THE "REAL" BIG SUR RECAP

(OK, this is my final coping mechanism)

Why do I do this to myself? Run marathon(s) you ask? While that is part of it, the other part comes in with the post race beating I put myself through. My experience on the Big Sur course was, shall we say, less than satisfying. Well, actually it was pretty poor. Freakin’ nine days later, I am still thinking about this marathon all the time.

I was felt SO ready for this race. Seriously, I felt ready. I was feeling great mentally and almost as great physically. However, in the afternoon before the race I starting feeling really nervous about the race. Scared even. In a manner of a few hours my thought process went from “this is going to be great” to “what in the world have I gotten myself into.” Suddenly the hills I was less than a day from running seemed REALLY big and my confidence was not so high.

However, that night I slept fairly well with all the anxious feeling I had. Getting up at 3:15 was no fun but oh well. I knew that was coming. There are buses that take the runners to start line in the dark of the early morning hours. The buses, of course, drive us to the start line on the actually marathon route. My confidence is continually sliding as I feel the roller coaster of hills we are ascending and descending on a school bus at 4:45 a.m.

We get to the start line and for whatever a big sense of calm comes over me in the VERY frigid early Sunday morning hours. I get close to a generator that is letting off something resembling heat. It was like high 30’s and there was still 75 minutes to the start. Small conversations start here and there among the anxious (and COLD) runners while waiting. With about 10 minutes to the start, I feel really good. My confidence is back and I think that running a 3:45-4:00 time is within me. The first few miles breeze by and then at mile six the woods open up to the ocean. The woods also open up to two things that become my VERY hated foe for the next three hours – strong winds and hills.

I adjust just fine to the hills and even the wind for the next handful of miles THEN my marathon experience starts to suck. The wind is not at my back, the sky is still overcast and there are still 10 hills in front of me. And, oh yeah, I was still cold wearing my non-technical long sleeve black shirt. Why didn’t I pack a technical long sleeve? Why?!?!?! My mind was playing dirty tricks on me and I was giving in. All things considered I felt fairly good physically but my mental state of mind was piss poor at best.

The last third of the course was about as miserable as I have felt in a while. Mind you I am doing ok physically but I am just angry. Once again, the harsh reality of not having a strong mental state of mind hits hard. Why can’t I have my mind think of happy thoughts when I want to be angry? Whatever happened to thoughts of pretty butterflies on a summer day, baseball on a warm July night or good looking women on Huntington Beach? Where were those thoughts at mile 17?!?!? Huh, where were you?!?! AH!!!!!

You train four 16 weeks four a little window of time. Just a brief little time block that in the grand scheme of things is less than half an eye blink when you take your whole life into perspective. A grain of sand on the beach. But this little bit of time is what running a marathon is all about. You invest countless hours and sacrifice an inordinate amount of thing for one morning on a road.

There is one VERY big bright spot in all this – my wonderful friends who were there at the finish line. Without them, this whole experience would have been a whole lot harder to swallow. They were amazing!



So here’s what I am doing with this experience so I can get better next time:

1) Take two weeks off from running in early June. For the average person this would be a blessing, yet this is not going to be fun for me. This will be a time to improve my swimming stroke.

My times are getting slower and it is probably because I need rest. When I started training for Big Sur, I knew that I would be losing a lot of my speed work that I had built up over the last two years. Sacrificing my per mile pace was something that was just fine for me however, I didn’t expect to perform as poorly as I did on the course. I went from a sub-7:00 pace in a personal best 10K effort 18 months ago and third place age group finish in my half-marathon to what I am at now. So not only am I slower after four months of training but I performed very poorly. Back to the drawing board for speed work because right now I feel like a child who learning to ride bike and is still using training wheels. This feeling pretty much blows.

2) My mental side of mind HAS TO improve. I have no clue at this point how this will happen but it will happen.

3) See a physical therapist in mid-June. I’d like to run for a long time and I better start seeing what an expert has to say.

4) I am running Big Sur again. Is this a hard course? Most certainly but it is a demon that I will conquer next time because it will not conquer me again. There’s no doubt this course has tested the most veteran of runners but it is a test that I am going to pass next time.

5) No more apathy about this race …