The Running Rewind
Hello, everyone! Long time no post, but I’m back to talk about my most recent round of training for the half marathon that I have coming up this weekend. On Sunday, September 1st, I’ll be running the Rock ‘n’ Roll half marathon in Virginia Beach, and I could not be more excited about it! This will be my second half in 2019 [and also in my life].
As I gear up for this race, I wanted to tell you all about some things I’ve learned from training, the ways that I motivate myself through hot summer long runs, and surprisingly, how different training for this half was from training for my first. After running the Shamrock half marathon in March, I immediately knew that I wanted to train for another – but it’s actually somewhat difficult to find good races in the summer because, you know, nobody wants heat stroke. So, I took some time to rest and recover and began a new training cycle at the beginning of the summer by basically starting back at the beginning.
Because of my slight knee problems back in April and May, I had to take off a couple weeks from running, in which time I lost the confidence I had about doing long runs, and I regressed to sticking with three or four mile runs for a bit. But once I committed to running a couple halves his fall, I knew I had to get back on the wagon with running or I would fall short of my goals. So, on my twenty-first birthday at the end of May, I did my first “long” run in a while – a 6.2 mile birthday 10K. Three months later, I just hit eleven miles for the first time in my training.
When I trained for my first race, I felt much more pressure to adhere to a training schedule of building my long run mileage by one mile each week. Every Sunday, I would wake up and do a long run, and until I reached ten miles, I rarely did the same mileage twice. It seemed like if I didn’t stick to that plan exactly, I would never be able to achieve what at the time already seemed like somewhat of an unattainable goal. So, I reached double digits about six weeks before my race and then I dwelled around there, running ten and eleven multiple times and even running twelve the weekend before the race. This time, I’ve had a very different mentality.
Having completed a half marathon before, I know that this is something I can do, even if I’m not muscling my way through an inflexible training plan. I’m trying a lot harder to listen to my body and its cues and know that as long as I train responsibly (in terms of both training enough and not training too much), I will be able to run 13.1 miles on Sunday. Sometimes, it makes me feel stressed. I’ve run ten miles twice and eleven miles once, but that’s nothing compared to how I trained last time. I’ve also probably done slightly fewer mid-length runs (6 - 8 miles) as part of my training, just because I moved above those numbers as long runs much later in the process. But I do trust that I can run two miles more than the eleven that I did today, and I’m excited to remind myself of my capability and hard work this weekend.
My different training approach definitely connects to a major lesson that I’ve learned in the past few months: training in the summer is VERY different than training in the winter. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me. I guess I just thought running is running is running, right? But no, the heat really gets to me. It dehydrates me faster and it slows me down [and I have a really weird shorts tan from running outside so much]. Especially in Williamsburg, where its often upwards of eighty degrees by seven in the morning and extremely humid, the heat is impossible to ignore – and I’m glad that I didn’t ignore it, because that would have put me in dangerous and unhealthy situations. I remember one seven mile long run that was supposed to be longer, but I stopped early because I felt so dizzy since I’d forgotten my water bottle belt and hadn’t drunk enough before I left. That run was a good reminder of how important it is to listen to your body.
The conditions that I was often running in forced me to be more flexible. I dwelled for a while on long runs between seven and nine miles, because I really wanted to get comfortable with those distances in the heat before pushing myself further in terms of physical exertion. As I trained in the winter for my March half, I refused to budge on the Sunday long runs, but in the summer, I felt more comfortable shifting around the days. If Sunday was supposed to be ninety-five degrees and sunny, I would happily wait until Monday or even a predicted rainy Tuesday to do my long run in more tolerable weather. I started to love running in the rain even more and purposefully planned my runs to coincide with the near-daily thunderstorms that hit Williamsburg in the afternoon and temper the humidity just a little bit [trust me, it’s worth it].
Another challenge was the absence of my running pals who were around during the school year but went home or went abroad during the summer. Although I started training for my first half on my own, I picked up some runner friends from my crew team who ran with me on the majority of my long runs eight miles and up and plenty of short runs too. Left to my own devices for the summer, I had to get better at motivating myself on my own in order to push through the heat and rack up some mileage. I made a solid cardio playlist and I even tried talking to people on the phone while running [not the best scheme I’ve ever had], but by far the best strategy was playing tricks on myself. Let me explain.
I have some mental games that I play with myself to motivate myself through my runs and I feel like these tips and tricks might be helpful to someone else out there, so I’m going to share them. I’m pretty good at daydreaming my way through at least the first few miles of a long run, but once I get around mile three, I start itching to check my watch and see my distance. My first strategy is putting that off as long as possible – it feels so much better to check your watch later and surprise yourself with how far you’ve run than to check it too early and be shocked when you’ve only run 2.7 miles or something and you already feel pretty exhausted [been there for sure]. Another thing I do is fib to myself about the miles remaining. I do this on both short and long runs, and I think it’s equally effective either way. Basically, I magically vanish a mile of the run with some unique math.
Here’s an example: I’m doing a nine mile long run, and I’ve run 3.09 miles. Ugh, you might think, six miles left. But instead of subtracting three from nine and settling on six, I subtract three from nine and settle on “five and change,” which then becomes “only like five miles, that’s not so bad.” It’s so simple and yet somehow it makes me feel so much better. I’m often doing running math in my head – breaking up my run into halves and quarters and sometimes even trying to do the division to get fifths or sixths or eighths just for the fun of it. Hey, it takes up time, right? And sometimes those little milestones are so important! When you can say even “I’m one fifth done with this run,” that feels much better than “man, I’m only two miles in.”
My third and final trick is choosing the right units to think about my runs. It’s kind of related to breaking them up into fractions. On a nine mile run, instead of saying I have three miles left, I’ll say that I have one third left. Same thing with minutes – thirty minutes seems like way more than three miles, at least to me. So, I get inventive with my units and choose the one with the lowest descriptor. It’s even more obvious on a bigger scale: even ten miles seems better than one hundred minutes. You can run for a minute and think “kill me, I need to do this ninety nine more times” or you can run for a mile and think “okay, only nine [or eight and change!] more times.” I know it’s a little silly and those units add up to the same distance at the end of the day, but it works wonder for convincing myself to keep going when I’m feeling beat at the end of the run. If you try any of these out, definitely let me know what you think!
Anyway, now that you know my extremely elusive ~secrets~ to running, I’m going to wrap this up. Also, there are no real secrets to running. Little tricks can only get you so far – you’ve got to get yourself out on the road or trail or treadmill and persevere from there. In a way though, that’s what’s so rewarding about running. There aren’t really any shortcuts, so when you finish a long run or you cross the finish line at a race, you know that you have really done something special. Running is physical, of course, but training I think is extremely mental. To push yourself through the training, to build your physical ability to complete whatever race distance you’re aspiring to, that takes some real mental grit. By the time you make it to race day, you’ve used your mental ability to create the physical ability in a way that I find so empowering. That’s what I was ruminating about on my run today – the connection between the physical and mental aspects of running that make it extremely worthwhile.
I’m excited to put both these facets of running into practice in T-5 days when I head down to Virginia Beach and run my second half there. This round of training was definitely challenging, especially due to the summer heat, but I’m glad to have pushed through it and come out the other end ready to crush 13.1 miles! Happy training everyone!
