Long Train Running: A Chicago Marathon Story | Chapter 7 — Easy Does It
They call them build weeks. The daily workouts are designed to build strength and stamina. The workouts are more challenging. Build weeks culminate with longer long runs on Saturday morning. On the other side of build weeks are cut back weeks. Easier workouts designed to let the body rest while remaining active. Cut back weeks culminate with shorter runs on Saturday morning.
Now that you understand that, understand this: Marathon training puts time and distance into relative perspective. Once you prove you can run seventeen miles, jogging a quick five constitutes an easy run. Five miles is nothing. It feels like less work than walking across the street to pick up my dry cleaning. Christ, I hate running errands.
I felt really, really good after completing the seventeen-mile run three weeks ago. It was the longest run I’d ever done and while I was glad to be through with it, I felt like I could have gone another mile or three. I felt strong. That run was the culmination of a build week. The cut back followed. And that subsequent Saturday we were tasked with running only ten miles. Only ten miles.
It’ll be a cinch, I thought. An hour or so, tops. No problem. Nothing to it. I still get a little nervous for the long runs on build weeks. I’ve learned that the best way I can prepare for them, other than maintaining good nutrition and doing the physical work, is to get a good eight or nine hours of sleep the night before. I took the same approach before the cut back ten-mile run. I was confident, not cocky. Ten miles may be a cinch but it’s still five more miles than five. And a lot can happen in five miles on a Saturday morning. So, I laid out my clothes and gear, set my alarm for before the sunrise and put my head on the pillow by 9 p.m.
I didn’t have any pain during that ten-mile cut back run, but my God was not a cinch. Not at all. I was tired, my muscles were tight, my form was sloppy. Why is this so hard?
At the last hydration stop at mile eight-ish, a woman in my pace group started talking to me as we sucked back paper cups of Nuun.
“This is hard.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I figured ten miles would be, like, nothing. I’m struggling.”
“Me, too. I felt great last weekend. Didn’t even take a nap. I went out for brunch right after the run and ended up staying out ‘til three in the morning.”
“Right? I felt like a god last week. I skipped the nap and had drinks that afternoon, too. I didn’t go that late, though.”
“I’m dying right now.”
“If someone killed me, I’d be okay with that.”
“Maybe this is why we have cut back weeks,” she said.
✶
Rest is as important as putting in the work. We have off weeks. We get busy with work or get sick or travel or just plain old can’t be fucked to be bothered to put on our running shoes and hit the streets. Or even cross-train. Or, in my case during the build week that followed the ten mile hell, all of the above. And so I took the week off.
Well, I did kick myself every day I decided not to run or bike or swim or even work my abs and core, or stretch. I was as unengaged in marathon training as I was before I signed up to run the damn thing. I checked myself with a friend who is also training and has run the Chicago Marathon a handful of times. She told me not to beat myself up over it. Rest is good. Everyone has off weeks. Yeah, I’d be fine.
But I didn’t run the full eighteen miles that Saturday at the end of the build week. I ran nine. Half is better than nothing. Plus, I was out of town and had family responsibilities to attend to, so I couldn’t exactly be eighteen-miles worn out. Or worse, injured because running eighteen miles after six days of sitting on your ass is a terrible idea.
At the time of this writing, we are twenty-four days from Race Day. This week is a build week. The culmination is the Long Run: 20-Miler, the longest run of the training season. This run will test my mettle. I started the build week a little slow. I’m feeling a little tight, a little sore. But if I can get through these twenty miles without problematic pain or walking, I’ll feel confident enough that I can do the same with twenty-six-point-two miles on October 13th.
This long run will be a difficult run. It’ll demand physical and mental endurance: maintain good form, time my nutrition intake and mind my fluids, keep my eyes up and don’t think about that big number. Take it easy. Easy does it. It’s just four easy five-mile runs. Nothing to it.
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