Addicted to Exercise

A comment from Mark this afternoon got me thinking a little bit, and I feel the need to reflect on where I’ve been. This past Sunday I just had the best race of my life so far. It’s pretty amazing to me how I got there.

One year ago at this time, I was training with a group doing long slow runs at about 9 to 10 minutes a mile. My goal was to simply to finish my marathon without hurting myself. See my original post on this topic. I was perfectly content with that. I figured one day I would manage to run a 4-hour marathon and I would be happy. About the fastest my feet would carry me was a 6:40 pace, and I could stand that for about a minute before I was totally drained. At the end of every long run I was totally worn out and just on the brink of hurting myself. I walked a lot at the end of my longer runs because I just had nothing left.

Shortly after my marathon last February, a friend talked me into joining Gilbert’s Gazelles training group to work on improving my fitness. I really did not think I could handle it, but I have been proven so wrong in the last several months it’s ridiculous. I waffled on it and didn’t actually start the program until the end of April, mainly because I was scared of getting schooled by all the faster runners.

What I learned is that while this training group has a reputation for having a lot of fast runners, the focus of all the work is really on form and balance and feeling good while you run. The idea is that if you are healthy, you enjoy the running more, you can do it more, and the improvements will come easily and naturally. That has certainly been the case for me. When I started in April I would always show up and run all out to try to keep up with some of the faster people. Al that did was wear me out and take me to the brink of injury. In fact, I had a nagging hamstring problem slowing me down for a month or so because of it.

Sometime around mid-summer, I finally figured out what Gilbert had been trying to tell me the whole time, and that was that if I backed off in my workouts, completed them feeling strong, and came back ready for each next one then I would start improving. It worked. I decreased my effort and started going a tad slower, and I found I was able to start improving some things in my form, and that allowed me to run with less stress on my joints. The funny thing is, I also felt like running even more. I love doing that anyway, but in the past I could really only go every other day because it took me that long to recover. Here I started going back to back days frequently, and because my form was better and I wasn’t wearing myself out I felt good doing it. Nowadays I’ll even throw in a second run in the evening if one of my friends wants to go run slowly (slowly for me, not always for them!).

I know I’ve been getting stronger. In the last couple months I’ve been improving very quickly and leapfrogging over people who have been training for much longer than I have. When I started in that group, I asked if he thought I could get my time down to 3:30 in February. I thought that was a little aggressive, and I wasn’t sure I could handle it, but he told me to relax, be patient, and enjoy the training. Nowadays, he’s made it clear he expects me to go quite a bit faster than my original goal. The times he’s been throwing out lately would have made me laugh a year ago.

This race on Sunday was a breakout for me. One of the things I could not figure out was how all the pieces fit together. I had the endurance and leg strength to run that long without stopping, and I had the muscle training to know how to run that fast. I put those together on the same day and went really fast. I was really surprised how good it felt. Prior to that race, the longest I had ever run at that speed was only seven miles. At the first mile split, I knew I was going pretty fast, but I didn’t feel like I was using it all up, so I just kept doing it.

I felt good after the race, but it hit me later that night and I’m still pretty tired even now. This is about what I felt like back in April and May when I was doing the workouts really hard, so I know that’s the signal to take it really easy for a few days until I feel back to normal again. Gilbert says my gym workout tomorrow morning should result in me feeling all back to normal. He’s been right a bunch of times, so hopefully this will be another!

The short version is, we are all capable of a lot more than we might think. It’s just a matter of believing you can and doing it in a lot of cases. Looking over at my race records I am reminded that within the last year I saw other people posting times like I’ve been doing lately and thought they were just plain better than I could ever do. Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson for good, because it applies to a lot more than just running. In a lot of cases, we create our own limitations. Once I started believing I could improve, things just started getting easier every time!

So, the event I mentioned that was going on at RunTex this morning was the official kick-off for the marathon in February. The highlight was that they had Alberto Salazar, a former world record holder in the marathon, as a guest speaker.

They also had breakfast tacos. Lots of breakfast tacos. Those are my weakness. I am sure I consumed enough tacos and donuts to make up for the 12 mile run I did beforehand!

There were several shoe vendors, race promoters, and training group leaders there, and I had a nice time seeing them all. Also, several people I knew from my marathon training group the last couple years that I had not seen in months all came out of the woodwork this morning, and it was good to see them, too!

I am now officially signed up for the marathon now, as they had a special discounted price through today ($15 off). I was going to do it anyway, but I usually just wait until the last minute.

Marathon running… To those that have never done it, it often sounds totally crazy.

In the fall of 2001, I was close to finishing my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Texas. I had a couple of friends at the time who had decided to join a training group to run a marathon the following spring. While they really wanted me to join them, I knew I could not accept the time commitment that year. I also wondered if I was capable of even doing something like that. I had gotten a bit out of shape in the previous couple years spending all my time working and going to school.

I love a challenge, though. So, the following year, the same friends asked again, and this time I joined them. My life has not been the same since. My goal at the time was just to finish. I sailed through the months of training until pretty late in the game, when I hurt myself because I wasn’t paying enough attention to the signs my body was giving me. I ended up sitting out for a few weeks only a couple weeks before the big day. By race day, I felt good enough to run, but my endurance was not where it needed to be. I ended up walking most of the second half of the course, but there was absolutely no way I was going to stop. It felt like years before I finally saw the finish line, but I got there.

A few weeks later, a funny thing happened. All of my aches and pains were gone, and all I could remember was this huge feeling of accomplishment from having done something that seemed impossible just a few short months before. I vowed to do it again, but without hurting myself the next time.

To make a long story short, I joined the same training group again last fall, but this time I actually listened to all the advice the more experienced people gave. I ate better. I wore better clothes and shoes. I stretched for a while after every workout. I went in and got sports massage a couple times late in the training program. I listened to the signs my body gave me and backed off when I needed to. I still didn’t complete the race very quickly, but I did do it while feeling great the whole time. My brief illustrated report is available here. The high I felt at the end of that race lasted well over a week, and nothing else I have experienced has even come close to it.

Now, I am definitely in the best shape I’ve ever been in my entire life. I found a good support group of friends that has convinced me to try even harder. Now that I’ve proven to myself I can complete this challenge, I want to see how fast I can get at it. My original plan was to run another one this fall, but I have recently started a new training program that’s helping me just get stronger and faster. I’m going to stick with that for a few more months and then really attack my time when February rolls around again.

Well it took me a while to get started, but I finally got my new website up and running. Soon these pages will be filled with accounts of the excessive time I manage to spend in the gym and on the trails. Enjoy!