Run your own race, or else!

I ran the San Antonio Marathon yesterday.

Okay, I ran and walked it. But that was my plan all along.

What was not my plan was to get a positive split.

What was not my plan was to walk what felt like much of the distance from mile 19 to the finish line.

And what was not my plan was to run the first 15 kilometers.

You see, I had trained most of the season to run and walk this marathon using the 1:1 method. That is where I would have run for a minute and walked for a minute, over and over again.

During the training season, after I switched from the 5:1 method to the 1:1 method, I was able to cut my minutes-per-mile pace down by more than one minute.

But when it came to the San Antonio Marathon yesterday, I ended up getting caught up with the crowd.

The street was very full at the starting line, and I decided that I should simply run with the crowd.

My goal was to finish in five hours. So I knew — and you can see this by looking in my pace-tables report — that my average pace should be 11:27/mile.

So what I chose to do was to constantly monitor my GPS wrist-unit and run as best as I could at an 11:27 pace.

My chip time at 5K (3.1 miles) was 35:14, so that was 11:22/mile.

I persisted with that 11:27/mile non-stop-running goal until I got to the 15K sign at 1:48:21 for an average pace of 11:39/mile, and then I decided that I had had enough.

The reason? I had not trained to just run constantly. I had prepared to run and walk this marathon using the 1:1 method after I had read an inspiring blog post by Jeff Galloway, in which he talked about how he and his wife ran a marathon in this way earlier this year and had completed it in five hours.

But, again, I got caught up by the crowd and effectively did not run my own race.

My reasoning at the time was related to my running pace and my walking pace with the 1:1 method.

If I had tried to walk every other minute in the crowd in those first nine-plus miles, then my reasoning, as faulty as I can now see that it was, was that I would have been constantly in the way of the runners around me, given that I would have been walking slower than they were running.

And, if had tried to run in the crowd during those 15 kilometers, then my (faulty) reasoning told me that I would have been constantly dodging around the other runners, given that I would have been running faster than they were.

Again, I let the crowd dictate my approach and pace so that I ran constantly with the crowd while trying to maintain an average pace of 11:27/mile.

As a result, I really tested my body’s endurance beyond what I had tested it all season.

And it showed with a positive split.

At the half-way mark (13.1 miles), I had a total time of 2:34:55. Well, at that point I had already run 15K or 9.3 miles at a pace of 11:39/mile, which was a little over my target for a five-hour marathon. But between the 15K mark and 13.1-miles mark, I had switched to running and walking with the 1:1 method, where neither the running nor the walking was as fast as I had wanted.

What I was shooting for was a 9:40/mile running pace and a 14:00/mile walking pace, which I was able to do during training with the 1:1 method.

What I ended up with, though, was a running pace into the 10:00’s and a walking pace that was into the 14:30’s or so.

By the time that I got past the 13.1-miles sign, things started falling apart in terms of my ability to sustain that, and I was walking into more of my running segments. And eventually I could not sustain my 9:40 running pace and could not even sustain my 14:00 walking pace.

I turned off my 1:1 interval timer by about mile 19 or 20 because I realized that almost all that I was doing was only walking — so the every-minute beeping from the timer had become a nuisance instead of the inspiration that it had been during training.

And those walks were mostly in the 15:00 or 16:00 pace, which would put me nowhere near (Laugh!) my five-hour target. The 2:34:55  for the first half was not going to make up for the trouble that I was having in the second half.

For those inclined toward the arithmetic: Given that the 1:1 method with a 9:40 run and a 14:00 walk leads to approximately a five-hour marathon, that works out to 150 minutes @ 9:40/mile and 150 minutes @ 14:00/mile, which works out to ~15.5 miles of running and ~10.7 miles of walking. But I ran non-stop during the first 9.3 miles, which means that I “used up” 9.3 of my 15.5 total miles of running much too soon.

For example, I should have run only 7.75 total miles by the time that I got to the 13.1-miles mark, if I had followed my 5-hour/1:1 plan throughout the marathon. But I estimate that I had already run a combination of 9.3 miles non-stop plus 2.25 miles with the 1:1 method for a total of 11.55 miles run when I reached the 13.1-miles sign. In other words, I ran 3.8 miles (11.55 minus 7.75) more than I should have run in the first half of the marathon. And none of this set me up for success in the second half.

I did find some energy to walk faster when I heard a good band, which could put me in the 13:00’s.

And I did find some energy to run when I found a good down-hill slope or a particularly good band — that kind of thing — and near the finish line, between around 25.8 miles and 26.2 miles.

But, other than that, I was a walker. And I was very much an in-pain walker / sore walker / achy walker.

And, I believe that all of that came about because I let the crowd get the better of me, so I did not run my own race. That’s my story.

What’s your story? Has something like this ever happened to you? What lesson or lessons did you learn? Please leave a comment here. Thanks!