Berlin Marathon Training: Week Seven

Almost two months ago, I wrote:

My milestone check-in is the San Francisco half at the end of July — the longest long run I’ll have done to that point. If I get there, and things go well, I’ll keep pushing for Berlin.

Well. I’m pushing.

This week my long run hit 14 miles, 13.1 of which came during the San Francisco Marathon First Half. I’ll be giving that a separate recap — no, it wasn’t really a “race,” but it was interesting exercise in running my pace in a crowd, which isn’t bad practice for a 40,000-person marathon — but the main takeaway is that while I might not have any speed right now, my endurance is my strength.

I’m going to take week eight as my cutback week; it seems to lend itself better to a build-and-recover cycle — OK, not like I know what I’m talking about, but it at least looks like neater blocks: a long run of 8 this week, then 16-18-20-15, then 22-15-8-26.2. I’ve been building nonstop since the beginning of June, and it seems right somehow to close out the first half (!) of training with some recovery.

Here’s how week seven played out:

Monday: Five miles, including a loop of Stow Lake. I felt like I was running faster than I actually was — not that my effort was high, just that I felt, I dunno, sleeker than normal — so I was a little disappointed to discover a 9:25/mile pace, but that’s all mental; the point is, I felt strong.

Tuesday: Morning ride on my old Wildflower training route, only with just one trip up the Legion of Honor hill, all of which I spent grunting and cursing and wondering how I used to do that four or five times in a row. In total, 12 miles in just over an hour, including a lot of stoplights. Yoga at night.

Wednesday: I got major stoplight rage on this run; it felt like I spent the first mile waiting at one intersection or another. I’d planned to continue into a neighborhood that would have had even more stoplights, decided that would just be setting me up for a no good, very bad day, and tacked on some extra miles in the park instead. Wednesdays seem to be for accidental progression runs; this one started with a 10:14 mile and descended every mile to a 9:04.

Thursday: Pilates fail. Again. For the second time, I signed up for a 7:30 a.m. class only to show up to a locked building. I bought three classes at the studio with a Groupon-type deal; I complained after the first canceled class, but at this point I’m just chalking it up to a $30 lesson learned, the lesson being that I will never go back there. Got a ride home and did a long set of PT exercises instead.

Friday: Aquajog with my pool-running buddy; our conversation kept me in the pool for an extra 10 minutes, ending the day with “5 miles” (per Cris‘s formula).

Saturday: Rest. Highlights included packet pick-up and expo sample-trolling, eating two different kinds of meatballs for two different meals, and watching as many hours of Olympics coverage as there were hours with my eyes open. Got into bed around 10 p.m. and read myself to sleep ahead of my 4:30 a.m. wake-up call.

Sunday: 14-mile long run, including a one-mile warm-up (9:45ish, too fast but fueled by a comedy of errors including a missing cab and a missing key) and then the San Francisco Marathon First Half in 2:13:31, a 10:12/mile pace. More to come, but this was by far the strongest I’ve ever felt at the end of a race — yes, probably because I wasn’t “racing,” but even so, I ran Nike, a similar course, a handful of seconds slower last fall. This tied for the most miles I’ve ever run in a day, and I felt like I could have run home after.

Week Seven by the Numbers

• 24 miles run, plus “five miles” in the pool
• 12 miles biked
• One post-race Irish coffee consumed
• Four sample Larabars pocketed at the race expo
• One out-of-town running blogger met (hi, Susan!)
• Two alarms unheard on SF Half race morning

Less-Wordy-Than-Usual Wednesday: Stamps

I will not miss this passport photo.

OK, there was one nice thing about it: I never had to wonder what the worst photo ever taken of me would look like. Because I had that photo. It’s right there.

I was 20 when I got that passport. I remember standing in the post office in downtown Erie, PA, as the clerk took photo after photo, struggling to view them on the bulky digital camera they’d just started using for passport photos, finally declaring she’d gotten something suitable. I shudder to think what the others looked like.

So no, I will not miss this passport photo.

But I will miss these stamps.

A record of a life lived. Our honeymoon to Madeira, when we almost got stuck in Lisbon and boarded the plane with hand-written tickets. Paris, just months later, when we’d gotten paid a ludicrous lump sum to move out of our old apartment and decided to spend it in another country. Costa Rica, where we crashed someone else’s 30th birthday party in the jungle.

I didn’t plan for my passport year to line up with my decade, but I’m glad it does. Starting my 30s with a literal fresh book. Blank pages to fill.

I eagerly await my new license to adventure.

Berlin Marathon Training: Week Six

I started this week of Berlin Marathon training nervous that it was going to be an injury-filled disaster. I ended it with one of the most delightful and well-executed long runs of my life. Week six, I want to hug you.

Backing up: My right IT band started feeling tight, but not stabby, during last weekend’s 10-miler. One of my problems with running injuries over the years is that I don’t get (or don’t properly interpret) many warning signs, so noticing the tightness was sort of a relief, because then I could make a plan. Said plan: lots of ice, lots of rolling, bonus PT exercises, and planning my routes so that I had plenty of escape hatches if the stabby pain showed up. I ended the week with no new pain and all of my miles, so I think I’ve got a maintenance plan going forward.

And hell, I will replace my couch with a pile of foam rollers* if it means every long run can feel as good as Saturday’s. Twelve miles through Golden Gate Park and along the ocean, each one feeling easier than the last. I focused on starting conservatively, because of the distance and the hills from miles 7-10, and by the end I was consciously holding back. Granted, the last few miles are downhill, but sometimes that can be its own kind of torture when I’m tired. This was a run where if someone had stopped me as I turned for home and said, “Just kidding! You have to run three more miles!” I would have done so gladly.

*My couch is not very comfortable. A pile of foam rollers would almost certainly be an upgrade.

This weekend brings the San Francisco half marathon — a probable Personal Worst, which is fine by me — as part of a 14-mile day. The next two weekends are most likely a cutback week and another half-as-training-run in the middle of a 16-miler, but the order is TBD until after San Francisco. (I’m trying my new Zen approach to race registration.) The summer is flying; our RSVPs for our gazillion September weddings are sent, and I need to hustle on renewing my passport — actually stopped in the middle of writing this to call AAA to make sure they take photos — so I can, you know, get to Berlin. It’s all happening!

As for the week that was:

Monday: In the morning, five miles (three in the Panhandle, two in the Mission). My legs felt like tree trunks, but a little tweak to a couple of my regular routes made the miles tick by quickly, and I was glad to be able to keep going when I passed my apartment at mile 3. PT stuff at night.

Tuesday: In the morning, 1200 yards of swimming (some drills, then alternating 200 pull/200 swim, and a 100 for time at the end). Vinyasa yoga in the evening.

Wednesday: Five miles along the Embarcadero, feeling like I was waking up a little more with every one. Not planned as a progression run; was one anyway.

Thursday: Rest.

Friday: 45 minutes of morning pool-running during which I met the other pool-runner!(!!) We split a lane and chatted for about half of my “run.” I remain overly excited about this. Quick PT exercises after work.

Saturday: 12.1 lovely miles in 2:04. Splits ranged from 9:54 to 10:35; this route is 2 miles uphill/3 miles downhill/2 miles flat/3 miles uphill/2 miles downhill, so not great for even pacing but good for practicing steady effort. Lovely weather, great soundtrack (This American Life, Firewall and Iceberg, and RadioLab), and just a very comfortable run all around. No reason for it, either: I botched breakfast and ate something I’d never eaten for this distance, didn’t get a ton of sleep, and drank a strong beer just before midnight the night before, not exactly the classic recipe for an awesome long run.

Stuff nobody but me will care about: It was a sunny and warm (… for San Francisco) day. I took my 10-ounce handheld bottle with half a Nuun tab and sipped on it over the first nine miles, then refilled at the fountain on top of The Awful Hill (hill #3 of 4 on the return leg) and drained all 10 ounces over the next three miles — which probably means I should have been drinking more earlier. Ate a ThinkThin bar before leaving home and nibbled on a peanut butter Gu (new flavor for me; I like it!) starting around mile 6. Other than the water stop and one quick bathroom stop around mile 5, everything felt smooth. Even The Awful Hill didn’t feel so awful, and I’m thinking that might be my triathlon fitness paying off, because even after months of relatively little running, my endurance seems steady.

Sunday: Morning bike through the park and around Lake Merced, same loop as last week only slower. One of those rides where I was Just Not Feeling It. Did not want to fight with the wind, did not want to stop at the stoplights, did not want to yell “on your left,” did not want to ride in city traffic. Went anyway, figuring Penelope deserved her weekly care and feeding, but then spent the better part of 90 minutes feeling ragey. In retrospect, I maybe should have gone for a swim. PT stuff after the ride.

Week Six by the Numbers

• 22 miles run
• 21 miles biked
• 20 minutes spent talking the other pool runner’s ear off
• $9 spent on laundry, most of which seemed to be running clothes
• 1 pair of shoes temporarily(?) shelved. Trances, you’re just not working right now.
• Three late-fall races bookmarked while I try not to get ahead of myself.

The 18th Minute, or: Running Stupid

I read an article in last month’s Runner’s World by a lifelong runner who’d been plagued by injuries but had successfully returned to running after changing his form. I didn’t save the piece, because I didn’t consider the possibility that it wouldn’t be posted online in the year 2012, but the basic point I remember was this: While the author was thrilled to be running again, he found that the constant string of mental cues he used to maintain his new form killed the joy that used to kick in around the 18th minute of every run. Before, when the 18th minute rolled around, he could shut off his brain and relax; now, that minute, and every other minute, came and went and he was just as keyed up as ever, thinking about running, not letting go.

I related. Related is a weak word; I wanted to pull out a highlighter and bracket key phrases and maybe hang the thing on my wall to remind me that I am not the only person who’s ever felt like a stranger in his or her own body while running. (And I’m not the only person: Lauren at Health on the Run recently wrote about running feeling mechanical, not peaceful, after an injury. Clearly, this is common.)

But honestly? I was never a runner whose mind switched off when her feet hit the ground. I started running when I was 25, after approximately 24 years of avoiding it, and it never felt easy or natural. I always felt awkward, lumbering down the sidewalk, feeling like I was taking up more space and making more noise than anyone around me. It was a lesser evil than the gym, so I kept doing it, but running didn’t click for me until I ran more than five miles and realized that my own joy came more from covering distance and being outside (and, frankly, getting caught up in entertaining podcasts) than from any particular freedom in the movement itself.

My “18th minute” is something a little different. I miss being an ignorant runner — in the ignorance-is-bliss sense of the word.

When I started running, I ran in some crap shoes from DSW. I … might have stretched — I was doing a lot of yoga at the time, so maybe I just got by with that — but I certainly didn’t know what a foam roller was. (A trainer at my gym tried to explain it once; I didn’t understand why sitting on the black hurty thing would be good for my workouts.) I didn’t think about how many miles per week I was running, or whether I was running too fast or too slowly, or whether I’d run too many days or not enough. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t know that I didn’t know what I was doing, and it was awesome.

Sometime in that first spring of regular running, someone told me about Shoe Dog, a service at the local RoadRunner that would look at my gait and get me in proper running shoes. I got injured for the first time that summer, and saw a podiatrist, and got told my shoes were all wrong and my feet were a mess, and got orthotics, and got other shoes, and got injured, and got told my shoes were all wrong, and got injured, and I really don’t need to write the rest because if you just repeat that cycle about six times, you’ll get to today.

I also always got better, and I ran a bunch of 10Ks and half-marathons and learned to love longer and longer distances and had the confidence to sign up for a marathon. It shouldn’t sound like it was all dire, because it wasn’t all dire, or I would have ditched running for something else long ago.

But somewhere in the mess of shoes and insoles and resistance bands and PT exercises and spreadsheets calculating exactly what 10% weekly mileage increases look like, running became high-maintenance. Or rather, I became high-maintenance. I didn’t lose the sense of freedom and clarity and peace that came from running, because that was never my relationship with running. But I did lose the freedom and clarity and peace that came with knowing I could go for a damn run — when I wanted to, where I wanted to, for how long I wanted to, without worrying about whether I was going to have enough time to stretch and ice and MYRTL after and whether my glutes felt sufficiently activated.

Is that a breakable cycle?

Once you’ve been introduced to the things you are doing wrong (or “doing wrong,” or at the very least could be doing differently) in the world of running, is it possible to go back to running stupid?

I don’t know; I don’t even know if I would want to, because I look back and think about that 25-year-old who basically decided one day that she could run three miles in her DSW shoes because why not, and I think: Well, duh, you introduced your body to a whole new activity without any prep or care; of course you were going to get injured. But maybe that’s my high-maintenance brain stomping all over my young, silly, carefree brain, still stuck in its blissful but unsustainable 18th minute.

Now I’m picturing brains with feet and if I were Shelby I’d MS Paint the shit out of that, but I’m not, so I’ll shut up and end with a question: If you’ve gone through a similar ignorant-runner-(or -athlete-of-whatever-persuasion)-to-high-maintenance-runner/athlete transition, what do you miss about your old self? And what would you not want back?

Berlin Marathon Training: Week Five

This was the week that playlists came back.

Until now, I haven’t needed more than one podcast or the same eight songs that have been on my Shuffle since March to get through my miles. But with my total running time topping four hours this week, I finally had cause to spend some quality time with iTunes. Right now I’m binging on WTF with Mark Maron interviews; why run alone when you can run with Amy Poehler?

This was also the week that double digits came back. I liked my PT’s suggestion of taking a cutback week soonish, but I also didn’t want to lose any of the milestone runs (16, 18, 20, 22) on my training plan for August and September. The best option seemed to be bumping my next three long run distances up; I’ve been feeling good enough that one or two more miles per week really shouldn’t wreck me. (Shouldn’t doesn’t mean won’t, but I’ve been so conservative until now that I’m hopeful.) So I ran 10 miles on Saturday instead of my planned nine, cementing my belief that I really shouldn’t even bother putting a nine-miler on a training plan, because I’ll never run it anyway.

Ten miles is my favorite distance, and it’s also the last distance I ran before the whole Sparkle Leg injury fiasco, so I was nervous — actually nervous! — about this run. I expected everything to go wrong, or maybe more accurately, I expected everything to seem to go right but then I’d wake up on Sunday with some new debilitating injury. But I did my best to relax once I actually got on the road, and my body seems to have responded by remaining in one piece. My right IT band is a little tight — actually, the left one seems tighter, but it doesn’t tend to yell at me like the right one does — but I’m spending lots of time torturing it and my cats with the foam roller and it felt good on this morning’s run. I’m being mindful of it without freaking out.

Also of note this week was spending Sunday afternoon volunteering at my tri club’s aid station at the Vineman 70.3. A bunch of my TAG teammates went on to train for Vineman post-Wildflower, and it was a blast to see them come through. This was my first race volunteering experience, and in the words of one of my fellow volunteers, I like cowbell-ing at least as much as racing. My shift started right as the bulk of the pack was coming through, and for the first 90 minutes I barely saw anything besides the tops of the water cups I was filling. But as things got a little calmer and people came through in groups of 10 and 20 rather than 50+, we turned our attention to cheering our faces off. It was a hot day, and some people were feeling rough, and I know there’s only so much that ice and pretzels and shot bloks can fix, but we did what we could. My favorite part was that, because of the long out-and-back in the middle of the run, we saw a bunch of the same runners after we had closed our station and they were several miles further along — and then saw them again as we drove past the finish. And um. You know. It just fanned the flames of certain triathlon desires.

But that’s for later. Here’s now.

Monday: Rest. Semi-unplanned, but we didn’t walk in the door until after midnight and my body was still on Chicago time.

Tuesday: Four miles through the Panhandle and just into the park. I always dread four-milers; adding one mile to this route also adds four stoplights, and this is the least stoplight-y route I can access from my door. I’ll be happy to bump my weekday mileage up again just to avoid this. A glorious return to yoga at night, during which I almost fell asleep in pigeon pose.

Wednesday: In the morning, 40 minutes of pool-running and a few hundred yards of swimming. The lifeguard knows my name now. Progress?

Thursday: Five miles of remembering why I prefer morning runs. I slept in and figured, hey, that’s fine, I’ll just run after work, work means I’m closer to my favorite five-mile route anyway, no big deal. Right, except my stomach hates when I run after a day of eating, so this was more like run 3.5 comfortable miles / spend the next .5 mile frantically tugging on the doors of various (locked) ferry terminals / alternately sprint and shuffle toward a Fisherman’s Wharf public bathroom / jog back.

Friday: Bonus rest day to flip my schedule back to normal after travel weeks.

Saturday: Ten miles. TEN miles. TEN MILES. I kept telling myself to take it slow, and easy, and easier — “stupid-easy” was the actual phrase. Pete and I ran the first five together, then he took the longer route back from the ocean and I headed back solo (though Pete later caught me about a mile from home). It’s still weird for me to celebrate slow splits instead of “fast” ones, but I ended up at 10:13/mile average, with all but one very downhill mile over 10. I should keep inching that slower as my runs get longer, but I’m a person with approximately three gears — sprinting, normal running, walking — so as long as it feels “stupid-easy,” I’m going to believe it’s right.

Sunday: An early bike ride around Lake Merced, 21 miles total. The wind was awful on the way out, but I knew — in that way you come to know when wind has been your nemesis throughout your rookie cycling season — that if I could just stick it out, the tailwind on the way home would feel amazing. I always think I’ll like riding around Lake Merced more than I do — it’s more crowded than I expect, even early, and there’s so much “on your left”-ing — but it’s a nice long-ish loop that requires no driving and minimal prep, so I really don’t have much to whine about.

Week Five by the Numbers

• 19 miles run, plus four more “run” in the pool
• 21 miles biked
• Two loaves of pumpkin bread baked
• Six episodes of WTF listened to
• Two or three alarms slept through
• (Only) one tank top bought at the GapFit sale, an exercise in restraint

End of the First Quarter

It occurred to me only after posting my week four recap that I’m a quarter of the way through Berlin training. September is now just a pair of month-clicks ahead on my Google Calendar, and while running a race on the very last day of a month has a way of making time feel deceptively compressed, I am still kind of running a marathon in two months, in the sense that said marathon takes place in the month that is two months from now.

That’s … nuts, basically, because I don’t feel like I’m training. It feels more like I’m “pre-training,” or “base-building,” or some other euphemism for running with slightly more purpose than I otherwise would — but a marathon, a whole twenty-six-point-damn-two, seems very far from where I am. Hell, my longest long run has not yet been a third of marathon distance. It’s still a long road.

But the road from “five-plus weeks of no running” to here was a long road, too, and I don’t want to lose sight of that. I never want to train for another marathon this way; I want more of a base, more time, more leeway, more cutback weeks, more total miles. But this is the way Berlin is going to happen, and do you see that? I’m finally starting to believe that Berlin is going to happen, and that makes me eager for, not apprehensive about, the weeks ahead.

Other thoughts from the first quarter:

• Sparkle Leg is, by and large, fine. It’s not 100%, maybe it will never be 100%, but most days I don’t think about it for even a second, and that is so far from where I was in March and April that it’s stunning. Every so often, there’s a bad day, but I have mostly managed to calm myself down with reminders that bad days happen and unless there are several bad days in a row, I shouldn’t panic.
• On that note, I “graduated” from physical therapy yesterday, and in all honesty I probably should have a couple of sessions ago, but I wanted to get solidly above my Wildflower average weekly mileage first. I’ve been over that total for a couple of weeks now, and even though I keep coming up with yet another milestone that will make me more comfortable flying the coop (10-mile long run! 20-mile weeks!), it’s time to move on. My PT is confident that if I keep doing what I’m doing, I should get through September, and I’m trying to absorb some of that confidence, too.
• I’m still a little freaked out by the relentless build in the second half of this plan. The SF Half is the halfway point, and that will be a great milestone, but going from a long run of 13.1 to double that distance in just eight weeks (including taper!) seems absurd. My PT is encouraging me to add another cutback week, too, so I need to do some number-monkeying and see if I can find a place for it.
• One option to create that space would be to move my long-run mileage up a week (10 instead of 9 this week, 12 the week after that), so I’d actually run 14 or 15 the day of the SF Half. This amuses me because for one reason or another, I have dropped a 9-miler from every. single. training. plan. ever. The only time I can think of that I ran 9 and only 9 miles was when it just happened to be the length of an out-and-back I ran when I wasn’t training for anything.
• Between weekends in Philadelphia, Michigan, and Chicago, I still haven’t done a long run in San Francisco. Frankly, it’s a relief, because I overuse my standard park loop for both running and biking and the potential for burnout is high.
• Runger has started to hit for the first time in a while, so apparently I need to start thinking about training nutrition again. I want to get smarter about both what and when I eat, especially on either side of long runs but even for weekday runs. My pre-run nutrition is pretty limited by what my stomach can handle, but I’m satisfied with my options. After, though, I’m kind of a disaster, either waiting too long to eat or eating something frankly inappropriate for recovery. (Bag of Starburst jelly beans, I’m looking at you.) Anyone have any favorite resources?
• I’m a pretty conflict-avoidant person, but man, I am so glad I fought for pool-running. My weekly session is about as close as I can get to a fourth day of running, and I’m actually enjoying it, thanks to a healthy selection of podcasts. I’ve had to go in the morning a couple of times when my least-favorite lifeguard is there, but I am slowly winning him over .
• I’m glad I’m not focusing on speed for any of my runs, because, um, I don’t have any. Sometimes I drive to the pool-running pool and pass the track, and I get this overwhelming nostalgia for track workouts, which I don’t even like all that much.
• My endurance has come back faster, but the last mile of any new long run distance is rough. I’m now even more certain that I’d like to run a longest run of 22, not 20; four miles in uncharted territory just sounds better to me than six.
• Starting marathon training right after a significant break is probably dumb on a lot of levels, but combining the promise of a first marathon with the “every! run! is! magic!” thing I always get after a layoff is pretty sweet. The idea of skipping a run hasn’t crossed my mind yet.
• That said: I keep thinking about triathlons. Someone accidentally sent a training kickoff note to my TAG group (instead of the summer TAG group) this week, and I wished it had actually been for me. Hm.

Berlin Marathon Training: Week 4

If there’s anything that illustrates the giant chasm between my pre-running days and today, it’s my attitude toward exercise on vacation. Pre-running, vacation was an excuse to skip my routine elliptical session and, for that matter, all exercise besides walking for the duration of the trip. Now, it’s an excuse to take in the local scenery from the multi-use paths, bodies of water, and other recreational venues — the more, the better.

So: Berlin Marathon training week 4 should probably be known as The Week I Didn’t Leave the Water. I ended up in a lake — be it Crystal or Michigan — at least one more time each day from Monday to Thursday, swimming easy freestyle laps and jumping off the Frankfort breakwater and perfecting my handstands and underwater backflips. I even briefly contemplated twisting our schedule in knots to squeeze in one more swim before Friday’s drive to Chicago, though a desire for more than three hours of sleep won out over sunrise laps.

Vacation ended with a long weekend in Chicago with college friends. When we met, they were both athletic — a swimmer and a soccer player — and I was decidedly not; now our trio is two triathletes and a marathoner, a boggling evolution from 12 years ago. We spent the weekend exploring some old college haunts by foot and by boat, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Chicago River kayaking

Monday: 1600-ish yards of swimming in Crystal Lake, in between the docks that seemed so far apart the first time I visited Crystal three years ago. I’m not sure if my stroke count was slightly off or if I really lose *that* much time on the wall at the pool — either seems possible — but I saw some times for 100s that I haven’t seen since the heart of Wildflower training.

Tuesday: Four miles — two comfortable and two steamy — on the road that rims Crystal Lake. After swearing not to run at noon again while in the midwest, I headed out for this run a whopping 15 minutes earlier. In my defense, it had been pouring for much of the morning but the storm didn’t seem to be doing much to cool things off, so I figured I’d rather get out while it was cloudy than wait till later when I’d be contending with the sun. The plan half-worked.

Wednesday: Another 1600-ish yards in Crystal Lake, this time exploring the whole far buoy line before retreating to the docks (the far line stretched roughly a quarter-mile, all the way to the shallows at the end of our little beach, but it was too shallow to be really enjoyable). This was the day all my relatives got swimmer’s itch from the warm, still water; I either didn’t get it or didn’t react as strongly, but it soured me on Crystal for the rest of the trip, and I was happy to spend the rest of my water time in Lake Michigan.

Thursday: In the morning/early afternoon, a 24.5-mile ride around Crystal Lake with Pete and his mom. The 2009 version of this ride is the one that convinced me a triathlon wasn’t an unreasonable reach, and it’s good I had such fond memories, because had I really remembered the horridness of the gravel-and-sand stretch that makes up the second quarter of the ride, I might not have been as enthusiastic about doing it again. Regardless, it’s mostly a beautiful ride, flat except for a few hills into downtown (a challenge on my borrowed hybrid), and excellently laid out to provide for a Cherry Hut lunch stop at the halfway point. After a couple of hours of recovery, we drove to the little lakefront town of Empire, ran four late-afternoon miles, changed into swimsuits, and plunged into Lake Michigan until we cooled down.

Friday: Rest — including an appropriate number of hours of sleep in an actual bed (not an airplane seat).

Saturday: 90 minutes of kayaking on the Chicago River. Highly recommended. We’d thought about doing a tour, but the tours were all booked, so we opted to rent three single kayaks by the hour and forge our own path. Given the size and (lack of) speed of the groups we passed, I think we chose well. We barreled through our rental place’s suggested route and then some, collectively losing one iPhone but gaining one coconut and a lovely new perspective of Chicago.

Sunday: A long run of 8 miles — five with friends, three solo — on the lakefront path. This is the path where I routinely rollerbladed double-digit routes in college; I know it well. So I was a little embarrassed that I forgot how to get onto the bridge to Navy Pier, leading to a 1.5-mile detour (including a stretch of the Magnificent Mile) before we could get back on track. We ran north past the Oak Street beach (where the waves were rocking and crashing over the retaining wall; I was getting seasick just looking at the handful of swimmers), turned and ran past the Drake, and took the right route to catch the Navy Pier bridge on the second try, where we hit the five-mile mark and I bid my friends farewell. My goal for the final three miles was to get to see my favorite view of the city, even if it meant running a little more or a little less than planned.

Not from yesterday. From 2004. Still lovely.

As it turned out, I hit 1.5 miles right at my favorite spot at the back of the Shedd Aquarium — even more of a favorite on this run because the Shedd was running its sprinklers. Dazzled by the view and cooled by the spray, I wrapped up the run with an average pace of 10:01/mile — still too fast, but pulled a bit by a 9:10 mile we logged while dodging and weaving through throngs of strolling tourists.

Week 4 by the numbers:

• 16 miles of running + 2 miles of swimming and 24.5 miles of biking
• 23 total vacation miles (including last Sunday’s 7)
• 1 new blister … on my thumb, from kayaking.
• 7,038 bug bites/swimmer’s itch bumps.
• 2 breakwater jumps … first and last, most likely, because that is some scary business.

Berlin Marathon Training: Week Three

Greetings from here:

“Here” is a cottage near Lake Michigan and on the shores of Crystal Lake, pictured in the photo above and my backyard for the next 4.5 days. Pete’s family owns the place and has been coming here for years; it’s only my second stay, but I can understand why everyone speaks of “the cottage” in such reverent tones. It’s beautiful.

In some ways — OK, in every conceivable way — the cottage is also the beginning of my triathlon story. Three years ago, the first time I stayed here, I’d just taken my first round of swimming lessons as an adult; Crystal Lake was my first open-water swim. This morning, as I swam a mile of laps between the docks, I remembered how on that swim, I’d pop up halfway through the lap, out of breath and disoriented, trying to figure out how I’d gotten so off-course when it felt like I was swimming in a straight line. But I loved swimming in Crystal then — the perfectly cool water, the tiny swells from passing boats, the they-really-weren’t-kidding-with-the-name water that I could see through all the way to the sandy bottom — and by the end of that trip, I knew I had the confidence to swim more and swim longer.

The bigger thing, though, was biking. It wasn’t the first time I biked as an adult; that had been a few weeks earlier, in Maine, when I spent half our rental window sobbing in a parking lot and the other half tentatively riding the Acadia carriage roads. But it was the first “real” ride, 20 miles around the lake (with a giant deli sandwich in the middle) on a rented hybrid. It would take another 18 months for me to actually buy a bike, to believe I could ride it in the city, but the seeds were planted here.

So what I guess I’m saying is, Week 4 of Berlin Marathon training is going to be spectacular, taking place as it is in one of my favorite places for sports in the whole wide world.

Week 3, on the other hand, was a bit of a mess. There must be some law that says the week before a vacation has to be the craziest week, just to guarantee you appreciate the break even more. Nothing really went wrong, per se, but it didn’t quite go according to plan, either.

Monday: A 60-minute Core Align class at a pilates studio for which I had an expiring pass. I traditionally have terrible luck with any form of exercise that can be referred to as a “method” (see also: the one time I did Dailey Method and really felt like I was doing things right and working hard and then woke up the next day with the insides of my elbows sore and nothing else), and this was no real exception. That said, I was thrilled to remember I booked an evening class the day after returning from Philadelphia, because no way in hell was I going to get out of bed even a second before required for work.

Tuesday: Three speedy-for-these-days miles through the panhandle with Courtney in the morning, and physical therapy stuff at night. Meant to get to yoga, but I was handing off our keys to a friend who’s watching our cats while we’re away, misjudged the time, and learned that no, I cannot make a 10-minute walk take 5 minutes.

Wednesday: Morning pool-running and a little bit of swimming at UCSF. My least-favorite lifeguard was there and gave me a skeptical look when I asked for a running belt but still fetched one; I’m 2 for 2 now, hooray. More excitingly, I spotted another pool-runner, though the lifeguard put me in a different lane and so I didn’t get to talk to her about running and pool-running and what was her schedule and could we please hang out all the time and pool-run together? (What? How do YOU make friends?) In total, 30 minutes of pool-running, 15 minutes of swimming.

Thursday: Pilates fail. Woke up early to take my last class on the expiring deal, only to find out it had been canceled. This is where I would put my rant about how if a studio requires a 12-hour cancellation policy for its clients, I’d suggest it also have a 12-hour cancellation and, more importantly, notification policy for its offerings, but they’ve extended my card an additional month, so I’ll back off. Ended up running four miles with no particular planned route; I don’t have a route of that distance that I love, so it was fun to play around … even though I did end up with an all-uphill first mile.

Friday: Leaving-town craziness kept me up too late and foiled my 6 a.m. wake-up plans, so no bike ride. Instead, PT stuff while watching DVR’d Olympic trials.

Saturday: Rest, by which I mean “sleep a little on a redeye and then sit in a car for six hours getting to the cottage.” Both of my last two rest days have come after redeye flights, which makes them not terribly restful; this is something I need to work on.

Sunday: Seven miles (10:16 average pace) around the cottage and out to the Point Betsie lighthouse on Lake Michigan. I’d had a few strange, niggling pains all week — the balls of both feet, the side of my right foot — that continue to raise overcorrection questions in my mind and led to a much more stressful decision about which shoes to bring on this trip than I anticipated, so I was thrilled that this run went well with regard to all things musculoskeletal. It was, however, pretty rough, probably due to starting at noon. Yeah. I know. The heat was actually fine, and I felt incredible for the first three miles, constantly reminding myself to pull back and really fighting myself to get the pace into the 10s. But boy, did I pay for that on the return. I kept imagining my head as a red balloon/cherry lollipop/insert-heat-metaphor-here, and staying in the 10s and out of the 11s was harder than I wanted it to be for a long run. It also occurred to me after finishing that it was the longest run I’d done since January; I think that’s allowed to feel hard. I actually felt great after, though, so I think the main lesson is maybe run before noon (or after 8?) next time.

Week Three Totals

• 14-ish miles run, plus “three miles” in the pool
• 2 states run in
• 2 social runs
• 10 ounces of water finished in the first three miles of a 7-miler with no water fountains, whoops
• Three giggle fits nearly had at names of moves in Core Align