Why this should have been the best marathon of my life:
I did my first marathon in 2004, and ever since then I have had grandiose dreams of getting faster. Grandiose dreams and lots of training plans, that is, but I'm never as excited to lace up my shoes as I am to hit the road. After the first 4 weeks before I lose interest and move on to the "whatever the fuck I feel like doing today," training plan. But this time I trained for an entire summer for this marathon alone. I also made a huge jump in volume, going from about 35 miles per week to 90 miles per week in my base phase (although I wasn't thinking of it that way at the time).
In my youth I used to shout to anyone who would listen about how I was a high-volume athlete, and how I always got faster when I was overtrained. Then I got older, life took me down a few pegs, and I tried the lower volume version of "whatever the fuck I feel like doing today (the 1 hour or less edition)." I found that I was able to run a 4:15 marathon on a standard marathon training program (Boston 2008), running only when I felt like it (San Francisco 2011), or absolutely no running whatsoever (Sugarloaf 2010), so I figured my 3:57 PR would probably stand for life.
I was as amazed as anyone else to find that running 18 miles a day was making me faster – MUCH faster. Running 35 miles per week, my 10K PR had been 51 minutes (8:13 pace), and I had never quite broken the 24-minute barrier for a 5K. I ran 3 10K's in preparation for this marathon: at about 46:30 (7:30-ish pace), 45:30 (7:17 pace), and 44:30 (7:07 pace). In the second of those three races, I ran my first mile in 6:13, and still continued on to a then-PR by holding a pace in the mid-7's, when the previous fastest mile I had EVER run under ANY conditions had been 7:00. I had hopes and beliefs in myself as a runner that I never thought possible. For once, I was seeing results.
This was going to be my year.
The race I chose was the American Discovery Trail marathon in Colorado Springs. Most of the marathon would be on a dirt path, which I hoped would cut down on the cumulative fatigue of pounding on pavement (which is what makes a marathon so much harder than a 50K, for me anyway). It started at 7000 ft elevation, but I hoped the 1300ft net drop and average negative 1% decline would make up for the altitude difference, right? And I had been training at 1% incline on the treadmill, so that would be my insurance policy, right? (When I say, "Right?" you should shake your head solemnly.)
Doing everything right
This was going to be my year, and this time I was going to do everything right. I showed up at altitude 5 days ahead of time to get acclimated to the elevation. I learned the best way to fat load before carbo-loading, and then carbo-loaded as best I could at restaurants for the last 2 days. I drank 7 to 10 liters of fluid per day for a week to make sure that my chronically dehydrated body could finally catch up on fluids. I walked around with my own shaker of low-sodium Himalayan sea salt and shook it in my water and food for 4 days (more minerals than regular salt, and ionization that improves absorption). I picked foods based on what had the highest potassium concentration. I ate chia seeds by the spoonful before chugging tons of coconut water because chia seeds slow fluids' emptying from the stomach. I cut caffeine completely out 8 days before the race so that it would have the maximum effect on my endurance on race day.
This next section will be all about poop
So now you have the back story, and all of ingredients that led to my demise. If you have been reading my blog for a long time, then you know that A) I am a very shy pooper, and B) my GI tract quits before my lungs and legs every single time. In a good week at home I might only go number 2 three to four times in seven days. I had been on the road for nearly a week, eating unfamiliar foods, using unfamiliar bathrooms, and not drinking coffee. By the time I went to bed the night before the race, I had a week's worth of fatty restaurant fare foods backed up in there refusing to come out. My GI tract, and not so much my race strategy was what kept me up half the night before the race with worry. Would I get it out in time, or would I be running with this extra baggage?
I woke up at 4:15 and finally had what I had been waiting for for over a week... No, not the poop, the coffee. But the coffee did help me "break the seal" so to speak on my other week-long poop abstinence. I had eggs on toast, which has been my breakfast of champions since the years of know-it-all youth, even though it has felt pretty heavy for me lately, now that I'm a "fast" runner. I downed some last-minute coconut milk with chia seeds in it to help me hold on to some last-minute hydration and electrolytes. After 5:30 (1 hour before start time), I didn't take in a single sip and waited for what I was sure was going to be the best crap of my life to marinate.
In the car, I finished the last of my pre-race fluids (a bottle of beet juice: don't ask, it works), and finally felt the timer on my poop-cooker ding. Finally! But as we pulled up to the race start, so did a bus, which evacuated a couple dozen runners from its own bowels and deposited them right in front of me in the porta-pottie line. Each line fed 2 porta-potties, and I was about 20 runners back from the long-awaited completion of my last pre-race preparation. As I waited and waited, I could feel my bowels losing interest. 'No! No! Just a little longer,' I begged them. But then, with only about 5 people in front of me, the worst thing that could happen happened. A man went into a porta-pottie, and did not come back out. I watched his door stay closed for over 5 minutes (I know because when it had been a long time and he still hadn't come out, I started my stopwatch), while the other porta-pottie had to deal with the rest of the demand. When I finally got to go to the bathroom, a sad, dry little turd from the Jurassic period was all that was left to me, while the rest had crawled back into its den to ride along for my whole race. With the way the lines were, there would be no second chances this morning.
While I had been waiting for the bathroom, I scoped out the other runners. This crowd looked more like the start of an ultra than a regular marathon: I spotted no "chunky" runners. Rather than Team in Training jerseys, I saw race t-shirts from a surprising number of 50- and 100-mile ultras. Rather than "supportive" Asics shoes, I saw Hokas, Newtons, and other signs of a more advanced crowd. But I belonged here, right?
A Website really should warn you about these things...
I found the 3:30 pacer, and he pulled us off to the side to explain our strategy. "Alright, folks. This race is downhill, but it's not easy. The first 9 miles are going to be the steepest down, so I'm going to be running a bit faster than pace to pick up some time before the hills..."
'Wait a second! I hadn't trained to run FASTER than 8-minute pace at altitude. The downhill was supposed to take care of any gaps created by the altitude. And HILLS?! What hills?'
"...Then, once we reach the air force base, it's all rolling for the next 9 miles, so we're going to be going through those rollers right at 3:30 pace. Try to stay with me. They're not tall, only about 30 or 40 feet each, but they're steep..."
This was where I knew I was fucked. Hills that were only 30 feet tall wouldn't show up on a 26-mile elevation profile, but I had learned from my final training runs this past week in Boulder that even the slightest hill could have me doubled over just to maintain a 10-minute mile.
"...Then, the last 8 miles are pretty flat right on to the finish. I suggest you run in front of me if you want to keep your pace. Good luck! Let's have a great run!"
The guy next to me was a chatty type. "This race is usually cold at the start. Some mornings you can see your breath and you're shivering before you get running."
"You've done this race before?!" I asked. "Where are you from?" I forget where he was from, but it was at sea level. "How much slower would you say this marathon is than a sea level race?"
"I'd say 15-20 minutes. Those hills aren't tall, but they're steep. That's why I'm with the pacer, I usually run about a 3:15."
Right then was when I knew that this would not be my day. I had pulled another rookie mistake, and underestimated the altitude. But I was not the only one. This gentleman would be among the rest of the walking dead who would stumble home long after the 4-hour mark had come and gone. I wanted to go get back in the car get more coffee, bring it back to the hotel, and read a good book. This was a waste of time.
After finishing, I found a forum thread that I should have looked at months ago. It said that at 7000 feet, there is 25% less oxygen than at sea level. Running at 5000 feet you can expect to add 10s to your mile time, 50 seconds to a 5K, and 2 minutes to a 10K, and expect more deterioration for longer events. Other runners suggested expecting a 10% decline in performance. But I didn't know any of that yet.
The Race
We began running and I felt good running with the pace group. I felt like I had enough air, and the rhythm felt fine. I felt good running that 6:13 mile at the beginning of that one 10K too... until all of a sudden I didn't. If running at altitude is about 10% harder, than maintaining this 8-minute pace was the aerobic equivalent of running at 7:20 pace. But how could I know that? at the moment I felt good and had no objective way of knowing that the shit was about to hit the fan.
We couldn't have been more than a mile in before my stomach started acting up and my bowels let me know they were finally ready. I knew from experience that this could only end one of two ways: I would either slow down considerably and feel sick for the rest of my race, or I would feel sick until my body finally gave up and I started puking my guts out. I made it to between 3 and 4 miles, and then I ducked into a porta-pottie and let the pace team go, and my 3:30 goal for good. However, the phantom poo had struck again, and I struck out in that first porta-pottie.
I ran until half way through mile 9 by myself, in the no-man's land that lies right after a pacer where only the flotsam and detritus of the race – those runners who took it out too fast – languish in their own world of pain way earlier than it is appropriate to be in that much pain. But nobody falls apart at mile 4; nobody but me so I was alone. I floated along, maintaining an average pace of about 8:18 per mile, unable to eat or drink as my poop went thunk-thunk-thunking in my intestines like the last tennis ball in a tube. At least I didn't feel like my bowels had turned to liquid anymore, I just couldn't eat or drink.
At mile 9 I had gotten my hopes up again for some relief, and ducked into another toilet. I let out a fart that felt like came from as high as my shoulders, but there was no ammunition behind it. Now even further behind and more discouraged, I stumbled back out onto the course to face the hills with my whole body feeling like it was made of lead. By this point, I could barely feel my body. I wasn't in any pain, I just had that out-of-body sensation you have when you've got a bad cold and you've taken too much medicine. Nothing hurt, my breathing wasn't labored, but every cell in my body was urging me to lay down and stop. Running 18 miles a day, I had gotten very good at continuing to push through all levels of fatigue, but this was different. I just couldn't will myself on. When the 3:40 pace group caught up with me, I was moving so slow that I had to stop and walk while they passed or else the disorientation of being left behind by the tide of so many people at once would have been enough to knock me over. Eventually, around mile 13 I felt a stabbing sensation in three places in my stomach, just like a side stitch. I let out a moan and gave up on finishing this thing running. I walked until the pain subsided, and then resumed plodding along at a jog until the pain was back.
All through the 9 miles of hills, I felt like the walking dead. I couldn't run up the hills, but sometimes I couldn't run down them either. I was unable to respond to the cheers from spectators and encouragement from runners around me. Even in my worst moments, even when I'm puking or I can't breathe I can pluck up a sarcastic comment, a wave, or a grunt. This time I couldn't even lift a finger in acknowledgement, and the race was barely half way over. And yet, my legs didn't hurt. My whole body felt like NOTHING.
After mile 18 I was walking so much that I had given up even running in a 1-to-1 ratio. I counted 100 paces, then would make a decision as to whether I could keep running or not. I never made it past 300 paces, and would need several minutes afterward to recover. A few weeks before I had started marathon training, I had done a 50K where I ran up 9 straight miles of hills on the 100-pace-plan, never once stopping to walk. If there was one mercy in this race, it was that my GPS had stopped during one of my porta-pottie stops, and I didn't know or care how far behind pace I was. And at least I held off the 4-hour pacer for 30K, that was something to be proud of, right?
You would think that if I had held off the 4-hour pace crew (9-minute miles) for 18 or 20 miles, then I would still mostly be surrounded by people running at that point, but all of those around me seemed to be in the same slow boat to hell that I was. I met two runners who claimed to be 3:20 marathoners, and passed them both. I talked to a college student from Boulder who said she couldn't feel one of her feet. I watched one girl climb up from all fours onto wobbly Julie Moss legs and stumble drunkenly on at mile 24. I saw a man white as a sheet completely unconscious in a ditch while a medic on a bike worked on him. Absolutely everybody that I talked to had a story about how their day had gone horribly wrong. For some it was the heat, others blamed it on the altitude, while others blamed the deep soft dirt that they had lain only a few days before after the trail had been washed away in last week's flash floods. ("Hey, I didn't know we had a beach in Colorado!")
Normally I have very vivid memories of the sequence of my races, but this race featured neither vivid pain, nor crystal-clear impressions of the course. In my mind, I only have isolated snapshots, and when I crossed the finish line I remember feeling exhausted without really feeling like I'd pushed at all. I crossed the finish line in 4:12, and then sat on the ground, dazed. I had finished in the same time as my last 2 marathons official marathons: Sugarloaf in 2010 after not running a step in over a year and a half, and I had run San Francisco in 2011 without running more than 3 or 4 miles in the year and a half that had passed since Sugarloaf. How could this happen?! I had run a 3:42 on the track only a few months before with no aid stations, pacers, or expectations. I could think of no explanation for my terrible performance but the altitude and (whispered: constipation).
Oh well. Another A race. Another race report about choking.
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