Blood, Sweat, and Rain: NYCM Training Round 2
There are few words in English or any other language that can describe how completing a marathon feels. I’ve tried every search query on Google, looked at every word iteration in a Thesaurus and still cannot delineate the emotions emitted when you cross that finish line. It’s not just the 26.2 miles you complete on race day; it’s conditioning your body through hundreds of miles of training, it’s reframing your mind to believe that you can make it, and it’s an emotional roller coaster when you follow your “why” while getting hit with dopamine and serotonin.
The New York City Marathon in 2019 is one of the best days of my life so far under the category of “personal achievements”, so I was more than excited to partake in the 50th anniversary the following year. Unfortunately, my body (and the world) had other plans in 2020.
A month or so after the race, I was running in the freezing cold, the type of frigid below-zero day where gloves with hand warmers and wool socks didn’t stop my fingers and toes from staying numb after a thorough warmup routine. I could not feel my feet contacting the ground at all and after only a mile in, I felt excruciating pain in the arch of my foot, and it felt like it detached from my lower leg. I limped home fearing it was the dreaded plantar fasciitis that I heard about in all the running publications.
After a week of this constant pain of feeling like I was stepping on LEGO blocks while barefoot, I reached out to my trusty physical therapist and started the rehab process early to try and get back on my feet for the NYC Half in March 2020. I was still occasionally running whenever I felt ok, but I kept going to PT weekly since it was nagging, and the pain was no longer localized. Sharp electrical impulses shot up and down the nerves of my leg.
Just days before the NYC Half, NYRR had to cancel the race and the city shut down. The world panicked over the unknown, and I was relieved that I didn’t have to make the upsetting decision to defer my entry due to my painful injury that would have been exacerbated if I participated at that time.
After a few months of the never-ending lockdown, the live marathon was canceled and NYRR offered a virtual option. I was not going to attempt that distance on my own for a virtual race while injured. After spending most of 2020 in PT and doctor’s visits for cortisone shots and orthotic fittings, I found out I had a small plantar fascia tear and got a stem cell injection to speed up my long recovery. While many people picked up running during the pandemic, I stared out longingly from a park bench wishing I could join in on the therapeutic sunrise runs.
My least favorite footwear; picture going from here to Williamsburg with this weight on my leg and a rucksack full of dumbbells in the heat of the summer of 2020. It took months to get my gait back to acceptably functional after this.
Though my own workouts were modified to be mindful of my pain, I still needed to meet with clients across the 5 boroughs while the gyms were shut down. I had to carry dumbbells and equipment in a backpack AND walk around in my gimp boot up and down those awful subway stairs miles away from our meeting places (outside/masked/6 feet away) in the summer. I’m sure the extra movement when I should have been resting my leg didn’t help my recovery, but I had to do what I had to do to stay afloat and pay for these treatments that weren’t covered by my health insurance (for which the premium I already paid for out of pocket; corporate gyms do not offer health insurance, my friends!). I know I sound like I’m whining here; I didn’t show just how much pain I was in during 2020 except to my closest friends and family because, well, people were dying of an invisible illness, and I was just thankful to be breathing.
Fast forward to 2021 when NYRR announced that they would indeed be putting on the 50th running of the NYCM. I had already left the corporate gym I was working at since my best clients moved out of NYC and I wanted to rebuild locally and online, and I took a full-time job at a care package startup to gain more small biz experience while I navigated the post-pandemic fitness world. I knew training for this marathon would be a different experience, and I was up to the challenge.
I knew what to expect in training for my second marathon, and it made me both confident and more nervous about it at the same time. In fact, training for my second one was much more difficult due to a multitude of factors.
Since I had to work from 10-6pm, my early mornings were dedicated to running. I prefer sunrise runs anyway, but the summer of 2021 was excruciatingly hot and reached 90 degrees by 6 a.m. with high humidity. I always felt like I had to rush my shower, eat something quick, and immediately head out the door to get to work no matter how many miles I had to run in the morning and no matter how much of a time buffer I had. There was no time to get a proper warmup for my achy joints, a good cooldown to prevent injury and those aches from happening in the first place, and the biggest pain point of this schedule was not having mental decompression before the busy workday on my feet. My old split-shift gym schedule might have been insane to some people (4 hours of clients, run, 3 hours of clients, admin, another 3-4 hours of clients, etc.), I found I missed it because demonstrating movements to clients early in the morning was like a little built-in warmup before my own workout.
My day job was very physical; I didn’t bother with a gym for my strength training and went all-in on working on my ChiRunning focuses of maintaining a tall posture and letting gravity make you run for you. I worked on my PT drills with the equipment I had in my apartment for maintenance, but I was not nearly as strong as I was during my previous training cycle. It was difficult to meal plan and eat optimal nutrition because of my hours, so I unfortunately relied on frozen meals just to get calories into my energy-depleted body. I would get so focused on tasks at work that my only reminder to eat or drink water was when coworkers would refill their bottles, or I’d get “hangry” late in the afternoon long after everyone else took a lunch break. If I had 10 miles on the schedule that morning, I was on my feet for another 5 miles during the work day according to my Garmin, so it’s no wonder why I was exhausted.
Before starting up the same Hansons Intermediate 18-week training plan, I was already drained. I had a few fainting episodes every few months for no known reason, and I was completely paranoid about it happening during training or the race. I physically didn’t feel the same way I did during the second marathon season, and with the traumatizing experiences of my fainting spells, I was mentally and emotionally worried something bad would happen. I tweaked a lot of my training plan to focus on the long easy runs instead of the tough track work because of this new fear.
My weekend long runs this time around were on very tough hills around the perimeter of Lake Hopatcong instead of slightly-above-sea-level sidewalks of Hoboken so I could float on my flamingo-shaped inner tube in the refreshing water and waterski as a reward. I also wasn’t running in the few NYRR races in Central Park offered that year, so I got my hills in with different scenery. I had every intention of hitting my long runs as prescribed, however, it rained in buckets most weekends. It wasn’t safe to run on winding roads with infinite blind spots when guys in pickup trucks around there drove past the speed limit all the time.
Rain was a big problem in that training cycle; I don’t mind running in a little mist once in a while, but the times it wasn’t too hot in the sun, the showers were worthy of hurricane names. In fact, Hurricane Ida had me stuck in my apartment for two days because my street looked and smelled like a canal in Venice, Italy. Then, when it poured every single weekend in October, the prospect of rain increased my anxiety even more at the slightest drop in the forecast. Rain was no longer just my migraine catalyst; it was a concern for safety. In fact, the slightest texture changes on the ground, rain or shine, resulted in three really bad falls on concrete, rocks, and trail roots that reopened wounds and gave me permanent scars (I’ll spare you the bloody photos of these deep lacerations on my hand and knee). Blood, sweat, and tears really do go into marathon training.
My mental state was all over the place leading up to the big day. I wanted to beat my time. Every little flareup in my foot, though rare, had me worried about permanent damage and never being able to run again. I wasn’t too worried about getting sick on race day, but I’d be furious if someone hacked a lung on me and had COVID. I trained way too hard, so I avoided people leading up to the race, including canceling my own birthday plans. Barely any new music was released in 2020, and I could never figure out what I wanted to listen to while I ran. I trained myself to run without headphones and focus on quiet foot strikes, calm breathing, and to mentally dig deep when the mileage got tough.
Between my competitive drive to set a new PR, uncooperative weather, a change in training strategy, a “typical” work schedule, mysterious health issues, tripping from a post-injury gait, and all the external COVID doomsday energy attacking me from all sides on the news and from fearful friends, last year’s New York City Marathon training cycle was just not the same experience as the first time around. Although there were so many hurdles to jump over to get physically and mentally in shape, I was still stoked to toe the line on November 7.
"You have to forget your last marathon before you try another. Your mind can't know what's coming."
-Frank Shorter, 1972 Olympic marathon gold medalist