Canberra Marathon

Endomondo Running Workout: "was out running 43.68 km in 3h:43m:12s"

1st km: already some of these people look serious...

I had concealed hopes of breaking 4 hours, just based on the fact that my times in training this last 3 weeks have taken a sudden leap downwards towards the 5 min/km mark, but I really had no idea how hard that last 10 km was going to be. As it turned out, it was difficult, but it didn't really affect the speed that much. That's consistent with my experiences with the 30 km runs, where a point arrives when the legs disconnect from the mind. One of the curious things about running is the mind/body relationship - ultimately the body wins because it's not physically possible to exceed certain limits, but within some parameters, concentration and willpower have an (measurable) effect. But at 32 km, give-or-take, the parameters get a bit hard to identify. Still, whatever the feeling or lack thereof, the legs did a good job of keeping turning over at (approx.) 11 km/hr.

At about 30 km my feet started to hurt a lot more than they have before; I wonder if that's partly an effect of running on wet roads? The rain was a big help in many ways, particularly temperature control, but the wet paint & metal insets in the road were very slippery and I'm a bit paranoid about falling. Also wet socks chafe a lot more than dry ones; for whatever reason, I spent 3 km running along thinking "My feet aren't important so long as they don't fall off" and they eventually stopped hurting. By the end of the race, the glutes seemed to be carrying the load and complaining bitterly, but an hour or so after the race the main ache seemed to be the hamstrings.

In Canada I was talking to the senior paddler on the Texan crew that holds the canoe record for the Yukon River Quest (42 hours for 740 km) and he said that his main job was, when people started looking tired, to get them to sprint for a couple of kilometers. Apparently the additional effort has a morale boosting effect (plus you make up some time). My plan was to try this at about 35km and it actually worked pretty well. From 35 km I got to 37 km without noticing any elapsed time and at 37 km I knew that I could run 5 km in pretty much any condition whatsoever. Which is pretty much how it went, although the last kilometer was my slowest. Having realised that I was going to finish, I spent the last 3-4 km trying not to burst into tears. No-one warned me about that! It's not particularly that I mind crying in public (and in the rain, even less) but I wasn't sure that I would be able to run and cry at the same time. It seemed much too complex. Constant deep breathing kept me (just) from finding out if it was possible. Even after the race, an hour or so later I was still fighting off great teary gusts of random emotion.

One of the side effects of the rain was that I ended up carrying my glasses for the bulk of the race; it's better to see things out of focus than through wet spectacles, which render me blind. Speaking of which, there was at least one blind guy running the course. He finished significantly in front of me. Anyway, Thurber wrote a story once - Thurber has dated pretty badly, but this maybe not so much - about the surreal world of myopia-without-glasses; at one stage Sunday I was following a guy who was hopping! You have no idea how how seasick that made me feel - I was forced to sprint close enough to him to work out how the illusion happens (at a certain distance wet tights & wet road are indistinguishable to an un-glassed eye, leaving the rise and fall of the contrasting coloured t-shirt the only visual input). There are people who hop the City-to-Surf (14 km), but I think it probably stops there. Other than that, not wearing glasses was OK. Comfortable enough to make me think of it as a regular option, because when I get sweaty on long runs they are inclined to slip off, and I don't like elasticating them on.

1st km; probably 200-odd people have already passed this point

The course wasn't quite as flat as I was expecting, although to be fair it wasn't that bad. What gradients there were were quite gradual. In a perverse kind of way I find hills easier to attack than any other part of a course. I don't know why, but it's much easier to find energy to focus on maintaining speed up a hill than on increasing speed on the flat. The other good thing about these Canberra gradients was that the downhill sides were shallow enough to stride out with a degree of confidence - well, for the first 20 km, anyway, when striding out was still an option.

The nutrition plan (fruitcake) seemingly worked. One of the things that everyone "knows" about the marathon is the phenomenon of "hitting the wall", when the muscles run out of glycogen & you have to stop. The main way to avoid this is to teach the body to burn fat - that's what the long Sunday runs are for - and apparently (there's a lot of nutrition folklore around) a moderate and replenishable supply of carbohydrate is required to underpin that process. "Replenishable" is the key (although, according to my spell-checker, non-existent) word here; it's not possible to take on/store enough carbohydrate to fuel the muscles directly but the amount required to fuel the conversion process is much smaller. There are oodles of purpose-constructed chemistry-contrived supplements for runners (we're an industry) but  rumour has it they can cause quite bad stomach cramps if you are not used to them. I read somewhere that fruitcake is a good option, and I've trained with it on the longer runs without problems. Of course, it's hard to know if it really makes a difference. I don't feel like scientifically trying a run without it, just in case it turns out to be the critical success factor. This goes for my entire routine really - it's quite difficult to contemplate changing any part of it, because it seems to be working. Now, in fact, I guess I'll find that I'm even more emotionally committed to it. Mind you, I am going to look for some different shoes. Perhaps it's not essential to have half my toenails either falling off or growing back.

The time was fantastic, much better than I ever dreamed of. I went out hard - which, oddly, I didn't notice at the time, perhaps because of the crowd effect - and the first 16 km time is in fact a PB for that distance. From 32 km onwards the time jumped up to around 5:40 per kilometer, but that was always my planned pace, so I was a long way ahead of schedule by then. There's video of me at 42 km on this website : http://www.marathon-photos.com/scripts/event.py?event=Sports/2011/Australian%20Running%20Festival&match=A458

39-ish km; not enough energy to smile for the camera

and you can see I'm pretty much down to a shuffle. It's still a faster than 6 mins-per-kilometer shuffle though - just think what I can achieve if I learn to run! My official time was 3:49; curiously my GPS recorder has the time at 3:43 (for 43+ km) but I think the bridges have an effect on the satellite tracking & the compensation algorithms must be a bit shonky.



I thought there'd be more to say. Oh well, I wonder what I can do next?