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2016 pony express marathon – pt. 1

2016 pony express marathon – pt. 1

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It has been a week (and change) now that I had the opportunity to run Sacramento’s inaugural Pony Express Marathon, and after drafting some thoughts now for about as long, I’m coming to the conclusion that, well, I have a lot of conclusions.

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My Sac-based friend Chris led PEM’s inaugural ambassador group, and I’m never one to shy away from a free marathon entry or to helping a new race gain some traction, so I joined in the efforts last summer and committed to running the marathon. May in Sacramento can be hot – and usually, for as warm as SJ is, Sac is typically even warmer because it’s further inland – and truth be told, I kinda banked on PEM being a hot race. It was this predetermined notion of mine that led me (in part) to register for Modesto and run my first marathon at 7 months postpartum, instead of 8, because I figured the likelihood of a really warm day in late March wasn’t as guaranteed as a warm (or even really warm) day the first weekend in May. Plus, a bunch of friends I’ve met since moving here were also going to be PEM ambassadors, so the race weekend would be a little reunion of sorts. All things considered, I figured I’d be at least setting myself up for a fun weekend, regardless of how the race fared.

PEM training and goals/expectations

The Modesto to PEM turn-around was relatively tight, six weeks, and even though I felt aokay soon after Modesto, I wanted to respect the recovery process (and, admittedly, get some more sleep) and laid low on my mileage for those first two weeks immediately after. I decided somewhat early on that I wouldn’t incorporate any hard speed stuff in those interim six weeks – again, respecting the recovery process, which includes mental recovery as well – and that I’d just focus on maintaining fitness. Rationally, I knew that I wouldn’t lose everything in six weeks’ time, but I also wanted some peace of mind going into PEM that I was in a good place, physically; marathons are challenging any day of the week, so even if it’s a free race – and thus, I don’t feel like I’m on the hook for anything – I figure it still kinda behooves me to not put myself out there only to blow up.

As wonderful as my intentions were – to get in some good long runs, to do “speed lite” (fartleks, pickups, that sort of thing), habitual core work like I was doing before – as the few weeks I had between Modesto and PEM unfolded, my intentions remained just that: intentions. I wouldn’t blame any_one or any_thing for my abbreviated training volume – something like sub-20 miles, sub-20, about 30, about 50, about 30, and then race week that had about 40 and change, if memory serves, with only 2 10 milers (one while pushing a stroller) and one 18 miler as my “long runs” in all of those weeks – I will admit that I felt like I just needed a break after Modesto. I wanted to keep running and training, no doubt, but my sleep has been more unpredictable and harder to come by, as Spike’s needs and sleep both have changed in that short period between Modesto and PEM (read: teething, gah). On many days when I’d find myself awake at all hours of the night with the baby, the last thing I wanted to do was to stay up and just go do my run a little earlier than usual or, conversely, stay up extra-late and do it when the family was down for the night. My days (and nights, sometimes) are already long and full and wonderful, but sleep is critical.

I had momentum in my Modesto training because I was basically doing everything again for the first time – running big distances again for the first time in a year, running fast again, all that stuff – and thus, I felt like I absolutely needed to figure out a way to make all the speed and distance runs, in particular, happen. I absolutely needed the physiological training benefits and stimuli to get me ready for Modesto, but I also needed the mental and confidence sides, too. With the short time between Modesto and PEM, I think both my brain and body knew that if a run didn’t happen – because I absolutely needed to sleep, because I needed a mental reset, whatever – it wasn’t the end of the world. I could try to convince my body and my mind that I absolutely needed to figure out a way to make shit happen so that I could run, but it was no use; it’s like it just knew.

In my little notebook of scribbles that helps guide these posts, I have an entire page filled out for a post that I was going to write that’d explain what my training looked like for PEM, with all sorts of explanations for why things looked the way they did. With the previous few paragraphs in mind, suffice it to say that it wasn’t great or what I imagined it’d look like. It was enough to maintain fitness – which was what I wanted – and in a way, when I learned that race day would be warm, part of me couldn’t have been happier because suddenly, I was absolved of any guilt for not training as well as I could have in that six-week interim. I don’t enjoy hot-weather racing at all; I haven’t raced a hot marathon since moving here; and I haven’t done a tight-turnaround marathon since before I had the baby, probably sometime in early 2014, if I recall correctly. Come race weekend, then, I knew I’d be approaching the race as a supported long run – a rare opportunity to just go run, uninterruptedly, for a handful of hours and not worry about needing to take care of anyone or be anywhere – and that I’d have some great opportunities to catch-up with friends. If things felt great – which I doubted would happen, but you never know – maybe I’d try to negative split, but as was more likely the case, I’d just ride out the run and enjoy it.

I guess that’s the thing about marathons; as is often the case, you register for them months in advance, life intervenes, priorities change, whatever, and come race weekend, you aren’t always staring down the race as you might have originally envisioned you would. It has been a long time – years, probably since at least 2010 – where I haven’t toed the line at a marathon in an attempt to PR, and admittedly, sometimes I even discourage people from running marathons “just for fun” because I think that the inherent risks outweigh the benefits for many people.

Lo and behold, though, come the weekend of April 30, I drove over two hours each way to go run 26.2 miles “just for fun,” and even with a somewhat bizarre existential “crisis” over the course of the weekend (and mid-marathon!) about marathons, I couldn’t be happier that I decided to eat my words and go marathon (verb? sure) for the hell of it.

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excuse the sub-par taken-while-walking photography skills of a very yellow bridge separating Sac from West Sac. we’d run over this twice on marathon morning.

(sorry for the break. That sleep thing I mentioned earlier? Yup – need it).

35 by 35: A Runner’s Quest by Taryn Spates

35 by 35: A Runner’s Quest by Taryn Spates

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One thing (among many) that I love about running is our community. Over the years, I have had the pleasure to get to know and befriend many people through running, training, and racing across the country, and I’m pretty sure that with many of those people, I wouldn’t have had the good fortune of interacting with them otherwise. That’s the cool thing about running; when we’re not on the trails together, we all lead such distinctly separate lives as parents/employees/whatever, but when we’re on the run, our singular identity becomes that of a runner, and that’s what binds us together. It’s kinda cool, really.

Soon after my family relocated to the Bay Area, in July 2014, I had the pleasure of running the San Francisco Marathon as a member of TSFM’s race ambassador group, and in the process of being an ambassador for the year leading up to the race, I got to meet many runners, some of whom were Bay Area-based and others who were not. As I wrote about in my recap, I had an excellent second TSFM, and more importantly, it was a really fun weekend with friends old and new.

One of those new friends I had met over the course of TSFM weekend was Taryn Spates, sister to also-new-friend Sarah, who is friends with old-friend-from-Chicago-who-now-lives-here Erin. Finishing TSFM meant a lot of different things for our little gaggle of women that weekend – including some BQ or PR victories – but for Taryn, it signified the culmination of finishing her thirty-fifth marathon by the time she turned 35 years old.

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one of my fav pics because these ladies are wonderful and because we all had a memorable race. TSFM ’14 with L-R Erin, Meg, Taryn, and Sarah

Let that marinade for a minute.

What have you ever done willingly 35 times?

Prior to the race, Erin had mentioned to me that Taryn was in the throes of realizing this “35 by 35” goal of hers and that she was working on a book about it, but I think it was one of those unfortunate in one ear and out the other things for me. Knowing that Taryn had completed her 35th marathon on TSFM race day was cool in and of itself; eventually learning (re-learning) that she was working on a book about her adventures was like the icing.

Earlier this year, when I was posting some book reviews up here about some running-related stuff I had read lately, Taryn dropped me a line and offered to send me a copy of her book, aptly titled 35 by 35: A Runner’s Quest. I won’t say that this is a “sponsored post” or anything like that because while yes, it was free, there was no expectation of me posting a review – it was a gift – but I wanted to take some time to share Taryn’s book because I think it’s a gem. Honestly. I wouldn’t spend my precious time dropping a couple Ks worth of words if I felt otherwise. I think many readers of this blog would appreciate Taryn’s writing and would be equally inspired by her drive to realize her endurance athlete goals.

The executive summary: 35 by 35 is an inspiring, motivating quick read that captures Taryn’s pursuit of finishing 35 marathons – stand-alone marathons and those completed as part of Ironman races – by the time she turned 35 years old. Not every race was pretty, as any runner can attest, but Taryn shows us how she walked away from each experience having learned something about herself as an athlete but also as a person and how each experience further stoked her drive. Along the way, we learn about how the “external factors” of Taryn’s life outside of racing and training – such as her employment (and sometimes, unemployment) in the entertainment industry or her getting married and becoming a stepmother – positively and/or negatively affected her ability to pursue her goals, which, at one time, included becoming a professional triathlete. While we may not be able to understand her unflinching love of the most grueling endurance pursuits out there (we’re talking about a woman who has completed at least nine Ironman-distance races), we can relate to how dearly she holds the endurance community in her heart. I read Taryn’s book in the days leading up to the Modesto Marathon, and I apparently couldn’t have chosen a better time to be reading a book that would help get me back into the marathon mentality. Her ruminations are honest and insightful, funny and refreshing, and when I finished reading her book, I was all-too-eager to go gulp down that marathon koolaid that was awaiting me at Modesto.

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Taryn divides each race experience into its own chapter, with the book going in chronological order, and each race reads like a bird’s-eye-view story or perhaps even like a fairly general race recap that you might encounter on a blog post (but with far less obnoxious language). I got the impression that each chapter/race experience entry could be its own disparate, stand-alone entry (again, kind of like a blog post) and read on its own, since each chapter/race usually doesn’t build much upon the preceding. It’s an interesting balance that Taryn struck here because while each unit could stand alone, the book pretty seamlessly transitions from race to race and isn’t jarring or abrupt.

With endurance events becoming increasingly popular in recent years (particularly at the half marathon distance), more and more people will be able to proudly call themselves endurance athletes, but for the large majority of the population, how and why people could become interested in, if not also addicted to, gruelling events like the marathon or the Ironman distance is beyond comprehension. I totally get it with marathons; with Ironman-distance events, not so much 😉 Taryn’s book shows readers how relatively easy it is to fall down the rabbit hole in this community – particularly after you run your first event and you begin to think about all the ways you can improve at subsequent events. Taryn’s entries unfold this phenomenon nicely, and the conviction in her love of the run permeates her writing in a way that makes it accessible to even the strongest naysayers out there. Dare I say that she helps people “get it,” even when they don’t think they can (or want to).

From her first marathon in San Diego in 2001, when she had “become a grown up” to her thirty-fifth at San Francisco in 2014, so much about Taryn’s life had changed – career, marriage, motherhood, you name it – but one of the only things that remained constant was her drive to be a better athlete, in part inspired by her brother and other friends and family members. This is again something where many of us can relate; like Taryn, we run our first marathon for the experience, and soon after we cross the finish line, we begin scheming about how much time we could imagine taking off by tweaking our training. Once that happens, then we begin to think about what it would take to qualify for Boston. Then once we realize that goal, it becomes about AG placing, and the list goes on.

This isn’t to say that this book is just a laundry list of goals realized; Taryn is quite candid about when things didn’t go well or when shit just sometimes happens – quite literally, as it were – in races. When you’ve been an endurance athlete for so long, as Taryn shows, sometimes you have good seasons and good races, and sometimes things just don’t go according to plan. It’s the ebb and flow of training and racing, much as we all seem to have an ebb and flow of life. There’s a reason that so many runners are also writers; the sport is like one big freakin’ metaphor.

As a multiple-marathoner myself, I enjoyed reading Taryn’s book a lot and found myself nodding in agreement with so much of the sentiments that she captured. The parts I found especially interesting were about her Ironman training and the times that, thanks to some employment/family life stuff, she was able to train for her events on a nearly full-time basis in an attempt to become a pro triathlete. Never in my running career, even at my most zealous, have I thought I stood a chance in hell at going pro, so these sections were pretty eye-opening.

Since completing her 35 by 35 quest, Taryn has re-run the Boston and LA Marathons and has also run her first trail 50k. She has no intention of hanging up her running or triathlon shoes, and I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before we hear from her again as she sets off to realize her Next Big Goal and who knows, maybe that’ll mean there will be a sequel! If you’re looking for a quick and fun read before your next big event, I think Taryn’s 35 by 35 fits the bill (and plus, hey, how cool, I’m in it! I’m “Ambassador Erin” in the SF Marathon ’14 chapter). Likewise, I think this book would make a thoughtful gift for someone who’s about to complete his/her first marathon or Ironman-distance event. Meeting Taryn on the final leg of her 35 by 35 journey was a treat, and seeing her hard work come to fruition in the 35 by 35 manifestation has been as exciting as another marathon finish.