30/30

On May 14 I started an experiment to see what would happen if I ran 30K a day, every day that I worked (i.e. not running on weekends and vacations) until I had run 30 days. On June 25, I ran my 30th 30K. I wasn't sure what would happen, but I expected something along the lines of burn-out, injury, an insight into the nature of discipline, and perhaps a zen state of nirvana akin to the Marathon Monks or Forrest Gump. Well... not really. But it has been the most worthwhile experiment I've ever done, and way less uncomfortable than giving up caffeine for six weeks.

I did offer myself some breaks. Because I knew that injury was certain if I insisted on running every step, I allowed that miles walked counted, and any 3 miles cycled would count as 1 mile run. I pictured myself spending hours and hours every day in the woods and mountains around where I live, becoming one with nature and coming home every day with dirty ankles and a peaceful feeling like an REI ad might evoke. That wasn't exactly what happened either. In fact, most of the miles were run on treadmills between clients at work, or on the bike trail less than half a mile from my house. Hilly miles are slow miles, and all this running had to be crammed in around other responsibilities.

Expectations...
I also expected conventional wisdom to be true: that I would get injured, that I would get slow, that I would lose a lot of weight and get frail, or put on weight and get fat, or bike most of it to reduce the impact on my legs, and that most of all I would begin to hate running even more than I already do. I was half expecting to give up in the second week. None of that happened either.

Lots of fried food in Arkansas after week 2 was
not good for my aspirations of making a visible
six-pack.

...versus results
What happened was that I got faster, and for the first time in my underwhelming 16-year-long running career, I felt like a runner. I started looking forward to the runs, and feeling lean and fast. I felt like I could push myself and endure pain like I used to relish when I fancied myself a talented cyclist (usually when I try to run fast I just feel like I'm going to poop my pants). In the first two weeks, I started to realize that I could do this. In the third week, I started getting faster. In the beginning of the fourth week I took nearly 20 minutes off my best marathon time without really aiming for it. In the fifth week I found myself a Boston qualifying race at the end of the summer (to allow time for recovery, and a lot of speed work), and started looking at pace charts again. In the sixth week, I started running more and more of my runs at a fast pace (8 min/miles, for me), and people started telling me that my abs looked good. It has been an incredible journey.

A typical day looked like this:

• Wake up between 3:45 and 4:45 am. Eat 2 eggs on toast with olive oil and black tea, plus 1-2 pints water. Drink coffee on the way to work and through my first client.
• Work from 5 or 6 until 8 to 10 am. Drink water as much as possible.
• After morning clients, eat fruit and yogurt, then get on treadmill and run 30 minutes to 2 hours (depending on breaks). Drink 16oz of water per hour. Sweat at least a liter per hour. In the beginning I would eat a bar per hour, but after a few weeks I started only eating mid-run when I was running more than 2 hours. Possibly shower, or possibly not, depending on schedule for the day. Eat 300-500 calories (usually in the form of a frozen entre or burrito; Amy is my personal chef) and drink as much water as possible. 
• If breaks do not allow for enough time to change-warm up-run-change-eat, then walk on treadmill in work clothes between sessions to knock off a few miles while responding to emails. Drink as much as possible. 
• Meet with midday clients. Drink as much water as possible. 
• Possibly add a second run between clients, if time allows. Possibly shower, but not likely.
• Finish with final clients of the day between noon and 4pm. Eat a bar and seaweed snack, and change into running clothes. Drive to trails or home to run on bike path (occasionally finish on treadmill if busy day). Finish miles for the day, possibly leave 1 mile for later (see below). Eat bar in car on the way home.
• Make smoothie (banana, frozen fruit, coconut milk, water). Drink smoothie on way to shower. Shower. Sit in cold bath for 3 minutes. Finish smoothie and eat 1lb of greens with dressing and usually toast with cheese. Maybe some tortilla chips. Drink as much water as possible. Do work till Tolerant Girlfriend comes home. 
• Possibly walk dog with Supportive Girlfriend for final mile or so that I have saved for "family time." Talk about our days (read: tell Patient Girlfriend about what happened in that day's installment of Game of Thrones or Biggest Loser).
• Eat dinner around 7:30. Usually some kind of vegetables: stuffed mushrooms, salad wrap, homemade veggie burritos, occasionally frozen pizza (classified by USDA as a vegetable) or mac & cheese (orange = high in beta-carotene). 
• Sleep between 8 and 9pm. 

Challenges

A picture from mile 5 of the 2011 San Francisco
Marathon. Note: shirt soaked through and shorts
plastered to legs. Already. At mile 5.

Rather than the miles, my biggest challenge was sweat. I am a very, very heavy sweater, especially indoors. I dealt with constant chafe, always in new places: armpits, mid-back, shorts band, underwear bands, chest, and always, always in the crotch. I have rash-like bumps under my watch, my engagement ring, and behind my knees from sweat being rubbed into the skin.  I created mountains upon mountains of sweaty laundry. I sweat so much that on more than one occasion I had to get off the treadmill not because I was done running, but because my shorts were plastered to me and there was sweat sloshing in my shoes (once I actually sweat through the soles of my shoes and they began making that "shoes on wet linoleum" squeak. I had to slow down for fear of slipping and falling off the belt). Once I even sweat the maxi pad out of my pants. Often I would get off the treadmill to find that coordination and even talking were difficult from electrolyte depletion. Once my key fell out of my pocket on the trail on a humid day, and I had to run an extra hour without water to circle back and find it. Then I would spend the rest of the day trying to slam in as much water as possible so that I would start peeing again, and then so that my pee would go from orange back to clear. I took electrolyte tabs when I remembered, but even though I know better, it still seems silly to take 2 salt tabs for a 1-hour run.

Why?
I started this experiment because I knew that there was another level on the other side of overtraining. I knew that if you pushed through the initial phase of push-back from your body – when you took your training to a whole other level – that eventually you would break through. I'd seen and read about it, but I'd never experienced it. I'd tried running a 90-mile week before and my body tolerated it, so what would happen if I did several of them in a row? I knew that whatever it was, it would be something worth knowing about.

But what did others think, you weirdo?
I have this blog (and sometimes Facebook) to brag,  but out there in the world I really don't talk that much about the things that I do or have done. I am fiercely proud of the things that I have achieved, and it really bothers me when people just call me crazy, or brush it off saying that "I could never do that" (like it's something that I was just born being able to do, and it didn't take hard work???). But if you're running 2-3 times per day every day at your place of work, then people are bound to notice, so I unveiled my plan only as people started to notice. In the beginning my reactions were along the lines of, "What do you hope to achieve with this?" (translation: you're stupid or crazy or both), or "That's a long way." (translation: that's impossible). As time went on, the reactions turned to, "And how's it going?" (are you injured yet, or just sick?) or just "Wow." (which means 'I don't believe you.'). There are surprisingly few people in professional fitness who have more than a cursory understanding of endurance training, and those few eventually began to take an interest, asking me in the break room how many days I'd done so far, how it was going, and how my body felt. Most people just stopped talking to me.

What it felt like...
I felt great. At some point I realized that what I was doing wasn't some monkish effort like fasting for a month or meditating in a cave for a year straight. I had been inspired by the marathon monks, but there was another subset of people who ran an average of 20 miles a day and everyone accepted it as normal: I'm talking about fast marathon runners. From everything I've read, even the most talented and low-volume elite marathoners run between 80 and 100 miles per week (although for them it means a lot less time on their feet). As long as my body could handle the mileage, then why would I assume that training more would give me a different result than them? Once I realized that the reason fast runners run more miles is to give themselves more training for their body to respond to (and once I had established that my body could handle the load), then I started running more of my runs even faster and dropping tempo sets into my 2.5 hour runs. Of the last 5 runs, I ran more than 10 miles at 8-minute pace (10K pace for me in 2009) in 3 of them.

Rather than cleansing my soul in a bath of suffering, my mind was more occupied with Netflix, Hulu, and Audible. At least I feel like I did occupy my time with worthwhile pursuits. Over this period I took in:

• An entire season of Biggest Loser
• 2 Game of Thrones books (numbers 2 & 3)
• 2 triathlon books (Matt Fitzgerald's "Iron War" and Chrissie Wellington's "A Life Without Limits")
• Too many movies to count here, including Braveheart, Radio, Marathon, and yes, Forrest Gump

What I learned
It was Chrissy Wellington's book that really seemed to put the whole experience into context (although to be honest, I could't wait to finish it so that I could get on to the next Game of Thrones book). In the end of the book she waxes philosophical about not imposing limits on your dreams; you really don't know what you're capable of, so don't limit yourself by only training within your expectations. It's not exactly a life-changing revelation, but you know how you think you know something, and then suddenly it takes on a whole new level of meaning? That was what happened to me. I realized that for years I had been training for marathons in the same way that everyone trained for marathons: build up your mileage to 40 or 50 miles per week, most of it slow-ish (because the body can't handle intensity at high mileage), build up your long runs by about 2 miles every week or two, taking a recovery week every fourth week. Do your Tuesday tempo run and Thursday track session in the final 8-12 weeks leading up to the race. Cut your volume in the 3-4 weeks before the race. Get the same result as you got last time. Then I realized that without training, I could still get the same result as if I did the training, so I stopped training for marathons. I haven't trained for a marathon since 2008, although I've probably run a dozen since then. Ho hum.

Me and Very Supportive Girlfriend (and PigDog) finishing the ceremonial final mile together.

But duh! I've always known that my body responds well to high volume on the bike, why didn't I ever run more? Because I hated it and was bad at it, that's why. It never occurred to me that I just wasn't training enough. So at the end of six weeks of high-volume running, this is what I've learned: If you impose limits on your training because you are surrounded by doubters (in my case gym rats who don't know the first thing about endurance and rookie athletes with a much smaller athletic base determining their training scale), then you will get mediocre results. If you push the limits and push the boundaries of what you thought possible, eventually something will break. Sometimes it might be your body, and you will have learned that that is not the way and it's time to go back to the drawing board. But sometimes you won't break, but instead break through.

Final thoughts
I am not training for a marathon, nor am I training to qualify for Boston. Dropping 25 minutes of my marathon PR and finally running a Boston qualifying time after all these years would be great perks, but even if I did qualify and the race filled up before I was eligible to enter, I wouldn't really care. Because I no longer think of myself as a 4-hour marathoner. I no longer think that running 90-mile weeks is only for genetic mutants. I no longer think that 26.2 miles is a distance too long to be raced, and only to be survived. I used to think that meeting a goal and beating other people was the best feeling there was in the world. No. Have you ever beat yourself and so far exceeded your expectations that you don't even know where to set your goals? It's a great feeling. From here on out I'm just training to figure out how deep this rabbit hole goes.