I think my marathon adventure may be over. Since last Sunday we’re now in stage 4 lockdown. One of the additional restrictions that has come into place is that only a maximum of 1 hour outdoor exercise is allowed, and it has to be within 5k of your home. I can do the shorter run in that time, but to do the weekly long run I need to be able to run continuously for 2 to 3 hours. Out of the four training runs I’ve got scheduled each week, that long run is by far the most important. Without doing that one, I have zero chance of being able to complete a marathon.
Initially I basically gave up on the whole idea. This stage 4 lockdown is going to be in place for six week. If things go well, it will be lifted two weeks before the marathon race is scheduled. Clearly nowhere near enough time to prepare and work myself up to double the longest distance I’ve ever done. But missing out is also incredibly frustrating after having trained for 7 months so far. I don’t think I’ll be able to muster up that willpower and time and effort required to do that again next year.
So at this stage, I’m still not really sure what to do. I have basically three options:
- I give up on the idea of running a marathon and resign myself that at least during 7 months of training I’ve managed to run further than I ever thought possible.
- I put things on hold for this year and start again next year.
- I try to keep my current fitness levels as much as possible and see if maybe I can pick up again once the lockdown ends and look towards running a different race later in the year.
Just two days ago I got an email from the race organisers and they’ve floated the possibility that they’ll change the date to later in the year. So with that in mind I’ve decided to go with option 3. I’ll try to run as much as I can fit into a daily hour (with one or two rest days each week) to try and not lose too much of my fitness levels and then see if I have enough time for either a changed race date or I’ll simply try and find another race I can do later in the year.
This won’t be easy. It’s taken A LOT to keep up the enthusiasm and willpower over 7 months so far. Having to do that for even longer than initially planned will be a big challenge. Additionally I can also no longer rely on a set program. So far, whenever it was really hard to talk myself into going for a run, one thing that kept me going was that I followed a strictly laid out program. That incentive is going to be missing for the next six weeks.
All that downbeat state of affairs has overshadowed the real positive news I had earlier. Two weeks ago I ran my first ever half-marathon. A full 21k. Even better, I ran it entirely non-stop. And better still, I ran it in a quite acceptable time of 2 hours and 1 minute. I had a look at the results of last year’s Melbourne marathon and that time would have placed me somewhere in the middle of the field. I had started this whole experiment just wanting to make sure I can finish a marathon and with the expectation that I would be very close to being last. So that was a huge ego boost. I also did this just running on my own, without the help of supply stands, pace makers and the excitement of running a race in a large group. I would like to think that if I had run in an actual race, I might have shaved another 10 minutes off that.
That said, doing those 21k was the first time when I felt really well and truly physically exhausted afterwards. Previously when I ran long distances, I did get tired too, but what I felt mostly was just being sore. I had pain in my feet and legs but it always felt that from a fitness perspective, I could probably have continued on for longer. After those 21k that was definitely not the case. For a day or two afterwards I still felt so physically exhausted that I started questioning whether I could keep this up and go even further.
Thankfully Monday was a scheduled rest day. But on Tuesday I had a scheduled 5k run on. These 5k Tuesday runs had become so easy that quite often I try to go really fast and see if I can do a personal best time. But this time I still hadn’t recovered and this run was hard! That just had me feeling even more that I had just reached my limit. Wednesday was another rest day and I decided to not even do a bike ride, which I usually did on rest days. I wanted to recover as fully as possible.
Then, on Thursday, the next run was scheduled, 6.5k. Surprisingly this felt like one of the easiest runs I’d ever done. I was so full of energy and I was going so fast, it completely restored my enthusiasm. On Friday 11.5k was on the schedule and the same thing happened there, I was full of energy and finished it easily. The long run for that week was only 16k, which I found a bit harder, but still completed easily. So I was full of enthusiasm for this week where I was due for a new longest distance of a long run of 24k and 47k total for the week. That’s when stage 4 lockdown got announced.
Initially I had pretty much given up at that point. When the next scheduled run was due on Tuesday, I gave it a miss. The first scheduled training run that I’ve missed since I started training in February. I did briefly attempt to do it, but then the weather turned and it was raining heavily with arctic winds and I just couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm.
By Wednesday I felt bad enough about missing that run that I ended up doing it then. I also hatched a plan where I try to split up the long run over two or more days. So that means fewer rest days but I may be able to keep each run below the maximum one hour a day. This means I’ve been running every day for the last four days now and I can really feel it in my legs. Not having a rest day is definitely not a good idea either.
I’ll see how I go over the next few weeks.
Dancing Brick 