It’s nine weeks out from Boston and training is feeling freakishly good. A little…..too good. So much so in that I’m certain I’m jinxing myself by even daring to write this. I’m trying to remind myself that there are still nine weeks to go and that that other shoe could drop at any moment.
I think the reason that it feels like this round of marathon training is going so well, is that it feels like the last few rounds went particularly not well. I’m doing a lot of the same workouts I’ve done before, with the guidance of the same savvy coach (thanks Andy!) guiding our little group of Canmore marathon trainees but it feels very, very different. I get a little sore after workouts, but so far, I haven’t felt the lingering heaviness in my legs that, in past training cycles, feels like it sticks around and accumulates for days or even weeks. I don’t even feel a sense of existential dread before my intervals or long run workouts – how sweet is that? Completing the workouts and hitting the paces feels as tough as it should, but I feel like I’m recovering much more quickly and I’m actually…..enjoying marathon training? It’s been really wild to reflect back on how much better I feel this time around. So what’s so different?
I’ve been really, really trying to manage stress in a more effective way lately. I think I’ve touched on it before, but for a solid year or two, I sure did not succeed at this. I got to take on some new and challenging projects at work over the last few years, which led me to experience a bit more work stress than normal. Not an inordinate amount, but part of being a project manager is just working as hard as you can to have a project pan out smoothly and then picking up the pieces when it undoubtedly falls to shit. I think it’s unrealistic to work as a project manager and expect predictability, constant calm or expect that there won’t be periods of high stress when it’s just simply go-time. However at some point, which I can’t exactly put my finger on, my overall stress load from my job went over the threshold I could tolerate and had a bit of a nasty, cascading effect physiologically. My sleep quality was the first thing to go; I started waking up in the middle of the night every night with my heart rate bumping and my mind racing, even when I wasn’t sure what I was worried about. The worse my sleep got, the worse my stress tolerance became and it really was a downward spiral. Trying to sleep properly became a new source of anxiety and something else to worry about and the more I fixated on trying to get better at sleeping, the worse it got. I just felt…..bad, all the time.
But not so bad, apparently, that I didn’t think I should aggressively train for a marathon. Running can often be an outlet and help to reduce stress but not in the way I was using it. Trying to run a sub three hour marathon felt like a light at the end of the tunnel and a welcome distraction. Every workout I ran felt like a desperate attempt to hit the paces I needed to get there and to convince myself that I was in control, and I was doing okay. But it always had the opposite effect. I was failing over and over, which only stressed me out further and made me feel miserable. My legs felt heavy all the time. My heart rate was way higher than normal, I often felt breathless running at what should have been an easy pace and I had this lump in my throat and tightness in my chest I couldn’t shake. Tense, high-strung, emotionally reactive and just absolutely fried as a human is how I would describe myself. I fought against the response my body was having for a few weeks or months but eventually (and honestly, luckily) my calf self destructed in the middle of a long run and made the decision that I didn’t have the mental clarity to make myself. Marathon training is supposed to be hard, but not like that.
For the record, I am not blaming my job for not having a super great training experience the last time I tried to run a marathon. I am recognizing the impact the stress that I was feeling had and how I wasn’t factoring it in to my training and my life. I could have done a lot of things to take better care of myself but I wasn’t really willing to, I just wanted to be able to carry on and train, business as usual. Drinking a few less glasses of wine each week, taking on fewer commitments and social plans to give myself some breathing room, or just straight up easing up on the intensity of the training could have made things way more manageable but I was not having it and my foggy brain couldn’t accept that I was writing cheques my body couldn’t cash.
Fast forward a year, work eventually settled down (for a bit..lol), I spent three weeks soaking up with sun and vino in Europe with my fiancé last fall and I felt like I hit the reset button. I didn’t have a whole heck of a lot to worry about for a few weeks and I also took a break from training after a huge 100km trail race. A few weeks of recovery and time away from work had me feeling l like a new person. A calm, present, focused and healthy person.My sleep habits returned to normal, maybe even better than normal. I still have the odd bad night now, but those are few and far between. Sleep is something I definitely took for granted before and something that, anecdotally, I think a lot more people struggle with than let on.
Work and the general business of life continue to test my ability to remain cool, calm and collected (as is the case for everyone) and that won’t go away. However, having been recently reminded of how much an impact your stress levels can have on your day to day, I feel newly committed to maintaining a sense of calm and taking care of myself. And not just so that I can train for a stupid marathon. That might mean saying no to more plans, skipping happy hour when I feel run down and the last thing I need is booze, rescheduling or ditching a workout when I have a mentally demanding day ahead of me at work or choosing to sleep in instead of cram in a few extra km’s. All these little actions we can take to keep our overall stress levels down are worth their weight in gold, and I’m determined to get through the next nine weeks feeling as good as I do now.
Last week’s training (Total 83km, 540m elevation, ~ 7 hrs)
Monday – Rest day
Tuesday – 3 sets of 800m/400m/800m @ 5km effort with 45s rest (~12km, 1hr)
Wednesday – 10km easy
Thursday – 15km @ Half Marathon Pace (I broke this up into 3 x 5km segments and progressed down to Half Marathon Pace for the last 5km. (19km, ~1 hr 30min)
Friday – 6km easy
Saturday – 6 x (1mile @ Goal Marathon Pace, 1min rest, 2min@ 5km pace, 1min rest) (~23km, 2 hrs)
Sunday – 12km easy trail
This one time I went running 