4:39.

i ran today, and i finished. i am overjoyed. i completed a 26 mile 385 yard race.

i had hoped to finish in 4:22, but i was 16 minutes shy of that. apparently john and i ran an average of 8:12 miles from mile 14 to mile 18. we had absolutely no intention of running that fast, and it haunted us both. i had to walk a little on belle isle. and then i had to walk a little more around 21 miles. and i pretty much walked almost all the way from mile 22 to mile 25. but i finished the last 1.2 miles on the run. everything hurt. it started with my quadriceps, and then it moved to my feet. my hamstrings started to tighten up, and i even got a bit of a stomach ache.

around mile 25.5, my friend, dave, from church showed up on the sidelines to cheer me on. he also greeted me in the finish area to congratulate me. he finished in an amazing 3:48. his excitement for me at the end really helped me along to the finish.

and right after i finished, my wife called my name. i was so happy to see her and so overwhelmed with the emotion of actually finishing a marathon that i ran straight to her and gave her a kiss through the fence. i think that made my day.

i feel bad, though, because john really found some pain around mile 18. he had been trailing me but within eyesight for about a mile, but i forgot to keep track of him for another mile, and he fell off from me. i didn't see him again, and i was afraid he had passed me without me noticing. but he was shortly behind me, finishing in 4:46.

we were both in pain. it took me a long time to make it to the car. we would walk and stop. i had to sit down a lot. john told me that he would walk about 20 steps and then sit down. at this point in the day, after largely laying around on the couch, i am feeling much better. i'm still quite sore, but it doesn't hurt to move, stand up, sit down, and i'm not getting any spontaneous cramps.

i'd also like to congratulate amy chu, another co-worker, who finished in 4:29, and jamie shinko, another church friend who ran the third leg in the relay. i assume she finished and feels amazing about it. she usually doesn't run much farther than 2 miles, so to run a 6 mile leg was quite an accomplishment for her. it reminds me of the first (and only) competetive 10k i ran. previous to that, i was working really hard to run 3 miles consistently.

i also ran into a former colleague, erez. he called out, "is it you?" to me as he was running past. i think i have lost a fair amount of weight since the last time i saw him. this was around the 4:10 mark. he said he was having knee pain and should have finished 90 minutes earlier. but i was glad he didn't so that we had a chance to see each other again.

so congratulations to john, dave, amy, jamie, and erez. and for whomever is reading this, thanks for following my path to this race.

robb.

GREAT weather (how embarrassing).

it looks like the weather is going to be phenomenal on sunday. the overnight low is 45, and the high is 62, meaning the bulk of the race will be in the mid 50s. partly cloudy, and chance of rain is 20%. this is perfect running weather.

*****

why 6053? because it's my bib number. or so i thought.

i guess i had the dumb when i created this blog, because i checked my registration email, and it clearly says my bib number is 6350. how i got 6053 is kind of beyond me. but i'm glad i didn't get custom sunglasses with 6053 etched in the lenses.

*****

i finished my last training run today at lunch. we did a very easy 2 miles. now i wait (and eat) until sunday morning.

you can follow my progress with either my last name (zimmerman) or my bib number (6350) at http://www.detroitmarathon.com.

robb.

robb.

6 days (carb up).

i woke up this morning and had a big bowl of brown rice with soy sauce and green chili chutney. (for the uninitiated, green chili chutney is a very spicy green chili paste used in indian cooking. it rivals sriracha vietnamese hot sauce for its flavor and hotness.) i will be eating a metric shit ton of rice and pasta this week, in a time-honored practice called "carbo-loading."

essentially, i am trying to cram as much carbohydrate energy into my body as possible so that i can be stored in my muscles as glycogen. the more glycogen, the farther i can run without pain. it's probably time for me to re-read the chapter in "martahon" about the week before the race. that is where i'm drawing this wisdom from.


i did another fast, compact 15 miles on the bike yesterday. every good week of training was preceed by a sunday bike ride.

the weather this weekend is going to be absolutely amazing. saturday is sunny with a high of 55. we're going to see msu v. osu in east lansing. it will be cool and comfortable pre-game, and get a comfortably fall chilly as the game wears on. sunday is partly cloudy and high of 57 with a 10% chance of rain. the temperature at race start will be in the low 40s. this is about perfect running weather. i can wear shorts and a longsleeve shirt for the whole race without much issues at either end.

and i will keep telling myself, "i can do it, i can do it, i can do it."

robb.

no rest for the weary.

i went running with my friend, dave, from church. the last time i ran with dave was in july, when i first ran 10 miles. it was a difficult run for me, and we finished in 1:45, which is a 10:18 pace. we only ran 8 miles today, but his watch charted us at a 9:07 pace, with our fastest mile at 8:40 (mile 7) and the slowest at 9:28. our last two miles were 8:40 and 8:45 pace.

it's funny because we agreed beforehand to go slow. i thought we were going closer to 10:00, but it felt fine, so we stuck with it. i don't think i'll go that fast for the race. but it seems increasingly realistic to beat a 10:00 pace. dave is hoping to beat 4 hours, which is close to 9:00 per mile. (9:00 works out to 3:55:48.) if i run at my 20 mile pace, i'll finish in 4:17:28.

my left arch is a little sore, but i'm going to ice it for the rest of the morning. (and by that, i mean i'll alternate 20 minutes ice, 20 minutes without. i will not be all ice, all the time for another hour.) i took last thursday off to give it rest. now that i know it's a real issue, hopefully all i need to do is ice it, and it won't be a problem for the race.

8 more days. i'm starting to get restless. i can really feel the difference in the decreased mileage the last two weeks. i have a lot of extra energy, and i'm getting very motivated for the race. i'm going to be a little ball of energy next week. we're going to msu v. osu in east lansing, so in addition to the game excitement, i'll be completely coiled for the race, too.

8 more days. 8 more miles.

robb.

running in the cold.

i think the jetstream has a calendar. in the week preceding october 1, the high temperatures were 79, 75, 68, 72, 63, 62. since october 1, the high temperatures have been 54, 56, 53, 55, 59, 58. considering that my 12 mile run was up north on saturday morning (low of 32), i had to switch very quickly from running in a t-shirt and sweating on 30th to running in long sleeves and still being very chilled.

i did a fair amount of running last winter in sub-freezing, snow on the ground and ice on the sidewalks conditions. i have a cross-country skiing jacket that is great for running in these conditions. but i don't remember having so many issues with keeping comfortable in these conditions in the past.

my sister-in-law got me a wonderful longsleeve running shirt last christmas, and as soon as i signed up, i planned to use it for the race. now i'm not sure it will be warm enough. i have also tried double-layering my warm weather compression longsleeve with a shortsleeve warm weather shirt.

i will be wearing that today (currently 60) and see how it goes. if i feel ok today (and saturday, therefore, was colder than i realized or would expect the race to be), i should be fine.

robb.

fighting the sense of accomplishment.

saturday was sobering.

all last week, after i had my massage, running wasn't as easy as i might have hoped. i don't know if it was because i didn't spend nearly the time on the bike on sunday as i should have, or if the massage helped alleviate even more pain after my peak training week. (perhaps the massage made it worse; i don't know.) but it wasn't easy like i had expected the decreasing distance to be.

to make matters worse, i never committed to saturday's 12 mile run like i should have. in many respects, it was very much like my 14 mile run -- the course was a straight line from start to finish and it was a lot harder than i would have thought. i felt like i had been running forever, and i looked at my watch to see 46 minutes had passes.

so i ended up walking some stretches between 10 miles and the end. i still finished under a 10:00 pace, but i had run the first 7 miles at a 9:00 pace, so i slowed considerably.

to fix this, i got out on the bike for a strong 49:00 minutes, covering about 13 miles. it is not the longest i've gone, but i should be tapering back my cross training at this point, too, and i put a lot of energy into it. in the past, my best weeks have come after a good bike ride on sunday. so expect this week to feel a lot better.

and it should, not only because my mileage decreases drastically this week (21 miles total), but also because i am under two weeks to the race. i think it was a good reality check to have a bad run on saturday, because my biggest concern was feeling too much like i had already accomplished my goal after running 20 miles. and the fear of another run like saturday's will hopefully keep me focused in the last two weeks before the race.

a short 4 miles tomorrow. i will try to go at lunch, as sarah and i may be laying grass seed and mulch tomorrow evening before the sun goes down.

robb.

i am officially on the backslope towards the race!

the internet connection at my in-laws was not working for some reason unbeknownst to me, so i was unable to write about saturday's run over the weekend.

somewhere about 16 miles, i couldn't help but think about what i was going to post. in my head, it sounded something like this: "i killed it. i stepped up and slayed it." about the 18th mile, though, i encountered a difficult hill that was far more traumatic than i thought. and then when i took me longer to reach 36th street than i had expected, i kind of broke down a little and walked for 45 seconds.

but in the end, i finished in 3 hours and 17 minutes (9:51), which was three minutes faster than i had reasonably hoped to finish. if i had run at my 18 mile pace (10:13), i would have finished over 7 minutes later than i did. this is progress, and it is far better than i had expected. and i had no pain like i did for the last couple miles of my 18 mile run.

shortly after i finished, i had a thought that i never wanted to run that far ever again, but after encouragement from my wife, mom, and in-laws, i am confident i'll feel as fine as anyone could after running 26 miles 385 yards. my mom, especially, helped. she told me that she had absolutely no doubt in her mind that i would finish the race. barring the bizarre, she's probably right.

*****

john and i set out to run 5 miles and stop at subway for lunch today. it ended up being almost 6 miles, and we finished around 53 minutes (i forgot to stop my timer), which is about 9:20 per mile. i am supposed to run 8 tomorrow evening, and then only 4 on thursday. my mileage is decreasing! i'm starting to conserve energy for the race.

*****

sarah has asked me to figure out how far i've run through the course of training thus far. she has (and i have, really) been struggling to grasp the sheer distances i've run. even though i was awake for, and can remember the entirety of, my 20 mile run on saturday, it's still difficult to really appreciate how far that is to run all at once. and combined with three mid-week runs of 5, 10, and 5 miles, i ran 40 miles last week. that is most of the way from my parents' house to my former dorm at michigan state, and hour's drive away.

so i just did a quick calculation including today, and i have run 368 miles since commencing my training on june 17. by the time i have run the race, i will have run 449.2 miles. that is the equivalent of running from my house to marquette, MI in the upper penninsula. it would put me about 60 miles shy of ottawa, ON, the national capital of canada. i'd be about 20 miles past madison, WI or 30 miles past of elizabethtown, KY, an easy mid-way point for my parents' drive down to visit us in meridian, MS.

it's hard to imagine.

robb.