Background
Well, I even have a blog about my running so I don’t need to write a lot about my history of running.
2020
Entering 2020, I didn’t really have any races to target and I hadn’t signed up for anything. The year before I had run the NYC marathon in 3:09 and I needed to improve with at least 15 minutes to have any chance to qualify for the Boston Marathon. This sounded like a big jump for a single year, so I decided to focus on a shorter distance. My high level plan was to run a half marathon whose VDOT score (https://runsmartproject.com/calculator/) would be equivalent to a safe Boston qualification in the marathon (2:53ish). This indicated that my goal for 2020 was to run 1:23 half.
COVID hit and even if I wanted I could not run a real race. I decided to still start a half marathon training cycle in March and hope to find some races at the end of May. Well, races didn’t really start happening for the following year, but I decided to keep going and organize my own COVID Half Marathon by the river paced by friends on bikes.
I did two training cycles that were absolutely the same and I ran the race almost on the same path. First training cycle ended up with a 1:24:55 half marathon (6:30 pace) on May 31 2020. Shortly after that I bought a bike and spent the majority of the summer biking with a nice 130 mile trip from Boston to Provincetown in mid August (I ate 3 ice creams in a day without regrets!). Two days after that I started my new training cycle with a running base significantly aided by all of the biking.
Two days before the race, Boston had a crazy snow storm. It was kind of weird being at work and explaining to my boss how I am planning to run a half marathon in running singlet and shorts two days later. Well, the next day was super warm, snow melted and I had perfect conditions on race day.
Race was perfect and I ran 1:22:31 Half Marathon on November 1st (two days before the November 3rd presidential elections, so I had all right to get totally wasted on election night). I even had some more energy in my legs and I could have run faster, but who has motivation to run faster than their A goal for the year?!
This was the first time I actually met a goal for the year, so I was pretty excited to see what’s to come in 2021.
2021
The goal for the year was simple: 2:53 marathon and qualify for the Boston Marathon. COVID was still booming in the first 3 months of the year and I wasn’t really looking forward to training in the winter, so I decided to target a fall marathon and use the first months of the year to gain some strength, build some aerobic base, etc. Well, in the end I didn’t do anything in the first 5 months and I was in worse shape than in the beginning of the year. I even was getting slightly injured and some of my previous hamstring problems were reappearing.
In June I visited Momo in Boulder and I took several days off from running. I realized that it’s high time to start a training cycle so I can run a marathon before the winter comes. I returned from Boulder on Monday night and Tuesday I started the same old 18 week, 55 miles max per week Pfitz cycle.
I had to find a good race. I calculated 18 weeks from the moment I started training and searched for decently sized marathons that are not too far and are good for BQ. That’s how I ended up signing up for the Milwaukee Lakefront Marathon – fast course, beginning of October with usually great weather, 2 hour flight away from Boston.
Rant about my training program:
Some of you may be wondering: What is this training program, why is Rumen doing it, how does he know that this is the best program? The short answer of why this program: I read on reddit that there is a book called “Advanced Marathoning” and I, of course, wanted to be “advanced” so I bought it, read it and this is the easiest training program in the book… Did I think through all the options and decided that this is the best choice? Not really. Did I spend a crazy amount of my life following this program? Definitely yes. In retrospect, I am not really advanced and this program is very intense. Following a training program that is too hard and too much for you can be very bad and unproductive and I wish I had thought more all the 3 and a half times before starting it. However, following an imperfect program is a much better choice than not following a program and giving yourself an opportunity to slack when it gets hard. I don’t even know whether I would have trained properly if I hadn’t been inspired by “advanced” in the title of a random book.
There were two major twists of the training:
The training cycle was going as good as it can get until the day of my 28th birthday, 6 weeks before the race. I was doing a boring 7-8 mile recovery run, until 5 miles in the run my IT band stiffened and I had to walk and limp run to get home on time for work. It was very surprising and out of nowhere, but I guess age is not just a number and it has a dramatic effect on you immediately. I couldn’t run for several days and I was getting really worried and my anxiety levels were reaching new highs. Instead of a long run that weekend I did a very nice 60 mile bike ride by myself.
The following weekend I was signed up for a 5 mile race in a small town in central Massachusetts. My leg was feeling much better and I could definitely run 6-7 miles without suffering too much, but I was far from fully recovered. This is where the other major twists come:
I won the race for the first and most likely last time in my life. There was the police car making way and stopping traffic and me running right behind it wondering whether my IT band would force me to walk the rest of the race and create a really confusing traffic situation with a very slow police car chased by a limping runner chased by fast runners. However, I survived until the end and the local town had a new hero. I picked up my award statue, took some celebratory photos and hopefully ended up in the front pages of yet another local newspaper.
On the following day, I had a 17 mile run according to the plan. I was afraid that my leg would give up at any moment and I would have to limb for a very long time, so I was running in a 7 mile loop to make sure I didn’t get too far. Somehow, my legs started working and managed to run the full 17 miles which was the first big sign that recovery is almost there and I am back to normal 4 weeks away.
Week leading to the race
The week before the race generally sucks. There isn’t any useful training that you can do. You are super anxious. I check the weather forecast for the race day 5 times per day, and even worse, it changes 5 times per day so you don’t know how to make sense of it. If something goes wrong in that week, such as injury, sickness, COVID, you don’t really have time to fix it. Basically, things can only go wrong in that last week. The two things that were going wrongly for me were the weather and my watch’s opinion about my fitness.
It’s a bit dumb to listen to your watch’s opinion about your health, but if there is something on your wrist measuring your heart rate 24/7 and it tells you “DETRAINING” 5 days before a race, it is hard to ignore it. For some reason my watch was really giving me mean messages all week and it was trying to make me doubt everything. I thought I managed to ignore the numbers on the watch for the most part it, but Jie still remembers how stressed I was about them so I might have complained 2-3, or maybe even, 80 times about them that week.
On the other hand, the weather looked perfect at the beginning of the week. It was about to be around 12c, no wind and no rain. However, as every day of the week passed the expected temperature started increasing by 1c and the probability of rain increased. Two days before the race the forecast was for 18c and 80% chance for thunderstorms. At that point, I was wondering whether the race will even happen as races get canceled for thunderstorms.
Still, Jie and I flew to Chicago on Friday before the race, had a nice lunch and explored the wonderful Chicago Botanical Garden. It is a great garden, the weather was super nice for walking – sunny and warm. I got upset that I walked a bit too much two days before the race, but thinking back it was nice to explore a bit, relax before the race and I didn’t kill my legs or ruin my nutrition, so I don’t think I hurt my race with the Friday trip.
The day before the race reached my peak anxiety, but overall it was uneventful (which is the best thing possible). I had the classic 120 grams of whole wheat pasta, 3 eggs, salt and olive oil and a bottle of kombucha for dinner. It was October 2nd and Netflix had started showing Seinfield since the previous day, so we watched 1 episode before bed. The forecast was saying maybe 40% rain, but no thunderstorms and around 18c.
Morning before the race
I got woken up at 4am in one of the most miserable ways possible before a marathon. The heavy rain was hitting the skylight in the Airbnb. I realized it will be a wet day. I had my classic breakfast, water and we started the 25 minutes drive to the start line. On the way things got even worse and we started hearing thunder. I was 70% confident that this race was not going to happen. However, we arrived at the start line 50 minutes before the start time and miraculously the rain stopped right after. I had prepared an extra set of clothes for a short warm up, so I didn’t start the race wet. I wanted to find a private area to change and I explored the random hallways of the high school where the start was. Fortunately, the sequence of random doors that we went through brought us to the back entrance of the VIP area, which had the most precious thing before a marathon – restrooms without a 20 person line!
Taking a photo with my watch on it to show the time so I can have my dinner the same time before my next race!
The thunderstorms were gone and the sun was making its way through the clouds. It was turning into not terrible weather, even though it was already a bit too warm for a marathon.
Race
The race started and I was finally relieved that I was at the start line and I was feeling great and prepared for everything to come. I had spent the previous week preparing my body in terms of nutrition, sleep and rest to give the highest confidence that I will feel great at 7:30am on this Sunday morning. Nothing big went wrong, race was happening and I was here with a lot of energy and everything has went according to plan.
Beginning of Race
Compared to the NYC marathon, the Lakefront Marathon is a lot more uneventful. The first 15ish miles are through open fields, where you can see growing corn, and through suburban neighborhoods where the houses have a bigger yard than the average sized park in Boston.
I was feeling great and I was trying to not run too fast. Miles were passing by quickly and I was mostly focusing on getting water at every water station as they were only 1 every 2 miles. My plan was to get gels at miles 4, 9, 12.5, 17, 21, 25 based on the location of the water stations. For every mile X in the first 15 miles, I was saying “oh, this is the best I’ve felt on a marathon at mile X”. I saw Jie at mile 7 where she gave me a cold bottle of water, which I could pour over myself and drink from, which was super useful. The next time I was supposed to meet her around mile 14 and get another bottle which I was looking forward to.
At some point I realized that my cadence is only at 180, which is on the lower end and forced myself to increase it a bit to my more normal values for this pace. Not sure what effect this had, but it was interesting that I could randomly just bump it.
The Strategic Mistake.
Marathon is just running in a mostly straight line for 26.2 miles. All of the strategies that people have are not very complicated: they sound like “Run fast in the beginning and run even faster in the end”. I thought I had perfected the strategy during the race, but here around mile 14 I made the biggest strategic mistake I had ever made in a marathon. I was running all by myself but for around 4-5 miles I was hearing a bigger group of people chatting somewhere behind me. They were slowly catching up with me and at that stage they were right behind me and I could clearly hear what they were saying. It was a group of around 10 guys and I was feeling that any moment they would come stomping on top of me. I decided that maybe it’s better if I drop back and join the pack, run behind them, absorb their pace and get some wind breaking from them – worst idea ever. We entered the next water station, while I was already feeling thirsty and warm. A person hands a cup and a guy in front of me takes it, a new person hands a new cup, a different guy takes it. This repeated 4-5 times, until there were no people handing cups and I was left without water at the station. Maybe I should have stopped, had 2 cups of water and gatorade, but I continued. For the next 2 miles I was feeling that I was Moses crossing the desert and I was praying to God for water. There was a guy biking next to us, but he only had a camelbak that was going to his mouth, which I couldn’t convince him to give me.
At some point, I see Jie driving on the side of the road and I just shout “water, water”. However, there isn’t a good place to stop and it’s very hard to communicate a lot while running a marathon, so that didn’t work. I spent the next 2 miles until the next water station thinking of how stupidly I ruined my race. I slowly started catching up on hydration, but that’s not where you want to be in a marathon. This definitely impacted my race and lost several minutes, but lesson learned – don’t try to be smart during a marathon.
(dear reader, sorry if i disappointed you with the water story, but what do you expect from rumenruns.com)
Mile 20
At some point everything fell apart. We started mile 20 and my body kind of switched off. I thought there is no way I can make my goal and finish strong. However, the people around me were feeling worse and I started passing people from the infamous pack. Around Mile 21 there was a small hill. I was faster than everyone around me, but I looked at my watch and it said over 7min/mile pace. This was upsetting and I told myself “I didn’t come to run 7 minute miles”. Increased the pace and started passing even more people.
I wanted to have one more gel around mile 21.5, but there was no water station. However, I randomly see a family with some 5-6 year old kids handing out cups. The kids were having a blast and some people were slowing and drinking from their water. However, here comes the thirsty Bulgarian, who grabs the cup from the hand of the kid, thanks them as politely as you could while not decreasing your pace, drinking the cup, having the gel and throwing both of them right next to their garden. THANK YOU SO MUCH GREAT FAMILY AT MILE 21-22 AT THE LAKEFRONT MARATHON AND SORRY FOR MAKING A MESS! YOU REALLY HELPED MY RACE.
Mile 22-26.2
This is the most interesting part and maybe the simplest part of the whole race and training. During that part of the race I was in very big pain. I was suffering immensely and every single part of my body hurt. My legs were shouting “stop running, you can just walk to the end”. However, if I had stopped even for a second, I think my legs would have turned into sticks and I wouldn’t be able to run again. There was this nice patch of grass on the left where people were sitting, laying down and enjoying the views of the lake and the only thing that my body wanted was to go and join them.
I started passing runners, some of them even walking, some of them just slowed down immensely. And here comes the tricky part: my brain is shouting “don’t waste all of your training, because you can’t deal with 18 minutes of pain”. Each runner in this stage of the race is facing a very simple question: should I stop or should I go? This is the moment where I had to decide whether I cared enough about my time in order to go through a 20 minute torture. Every single second of this time I was thinking about how much I want this to be over and for me to just be done with it. I try to distract myself with every single thing possible. “Oh, a big rock on the side”, “oh, we have to cross a road”.
The biggest moral boost came from throwing my hat. I have raced with this hat for basically all my races so far and I like it. However, it had rained earlier in the race and it was soaked wet. However, right now, I didn’t really feel warmth or cold, I just felt pain and the hat was not helping with that. For half a mile I was wondering whether to get rid of it with possibly not seeing it again or carrying it on my head for the rest of the race. At some point, I made the decision to shed off the extra weight and throw it in a predetermined place with the hope that it would still be there 2 hours later. (Hint: It was there and I am running the Boston Marathon with it tomorrow :))
I saw Jie at mile 25.7 and she had a wonderful sign and a lot of energy to shout. I wish I could say it helped, but I was just counting down the 180 seconds that were left.
Finally, I see the finish line, the stands, the announcer and I am there. After I crossed the finish line, I managed to sneak in a shout of celebration and then I was done. My body was so done, exhausted, I had no emotions, I could barely speak, I could just slowly walk straight. A volunteer came to me and asked me “are you ok” and my answer was “no, not really”. Well, still he just smiled and sent me my way. They put a heat blanket around me, and he slowly escorted me straight, while I was just staring emptily ahead. I walked through the exit section of the race. I had just a blind stare on my face, walking like a ghost. I squeezed out every single ounce of energy from my body.
I paused and then it hit me: I did it, I am done and I succeeded, I ran 2:55:14 and should be good for Boston. At that moment, all of my emotions engulfed me and I had my little boy cry.
More photos: https://www.focalflamestore.com/search/?n=focalflame&scope=node&scopeValue=5bKFtR&c=photos&q=858#i=24