The Comeback
This story may make a bit more sense if you've read "Rubber Side Up", the post about my bike crash. If you just want to hear about how the Boston marathon treated me, jump here.
I'm quite a fan of my orthopedist. The day I was discharged from hospital after he had rebuilt my shoulder blade from 15 fragments, he told me to be sure to do my physical therapy "or else 2 months from now you'll be in worse shape than when you arrived in hospital." A few weeks later I asked him how my surgery ranked among other shoulder repairs he had done. He said something like "At one end you have simple collarbone fractures, and at the other you get someone whose arm has been ripped off. You were in the middle. You don't want to be at the extreme end." How we all laughed!
Anyway, he also told me, once I could move the arm, that I should stretch for 3 hours a day. Like most runners, I consider stretching a necessary evil, and about the most boring activity possible, so I don't think I ever got close to that goal. I like to think he was making an extreme statement to motivate me in the right direction. So when I eventually reached the point where I could start to run again — about 4 months post-accident — I figured I would count my running time as part of my daily stretching target. Unfortunately, running sucked about as badly as stretching, but at least there was variety in the suckage. Not only did my arm not swing properly for the first few months, but I had lost all fitness, and even the tolerance for the pounding of feet on pavement was gone. For the first time in my life I had some sympathy for people who say "I can't run, it hurts my knees."
Motivated by the desire to fix my shoulder and get my fitness back, I toughed out a couple of months of unenjoyable runs. I would just run away from my house for about as long as I could stand it, knowing that I would rather run back than walk. By New Years - 6 months post crash — I was up to an 8 mile long run and a 30 mile week. Running was enjoyable again. In March I managed to race 5 miles in a personal worst time of about 31 minutes.
So a month later the Boston marathon bombings happen and lots of people decide that they want to run Boston 2014. Many of my friends, including Christy, are among them, and a plan forms to use the Santa Rosa marathon in late August as a qualifier. I didn't want to commit to this plan from such a low point in my fitness, but I decided to start ramping up the mileage to see if it was at all feasible to be in marathon shape by August. As a bonus, Santa Rosa fell 3 days after my 50th birthday, and I liked the idea of testing my competitiveness in the new age bracket. Here is our bicoastal team of GBTC runners past and present on the night before Santa Rosa.
Santa Rosa went pretty well (except for the fact that my training partner Jeff had a "calf heart attack" at mile 2, ruling him out for Boston and leaving me to find new friends for the rest of the race). I finished in 2:56:59, well under the qualifying time for my new agegroup, and for the first time since my crash, closer to a personal best than a personal worst. And I won the 50+ division, a nice way to celebrate my birthday. We all retired to a winery afterwards and had a great little picnic.
Once the qualifying marathon and associated recovery was out of the way, I turned my attention to cross country running. That was a good way to start getting some of my speed back, and it's also the running discipline I love the most. I had a pretty good season - one nice thing being that in XC, you can't really tell if you're as fast as you used to be, because every course is different. It all went well until the 4.5 mile mark of the National Club championships in Bend, OR, when I had a calf heart attack of my own. Unlike Jeff's, I was able to keep running through mine — I only had 1.5 miles to go — but once I hit the finish line I was limping and in a fair bit of pain. I knew I was going to have to take some time off before I could start my Boston prep — and Boston was only 18 weeks away.
I took a few days off, then started cycling, and after 2 weeks I started the rehab process described here. My January training log shows this progression of weekly mileage: 7, 13, 40, 54. I've definitely never ramped up like that before, but time was running short.
From there on, my training went pretty well, and was about as good as I've ever done for a marathon in terms of consistency and mileage. I started to get in some good track workouts and long runs with sections at "goal marathon pace". The only problem was that I kept on getting small calf cramps during long runs — making me worry that I might have the same experience as Jeff, or as I had in Bend except with 10 miles left to go rather than 1.5. When talking to a friend the day before the race, I estimated that my odds of finishing the race were about 75% — that's how much I thought the calf might be a limiting factor.
Well, marathon day finally arrived. For weeks I had been saying "I just want to be in the race". I wasn't actually looking forward to being done — I was looking forward to being in the race. And it didn't disappoint. The marathon always feels like a pretty big deal in Boston, but this time was obviously different. It was a national news story, and the whole city seemed to be embracing the race in a new way. I told myself that even if I DNF'ed, it would be cool to have been part of it. But I really hoped I wouldn't DNF.
Having failed to run any races during my marathon buildup, I was at a bit of a loss as to what my time goal should be. I was pretty sure I could go faster than I did in Santa Rosa thanks to a lot more training under the belt, but I also figured that it was unreasonable to expect that, at age 50, I could match the time I ran when I was in my peak shape at age 44. So I picked an intermediate goal — sub 2:55 — and started the race a little bit faster than that goal pace so that, if things went really well, I'd have the chance to challenge my best Boston time of 2:49:46.
The first sign that I was having a good day came at mile 16, the steepest descent in the course, right before the Newton Hills. In 2008 I had started to feel quad pain at that point, and that turned out to be the first sign of the sufferfest that was in store for me later in the race. That race ended with me crawling to the finish (video here, report here) — an experience I was eager to avoid. So when I made it into the hills with no quad pain, I began to imagine that I might even have a strong finish to the race. Not that I felt in any way fresh at this point — but at least I was pain-free.
The hills went well — as they always have for me — and I saw a few familiar faces cheering for me as I headed towards the top of Heartbreak. I have always had trouble getting from the top of Heartbreak to the finish, so I told myself to relax as I ran the "haunted mile" from the top to mile 22. But at this point I hit the wall big time, just like my 2 previous Boston experiences. The desire to stop was just incredible. Fortunately I have been through this a few times now, and I have some mental tricks to silence the voice that tells me how good a little walking would feel. And the very fact that my calves — which I thought might be my undoing — were doing just fine gave me another story to tell myself: "you've made it this far without being stopped by injury, don't mess it up and wimp out now." So I sucked it up and pressed on.
There was a point around mile 24 when I began to wonder if I was going to have another day like 2008 when the legs just wouldn't keep me vertical, so I eased off the pace a bit — actually, I thought it was a lot. If you'd asked, I would have said I was running 8:30 per mile, while post-race data shows I slowed to 7:15 pace at the worst. I remember hitting the 25 mile mark, and then much, much later hitting the "mile to go" mark at 25.2. When I reached Hereford St, I realized to my dismay that it was two blocks to Boylston, not one as I had remembered. But then I was on Boylston, and even though the finish looked impossibly far, I had checked the map beforehand and verified that it was only 3.5 blocks away. I counted down the blocks and made it across the line. Given that I had stopped thinking about my time quite a while ago, I was astonished — and thrilled — to see 2:53:19 on my watch.
My only regret about the race is that I don't feel like my mind was really focused on the unique Boston-after-the-bombings experience. I was too darn tired and focused on getting to the finish. But it was a great event to be part of. And this was a special marathon for me because, after a year of training, it's brought me to the point where I feel like I'm back to where I was pre-crash. That feels great.
I'm quite a fan of my orthopedist. The day I was discharged from hospital after he had rebuilt my shoulder blade from 15 fragments, he told me to be sure to do my physical therapy "or else 2 months from now you'll be in worse shape than when you arrived in hospital." A few weeks later I asked him how my surgery ranked among other shoulder repairs he had done. He said something like "At one end you have simple collarbone fractures, and at the other you get someone whose arm has been ripped off. You were in the middle. You don't want to be at the extreme end." How we all laughed!
Anyway, he also told me, once I could move the arm, that I should stretch for 3 hours a day. Like most runners, I consider stretching a necessary evil, and about the most boring activity possible, so I don't think I ever got close to that goal. I like to think he was making an extreme statement to motivate me in the right direction. So when I eventually reached the point where I could start to run again — about 4 months post-accident — I figured I would count my running time as part of my daily stretching target. Unfortunately, running sucked about as badly as stretching, but at least there was variety in the suckage. Not only did my arm not swing properly for the first few months, but I had lost all fitness, and even the tolerance for the pounding of feet on pavement was gone. For the first time in my life I had some sympathy for people who say "I can't run, it hurts my knees."
Motivated by the desire to fix my shoulder and get my fitness back, I toughed out a couple of months of unenjoyable runs. I would just run away from my house for about as long as I could stand it, knowing that I would rather run back than walk. By New Years - 6 months post crash — I was up to an 8 mile long run and a 30 mile week. Running was enjoyable again. In March I managed to race 5 miles in a personal worst time of about 31 minutes.
So a month later the Boston marathon bombings happen and lots of people decide that they want to run Boston 2014. Many of my friends, including Christy, are among them, and a plan forms to use the Santa Rosa marathon in late August as a qualifier. I didn't want to commit to this plan from such a low point in my fitness, but I decided to start ramping up the mileage to see if it was at all feasible to be in marathon shape by August. As a bonus, Santa Rosa fell 3 days after my 50th birthday, and I liked the idea of testing my competitiveness in the new age bracket. Here is our bicoastal team of GBTC runners past and present on the night before Santa Rosa.
 |
| The GBTC crew. (Photo credit: Rod Hemingway) |
Santa Rosa went pretty well (except for the fact that my training partner Jeff had a "calf heart attack" at mile 2, ruling him out for Boston and leaving me to find new friends for the rest of the race). I finished in 2:56:59, well under the qualifying time for my new agegroup, and for the first time since my crash, closer to a personal best than a personal worst. And I won the 50+ division, a nice way to celebrate my birthday. We all retired to a winery afterwards and had a great little picnic.
Once the qualifying marathon and associated recovery was out of the way, I turned my attention to cross country running. That was a good way to start getting some of my speed back, and it's also the running discipline I love the most. I had a pretty good season - one nice thing being that in XC, you can't really tell if you're as fast as you used to be, because every course is different. It all went well until the 4.5 mile mark of the National Club championships in Bend, OR, when I had a calf heart attack of my own. Unlike Jeff's, I was able to keep running through mine — I only had 1.5 miles to go — but once I hit the finish line I was limping and in a fair bit of pain. I knew I was going to have to take some time off before I could start my Boston prep — and Boston was only 18 weeks away.
 |
| The face of a man whose calf has seized up. |
I took a few days off, then started cycling, and after 2 weeks I started the rehab process described here. My January training log shows this progression of weekly mileage: 7, 13, 40, 54. I've definitely never ramped up like that before, but time was running short.
From there on, my training went pretty well, and was about as good as I've ever done for a marathon in terms of consistency and mileage. I started to get in some good track workouts and long runs with sections at "goal marathon pace". The only problem was that I kept on getting small calf cramps during long runs — making me worry that I might have the same experience as Jeff, or as I had in Bend except with 10 miles left to go rather than 1.5. When talking to a friend the day before the race, I estimated that my odds of finishing the race were about 75% — that's how much I thought the calf might be a limiting factor.
Well, marathon day finally arrived. For weeks I had been saying "I just want to be in the race". I wasn't actually looking forward to being done — I was looking forward to being in the race. And it didn't disappoint. The marathon always feels like a pretty big deal in Boston, but this time was obviously different. It was a national news story, and the whole city seemed to be embracing the race in a new way. I told myself that even if I DNF'ed, it would be cool to have been part of it. But I really hoped I wouldn't DNF.
Having failed to run any races during my marathon buildup, I was at a bit of a loss as to what my time goal should be. I was pretty sure I could go faster than I did in Santa Rosa thanks to a lot more training under the belt, but I also figured that it was unreasonable to expect that, at age 50, I could match the time I ran when I was in my peak shape at age 44. So I picked an intermediate goal — sub 2:55 — and started the race a little bit faster than that goal pace so that, if things went really well, I'd have the chance to challenge my best Boston time of 2:49:46.
The first sign that I was having a good day came at mile 16, the steepest descent in the course, right before the Newton Hills. In 2008 I had started to feel quad pain at that point, and that turned out to be the first sign of the sufferfest that was in store for me later in the race. That race ended with me crawling to the finish (video here, report here) — an experience I was eager to avoid. So when I made it into the hills with no quad pain, I began to imagine that I might even have a strong finish to the race. Not that I felt in any way fresh at this point — but at least I was pain-free.
The hills went well — as they always have for me — and I saw a few familiar faces cheering for me as I headed towards the top of Heartbreak. I have always had trouble getting from the top of Heartbreak to the finish, so I told myself to relax as I ran the "haunted mile" from the top to mile 22. But at this point I hit the wall big time, just like my 2 previous Boston experiences. The desire to stop was just incredible. Fortunately I have been through this a few times now, and I have some mental tricks to silence the voice that tells me how good a little walking would feel. And the very fact that my calves — which I thought might be my undoing — were doing just fine gave me another story to tell myself: "you've made it this far without being stopped by injury, don't mess it up and wimp out now." So I sucked it up and pressed on.
There was a point around mile 24 when I began to wonder if I was going to have another day like 2008 when the legs just wouldn't keep me vertical, so I eased off the pace a bit — actually, I thought it was a lot. If you'd asked, I would have said I was running 8:30 per mile, while post-race data shows I slowed to 7:15 pace at the worst. I remember hitting the 25 mile mark, and then much, much later hitting the "mile to go" mark at 25.2. When I reached Hereford St, I realized to my dismay that it was two blocks to Boylston, not one as I had remembered. But then I was on Boylston, and even though the finish looked impossibly far, I had checked the map beforehand and verified that it was only 3.5 blocks away. I counted down the blocks and made it across the line. Given that I had stopped thinking about my time quite a while ago, I was astonished — and thrilled — to see 2:53:19 on my watch.
My only regret about the race is that I don't feel like my mind was really focused on the unique Boston-after-the-bombings experience. I was too darn tired and focused on getting to the finish. But it was a great event to be part of. And this was a special marathon for me because, after a year of training, it's brought me to the point where I feel like I'm back to where I was pre-crash. That feels great.
posted by DrBruceD | 9:24 PM
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