Week 15/16 (of 20) -- 20 Miles!!!

(Sept 8th - 21st, 2008)

The weekend of our longest long run (20 miles), my team was scheduled to run the first half of the Nike course in SF. Unfortunately, Mark and I had to go out of town for a wedding that weekend, so I wasn't able to run the Nike preview with them. :-(

But I was determined to not miss the 20 mile run, so I decided to take the Friday before (they were running on Sat) off from work and run the 20 miles on my own before Mark and I had to head out of town. I opted to run the Los Gatos Creek trail from Meridian Ave in Campbell towards Los Gatos. This is slightly less than than 9 mile, flat, paved trail, but if you continue past the end of the paved part and head up toward Lexington Reservoir, it adds another 1 1/2 miles or so making the whole thing end to end about 10 miles (the section near the reservoir adds a pretty steep hill, which was good, I reasoned, since the Nike course has a pretty significant hill about 6-7 miles in... good training :-) ). This was just about the most ideal place to run 20 miles on my own, there are plenty of bathrooms and water fountains along the trail to refill my bottles, and at no point is it too far away from civilization if I needed to bail for some reason.

So... I dutifully got out of bed at about 5:30am and and drove to Meridian Ave so I could start my run by 6:30am. I was anticipating that it would take 5 hours at the most, and we needed to leave MV by about 1pm or so to get to the wedding. Leaving just enough time for my shower and ice bath once I returned.

It was still pretty dark when I started on the path, but there was just enough light from the street lights and the moon to see where I was going. I started out fine, and in retrospect, probably a little too fast. For the first 13.1 miles I was pretty much on pace to finish in 4 1/2 hours, and I was pretty excited to suddenly have an extra 1/2 hour to get ready. That didn't last too long though. Around mile 15, I stopped to stretch my hip flexor since it was feeling a bit sore, but then when I tried to start running again, that area was in excruciating pain! It really felt like my thigh muscle was separating from my hip bone. OMG, did it hurt! I still have no idea if I somehow overstretched it and thus, caused the pain myself, or whether it was slowly building and inevitable and was really just coincidental that it started hurting after I stopped to stretch. In any case, I could barely even walk after that much less run (although walking hurt less than running), so I kind of limped along for the next 2 1/2 miles or so. My extra 1/2 hour went right out the window at that point. When I hit mile 18 and realized that if I didn't pick up the pace I wasn't even going to finish in 5 hours, and that meant that not only wouldn't I have extra time, I would even be late getting home and would probably have to sacrifice my ice bath in order to be ready to go at the right time. Well... that motivated me to try to speed up a bit. I knew that that day, more than ever, I NEEDED that ice bath. That's when I realized that it probably hurt because somewhere along the line when I got tired, my form had suffered, and I ended up running with only my legs which just put a lot of strain on my poor leg muscles. So, I started to chant to myself "Everything moves from the core" over and over again, to try to get myself to move my legs from my core muscles rather than my thigh muscles. To my amazement, that actually worked! I was actually able to jog for the next two miles in significantly less pain, and I managed to finish the 20 miles in 4:59 and some odd seconds - almost exactly 5 hours!

That run taught me two valuable lessons (or rather reaffirmed what my coaches have been saying over and over again for the last 5 months): (1) you need more than strong legs to run a marathon. In fact, every muscle in your body is important. Your core muscles keep you in good form when you get tired (I could have improved this quite a bit if I had continued our core exercises from the beginning of the season...), but even your shoulders, neck and face muscles are important. If they're tense, your whole body will be tense. So, during the race I have to utilize my core muscles more and relax my upper body. And (2) don't go out too strong. I'm not entirely sure if this had anything to do with my leg pain at mile 15 or not, but I'm hoping that if I slow down more in the beginning of the race, then I won't strain my muscles as much and will hopefully avoid the excruciating pain. :-\ We shall see...