Not Too Late To Finish: Marathon in Midlife

0 CommentsMonday • May 5, 2014 • by Imei

Marathon, Running, Fitness, and Midlife

As has become a part of my ritual, here’s my race report/blog post about training and running my first marathon. I hope you find it entertaining, and you have my permission to snicker to your heart’s delight. 

 

Training for a marathon in midlife is neither impossible nor easy. It is not something you can power through like you’re in your twenties. However, people in midlife can have a few tricks up their sleeves that have them finishing races when the rest of our cohort struggles to meet minimum health standards.

I’ve come to understand how much fun endurance racing events can be when you prepare well AND plan to encounter the best (and worst) in yourself. Not only is it often beautiful to play outdoors, but endurance fitness training can be a place of belonging, community, wellness, and psychological growth.

 

Pre-Marathon Dream: The Night Before

The night before the BMO Vancouver Marathon, my beloved Man-Geek listened to my plaintive, bleating thoughts about being afraid of the pain of running a marathon. He asked me why I wanted to run a marathon in the first place (a very good question coming from a Cognitive Psychology PhD, btw!), and I gave him a few plausible but ridiculously stupid answers (the real answer is at the end of this blog post), steeped in whimpering excuses and childhood psychological trauma. He calmly listened, snuggled me tight, and I fell into a deep, dream-filled sleep.

In one of my dreams, I was awake and saying, “Wow, I finished a marathon! That was great!” I watched myself walking away from the finish line, happy and relieved. Then the alarm went off, and I realized it was time to wake up, have breakfast, and get dressed for the race, for reals! Oops, I guess you have actually have to run a marathon to be a marathon finisher. Dammit.

If you are a marathoner, you know what I’m talking about! By the time you have finished training for a marathon, you have run the distance of several marathons combined. Your body has been trained, you have consumed a gazillion calories, electrolyte fluids, and post-workout snacks; you have pulled your wracked and tired body in and out of bed so many times, it feels like it has already “been there and done that.” No wonder my body was confused, even as it came off a sweet three-week taper full of restful sleep, nutritious, gluten-free foods, and a kind community of racing friends and supporters.

 

Pre-Race Prep: Predictions and Restrictions

Allen Lim, Sports Physiologist, with “Rice Cakes” for athletes

Because I am Celiac “suspected” (DNA confirmed, gluten-intolerance confirmed, biopsy waiting), I booked a hotel room with a kitchenette and cooked all my race food the night before. My race food is a combination of Honey Stingers taken in small “hits” from a gel flask for the first 13.1 miles/21km), and then only real food for the remaining half. After much experimentation between my triathlon races last season and my half marathon and marathon training, the food of choice for me is a rendition of the snack eaten by endurance cyclists. It’s a combination of white rice, seaweed, bacon bits, scrambled egg, and salt, and its highly digestible format makes it a great combination for this gluten-intolerant, hungry runner. I added pure maple syrup (tapped from tree, yes yes om nom nom!). Best of all, I get zero tummy issues with eating real food during races, versus the crap shoot (no pun intended) that happens when I rely solely on race gels. Gels often have maltodextrin (corn), wheat, whey (milk), soy, and/or nuts, most of which can leave me by the side of the road, vomiting or having anaphylaxis (severe peanut allergy). You can tell others have tummy trouble during races if/when you stop at a Honey Bucket (oh so much yuck on the bottom of your shoes from someone’s previous misfortune).

A much younger person with a faster time and no tummy issues won’t need to carry much food or fluids on well-organized marathons. The BMO Vancouver Marathon earned a position among the Top 10 Destination Marathons in Forbes Magazine for a reason: 21 water and food stations, med tents, 4000+ volunteers, beautiful scenery through 17 neighborhoods. Running in midlife usually means you’re going to be out on the course for at least four hours, and it’s not just the effort but the time it takes to exert that effort which requires the midlife runner to either carry food and gels or rely on the race to have the ones that work for them. One misstep can mean the race. It’s not untypical to see people of any age hurting on the side of the road, nauseated, vomiting, or lining up at the port-o-potties with GI distress. On ultramarathons, almost all racers bring their own fluids and food, and on very long distances, they have a support person bring food to them at scheduled stops. More times than not, it’s real food they are reaching for.

At the marathon expo, I purchased a gel flask holder and attached it to my race belt, a Fuel Belt with a medium-sized pocket for my real food in a baggie, a couple of electrolyte pills in case the weather decided to change, and two water flasks filled with water in one and electrolyte fluid in the other (again, for just in case). The gel flask was filled with more than enough Honey Stinger gels (gluten-free and mostly honey with no high fructose corn syrup) to get me past the half marathon mark before switching to real food.  I had checked the race details, and the electrolyte drink on the course was Optima. Because of my food and drink restrictions, I knew not to use the race to experiment with anything new, and I had not trained with Optima so that was a no-go.

Two weeks prior, my left Achilles started aching badly enough to cause me to limp. I got to work on it immediately, and with the advice of my cousin Joe Huang (he has experience working with college athletes) and Coach Covey of Pro Sport Club, I was “on it” immediately doing calf stretches, icing and heating, treating the inflammation, and backing off the shorter taper runs by replacing the intensity with pool running and cycling. At the Expo, I found the RockTape kiok and had both of my Achilles taped up and a nice “X” of the tape placed on my left calf. RockTape is the bomb. It increases circulation and helps to stabilize muscles that have become strained or weakened from overuse. Fortunately, my Achilles was not torn; it was just achy. I had also weighed in: I was three pounds under my ideal race weight, so I used the taper weeks to do my best to gain back a little weight so I would have the wiggle room to take a loss during the race. A trip to Tucson helped me gain back one measly pound.

A week before race date May 4, 2014,  the weather had been gorgeous in the PNW. I simply couldn’t help wishing that it would last into the weekend, but every weather forecast was showing a 70% chance of precipitation and  temperatures twenty degrees cooler. Man-Geek pumped me up with some hopeful statements, such as, “Cooler, rainy weather means a PR!” I smiled weakly, recalling how I had managed to put the majority of my long runs on Seattle’s sunniest Spring weather days. Oh well.

While I did train from January through April and I’m used to running in the rain, race conditions of a 16,500 person marathon, half, and 8K add up to a lot of waiting outside without protective cover. Many people choose to bring old clothes as layers, which they shed along the first few miles of the race course. It ends up looking like the Rapture took people naked up to Heaven and left their clothes behind! Instead, I managed to grab a fairly thick clear plastic bag for insulation and rain protection, punched arm holes and a neck hole, and let my teeth chatter away. I was freezing.

As is my race ritual, I eat about 1/4 of the real food I packed about 25 minutes before the race start time. It delays my need to start taking gel hits and decreases my chances of getting cramps from starting out fast in the first few miles as runners in your finish time corral jockey for a space to run, spread out, and lock into their pace.

With all that said, with all the training behind me, and with a positive mind set, we trotted up to the start line, heard the roar of the crowd, and the next thing I knew, I was running.  I had done the best prep that I could. The race is simply the time you put all the hard work together. Once the GPS watch is started, I find my pace, set a playlist of songs in my head, and let my inner musician run wild.

 

Don’t Change A Thing

One of the cool things about the community in which I train for triathlons is that it is balanced with both newbies like myself and seasoned athletes competing at almost every level and across each decade. Just by hanging out and listening, you learn a world of great advice that can save you heartache and body aches. The challenge: you actually have to listen to the advice!

I changed two things about this race that I wish I hadn’t:

1. I had trained with a Nathan hydration vest. Because of what happened at the Boston Marathon in 2013, many marathons have asked runners to not wear a backpack while running. I interpreted this rule to mean I would need to wear a water and food belt, and this was the sole reason why I purchased a gel flask holder at the Expo the day before the race. While I tested the gel flask in my hotel room to make sure it was in the right place on my belt, I did not have the ability to test how the gel flask would do bouncing along my hip for 26.2 miles. It turns out that quite a few runners in the slower corrals (four hours or more) used hydration running vests. It has a convenient pocket in the front to hold your gels and food.

That was a fail. Somewhere between the 13th and the 14th mile, I suddenly noticed that my gel flask was gone. While the course had three more stations that provided gels, the majority of them were going to be brands of gels I knew I could not consume without risking GI distress or illness. At that point, I realized I had just enough real food on me to likely take me to the finish line under reasonable conditions. When you read #2, you’ll understand why I despaired.

2. I should have bought a roll of RockTape and taped up my knees. At home, I had a roll of Kinesio tape to cover up both kittehs like little mummies as an art project! My knees had been doing well through the long training runs, and I had stopped taping them altogether. At the RockTape kiosk, they were selling extra rolls. The woman taping me said they didn’t have time to tape more than one area “hot spot on each runner (the line was growing long), so I had her tape the Achilles on both feet and left the kiosk.

Back at home, Coach Covey had reminded me that injuries have a way of working their way up or down the body. With left-sided injury, it’s absolutely conceivable that my right side had made tiny adjustments to avoid pain on the left. By mile 7, I started feeling a tweak, in the right knee; by mile 10, I knew I was in trouble.

Limping up through mile 14 and crawling at a 14:00min/mi pace (significantly slower than my usual 9:30), I heard my mind say, “That’s it, Kitten. You’re cooked.” That’s when I bumped into Rennie. Rennie was a chipper, grey-haired woman who was also limping up that same 14 mile mark stretch. She was badly injured, unable to weight-bear on her ankle. “Do you know where the next med tent is?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but they never seem to be near enough when you’re hurt,” I replied. We both laughed.

She looked at me, limping along, and asked if I was planning on finishing. That’s when I heard myself saying to her, “There is no way I will finish in the time I had hoped, but now I think I will see if I can just finish. ” My mind had replied to her before it could ask the body!

And off I limped to the next ridge, drenched to the bone, cold and shivering, with my tiny belief that I would finish in under six hours. Or at all.

 

Brains Are Sexy

When I was last at Burning Man, I encountered a group of people with backpacks full of signs with multiple copies of the entire alphabet. They would ask onlookers, “Give us a word to spell!” and as soon as you shouted a word, they would quickly arrange themselves in order to spell your word. I gave them the word, “Acidophilus”. They got really excited!

Do you remember what those old GPS navigating devices sound like?  When you drive off the expected route, it chimes, “Recalculating” in a flat, uninspired voice. That’s what my brain started to do. It started recalculating. It started rearranging the letters and the numbers into an intelligent thought. I had three-quarters of real food left in my pouch, which was enough to make it to the end of the course —  that is, if I could run between a 10 and 10:30 pace (five hours). My calculations had me running a 12 min/mi and running out of gas in the tank in the last 3-4 km., simply because it would take more time than I had planned, and there was no gel flask to fall back on (five and a half hours).  I would have to find something to eat or risk bonking badly within the last couple of kilometers. 

I heard myself saying, “C’mon, Kitten! You did not come all this way to give up so easily. So you’re going to run to the next ridge, and when you get there, you are not going to stop because it hurts more to stop and get going again than to just keep going. And you’re going to run a 12 min/mi and it’s going to be just fine because that’s an easy run. Because I said so.” And I started imaging my version of a silly nightmare, a combination of Clown Zombies chasing after me. Man-Geek later suggested I should have included arachnids, but believe me: Clown Zombies tooting plastic horns was enough to make me laugh and keep me moving.

The pain in my right knee went from throbbing to blinding. At one point, I thought I was going to throw up, which is my typical response to sustained pain levels. I rolled down my compression sock on my left calf, took a piece of RockTape from the “X”, and rubbed it onto the outside right section of my right knee. At mile 17, I began getting my pace up to 11:30, and by mile 20, I had entered Stanley Park and the road home.

Brains are sexy. One of the best things about our brains is that we can use our own thoughts, also known as Emotional Intelligence, to help change our own responses to many kinds of stimuli. There have been significant research studies which, while difficult to replicate, appear to indicate that our own thoughts can even change our body’s response to injury and illness. By mile 18, I was already telling my body that the pain was “fiddly dee dee, nothing to never-no-mind about”(to borrow the words of Scarlet O’hara in “Gone With The Wind”), and I used that thought, combined with a few others, to will myself to mile 25. I figured, by mile 25, I would be all sorts of stupid to even think of walking by then.

I recalled at the start of the course, a thin, smiling Asian man standing on a corner, waving to the last corrals of runners who had just passed the first half mile. He said, “This is really important! Forget everything your coach told you. Run the pace that you want to run. This is the pace that is best for you. You know what that is.” I heard his words and took them to heart with me for the rest of the race, not as disrespect for the hard work that our coaches do for each one of us, but as a deep respect for individual intuition, compassion, and the knowing of the Self. At the end of the race, you are the one who runs across the finish line.

Many miles later, I realized it was the first time since 2012 I had run this kind of distance at a much slower pace. They felt harder to me than the faster ones of my last half marathon, because the faster ones were filled with energy and enthusiasm, and the slower ones were wracked with pain and a mixture of despair. It is what we believe it is; it was going to be whatever I made it to be. And that belief is powerful.

 

We’re Up All Night To Get Lucky

At the last food station, a young volunteer called out, “Vanilla gels, no caffeine!” I called back, “Are they gluten-free?” He checked the ingredients: soy lecithin and maltodextrin,  but gluten free. “I’ll take it!” I said, and tucked the packet in my pouch. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use it, even though my sexy-brain recalculations suggested I would need something in the last 30 minutes. I had sucked the last grain of rice from my food baggie, and the last traces of maple syrup had been replaced by another flavor: the flavor of my mouth when I start to feel hypoglycemic. It started hitting a bit earlier, likely because I was using a lot of energy to keep my body warm in the pouring rain.

My 4:40 race corral was long gone. The remaining runners really did look like straggler marathoners taking selfies with their phones as long as they finished in the eight hour cutoff time. Many were older, walking, limping, or what I call “lifers” — people who travel to do marathons all over the world at whatever pace, just for the fun of it. Some of them have completed more than 400 marathons, so don’t even think of laughing. There were volunteers strewn along the last six miles, yelling, “You got this one! Keep moving! Every step is one step closer to the finish line!”  I ran most of this fairly alone, occasionally passing another injured runner with a gentle word, “You can do it!” I told my knee pain to shut up and f@ck off, and probably in combination with the beginning of the bonk at mile 23, I believe I experienced what runner’s call a “runners high”. The pain stopped mattering, and getting to the finish line was the only thing left. I replayed an Eagle’s song in my head, “Fly Like An Eagle.” My trot became a romp. I picked up my pace.

With less than two miles remaining, I took a hit off that Vanilla gel I had picked up from the volunteer and tossed the rest, drank my remaining water, looked at my watch for the last time, and made my way towards the stone bridge that takes the runners around the last curve towards the edge of Stanley Park and the way “home.” Within minutes, I saw the last sign: 1 km.

I got lucky. The gel didn’t make me sick, and it gave me enough energy to overcome the heaviness in my legs and my foggy brain. It didn’t, however, keep me from almost being run over my a bicyclist who was not watching where he was going. In order to avoid being run over by him, I quickly maneuvered to my right, forcing me to turn on my knee which shot a pain straight up in my glutes. I cried out in pain and just kept going, shivering, teeth chattering, hands clenched into little fists, focusing on making the most of each stride. If there wasn’t going to be much speed, there was at least going to be some careful technique! Because looking good is feeling good. Or something that sounds like the kind of b.s. that makes me laugh.

With the exception of about three miles of the entire race, the skies puked drizzle or downpours in alternating succession. The last kilometer was a full-on downpour, and most of the crowds from earlier in the morning had all but dispersed. There was little fanfare, but that wasn’t why I had decided to run a marathon, so the thinned crowd was just fine. Fewer witnesses to an embarrassingly slow performance, I thought. The mostly-empty sidewalk and road of the home stretch with the finish line in sight helped me smile a cheesy grin for the last photographer. Finish time 5:33. That’s nearly one hour later than my projected finish time.

As I crossed the finish line, I saw my man, who waved to me and shouted, “Congratulations!” A man from the med tent inside the finish chute quickly inspected my knee, of which he agreed with my conclusion, “Overuse and stiff, but not torn,” and he waddled towards the next injured finisher.  My gear check bag held my warm clothes, and a quick change in a tent stopped my teeth from chattering; an old mylar blanket from a previous race was reconfigured into a rain coat for our dash to a taxi.

 

The Real Stuff

At the beginning of this post, I had told Man-Geek some ridiculous reasons why I wanted to run a marathon. I concealed the real ones. Here they are:

1. The last few years have been filled with more easily achievable goals. Training and running a marathon was something I had always wanted to do because I wasn’t sure I could actually do it. This race forced me to encounter the possibility of failure, and the opportunity to learn what I would do with that encounter. Apparently, I fought back!

2. I wanted to know what my mind could do when my body wanted to quit because of physical limits. Now I know: my mind can want to quit, but it also has the ability to reason, soothe, and to coach its way to another outcome. Woot!

3. That part about my former podiatrist who told me I would never run again back in 2006? All true (I told the story in another post), and you know what? I don’t hold it against him. In fact, he was only sharing what his limited medical profession offered — risk reduction over an anticipated long lifespan. I get it. So actually, #3 was one of those ridiculous excuses for wanting to run a marathon. I wasn’t proving this doctor wrong; I was actually proving my intuitions about myself right. Which is really the point of most psychotherapy. It’s not the addition of personal growth you’re trying to obtain, but the “shrinking” of all the accumulated crap of life that you remove to get to the authentic self. And that self seemed to know that this was possible long before I proved that it was. So there.

Btw, I ran by a group of ladies who were talking about how running was cheaper than therapy. As I trotted by, I told them, “You are correct, running is cheaper than therapy. I should know. I’m a psychotherapist!” And we all had a good laugh.

4. Out of empathy for my partner in life, I wanted to be a marathoner. Not only could I empathize with his goals as an ultra runner and Ironman, I would feel more worthy of his admiration and respect. In other words, I would always know that BOTH of us could say, “You are badass!” Yet I felt that if I told him this answer the night before, he would have taken away a part of my zeal by possibly denying the veracity of my reason to run:  to feel a sense of belonging, not only with him, but with others in my community.

One of the strange epidemics of our times is the advent of loneliness in the age of Social Media. With as many tools as we have to connect us to others, the art of connecting seems to be losing ground. I had noticed I have been working hard to build a sense of connection and community with others, and running had become a part of that connection, even with my life partner.

Just a few hours later, as I sat on my couch sipping a hot tea, I experienced this strange feeling that it was another part of me that just ran and finished that marathon, much like that dream I had had the night before. Maybe it was all that meditation along the way, which often gives one a sense of momentary separation from the physicality of this life. Maybe it was low blood sugar! Still, I think it helped to experience some momentary distance to enjoy what connection had brought to back to me.  What I do know is that I was already evaluating the lessons learned on this marathon training and running adventure, and I’m almost ready to plan out my races for the season. I don’t feel like I’m running alone.

There are many tales and allegories about how running a marathon is like living life. I’m sure I’ll be thinking them over during my recovery time. All I’m doing now is paying attention and taking notes to my body’s responses, like how I want to “eat all the things” in the kitchen, but I can’t, and how going upstairs is significantly easier than moving my hip down the stairs. And how soft sheets feel against your skin when you’re tired. And how the love and support of friends brings tears to my eyes as I write this post.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the strength gain during recovery makes me an even more fit dancer. The power of box jumps, squats, and weight training cannot be underestimated. My next gig in May buys me a bit of time of turning my running efforts into some power shimmies to die for. And one thing’s for sure: this marathon in the pouring rain and cold wind is going to make any other 10K at the end of a triathlon feel like a piece of gluten-free cake this summer. Bring it.

Pictures from the BMO Vancouver Marathon will be added in a couple of weeks. I don’t run with a phone or camera, preferring to treasure a sacred sense of space when I run. And not take selfies.