When Things Don’t Go As You Plan

Happy Wednesday gang! I hope you all are having a good week so far. This morning I headed back to Barry’s Bootcamp for the first time in 10 days and the intense workout was exactly what my body needed to reset 100% from traveling and partying. As of now, I don’t travel again until April when I head down to Savannah for some quality time with my family! I can hardly believe it at this point since I feel like I’ve been traveling weekly for the past few months. 

This week’s marathons+moderation guest post hits home for me as many of the same feelings Jamie talks about are ones that I had this year when I finished Philadelphia but Bo chose to hold out for NYC 2013. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do and head on over to her blog to show her some support!

Hi everyone! I’m Jamie and I blog at From Couch to Ironwoman.  My husband, Mike, and I started running using the Couch-to-5K program and relatively quickly built our way up to a half marathon only six months after we started running.  Since our goal is to do Ironman Louisville in 2014, we knew we couldn’t stop at the half marathon distance.  Last December we registered for our first marathon, the Wineglass Marathon in Corning, New York, and we trained for it diligently together throughout the summer.

Mike and I have trained together since the beginning.  We completed all of our training programs together: Couch-to-5K, Bridge-to-10K, our first half marathon and our first triathlon training program.  It only made sense for us to do our first marathon training program together, sure there were days when we couldn’t run together because of conflicting schedules but for the most part we were together.

On the days when we were supposed to do our “marathon pace” (which we just guessed at since it was our first marathon), I would run slightly behind Mike.  I ended up never running my goal marathon pace, I ran it slightly faster.  We ran our long runs together and suffered through some pretty horrible training runs, and celebrated the good ones.

Our 20 miler went really well for me, but Mike struggled through it.  Even though we had both had some difficult runs (19 was NOT good for me), I never had a doubt in my mind that we weren’t both going to become marathoners.

On the morning of the race, I could tell that Mike was really nervous. I don’t think that it helped that his mom was talking about running almost the entire car ride to the marathon, so I just tried to get them to change the subject.  When we got the race, we did our thing and saw two of our friends who were also running the race. Then, we all went and found our respective spots with the rest of the runners.

Although Mike and I train together, we don’t race together. He is a lot faster than me so he lined up with the 3:55 pace group and I fell back somewhere behind the 4:10 pace group.  This was a little bit faster than what we had been planning for but we both knew we felt relatively good.

A little while after 8am, we were running our first marathon.  The first 10 miles I was averaging 9:30 pace (which was a bit faster than my goal marathon pace) and that’s when I saw Mike’s parents for the first time. His mom told me that Mike was doing well, and under his goal pace too, so that made me happy.

I hit the half marathon point at 2:07 and then I started to feel fatigued.  I kept pushing but there were times when I had to walk.  At this point, I still didn’t doubt that I would finish the marathon but I knew that I might have gone out too fast in the beginning. I saw Mike’s parents again at mile 16, and his mom said something about Mike and his paces but I couldn’t understand her.

Then, at mile 18.5, everything changed. I saw this guy that looked like Mike on the sidelines cheering me on and then I realized that it WAS Mike. I was so disoriented and confused, but I asked him what he was doing. He told me not to worry about him, but since we’re married I did just the opposite. I remember motioning and willing for him to come with me, but he wouldn’t. I even said, “well then I don’t want to do this either”.

From that point on, the race was “over” for me and really over for Mike. His legs and hips had cramped up so badly he couldn’t continue.  Looking back on it now, it was the right decision, but in the moment I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t going to achieve what we set out to do.

The rest of the race I struggled; my paces plummeted to over 15 minute miles at times. And I probably walked more than I ran. I also stopped taking in fuel, mainly because mentally I didn’t care anymore.  The only thing that got me through was our friend Mark who saw me with about 3 miles left to go, and knowing that Mike wanted me to become a marathoner.

I finished my first marathon in 5:01:23 and I cried as I crossed the finish line. Not because I was happy, but because my training partner, my husband, hadn’t done the same. I felt guilty and I had a hard time calling myself a marathoner (I still do) for a long time.

I know that 26.2 miles is a long way and that anything can happen, but I NEVER expected anything like that.  It felt like nothing was going right and I really wanted to quit, but I didn’t.

Mike is going to become a marathoner someday, and I hope that our next marathon is one that we will remember for the good times and not the bad.  We’re registered for two marathons this year: the Cleveland Marathon and the Mount Desert Island Marathon. In fact, we registered for the Cleveland Marathon the same night after my first marathon finish. We needed redemption and we will get it.