Marathon Training

This morning, after getting very little sleep because of the heat, I got up at 6:45 to get ready for my long run.  I wanted to hit the trail by 7:30 in the hopes that I'd be home before it got unbearably hot out.  I dragged my butt out of bed, choked down half a banana and a Larabar, and geared up.  Yes, gear.  Running long distances requires a lot of gear, at least for me, and I find that I look at other runners differently now based on what they pack along; I try to guess how far and how fast they are planning to go based on what they are wearing and carrying.

Anyway, my essential long run gear includes the basics: shoes, dry-fit socks, running skirt, industrial strength sports bra, tech fabric tank top.  It also includes the extras: shoe wallet with keys and ID, running belt with water bottle, electrolyte packets, Larabar and cell phone, Ipod, running hat, sunglasses.

Once I was all geared up, I hit the road a little bit late at 7:40.  My long run route now is basically two loops.  I do a loop from my house to the south end of the Fanno Creek Trail in Tualatin, then pass my house and do another loop out to the north end of the trail in Beaverton.  The south loop is usually much shorter, but today I had to add two miles to it so that my total route would be twenty miles.  That meant that by the time I hit the trailhead on my 12-mile Tigard-Beaverton loop, I'd already been running for an hour and half.  And I could feel it.

I have run that north loop so many times that it's built into my muscle memory.  I know exactly how far I've come and how far there is to go at any point on that trail.  Hitting that north loop trailhead having already run 8 miles was hard.  My body knew exactly how far it had yet to go and how tired it already was.  Also, by then, it was starting to get hot, and I had to be really conscientious about water.  There are a lot more opportunities to hydrate on the south loop than the north.  There's only one drinking fountain on the whole north loop, and it's two miles in.  So I had tried to drink and refill my water supply at least once on the south loop, and then drink and refill it again at the beginning of the north one.  But that fill-up had to last 8 miles, so I was rationing it out.

I started to worry about water around mile 15, with three miles left before I could refill, no water left in my bottle and the sun high enough that the normally shady trail was bright, hot and sunny.  I stuck to the shade as much as possible and slowed my pace down so I wasn't working so hard, but I was warm and tired and thirsty and slowing down made me feel almost... dizzy.  It was a pretty rough couple of miles.

Finally, I got to water and stopped to soak my hat and my shirt, to refill my water bottle and to drink as much as I could.  I had only two miles left and a full water supply, but I was still tired, still hot, and then my ipod died and I was overwhelmed with the feeling of how far I'd come.  I knew (knew, in my bones) that I had just run 18 miles, and it was an oppressively exhausting knowledge.  I almost, almost gave up.

But there was this family, a dad and mom running and two kids on bikes, that had passed me a few miles previously and then hit a turnaround and started back the other way.  I ran into them as I was trudging a minute or so after my water refill, and I got a thumbs-up from the dad and mom, and the kids said "Good Job, lady!"  They were so cute and so encouraging to a random stranger sweatily walking along that it made me feel like I was not alone and that, having come 18 miles, I could surely run a measly 2 more.  So I ran.  I shifted somehow from shuffle to jog and made it my last two miles with no music, just the sound of my breath and my own gasping promises to myself: "If you can just make it another 3/4 of a mile, then you get to stop running.  Soon, soon, you will get to stop."

20 miles.  It wasn't easy, but I made it.