Last year I had my first-ever marathon DNF. I know! Shocking! After 11 years of running marathons without a single DNF. (In case you found this blog from outside the running universe: DNF at stands for “Did Not Finish”). It was my marathon attempt number 71, in April 2022. Yes, it took me nine months to write about it, mainly because I not only decided to stop running but also to stop trying to figure out how to get back into it, to allow myself to admit: I had hit a roadblock, had run out of ideas, and that’s how life is sometimes. Tough luck. But before I tell you how it comes that in fact I am on Madeira and going to run the Funchal marathon tomorrow (the same one that I did three years ago), I want to take the time to put together lessons that I might have learned (or got reminded of), and that might have contributed to my potential marathon reboot.
Lesson 1 – Overtraining does exist
Over my 11 years of running 70 marathon races, including a few ultras (and more of those distances during training), the idea that I could enter an overtraining cycle had never occurred to me. I didn’t even know which symptoms to look out for. I think now, that this is what it was. Instead of running by feel, I slowly but surely shifted more and more to relying on pace, distance and, lately, heart rate data. But I wasn’t either here nor there, and got the worst out of both worlds: the feeling that I should be able to do this, but can’t. I was considering pace and distance data, but not the overall effort. Yet, effort, and a steady increase of such, is key. If your effort, measured by heart rate, is too often, too much increased (over e.g. weekly average) you overtrain. The symptoms? More training leads to worse performance. You feel too often tired, joyless and running becomes a chore. Which is the story of my last two and a half years of running.
Lesson 2 – Garmin can get it wrong
I got this Garmin watch with built-in heart rate monitor (HRM), which strangely coincided with the last running crisis. The first lesson already touches on the data aspect here. But there is more: Occasionally, my little Garmin robot warned me of an abnormal high heart rate. Or I had an easy run and the heart rate sky rocketed. Sometimes it matched how I felt, sometimes it didn’t. Garmin’s training program classified absolved runs as “performance decreasing” even though they felt great. All this I found increasingly irritating. At some point, when the “abnormal” heart rate alarm went off (110 bpm, when resting an hour after activity), I had the genius idea and took the watch off, put my fingers at the opposite wrist and counted the beats myself. Once. Twice… My pulse was normal at under 80 bpm. I put the watch back on and voilà, the watch confirmed my manual assessment. Duh! An at times inaccurate operating Garmin HRM seemed to be the best explanation for inexplainable fluctuating Garmin performance feedback. Which was confirmed when I googled: depending on individuals, the device can have inaccuracies around 20%. I still wear the Garmin, but now take the results with a pinch of salt. … or two pinches… or three.
Lesson 3 – The power of slow change
Ideally you want to make the power of slow change make work for you. It is the power of building habits, that support your goals and values. It has a caveat though. It also works when you are not aware of it, and in that case the outcomes can be (and I believe most often are) negative. I had my running peak in 2016/2017, a time of fairly consistent running, pain-free, enjoyable, good stretching habits and fairly regular days, weeks and months. Then I made a career change that made everything less regular and my running less consistent. First, I still ran very long distances enjoyably and could pull off respectable marathon performances with limited training and I did not even realise the difference. The change was too slow to notice. Then a global pandemic did its thing and changed our all lifestyle habits overnight. While I was still doing my daily runs (or 5 a week), I barely walked, hiked, cycled or swam, all pre-pandemic activities that were simply a part of my lifestyle, and not a fitness regime. As a result, I did not notice their decline either. After my running came to a standstill with the marathon DNF experience last April, I notice how much weight I had put on. My work suits got too tight, and I needed a new one and did not want to buy bigger sizes just because I could not manage my weight. I joined a weight loss programme. Part of it was exercise in form of steps per day. I was shocked how little I walked. So I slowly ramped that up. Apparently walking is not much different to running, when it comes to supporting weight loss and overall well-being. 10,000 steps daily was my goal. At some point it became a challenge to fit that time into my day. Which led me to attempt little jogs again. just to cover the missing 2,000 steps faster. 2 km slow jogging, that’s doable. This way I slow-jogged my way back into running. Only goal: building consistency, facilitating that slow change, doing a little bit more running every week. I also commute cycled as much as I can, walk during lunch breaks, try to stay and do more on my feet when not sitting at a desk in front of a PC. Did you now that you can read a book, watch TV, snack, be on you phone while you stand? Now, I am back to my previous weight (even slightly under), doing weekend long runs again and this weekend, I am back to Funchal, Madeira, for my first marathon attempt in 9 months. Happy days!
This whole Funchal idea was born in October when running buddy Michael sent one of his subtle signals: “I know you are not running at the moment, but just in case you are in January, I’ll do the Funchal marathon there, why don’t you join me”. I have fond memories of that event, when I did it first in 2020. My running over the last 7 months has been minimalistic: barefoot, running sandals or Vibram FiveFingers. Tomorrow I will not only trying that distance again, but will do it in running sandals. If I succeed, I’ll call it “Madeira Marathon Reboot”. Let’s see!
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