Why the marathon is not for me

"Are you training for a marathon?"

I get asked that question a lot by people who find out that I like to run. It's a totally understandable question, given the prominence that the marathon has assumed as the presumptive "event" for recreational runners. And yet, I have pretty much zero interest in running one. To be sure, I say that with absolutely no intention of downplaying the accomplishment of those who train for and run (or try to run) one. If that's what gets someone motivated to run, that's great. It's just not for me.

Long run motivation

Napping was at the top of the list of what I wanted to do this morning. Going for a long run was much farther down the list. I mean, I love being a runner, and I love the feeling of satisfaction that comes with a good running workout, but sometimes I have to motivate myself to go for a run.

This is apparently common for runners.

One way to get myself up for a long run is to go to the gym, get on the treadmill, start streaming my latest binge-watching obsession, and press "Start." However, while "The Wire" is good, it just hasn't been as compulsively addictive for me as, say, "The Shield" or "Justified." Plus, the weather outside looked divine for running: temperature in the low 60s, lots of cloud cover with isolated patches of blue sky, just a gentle breeze for circulation.

So I followed the suggestion of putting on running clothes: light blue Patagonia wool/polyester blend tech shirt, black tech shorts, and merino wool socks, SPF 50 sunblock.*

* I dislike putting on sunblock, because I've read that oxybenzone - the primary ingredient in many sunblocks - is pretty nasty stuff. I go out of my way to buy sunblocks that rely on physical barriers, as opposed to chemical ones, meaning either titanium dioxide or zinc oxide. Physical barrier sunblocks are apt to leave white streaks and they're not that easy to clean off, even in the shower; often I have to scrape a bunch of it off.

It did get me closer to the door, which got me close to my running shoes, which I put on. All that was left was headphones and firing up the Audible app on my smartphone (I'm about halfway through Peter Hamilton's Pandora's Star right now) and then my trusty companion RunKeeper.

A good audiobook makes a big difference for me. When I run races, I don't listen to anything except RunKeeper's periodic audio cues about time, distance, and average pace. When I do speed workouts, I sometimes don't listen to anything. But when I go on long runs, I like to listen to audiobooks (or music, but I prefer audiobooks). I've discovered that some books I liked in print make not so good audiobooks, and other books I liked in print make really good audiobooks. I'm not sure why, exactly. It's tempting to blame (or credit) the narrator, but I don't think that's it. I like David Baldacci's thrillers, but when I listened to The Whole Truth, I found that a lot of the writing seemed corny in a way that didn't appear that way on the printed page. Pandora's Star, on the other hand, has been crackling good, even though I've already read it before and hence shouldn't be surprised about anything.

Anyway, 11.25 miles later, I was done running. It had been a mild day, mostly cloudy with isolated patches of blue skies, and temperatures in the low 60s. Really a perfect day for running. Long run of the week in the books. Glad I got out there, even if napping is so awesome.

May 2014 recap

I closed the books on May with 161 miles, which is the fourth month in a row with a higher mileage than the previous one. (April was 150.) Of course, a big reason for that steady increase is that I hurt both of my Achilles tendons at the beginning of the year, so I was recovering and then building mileage up slowly in those early months.

Most of the increase has come from stretching my long run from 10 miles out to 12+. My pace on those runs has slowed a bit but that's okay, as a long run should be slow and easy. On a few other occasions, I've thrown in a second run in the late afternoon, usually 3 very easy miles.

One thing that helps with stretching out long runs is to have something captivating to listen to. Right now, I'm working my way through Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star, which is a gigantic (900+ pages) space opera that takes up 30+ hours on the audio version.

And it's part 1 of a two-part series.

With a subsequent trilogy set in the same universe with many of the same characters. (Though, I should note, the trilogy's books are shorter, only about 600 pages each.) So I'd say I've got plenty to get me through long slow runs.

You'd think the weather would help too. This is what things looked like on Friday:

Looks pretty gorgeous; Pacific Northwest summers are to die for. But, that sunshine also translates into warmth, which is somewhat suboptimal for running. Much better is weather like what there was for the start of this morning's run:

That's basically the same stretch of road. With sunshine, it was into the 70s; with the cloud cover, it was around 60. By the middle of this long run, though, the clouds had mostly burned off and it warmed up, but in some ways, this was the best of both worlds: cool for part of the run, and sunny and warm for the rest of the day.

Surprise: long runs sure take a l-o-n-g time!

My long runs have generally been 10 or so miles, but the past month and a half or so, I've been extending them a bit, sometimes to close to a half marathon distance. I've also been working on going deliberately slowly, as I've run myself into a plateau in the past when I've run all of my runs at a similar pace.

Not surprisingly, the combination of going for a longer distance and going slowly adds up to taking a long time to finish these long runs. Today's run was 12.14 miles and took just under two hours (1:57:12, to be exact), with a total elevation gain of 1534 feet. Now, on a treadmill without the hills in my neighborhood, I'd probably have run at more of an 8:35 pace, but even that would've taken me more than an hour and 45 minutes to finish 12 miles.

Endurance-wise I feel pretty confident that I could've gone at least another three miles, but as awesome as running is, that's really getting to be a ridiculously large part of the day.