From Roger Bannister to Long John Silver

The alarm on my cell phone rang out at 4am on Saturday. It was 3 hours to race time: The SunTrust National Marathon, running through the streets of Washington DC. I had decided that the Marathon was definitely out for me, so I’d signed up to run the 1/2. I had a goal for this race, I wanted this to be my first sub 2 hour race. My first 2 1/2 marathons had given me times of ~2h 3m, and my split time during the Marine Corps Marathon last year was 2h 1m, so I knew that I could do it.

Training had been a mixed bag, I had completed a 10 mile run 2 weeks earlier in a time of 84.5 minutes, but had also pulled my calf. Since then I’d avoided running. Would my calf hold up? I’d had no knee pain while running for months, had the glucosamine chondroitin I’d been taking worked and repaired my troublesome joints?

Just after 6am the metro train deposited me at the RFK Stadium / Armory station, with a short walk to the start of the race. It was cold, in England we’d call it brass monkey weather, but still I took off my tracksuit and handed it in to the baggage check area while I tried to warm up.

After the formalities (national anthem, address by the mayor, etc), they started the wheelchair race. Unfortunately the sole registrant for this portion of the program failed to appear… not necessarily an auspicious start. I maneuvered myself over to the 3:40 pace group, figuring that I’d stay with them until ~10 miles, then I’d ease up and coast to the finish at about 1h 55m.

…and we were off. The 3:40 pace group was supposed to stick to a pace of 8:23 per mile. We reached the 4 mile marker at exactly 32 minutes, almost 2 minutes ahead of pace (at one point we caught up to the 3:30 pace group). It was then that I started to feel a twinge from my left knee. Listening to that twinge I decided to ease off a bit and let the 3:40 group zoom off into the distance. Between miles 5 & 6 I found myself running next to the mayor of DC - Adrian Fenty. He was running the full marathon, and once we went through the Dupont Circle underpass he started to pull away.

My first pre-race goal was to hit the 7 mile marker at an hour. I’d done that in both of the other 1/2 marathon’s I’d run, and knew that I needed to do that in order to hit the sub 2 hour goal. I passed the marker at 1h 2s, pretty close. Next I wanted to hit the 10 mile marker in less than 90 minutes. I crossed that line in 89 minutes. All I had to do was complete the last 5k in less than 31 minutes, in other words do better than a 10 minute mile for the rest of the race, easily something that I could do.

…unless the calf muscle started to ache once more, which it did at about 10-1/2 miles. In order to protect it, I changed my running gait. This caused my left knee to complain rather loudly. After a further 1/10 of a mile, I could no longer bend my knee while running. so I alternated between walking and running on my right leg while hopping on my left as though it were made of wood. All I needed was a parrot on my shoulder to complete the look…

At the 11 mile marker I still had a shot, I just needed 2 sub 9 minute miles, but my knee stubbornly refused to co-operate. The last 2 miles ended up taking me 12 minutes each, and I finished with my slowest 1/2 marathon time of 2h 6m 28s.

I’m not disappointed though, as far as I’m concerned I did fantastically. I know that, given the physical challenges, I couldn’t have done better. At no point did I consider just giving up, after all, I had to get back to the baggage check to get my tracksuit back anyway.

Ok, and now for my final total for the contest. I had said when I started this contest that I wanted to lose 10 lbs. I began at 218, and my weigh in after the race was 208.4, so I did it. I could probably have done better had I not injured my calf, etc, but that’s life, and there was no way that I was going to get anywhere close to challenging Scottie or David (congrats to both of them, and to all other participants that lost weight).

Let’s make my final word on this contest be a thank you to Donna for setting it up, and to those people and companies that donated prize money.

Goals and Goals

As the contest draws to a close, I thought that I should really try and find my password so I could post over here again

What’s been going on with me for the last few weeks?  Firstly, just over 2 weeks ago, I managed to do a 10 mile run, in only 84:30, which is absolutely, fantastically well inside my goal time of 2 hours for the national 1/2 marathon tomorrow.   Slightly under 2 weeks ago my left calf went again while playing soccer.  Since then I’ve not run, or played soccer.  I can feel slight twinges every now and again, but the real acid test is going to be tomorrow.  Will it hold?

I hope that it will, also because I’ve now signed up for 2 soccer leagues, an 8 a side on Saturdays, and a 7 a side on Tuesdays, and somewhere towards the end of the season I also have to do the Marine Corps 1/2 marathon…  It’s going to be a busy spring for me, and one in which I doubt I’ll be gaining any of the 10 or so pounds that I’ll have lost over the course of this contest.

Congratulations to the eventual winner, which looks like being either Scottie or David (unless a dark horse rears up on Monday).

The Good, The Bad, and the not so Ugly

The Good

After my calf strain on Sunday I decided to give exercise a rest for a few days, so on Tuesday I had decided that it was time. Then a co-worker, Nate, who’d injured his knee the weekend before went for a run and managed to get 1/4 mile out before his IT band started causing him pain… maybe I’d wait another couple of days, just to make sure that my calf was better.

So last night I climbed back on the treadmill and started running, again with no knee braces. After 7.6 miles in 68:45 I stopped. No real knee pain, and over 1400 calories burnt off. Nice, because that made up for

The Bad

On Tuesday I made it out to my favorite Vietnamese restaurant - Taste of Saigon - and had their wonderful black pepper mock chicken, and was then tempted by their ginger ice-cream (it had ginger in it, how could i say no?). On Wednesday I had a client presentation close by the bakers that makes the most gorgeous ginger cookies, so I had to have one of those… before the presentation and one after.

Last night, on the way home, I was trying to decide what to have for tea, and came to the conclusion that I may as well head to the local Fosters Grill. Picking up my daughter, off we went for our Veggie burger and fries, following that up at home with a Weight Watchers eclair each (which I didn’t really enjoy, I’m not that much of a chocolate person, and the filling was like vaguely edible styrofoam).

So after all that I was concerned about the score on the scale, but after the exercise it turned out that it was

Not So Ugly

Stepping on the scale this morning I saw that for the first time in this contest I have managed to dip below the 210 mark, coming in at 209.8. This means that I’m almost at my goal weight of 205 - 208, and should easily be there next week. I knew up front that I wasn’t going to win this contest, but at least it’s given me the impetus to drop the additional weight of the last 6 months.

(oh, and since I’m not going to win, feel free to jump over to my charity and give them a donation, or if you’d like to know more about their work, the Kids Wish Network Blog has a great video that went live yesterday).

Pain, but thankfully no gain

Morning weight: 213lbs

On Saturday I decided that I’d try and see how well my knees would hold up if I didn’t wear braces for my soccer game.  Two hours later, they felt fine.  I had no soreness, no niggling pain, nothing.  I felt so good, that I decided to go to another game on Sunday.  Again, no knee braces (although they were in my bag).  I did my usual warm up exercises, and started the game.  After about 45 minutes I noticed some pain in my calf.  Unlike the last time I played when this happened, I decided to keep going.  Rather nicely I scored a hat-trick (3 goals), which was a first for me, given that I usually play back in defence, but we had a really good player on our team so pretty much all I had to do was stand in the right place while he took on every defender on the other team, then crossed for me to just tap the ball in.

After the game my calf continued to hurt.  I made the decision not to exercise yesterday, as I don’t want to exacerbate the injury, although I did do a quick walk around the block with the dog.  Today it feels a lot better, and I think I’ll try and work out tonight, getting back into the swing of things.

25 days to the 1/2 marathon…