A Look Back - My First Marathon

I didn't run today, still recuperating from my surgery, so I figured I would write about my first marathon experience, which wasn't real pleasant thanks to my poor training regime, if you can call it that.

In 2001 I was living in San Diego and was leading a very sedentary lifestyle. I used to play quite a bit of poker as a hobby, which is legal in California, so when I wasn't spending time sitting at my office, or sitting in a law school classroom, I was sitting at a table in a cardroom. That's a lot of sitting, and aside from the occasional game of golf or taking the dog for a walk, I got very little exercise. In January, the girl I was living with at the time told me that our friend Trevor was coming to visit in June to do the Suzuki Rock n Roll Marathon. She suggested that I do it as well. That idea was somewhat out of left field, as I had never been a runner, and certainly was not in any kind of shape to run 26.2 miles. I had been with this girl for several years so I kind of knew what the subtext of her suggestion was. I was in a rut and knew it so I welcomed the motivational push to try and tackle this new challenge. The next day at work I hopped online and registered for the event. I was feeling pretty confident about things. I had run a mile in gym class back when I was 16. And I had actually run a 5 mile race on Thanksgiving several years earlier, and I was a smoker at the time. I had since given up cigarettes, and while my diet consisted largely of Double Doubles and vanilla milkshakes from In N Out Burger, I wondered how hard could the marathon be?

I went to the store and bought some running shoes, and then one day after work went to the gym at our office building to try and figure out the treadmill. I got on and tried to see how far I could run. As it turns out, it was only a quarter of a mile. Oh boy. This was going to be tougher than I orignially thought. A marathon is 26.2 miles and I could only do 1/4 of one mile, with the race 4 months and 1 week away. Not only that but the 1,320 foot journey made me too sore to run the next day.

Two days later I went back to the treadmill and tried to go longer, and was able to do a half mile. Woohoo! I was making great progress. Inspired by my amazing results, when I got home I did some research and wanted to find a good goal for myself in terms of a finishing time and saw that 4 hours was kind of the benchmark for non-professional runners to try and break. So I did some math and figured out what pace I needed to run, which was 9 minute miles. On the treadmill readout that is 6.7 miles per hour, so that is the speed I would program for all of my future treadmill runs. Incidentally, this is not the correct way to determine your pace. Your pace should be dictated by your ability and not some goal you looked up online after nearly falling off of a treadmill after a half mile "workout".

Although I ultimately got into a good 9 minute mile groove, I didn't like running on the treadmill at all. It made me kind of dizzy and was incredibly boring, so after I got up to about 2 miles I decided to take the show on the road. Luckily I was living in San Diego where the weather is always pleasant, and there are some nice trails to run on that are quite scenic. The main place I used to go was Crown Point, where there is a sidewalk with markers every quarter of a mile, so it makes it easy to track your progress and monitor your pace. The path winds around Mission Bay, a beautiful body of water not far from Mission Beach and the Pacific Ocean.

On my birthday, March 11th, my then girlfriend bought me a runner's watch, which was very thoughtful of her. So now I could time myself more accurately when I ran outside (for the previous couple of weeks I would just note the time on the clock in my car and check it again when I got back, not very accurate). So now that I had the watch and I had been training for 6 weeks, I wanted to see how fast I was. I decided to run a mile as fast as I could, which is a common method of training, to mix in a night of speedwork, but I didn't really know any of this at the time. This was on a Tuesday night, when I would typically run 3 or 4 miles at the usual 9 minute mile pace. I ran the first mile in just over 7:00, and was pretty exhausted after doing that. So I just walked around and caught my breath and drank some water for about 10 minutes and then started the stopwatch and made another go at it, back toward my car, determined to break 7:00. As I got near the end I sped up quite a bit and went flying by some people on roller blades who looked at me like I was nuts. As I crossed the finish line I clicked the stopwatch off, and when I looked down I was happy to see the readout: 6:59.93! It is kind of funny to think of it now, since now I can do sub 7 minute miles for a 10k, and once did exactly 7:00 pace for a 15K (9.3 miles), but at the time those 2 seven minute miles took a lot out of me. I was actually too sore to run until the weekend, having to skip my Thursday night run. But that is one of the thrilling things about running, reaching new limits and establishing new personal records.

I was following a schedule I had found online or in a book, doing a long run on Sunday and shorter runs on Tuesday & Thursday nights, gradually increasing the mileage as I went along. I had made an Excel schedule calendar where I put the proposed miles for every day, and then would update it with the actual results (the real miles I wound up doing, which would often vary, and the times). So I was pretty well organized and was living in a city with an ideally suited climate, had a supportive girlfriend in my corner, and plenty of weeks left to get ready for the race. Sadly, the wheels were about to come off of the whole operation.

On April 15th I did a 12 mile run, which I started in Mission Bay and went all the way to the ocean and then up the boardwalk in Mission Beach for a bit, and then turned around and came back. It was unseasonably hot, and it was a bit rough so I couldn't maintain the 9:00 pace, slowing down at the end to a 10:00 pace, but still not too big of a problem in the scheme of things. However, as it turns out, this wound up being my longest run before the marathon. For those of you new to the sport, what I should have done in the following weeks, and they were all laid out right there on my handy Excel schedule, were Sunday runs of 14, 16, 18, 20 and then tapering down to 12, 5 and then the marathon. Instead I opted for 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, and marathon. Don't try this at home!

After April 15th I was not as busy at work so there was really no reason to be missing runs. School ratcheted up in intensity a bit, as my final exams and a big paper were on tap for early and middle May, but there was still plenty of time to run. I had no excuse, I just wound up not doing the long runs. I would run periodically on Tuesdays & Thursdays, 5 miles at the most, sometimes only 3. I had started playing poker again, which is something my ex-girlfriend hated and was probably the driving force behind her suggestion to take up running. After all, running was much healthier and a much less expensive hobby. I'm not sure what was going through my head at the time, I'm sure we were having some kind of relationship difficulties (we would break up 6 months later). But mainly I was just being a lazy loser. In any event, with 6 weeks or so to go before the race, I essentially stopped training altogether.

The Friday before the marathon I went for a run around my neighborhood, probably only a mile and a half. This was the first time I had run in over two weeks. Sunday was going to be ugly; I had read enough on the subject to know that failure to log enough miles was going to cost me in the later stages of the race. But our friend was in town and he was doing it and it had been built up so much that I couldn't back out now. I had made my bed and now I had to lie in it.

At the starting line I realized there was one crucial decision left to make, one that might spell the difference between finishing and not finishing, and that was what pace to run. I could go out at the old 9:00 pace and see if by some miracle I could do it in 4 hours, or slow down as a concession to the reality that I had not put in nearly enough miles. Again, I made the stupid decision and threw caution to the wind. I did the first 10K in a 8:53 pace. The next 6.9 miles I slowed down to a 9:47 pace, which is attributable in part to a prolonged uphill from miles 6 to 10. My half marathon was 2:02:32 (9:21 pace), so if I could have sped up a bit I could have broken 4 hours. But that was never going to happen, as my legs were already getting sore. This represented the longest distance I had ever run at one time before, and now things were going to get difficult. I began walking through the water stops, taking a cup or two at the beginning and then walking through the whole station and then starting to run again after having leisurely drank my fill. Once I got to the 20 mile mark things got even worse.

At the 20 mile point back then (the course has since been changed) there was this really large hill that seems to go nearly straight up into the sky. I had to walk up it and it then we went down a hill of nearly equivalent steepness, which was also painful. After that I kind of started hallucinating, which is always fun. I began talking to myself aloud, kind of a Tourrette's Syndrome kind of thing, where I would just randomly swear under my breath in repsonse to the pain. One thing that kind of helped keep me going was that the pain would manifest itself in different parts of my body. So my legs would hurt, and they wouldn't stop hurting, but all of a sudden a new and more exquisite pain in my left shoulder of all places would come to the fore. This was actually a welcome break in the monotony and was almost entertaining in a way.

Another way I tried to keep myself sane during the torturous last 10K was to do math in my head. Now that the 4 hour goal was out the window I kept revising my time goal and doing the necessary calculations to figure how fast I needed to go. Doing math in your head of this nature is tough enough under the best of circumstances, but when your brain is not working properly it is nearly impossible. My 20 mile split time was 3:29:13, and I was walking at this point, so I came up with a new plan to just try and break 5 hours, which could pretty much be accomplished by walking briskly at a 14:30 pace the rest of the way.

I also resolved that I would finish the race running, so I made the conscious decision to do a lot of walking from miles 21 to 24. After the 24 mile mark, with 30 minutes to go, I started running again, albeit much slower than before, but running nonetheless. So when I entered the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot for the last few hundred yards of the race I was moving at a respectable clip. When I crossed the finish line the clock read 4:55:06, and my net time was 4:53:40. I was very happy that it was over, and I saw my friend Trevor, as well as his fiancee and my girlfriend who were volunteering at the finish line. I got one of those tin foil heater things and a banana and sat down on a box of water bottles, which isn't optimal (you're supposed to keep walking to aovid getting sore). But I didn't much care at that point I had no energy left and could barely stand up. We went and got some free food, mainly chocolate chip cookies for me, and then made the long walk back to the car.

The rest of the night I spent sitting in a recliner in my apartment, and I was incredibly sore and stiff the rest of the week. It was probably Friday when I was walking in a manner that was not reminiscent of Frankenstein's Monster. I did have a tremendous sense of accomplishment, but was not yet in love with running. Having run alone all during my training and then enduring so much pain at the marathon itself, the whole experience was not as fun as it should have been. Consequently, it would not be until 2 years later, in the summer of 2003 that I would run seriously again.

The difference between this experience and my first year with Team for Kids (2005) was like night and day. I almost never ran alone in 2005, I always had great people to keep me company. As my speed changed throughout training, I just found new people to run along side with no problem. I never missed a training run unless I was too injured, as I didn't want to let down my teammates or miss a chance to see them again. The results were vastly different, I completed the New York City Marathon in 3:57:34, about 56 minutes quicker than my first effort. I had run New York the year before (2004) in 4:41:20, which is one where I trained by myself yet again, but actually did an 18 mile long run and did not decide to stop running in the weeks before the race. So while 2004 was an improvement over 2001, and resulted in knocking 12 minutes off my time, joining Team for Kids was the key to breaking 4 hours and joining the ranks of the speedy amateur runners.

So the moral of the story is to join a team or at least find somebody else to train with, unless you have the discipline to make yourself show up day in and day out for your scheduled training runs. Even if you are the kind of person that has that ability to drag yourself to the park early in the morning just because the Excel schedule tells you so, joining a team is going to provide you with a lot of great friends that will make the expereince much more fun and memorable.