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. 

pickle-laden sandwich at Full Belly Deli

November 21: Turkey Trot, Brewer ME

In the "everyone's doing it" spirit, we decided to take on Brewer High School's Turkey Trot.  With a fun run for the kids and a 3-miler for us (and Mum and Dad willing to come along and cheer/kid-sit) it seemed like a great way to spend the afternoon. 

So we rose early and attired ourselves in layered assortments of running togs, long underwear, sweats and even pajama bottoms(!) and packed sandwiches and snacks for lunch and....went to church.

After doing our bit and blitzing the coffee-hour, and a quick change for Nancy (from choir-appropriate footwear and a skirt to sneakers and sweats [that long running skirt I've been eyeballing would have been totally perfect for this...]) we convoyed to Brewer, scarfing down more snacks in the car.  We arrived in plenty of time to pick up our bibs, use the facilities and figure out where we needed to be.  Mum and Dad, of course, played things a little closer to the wire.  Mum saw the kids start and then retrieved Dad from the car in time to see them finish.  All three did a great job.  They had fun in spite of the cold and were pleased with their times.  Alan was desperately trying to get some stretching in before the start but I just kept thinking how much I didn't want to shed any layers.  At the last minute I shoved my fleece at Mum, along with assorted water bottles and cheese and crackers I'd been nibbling on.  It was really cold while we waited for the horde to surge forward, but after that the chill was quickly left behind.  For almost the first mile I kept pace with Alan.  He was in the zone with his tunes so we didn't chat much but he kept looking over at me as if to say "you're still here?".  I finally let him go and hunkered into my own pace, but I really didn't feel like I'd pushed it that much to begin with.  During my first walking break, Carey from UMaine who I frequently see at running events ran past and said hello.  So I picked it up again and chatted with her for a bit which was just what I needed.  Between keeping up with her and trying to keep Alan in sight I was able to pull off a pretty good pace overall.  The brisk air was certainly invigorating as well!

Afterward, we all milled around in the high school gym and visited with the many people we know.  Once again I marvelled at how much taking up running is like joining a secret society only to discover that I already know a huge portion of the membership.

As usual, we won no prizes, although someone we know walked away with 3 turkeys (yes, age-group and team awards come in the form of frozen fowl) and the $600 cash door prize (one dollar per registrant)!

It was a fun event (even though the kids were a bit unmanageable) and we're very likely to do it again.  At first, I thought the tee shirts were terrible because I thought the turkey looked evil.  They had car decals, too, and Jeremy kept asking if we could get "evil chicken stickers".  I'm thinking someone overheard us because they made a point to announce that the artwork was done (and donated) by the artist who draws The Hulk for Marvel Comics.  Upon closer inspection, it's easy to see that he is not, in fact, an evil chicken, but a hulkified turkey.  No one's gonna cook his giblets!  Way cool.

J, j and M strike action poses

Emilie with her Marks Family flock of newbie runners

DI Pie in the Sky Race Report

Back on September 11th, the kids enjoyed a really nice fun run put on by the Destination Imagination group as part of the annual Orono Village Festival.

There were prizes for "best use of duct tape" so we commissioned Nana and Gumpy to help out with construction the night before.  The kids came up with some great ideas and executed them beautifully.  And it paid off: they won a family award for their collective efforts.

And they raced well, too!  This was one week into my shingles drama so I was pretty useless, but Alan drove me in and parked me at the start/finish so I got to enjoy some of the excitement, even in my very fragile state.

James carried his duct tape battle axe and shield and didn't stop running the whole way.  His time was 11:04.

Madeline also did a great job and looked very fashionable with hot pink duct tape wings on her feet.  Her winged helmet reads: "Duck Tape Awesomeness". She's got great form.  Her time was 11:34.

Jeremy did his typical runrunrunreallyreallyfast! and then stop to hold his side and plod for a bit and then runrunrunreallyreallyfast!...and repeat (you can see him pausing to look back on his way up the hill in the picture below).  But he didn't get lost (every mother's fear) and he appeared to be having fun when he hit the finish line.  His time was 14:53.

I'm so proud of them!  They pushed themselves, they felt proud, they had a great time, and they were nice to all the other kids.
Here they are in their post-race DUCK TAPE AWESOMNESS!