My First Marathon (x2)

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My First Duathlon

There are relatively few road running distances I haven't raced and the same is true with triathlon. But there's a whole multisport world I never really planned to explore. I always teased David that duathlon was for people who can't swim. And it still may be, but the why we can't swim has changed. Pools are closed and it is still a bit early for open water (never mind you shouldn't really swim open water alone). And so I did my first duathlon. It wasn't what I would call an exceptionally well planned event. It was more like semi-spontaneous shenanigans. Semi being like 10 days lead time. It started with a social pose from Ironman Virtual Reality with the upcoming schedule for their VR events. April 24-26 was listed as half Iron distance duathlon. I looked at my Training Peaks plan and my weekend was going to be "close enough" to that that I asked coach. He said sure and rearranged my weekend. I took Friday off work to plan everything for my Saturday

COVID-19 Carmel Marathon

When the Carmel Marathon was rescheduled from April 4th to June 14th I was sad. I knew it was necessary. I also knew that I have Ironman 70.3 Wisconsin in Madison that day. And assuming we can race by then I will be in Madison. Normally I would just completely be - oh well, can't so a race that isn't happening. I don't do virtual races. I kinds thing they're dumb. But they're cool for some people. I had deferred my Carmel entry to 2021 and figured my streak had ended...this was supposed to by my 10th year of the Carmel races and I am one of the remaining streakers. Then coach encouraged me to to a 26.2 mile "race" as part of my training for Ironman Wisconsin. So I stuck with the original date, and eventually running in Carmel. Not on the course as they had asked us not to and part of the trail is closed anyway. Here's the tale of my solo, self-supported, self-entertained Carmel marathon. The end of taper week was kinda driving me bonkers because ther

First time for everything

There's a first time for everything. Today is the first time I've missed a 20 mile run in a marathon training cycle. Yesterday I got hit hard with what is likely rotavirus. Like puking into my trashcan in my office hit hard. After that the only thing I ate the rest of the day was about a half cup of cream of rice in the evening. Even if I wasn't dehydrated, didn't spend all night getting further dehydrated with sweating, and felt great I would have too much of a caloric deficit to attempt a 20 mile run. And so I spend this morning on the couch writing instead of training. Coach says getting healthy is the most important thing for my training. Fortunately I have enough time for at least one more 20 before Carmel and I already ran one 20 miler so I should be ok. But it is hard to skip. I might be able to pull off some kind of long run tomorrow. Or at least some kind of run. And in the afternoon it will be in the 40s so I won't be further stressing my body with cold.

Vision 2020

I'm a planner. And a dork. And I wrote a lot of Vision 2020 plans around 2000 so now that it is 2020 everything feels weird. Ok, that's out of my system. Let's talk about 2020. I've already done a self-assessment of last year and met with coach to plan 2020. Everything is focused on Ironman Wisconsin on September 13.The milestones have been set, but there will be some infill along the way. Milestone 1: Carmel Marathon - I did a spring marathon (also Carmel) in 2018 ahead of Louisville and it seemed like a good idea to do that again. So for the 10th Carmel Marathon I am running the full. Spring marathons feel undertrained compared to fall because the time between recovering from fall and getting ramped up to multiple 20 mile training runs is not there. I take the spring effort as a see what happens sort of race. Must finish to keep the streak alive, but I will see how everything else unfolds. Milestone 2: TourdeLou - not so much of a race as a supported event ride

Monumental Goals

After the DNF at Marine Corps Marathon, racing Monumental was a done deal. I hadn’t done too much damage to be ready to go based on where I dropped MCM and had two weeks to recover and regroup. All my training in between was good. On Thursday before the race I went to the expo to pick up packets, drop off some things, and head out for my run. All was good and it was nice to see people. The cold weather moved in Thursday night, but that didn’t stop me from being at the shakeout run with Deena Kastor at 6 AM Friday. Even though that meant I was on a bus at 5:15 AM. When I am normally still asleep. I had a too quick and very cold two mile run and even got to run part of it with Deena. Then I had to go to work for a bit, then back to the expo for coach Matt Ebersole’s talk and Deena Kastor’s talk. I took the bus home to have dinner with David and settle into final race prep. Saturday morning was blustery, but I had my gear ready to go. David came down early and gave me a ri

Other than that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

A couple weeks ago in the INEOS159 "race" we found that with perfect conditions a person could indeed run a marathon under two hours. The question at PBT then became "what's your breaking 2:00?" Since I broke 5:30 and have had some great training (and a few decent races) this year it seemed like breaking 5:00 was possible. It is now my breaking 2:00. After my last long run I went public with it on my little triathlon FB group in a video. Lots of friends and family were tracking me for the Marine Corps Marathon yesterday. I was going into the race fairly confident and with strong expectations of breaking 5:00 or at least a HUGE PR. The weekend started out to plan. Friday went nearly to plan and Saturday was perfectly to plan. I even figured out that indeed I wasn't going to be able to use the local bus to get to a Metro station to get to the race Sunday morning and sucked it up and scheduled a Lyft even though I am not a fan. Before I went to bed on Sa