This week I've been spending some time thinking about (well, like the title says) the assortment of and connections between of pain, torture, and exercise that go into building endurance and just generally getting more fit. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago how I was finding it strange that my legs would be tired but not actually sore at the end of some of these days of running, and since then that trend has only intensified (if vague muscle tiredness can really be said to be "intense," that is).
I think the reason I find this so strange - this relative lack of pain during exercise - is that it runs so counter to my previous experience of what it means to be whipped into shape. I mean, in high school during the first few weeks of soccer practice I fully expected (expectations that were, more or less without fail fully met) that twice a day my lungs would be burning and my legs crying out for help. Or, a bit further back, skating those infernal suicides during hockey practice. Or, for that matter, those crazy, screaming-calf-muscle plyometrics classes in college with Coach Michelyne. The common theme was always (1) work hard, (2) suffer, (3) improve. And I always thought that that's just the way exercise worked.
So, this running program has continued to strike me as a little odd. I mean, sure, on my fast runs I'm breathing quite hard, and at the end of the long weekend runs my quads let me know that I have indeed been running for a while. But it's just not the sort of level of pain-feedback that I'm used to...
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Monday: 21 minute on the erg. Took me a while to fall into a good rhythm, but once I did a very nice, light cross-training day.
Tuesday: 1 x 2 miles, 2 x 1 miles, and 2 x 800 meters, progressively faster but with a two minute rest in between each.
Wednesday: 6 miles, moderate pace.
Thursday: The fastest 5K I've ever run in my life. Exhausting.
On Friday, some rest
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Well, the reason I've been thinking about this is that this week I've had to face the fact that I think I might be in the best shape of my life. At least by a few metrics, anyway. Today I definitely ran the farthest I've ever run in my life, and just a few days ago ran what was easily the fastest 5K of my life. (Now, maybe at the peak of my soccer fitness I might have been able to match Thursday's 5K pace if I was running a race, and granted Thursday I was on a treadmill, so it was a little easier to stay on pace over the last mile, but still, you see my point.) This all seems to fly in the face of my whole established Exercise-Pain-Fitness belief system (a sort of Aeschylean "He who learns must suffer/And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget/Falls drop by drop upon the heart,/ And in our own despite, against our will,/ Comes wisdom to us..." but for "fitness" instead of "wisdom," I guess) Hmm....
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Saturday: 6 miles - same distance and pace as Wednesday, but it's amazing how much easier the same run feels after a day of rest.
Sunday: 12 miles. I'm trying not to gush each time I increase my previous record for distance by one little mile, but still...I was excited!
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Currently reading: Just finished that Michael Chabon book...and actually, I was a bit disappointed. Maybe I'm only remembering the essays that I really liked from the other collection of his that I read, but this one just didn't strike me as being nearly as good. Oh well.
Remembered cheese fact of the week: Fresh, imported Gorgonzola is so, so much tastier than the wrapped, packaged wedges I often get at the supermarket. A factor of two or so more expensive, but, once in a while, definitely worth it.
Current estimate of my odds of completing a marathon on May 1st: Compared to last week, I'm giving my self +3% for feeling generally fit and in shape, but also -2% for a creeping confidence that I'll be able to do this without a problem. Mustn't get too cocky. 76%
January 31, 2010
January 24, 2010
Week 4 - In which I wonder a bit if I am, in fact, the sort of person I think I am...
Specifically, I've always liked to think of myself as a very determined, stick-with-it, if-I-say-I'll-do-something-then-I'll-do-it sort of person. (Well, I suppose, who doesn't like to think of themselves that way...) But at the same time, I'm not sure that aspect of my character has really been put to all that much of a test. I mean, when I think about it, most of the medium/long-term projects I've undertaken that have required some degree of determination to get through have also happened to be at things that I am both fairly good at and enjoy doing. And those conditions, well...not exactly a fiery furnace in which to test one's mettle.
Anyway, I was thinking of this because this week I went ahead and actually registered for The Race. I know that - both here on the blog and in person to many of you - I've been saying I was going to do this, but I feel like registering was really the key thing: now there's really no way for me to walk back any verbal claims about deciding to try to run this. Well, I guess we'll just have to sit back, wait, and see what the next few months reveal about me.
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[Update: In the spirit of some sort of anti-competitiveness I've decided to stop referencing each run with its relation to my goal pace. And, really, It was kind of absurd to do that in the first place without ever saying what the goal pace was, no?]
Monday: 40 minutes on the stationary bike.
Tuesday: A fast set of 6 x 800 meters, followed by a slow, 1 mile cool-down jog. I think I rather like doing these once a week intervals.
Wednesday: 6 miles...it's very strange to me that I'm starting to think of 5 and 6 mile runs as only "medium" length endeavors.
Thursday: 4 miles, with a ~0.5 mile warm-up/cool-down run to and from the gym
On Friday, a nice, restful day.
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So, the semester has finally started...although, as the one class I'm taking has only met once so far, it's not like things have gotten all that busy just yet. Still, I'm pretty optimistic that this semester is going to be a good one: I think the class ("Phase Transitions" - with a professor I've taken a class from before and thought he did a good job) will be a good one, and I'm sure with only one class it won't be that much of a problem to keep up with the research.
Also, lately there have been some crazy rumors swirling around about actually attempting to make a turducken for Super Bowl Sunday. I can't quite decide whether I'm terrified or deliriously excited. Probably both.
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Saturday: 6 unpleasantly fast miles. Definitely hurting at the end of this one.
Sunday: 11 miles! I don't mean to boast, but holy mackerel - I just ran two digits worth of miles!! Also, today I discovered that doing these long runs with somebody else is far, far more enjoyable than logging miles on the treadmill. Who would have thought, right?
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Currently reading: Finished "The Broom of the System," and I have similar thoughts about it now as I did two weeks ago. Very good book, but not nearly as polished or as fun as Infinite Jest. Still, it was neat to see a lot of the same themes and motifs appear in his earlier work, and all in all I enjoyed reading it. Anyway, I've now just started Michael Chabon's "Manhood for Amateurs" - it came recommended from a friend, and essay collections are particularly well suited to being read during the semester.
Current estimate of my odds of running a marathon on May 1st: For actually registering and for pushing past the 10-mile mark on Sunday, I'm giving myself a ten percent boost here. 75%
Anyway, I was thinking of this because this week I went ahead and actually registered for The Race. I know that - both here on the blog and in person to many of you - I've been saying I was going to do this, but I feel like registering was really the key thing: now there's really no way for me to walk back any verbal claims about deciding to try to run this. Well, I guess we'll just have to sit back, wait, and see what the next few months reveal about me.
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[Update: In the spirit of some sort of anti-competitiveness I've decided to stop referencing each run with its relation to my goal pace. And, really, It was kind of absurd to do that in the first place without ever saying what the goal pace was, no?]
Monday: 40 minutes on the stationary bike.
Tuesday: A fast set of 6 x 800 meters, followed by a slow, 1 mile cool-down jog. I think I rather like doing these once a week intervals.
Wednesday: 6 miles...it's very strange to me that I'm starting to think of 5 and 6 mile runs as only "medium" length endeavors.
Thursday: 4 miles, with a ~0.5 mile warm-up/cool-down run to and from the gym
On Friday, a nice, restful day.
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So, the semester has finally started...although, as the one class I'm taking has only met once so far, it's not like things have gotten all that busy just yet. Still, I'm pretty optimistic that this semester is going to be a good one: I think the class ("Phase Transitions" - with a professor I've taken a class from before and thought he did a good job) will be a good one, and I'm sure with only one class it won't be that much of a problem to keep up with the research.
Also, lately there have been some crazy rumors swirling around about actually attempting to make a turducken for Super Bowl Sunday. I can't quite decide whether I'm terrified or deliriously excited. Probably both.
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Saturday: 6 unpleasantly fast miles. Definitely hurting at the end of this one.
Sunday: 11 miles! I don't mean to boast, but holy mackerel - I just ran two digits worth of miles!! Also, today I discovered that doing these long runs with somebody else is far, far more enjoyable than logging miles on the treadmill. Who would have thought, right?
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Currently reading: Finished "The Broom of the System," and I have similar thoughts about it now as I did two weeks ago. Very good book, but not nearly as polished or as fun as Infinite Jest. Still, it was neat to see a lot of the same themes and motifs appear in his earlier work, and all in all I enjoyed reading it. Anyway, I've now just started Michael Chabon's "Manhood for Amateurs" - it came recommended from a friend, and essay collections are particularly well suited to being read during the semester.
Current estimate of my odds of running a marathon on May 1st: For actually registering and for pushing past the 10-mile mark on Sunday, I'm giving myself a ten percent boost here. 75%
January 17, 2010
Week 3 - In which I contemplate my love/hate relationship with the treadmill...
Seeing as it is the wintertime, and of course I neither have nor particularly plan on investing in cold-weather running gear, by necessity all of my running is at one of the two gyms on campus. Furthermore, the indoor tracks are both short (one just less than 200 meters, the other closer to a bizarre 300 meters) and have a fixed schedule of clockwise or counterclockwise running - which would mean, for instance, that if I were to run only on the track, every long run on Sunday -or every interval workout on Tuesday, or what have you - would be in the same direction. Much as I relish the prospect of having one leg substantially larger than the other, this mean that I end up running mostly on the treadmill.
I used to loathe the treadmill. Or, rather, I assumed that I did, never having to use one much. And now that I've had a few weeks of heavy treadmill usage, I'm still not the biggest fan, for all of the usual reasons: the monotony, the lack of scenery or even the sensation of moving through space (it's not like there's that much scenery on the indoor track, after all, but at least you feel like you're moving), the lack of a breeze (what I wouldn't give for a fan in front of me on those longer runs!), etc. Plus, I'm left wondering just how comparable running on the treadmill really is to running on the ground... are the pace settings really equivalent efforts to running that fast over pavement?
However, I'm slowly coming to appreciate the 'mill, at least a little bit. A few weeks before I started a friend of mine remarked that treadmills take a lot of the mental effort out of running/exercising. At the time I didn't really understand that remark much at all, but now I see how true it is: you just set the pace and incline to whatever you like, and then just run. You don't have to focus on maintaining a pace (which is good - it turns out maintaining a steady pace is something I'm terrible at), you don't have to worry if you're slowing down a bit. You just tell your legs to keep running, and you can then just space out - or listen to the music, or what you will - until the little clock tells you that you've run the desired distance.
Also, I really like the name. I realize that treadmills and treadwheels were once actually used for milling purposes, but I just like the idea that the treadmill is there, slowly grinding me down and leaving behind only...well, I'm not quite sure... the quintessence of distance running or something like that, I suppose.
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Monday: A scheduled "easy week" (with the quotations only because to me it still seems absurd to label a week with 24 miles in it "easy"). So, 20 minutes on the stationary bike, and 8 minutes of Eight-Minute Abs (which, it turns out, are way less fun when done outside of Mission or Prospect).
Tuesday: 5 x 1000 meters at MP - 0:30
Wednesday: 5 miles at MP - 0:15
Thursday: 3 miles at MP + 0:15, followed by 2 miles at MP - 0:15
On Friday, The Coach said "rest."
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Anyway, other than running and steadily putting in the time at the office, this was a pretty uneventful week. The semester starts this coming Tuesday, so I'm sure things will start picking up soon. But for now, nothing much to report... sorry!
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Saturday: 5 miles at MP - 0:15
Sunday: 6 miles at MP + 0:15
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Recent goal accomplished: This week, with "The Man Who Wasn't There" and "Blood Simple," I finished my quest to see every Coen brothers film over the break.
Current estimate of my odds of running a marathon on May 1st: 65%
I used to loathe the treadmill. Or, rather, I assumed that I did, never having to use one much. And now that I've had a few weeks of heavy treadmill usage, I'm still not the biggest fan, for all of the usual reasons: the monotony, the lack of scenery or even the sensation of moving through space (it's not like there's that much scenery on the indoor track, after all, but at least you feel like you're moving), the lack of a breeze (what I wouldn't give for a fan in front of me on those longer runs!), etc. Plus, I'm left wondering just how comparable running on the treadmill really is to running on the ground... are the pace settings really equivalent efforts to running that fast over pavement?
However, I'm slowly coming to appreciate the 'mill, at least a little bit. A few weeks before I started a friend of mine remarked that treadmills take a lot of the mental effort out of running/exercising. At the time I didn't really understand that remark much at all, but now I see how true it is: you just set the pace and incline to whatever you like, and then just run. You don't have to focus on maintaining a pace (which is good - it turns out maintaining a steady pace is something I'm terrible at), you don't have to worry if you're slowing down a bit. You just tell your legs to keep running, and you can then just space out - or listen to the music, or what you will - until the little clock tells you that you've run the desired distance.
Also, I really like the name. I realize that treadmills and treadwheels were once actually used for milling purposes, but I just like the idea that the treadmill is there, slowly grinding me down and leaving behind only...well, I'm not quite sure... the quintessence of distance running or something like that, I suppose.
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Monday: A scheduled "easy week" (with the quotations only because to me it still seems absurd to label a week with 24 miles in it "easy"). So, 20 minutes on the stationary bike, and 8 minutes of Eight-Minute Abs (which, it turns out, are way less fun when done outside of Mission or Prospect).
Tuesday: 5 x 1000 meters at MP - 0:30
Wednesday: 5 miles at MP - 0:15
Thursday: 3 miles at MP + 0:15, followed by 2 miles at MP - 0:15
On Friday, The Coach said "rest."
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Anyway, other than running and steadily putting in the time at the office, this was a pretty uneventful week. The semester starts this coming Tuesday, so I'm sure things will start picking up soon. But for now, nothing much to report... sorry!
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Saturday: 5 miles at MP - 0:15
Sunday: 6 miles at MP + 0:15
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Recent goal accomplished: This week, with "The Man Who Wasn't There" and "Blood Simple," I finished my quest to see every Coen brothers film over the break.
Current estimate of my odds of running a marathon on May 1st: 65%
January 10, 2010
Week 2 - In which my mind is sharp, my legs are tired, and I'm quite sleepy
So, last Sunday I felt like quite the Renaissance man! After my long run I went in to the office and got some quality work done, then went home and cooked myself a dinner made extra delicious by some outside-the-recipe spice additions, and then went out to the Blind Piglet where my team won the weekly trivia competition. I wish all my days could be so diversely productive!
The next few days, sadly were not quite so exciting. And, Monday and Tuesday I had the strange feeling of my legs feeling tired and generally weighed down with moderate quantities of lead, but with absolutely no soreness. I'm not sure I've ever experienced that particular combination...very strange. Anyway, I also had trouble sleeping this past week. I think, with everyone gone, I kept shifting my schedule to go to sleep progressively earlier in the evening, until this week I hit the point where I would go to bed before I was really tired enough. Which inevitably resulted in my sleeping for a few hours, waking up, and then being unable to get back to sleep. I'm going to have to work on re-setting my sleep schedule before the semester starts.
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Monday: 40 minutes on the elliptical. My preliminary feelings for ellipticals are not very complimentary.
Tuesday: 6 x 800 meters at MP - 0:45.
Wednesday: 5 miles at MP - 0:03. I meant to do this run at MP + 0:30, but I think running the intervals on the treadmill messed up my internal sense of pace.
Thursday: 1 warm-up mile at MP + 1:45, 1 mile at MP + 0:45, 2 miles at MP - 0:15, 1 cool-down mile at MP + 1:45
On Friday, The Coach says to rest.
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So, speaking of The Coach, I suppose now's as good a time as any to explain. The Coach (I'll have to post a picture sometime) is just a big collection of papers - monthly calendars, notecards, etc. - that I've got attached to the refrigerator. The monthly calendar, with its schedule of what to run on each day, is a veritable Blue Label of training plans, blended from only the finest hand-picked plans into (what I hope is) an exceptional final product. Should I really be mixing and matching from training plans, each of which seems to have its own logic? Who knows? Well, I certainly don't, and I'm not going to let that stop me! Each plan on its own seemed to have one problem or another - this one had reasonable mileage progression, but seemed boring; that one had great variety, but seemed far too ambitious for a novice runner; and so on - so I tried to take the strengths of each and roll them all together. And, since I'm not going to be competitive, and any time at all would be a Personal Record, it probably won't make all that much of a difference.
The rest of The Coach - a halo of index cards and post-its arranged around the calendar - is a collection of advice, pace guideline conversions (which I need plenty of... The training plans all had the pace for a given day's run as "your 5K pace today" or "run this at a 10K clip" - as if I have the faintest idea how fast I can run those distances!) , encouragements, and general running tips that my Assistant Coaches (i.e. friends) have been sending to me. There's still plenty of room on the fridge - and I've got more than enough magnets - for some additions, so if you have any advice please do let me know; you too can have the honor of being an Assistant Coach in this mad little endeavor! [As an aside, is it strange that my Assistant Coaches are all real people, but The Coach him-/her-/itself is just a collection of paper? Shouldn't I have organized things the other way around?]
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Saturday: 5 miles at MP + 0:15. I can't believe I'm saying this about a distance of five miles, but after Friday's day off and today's moderate pace, this felt like an easy run.
Sunday: 9 miles at MP + 0:45. Nine miles!! Farther than I've ever run before! Something I'm presumably going to have the opportunity to say that a lot over the next few months.
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Currently reading: Mid-way through "The Broom of the System." It seems a bit more uneven than his later books, but I'm still thoroughly enjoying this one
Current estimate of what I think the odds are of me following through with this and being able to finish on May 1st: 63% - I mean, I don't feel particularly closer to being able to finish, but I also feel like almost by definition each week that I stick to the plan and put up a post the number has to creep a bit higher.
The next few days, sadly were not quite so exciting. And, Monday and Tuesday I had the strange feeling of my legs feeling tired and generally weighed down with moderate quantities of lead, but with absolutely no soreness. I'm not sure I've ever experienced that particular combination...very strange. Anyway, I also had trouble sleeping this past week. I think, with everyone gone, I kept shifting my schedule to go to sleep progressively earlier in the evening, until this week I hit the point where I would go to bed before I was really tired enough. Which inevitably resulted in my sleeping for a few hours, waking up, and then being unable to get back to sleep. I'm going to have to work on re-setting my sleep schedule before the semester starts.
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Monday: 40 minutes on the elliptical. My preliminary feelings for ellipticals are not very complimentary.
Tuesday: 6 x 800 meters at MP - 0:45.
Wednesday: 5 miles at MP - 0:03. I meant to do this run at MP + 0:30, but I think running the intervals on the treadmill messed up my internal sense of pace.
Thursday: 1 warm-up mile at MP + 1:45, 1 mile at MP + 0:45, 2 miles at MP - 0:15, 1 cool-down mile at MP + 1:45
On Friday, The Coach says to rest.
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So, speaking of The Coach, I suppose now's as good a time as any to explain. The Coach (I'll have to post a picture sometime) is just a big collection of papers - monthly calendars, notecards, etc. - that I've got attached to the refrigerator. The monthly calendar, with its schedule of what to run on each day, is a veritable Blue Label of training plans, blended from only the finest hand-picked plans into (what I hope is) an exceptional final product. Should I really be mixing and matching from training plans, each of which seems to have its own logic? Who knows? Well, I certainly don't, and I'm not going to let that stop me! Each plan on its own seemed to have one problem or another - this one had reasonable mileage progression, but seemed boring; that one had great variety, but seemed far too ambitious for a novice runner; and so on - so I tried to take the strengths of each and roll them all together. And, since I'm not going to be competitive, and any time at all would be a Personal Record, it probably won't make all that much of a difference.
The rest of The Coach - a halo of index cards and post-its arranged around the calendar - is a collection of advice, pace guideline conversions (which I need plenty of... The training plans all had the pace for a given day's run as "your 5K pace today" or "run this at a 10K clip" - as if I have the faintest idea how fast I can run those distances!) , encouragements, and general running tips that my Assistant Coaches (i.e. friends) have been sending to me. There's still plenty of room on the fridge - and I've got more than enough magnets - for some additions, so if you have any advice please do let me know; you too can have the honor of being an Assistant Coach in this mad little endeavor! [As an aside, is it strange that my Assistant Coaches are all real people, but The Coach him-/her-/itself is just a collection of paper? Shouldn't I have organized things the other way around?]
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Saturday: 5 miles at MP + 0:15. I can't believe I'm saying this about a distance of five miles, but after Friday's day off and today's moderate pace, this felt like an easy run.
Sunday: 9 miles at MP + 0:45. Nine miles!! Farther than I've ever run before! Something I'm presumably going to have the opportunity to say that a lot over the next few months.
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Currently reading: Mid-way through "The Broom of the System." It seems a bit more uneven than his later books, but I'm still thoroughly enjoying this one
Current estimate of what I think the odds are of me following through with this and being able to finish on May 1st: 63% - I mean, I don't feel particularly closer to being able to finish, but I also feel like almost by definition each week that I stick to the plan and put up a post the number has to creep a bit higher.
January 3, 2010
The Marathon Blog begins!
First, sorry about that tag-line; it was the first thing that popped into my mind, and I know it's terrible. I'll change it soon. Anyway, as you can see, the Bread blog has been reborn and re-purposed as I prepare to run a marathon on May 1st. Only, I'm still keeping the breadblog address... because, you see, "bread"... it's like a metaphor for those things which sustain me, and... okay, really I'm just too lazy to register a separate blog.
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Monday: My designated cross-training/rest-if-needed day. This week, 30 minutes on a stationary bike.
Tuesday: 3 miles at 30 seconds faster per mile than my goal marathon pace (or, in my notation for this blog, MP - 0:30).
Wednesday: 5 miles at MP - 0:15.
Thursday: In a boring repeat of Tuesday, 3 miles at MP - 0:30.
On Friday, I rested.
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So, why on Earth would I decided to run a marathon? And why restart the blog? Unlike the first time I answered those sorts of question, this time around it's the second question that's easier to tackle: I figure the more people I talk about this, the more likely I am to actually go through with it. Also, knowing that I'll be posting my runs will help keep me honest in sticking to what The Coach tells me to do. (I should here point out that The Coach is not a real person...just what I've nicknamed the training schedule I drew up for myself. More on that, maybe, in a future post.)
So, that still leaves the matter of why I've started on this fool-crazy plan. I mean, I can come up with a lot of reasons why this won't work: (1) I don't really enjoying running by myself, and in preparing for this it sure seems like there's a lot of precisely that in store for me. (2) Before I started training (~ two weeks ago) the longest continuous run I'd ever done was probably between five and six miles. The idea of more than quadrupling that in 19 weeks is preposterous. (3) The middle of this Spring, around March, is going to get very busy for me between coursework, heading to a conference, and preparing for my prelim, and I'm not sure where I'm going to find the time. (4) It's too cold for me to really run comfortably outside, so probably the next two or three months of this will have to be run on a track or treadmill in a gym. How could that not get pretty boring, pretty fast? Well, I could go on, I'm sure, but you get my point: ordinarily there'd be no sensible reason at all for me to even be thinking about signing myself up for a run this long.
Basically, for me a marathon has just one thing going in its favor: in nature it is almost perfectly complementary to my work towards the Ph.D. Lately I've decided that the mood I'm in is decided too entirely by how my last day at work went, and this is, I think, problematic. After all, while the goal -- finishing my degree -- is very well defined, the actual process of research is not. "Completing the thesis" is just some vague and dauntingly challenging objective far off in the future, and on any given day it's practically impossible to tell if you're any closer to finishing. In contrast, "running a marathon on May 1st" is concrete. A medium-term goal that, at the moment, seems completely unobtainable, but a goal that comes with the promise: listen to The Coach, just do what is on the schedule today, and the day after, and the next, and by the end of the first Saturday of May, you'll have accomplished something. At the moment, I find that very appealing.
Plus, of course, I'm feeling up for a good challenge, and especially one that will keep me in shape during the winter months. At first I was only going to try for a half-marathon (and, let's be honest, there's always the possibility that's what I'll end up retreating back to), but that just didn't seem like it would be enough of a challenge and enough of an accomplishment to keep me motivated. I mean, if pushed, deep down I suspect I could run a half-marathon right now; it wouldn't be pretty, and it wouldn't be fast, but I could probably stagger across the finish line one way or another. But a marathon? From where I sit now? Not a chance.
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Saturday: 5 miles at MP.
Sunday: 8 total miles. 6 at MP + 0:15, then the last 2 at MP - 0:15. Right now, I really dislike whoever came up with the idea of running negative splits.
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Currently reading: Just finished Murakami's "Norwegian Wood," which I enjoyed reading... haven't decided yet, though, whether I liked it more or less than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Probably a bit less, but I'll have to think it over. Anyway, just about to start DFW's "The Broom of the System."
Current estimate of what I think the odds are of me following through with this and being able to finish on May 1st: 60%
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Monday: My designated cross-training/rest-if-needed day. This week, 30 minutes on a stationary bike.
Tuesday: 3 miles at 30 seconds faster per mile than my goal marathon pace (or, in my notation for this blog, MP - 0:30).
Wednesday: 5 miles at MP - 0:15.
Thursday: In a boring repeat of Tuesday, 3 miles at MP - 0:30.
On Friday, I rested.
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So, why on Earth would I decided to run a marathon? And why restart the blog? Unlike the first time I answered those sorts of question, this time around it's the second question that's easier to tackle: I figure the more people I talk about this, the more likely I am to actually go through with it. Also, knowing that I'll be posting my runs will help keep me honest in sticking to what The Coach tells me to do. (I should here point out that The Coach is not a real person...just what I've nicknamed the training schedule I drew up for myself. More on that, maybe, in a future post.)
So, that still leaves the matter of why I've started on this fool-crazy plan. I mean, I can come up with a lot of reasons why this won't work: (1) I don't really enjoying running by myself, and in preparing for this it sure seems like there's a lot of precisely that in store for me. (2) Before I started training (~ two weeks ago) the longest continuous run I'd ever done was probably between five and six miles. The idea of more than quadrupling that in 19 weeks is preposterous. (3) The middle of this Spring, around March, is going to get very busy for me between coursework, heading to a conference, and preparing for my prelim, and I'm not sure where I'm going to find the time. (4) It's too cold for me to really run comfortably outside, so probably the next two or three months of this will have to be run on a track or treadmill in a gym. How could that not get pretty boring, pretty fast? Well, I could go on, I'm sure, but you get my point: ordinarily there'd be no sensible reason at all for me to even be thinking about signing myself up for a run this long.
Basically, for me a marathon has just one thing going in its favor: in nature it is almost perfectly complementary to my work towards the Ph.D. Lately I've decided that the mood I'm in is decided too entirely by how my last day at work went, and this is, I think, problematic. After all, while the goal -- finishing my degree -- is very well defined, the actual process of research is not. "Completing the thesis" is just some vague and dauntingly challenging objective far off in the future, and on any given day it's practically impossible to tell if you're any closer to finishing. In contrast, "running a marathon on May 1st" is concrete. A medium-term goal that, at the moment, seems completely unobtainable, but a goal that comes with the promise: listen to The Coach, just do what is on the schedule today, and the day after, and the next, and by the end of the first Saturday of May, you'll have accomplished something. At the moment, I find that very appealing.
Plus, of course, I'm feeling up for a good challenge, and especially one that will keep me in shape during the winter months. At first I was only going to try for a half-marathon (and, let's be honest, there's always the possibility that's what I'll end up retreating back to), but that just didn't seem like it would be enough of a challenge and enough of an accomplishment to keep me motivated. I mean, if pushed, deep down I suspect I could run a half-marathon right now; it wouldn't be pretty, and it wouldn't be fast, but I could probably stagger across the finish line one way or another. But a marathon? From where I sit now? Not a chance.
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Saturday: 5 miles at MP.
Sunday: 8 total miles. 6 at MP + 0:15, then the last 2 at MP - 0:15. Right now, I really dislike whoever came up with the idea of running negative splits.
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Currently reading: Just finished Murakami's "Norwegian Wood," which I enjoyed reading... haven't decided yet, though, whether I liked it more or less than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Probably a bit less, but I'll have to think it over. Anyway, just about to start DFW's "The Broom of the System."
Current estimate of what I think the odds are of me following through with this and being able to finish on May 1st: 60%
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