Spring 2017 recap

Well I suppose it’s about time I wrote up a spring 2017 recap. I have been putting this off for a month and the excuse I’ve been telling myself is that I need some time to get away from it and get some perspective, but in truth it’s because I just don’t like recalling experiences like this. The essence of why this is going to be hard to write is not only because the season went poorly, but because I can’t really understand why it went poorly. That means that it will be hard to correct for the next time around. I’ll pick up on where I left off after NYC half.

Cherry Blossom 10 miler – 4/2/2017

Looking at the NYC half, I saw a couple highlights. I thought I had competed well and raced my nuts off, which was very good considering I had not raced in a long time and was a little worried I would have forgotten how to execute correctly. My only complaint was that I just didn’t run as fast as I wanted. I figured that maybe I just wasn’t quite as fit as my workouts had indicated and that with this race under my belt as a rust-buster and really hard effort it would open the door to running better at future races. With that in mind, I went to DC with the hope, as always, of running as close to 50 flat as possible. It ended up being a perfect weather day with no excuses but I managed to only run about the same pace that I ran at NYC. 5:08 pace for 10 miles frankly should have been a hard workout, not an all-out race, but unfortunately it was the best I could do and I was pretty disappointed.

Pittsburgh half marathon – 5/7/17

I had a couple low key races in the month between Cherry Blossom and Pittsburgh in which I was able to win a little bit of cash. These races were encouraging as I ran about the same times that I ran at the same races in years past, when I was in pretty good shape. For instance, I ran the pikes peek 10k in about 5 seconds slower than last year, when I ran a PR at Broad Street the next week. Again, with higher expectations I went to Pittsburgh with the hope of competing well and in the running for a little bit of money. The race did not go well at all and I had a pretty miserable time in the race. From the gun I was alone, passing 1 guy and getting passed by 1 guy over the entire course. The course was fair, a little more difficult than the very fast courses I’ve run on in the past, but definitely not unreasonable. I ran a shit time, something over 1:09 I think, I can’t even be bothered to look it up. The fitness just wasn’t there and had never been there for the entire cycle but I tried to push through it and keep working towards a performance I could be proud of. Unfortunately that never came.

Why did this season turn out badly?

This is the part of this write up I was dreading the most. I just don’t have a great answer here and exploring the reasons for my shortcomings is never fun. I’ll start with a zoomed out view of the season starting from where I was before. Last summer and fall I had big plans to go to Chicago and run fast. I got sick a few times in the summer and fall, probably due to overtraining and having a weird physical response to forcing myself too hard in high heat, and bailed on that race plan because I didn’t feel as though I was getting in good or consistent training when it mattered. I took about a month completely off, something that I had never done, and built up very slowly with an eye towards a spring season. I knew it would be far enough away to rebuild my fitness so I took it slow because I was afraid of having those fevers flare up again.  I made a logical, progressive plan towards building fitness for races between 50-70 minutes in length. I was getting in good mileage with 2-3 workouts per week. I was doing a dedicated hill workout for probably 2 months, getting in good work without timing anything just to get solid conditioning in. After a couple months, I ran some low key distance races (club challenge, Tim Kennard) in late winter/early spring. Coupled with the interval workouts, tempos and mileage, I was pretty confident. But somehow it just never came together.

Why didn’t this season come together despite months of solid work? Well, I really don’t know for sure. I think a big part was that I broke the chain of compounding cycles with the time off and bad training last fall. I also think I’ve lost a lot of the under distance fitness I had when I ran well in late 2015 off of easier training than this year. Back then I was coming off a great track season and I think I carried that speed into the longer road races. This spring I had zero background of that nature under my belt so I just had no speed endurance or comfort at that level of racing, even with all of the pace work I had done in training. Thinking about training at this point is really just speculation; I still cannot find a true weakpoint that I didn’t try to address. That’s what made the season, and even looking back on it now, so frustrating. This is a first for me – I’ve never had such a helpless feeling in which I just can’t diagnose what went wrong and why my racing didn’t meet my expectations. Sure, I’ve had bad races before or races that weren’t home runs, but in hindsight it was always pretty clear why they turned out that way or why my expectations were unrealistic. This time I can’t figure it out and it’s maddening.

This summer is going to be an extended layoff. I hate training hard during the East Coast summer with 70+ degree dewpoints and with a 2 week honeymoon in August I won’t try to force training through that. Once that’s done and the weather breaks a little I’ll think about race scheduling but until then I’ll take it easy and more laid back. Still might train a little but with no serious aspirations.