See Sarah Run

On St. Patrick’s Day, I ran the Hampton Court Half Marathon. High Power Running Mentor #1 (HPRM#1) talked me into this race several months ago. I was trying to plan my racing schedule a bit more sensibly this time around, with races building to my goal race, the Boston marathon. HPRM#1 kept saying that doing a prep race 4-6 weeks out from the marathon was important and it’s true that lots of runners I admire seem to do this. The Hampton Court Palace Half Marathon looked amazing. Hampton Court is a Tudor palace from the days of Henry the 8^th. The race has a Henry theme – he appears on the medal and the t-shirt – and you run through the palace grounds. Spectacular!

The Hampton Court Half was also not at all next to the university where I was staying for work. A friend from the Running for Real Facebook group tipped me off that I would not be able to get from the university to Hampton Court on race morning on time for the start. She also came through with a suggestion of an inexpensive hotel in the vicinity of the palace. I could shift hotels on Saturday and sleep near the race. Brilliant. The Incredible Mervus was on board with my spending two extra days in London, simply because he’s amazing.

The real reason for the trip was a workshop on parties of the mainstream right in Europe so I spent a lot of time doing the typical academic thing – listening to people present their research, giving comments, presenting my own work. It was a very good workshop, if a little stressful. This is a new project for me and new colleagues so I didn’t know what to expect. I also ran 38 miles in London in the days leading up to the race. I felt like I was constantly changing between professor-mode and runner-mode and I didn’t do much in London other than work and run. The weather wasn’t great. We had very high winds all week and a lot of rain so I was trying to time my runs between workshop meetings and gusty downpours.

I travel for work alone pretty often. I run alone in places I am not familiar with when I travel. It’s a great way to explore a new city. Maybe this all looks easy from the outside, but it isn’t always easy. It takes a lot of planning and a little bit of bravery, especially if I am training for something and not just running casually. I brought my running headlamp on this business trip because I knew time would be tight and I did end up running once after dark. I brought everything I would need for the race, including fuel, my fuel belt, and a range of running clothes because the weather was looking so unpredictable. Actually, I ended up tossing stuff in the suitcase at the end and brought no fewer than four different fuel belts to London. Better safe than sorry!

The day before the race, I went to the Tower of London, which was amazing. But also – the wind was often 30mph or stronger and it was sometimes raining. In the late afternoon, I took three different trains to get out to Hampton Court. I found a great pub for dinner and took myself out. Some of this trip was delightful and some of it was hard and lots of it was draining. The night before the race, I started to wonder what the hell I was doing. Why was I out in the suburbs of London, at the equivalent of a Holiday Inn, when I could have been home? This is the moment when I nearly lost my nerve.

I touched base with both Coach Mick and HPRM#1 the night before the race. Thank goodness for the internet. One of the things Coach Mick and I talked about was whether a PR was possible at this race and whether I should try for one. He said he thought it was possible, but that it would be very hard. And that I had to believe it was possible, deep in my heart. HPRM#1 used essentially the same words – a good race plan is one I believe in, deep in my heart. When I signed up for this race, I had thought to PR. It’s a flat course and I decided to race at the end of the week in London so I would be largely over jetlag. Now, the reality of travel fatigue was setting in – something I had always been worried about with the prospect of racing while abroad. Could I get my head around running a 1:45 half? I wasn’t sure. After talking to Coach Mick, I was starting to believe it was at least possible. We agreed that the best thing was to run fearless, no deal, no regrets. He gave me a race plan for 1:47, but whatever happened in terms of time, run with with no deal, no regrets.

Race day dawned sunny. Thank goodness. We had had so much rain and clouds and crazy crazy wind. I had to make oatmeal with a weird hotel hot water boiler, I had to go fetch coffee because breakfast was not open yet, etc. All the usual pre-race preparations are trickier on the road and especially tricky in a foreign country. Breakfast was 2 packets of instant oatmeal plus a banana plus 3 shots of espresso. I left the hotel around 7:15 and using Uber, arrived at the race at 7:30. Hampton Court is STUNNING! Really just so beautiful and the grounds were full of flowers. But it was really cold.

I walked through the grounds and got my bib, but now my early arrival strategy was showing its weakness. I had over an hour to wait, no shelter and it was so cold I was almost shaking. I looked around a bit and found a sunny wall with a corner and hunkered down. A few other runners, more serious looking types, showed up and did the same. With about 30 minutes to spare, I went and checked my bag, debating about whether to keep my jacket and finally kept it. It was just so, so cold.

Finally it was time to get ready so I did my warm up and jogged over to the starting line. Wave 1 was lined up already and I was wave 2. In the corral with 90 seconds to spare, I decided to take the jacket off and tie it around my waist. It was maybe 35 degrees (though Garmin Connect says 43?) and semi-sunny but windy – on average 10-15mph but gusts were much stronger. Off we went!

In talking to Coach Mick and HPRM#1 the night before the race, I started to understand that a prep half might have reasons other than a PR attempt. I would have loved to PR at Hampton Court, but mentally, I wasn’t really there. That’s actually ok – it doesn’t have to be a choice between a 13.1 mile tour of the castle grounds, stopping for pictures, and a furious PR attempt that’s a failure if it doesn’t happen. Instead this race became partly about practice and partly about testing the waters in terms of fitness. I don’t think I knew that before the race – that’s one reason I write these reports.

What did I get out of this race other than a cool t-shirt, a medal, and the chance to run by a palace? I got to pin a bib on. I got to practice remembering to take everything with me on the road. I organized race day breakfast in a hotel. I figured out transport to the race and back. In just a few days, I will do all of this again in Boston and it will be SO much easier than doing it in London! I didn’t get a PR, as is probably obvious by now to astute readers, but that’s ok. Both Coach Mick and HPRM#1 helped me understand that these are legitimate reasons to race. Which seems obvious now, but did not seem at all obvious the night before.

From a racing perspective, I wanted to execute Coach Mick’s 1:47 plan and see how it felt. I had run 1:54 at the Colchester half so 1:47 was a chunk faster. At Colchester, I was aiming for 8:30s, more or less, given the hills. That felt daunting beforehand, but I did it and it was mostly easy. Here, I was aiming for more like 8:10-8:20 on a flat course. Starting a race is like dipping your foot in an unknown lake. How cold is it going to be? How is faster running going to feel? I was wearing my Vapor Flys and those shoes are amazing. Already during the warm up, they felt fun and bouncy. During the first mile or two of the race, I felt great. It was very crowded so I didn’t have a lot of choice in terms of pace, but I felt fine. Coach Mick had said to run the first 5K at 8:20, then run 10K at 8:10, then give it what I had. The first mile of 8:17 was just a few seconds quicker than planned but felt great. I could tell within the first couple of miles that physically, at least, I was really fine. Better than fine. I was running in the low 8s and felt really good – easy and relaxed.

The first part of the race was along the Thames and it was so gorgeous. People were out in rowing boats. Swans. Flowers. The whole English countryside thing. I focused on how pretty it all was. Still – some dark stuff crept into my brain early on. I was worried about how much energy I might have burned up shivering. Also – was I going too fast? Too slow? But mostly I was right on track. I did a good job this time pushing the negative stuff away.

Splits:
1 8:17
2 8:11
3 8:12

We ran along the river and then took a sharp right and over a bridge into town. For a bit, it was fun, running past stores and cafes. Then we turned again and the wind arrived. Whoosh – NOT a small wind. I wondered how much it would slow me down. But then I remembered Coach Mick saying last night: “No one can expect you to have fun running in the wind.” I don’t know what he was on about with that comment – I strongly suspect he was trying to get me to say I could run in the wind anyway and even though I definitely think he was reverse psychologizing me, it also worked. I thought, well, phooey on you Coach Mick! (Maybe somewhat harsher language…) I am going to have fun running in the wind! I do not like wind, but now I pretended I was a kite. I pretended I was a blade, slicing through the wind. I worked on practicing my form and thought about my idea that wind makes this easier to do. I did slow down a little bit but I didn’t let the wind get in my head and make me upset.

Splits:
4 8:04
5 8:11
6 8:12
7 8:13

Much of this part of the course was less pretty. We were running through town but mostly past boring shops or even gas stations. I was also paying less attention because I was focused on maintaining pace. Finally we came to a turn and crossed over another bridge and turned back. This was less windy, at least, but more gas stations, etc. I smiled a little thinking how they don’t advertise that bit on the course description. I thought about small towns facing the challenge of finding a place to put 13.1 miles of race course and mostly had sympathy for the race organizers. The half marathon is the most popular distance after the 5K but sometimes they are just hard to squeeze in. Middletown’s half has been switched to a 10 miler, partly for this reason.

For this part of the course we were on a sidewalk and a lot of it was pretty narrow. I again found myself having to focus on pace because it was easy to zone out and just run what the crowd was running. We seemed to have a cross wind some of the time. I felt good though – At mile 7 I found myself thinking – oh, we are more than halfway through this race already! I had better remember some of this because I love this so much – I want to capture it in my mind. Whenever my thoughts started getting darker, I found some flowers to look at. It feels like it’s been a long winter and spring is just a miracle.

A lot of this was like driving a car and just looking for cruise control. If I lost focus, I might slow down or speed up so I tried to hang right at 8:10 pace or at what seemed like 8:10 effort. I had jumped to 8:10 a little early, but I was feeling good. Often a half marathon starts to hurt a lot at mile 9. When I ran my PR with the Retiree last summer, I felt pretty bad already at the 5k mark, but here at mile 8 I thought, well, everything seems quite fine. Let’s make this hurt a little more. I thought of HPRM#1 and getting what I came for and Coach Mick’s advice to run without regrets and I picked up the pace.

Splits:
8 8:03
9 8:09
10 8:06

Miles 8, 9 and 10 were some of my fastest miles of the race. We went past the palace area again and past a choir singing on the sidelines. I was still feeling quite good, working for sure, but not popping-out-my-eyeballs working. I was waiting for it to start hurting really badly but that hadn’t started yet.

Then we started some kind of out-and-back but I hadn’t looked closely enough at the course to know when the turnaround was. We left the gravel path that was along the river and headed to the left. The surface changed and was somewhat more uneven as we headed into what looked like farmland. Time to work – no point in saving anything with just three miles left to go – but the “road” surface was getting hard to deal with.

Finally around mile 11 we turned and headed back toward the palace. I glanced at my watch and it said 1:32:xx. Great – 18 minutes to run 2 miles – I would be under 1:50, which I really wanted. I started to get hit with something – my brain couldn’t process what was happening at first and then I realized it was hailing! Ha! It really was cold. The hail looked like flower petals, it was so big, but of course, it felt like rocks. Luckily that was short-lived. But when we turned, the surface changed again.

Now we were running back toward the palace through farmland on what might generously be called a “path” though surely not a “road”. I would call it a cart track, two parallel muddy ruts where the wheels of the cart go. A strip of matted down slick grass in between. Yikes. The cart tracks themselves were muddy and full of puddles. The grass in the middle was so slick that I thought I would fall if I ran there. The area to the side of the tracks was too narrow to run on and uneven. I was wearing my Vapor Flys when clearly cross country spikes would have been the much better choice.

I knew this was going to slow me down and there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it. Just when I was supposed to kick it into gear! I know the surfaces of the cart track so well because I spent two full miles staring down trying to figure out how best to manage running on them. I tried picking up my knees more, faster turnover, staying out of the mud – all to no avail. I could feel it clinging to my shoes like a kid who has had a really fabulous mud pie outing in rain boots. Nothing to be done about all this. I decided to be grateful for the week of running on the tow path in London. I had had plenty of practice dodging puddles. I remembered that I ran best on the tow path when focused on staying with the person in front of me or passing them so I tried that and that did help. I knew the finish of the course was regular road and it had to get here eventually so I just hung on as best I could. It was weird because I think I was mentally and physically ready to dig pretty deep here – I had wanted to end with a few sub-8 miles – but on this terrain, I was just happy to stay upright. I know that 2 miles to go is a count of 1000 for me so I started counting.

11 8:16
12 8:29
13 8:31
.1  8:01

After what felt like an eternity, we finally came off the cart track onto slick grass. Sheesh! Where was the road already! Then there it was at last and the finish line also. I had been watching the time enough to know that I was going to be pretty close to 1:50 after all. I came off the grass at 1:48:30 and gunned it as soon as I hit the gravel path! I heard them call my name as I crossed – the clock said 1:53:xx but I figured that was for the first wave so I was probably ok. My watch said 1:49:15. Actual official finish 1:49:11! I am guessing the cart track business cost me at least a minute but I really didn’t care.

I cleared the finish line, caught my breath for a second, and collected my fabulous Henry the 8^th finisher’s medal. They had the t-shirts right there too so I made sure to get the right size, plus my goodie bag, and some water.

How did I feel? Fantastic! No injuries, which is often the first thing I assess. Tired, yes, and happy to stop running, but not sick. Laughing about the cart track. King Henry should really consider getting that paved if he’s going to keep holding races here.

Mostly, though, I felt something else. Something that makes me smile even now, thinking about it. It hasn’t been an easy training cycle. I’ve run through a lot of pain with my foot, waiting for the EPAT to take effect and without knowing if it would work. But it did. This was my fourth race, but no new PRs since Erie and I’ve wondered – did I spend all this time getting back into the shape I was last September but not making any progress? Since the adductor thing cropped up, I haven’t done track work, so no way to see – oh, my 800s are getting faster. But. I’ve run more 50 mile weeks than ever before. We’ve been using 7:45 as my tempo pace and I have largely hit that. My mid-week long runs have been getting more challenging each week on paper, but actual execution of those runs has been getting easier. Coach Mick says I’m in better shape than I think I am and this race showed me that he’s right.

My half PR from last summer is 1:45:45 run at the Iron Horse Half Marathon with the Retiree as pacer. A lot of things came together for that race. I had been doing half marathon specific training for several weeks. I was more tapered. Iron Horse is flat and I had a trusted pacer. The weather was ideal. I was completely spent at the end of that race and spent several minutes leaning over the barrier, catching my breath and getting my act together.

At Hampton Court, I ran 1:49:11. No pacer and I didn’t know a soul at the race. I had spent the previous day negotiating London alone in truly wretched weather. I had spent the previous week at a workshop with brand new colleagues working on a new project – while also running over 50 miles for the week. I’ve done zero half marathon specific training. The wind during Hampton Court was variable, but sometimes quite high and I had that cart track to deal with. I finished feeling fantastic – happy to be done, but immediately able to talk and I was not that sore after the race. There’s a whole lot of fitness lurking there that has kind of built up without my really knowing it. How much? I don’t really know. I’m feeling quite excited to find out at Boston!

I ran this race two months ago (!), but it’s been a really busy spring. So, here’s a very old race report about the first indoor track race I ever did. Enjoy!

At some point last fall, some of my Inner Running Circle got started thinking about the possibility of a meet-up. We fairly quickly settled on the notion of meeting at the Armory, a famous indoor track in New York City. After some back-and-forth, we finally settled on the idea of a 5k on January 24^th. The travel negotiations alone to get us all to the track at 7pm on a the appropriate Thursday were epic enough to fill an entire blog post, but I’ll spare you. The weekend included copious eating and drinking and lots of non-Armory running, but I wanted to focus here on the race itself.

Many of us had never raced a 5K on a track before though High Power Running Mentor #1 (HPRM#1) has actually raced at the Armory and was sort of the driving force behind this venture. After my disappointing New Year’s Day 5K, I was looking for some redemption, but this training cycle has had a lot of ups and downs. Despite the EPAT treatment, my foot was still hurting every run, just sometimes more and sometimes less. The stomach flu in December was a huge setback. And the Armory was weekend #2 in a series of three weekends being out of town and all the disruption to life and training that travel brings with it. Plus, 5K on an indoor track is a whole lotta laps, 25 to be exact, but who’s counting? Stay tuned for the answer to that question (Spoiler alert – it turns out, no one!).

I learned a lot about indoor track racing by talking to Coach Mick ahead of time. He said to go out at 60 seconds per lap for the first 8 laps and then speed up a little at a time. First lesson there:  pacing on a track is about time per lap, not pace. Of course those are the same thing, but your watch’s GPS isn’t going to be accurate on a track and it’s for damn sure not accurate on an indoor track. That hadn’t occurred to me, to be honest, but now I knew: think about pace in terms of seconds per lap, not minutes per mile. Dead obvious to experienced track runners, which I have never claimed to be!

Once I figured out what Coach Mick was talking about, I registered his proposed time. 60 seconds per lap works out to an 8:00 min/mile pace. What? That’s more like my tempo pace, not my 5K pace. Even the terrible New Year’s Day 5k was 7:47 pace. When I asked him about this, I learned more about indoor track racing. He noted that it was going to be really exciting and I would probably go out too fast. So, he revealed, his 60 seconds/lap included the idea that I would more than likely run 58 seconds/lap instead. That’s closer to 7:40 pace. The 200m track is so tiny that every second per lap faster is more or less equivalent to 10 seconds per mile faster. There is not a lot of room for error here. 7:40 is a pretty reasonable starting pace for me to run a 5K. Coach Mick pointed out that if he told me to start at 58 seconds, but I went out in 56 seconds, I’d be at 7:20 pace, which was probably too quick. We talked about various pacing options, what my goals were for the race, best case and worst case scenarios. I decided his 60 seconds /lap was actually a quite good idea and I would aim for that.

Thursday night we gathered at the Armory with hugs and introductions all around. Many of us had never met in person so it was that lovely experience of suddenly filling in the details of your online friend with an actual physical friend. The Armory was as exciting as promised, full of gazelle-like high school girls laughing and sprinting about. We had to sign in and get our numbers – stickers to put on our right shoulders and left hips – how official! The Armory has a second floor so we ran about up there for a bit to warm up. They were running the 800 meter race first plus lots of field events and the chaos level was quite high, but fun. I felt much less nervous than I had expected and mostly just happy to be with my running friends in such an amazing location. Way too soon it was time to line up.

Right before I stepped onto the track, HPRM#1 grabbed me for a last minute piece of advice: Don’t go out too fast. I was massively relieved to hear him say this. I often talk race strategy with him ahead of time, but this time I hadn’t so he didn’t know the 60 second lap plan. I had been fretting a little that he would think I was insane for going too slowly because a lot of his message about racing over the past year has been: run harder from the gun. I assured him – I would not go out too fast.

The Armory puts your name in lights above the track so everyone can see your split times and how many laps you left to have run – it’s a total rockstar environment! We got instructions about how to negotiate moving from the outer lanes to the inner lanes of the track, they fired some sort of gun, and off we went! Whoa!

After one lap, I was in last place. Ha ha! That is not a position I am used to being in at all! Luckily I was somehow managing a pretty chill attitude about this and just figured, well, I clearly did not go out too fast. I could hear my friends cheering from the sidelines and HPRM#1 was saying something like, settle into your pace, great job! That was heartening. I had absolutely no idea how fast I was running so I started trying to get my bearings. The board had our names in lights with times but it was hard to see it. There are quite a few pictures of me like this, trying desperately to see the board!

After a few rounds, I realized I needed a new strategy. I had started my watch and remembered that I could start using the lap button to get splits that I could see. First visible split: 54 seconds. Whoops! So much for not going out too fast! That first round, where I was aiming for 60 seconds, guessing I would run 58 due to excitement? The lap where I landed in LAST place? Yeah, I was able to check later and I ran that in 52 seconds! I think that’s something like 6:40 pace – my mile PR is 6:55! So much for not going out too fast. But when I saw the 54 seconds, I knew I had better get it under control and the next lap was 56 and the one after that was 57. That pace felt “comfortable” meaning, I could keep running that fast for while without actually dying.

After that crazy first lap, I had also started passing people, which was enormously satisfying. Now I came up behind Corgi Speedster and had to decide what to do. I suspected we weren’t radically different in our fitness levels for the 5K and in any case, she has loads more experience than I do. I was feeling great, but it was early in the race and one of my main goals was to finish strong. I hung right on her shoulder as we clicked off lap after lap. 57, 57, 57. She was a freaking metronome and all I had to do was stay with her. This was fun! Our friends cheered! I waved! (Heh, sorry-not-sorry HPRM#1! I promise to ignore you next time!) Click, click, click. Then suddenly 58. Did she make a mistake or was she slowing down? Next lap, 59. That was not a mistake. Corgi Speedster was slowing and it was time to pass her. She cheered me on as I went by because she’s an amazing good sport!

Now I confronted a new dilemma. Where exactly was I in this race? 25 laps total but how many had I run? I had no idea. At some point I had seen “15” on the board next to my name and then “9” but the board was almost impossible to see and now it appeared to be malfunctioning and I couldn’t see my name at all. I was considering some kind of finishing kick but how far was I from the finish? No clue. I just kept running. Strange thoughts started to enter my head as can happen in a 5K. If no one told me to stop, would I stop? I still felt fairly good, but this needed to end at some point. Would they start the men’s race and leave me running around the track? Worse still, would my friends all run their races and just forget about me going around and around while they went off to Coogan’s to drink? Was it possible someone would turn the lights off and I would still be going around all night long? This near-delirium presents the possibility that I was doing somewhat less well than I thought I was doing. I started yelling to people to ask how many laps: The woman who seemed to be running the finish line. The guy who seemed to be a photographer. Glitter-Mom who had come to spectate. No one seemed to know. Finally I looked at elapsed time on my watch which read 26:xx and I figured I was definitely running faster than that so I must be done. My best guess is that I ran 2 extra laps, but who knows? Poor Corgi Speedster was behind me in the same situation, wondering when the hell I was going to stop because she knew I had to finish first!

Thank goodness races at the Armory are chip timed and despite my extra laps, the race folks got an official time: 23:46! Just about 1 minute 40 seconds better than my New Year’s Day 5K and only 26 seconds off my PR from last March! I was elated! Given my time off for the PF recurrence, then the flu, the near complete lack of 5K training – this was great news! North Shore Strider had unsurprisingly run a new PR and Corgi Speedster was happy with her time, especially given her crazy mileage lately. Sweaty high fives all around!

I limped around the upper circuit of seats for a bit by way of a cool down and Glitter-Mom had some weird Listerine strips of some sort from HPRM#1 that helped with the dry air. The boys were racing in separate heats so we had two more exciting 5Ks to watch, but that is their story to tell or not. Once everyone finished running, it was off to Coogan’s, a famous runner pub just a block away. I am pretty sure I had tacos. I know I had wine and some shots of tequila (I think?). I also laughed so hard my stomach hurt. Somehow we stayed up past 4am and still managed to show up and run in Central Park around 9am the following morning. At least the Big Dogs did. The Little Dogs may have enjoyed sleeping in, as is perhaps their right, and yet it is our right to give them shit about it until the end of days. Much eating and drinking and even some running rounded out the weekend. A thousand thanks to Corgi Speedster for her incredible hospitality. I left a piece of my heart at the Armory and I can’t wait to go visit it at some future meet-up.

It’s been about three months since I published a training log, which is the first 75% of the Boston training cycle! In fact, the very last week I posted a log was the first week of Boston training. To refresh everyone’s memory, Coach Mick flagged December 10^th as Boston Training Day #1. That week featured a track workout of 5x800s, some crappy weather, a not great mental attitude, and a foot that was still painful.

I’m not going to go back and fill in all the details for the last three months so I thought instead I’d just note some of the highlights (and low lights). This is great timing as this is the last week of peak training before taper starts.

This training cycle has featured some obstacles. Whereas training for Donna had me grateful to be back running pain-free and training for Erie had me coming off a string of PRs, training for Boston has been, well, not those things. The most challenging obstacle was (was!) the continuing issue of the plantar fasciitis. It cropped up before Erie and refused to go away. I eventually sought out a treatment called EPAT. With my last EPAT treatment in late November, the podiatrist said I could expect to see the full effect in 6-12 weeks, some time between January 1^st and February 12^th. [Of course, I still called him after three weeks to ask why my foot was still hurting. He said, be patient, lady!]

I made a choice with EPAT. I thought it was my best chance to get rid of the PF. The doctor said I could train through it. I knew that it might mean running with some foot pain and that turned out to be true. I underestimated was how mentally and physically draining I would find that experience. I’m still happy – very happy! – I decided to do things this way. I’ve been able to train. The foot pain gradually eased off until indeed, in early February, it subsided entirely. But it left a bit of a mark on my mental state. I found it very hard to run with joy while also running with pain. Of course, New England winter weather was as crappy as usual. I also got a severe case of the stomach flu in late December and spent Christmas vacation glued to the couch. I’m a person with a lot of natural perk, but all of this made me rather weary.

I’ve race four times this training cycle, two 5Ks and two half marathons, but I’ll do separate race reports on those. The first 5K was January 1^st and it was slower than I had hoped. By early January, I was in a pretty serious funk. This was NOT what I had had in mind when I started training for my very first Boston!

The low point (one low point…) was January 10^th and 11^th. On January 10^th, I did 9 miles for a mid-week longer run and felt awful. It was snowy and windy and I under-fueled and I ran on a ton of hills to make things extra bad. My brain was really in the toilet. I was doing way too much comparison with other people who were running without my struggles – though of course they probably privately had their own. If this was what the whole training cycle was going to look like, was I even interested? There was no joy.

High Power Running Mentor #1 really turned that one around for me. After the yucky 9 miler, we texted for a long time about what it means to run when it feels awful, whether bad runs are more frequent as you try harder, whether I had needed more of a break after Erie and perhaps most importantly, if there were any options available beyond enduring the suck until Boston. I was ready to endure the suck, but I wasn’t excited about it.

The next day I had a hard tempo run and I had to do it on the treadmill, which I don’t like. But I woke up to a new playlist from HPRM#1, designed specifically for that workout, filled with songs that addressed all the concerns I had raised during our long conversation. I wish I could say that I went downstairs and banged out the tempo run, but that’s not true. I went downstairs and got on the treadmill and I had to stop three times to convince myself to keep running. It felt awful and I still wasn’t quite hitting the pace I was supposed to. It was a deep dark look into whether or not I wanted to keep training for this marathon or keep running at all, frankly. But every time I stopped the treadmill to ask myself those questions and re-group, the answer was the same. Yes, I want this. I want this very, very much. Even when it sucks pretty damn hard, I still want to train for marathons and try to run them as fast and as well as I can. For damn sure, I want to run Boston. So three times I stopped the ‘mill and three times I re-started it again. At the end of the run, I was a mixture of embarrassed that I had stopped at all and proud that I kept going. But two months later, I know that was one of the most important runs of the training cycle and one that I’ll remember a long time. I found a little piece of myself that had gone missing on that run, one of the best parts of myself.

One aspect of training, I figured out on my own. Mid-week longer runs are usually some of my favorites, but I found them challenging this time around. The Incredible Mervus is out of town Wednesday night so I can’t run early Thursday morning because I can’t leave the kids alone. Instead I get up early and work, help get Aidan out the door, work more, help get Rose out the door, try to resist the temptation to go back to work and instead start running. Try to finish running before my early afternoon office hours. This whole routine proved tricky from a timing and fueling and route perspective. Coach Mick also turned a lot of these into progression runs so they weren’t always simple from a running perspective. Midway through the training cycle, I started to get a handle on them though and that felt great. Now, I always do the same route (it’s not hilly!). It turns out that with breakfast at 6am, I have to eat something else before running at 10 or 10:30am. I have to be very disciplined about moving back and forth between work and kids and running in order to fit it all in. But getting this piece of training under control and starting to nail these runs felt great.

The last update is the story of the long run gone terrible, then good again. I had some good long runs early on. I was on the road three weekends in a row in January so figuring out how to fit these in was complicated. The best thing I did was sign up for a 17 mile training run with the Rogue Running group while I was in Austin for work. Another weekend I ran about 11 miles in Central Park while in NYC with friends. Sometimes I ran with my girlfriends at home.

On February 20^th, I did my first 20 miler and it was horrific. There’s just no other word for it. It was really cold ( with a “feels like” temp of around 5 degrees), I wasn’t even close to the pace prescribed by Coach Mick, and halfway through the run, my adductors starting hurting incredibly badly. It ended up being one of the worst runs of my life, not exaggerating. It shook my body and my confidence a lot. I don’t know what the adductor issue was but it took two massages and two PT sessions to fix the right side and the left side lingered for two additional weeks. The only good thing about this run was that my foot, which had been steadily improving, didn’t hurt much at all. Also, I finished all 20 miles.

Psychologically, though, this run was bruising. I felt like I was back at the stage where I’d been with the January tempo workout except maybe HPRM#1 was losing patience with me and maybe I was losing patience with myself. Coach Mick, luckily, is a saint, with endless patience. We talked a couple of times and he kept giving me options until we came up with a long run strategy that I didn’t find terrifying. I just didn’t want to experience that kind of pain again. I ended up with a 12 mile progression run the following week and it went fine. The next week I did 18 miles and if I was a little disappointed in my pace, it was basically fine.

Then, on March 9^th, I did 20 miles again. This time alone. It was warmer and I went later in the day to simulate fueling for Boston, when I will presumably start around 11am. I nailed this one! I felt really strong the whole run. It’s the first time I’ve ever done a 20 mile training run in under 3 hours. It was such a confidence booster and I am really starting to think that my fitness is in a better place than I realized. With all the crap that has been going on – the foot and the illness and the travel and the adductor, but probably most of all my mental darkness – it’s been hard to see the progress that has been happening beneath the surface. But I’ve been doing a lot of running so that progress is happening even without my noticing and now I’m starting to feel it, which is really awesome.

Over the last few weeks, the foot pain has faded, stomach flu has become a memory, I recovered from the 20 mile horror show – and something else wonderful happened. I started to enjoy running again. The winter was really a grind, but I truly love this sport. I love the structure and satisfaction it brings to my life. I love learning new things about how to train or what the elites are up to. More than anything, I love the people running brings into my life. To have the joy return to my personal running has been like rediscovering a lost friend. I am so happy to have it back.

I’m going to use this post plus a follow-up post to share my experience with EPAT (Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technology), a treatment I’m getting for plantar fasciitis. I’d heard a little bit about EPAT during my first serious bout with PF in 2016-2017. To my mind, it fell into the category of fairly extreme measures, along with PRP injections. I ended up in the boot for five weeks, the PF got better, and I assumed that was the end of it. Until fall 2018.

To remind loyal readers, the dreaded plantar fasciitis returned in August about a month before I ran the Erie marathon. Coach Mick switched the majority of my easy runs to cross training, the PF subsided enough and I got through the race fine, earning my BQ. But after Erie, all attempts to return to running ended with an incredibly painful foot. I went back to the Maestro, my amazing physical therapist. After initial conservative measures did nothing, he said we had better get some images in case I had another tear of the plantar fasciia.

This time, I wasn’t messing around with random doctors. I went to a fairly fancy podiatrist in West Hartford at a practice that seemed to specialize in treating runners. He more or less guaranteed that he’d be able to fix my feet with EPAT. We tried some oral steroids and yet another pair of orthotics, just in case. That went nowhere. I was starting to get depressed and worried. Sure, I had time before I needed to start training for Boston, but last time around, it took nine months for the PF to go away. I didn’t have that much time. Furthermore, I had hoped to get a bit of a fitness boost by maintaining my mileage at a level that I hadn’t managed before. Instead I had to stop running entirely. Plus, this podiatrist was starting to set off some alarm bells. I know PF well enough to know that no treatment works 100% of the time, yet that’s basically what he promised. He also did x-rays, and discovered I had heel spurs and blamed the PF on them. Yet I know the literature has shown no connection between heel spurs and PF. Also, EPAT was sure not cheap. He was charging around $750 for three treatments and it’s not covered by insurance.

As I was mulling this over, I started a running group at my church. Our Sunday afternoon post-church run/walks were sometimes much more painful to my feet than I cared to admit, but they fed my soul like nothing else. On a trip to Fleet Feet to get the church runners fitted for shoes, I discovered the same EPAT brochure my podiatrist had, but with a different doctor’s name on it. Fleet Feet had had this doctor in the store demonstrating EPAT earlier in the fall. One of staff had been successfully treated for Achilles tendonitis, another recalcitrant ailment runners are prone to. This doctor offered five treatments of EPAT on both feet for $500 instead of three treatments of one foot for $750. I started investigating and found several practitioners across Connecticut offering EPAT at an astonishing range of prices, but Dr. Bellezza, of the Fleet Feet brochure and Bristol Hospital, was the most affordable by far.

So what is EPAT exactly? Even though I’ve read a lot about it, it’s not simple to explain. It’s sort of like extra-powerful air waves that pummel your feet. Many runners have had ultrasound therapy at some point in time and know that the idea is that the soundwaves penetrate your body, cause a slight amount of damage, and this triggers increased blood flow to the treated area, which promotes healing. Normal ultrasound is not invasive, not expensive once you have the machine, and completely painless. The Maestro lent me a machine for awhile and I gave myself daily treatments at home. These treatments had no noticeable effect and that’s one of the problems with ultrasound. There isn’t a lot of evidence supporting its effectiveness, at least not in treatment of plantar fasciitis.

EPAT is somewhat different, but a similar idea. The air waves used in EPAT are much more powerful than standard ultrasound and delivered differently. Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy (ESWT), yet another therapy, uses electromagnetic waves for the same underlying purpose – to break up scar tissue and cause a little damage that triggers your body to re-start the healing process. ESWT is more intense and requires anesthesia, but only one treatment. EPAT is less painful (everything’s relative…), but requires multiple treatment sessions. The use of ESWT/EPAT as a treatment modality was discovered in Germany and has been used for decades in the treatment of kidney stones. The waves simply blast the stones to smithereens. These therapies are much more widespread in Europe and Australia, where it is often covered by insurance. Use of ESWT/EPAT was permitted by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2000, meaning the FDA found that the technology did not cause harm. Despite multiple subsequent studies showing the benefit of these therapies, insurance companies have yet to be convinced and this treatment is not generally covered by insurance in the USA, hence the free-for-all when it comes to pricing.

Of course, I dug into the scientific literature on the effectiveness of EPAT in treatment of PF. I have an academic library at my disposal and anyway most of the papers are publicly available. I started doing some reading and I was impressed by the results. Whereas you’d be hard pressed to find peer-reviewed journal articles with evidence-based research supporting the treatment of plantar fasciitis with PRP injections, several papers had found quite good results in treating PF with ESWT. I decided to go meet with Dr. Bellezza.

Here are links to some of the studies on the effectiveness of EPAT/ESWT.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22734281

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14530990

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23813184

Dr. Bellezza works out of Bristol Hospital but his office is in Southington. Note, this blog has the practice of giving everyone cute, hopefully amusing names, but it’s not all that hard to decipher who is who in the cast of characters. I’m not disguising Dr. Bellezza’s name because I want him to be easy to find. Here’s his office phone number: 860-426-0252. Our initial appointment went really well. He didn’t promise 100% success – he quoted success rates from some of the journal articles I had read. I asked him about where he had learned EPAT (Seattle area, during residency), how often had he done the procedure (many times as a resident, 3 times last week as an independent practitioner – he is just starting). Why did Bristol Hospital decide to get an EPAT machine? (The hospital CEO had terrible plantar fasciitis and wanted to try it. Yes, his feet are better now). Could I do just three treatments and see if that worked in order to save money? (Yes, of course). Perhaps most importantly to me: Could I run while receiving treatment? Absolutely, as tolerated. Nothing in the research says this is a problem. Olympians and other elite athletes get treated with ESWT all the time and train through it. Hmm. West Hartford guy had said I had to take a full month off. Dr Bellezza was sounding better and better. He didn’t even blink when I pulled out my laptop to make notes during our appointment. I sent him a follow-up email later in the day and he responded in less than 20 minutes. Maybe this starts to give an idea of how seriously I screen care providers! I’m very picky about who gets to join Team Professor Badass, but I had found my podiatrist. I talked it over with the Incredible Mervus and we decided to at least try three treatments. This running hobby ain’t cheap, no matter what they say, and I wanted to be able to make it to the starting line in Hopkinton.

Why do I run? It’s not a requirement for living a good life. It’s not even a requirement for living a healthy life. For a long time now, when someone sends me an article about the drawbacks of running – it’s bad for your knees! It causes heart attacks! You don’t need to run that much! – I’ve responded by saying: I am not running for my health. So why exactly do I engage in this activity that takes so much time and energy and frankly also money? Why do I head out when it’s too dark in the winter and too hot in the summer, almost always when it’s way too early? My “secret” is that I love to run and that to me, it almost never seems too dark or too hot or too early. But why try to run fast? I quite enjoy easy cruising around the neighborhood, so why bother to train and to race? Here is my why.

Glory. In many ways, I live a small and ordinary life. I think that is the sort of life I prefer. I wouldn’t be happy as a Hollywood star and I for sure wouldn’t be good at. But it’s nice – more than nice, it’s important – to be able to touch the non-ordinary. I believe this is a fundamental human need or at least it’s a fundamental need of mine. To rise above ordinary life and create something beautiful and spectacular and amazing. To live in extremis at least occasionally. To reach out and touch the sky or at least to give your all trying to do so. That is one piece of being fully human. Running is my pathway to glory and glory is one part of what makes life worth living.

God. I would never claim to “speak for” God or to say “God wants us to…”. It is not up to us to know those things. But to work hard, to test our physical limits – I believe these actions honor God. Working hard to run fast is one way to display and honor the beauty of God’s creation of the human body. The beauty of every human body, even my middle-aged sometimes slightly broken one. If we honor God through running, we can also feel God’s presence when we race and when we train. Jesus’s most common advice in the Bible is “Fear Not.” Running can be scary and when we face our fears and discover that God does not abandon us, we can be braver runners and braver humans.

Geeks. I run for the geeks of the world and I always have. For everyone picked last in elementary school. For everyone who never learned how to throw a ball properly. For everyone who can’t really shoot a basket or even knock down bowling pins reliably. For everyone like me, who grew up wanting to believe that those things don’t matter. It turns out they do matter – see Glory and God above – but it also turns out anyone can get better at them. Where you start does not have to be where you end in terms of athletics or anything else. The geeks of the world need to know this and sometimes I can be someone who shows them.

Girls. How often does it come down to this? My parents report that when I was only two years old, I was looking at a book and asked: Where are the girls? Well, the girls were told we couldn’t run longer than 800 meters. The girls were told marathon training was too difficult. Kathrine Switzer was actually attacked during the Boston marathon because she had the audacity to run it while being female. The girls have always had to fight just to get equal treatment, while constantly being told that we are too weak and not tough enough to fight. That is wrong. It is both factually and morally incorrect. Every time I run a marathon, every time I run at all, I do a little tiny bit more to right this wrong. If I spend my life working to correct that injustice in whatever way I can, that will have been a life well spent.

Gratitude. I used to think those gratitude journals were yet another tool to oppress women and convince us to be satisfied with our lot. We should be angry, rather than grateful, or so I believed. I am still sometimes angry, but running has taught me to be grateful and to live life with gratitude. Having not been able to run for many months, I am still grateful for every step. I am beyond grateful and just astonished at the incredible people who have come into my life through running. Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the support I receive from family and friends in my running endeavors. I am beyond lucky. I am truly blessed.

I don’t need to BQ or even PR to run for glory and God, for geeks and girls, to run with gratitude. I want to do the best I can with the circumstances I am given. If I can manage that, I will be totally satisfied with the result, whatever it is.

Wintergrace by Jean Ritchie

This is the time, so well we love,
The time of all the year,
When winter calls with chilling breath,
For fireside and good cheer.
A time for man and beast to stand,
And feel the seasons turn,
To watch the stars for secret signs
And God’s true lessons learn.

I do love this time of year. This week between Christmas and New Year’s when the world seems to pause for a beat. The work of Christmas is over. The work of January is not yet begun. It’s a time of reflection. A chance to catch our breaths. Spend time with friends and family without the pressure of the Big Event. Space to think.

On the surface, my 2018 in running looked like this: Sarah returns to the marathon to run a very hot, slow race in February. Sarah spends the spring running a string of PRs at shorter distances. Sarah finally (!) gets a Boston qualifying time at the Erie marathon in September. But what happened next? First, a little year-in-review.

First Quarter

In January, I ran a lot of miles, many of them in absolutely frigid temperatures. On a rare treadmill run, my word for 2018 came to me: Focus. Focus on what you want, on what you need to do in order to get there. Focus on what matters.

Then I did go run an insanely hot marathon in Florida, 26.2 with Donna. The marathon broke my heart (again) but also reminded me that I want to be able to play more than I want to win. That is, the chance to get to the starting line is more important than the time on the clock at the finish. When you miss your goal time by AN HOUR, however, it’s still pretty rough. After a good deal of reflection, I know that even though I didn’t get the finishing time I wanted in Jacksonville, I got some other things that matter a lot. I got proof that I could still run marathons. I got to meet my coach in person. I got to share a marathon with my parents and a good friend. Remember the big picture.

Second Quarter

Then in the spring, I had some real fun. I ran PRs at all the shorter distances: the 5K (with HPRM #1!), the 10K (third woman overall!), the 10 mile (broke 1:20:00!), the half marathon (twice!), and the mile (also twice, plus again on the crazy Spring Street Mile race!). I learned a lot about racing and about myself. I focused on not taking the deal that the devil inevitably presents during a race. I found my running connecting to my spiritual life in ways I had never imagined. I was learning to be braver.

Third Quarter

The summer brought hot and humid marathon training and a whole lotta driving with road trips to Geneva-on-the-Lake for a family reunion and Cypress Lake Provincial Park for family vacation. I slogged out the miles on the road and at home.

Some runs inevitably stick out in your mind. I remember pausing on a bridge in Wadsworth State Park when a heron flew overhead. Beauty on the wing. I remember sweltering through a 22 miler with Squirrel when we stopped at the golf course to refill our water bottles. We banged out the last few miles of that run in the shared silence of hard, hot work, preparing our bodies and minds for the challenge of the races to come. I remember a crazy Alice in Wonderland style run with Snarky Girl when the woods was so full of mushrooms that it seemed transformed into an alien planet. I remember a difficult, demoralizing solo 20 miler on the airline trail that temporarily shook my confidence, but ultimately gave me something to draw on come race day. Hot, hot, hot all summer and I welcomed it because I was focused on out-training Mother Nature and whatever she wanted to throw at me.

August brought more summer fun. Coach Cupcake came for a visit and we escaped for a day to NYC for loads of walking and a theater visit.

I spent an incredibly special weekend in Newport, RI on a Run-cation, with friends new and old.

The Erie Marathon on September 9^th was the pinnacle of my running year in many of ways. I’ve already written lots about that race. When I look back on it now, I think: Focus. The BQ is what I wanted most out of running this year and I got it. Triumph!

Fourth Quarter

That triumph felt weirdly short-lived, to be honest. The plantar fasciitis that had plagued me in 2017-2018 flared up again in August. We managed it successfully to get through Erie. Coach Mick and I both assumed that a little time off running would fix the foot right up, but it didn’t. Every time I tried to run, it hurt. Finally I pounded out an angry 9 mile run in Pittsburgh that soothed my soul, but blew up my foot. It was time to change gears.

I’ll write separately about the hunt for (yet another) podiatrist, the decision to try EPAT, and details of that treatment. My plan had been to spend the fall running around with my girlfriends watching the leaves change color. Instead I spent a bunch of time driving to the podiatrist’s office and a whole lot of emotional energy being worried. The whole season feels heavy and dark. Sure, there were some bright spots. I cheered friends to incredible PRs at Hartford. The Manchester Road Race was absolutely freezing, but still a lot of fun. I started running with Pokey and Speedy Stork and I revived the Friday Girlfriend Run. But when December arrived, I was keen for the darkness of advent.

Our church’s advent prayer this season contained the phrase “knowing the darkness brings unexpected gifts.” I waited in darkness, sometimes impatiently, possibly obnoxiously, often losing sight of hope. I was in full-on comparison mode and my own achievements felt minor and unworthy. The official kickoff to Boston training made everything worse instead of better. Who the hell was I to think I had earned a right to run that historic and prestigious race? Coach Mick reminded me to look at the postcard on my refrigerator. The one the Boston Athletic Association sends as notification of your official acceptance. I did look. Every day. It helped, a little. We had a good conversation where we went over all my fears, one by one, and tried to deal with them. That helped too. My brain started to come around a little bit.

Then a few days before Christmas, I got sick. Really sick. Lie on the couch all day sick, stomach cramps like you wouldn’t believe sick. It was kind of horrific. I rallied enough to get through Morning of Kindness, to manage the drive to my parents in Michigan, to finish last minute shopping. But I was operating in a haze of cramps and nausea. Really not my best holiday season ever. Luckily I can barely remember a lot of it.

In the middle of the haze, we went to Christmas Eve services at my parents’ church, the church I grew up in. I love this service, especially the “shalom circle” at the end, when they turn off all the lights and everyone stands in a circle holding a candle and the light is passed, one by one, until the circle glows. It is magical and stunning and peaceful. But I felt so awful that when we walked in the door of the church, I sent up a prayer in my head: God, I need a sign that this is going to be ok. That somehow I will get through not just this service and this particular illness, but that my foot will get better. Yes, I’m praying for my little unworthy foot and my poor stomach and my sick heart. Please help me.

We went upstairs and sat in the second row, our standard spot when I was a kid. The minister turned around and said to Rose: One of our readers couldn’t make it tonight. Would you like to do a scripture reading? Well, YES SHE WOULD! She was a little nervous though. Mom, she said, there’s a lot of people here. Will you go up front and stand with me? Of course. When we got to the part in the service where the angel appears to the shepherds, the two of us went to the front and she read beautifully. My beautiful fantastic sensitive strong daughter. I used to have to bribe her with chocolate to convince her to go on stage at dance recitals. She read the scripture on Christmas Eve in the church I grew up in and my heart overflowed. All I could think was, sheesh God, sometimes you sure work fast. I asked for a sign and it took you less than five minutes to deliver. How could I have doubted?

I thought I would be ending the year full of doubt and worry and fear. I am sure I will feel those things again. I am far from perfect and I will forget again. But then I will remember again, that in the deepest darkness, the light returns and heals sick stomachs, damaged feet, and even sad and fearful hearts. Happy New Year everyone. Wishing you peace, joy, and good health.

A whole lot of last week was not so fun. My foot is not where I had hoped it would be. The official “Boston Marathon Training Kickoff Day” threw the worry gear in my brain into overdrive: What if my foot doesn’t stop hurting? What if it gets worse? What if [gasp!] it gets so bad I can’t even run Boston? Or, for variation’s sake, what if I’ve had so much time off from running that my fitness level somehow doesn’t come back to where it was? Why does this all seem so hard?????

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