Dan Corbera of Urbanathlon fame, Joel Desjardins and myself have all set a goal to tackle the Hyannis full marathon come February 28th, 2010. I am following the Runner’s World sixteen week training program and I am off to an ignominious start. I visited the track on Tuesday for my first day of training. The training schedule called upon me to run two miles at race pace, 1 mile at 105% of race pace and finish up with two miles at race pace again. It had been three weeks since my last run which was the Urbanathlon, but I felt good and hoped things would go well.
The weather was great, I was running on the track and I felt pretty good. After a mile warmup I took to the track and only made it a mile and a half at a 7:20 mile. For those wondering why I chose 7:20 the Boston Marathon requires a qualification time of a 7:22 mile or a 3:10:00 overall. I would love to be able to qualify and run in the Boston, but my first day of training was a rude wake up call to say the least. A 7:20 is fast. Real fast. I can hold an 8 over five miles pretty easily, but that extra forty seconds takes a big toll. The longer I ran the more I could feel my breath getting away from me. I tried to fight through it, but I could feel my lungs burning and stomach churning. As I pulled up I felt a little light headed and had to take a long break. Not good.
No matter though. It had been a few weeks and I would start running every day and get back into the swing of things, right? Not so much. On Wednesday I was exhausted. I wanted to go for a run, but by the time I got home I knew it was coming… I was getting sick. And boy did I get sick. I still feel terrible three days later. I’ve been through two boxes of tissues, a bottle of Tylenol, tried Nyquil, Sudafed and sleeping pills. I’ve had a headache for four days straight and nothing is making me feel better. At least today I can finally breathe without gasping for air. Gretchen has been a dear and is taking care of me of course, being sick by yourself is the only thing worse than being sick.
I suppose it is better that I got slammed now rather than in the middle of training, but it is heartbreaking to know you are starting behind where you want to be and then get sidelined for a week right after. I already know that a run tomorrow is out of the question. I feel completely drained. On Tuesday I will pick up my training where I left off and work doubly hard to make sure I can get where I want to be. I will try and keep a log of how things are going and I can only hope that race day come February goes as awesome as my last two races have gone.
