Dignity Not Failure

They came. The dreaded letters. DNF. Lochaber was a bust and I'm still to complete a marathon.

So what went wrong?

Well, lots to be honest, and over a long period of time.

1) I hadn't done enough training. I should've been putting in big miles since Christmas, but between my exam and the run of colds in February, my training didn't really start till March, and 6 weeks clearly wasn't enough time to prep for a marathon for me.

2) I didn't treat the race with enough respect. I basically saw it as a glorified training run & not a race, so didn't put in race effort into training. It ties up with point 1) as I didn't get my finger out till too close to the event.

3) race week was disturbed. Between stupidly sitting up till the early hours of the morning Monday and Tuesday, as well as trying to find a leaking pipe Wednesday and dealing with the stress of a close door that's in danger of being ripped off the wall by local idiots & the mess they make in the close, I didn't sleep enough or rest completely.

4) my nutrition was poor on the lead up. Following on, being so tired I got lazy & had too many takeaways.

5) I did something that led to giving me blisters. It may be the socks were messed up & too old. It may be something else. All I know is I've ran 10 in those shoes without a blister forming.

6) I didn't do enough in taper week. I swam on the Tuesday & had planned to do a couple of short runs to loosen everything off, but everything in pt 3. put me off. This led to everything tightening up, so when I went to do a sun salutation in the morning before the race, I could only bend 90deg.

I may also have started out too slow on the day, such that I wasn't stretching my ITB on the run.

So that's a brutally honest look at what went wrong. Now, what went right?

The big thing for me is that when my ITB started flaring up, I tried to run through it, and by altering my stride made an extra 5 miles before walking became the only option. Through that 5 miles I argued over what would be worse for me, the physical damage for making it to the end or the psychological damage for failing. I went for the former. After the turn, I tried running on the verge to take away the impact on the knees, but that aggravated the blister - it felt like it had grown from the arch down to the middle of the sole of my foot, but in fact it had just burst I found out after checking, so cracked on, determined to walk until I found my mate's car, making it a further 6 miles. By the time they made it to me cos they were starting to get worried, I knew that to finish would result in me being off training for weeks, which big picture wise was not an option. Driving in the last 7 miles & seeing the broken bodies just reinforced that I was right.

So what do I do now?

Rest, get a massage & get back out training. Get big miles in on the run. Work hard.
But what about my feet and my ITB. New socks may be a game changer, but I'm starting to wonder if I should've been training long distance in my Inov-8s. Yeah, my calves get a beating, but had I started 3 months back, I could've got myself up to the distance, or at least close by, because in them, I've had less ITB problems. So I find myself in a quandary.

Its something to think about over the next week. If I'm running this weekend coming, I'll be doing it for fun, to remind me what running can be, and it'll be in my Mudclaws off road in the mud!

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