I had some good weeks in December, but travel didn't make the rest easier. Finally, I realized things weren't going great and I needed to pick it up in January, starting with 80 km weeks for most of the month. And then, just 3-4 weeks before the race, there was a huge cold around here, then a long trip around the country, then a lot of snow... I can keep coming up with excuses, but the fact is my training was fairly spotty.

Elevation profile of the course. Did anyone say 'hills'?

So, what was my plan? Even though I hadn't put in enough mileage, my pace in training had been creeping up, to the point where 3:20-3:25 h sounded reasonable in good conditions. Not in Austin, though. If you look at the elevation chart, you can see why. So, I decided to shoot for two things: (i) run a controlled race with a negative split (sounded easy because the last 11 km are downhill); (ii) finish with a time around 3:30 (which I thought accounted for the hills and my not-so-stellar shape).

First half

I flew into Austin the day before the race and spent most of the time catching up with an old friend and getting some work done. Carbed up properly the evening before (note to self, find a place in Boston that serves Mexican lasagna) and, after a few hours of sleep, found myself lining up at the start line right before 7 am. This was a big (20,000 people) race, so the start was fairly anti-climatic, taking about a minute to cross the line from the 3:30 corral.

I knew I needed to run around 5:00 km / min and locked into that from the beginning [5:06] [4:58]. The first big hill was about to start around the 5-km mark after a short downhill section [4:45] [4:51] [5:04]. I was genuinely enjoying the run -- the city looked great early in the morning and there was a surprising amount of people watching for a Saturday at 7 am. I crossed the river/lake literally at the moment when the sun showed up on the horizon -- a running idyll until this point.

It was time for the first major hill, going up for about 5 km. No drama so far, I was still enjoying myself keeping up pace [5:09] [4:59] [4:55] [5:01] [4:43] without any significant effort. I remember thinking "It's just another slow Sunday 30-km run... just an easy downhill section after it". The following 5 km were downhill, quite steep at times, and I was careful not to let go too much [4:47] [4:51] [4:53] [4:57] [4:52]. Around that time, I passed by the Livestrong aid station -- damn, those kids were loud! That did charge me up quite a lot actually; I can only imagine what the Wellsely tunnel would do...

Anyways, it was time for some up-hilling. About 16 km of it, to be precise. I didn't need to push through the first set of hills which were relatively steep and just needed to keep going [5:11] [5:08] [5:11] [5:12] [5:18]. Temperatures were starting to reach Texas-warm and I was getting slightly tired, but not enough to worry about yet. I knew that the climb was much more moderate after the half mark, so I could just keep going slowly until 31 km, and catch up on the big downhill near the end.

Then, during the remaining 1 km until the half mark, things changed very quickly. My calves suddenly went from slightly tired to some sort of formless mush. I hit the half mark at 1:46 h after a very slow 1 km [5:41] and there was a huge red light flashing in my head.

Second half

Why was this happening? I know training wasn't great, but I'd done the half distance many many times, sometimes at significantly higher speeds. And in none of those cases had I seen such a quick mess-up. The 3:30 pacers quickly passed me (I was keeping several hundred meters ahead of them); I tried keeping up for a short while, but that wasn't working out great. It was obvious that finishing in my target time was out of the question, the larger worry was whether I should risk injury and finish at all.

In the next several km [5:46] [5:41] [5:24] the mush that my calves had become stiffened up and expectedly started cramping. My pace decreased to a slow jog, interrupted by walking breaks when the cramps were getting too bad. I was obviously not running against the clock any more, but mostly stubbornly pushing through the pain to get to the finish.

Nothing terribly exciting during the next 18 km until the end. I was hoping that the downhill section would help because it stresses other muscles, but it didn't. I must have been looking very miserable (race pictures also confirmed that) because a lot of people were urging me to pick it up. On several occasions that worked, only to result in worse cramps after 30-40 meters or so. By the way, people in those sections were extremely nice, often watching from their gardens, and organizing unofficial aid stops with orange slices, bananas and various types of sugary things.

I kept my miserable run/limp until the end and crossed the line in 4:12:50. Because of the slow pace in the last 2+ hours, I didn't feel tired at all (other than the stiff legs, of course). I even did the post-race food splurge somewhat half-heartedly. But, oh well, at least I pushed to the finish...

Considering this one for my
wall of shame...

What next?

As you can see, I'm not wildly excited about how things turned out. But, if I am to quote a rather more experienced runner: "Any day you can run a marathon ... is a GREAT day!". In retrospect, I should have covered a significantly higher mileage before the race. I'm still trying to figure out why my calf situation happened -- leaning towards simply not enough uphill training.

The next race is most likely Sugarloaf in Maine during May. No uphill drama there, just point-to-point downhill through the mountains in Maine. I might shoot for a good 3:20 there... But before that, there's a few hundred km to run first...