Jason: Ups, Downs, Sights, and Sounds in Marathon Training on the Road

I reflected back on this big part of my experience in our four weeks on the road. In my marathon training plan, the four weeks coincided with a wave of increasing mileage week per week, in total managing 173 miles, with 8,595 feet of elevation gain in the 24 hours and 21 minutes I spent pounding the pavement, trails, and beaches.

While the first week of our trip was an easy week in my plan, things got more complicated as the load increased. In week 2 in particular, we found ourselves boxed in by mountains in most places, so I had no choice but to do hills, and lots of 'em! Three days in a row Strava (the app I use for run tracking) showed I gained more than 600 feet of elevation, which is a lot for a Manhattanite!

I also encountered the most difficult run conditions I've ever attempted at Crater Lake. It was truly epic - High altitude, sharp elevation changes, forest fire smoke, and terrain that alternated between rocky climbs/descents and soft sand. It's the first run I've done in years where I had to walk for stretches, due to steepness or tricky terrain, usually both. Intending to do 14 miles, by 3 I knew this was just stupid difficult, so I turned back and called it a day at 5 miles.

Yeah, that was nuts.

But with mountains come great views, and there were plenty of them! By the third week I had accepted that I needed to take it easy when in mountainous and high-altitude terrain, and just enjoy the scenery. Here are some of my favorites:

Running the rim of the Grand Canyon

Looking inland from Malibu

Above the beach in Carpinteria 

Just a silhouette of Wizard Island in Crater Lake

Mount Hood from the Oregon High Desert

Swans in the mouth of the Yellowstone River

Looking down the sulfur walls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

The Tetons from Swan Lake

The namesake of Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Another challenging issue was time - We kept a pretty aggressive travel schedule, usually counting on 3-5 hours of driving each day along with sight-seeing. Between prep, running time, stretching, and cleaning up, I needed between 1.5 and 3.5 hours to accomplish a run, so we had to get creative many times by:

1. Shifting the time of day of the run from my morning routine (sometimes bringing challenges like afternoon heat, higher altitude, or darkness... yeah, I twice ran with a headlamp)
2. Switching around workouts, like moving a long run to an earlier day to leave a shorter one on a bigger sight-seeing day
3. Getting up before dawn and heading out in the cold
4. Just plain cutting down the miles in a run

My final run on the road I had planned with my great friend Steve well in advance - we both signed up for a 10k race on Labor Day in his home city of Minneapolis. The run went perfectly - I had a goal pace in mind, and managed to hold it through the whole 6.2 miles to finish in 41:21, more than 2 minutes faster than I ran my last 10k race in April. I could really tell that training for a marathon, including the previous four weeks, was having some great effects! It was a fulfilling way to cap off a month of challenges and beauty.

Mission accomplished!