Twin Cities Marathon, Oct. 1, 2023 – Cancelled
You spend months training for a marathon with the hopes of crushing your goals and realizing your dreams only for it to be cancelled. It’s not hard to imagine how disappointing this is for many runners when this happens. For me it was a relief. Even though I’m sure it was an extremely tough decision for the race organizers to cancel the race, I think it was the right decision because it probably saved lives. The heat though wasn’t what worried me, it was once again the pain in my groin.
For my second marathon, I had adopted the rule that I wouldn’t go further than 20 miles or three hours for any long run. I broke this rule about four weeks out from my third marathon. I was feeling really good though and should have turned around at mile 10, but kept going almost an extra mile. I was about three miles from home which is probably the hilliest part of the run when my groin injury, having made its initial appearance training for my first marathon, decided to return.
Looking back on it I hadn’t made the best training decisions up to this point. It was my third week of 70+ miles, which I’m learning may be 5-10 miles too many for my peak training. Generally speaking, higher mileage can lead to faster times, but it can be a fine line between peak performance and injury. I’m learning I have a tendency to cross the line resulting in injury. It also may have been a mistake not to have taken more time off after Grandma’s Marathon in the spring. That marathon was June 17 and this one Oct. 1. That only gave me 15 weeks or so between marathons. While I should have realized that since I had just run a marathon so was in pretty good shape already, I could afford three or four weeks of low volume, easy running. Instead I started to ramp up my mileage right away. This was partially due to having felt great the next day after Grandma’s, which made me think I didn’t need as much recovery. No matter how I felt, after 3 to 4 months of solid marathon training, I probably needed a little more time off.
Maybe the biggest mistake though was that by about mid-August I had stopped doing my strength and mobility routine. When you spend so much time running it can be easy to skip the PT especially because I don’t especially enjoy doing it, but eventually it seems to catch up to me. It’s one of those things that doesn’t seem like it’s helping until it’s too late and you regret not doing what you can to stay healthy.
I took a couple days off and tried to manage my injury by cross training, but again I had troubles allowing myself to rest. A full week off likely would have given my body the time it needed to repair itself, but once again I thought I could try to push through it by just reducing my mileage a little bit and then hoping my taper would take care of the rest.
By the end of my taper, I realized it wasn’t going to work out how I had hoped. Having kept an eye on the forecast that week I knew it was going to be hot and with my injury, I had already accepted that this wasn’t going to be the marathon that I break 3:20. I still wanted to run the race, but I wasn’t looking forward to it like my past marathons. My plan was to basically run based on heart rate, drink a lot more water, bring salt tabs for extra electrolytes and plan on a long, slow, uncomfortable slog.
The morning of the marathon I got up three hours before the start of the race to drink coffee, eat my breakfast and get ready for the race. Not long after I ate breakfast, I got word that the race was cancelled. I wasn’t angry or even all that disappointed. I was actually relieved. I was thankful this wasn’t my first marathon since I know that after training for months you want to prove to yourself that you can do it, but I knew this wasn’t going to me my fastest and definitely not my most enjoyable marathon. Some runners still ended up running the course on their own, but the thought of that didn’t even cross my mind. Maybe if I had shown up at the starting line because I missed the text, I might have considered that, but likely I would have just gone home. This was probably as much an indication that I was over training and maybe a little burned out on running at this point. The race organizers were able to refund the participants their full entrance fees which was unexpected and definitely not part of the terms of signing up so it was a real class act that they were able to do that.
Even though I didn’t end up running the race, I still appreciate feel like I gained some experience and knowledge having trained for this marathon. Having one decent marathon doesn’t mean that every subsequent marathon will go equally as well. It definitely served as a good reminder that I need to stay on top of my PT, use good judgement when it comes to weekly mileage and listen to my body above all else.
Stay tuned for marathon #4. Will I finally break 3:20?