The Indiana Ultra

It would be a rare occasion if a marathon training program went perfectly.  In an ideal world, one without rain or injury or the obligations of family and friends and work, running the workouts in a carefully-designed plan - easy runs following hard runs, rest days coming up on schedule - would not be a problem.  But that never happens in the real world.

In the real world this week, my Mom celebrated her 90th birthday, and that was an occasion that we simply could not miss.  So I compressed the workouts in the first part of the week into two days, Sunday and Monday.  As a result, the workout on Monday just did not happen - I could not muster up six "Yassos" (800-meter repeats) the very next day after an 18-mile run, so I simply did the best I could, which was two of them.  Then on Tuesday, we headed out early in the morning for a 600-mile drive to Indiana to celebrate this landmark occasion in my Mom's life and in mine.  It was a good visit, and we enjoyed visiting with her and with my sister and her son.

Thursday we returned (and by the way, we decided that we would never, ever attempt to drive 600 miles a day again) and I felt as sore as I imagine I would feel after an Ultramarathon:  the "Indiana Ultra!"  Today I was scheduled to run 10 miles at Marathon Goal Pace (MGP), and I again fell short, mustering up only four of them.  But they were good miles, and a little faster than I had planned.  What a mistake it would have been to struggle through the complete workout with the Big One looming first thing in the morning:  my first 20-miler.

In the real world, we simply do all that we can do to prepare for hard struggles like marathons, and we hope that Prince Hamlet's observation is accurate:

"If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all."