In December 2012, thoughts about next year's "season" came about. What races did we want to run? What goals did we wish to achieve? We looked toward setting new distance records, and with a year to train (and for me, heal/rehabilitate), we thought a half-marathon was possible. Instead of running the Hartford half-marathon, we decided to make an event out of it. Montreal had its half/full marathon scheduled for the weekend of our fifth wedding anniversary. 13.1 miles. We signed up, me, unsure how ready I'd be.
In January 2013, I went to physical therapy for a few weeks to address sharp pains I would get in my knees right around 2.2 miles whenever I ran. I had been running farther than that for many years, so this had to be a correctable problem. The therapy concentrated on getting better flexibility in my legs, so all I had done for several weeks was stretch my legs in a variety of ways. I thought it was helping, but despite my increased flexibility, the pain still came right around the same distance.
Then I came to the realization that not all physical therapists are created equal. How? Because after only 6 weeks, she tells me, "Maybe you should think about about not running anymore." I was so disgusted with this assessment. I knew that this was not an irreversible structural injury. I needed to get a second opinion, so I met with a therapist Jenn had seen at her gym. April was a former hurdler at UConn, so she understood a little something about running.
April had a different approach to my problem. Instead of stretching, I needed to strengthen. My knee pains were from certain weak leg muscles forcing other muscles to compensate. I started strength training and by late-Spring, my knee problems were gone.
I started increasing my distances when running, and had gone as far as 6.2 miles (10k). But on one such run, I developed a pain on the top of my foot. It was a sharp pain that increased just from walking days later. I was concerned I might have a stress-fracture. A x-ray came up negative, so I just took it easy a few weeks and didn't run. But just walking was enough to aggravate my foot. I went to a podiatrist recommended at a free consultation at a running store. He confirmed I did not have nor did I have in the past a stress fracture. Since my foot wasn't healing after a month of inactivity, he recommended physical therapy. I went back to April, and besides some strengthening of some muscles around the foot, she applied a few treatments of ultrasound and iontophoresis (an electrical method of drawing medication below the skin into the tendons of my foot) to the top of my foot. My theory on what had happened - my running shoes had laces which were too tight one time, and they bruised the tendons in my foot from one run. Since tendons get very little blood flow naturally, they were not healing through simple rest.
Once again, April healed me after several weeks, but now I had another problem: I hadn't run in 2 months, and I had only 8 weeks until the Montreal half-marathon. I feverishly researched the internet for half-marathon training programs, but most of them were 12 weeks or had me running 5 days a week, and I was not comfortable jumping to that level of activity so quickly (plus, I can't fit 12 weeks of training into 8 weeks).
I finally came across a program which was fairly basic in its design. Run 3 times a week, 2 short runs and 1 long run. The short runs increased 1/2 mile each week, and the long run 1 mile per week. With my primary goal of being able to just finish the race, I decided I could take that training up to a long run of 10 miles one week before the race, and that I would have to gut out the final 3 on race day, walking them if I absolutely had to (I didn't think that, but did know there was some risk of a muscle injury making an increase in mileage the large in just a week).
My training went along without any major issues. I did learn a few things about running longer distances (like how far I can go before I have to drink water or eat something), and so came the trip the Montreal. We drove up (~6 hours) on a Thursday afternoon while Evan stayed in CT. On Friday, we toured the city (mostly on foot) and welcomed into town my next-door neighbor Chris (and his sister from NJ), who has been living in CA on a temporary assignment since April. Chris qualified for and completed the Boston Marathon in 2011, so he is no stranger to running. In fact, he has been our pseudo running coach. On Saturday, we saw more of Montreal and prepared for an early bedtime and early rise...the race was Sunday morning.
Sunday morning came and with it 50-degree weather and steady rain...less than ideal conditions for running a half-marathon. We loaded up on coffee, artisan bread, and the worst-tasting natural peanut butter I'd ever had. We set across town on the Metro with thousands of other people. Near the start line, we finished any remaining snacks and water, and needed a final pit-stop before heading up on a bridge for the starting line. It turns out there were not nearly enough port-o-potties, and we (shamefully) cut in line to make sure we weren't still waiting when the race started.
Up the bridge we went and then waited in our respective starting "corrals" (based on expected finish time). There we stood for for at least 30 minutes while the corrals in front of us were released every few minutes (Chris was in the very first corral). Fortunately, the rain was not a heavy downpour; it was a light drizzle which eventually stopped. The bigger effect the rain had was seen in the first several miles of the course...it ran through an amusement park where large puddles of water had collected, and runners on a 15-ft wide path all bottle-necked to the narrow areas to avoid stomping in 6 inches of water. Once past that, I just plugged along and kept my target pace without any incidents. The last challenge was a killer uphill section about a mile from the finish. I had next to nothing left, but I did not walk. I finished and beat my goal time, despite having run (according to my GPS watch) an extra quarter mile beyond the 13.1 (I'm still unsure if that extra distance was some metric-English measurement error or whether any meandering beyond straight corner-to-corner over 13 miles could add that much extra distance). Happy to have finished, I waited for Jenn to cross the finish line. We found Chris and his sister, ate a few bites of food, and headed back to the hotel. The weather had seemed to get chillier, and there wasn't enough entertainment for us to stick around.
We
My legs were quite sore for a few days, and I had some nice blisters on my feet. I did tax my muscles by increasing distance so quickly, but figured out how to recover without therapy this time. We ran the Manchester Road Race again (this time in some brisk, 34 degree weather). I fought through more muscle soreness (not yet recovered form the marathon) but still beat my 2012 time by 8 seconds.
