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Deciding "What's Next"

After completing the 2002 New York City Marathon, I decided to try maintaining my marathon condition.  After my two prior marathon efforts, I'd experienced a post-race letdown, and in both cases took several months to decide what my next running goal should be.  While that's completely normal, it's also a bit frustrating.  I felt as though I'd squandered some of the hard work I'd logged by falling a bit out of shape.  In the worst case, I'd actually fallen out of half marathon shape as well.  It doesn't take long to come back from that physically, but the bigger barrier is mental.  You really need to revisit what's important to you in terms of your running.  Once you know what that is, it's straightforward to apply yourself to that goal.

Following my big race in New York in November of 2002, I resumed running after a week's layoff.  I took things fairly easy, and didn't do any distance workouts for three weeks.  I also kept up with my journaling, as I'd found this to be a great clarifying exercise.  This was a new habit I'd begun when training for New York.  Once I'd written down the numbers and key points from each workout, I was far more likely to train effectively.

The big question was : which one to do?  Early on, I aimed for the Vancouver International Marathon.  This was an event I'd wanted to do for several years - I had originally planned to run this in 1997, but came down with a nasty cold two weeks before the race, and opted for the half.  Six weeks later Kayla was born, and it was a year before I built back up to marathon distances.

Kris modified my Vancouver plan when she decided to celebrate her <milestone> birthday by doing Grandma's Marathon in June (in Duluth MN).  She offered me the honor of running with her.  I couldn't turn that chance down, but nor was I comfortable with the prospect of running two marathons in the space of seven weeks.  I decided instead to run the Yakima River Canyon Marathon, from Ellensburg WA in April.  This is a really nice and fun small event (fewer than 200 runners).  There were some challenging hills on this course, but I heard great things about the event itself, so decided to give this one a try.

While running the Nookachamps Half Marathon in January, I spoke with a woman who had done the inaugural Whidbey Island Wings of Gold Marathon the previous year.  It sounded like a lot of fun, so I kept this one in the back of my mind too.  It was a week later than the Yakima River Canyon event, so it sounded like a good alternative if my schedule shifted, or if I simply changed my mind.

I caught a nasty cold about a month before the Yakima River Canyon event, and needed to push my last long run out a week to give myself time to recover.  Rather than risk a short (two week) taper, I opted for Plan B, running the Whidbey Island event.  In retrospect, I opted for the more challenging of the two, possibly costing myself a marathon PR as well.

My Training Plan

I decided to try doing a marathon without walk breaks for the first time as well.  While I'd had good success with this approach, I was also curious to feel what running straight through for 26.2 miles would feel like.  This didn't take too long to get used to, although I definitely feel more late-mile fatigue.

Other than the walk-breaks, I followed the same rough training schedule, and weekly rhythm that I had while training for New York.  Kris began marathon training in February, so I ended up shifting most of my long runs to early Sunday mornings.  Early in my training, I also did lots of trail running, with some fairly healthy climbing.  I definitely felt stronger on hills than I ever had.  Unfortunately, I traded these sessions for mile repeats later in my training, and as a result, lost some of that hard-earned strength.  It would have come in very handy when running on Whidbey.

I also did fewer of the acceleration runs as I had previously.  I had been fairly religous about including 10 of these in my last weekday run in the two months leading up to New York.  This time around I lacked the same ambition.  My mile repeat work was also not of as high a quality.  I did two 26 mile training runs though.

Also in retrospect, my focus tailed off in the month prior to the race.  There were a couple of weeks in February and March in which I simply did not put the time in enough.  I don't really think this affected my physical conditioning as much as it spoke of my mental approach to this race.