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| Life since buying a Garmin watch. Boston and Philly training periods are color-coded |
As I'm feeling proud of the above graph, and for crossing the 200 mile-in-a-month mark, now seems like a nice time to recap a bit...at the beginning of 2013 I weighed myself at 218 lbs; I wasn't leading an active lifestyle; I was 7 years removed from my last marathon, and 10 years removed from my last sub 4-hour marathon. I knew I needed to get out and run a bit more-I needed to lose weight and get down to under 200lbs, quick. January and February I didn't even get out to run much, and I remember going for a 6 mile run in Phoenix in February that was sllloooow. I didn't bother to time myself, but it was rough.
I kept running a few days a week through the next couple of months, and on the third Monday in April, I was at home watching the Boston Marathon on TV with my parents and two children when the bombings happened. The next day I was able to connect, and have dinner with, an out-of-town friend who, safely, ran and finished the marathon before the blasts. We wanted to talk about anything besides the bombings, but I did want to hear as much as possible about his race, so he showed me the graph of his mile-by-mile progress from his phone, which I though was incredibly slick. He told me it was easy enough with his Garmin watch, it just exports to Excel through the Garmin site. So, right there when he mentioned exporting data to Excel, I'm sold. I bought my first Garmin watch and on April 24th, 2013, I ran my first run with a running watch...a 3.5 mile run at 9:23 min/mile, I remember thinking that it seemed like it should have been at least 5 miles...I developed a love/hate relationship with that watch. That was a Wednesday, and I didn't run again for over a week, when I did the same 3.5 mile loop and made sure to run it under 9 min/mile.
I ran a 5 mile race in May 2013 at 8 min/miles, and was
(sort-of) proud of myself, so I signed up for a 1/2 marathon in the fall with a few friends. While I had run 7 marathons previously, I had never run any other distance aside from the 7 mile Falmouth road race, and one 5k when I lived in CA. Falmouth Road Race in August 2013 went well, and I ran the course in a (sort-of) respectable 7:20 min/mile. At that point I decided I would commit to running the 2014 Boston Marathon under a charity number. I committed to raising $4,000 for charity, and I promised myself I would train at a level that would allow me to run 3:45, or faster. I raised over $11,000 for charity and ran the course in 3:32:28, for my second fastest marathon.
Over the last 20 or so months, I've dropped 42 lbs, from 218 down to 176, and I hope to run Philly under 175 lbs. I ran a training marathon last month in 3:41, and my goal for the Philly marathon is to finish under 3:20, at a pace of 7:37 min/mile. That would be over 12 min faster than Boston and almost 6 minutes faster than my marathon personal best, at the 2002 Pacific Shoreline marathon (at 23 years old.)
I'm training in ways I never have before. Combining speed workouts with hills, tempo runs, and long runs targeting specific segments at marathon pace. For the Boston marathon, I would just wander out my front door with my shoes and a watch, and come back after running however long I thought I needed to run.
I have a new routine now. I employ dynamic stretching before a given warmup period. I focus heavily on muscle recovery and a post run stretching and flexibility regimen. I take ice bath and get massages. I focus on nutrition and sleep. I devour training information and pay attention to data coming to me from my heart rate monitor. Every time I walk out of the house for a run, I have a specific, mile-by-mile plan for the run. Sometimes it works out the way I planned, sometimes it doesn't I'm also racing strategically: this marathon training period I've run a 200 mile relay race, 5ks, a mile race, a 30k race, a marathon as a progressive run finishing at marathon pace.
I'm energized and excited, October was a great running month for me, everything went according to plan, and now it is November. Race month.
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