Usually, such a practice run is a luxury of training for a local race. One gets to test out the course ahead of time. But, so far, for me, luxuriating has not turned out well. The first time was the Potomac Marathon 2014, which was my first and only DNF. This time was the B&A Trail Marathon on, naturally, the B&A Trail, one of those rail-to-trails, near Severna, MD. Three Sundays before the race, I ran 22 miles of the course, just before my three-week taper of a 16-week training cycle. Overall, it was a good run. I felt good. The weather was nice. I found out the course was not as flat as I'd thought for a rail-to-trail but, generally, not a difficult one. In any case, having run it, I felt mentally prepared. Pace was 40 seconds slower than my PR pace (Pocono 2016) and 28 seconds slower than my current BQ pace, which was just about what I was aiming for. I practiced hydrating and fueling on the run, at about every five miles. And, I negative split towards the end, finishing at 8:58, my PR pace, for Mile 22.
Everything seemed fine--at the time. Somewhere past Mile 13, I did start to feel a kind of soreness in my left hamstring, nothing particularly different from others in the past that I'd run through without much problem. I felt fine after the run, as I stretched a bit, before driving home. Still, given my three-week taper, I decided to be, what I'd thought at the time, super careful and take a week off and just work on the core.
As it turned out, and as was the case with that gorgeous morning run in Paris, sometimes, it's hard to know which soreness/pain to run through and which ones to trigger the alarm and stop. I ran an easy six miler the following weekend and found out the soreness was still there ... hmm. I test ran again (six miles) three days later and almost had to walk the second half home ... damn.
For the next week and a half, up to race day, I didn't run and just continued with core exercises. Still, up to the day before, when I was picking up my bib, I was debating whether to run the race. There was definitely some loss of fitness; so, it would have been a relatively slow run, just to finish--and not very satisfying. More importantly, Pocono 2018 was coming up in six weeks; it's my last race this year before the cutoff in early September for qualifying for Boston 2019. So, I reluctantly decided to not risk it and gave my timing chip back to one of the volunteers.
I did pick up my race shirt, and the quote on the back tempted me the entire way home.
So, last Sunday's B&A turned out to be not a DNF but a DNS, my first and hopefully only one. I'll definitely sign up to run it next year. But, first, Pocono. This past Monday, I did a really easy two-miler on the treadmill; no problem. On Wednesday, I went outside and ran four miles; felt good. With my hopes up and thinking perhaps eight or ten miles on Sunday, I went out yesterday (Friday) for a six miler. I couldn't get past even two miles!
There are now only five weeks until Pocono, and I'm starting to worry just a bit that I won't have time to get back my fitness--or, to even recover enough--to race it. This morning, with frustration mounting, I came across an article about Tim Don, the world record holder in the Ironman triathlon, who had suffered a broken C2 vertebra from an accident during training in October last year. Six months later, he'll be running the Boston Marathon (this Monday, April 16) with a goal time of 2 hours 50 minutes! A quote from the article: "If I'm going to recover, I'm going to bloody recover. I'm going to push the boundaries and come back as soon as I can, as best I can, and try to be even better than before. Why not?"
