Making Our Marks: Alan's Marathon Blog Post, Part 1

[It took running a marathon to get Alan to write on the blog, and then he wrote so much I decided to "chunk it" for easier consumption. Other than that, all I've done is throw in a picture or two.]

Surprisingly, I wasn’t really all that nervous the morning of the race. I had actually been more worried in the days leading up to it. Not so much about the race itself, though. I felt I was about as ready as I could be for it. I’d gotten my 20 miler in three weeks before. It wasn’t as fast as I had hoped it would be by about half an hour, but it was actually my second attempt in just 6 days to make that distance. The first time I came up short at 16 miles because my knee was hurting and I didn’t want to push it, so to hit my 20 miler only six days later at any pace was fine as far as I was concerned. And then I bounced back from that quickly enough to do the MDI Half the following weekend and have a new PR for that distance. So after tapering over the following two weeks, I was nice and rested and in a pretty good place as far as my training was concerned. On top of all that, I broke 600 miles for the year in my last short run before the marathon. There was no telling what might happen on race day, but there really wasn’t a hell of a lot more I could have done to get ready for it, and I didn’t feel stressed.

I also managed to fight off the cold that blew through our house the week after the MDI Half. Two of the kids and Nancy all spent time home sick, and I could feel the telltale stuffy nose and scratchy throat that almost always leads to a major cold for me. I was sure I was doomed. It’s been my pattern over the last year or so. I stay healthy all through the training cycle and then get sick right before the race. I had a miserable cold for the two weeks leading up to the MDI Half in 2010 (my first ever half marathon). It broke just a couple of days before the race, but I was still wrung out on race day and was a good 15 minutes slower than my goal pace. Almost exactly the same thing happened in May this year at the Big Lake Half, and I ended with almost exactly the same time as last year’s MDI. This year’s MDI was the exception to that. For a change I was perfectly healthy and it showed in the PR. Now, though, I felt like I was going to pay for that bit of good luck and be miserable for the big race I’d been training for for the past five months. If a bad cold could lay me up the way it did before those two half marathons, how bad would it be to run twice that distance (and to be going 6.2 miles longer than I had ever run in my life). In the end, though, I got lucky. I spent a week pumping myself full of vitamin C, sucking on those god-awful tasting zinc lozenges, and staying as far away as I could from the rest of the family. I felt a little guilty every time I told my kids to get away from me because I didn’t want them to breathe on me, but eventually the scratchy throat and stuffed up nose went away. A week ‘till the race and I was feeling fine.

It couldn’t last, though, as Murphy would say. Something had to go wrong, and it did. I went to bed the Wednesday before the race feeling fine, and woke up Thursday morning with my left foot stiff and hurting. Yes, that’s right. I’ve been running steadily for almost two years, 1100 miles total, 3 half marathons and a handful of 5 to 10k races and during all that I managed to avoid injury. Now, 3 days before running my first marathon, I somehow managed to hurt myself . . . IN MY SLEEP. I know that when you get older you become more prone to injury, but isn’t that pushing it a bit?

I did my final short run of 3 miles that morning despite the soreness in my foot and was reassured because it didn’t bother me while I was running. It was side to side motion that hurt and since the whole point of a race it to move forward, I figured there was hope, at least. But I also knew that there is a big difference between running 3 miles and running 26.2 miles, so I spent much of the day icing the foot, trying to stretch whatever I could stretch, calling the chiropractor for an emergency appointment, grumbling about it when I couldn’t get one, and generally convincing myself that I was completely screwed.

On Friday I finally managed to get in on a cancellation at the chiropractor, and he spent a long time working on the foot trying to get things to straighten out. There turned out to be three different bones that had slipped out of place (the cuboid, the calcaneous and one other whose name I forget) and they didn’t want to go back where they belonged. At one point he was lifting my ankle a foot or so above the table and slamming it down hard to try to get the bones to shift. Eventually they did, but I was still not all that optimistic about the marathon now just two days away. Lots of ice and elevation lay in my immediate future.

Come Saturday, Nancy and I drove to Portland to pick up my race packet and to spend the night before the race in a hotel, and while my foot was a little better, it was far from perfect. All around the ankle bone was visibly swollen (I made sure that Nancy got a good look at it so that she could verify that I wasn’t making up some excuse in case I couldn’t finish the race). I tried not to let it ruin the experience, though. We wandered around the race expo. Nancy bought a couple of things from the vendors, and I got a rub down from the volunteer massage therapists set up there. We had a nice lunch at the aptly named Full Belly Deli, and I carbo-loaded later that night on pancakes and hash browns at Denny’s. But my mind kept coming back to the way my ankle felt which might have been a little better, but was far from perfect. One last ice down and then it was time to get some sleep.