My bad habit continues...

Saturday, 15th June 2013 – 27.4km Portumna Forest Marathon DNF

Sunday, 16th June 2013 – Rest Day

"I guess I got a bad habit 

Of blowin' away 
Yeah I got a bad habit 
And it ain't goin' away Yeah"

Well, that didn’t go to plan! Almost a week has passed since the race and I’m still trying to fathom why my second goal marathon of the year resulted in a DNF once again.

The lead-in…

I really dislike taper time as my discipline & diet often fall apart. I end up getting lazy which results in eating crappy foods, feeling sluggish on easy runs and generally feeling guilty that I haven’t done enough. The day before the race though I managed to have two medium sized pasta dinners to maximise the carb intake. I also decided not to run in order to be as fresh as possible for the Midday start. 

Up at 8:30am on race morning, I devoured a couple of scones and a cup of tea and was on the road by 9am. Arrived into Portumna for 11am, and after registering I hung around the finish area for a while chatting to a few fellow runners and helpers. 

Race

With 20mins to go we made our way to the race start and after a 5 min delay (which was just enough for us to get soaked by a thunder shower!) we were away. A mini group had formed in advance, all looking for about 3:15. Myself and Joe had been in Rotterdam where we both had very disappointing races and this was payback time! Dave was my co-pacer for 1:45 in Wexford. He wasn’t sure what time he was capable of on the day so his game plan was to hang with our pace for as long as he could. Anthony (or Plumber77) - a new guy to us all – completed the quartet and was looking to beat a PB of 3:16.

Photo courtesy of Peter Mooney

There was a nice bit of chat between us over the first few kms. At various times each of us took up the pacing duties. We were sticking to approximately the correct pace by the time we were passing through the finish area for the second time (7.2km point). This had consisted of a 2.2km run from Aldi to the finish area and then the first of 8 x 5km loops. The loop was pretty flat with just slight drags here and there. The surface was good with tarred paths combined with gravelly sections. Unfortunately there was just a couple of short potholed sections towards the turnaround point but these were nothing too drastic. There was a lot of tree cover also and this seemed to throw my GPS signal off quite often. This meant I wasn’t sure if I could really trust the data it was feeding back to me so I kept asking the other guys for confirmation that we were on target. Even though the inclines were minimal they were still slowing us down enough to make keeping a consistent average pace difficult. Eventually I gave up trying to run the right pace and ran by perceived effort instead. This was probably where I was lulled into running that bit too quick.

Lap two was more of the same only a little faster. Again there was a little confusion over what pace we were running (add in to the mix kms v miles to further complicate matters!) and we worked out that we had just slipped off the pace a little. So, lap two came in at 20 seconds quicker than lap one. Not a huge difference in pace (just four sec/km) but probably the straw that broke the camel's back.

Photo courtesy of Peter Mooney

Lap three and we appeared to be back on pace. I noticed though that the effort began to feel just a little tough. The rest of the guys seemed to be still going steady. Then just after the start of lap four at 18km it dawned on me for the first time to check my HR. it was showing a rate of 156-158bpm around now and I knew I had to ease back. My marathon HR ceiling is 150-152bpm so I was well above it now. The next couple of kms saw the rest of the gang break up ahead of me too. Joe pushed on as Anthony and Dave continued to run together. By the time I hit the turnaround point I was in serious blow-up mode. I stopped to get a bottle of water and throw in a salt tablet, and to help lower my HR in a bid to give myself a chance to return to a fully functioning level. This didn’t work though and by 500m later the HR was sky high again. That’s the problem once you overcook things early on in a marathon – it’s so difficult to recover from. The last 2km of that loop was a real effort and when I approached the finish area I had almost fully decided to stop and DNF. My pace for that 5km had dropped to 5:00/km and was only going to get slower. 

Goal time was well gone by now and any chance of PB was drifting away. Just after the finish area I was about to slow to a walk when I heard a shout from Anto who was doing the 100km. I wasn’t sure what he roared at me but the facts that the t-shirt I was wearing was from his 50km race and that I had ran barely a quarter of the distance of his race meant that shame prevented me from stopping here! I thought one more loop and see if I recover. A lot can happen in 5km! 

Photo courtesy of Peter Mooney

At this time my mind began to ponder turning this into a long slow run, and complete the marathon race, and forget about the inevitable slow time. As the kms slowly ticked by though I concluded that if I was just going to flog myself to get to the finish my recovery would take weeks rather than days and all for nothing really. Instead, I gave in to the Central Governor and reckoned that if I pull out at the end of the next loop then I could be back in training after a couple of days. The body was weak but the mind was weaker/more cunning! So, resigned to my fate I jogged the remaining 2km of the loop. Even at that pace though I had to stop and walk for 20m on the final straight. It seems that lots indeed can happen over 5km but in circumstances like today they are rarely good things. Eventually I made it round to the end of lap five and stepped off the course. First thing I did was remove my number before anyone could work out what had happened. Then I watched for a few minutes as the 50km finishers were arriving in to complete their distance (they had started 2hrs before us). A couple of minutes of that was all I could take though, and disappointedly, I faced into my 2.2km trek back to my car.

Afterthoughts

Still not quite sure what went wrong but my main reckoning is a combination of my pace being slightly too quick too early and the heat oft the day. Perhaps also I was low on nutrition (I don’t take gels and the Midday start time wouldn’t have helped). The result was an unsustainably high HR – I checked the data on the walk back to my car and was surprised to see it was consistently above 152bpm for about 10km before the blow-up. I usually keep a keen eye on the HR data during the run but today that lapsed for some reason. Perhaps I got caught up with sticking with the other guys rather than running my own race. Had I been running without such a friendly bunch maybe I’d have eased back much earlier and stil nabbed a sub 3:20 (which I would have been very satisfied with even before the race). 

I will be running the Le Cheile Midnight marathon this Friday night in Leixlip so I think I will make the HR display my main data field and keep sub 150bpm all the way and simply discover my pace and time when I cross the line instead. It’s a low priority run and all I really want to do at this stage is finish it to get some confidence back. After all, these DNFs are just a bad habit that needs breaking.

Week 24 Summary:

RTW: 4 from 7 days
DTW: 50.9km
DTY: 1891.0km