Catching Up, Part 2: Lessons Learned

Hello again friends. Welcome to Part 2 of our latest catch up, en route to, yes you heard right, a ✨👟marathon race report👟✨ (by which, just to be clear, I mean a race report about a marathon, not just, like, a **really long** race report).

Catching Up: Part 1 (icymi)

Where were we? Oh yes! End of July 2025; missing out on Tracksmith SF 5000; recovering from a horrific back strain. Let us move on to late summer.

In general, the plan was:

• Mid August ➡️ train for & run a one-mile time trial on the track
• Late August ➡️ Tahoe vacation with family
• September ➡️ Start training for CIM

AUGUST

In which the future was still so bright (in many ways). My back continued to feel fine; I continued to rip fast workouts on the track without worrying too much about building overall mileage. Having run a 6:28 mile on the roads in May with, like, two weeks of mile-specific training, I was very curious what I could manage on the track in spikes having spent the summer doing honest-to-gods speed work. 6:20? 6:15? Faster?? I tried getting a group together for a time trial day (mostly for my own selfish rabbiting purposes) but at that point people were mostly busy getting ready for other things so I ended up going it alone. On a weirdly humid August 17 I drove to the track, did a little warm-up and some strides, put my spikes on, and did my best to flog myself to one all-out mile, with not-terrible results: 

Catching Up, Yet Again: Part 1

Heyyyyy friends 👋👋👋 Long time no post. Such is life; things take crazy turns and suddenly writing about one's hobbies on the internet no longer falls into the top ten most critical tasks to be spending ostensible free time on. However, I HAVE JUST RUN A MARATHON and I feel that needs to be immortalized in these digital pages one way or another, so I'm making time.

But first, we need some context. This series of catch-up posts ends in a race report, but it's a race report that won't make a ton of sense without quickly (well, relatively quickly) buzzing back through the last seven months. So, without further ado......

Where We Left Off

Last we spoke, I had just run a pretty solid track 5K in Oakland (June 19), with plans to spend four weeks getting even faster, then run another track 5K in San Francisco on July 19.  Things went okay for a couple of weeks, and then, in retrospect, I started getting a bunch of messages from my body that ** Hey we are not okay, maybe take a few days off here **, but none of them were ever, like, BRIGHT BLINKING RED and/or I was just so distracted by everything else going on in life that it never really hit me all at once the way it should have.

Fall Speedfest, Weeks 8 & 9 of 18: Hot Mess Edition

As in, I am one. Seriously; in the last two and a half weeks I have just about completely and totally fallen apart.

You might have already read about my 'meh' race in San Jose. (tl;dr - My heart was never really in it, I woke up not really wanting to run, & managed to hold a decent half marathon pace for the first few miles before it became obvious that whether for lack of fitness, heat, or just plain lack of enthusiasm, that was all I had. I jogged the rest at an easy pace for a 1:51:30 finish.)

The worse part, though, was the aftermath on the left side of my body. I've had chronic plantar fasciitis in my left foot for years; it comes and goes in terms of the severity but for whatever reason a few hours after the race I could barely walk on it. I'd like to tell you the week got better, but...well...

17 days, 5 cities, 2 marathons, & a partridge in a pear tree

Or: The Travel Crazies.

As I said before CIM 2016, I don't understand people who dread taper. I love taper. I'm great at taper. I'm a freakin' pro over here.

But as I've learned with the two other races I've flown to, it's harder to properly taper when you have so many balls in the air getting ready to travel, and then actually doing the traveling, while also managing to hold down/wrap up a full-time job, get a cavity filled, manage 47 crises related to your house remodel and oh yeah, not forget to do your taxes at some point.

And in case you'd forgotten, this particular trip is a bit more involved than most. Let us review:

- April 13-17: Boston Marathon (with side trip to our sister dojo at MIT, because not enough sportsing going on that weekend already)

- April 17-22: NYC vacation side trip

- April 22-25: Speak at Math Conference in DC (& also hang out with my college roommate)

- April 25-26: Late flight home, one night in my own (actually not even my own) bed, & an early-morning road trip to Big Sur

- April 16-29: Big Sur Marathon (plus a bit of general Big Sur sightseeing)

Are you tired yet? This was all my idea & I'm already tired. (BUT WHAT ELSE IS NEW.)

Race Report: Oakland Marathon 2018

So I wanted to wait until the race pics were available to publish this, but it sounds like they won't come out until maybe next Sunday and I didn't want to wait that long. (You can get them free & instantly if you give CSE all your Facebook information, which, sorry, no thanks.) So, please enjoy this photo-lacking account of my Oakland Marathon experience, and I'll go back & add pictures when I get them. Unless they suck. (But, if they suck REALLY bad, then I might still.)

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Well, I'm super behind with weeklies, but that's partly because of more dumb injury stuff. :-/ Honestly, at this point I just want to finish Boston under my own power and depending on the day there have been a number of times when I was not sure that was realistic.

Which, hey! Brings us to the Oakland Marathon!

The Backstory

Sometime last fall, Jen shared a discount code for the Oakland Running Festival, which fell on the day of my last 23 mile long run before Boston. I really hate doing my 20+ runs on the same old loops in GG Park, so I decided it might be nice to run a nice easy marathon on that day instead. I could have done the half but didn't want to squeeze in *another* 10 miles before or after, and besides, I'd never run the full, which had a reputation for being both pretty and hilly, which I thought might be fun and also good training for Boston and Big Sur.

Boston Marathon Week 11 of 18: How Not to Plan Your Training Week

So, at least for now, it seems like I've gotten back to a normal training load, just in time to turn 37 last Friday. I decided against the Saturday 10K, for a lot of reasons, including 1) running 6+ miles at 10K race pace is REALLY DIFFERENT than a run-of-the-mill speed or tempo workout, and I don't want to risk my hip relapsing so soon after it's started to feel normal again; 2) I reallllly need to prioritize long runs right now given my distinct lack of them as of late, and racing on Saturday makes a Sunday long run potentially miserable or a bad idea or both (if not impossible); 3) $60 is pretty pricey for a 10K I haven't even really been training for; but mostly 4) I wanted to go out for a fun dinner on my birthday Friday night without having to worry about what I'm eating or drinking and going to bed early and getting up at the butt crack of dawn or feeling like crap at the starting line.

So. I'll race something else later. Right now we are seven weeks out from Boston and it seems prudent to keep one's eye on the prize so to speak.

As for week 11? Well, on the face of things, it looks like, "Hey, wow, a normal-looking marathon training load! Woohoo!" And there's some truth there. My hip has felt 100% completely fine (because you can bet your booty I wouldn't be running this mileage otherwise), and it DOES feel super good to complete all the workouts and finish the full long run and even hit all the paces. (I've even been doing the strength work!) So, in a lot of ways, #winning.

But there was also a little comedy of errors going on this week in terms of how I ended up running all those miles & workouts. So let us talk about how, in an ideal world, one would perhaps NOT structure their training week!

It's Getting Real in 2018 (+ a discount code)

Hey hey friends! If you're reading this, then I assume you've successfully navigated the maze of Christmas carols and awkward gifts exchanges and cheese plates and champagne toasts that is The Holidays and arrived safely on the other side in good ol' 2018.

We spent Christmas in Spokane with Don's family, then celebrated New Year's by getting the heck out of the city and up to Bodega Bay for a few days with friends. I did my best to keep on my regular training plan through all the craziness and *mostly* succeeded, though there were a couple of snafus. Now that things are back to normal, I'm in the thick of week four, cranking out mile repeats & 2Ks at HM pace & whatever else RunCoach throws my way.

In January 2017, I started the year with a nearly empty race calendar, just a March half marathon (which I flaked out on) and a September 10K because of a cheap re-run offer from the year before. After CIM 2016, I felt a bit exhausted and extremely unmotivated to seriously train for anything. By early fall I finally pulled it together long enough to race a pretty decent half, but by & large it was a fairly lightweight year in terms of training & racing.

Not so this year! I'm not sure when it happened, exactly, but at some point my 2018 running year got super booked up. I'm even (gasp!) a race ambassador for something this year. (For which race?? You'll have to read on to find out!)

Because Boston's Not Enough.....

Sure, everyone's so obsessed with That One Marathon in April, but it turns out that there are a few others. Pretty highly regarded ones, even. One of them is just down the road from here, along Highway 1.

I have lots of friends who have run this race (multiple times, even!) and absolutely raved about it. You also can't really argue with it being on the short list for marathons with the best views. So I've definitely been a bit Big Sur-curious for a few years now, but never pulled the trigger.

There are some good reasons for this. The main one is that my focus as a runner tends to mostly be on speed and working hard to have the fastest race I possibly can, and Big Sur does not really lend itself particularly well to that. It's not the Pike's Peak Marathon or anything, but there is 2,000+ ft of elevation gain (as opposed to, say, 200+ in the Eugene Marathon, 300+ in the Napa Valley Marathon, and 400-500+ in CIM) and there is the potential for heinous wind. Sure, I'm up for running the occasional casual race for the experience, but marathons suck up so much time and energy--to say nothing of the money involved when it's a destination race--that I've mostly limited that stuff to shorter races where I don't feel like I'm giving up 6 months of training for something I know isn't going to be a fast race.

Another reason is its insane popularity. I am super super turned off by races that sell out in minutes or hours or where you have to send your credit card info off into the void, cross your fingers, and hope you're randomly selected by the running gods. I just could not get that excited about the uncertainty of it all.

But then at some point last year I remembered the existence of the Boston 2 Big Sur Challenge, wherein anyone registered for Boston can sign up to also run Big Sur 6 or 13 days later (depending on the year) and also get a bunch of nice perks as well. Since I was already committing six months to for-real marathon training and wouldn't ever be betting on Big Sur for a fast race anyway, I decided, what the heck? Let's see how these old legs handle two marathons in less than two weeks. (Thankfully, 2018 is a 13-day gap year; I don't know if I'm quite crazy enough to try this in a 6-day gap year!)

Since I have a conference to present at in DC in during those two weeks, however, things will be a bit shall we say interesting next April travel-wise.

Le Plan:

Friday, April 13: Fly to Boston, do fun Boston-ish things

Monday, April 16: ***Boston Marathon***

Tuesday, April 17: Train to NYC, do fun NYC-ish things

Saturday, April 21: Train to DC, do fun DC-ish things

Monday, April 23: Speak at conference

Wednesday, April 25: Fly to SF

Thursday, April 26: Drive down to Big Sur, do fun Big Sur-ish things

Sunday, April 29: ***Big Sur Marathon***

The plus side is that thanks to my conference, work will cover my flights; the downside is that there may not be as much rest & recovery during those 13 days as one might ideally hope for.

Eh, I suppose it's not called a challenge for nothing....