Grandma's Marathon Race Reflection: 2023

Here's the thing about me: I am not the fastest runner, but I am consistent.  Every single road half-marathon I've raced, over the course of eleven years of racing and twenty-six half-marathons, has been run at an average pace somewhere between 8:40 and 9:45 per mile, which has resulted in a best time of 1:53:37 and a worst time of 2:07:55.  Times have started to skew a little toward the slower end over the years, but conditions like temperature, whether the course is hilly or flat, etc., have also played a role, and keeping them all that close (with most of them falling between 1:55 and 2:05) is something I'm pretty proud of.

With full marathons, I haven't had as much experience, but I have run five now, with a PR of 4:30:54 at Grandma's in 2022 and a worst time of 4:56:24 at Chicago in 2021, and, guess what? The overall time gap is bigger than with the half since I'm running twice as far, and the overall pace is a bit slower, but the pace difference (within about a minute per mile, around 10:20-11:20 in this case) is about the same.  So, when the temperatures started to climb and I started falling off goal pace at Grandma's this year, and when I crossed the finish line at 4:40:24, I was disappointed, first, to not PR, and second, not to at least get sub-4:40.  However, by the time I talked to Carrie N. on the phone on my way home from the race the next day, I had put it in the perspective of, "I think I found my range.  4:30:54 is what I can do when conditions are perfect, and 4:56:24 is what I can do when conditions are terrible, and the rest will fall somewhere in between.  And the good thing about Chicago sucking so hard is that I can always say, 'At least it wasn't as bad as Chicago!'"  I do hope that I have not peaked and that I can still hit a sub-4:30 someday, but prior to Saturday, I had PRed at every full marathon EXCEPT Chicago, and it's probably not realistic to expect that every time.  Train for it, go for it, but manage expectations and don't make it the end of the world if it doesn't happen, I think is the lesson.

Also: I was not hating my life this race.  At any distance, there have been races where I have gotten MAD, and not in the good, "My competitive spirit is revved up!" kind of way, but in the "I hate everyone and everything!" type of way.  At Chicago, for example, I remember crossing the 18-mile mark and thinking, "Eight more miles of this? REALLY?!" At the Lincoln Half this year, which was one of my worst at 2:06:16, I was ready to fling my slick-with-humidity water bottle to the side of the road, and a completely innocuous conversation between a couple of other runners made me think, "Shut UP!" I was straight-up not having a good time.  This race was not like that.  At mile 20, knowing that I had fallen off pace and not quite having it in me to pick it up, but also not feeling terrible, I thought to myself, fairly calmly, "It's just a 10K left.  You can do a 10K."  Also, though I did slow down in the second half, I don't feel like I "bonked," as I did in my first two Indianapolis marathons; I feel like I slowed down slightly and naturally as the temperature rose, which I can't say was a strategy, but I think was pretty normal.  

Other things from the race weekend as a whole that I will remember:

1) I spent the night in Minneapolis on the way so I could get to the marathon expo early enough to see Olympic marathoner Kara Goucher, who was signing her new book at the expo on Friday.  At my hotel in Minneapolis were a bunch of middle-school girls who were in town for a volleyball tournament.  I had been told there would be cookies in the lobby at 10 p.m., and since I was still up, I went down to get one.  Those middle school girls descended on those cookies like a swarm and had them gone in like thirty seconds.  There were more cookies where that came from, it turned out, but it was a pretty funny thing to watch.

2) I got to add to my collection of photos of me with famous lady marathoners, which prior to this included Kathrine Switzer, Deena Kastor, and Shalane Flanagan.  This one was the most personally significant, however, because I read Kara Goucher's book on running for women early in my running career and used to constantly talk about what "Olympic marathoner Kara Goucher" had to say about this or that.  I managed not to go on and on about that and to just say normal things like "Hi" and "Thank you" as she signed my book and took a picture with me.

3) I got to hang out with my friend Julia at her first full marathon, which she crushed! So glad we got to ride the shuttle together and hang out after the race!

I actually have ZERO races in July and August!  But I'm doing the Monument Marathon in Scottsbluff in September and the GOATz 50K in October, so training starts on July 10th.  I'm trying a different training plan geared toward the 50K which includes hill repeats, so we'll see how that goes!  The plan is to run pretty minimally this week, then take it relatively easy the two weeks after with long-ish runs at 6-8 miles.  I think a three-week training break will be about the right amount, because I had like three MONTHS after the fall racing season last year, and while it was nice to not have to follow a training plan when it was so cold, I did feel like I lost some fitness (though I was still doing some running).

Okay! Spring racing season 2023 in the books! Onward and upward!

Unpacking Daisy Jones and the Six: Daisy and Billy and Camila (Spoilers)

Billy Dunne has this version of himself that he wants to be, which is the version that stays clean and sober and is a good husband to Camila and a good father to Julia.  Then Daisy Jones enters his life, first to sing harmony on one song and then as an official member of the band, and she brings out a lot of his insecurities and challenges him in ways that he isn’t used to being challenged.  He expects her to just sing that first song, “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb)” as written.  She rewrites it, and he hates, and has a hard time admitting, that it’s better her way.  At her first live performance with the band, he tells her they’re singing the song fourth; she comes out after the first song, they do the song second, she never leaves the stage, and he hates that the fans don’t want her to.  Basically, he hates, and has a hard time admitting, that he needs her more than she needs him professionally.  There’s one point where he tries to threaten her that unless she does this or that, she’s not coming on tour, and she says, “There IS no tour without me, you stupid son of a bitch.”  He really has a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that he’s not in control with her.

He also has it in his head that as long as he never actually crosses the line of sleeping with her, he’s not doing anything wrong as far as his marriage to Camila is concerned, even though Camila literally tells him otherwise right to his face.  Literally.  She straight up tells him, “I don’t have to know everything, but if you love her—” He interrupts her to tell her he doesn’t.  She says that if he ever does, they’re over.  Yet, when Camila is upset after seeing Billy and Daisy having what is clearly an intimate conversation, he is very insistent that all they’ve done is kiss once.  He can’t get it through his head that she doesn’t care about that.  With both Daisy and Camila, he has these clear ideas about how things are going to be without it ever even occurring to him that they never agreed to those terms or that they might have their own ideas about what they want and what is important to them.

This becomes clearest when, after leaving messages for Camila begging her to give him another chance and come to the fateful Soldier Field show that winds up being their last, a fan buys him a shot, and he takes it.  He is drunk and high at the show that night, and he is different with Daisy than he ever has been before, joining her at her microphone, coming so close their lips almost touch and, at one point, putting his arms around her from behind as they sing.  When they go backstage before the encore, he begins kissing her, and she responds at first.  But she realizes he isn’t being himself and that he’s just reacting to Camila leaving him; he tells her this is who he is: broken. “Let’s be broken together,” he says.  Essentially: I couldn’t live up to Camila, so I might as well live down to you.  To Daisy’s credit, she doesn’t accept this for herself, and firmly tells him, “I don’t want to be broken.”  Daisy told him early on, when they were writing songs for the album together, that he writes from the perspective of who he wants to be, not who he really is.  Billy both loves and hates that Daisy sees who he really is, and loves, hates, and is scared of who he is with her.

Bottom line, he puts A LOT on both of the women in his life.  But Camila isn’t perfect, and Daisy isn’t “broken.”  They’re both real, human people with strengths and weaknesses, and I am really impressed that the show lets them both be that, even if Billy can’t always see them as anything but projections of what he does or doesn’t want to be.  I think it’s a huge departure from a lot of music films.  I love Walk the Line, for example, but in the context of that movie, June was there to save Johnny Cash, and his first wife, Vivian, was there to hold him back; that made sense in the context of that story, which was told from John’s perspective, and very well may have been how he saw things.  Things get more complex when you start showing events from multiple people’s perspectives, though, which we get in Daisy Jones and the Six, where there are no heroes or villains, just a bunch of flawed people trying, and sometimes failing, to do their best; sometimes bringing out the best in each other, and sometimes bringing out the worst.

GOATz 50K Race Recap

 I signed up for the GOATz 50K back in April, I think, on the day that my friend Carrie M. organized a forty-mile run as preparation for an upcoming 100-mile race she was training for.  I was in the midst of training for Grandma's Marathon at the time; I had fourteen or fifteen miles on the training schedule that day, I think, but wound up running seventeen, and signed up on the adrenaline of the day's run and the buzz of a few post-run beers.  In June, I ran a marathon PR at Grandma's and was a little dismayed to realize that training for GOATz needed to start pretty much immediately.  I took three days completely off from running and a full week off from any training plan, then went back to it.  As the fall race calendar started filling up with the Harvest Moon Hustle 10K and the Monument Half-Marathon in September, then the Market to Market relay and the Garmin Kansas City Half-Marathon in the weeks immediately leading up to GOATz, I started to wonder if I had bitten off more than I could chew.

This feeling came to a head at the GOATz preview run the weekend before Market to Market.  I already had one twenty-miler under my belt during this training cycle, but I had run it on pavement during my friend Karri's brewery run.  This time, I did two loops of the GOATz course (the 50K would be three loops) and was hit with how hard it was going to be and how long it was going to take.  Two loops (twenty-one miles) took me something like 4:35, which was slower than my most recent marathon time.  "I thought this would be okay since I've already run marathons, but those were all on flat roads!," I told my friends.  "This is on hilly trail!"  A couple of them chimed in to point out that you don't run a trail race as fast and that you hike up the hills.  "That makes it even worse!," I said.  "I'll be out there for like seven hours!" I was told that wasn't a bad time for a first 50K; I was like, "But I don't WANT to run for seven hours!"  I knew the GOATz course was a loop of 10.5 miles, and that there would also be 10.5 and 21 mile races going on at the same time.  If literally any one of my friends had been like, "Well, you know, you can always drop down to the 21," I would have been like "OKAY! YES! I'll do that!" None of them did.  

Market to Market came and went.  Garmin Kansas City came and went.  Next thing I knew, there was nothing to do but run a 50K.  The morning of the race, Jimmy Brown of Runner Church gave a short message where he quoted a Bible verse about finishing the race, and said something along the lines of, "You did not just sign up for this race to sign up, and you did not come here to just run part of the race.  You came here to finish the race, and unless you get sick or hurt, you will finish."  I looked at my friend Julia, who was also running her first 50K but was much more excited about it. I wish I could say that that's the moment where I was like "YES!," but I was still really nervous.

The race started, and everyone, except for the 50 milers, who had started at 3 a.m. (!!!) took off together.  A few of us had planned to run at least the first loop together, so during the first few miles I was mainly focused on staying with the group while everyone in the race was trying to settle into their paces.  Eventually, people spread out a little bit, and it started to feel a little more relaxed.  I had told myself I would eat something, whether the Skratch chews I had brought along or something from an aid station, every four miles, so I had six Skratch chews four miles in, then some peanut butter pretzels at the Runner Church aid station at mile eight.  The start/finish aid station at mile 10.5 marked the end of the first loop.  I used the Port-a-Potty, ate a few more pretzels, Amber refilled my water bottle for me, and then we were off again.  At that point, our group spread out a bit.  Karri was planning on pacing me for the whole thing, so she stuck with me; Anna and Julia went on ahead for awhile, then we caught them, then Julia took off at our next stop at the Runner Church aid station.  Anna was doing the 21 miler, so the end of the next loop was her last.  I made one more stop at the Port-a-Potty; Macy, who had won the 10.5 miler for the women earlier that day, refilled my water bottles; and Karri and I were off again.

Four miles into the loop, I tried to eat Skratch chews again, but after the second one I had a strong feeling that if I tried to eat any more, they would come back up.  Luckily, I was still at least able to drink water.  I think I got maybe one more Skratch chew down later down the road.  It got very windy.  At one point, where we were briefly on pavement on our way back into the woods, I felt like I was going to be blown over sideways.  Karri had been playing music for us, and at one point, "Jessie's Girl," one of my favorite songs of all time, came on.  "I'm going to do the hand-clappy part to see if I can still clap in rhythm," I told her.  I kind of could.  Running and clapping is hard, FYI.  At the Runner Church aid station, I tried to sip a little ginger ale, but since we were 2.5 miles from the end at that point, I didn't try to get anything else down.  Karri needed to put on sunscreen, so she told me to go on ahead and she would catch me.  After the Runner Church station, you ran up a grassy hill, crossed some pavement, and went back into the woods.  At that point, I tripped over a root.  I caught myself and didn't hit the ground.  Still, I shouted, "THIS SUCKS!" to the heavens.  Karri caught up with me again.  The next thing that stands out is that there was a big hill, and Karri was like, "What song can I play to get you up this hill?," and I was like, "Nothing."  Like, not in the mood for songs right now, let's just finish this thing.  (Later, I realized that "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" would have been the correct answer.)  We crossed the finish line in 6:58:34, so I was pretty right when I predicted that I would be out there for "like seven hours."  Our friends were there to cheer us in at the finish line.

I went and sat at a picnic bench.  Then I wanted to lie on the ground, so Carrie M. went and got a blanket.  Then I drank some ginger ale.  Then my stomach started to settle down.  I drank a Coke.  Eventually, we went our separate ways and made plans for dinner later.  I went home, took a shower, ate some Pringles, and by the time we were on our way to dinner, I said to Karri, "I reserve the right to change my mind on this, but I have felt worse after other races."  I threw up at the finish line of my first half-marathon.  I ran a 15K trail run in July heat back in 2012 that I still refer to as Death in the Woods.  Lying on a blanket feeling a little queasy didn't seem terrible by comparison.

We all went out for dinner, and Theresa asked me what the best and worst parts were.  I was quick to recount the queasiness as the worst part.  Then I said that the best part was the camaraderie, and I can't stress that enough.  Between getting to run the first loop with Karri, Ross, Anna, and Julia, Karri pacing me the whole way, Macy and Amber there at the aid stations, everyone there at the finish, and still more people there to congratulate all of us on Tuesday at run group, I felt so supported before, during, and after.  My friends are so great.

I drank a beer that was literally the size of my head that night.  That seems like an important detail.

I didn't sleep well that night and woke up sore the next day.  I got a really good night's sleep on Monday and woke up even more sore on Tuesday.  Tuesday night, I went to IRRC and walked with Julia and Theresa.  Afterwards, I talked to Carrie M. and said, "I feel like with races like this, it's you versus the course," and she said, "That's exactly right." I planned to take a full week off running and have stuck to that so far, but I am mostly not sore anymore and starting to feel a little antsy.  Still, with midterm grades due today and some fun social plans coming up this weekend, it should be easy enough to wait until Sunday.

Some takeaways:

1) The three weeks between the preview run and the race were very stressful and full of self-doubt.  However, I'm VERY glad that I did the preview run and kind of got real with myself about how things were going to be.  Up to that point, I think I thought it was going to be "not that much harder" than running a marathon.  It was a lot harder.  I'm glad I was prepared for that.  It's not good to be so scared that you talk yourself out of things, but it's also not good to kid yourself or not take things seriously enough.

2) That said, I actually was fairly physically prepared at that point, or I wouldn't have gotten through it.  I basically adapted the Hal Higdon Intermediate 1 plan that I did for Grandma's Marathon, doing more runs on trails and adjusting as I needed to for other races.  I totaled up and figured out that I did 88% of the workouts on the plan, giving me a B+ for preparedness.  Though I joked with my friends about the fact that I calculated all that and graded myself and all, I think it was actually a pretty good gauge, and think that in the A-/B+ range is a good place to be; I don't want to ever be so rigid that I can't ever miss a workout, but I also am not someone who "wings" things.  I would not have done it if I was not actually prepared.

3) I started my adult running career (I ran track and cross country in high school) in the year 2011.  I've run alone, with different small groups of friends, and with organized training groups, and I imagine that I will run as long as I am able and still liking it regardless of where I am or who I'm with.  However.  It's my friends who have consistently helped me level up and supported me.  In 2018, after finishing the Kentucky Derby Mini-Marathon, showering, and venturing back out for lunch, my friends and I passed people who were finishing the full.  While I was thinking, "Man, I'm so glad I didn't do the full! That looks terrible!," Carrie N. was like, "If they can do it, we can do it."  I was like, "FINE." So we registered for the Monumental Marathon in Indianapolis that fall, trained together, and my friends Alice and Shannon surprised me at the finish line with signs they had made.  At lunch, they gave me a decorated box full of cards and gifts from other friends who couldn't come but wanted to show their support.  The next year, Alice brought our friends Mel and Erin along.  I still remember (and have video somewhere) of running down the stretch before I made the last turn to the finish and seeing them cheering.  There was a woman holding a sign that said "Tap here to power up" with the mushroom from Super Mario Brothers, and Alice started shouting, "TAP THE SIGN! TAP THE SIGN!" I still giggle when I think about it.  Then I moved to Omaha, and was introduced to the Omaha running community through the Inner Rail Run Club; it was the friends I met there who introduced me to trail running.  I knew ultrarunning existed before meeting them, but I had never actually known anyone who had run further than a marathon.  I started thinking about it, but when I got into the Chicago Marathon in 2021, my focus all went toward training for that (though I did some shorter trail races throughout the year).  So, this was the year.  Thanks so much to Karri, Carrie M., Julia, Anna, Amber, Macy, Theresa, and the MANY other awesome people who did training runs with me, ran with me for all or part of the race itself, or were there at the finish line-- all while working toward their own goals.  Would I run on my own?  Yes, but definitely not as far, and it definitely wouldn't be as fun.

Monument Half-Marathon Race Recap

I used to be able to hit sub-two hours in the half-marathon consistently, with just the occasional exception on an especially hilly course or a really hot, humid day, until 2019, at which point it became much more hit or miss.  I hit it most recently in October 2019 at the Evansville Half with a time of 1:55:56.  Though I'm sure age has something to do with the difference, I will also say that nine of my top twelve half times (I've run twenty-three road half-marathons) were at the Evansville Half, which is held in early October; the weather tends to be cool, and the course is mostly flat.  There was bound to be more variation once I started branching out more frequently to different courses, running them at different times of year, training for longer distances, and doing the occasional not-that-smart thing like running halfs on back-to-back weekends.

This past Saturday I ran the Monument Half-Marathon in Gering, Nebraska, and I knew a sub-two time was probably not in the cards when miles two and three were both up the same, seemingly endless hill.  The first mile was downhill; when my watch chimed and I had an 8:31 pace, I wasn't sure whether to think, "Oooh, you went out too fast," or, "It's fine, you have some time banked now," or just, "Well, that was downhill, who cares?" A woman running near me, who I will refer to as My Musical Friend because she was playing music over her phone, and throughout the race I would speed up when I heard the music coming behind me, scolded her husband for pacing them too fast during the first mile.  During the second mile, when we all started uphill, he said something to her like, "Look, I will stay with you until it doesn't make sense anymore."  My watch chimed at the end of the second mile: 9:39.  "Oooohhh," I said aloud, in a tone like, "That's not good."  My Musical Friend said, "It's okay.  It'll even out with the downhills."  That made sense at that point, since my first mile was about thirty seconds too fast and the second was about thirty seconds too slow for the pace I was trying to hit...but then mile three continued uphill.  "Just go!" My Musical Friend said to her husband.  Up ahead, another woman urged her friend to go on ahead of her; the hills were breaking up duos left and right.  Mile three was another 9:39.  The hill finally started to descend at mile four, but not quite at the same degree; mile four was 9:07, which was better and back on pace, though not enough faster to make up tons of ground.

A few things happened relatively simultaneously at mile five: the course turned onto a gravel road; the half-marathon relay, which started thirty minutes after the half-marathon, had its first exchange point, so there was a "Why are there so many people just standing around?" moment; and the course became just BEAUTIFUL.  If you've ever been to the Scottsbluff/Gering area, you know that it is beautiful in general, but at this point there were some Badlands-like formations that you don't normally see.  We were running on a gravel road around the back side of the Scottsbluff National Monument, which you don't normally have a reason to go to.  Also at this point, us runners spread out a bit more.  I passed an older man who had started alternating between running and walking.  Occasionally, I would hear My Musical Friend's music behind me, then the music would fade again.  One thing with the early uphill miles was that you started to see people struggling earlier in the race than you normally would.  I wouldn't say I was struggling, but I did consciously adjust my goal from sub-two to "just try to keep all your miles under ten minutes."

Things kind of became a blur around mile seven or eight.  My Musical Friend disappeared somewhere behind me (I wish I knew her real name so I could look up how she finished).  We got back on pavement as the course turned onto the paved bike/running trails near the monument.  My parents were cheering two different places.  The first, my dad called out that I was twenty-fourth out of the women.  The second, my mom called out, "Molly! Look who's here!  It's Kaitlyn!"; my cousin's daughter was volunteering with some fellow nursing students.  The course kind of zig-zagged through some neighborhoods, with arrows on the ground pointing our way and volunteers in the confusing spots.  We switched back to gravel to head back to the start/finish at Five Rocks Amphitheater, running past a cemetery.  There was another downhill, and a volunteer kept calling out to us to watch ourselves on the gravel.  Next thing I knew I was crossing the finish.  My time was 2:07:55, far off the goal (hope?), but sometimes you adjust as you go when the course is more challenging than expected.  Final results were 24/125 women and 61/218 overall.

It was a great race.  I really enjoyed the mixture of pavement and gravel, and the scenery was beautiful.    Since it was a smaller race, you spread out a bit more than you typically would in a road half-marathon; the person who finished before me was forty seconds ahead, while the person behind was more than twenty seconds back.  I think I'm going to go back for the full next year.  For the full, they bus you out to the Wildcat Hills, and the first five miles are downhill.  Their second half overlaps with the half-marathon course.  I imagine pacing would be challenging since the second half is the more difficult half.  At any rate, I'd like to try it.  I think I love smaller races.  

One of the sponsors was the Flyover Brewery, and they offered a free beer if you brought your race bib in before six p.m.  My parents and I went sometime between five and six, and there were lots of people there wearing their race shirts, and the race director was coming around talking to everyone and thanking us for being there.  The proceeds go to scholarships at Western Nebraska Community College, so she emphasized how much they have raised since they started doing the race.  The whole community was really supportive of the race.  I would definitely recommend.

Grandma's Marathon Race Recap

Grandma's Marathon race day started with them shuttling us via school bus from hotels/dorms/various locations around Duluth to the starting line.  I noticed as soon as I got on the bus that my phone battery was already down to 52%, which I cursed myself for and knew would not end well.  Fortunately, that would be the worst thing that happened that day.

My previous marathon PR was 4:36:17, set at the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon in 2019.  Having bonked at all three of my previous marathons, I decided to start off with the 4:35 pace group.  During the fourth mile, I kept finding myself having to slow down and let the pace group catch back up to me, which eventually started to seem dumb, so I decided to just run my race.  I warned myself not to let myself get under 10:00 miles until at least mile sixteen.  I accidentally did once at mile thirteen, but it wasn't much under so I didn't worry about it.

Though I left the 4:35 group behind, I had a pace bracelet telling me what time I needed to be at at each mile to hit 4:35, which was SUPER helpful.  With two miles to go, I knew I had banked somewhere between two and three minutes and would hit my goal as long as I kept within the range of what I'd already been doing.  Then someone started playing "All I Do is Win," and a random stranger called out to no one in particular, "YOU'RE DOING IT!!!," and I was like, "I AM doing it!," and I took off.  Mile 25 pace was 9:39.  Mile 26 was 9:33.  After I crossed the finish line, I got the notification on my watch from the Grandma's app that said, "Molly Brost has crossed the finish line at 4:30:54," and I was like, "HOLY CRAP!" I managed to collect my medal and, with my phone now at 7%, shoot off a text to my family telling them my time.  Somehow, even after my phone died, I was still getting notifications on my watch, so even though I couldn't respond, I managed to get the gist of where my friends were and find them with only *a little* wandering around cursing myself for not making sure that I had started the day with a properly charged phone.

Some things that helped me reach my goal:

1) Nearly perfect conditions.  Temps were in the 50s, the course was nice and flat with some downhills and only really one big uphill.  I commented to more than one person, "Part of me wants to retire from marathon running right now, because I will never have this perfect of a race again."  A random stranger who struck up with a conversation with me at a water fountain was like, "Oh, wow, what a great thing to be able to say! You're not going to, though, right?" I was like, "Of course not."

2) The Hal Higdon Intermediate 1 training plan, pictured below:

For my previous three marathons I used the Novice 2 plan.  The main difference between that one and this one was this one included five weekly runs instead of four, which meant back-to-back runs on the weekends.  This sometimes led to things that I never would have considered possible before, such as, say, running the Early Bird 10 Miler one day and then waking up the next morning and doing fifteen miles.  I thought to myself multiple times throughout training, "I don't know if I'm actually getting faster, but I can DO MORE than I've ever been able to do before."  I didn't follow the plan perfectly, because life happens, but I calculated it and determined that I did 91% of the workouts on the plan.  I think it's good to choose a plan that is maybe just A LITTLE too hard, because even if you fall slightly short, you're still going to be doing more than you've done before.

3) Proper portions of Honey Stinger chews.  I always struggle with race day/long run nutrition.  I was worried because I felt like I'd been really fading on my long runs.  Then I looked on the back and saw that the serving size was six Honey Stinger chews.  I'd been eating four every four miles.  I upped it to six, and I swear to God it made a huge difference.

4) Last, but CERTAINLY not least, awesome running friends! Omaha has a fantastic running community.  There are running groups most nights of the week, and through those groups you can meet awesome friends to also do your weekend long runs with 👍. Thanks so much to everyone who did training runs with me, shared the race weekend experience, or offered support from afar!

After the disappointment of last fall's hot AF Chicago Marathon, it was nice to have a race go really well.  I feel like this is the first full marathon that I've actually raced and not just tried to survive.

Reflections on the Chicago Marathon almost a week later

My training for the Chicago Marathon officially began the week of June 7th. I was still pretty trained up after back-to-back spring halfs: the Kentucky Derby Mini-Marathon, held in a staggered format over four days (I believe), mostly on running paths over the Indiana border; and the Lincoln Half, held in a more normal format with some Covid restrictions. I wasn't overly happy with my performance in either; I'm really motivated by competition, and the staggered format for Derby had us so spread out that I found it hard to keep up a good race pace. Not only was the Lincoln Half fairly hot and humid, but it was literally a week and a day after Derby, so I really hadn't had time to recover. I was pretty proud of myself that I was in good enough shape to do halfs two weekends in a row, though.

The training plan that I followed was the Hal Higdon Marathon Novice 2, which, according to the web site, is designed for runners who may have already finished their first marathon and are looking to build mileage and improve speed for their second or third. I actually used the exact same plan when I ran my first two marathons. I like it, but while looking at the web site just now I saw the Intermediate 1 plan and am preemptively excited to use it for my next full. It has runs five days a week instead of four, which I sometimes did anyway even when I was doing Novice 2, so I think I'm ready. The Novice 2 only included one race in the build-up to the marathon, a half-marathon. I did A BUNCH more than that, including the Don Childs 5 Mile Run; the Cornfield Cornfield, Boonville Backroads, and Harvest Moon Hustle 10Ks; the Dizzy Goat endurance trail run, which for me wound up being 12.4 miles; the What the Hill?! trail half-marathon; and the Market to Market relay, where my legs added up to around 14 miles. I know this doesn't sound ideal, but I think it worked out okay, because I was still able to keep up with my long runs even on 10K weeks, and the 10Ks basically wound up being my pace/tempo runs on those weeks. Also, most of them were so much fun; there were only one or two that I can even imagine NOT doing next year, so that's just going to be how it goes in the summer/fall racing season, I guess.

My first two fulls were the 2018 and 2019 Indianapolis Monumental Marathons. I ran the first in 4:37:35 and the second in 4:36:17. I figured I would shoot for 4:30 in Chicago and drove my Omaha running friends and my Indiana friend, Carrie, who was also going to be doing Chicago, absolutely INSANE trying to determine whether I would start with the 4:30 pace group, the 4:20 pace group, or just not run with a pace group and try to keep my pace under 10:17/mile, which is what I needed for 4:30. In the end, I went with the third option, only I hadn't counted on it being SO FREAKING HOT.


The Chicago Marathon has an alert system where green means ideal running conditions, yellow means proceed with caution, red means potentially dangerous, and black means so dangerous that they would have to shut down the race. The alert level was at yellow when we started the race; I don't even remember which mile I was at when I saw that it had changed to red. I DO remember thinking, "If they change it to black and I don't get to finish this race, I am going to lose it." Luckily, that didn't happen.

My first four miles were sub-10 minutes, which was a little fast but not alarmingly fast. When I fell back into the 10-11 minute mile range at mile five, I thought that was good; I was settling into a pace. A few miles were slower than the 10:17 pace I needed, but I figured it would probably all work out since the first four were a little faster than I needed, and I had it in my head that as long as I stayed at a net pace of 10:30 or under, I would still PR. At maybe mile twelve or thirteen, the 4:30 pace group caught me, and I ran with them for two or three miles. One pacer was going real crazy waving her sign around; I was already kind of fading and in a bad mood at that point, and all I could think was, "Take it easy with the sign! You're going to hit someone!" Or maybe something meaner. You know. Then at mile fifteen I was like, "Whoa! Why are they taking off at a dead sprint?" They were NOT taking off at a dead sprint. Friends, The Wall is real, and I hit it hard at mile fifteen, and harder at mile nineteen. At some point I basically abandoned all time goals and just focused on keeping going. Also, I drank A LOT of water. I carried my own water bottle; at some water stops, in addition to the paper cups, they had people just standing there with jugs who would fill your bottles for you, which was nice. I also ate, over the course of the race, some Skratch chews, two mini Honey Stinger waffles, and part of a banana that a volunteer gave me at some point in the last ten miles. They gave me I think half of a banana; I couldn't eat all of it, and as I threw the rest on the ground, I was like, "Oh, no, what if someone slips on my banana peel?!"

Another thing is that my watch didn't quite line up with the mile markers. I had been warned beforehand that the tall buildings and tunnels would throw off my GPS, so I knew that was going to happen, but it was a little demoralizing to hear the beep signaling a mile and then not see the mile marker for like a quarter mile. (My watch wound up measuring the course at 26.59, so less than half a mile off, which doesn't seem terrible given the distance, the buildings, etc.) At some point I thought to myself, "Well, I think I can still finish in under five hours, but who the heck even knows at this point?" That's right: I fell pretty far off goal pace. I ultimately finished in 4:56:24, which obviously wasn't what I wanted, but given that the temps were literally thirty-five to forty degrees higher than they were when I set my PR at Monumental in 2019, I didn't think it was that bad. The difference made sense to me.

Even though I ate more/better during this race and drank a lot more water than I did at Indy in 2019, I still don't feel like I have race nutrition totally figured out. As I mentioned, I am going to the next step up in training plans the next time, so that should also help. However, I was pretty happy with the training season as a whole. Also, wow, what an experience race weekend was! Everywhere had long lines, but everything was run very quickly and efficiently. It was also great that basically the whole city seemed excited about the race; a banner greeted us at the airport, and even flying out the next day, people were still wearing their shirts and medals at the airport, which was neat.

It was also, of course, super fun spending time with my friend Carrie, who I hadn't seen in six months, and her family. All in all, the whole weekend was a great experience. My next full will probably be a considerably smaller one, but it was great to have the World Major Marathon experience.

Thoughts on The Baby-Sitters Club Season Two (spoilers)

 

Don't you love that I haven't written on this thing in more than a year and The Baby-Sitters Club is what brings me back 😅?  I just unabashedly love this show.   Just in general-- and this was true of Season One, as well-- I love how the series is faithful to the spirit of the books and uses individual books as the inspiration for specific episodes, but doesn't treat the books as gospel.  With that in mind, we get roommate problems between Mary Anne and Dawn, but they happen when Mary Anne and her dad are just staying with the Shafers for a week instead of after they become stepsisters, and we get Derek Masters, the child star who gets Jessi thinking about giving up ballet, as an online sensation rather than as a TV actor, among other changes.  

 One especially well-done episode was the one where Mimi dies.  As a kid, I remember putting reading off that book for a really long time because I knew it would be sad.  The episode was obviously also sad, but really well-done.  Claudia spends most of the episode trying to distract herself from her grief.  Mary Anne is the one who finally gets through to her, reminding her of a time when she broke a bone, and how if she had just ignored it, it would have only gotten worse, but since she dealt with it and got help, it healed correctly.  She says that grief is the same, and she has to face and deal with her pain in order to get through it.  I thought that was a really good way of putting it.  Also, how weird was it when Karen told Claudia that Mimi and Old Ben Brewer were together in the afterlife like literally the day after Mimi dies?  And literally no one tells Karen that was inappropriate.  To an extent, I think it's great that the Thomas/Brewer family lets Karen be weird, but wow.  Finally, when Janine announced that she was in love with Ashley, I literally blurted out, "Oh, shit!" I did NOT see that coming, I guess because it didn't happen in the books (Ashley Wyeth was a character, but she was an artist who briefly distracts Claudia from the Baby-Sitters Club).  But it was pretty awesome.  

I also was fairly impressed with Watson's little speech about how the Thomas kids' dad is a piece of shit (obviously he didn't use that kind of language, but you know) and that they all needed to just stop letting him disappoint them and let him (Watson) be their real dad.  I also liked how Dawn and Mary Anne jumped in to back him up, with Dawn saying that even though her parents are divorced and she doesn't get to see her dad much, he is NOT absent in the way that Kristy's dad is.  I don't really remember having strong opinions on Watson one way or another in the series, but I appreciate that the show is portraying him as a big dork who tries too hard but a really, really good guy.  

I also really appreciate Kristy on the show, and I like that the other girls seem to really appreciate Kristy, too.  There is one episode where Kristy is sick and Dawn, as Alternate Officer, takes over; Dawn has a lot of good ideas, but no real plan to execute them.  Kristy comes back and is very quickly and efficiently like, "Great ideas, Dawn.  Here's how we're going to implement them."  I appreciate that she didn't take glee in the fact that things were kind of chaotic without her or shoot down Dawn's ideas, but actually saw the good in them and figured out how to make them work.  Along with that, I also like how even though sometimes the girls disagree or get annoyed with each other, they are fundamentally good friends who accept each other for who they are.  Their families, for the most part, are like that, too.  There is one episode where Stacey asks them to help with a fundraiser for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and Kristy firmly says she'll participate, but will NOT wear a dress; they're all just like, "Yeah, cool."  In the Valentine's Day episode, Karen asks Kristy if anyone gave her a flower for Valentine's Day, and Kristy's just like, "No, thank God"; Karen's just like, "Hmm. Cool, now let's talk about how our house is haunted," or whatever.  They all know when to call each other out or challenge each other, but they don't make A Thing out of every little thing.  

The stuff with Mary Anne and Logan's relationship was kind of weird.  The two become a couple and Mary Anne is overwhelmed with how much things change; they get invited to sit in the "couples lounge" at lunch, Logan gets kind of peer pressured into taking Mary Anne on a really fancy date for Valentine's Day, and Mary Anne's friends stop inviting her to some things because they assume she'd rather hang out with him.  Mary Anne's dad eventually has a talk with her and tells her that she and Logan don't have to be a couple, they can just be friends who like each other, which is good advice, I guess, but I feel like another option was that they could still be a couple, just not LIKE THAT.  That's basically what they wind up doing, but junior high relationships weren't really like that anyway, were they?  Hmm.

I also really appreciated how Jessi's mom was just like, "Oh, you are NOT giving up ballet just because you didn't get the lead in one show."  I think what happened there was Jessi went from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond, which happens to everyone sooner or later, and it's probably good that Jessi got that experience out of the way so young.

Finally, I'm sure I mentioned this in my first season review, but how brilliant was it of them to cast Alicia Silverstone as Kristy's mom? She was like ICONIC to us 90s teens.

Anyway, can't wait for season three! Great job, show!