So I decided to do a write up about my experiences leading up to and during the marathon, it’s my first one so don’t beat me up too bad…
Figured I would just post in here so it doesn’t seem like I’m trying to get traffic on my blog…
I have been debating for a few weeks now as to whether or not I should put my thoughts, feelings, and experiences down in writing and after about a year of reading other race reports, I feel I’m ready. Over the past year or so I have read 50+ race reports, be it marathons or triathlons, and realize the majority fall into one of two categories. The first is a report detailing the emotions, the build up, the training, the hurdles, and finally, the race. The later is a report detailing the nutrition, miles logged, routes run, paces kept and split times on race day. To me, both are enjoyable reads as I’m curious what others have experienced and what shortcomings have been bestowed upon them come race day. So, I will be making my best attempt to blend the two styles with this write up. I’m going to attempt to start from pre sign up and take you through the finish line (and maybe a few minutes after) so I hope you enjoy and I’ll try not to ramble too much.
I want to start by saying in 2012 I thought of myself as a runner, I used to run quite well when in the Army and felt I had gotten most of that endurance back. Boy was I wrong. After doing several 5K’s, a 10K and even a half marathon Teresa (my wife) and I decided to sign up for the 2013 Michelob Ultra Challenge in Tampa, FL. This weekend long event consists of running a 15K (9.6 miles) and a 5K (3.1 miles) on Saturday morning back to back followed by a half marathon (13.1 miles) and an 8K (roughly 5 miles) back to back on Sunday morning. We trained, or so we thought, did the weekend and met our goal of running the entire distance without stopping to walk. When starting the final 8K on Sunday my legs were done, I thought for sure they would warm up but never did and that became the hardest 5 miles I had ever run. Being on the post race runners high we decided to sign up for the Gate River 15K race a couple of weeks later. This run is arguably one of the most fun I have ever experienced, yes I said run and fun in the same sentence. The last time I ran a 15K my time was just over an hour and a half (don’t give me too much grief I was still in my Vibram phase) so I was shooting for a personal record on this one. We started and I finished in an hour and twenty-five minutes, goal met.
So there we are in the middle of March, on another post race high, and the topic of marathon comes up. Can we do it? If we could do the Ultra surely we could run a marathon, right? So the search began and we landed on the Marine Corps Marathon in DC. After some debate and realization that due to the registration structure we both might not be able to get in, I asked if Philly had a marathon. BINGO! They did, and not only did they have one but 2013 was going to be the 20th anniversary. All the stars seemed to align on Philly, Teresa is from there, it would be our first and it was a big milestone for the race, LETS DO IT. Registration opened on April 1st and Teresa was online ready to go. First thing in the morning I get a text that just read, “we’re in”. The gauntlet had been thrown down, money paid and training plan decided on. Come Hell or high water, the Owen’s were doing the Philadelphia Marathon.
The training program we decided on was one published by Hal Higdon, tried and true. We would begin eighteen weeks out from the date we were supposed to toe the line and run every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. The mileage started out short and almost seemed too easy, three miles here, four miles there and a five or six miler on Saturday mornings. We mixed some local races in periodically; we still had to have short-term goals. During this time I was becoming interested in triathlon so I began to include swimming and biking in the training schedule as well (I would later realize how much this helped my running).
I won’t bore you with exactly what miles were run week by week but instead tell you about my experience with those miles. As the distance increased, I found myself tired, at times so much so that when starting a run my legs felt like logs. Those who know me understand that I am a competitive person and that I do not like to lose. Well, when it comes to training, the competition is my mind versus my body. Sometimes friends will ask why I went so “fast” during a training run, the answer, I don’t know any other way to train, 100% or nothing. I used to think that once I started feeling a little sore during a run I had done enough. WRONG. One thing this training has taught me is how far I can push myself, some of you will understand and some I hope will one day understand. Training of this frequency, if done to your full potential and given 100% effort every time, will have you pushing your body beyond pain into the realm of numb. As a trainer I go to says, “that’s where the good stuff is.” Boy is that the truth!
The weeks came and went, miles ticked off the chart, and days flew by. I’ve said many times before and will say again, God blessed me with the best partner EVER. There are many positive adjectives I could use to preface “partner” with, running is one of them. To look at a chart and see fifteen, eighteen, sixteen, twenty listed on your upcoming Saturdays can make one question themselves. What happened was quite the opposite for me as Saturday mornings became not just a 3 + hour run, they were a 3 + hour conversation with my wife. We got up at 4:30am most of the time, got in the car and headed to the Dunedin Causeway bridge. This was a great route as it was 2.5 miles out and 2.5 back so we could do it a couple of times depending on the distance for the day while leaving extra water bottles at the car so we could refill mid run. Trust me when I tell you there are not many people on the Causeway Bridge at 5am and running out over the Gulf waters, under the stars was serene. So we ran, we talked, we ran and we talked, no electronics, no work, nothing but me, her and the road under the stars over the Gulf waters.
Before we knew it the time had come, November 17th was one week away and we were in full taper mode. The race fell on a Sunday and we had our flight booked for Saturday morning in time to get up to Philly, go to the expo/packet pick up and see some of her family. Packet pick up was SO easy which was shocking when you consider the fact that roughly 30,000 people registered for this. We met Teresa’s Aunt, Uncle and some cousins for an early dinner. After dinner they dropped us back at the hotel where in true JO and TO fashion we had a couple glasses of wine before heading up to bed. There was a kind of eerie calm in the hotel that night as it was the host hotel and 90% of the people staying there were runners.
IT’S GO TIME!! My thought when the alarm went off at 4:30 in the morning on Sunday, November 17th 2013. We got up, got dressed, ate our snack and headed downstairs to start making our way to the starting line. Fortunately our hotel had a Starbucks so I was able to get my usual pre race coffee in! The weather was much better than previously expected, about 50 degrees and foggy, earlier in the week it looked like 30’s would be possible. We had been told that if you wanted to layer in clothing to donate to charity you could shed it to the sides of the route and it would be sent to the homeless. In our layers, with my coffee and all of our race time nutrition, we walked the half-mile or so to the starting area that was HUGE. People were everywhere; we headed to the bag drop area to deposit our post race bag that contained some dry shirts and other essentials. Once we took care of that we began trying to locate Teresa’s cousin who was running the half marathon (marathon and half marathon were starting together). This became a bit of a task as locating one person in a sea of 30K is not easy but we found her. Next on the list was the bathroom, as I was told, which I was amazed at how many port-o-lets they had. After standing in line for one roughly 25 minutes we decided it wasn’t that important and headed to our corals. At a race of this magnitude they assign you a coral to start in based on your estimated finishing time (aka your pace). We were in the purple coral for folks estimating a 4:30 finish time or 10-10:30/mile pace so we began heading that way and found out it was directly in front of the Rocky steps (also know as the Philadelphia Museum of Art)! How fitting! There we were, 5 minutes from go time, listening to the announcer send off the elite runners. After a selfie of us in front of the steps (hey, I was with the wife, selfies aren’t my thing) we got the necessary phone apps running and waited. We began shuffling toward the starting line as each coral was being sent off, the anticipation building. Soon enough we went from a walk to a slight jog and then it opened up, “WE’RE STARTING”.
At first I tried to keep myself contained and not go too fast, we selected a pace and I did my best to keep it under control. This run was about finishing, not time. We knew our fitness level, just a couple of weeks prior we both turned in personal records for a half marathon of 1:42 for me and 1:46 for her, we can run. The temperature was perfect, the fog was clearing and we were running through the streets of downtown Philadelphia with high rises everywhere. Crowd support was like nothing I had ever seen before. People were in the thousands on the sides of the road, signs, cheers, it looked like a crowd for the Macy’s day parade. The route took us down toward the river at which point we made a right and headed along it for quite a bit. I was amazed at the amount of people stopping to pee, “folks we’re not even 3 miles in yet”. We made another right and headed back in towards downtown, the route was basically two 13 miles loops in opposite directions so the half marathoners would drop off as the marathoners would head out to another part of town. Teresa’s Aunt and Uncle were supposed to be looking for us around mile 6 so we started crowd watching, the miles were really flying by.
During my research for this run I read a lot of remarks regarding how flat it was with the exception of the two hills between miles 7 and 10. While running those first miles it didn’t seem like we were encountering any hills, not even rolling hills, I later discovered this was not true. Sure enough as we approached mile 6 there where her Aunt Cindy and Uncle Joe! We stayed to the right, caught their attention and got a couple of high fives. Once past them, I began looking for these hills I had read about and soon enough we found them. Let me say that if you are a northerner reading this and I tell you that Florida isn’t that hot in the summer, I now equate that to one of you telling me an area up there is “flat with some hills”. The first one wasn’t so bad, we knew it was coming and actually maintained our 10 minute per mile pace up and over it. Around that time we came across Greek row for Drexel University and yes, the Greeks were out in force being college kids (aka drunk, at 8 in the morning). They were really cool, hell they probably never went to bed from Saturday night! One frat house had a table set up passing out beer shots, another guy caught my eye and tried yelling something but I was sober and couldn’t understand drunk but got a laugh none the less.
Once we got through that area I began looking for what I thought was our final hill to conquer and again, found it. This one was a bit steeper and a bit longer, roughly a half-mile trot which we kept our pace up and over. At this point we had hit mile 10 and I realized with all that was going on I hadn’t really been keeping up with my nutrition intake plan. Time to regroup, I took a GU and opened up my bag of chomps so I could start munching on those. Endurance athletes will tell you, and I now know, that once you start feeling nutritionally depleted it’s too late to recover. My inventory consisted of 4 GU Roctane gels, a bag of GU Chomps, two packets of enduralytes salt pills, a packet of GU Roctane powder to mix with my water and a Lara Bar. Sound like a lot? I fit it all in my recently purchased Spi Belt, look into them and get one (thank you, Summer for the recommendation).
The miles continued and we were closing in on the halfway point, we could see the Art Museum again in the distance and began seeing signs “marathon to the left, half marathon to the right”. It was about this time that I began to worry, I was feeling a slight flutter in my left calve. Was this happening!? How!? I just ran a half marathon at roughly 2:30 per mile faster and was fine! I never even got a cramp on our 20 mile training run, this isn’t happening! It was. So, again, time to regroup but this time it was mental. I told myself that I needed to come to the realization that the remaining 13 miles would hurt as I knew it wasn’t going to get any better. I went into damage control mode and took more GU, I took my other salt tabs (earlier than planned) and downed the remaining fluid I had in my water bottle. From this point on I refilled my 20 oz bottle at each aid station with half water half Gatorade, all while never walking (we said at the outset, WE ARE NOT WALKING).
My mental plan was to break the race down into three parts, the half marathon point, 20 mile marker as that was the final turn around and the 25 mile marker as we only had 1.2 miles left at that point. So, I set my sights on the 20 mile point, put my head down and just kept moving. The pain continued to get worse, I don’t think Teresa ever knew how bad it was until maybe at the end. I didn’t want to tell her for two reasons, one, I knew she was most likely fighting her own battle and didn’t need my pansy ass complaining and two, when it comes to running my wife is like a drill sergeant if someone starts to complain, YOU GET AN EAR FULL OF SHUT THE HELL UP AND MOVE YOUR ASS. I love my wife! Mile 18, “only two more miles, come on John you can run two more miles”, I was having full-blown conversations in my head at this point. We kept moving and entered the small town of Manayunk just outside of Philly, about 6 miles outside of the Art Museum to be exact. The crap part of this final 13 miles was the word flat did not correlate with the route. We where on constant rolling hills, it’s either up a hill or down a hill but never flat. So, to all you northerners who said this course is flat, come on down to Florida in August, it’s perfect weather!
Before long I saw it, MILE 20! One thing I’m not fond of is 180-degree turn arounds and they’re even worse when your legs are to the point of locking up with the slightest wrong movement. We hit the turn around and it was time to flip the switch, next target mile 25. “You can run 5 miles, you run that or further 3 days a week”, the mental conversations continued and the pain became excruciating. My whole body hurt at this point, my shoulders, my arms, my quads were locking up, calves locking up, I was to the point of having to run flat footed on my left side because if I flexed my ankle my entire leg would clinch. PAIN. There it was, mile 23, “we’re doing this, we’re going to do this!” It was around this point that I think Teresa realized how much pain I was in and that I might be losing the mental battle. She asked me, “what are some of your favorite quotes? Think of those.” Immediately I thought of Rinny Carfree, Ironman World Champion, “there are two types of endurance athletes, those who hit the wall and quit, and those who hit the wall and push through.” It was time to push because quitting to me is NEVER an option. All while keeping our pace we continued moving forward and I continued slamming my water and Gatorade mixture.
There it was, MILE 25!! We could hear the finish line announcer and at this point I remember hearing Teresa say, “holy crap look at that medal!!” We began seeing folks who had already finished walking along cheering on those still out on the course. Soon enough, we’re in the finishing chute that was about a half mile long. The crowds were back to the Macy’s parade size and boy were they cheering, it was a huge lift. Philadelphia Mayor Nutter was about 100 feet in front of the finish line giving high fives so we lined up and smacked hands with him. Per our tradition, we locked hands and continued jogging, 50 feet, 25 feet, and finally with hands overhead saying, “YES, YES” we crossed the finish line of the Philadelphia Marathon in 4:47!
After running for that length of time your body is not quite ready to just stop and walk, getting through the area they had set up was an arduous task. Remember, legs, locking up, and arms, wanting to fall off. We headed over to bag check to get our things and then out to find Teresa’s family that had stuck around for that entire time to support us, that was awesome. Once we found them, I took a seat on the sidewalk, put my head in my hands and began pouring water over my neck. No matter what I did or how I sat my legs were beat. Philly HAS hills, folks! Before long I was recovered, put on a dry shirt and began feeling better. I couldn’t then and to some degree now still cannot wrap my head around that run. People say you experience the highest of highs and lowest of lows during a marathon, they are correct. It’s about those lows to me though, it’s about seeing how low you can get, how much pain you can take and still rebound to complete the task at hand. Will we do another one? Right after I said no, since, we have signed up for the Clearwater Marathon on January 19th. I want to experience a flat course and see what I’m made of in that set of circumstances. If you’re reading this thinking, wow, I could never do that, you’re wrong. In the last two years since we’ve really taken up endurance sport I’ve learned that there is nothing you can’t train your body to do. So get off you ass and get after it! Hope you enjoyed the read, sorry, I know I rambled.
Cheers
JO,
Excellent Report! I enjoyed reading about your experiences. Good luck to you and your wife at your next (of many) marathon.
Michael
Thanks Michael, we’re expecting a much better result next time around.
Oh wow this is long. What was your time?
4:47, BOP by ST standards. I’ll get faster, just need to be able to hold close to my HM pace for a full.
Cool good for you for getting out there and staying healthy. That’s never a bad thing.
If you want to run faster you’ll need to run more than HH’s plan calls for since it really a plan centered around mediocrity and is based in antiquated concepts (Long runs are 90 seconds slower than race pace, etc) , which seemed to cause a lot of your problems. Quite simply I have never really seen anyone use the HH plans and do well, let alone even come close to a good time, and they usually arrive at the start line woefully unprepared for the race.
That said, Philly is an awesome course and one of the best to qualify for Boston on. People equate flat courses with fast courses, but that isn’t always true. And the run out Kelly Dr. and back is relatively flat with small little knolls here and there and some rollers into and then back out of Manayunk. There’s nothing than can be considered a hill.
Bob
If you want to run faster you’ll need to run more than HH’s plan calls for since it really a plan centered around mediocrity and is based in antiquated concepts (Long runs are 90 seconds slower than race pace, etc) , which seemed to cause a lot of your problems. Quite simply I have never really seen anyone use the HH plans and do well, let alone even come close to a good time, and they usually arrive at the start line woefully unprepared for the race.
This is probably true of the novice plans but the intermediate 2 and up are not “easy” plans. They aren’t Pfitz plans (which I BQ’d on) but I put in respectable times using Intermediate 2, and very average times with the novice plan (I am working on 50 states club so not all of my marathons are “A” races). But yes, my last marathon I used Novice 2 since I was in the middle of moving (twice) and buying a new house so time was at a premium…and I was woefully under-trained for a hilly marathon in Bar Harbor and was almost slower than my IM marathon run. Lesson learned.
This is probably true of the novice plans but the intermediate 2 and up are not “easy” plans.
I’d agree with this and even say the Intermediate 1 isn’t bad. I BQ’d using it and even replaced the Saturday run with a 1:30-40 ride. Although, I’d also agree with Macho Grande that I was unprepared for the pounding a race pace marathon was going to give me body. Got my BQ but was out of commission for 6 weeks after the race. (Have to take a good deal of the blame for starting the HH program at week 8 since I have been doing HIM type training leading up to it and doing a ride rather than run on Saturday.)
Good job!
Although hate to break it to you, but the Philly marathon doesn’t count as a hilly marathon. Not even close. It’s flat. Those little rollers might feel like mountains when your legs are taxed to the limit, but the Philly course is considered one of the fastest non-downhill marathons in the country because it’s so flat.
I wouldn’t say it is flat (three significant hills on the front) but the run out and back along Kelly is flat with the exception of the rollers in Manny Town.
Bob