Post Marathon analysis

You can see from the first graph the difference between the two Marathons I have run. What is striking is that the line representing the Amsterdam Matathon from 2008 is very similar to the line representing San Sebastian, just shifted left by about 15 kilometers! It looks like I was using my anaerobic engine from the start of Amsterdam - probably a combination of starting too hard and not having done enough aerobic training prior to the race.

In the second graph, you can see the very clear trend that I was running faster and faster throughout the whole race - I wasn't even aware of this until after the 35km mark, when I decided that I felt strong enough to push on to the finish line. I think I could have started off a bit faster but, who's to say that I wouldn't have blown up. Something to try next time now that I finally have a Marathon I can be proud of under my belt... Certainly I was trying too hard to be below Jonathan's prescribed heart rate: as there is always some "noise" due to slight inclines, wind, etc., perhaps I should have allowed it to go a bit over the limit knowing that there would be other stretches that would compensate.

What is really interesting (well, to me, anyway) is the third graph. I had thought that the calorie counter in my watch would have a fairly simple algorithm that would correlate calorie expenditure to heart rate but I was surprised to see that I was burning as many calories per kilometer at the beginning of the race as at the end. This is partly due to the fact that, at the beginning, my heart rate was low but I was taking more time to cover the ground; at the end, my heart rate was much higher but I was running faster. Even correcting for this, it turns out that my watch has something a lot more sophisticated under the hood. The third graph compares the number of calories I was supposedly burning per kilometer with the number of heart beats I was above or below Jonathan's prescription. There definitely appears to be a relation between the two - maybe something for Jonathan to look into? It would certainly be a lot easier to maintain my calorie burn at 63kcal/km, say, rather than having to scribble the particular heart rates for each kilometer on the back of my hand / watch.

As for how I feel today, I really don't feel bad at all. My weight is back to normal (although I did break the 8% body fat barrier!). My legs are a bit stiff, mainly in the muscles that I didn't concentrate on in my weight training, interestingly enough, like the groin, glutes and hip flexors. Now I have a little holiday from serious training, to allow my body to rebuild itself after its little ordeal. Its definitely a good moment to get back in the swimming pool and see if I can get some halfway decent technique...

In Jonathan We Trust

This was the mantra I repeated over and over to myself (until, with only a few kilometers left, someone shouted "Con dos cojones!" and this promptly replaced the old mantra). Jonathan is my coach and, this time, I stuck to his advice.

Ali G runs da Marathon

I had a brilliant race. I can't tell you much about San Sebastian, the Marathon course or its environs, as I spent most of the time looking at the hairs on the neck of the guy in front of me but they say it is a very picturesque route (very flat but a bit windy). More importantly, I managed to achieve all my objectives: no cramps, no "wall" and a time of 3:07:18 (that's an improvement of just under 53 minutes, by the way)! Oh, and I actually enjoyed it. What's crazy is that I ran the first half marathon in 1:37 which means that the second half marathon took only 1:30! The only strange thing is that, as the race wore on, I seemed to be able to run faster and faster at the same heart rate. I can only guess that the excitement of the race or the caffeine loaded gel I took after breakfast (yes, I couldn't resist taking this risk in spite of what happened in Lisbon) were to blame for an accelerated heart rate at the beginning.

As it was so windy, I went from peloton to peloton, having to almost sprint in between, as facing the wind alone was very costly. I was having to constantly decide between running along at too low an intensity in a group, or braving it and suddenly finding myself well over the limit. Sometimes these decisions were taken based on the strange running style of the person in front of me or simply because I didn't like his haircut. It was always a relief to see that, once back in the fold of my new group, my pulse would settle back down to a maintainable rate.

It felt very easy until about the 35km mark when I felt my legs getting a bit tired. I felt a lot more scared than tired because I was literally running into unexplored territory: I had never run more than 27km nonstop before. But, as I had run the first half conservatively, I was able to run the end making full use of my anaerobic engine: the last few kilometers I was clocking at over 15kph! It was such a great feeling to be overtaking everybody and hearing people in the crowd saying things like "Wow, look at him go!" as well as some other stuff in Basque which sounded equally encouraging, even though I had no idea what they were saying. I was running for a Basque club that some of my friends run for so people were probably egging me on all along the course but, it was impossible for me to know as I can barely pronounce the name let alone actually remember it.

A nice surprise was to "bump into" some friends of mine from my triathlon club along the way. One of them is very fast so overtaking him made me feel invincible and probably spurred me on to shave half a minute off my time. (It was only afterwards that he explained he was just doing a "training run" and had only run the second half...)

Coming into the stadium and feeling the crowd, I mustered a massive sprint for the finish line and my trademark roar as I crossed it. What an adrenalin rush! I felt overwhelmed and I started to "craugh" (cry and laugh at the same time) uncontrollably. You had to have been there really to understand...

So all this bodes well for the Ironman - I need fear the bastard Marathon no longer. It seems that the carbo loading, the 9 high5 isogels and the 9 salt stick pills I took during the race, the calorie counting, the controlled low intensity workouts and the Pose running technique all paid off in the end. Now I have the "problem" of being tantalizingly close to the magic 3 hour boundary. Hmmmmm....

Here's why its a good idea to take salt tablets

Location:San Sebastian

Nearly a third of the way there...

You've almost donated 1,000 pounds to the BHF, thank you so much! Now, wouldn't it be cool to be the one to tip the counter into 4 figures???

EDIT: Thanks to Fernando Gutiérrez for the 4 figures! (Let's see who will get us to 5...)

Carbo loading

I thought I'd give this a try - I'll let you know around kilometer 30 if it has any effect or not...

I've chosen to try the less extreme version of carbo loading, which doesn't have a carbohydrate depletion phase involving running on an empty petrol tank and which is quite unpleasant from what I have heard. The "light" version sounds great, doesn't it? Being able to stuff yourself with pasta and sugary drinks all day long. Now that I have seen what it involves, I'm not so sure. I've just carted a box of gels and magic powders into work that I am supposed to take on top of my usual diet, over the next 3 days - it weighs a kilo for goodness sake! I'll probably be so sick of gels by the time I get to the Marathon on Sunday, that I won't be able to force any down during the race!

A little twist to the carbo loading that I am also going to try is to do a short sprint before taking in the carbs, to get the lactate flowing in the blood. The sprint should be short enough not to tire me out or cause any muscle damage, but just long enough to get that burning feeling in your legs. Apparently, if you run below your Aerobic Threshold you burn more fat than at higher intensities, but your body also tends to store fat more easily than carbohydrate as a result. I've been playing around with finishing my workouts with a short sprint to see if I can trick my body into burning fat but storing carbohydrates. I haven't really seen much scientific evidence to support this so, for now, this is more of a superstitious ritual of mine. At some point I'll dig around to see if I can find anything more on the subject.

OK, enough procrastination. Now for those gels.... YUCK

How fragile we are

I just had a piece of bad news today. This time it concerned someone who I wouldn't class as a friend but he was a trainee in my team for 6 months last year. I particularly remember watching the inauguration speech of President Obama with him - being African, he was especially proud and it was quite moving to share the moment with him. It's just mind boggling to think, had I known then, that sometime the following year, one of us would die suddenly of a heart attack... We still have the misconception that bad things only happen to other people, particularly if they are obese, if they smoke or if they don't do any exercise. It just isn't true and it makes me doubly determined to raise money for the British Heart Foundation. RIP

It ain't half hot...

I hate running in the heat but I suppose it's a price I'm willing to pay for the otherwise great lifestyle in Madrid. How can I be complaining about the heat in November? Thing is, I decided to run indoors in the work gym today. The air conditioning is set at about the right temperature for sitting around in a t-shirt and shorts, but as soon as you start actually doing anything you - at least I - start sweating buckets. (To give you some idea, if I spend more than an hour on the elliptic machine, the puddle of sweat goes as far as causing a short circuit which puts all the machines out of action - seriously!)

Today was worse than usual because I was running late and hit the lunchtime rush hour. When there are lots of other hot and sweaty bodies working out, it gets even more stifling. On the running machine, you don't have the cooling benefit of the air rushing past you so it's inevitable that your performance is going to be affected but that I should have to run 35% slower to achieve the same heart rate (intensity) as I would have running outdoors is just ridiculous! I suppose it is good to train heat tolerance now and again but it's got to the point where I can't do a proper workout indoors. It may also explain why I spent too much time running at too high an intensity the last couple of years - its only since I started biking that I found good outdoor trails and so, previously, I did almost all of my training on the running machine.

Why we run

I don't want this blog to turn into one of those blogs where I detail laboriously all my training runs but today was special. I can only suppose that its due to being in the tapering phase, where the training volume is reduced significantly, so that I have much more energy than usual. I'm also a bit nervous to write about it, as if I were tempting fate but, what the hell, I don't seriously believe in that crap - anything can still go wrong in the Marathon for any number of reasons, none of them being that I have somehow "jinxed" myself.

(I am touching wood as I write.)

Today just felt great and I wanted to write about it, more than anything just to remind myself in the future what it should feel like. The run was a 20 minute warm-up, followed by two 4km runs a bit slower than my marathon pace. I judged this pace by my heart rate but ended up running them both much faster than I expected. I thought something was either wrong with my watch or with me, it felt so easy and fluid. And now, I really don't feel tired; quite the opposite - I have this nice tingling feeling in my legs, my lungs feel bigger than normal and I feel wide awake. This is the famous "runner's high" that comes from the endorphins coursing through my body.

This is why we run.