Honolulu Marathon 2019 was my chance to finally have a good outing. My spring "B" races, Hapalua and Honolulu Triathlon were OK, but I saw them as stepping stones to my big "A" race, Ironman 70.3 Hawaii, a.k.a. Honu. Honu was a big improvement from prior years, but there remains unfinished business. My Honolulu Century Ride was disrupted by a round of vertigo - it was all I could do to ride out to Hawaii Kai with Pattie's cruisers. That same setback set back my marathon training, but I was reasonably certain that there was enough time remaining to minimize the damage. That left last Sunday's marathon to make something of the year. It didn't happen.
In Part 2 of this series I will go into more detail about how I trained. For now I will focus on the race.
Peter Sagan has this to say about plans: "One of my mantras is that it’s good to have a plan, but plans don’t always work." Sagan Peter. My World (p. 136). VeloPress. Kindle Edition. My preference for planning a race like this is two make two, one a stretch and one more reasonable. I do this because I tend to hold back. Call me the reluctant runner. Having an aggressive plan pushes me out of my comfort zone.
First, a bit of history. People keep asking me how many marathons I have run and I can't remember, so here it is, for the record. Including this year, 7. The data in the table below is a bit iffy as it comes from my Gamins and TrainingPeaks. Nothing official but plenty good enough to make comparisons.
I started out to examine the usual splits, 13.1 and full. This works well on a flat course, but the disruption in pace caused by Diamond Head - 18th - Kilauea distorts how I was running on flat ground. The 10K point is near the entrance to Kapiolani Park. I could have used 7.5 mi, the start of the climb up Diamond Head, but that seems like an arbitrary number. I'll did deeper into these numbers in a future post.
Plan A. Aim for an average pace of 16:00 min/mi which should have me finish in a squeak under seven hours. If I could get even close to that I would beat my PR from 2014. That sounds like a crazy goal, but I have been training well all year with no running injuries, running well, and except for that bout with vertigo feeling great. No flu, no pulled hamstrings or wonky knees.
Plan B. Aim for an average pace of 18:00 min/mi which will get me in under eight hours. This felt totally doable because I have been running this pace regularly on my long runs.
Running with a power meter adds a whole new dimension that compliments the more traditional heart rate and pace. My first run with Stryd was October 3rd, 2017, so I do have some data to look back on. For now I'll just say that for Plan A my target power was 143 - 149, mid zone 2 to low zone 3. For Plan B, 133-135, the very bottom of zone 2, which is where I paced my long run workouts. I had done multiple runs in excess of two hours at that intensity and felt fine at the end and able to go on and have a normal, productive day.
I planned to do the first few miles as a gradual warm-up. Walk the first ten minutes, just like a workout. This is a brisk walk, not a stroll through the park. From there on I would use the same 10/1 run/walk method that I had used in my long runs. My pace would be Plan B until, maybe, we get back to Ala Moana Blvd. Or maybe sooner, along King Street. When I felt well warmed up and settled I would approach Plan A and see how it felt. At this point in a race I tend to go too hard, so I wanted to be careful to sneak up on it from below.
In the past year I read a couple of interesting books on the brain's role in regulating effort. Endure, by Alex Hutchinson, and Brain Training for Runners, by Matt Fitzgerald. My takeaway from these is that the brain has more to do with when an endurance athlete slows down or stops than the muscles or the fuel. Bonking is still a popular notion, and indeed getting your nutrition wrong will compromise your performance, but the body does not slow down and stop when it runs out of fuel, not like a car or a smartphone. Without fuel, your heart would stop beating. Since bonking does not result in death, there must be something else in play. Nobody knows for sure what that is, but so far most evidence points to the brain trying to keep you alive.
The Hutchinson book is a fascinating read (highly recommended!), whereas Fitzgerald goes more into application. He even includes training plans for 5K, 10K, half and full marathons built on his belief that carefully progressive workouts teach the brain that long, hard efforts are not going to kill you. The brain learns to stop complaining. He makes the point that you can't count on forcing yourself to overcome these survival instincts, but if you understand the mind's role you can push yourself to go harder than you would otherwise. I think this is something Ironman athletes figured out a long time ago. What is different now are studies that quantify this effect. As I trained for this marathon I worked both ends of these theories, doing the long runs and bike rides to teach my brain that long hard work is no big deal (!), and practicing how to push myself out of my comfort zone.
My Garmin 935 provides a wealth of useful data and TrainingPeaks displays it beautifully. (And let's not forget WKO, which does even more!) What these tools do not make obvious is how I was trying to run the first 10K. This is due to constant variation caused by dodging slow runners and walkers, not to mention so many people stopping to take pictures of every Christmas display and distance flag. I don't mind that. It is all a part of the crazy marathon party. I see me hitting 16:00 whenever I can after coming up Nuuanu and turning east onto King. That holds all the way to the park, which meant Plan A was a possibility even if hitting an overall average of 16:00 would require a crazy fast negative splits. Remember, 16:00 was not an absolute goal. It's not as if I was trying to hit a Boston qualifying time. It was intended to be a very high bar. My average from Nuuanu to the park was 17:30, well under my Plan B and I was seriously holding back. I felt good, and when I saw my time I felt even better.
I always struggle with the Diamond Head - 18th Ave - Kilauea section. I learned the hard way not to run the steeper sections, and to hold off a little longer before starting to run again. I did this section exactly as planned, at an average pace of 18:34, only a little slower than Plan B. Not too shabby! I was a bit concerned that coming down 18th I had sweat running down my face. It was then that I noticed how clear the sky was. I stopped to take some pictures to show why I felt so hot.
No clouds, no wind, lots of sun.
It was while coming up the long false-flat climb on Kilauea to the Aloha gas station when I began to feel in trouble. This was supposed to be a recovery section after the recent ups and downs, but when I tried to run I soon felt exhausted. My nice 10/1 run/walk deteriorated into a 1/1.
I was pacing myself primarily by power, with an occasional check on pace, leaving heart rate to do its thing. I set my Garmin to display the new Stryd Zones Connect IQ app on page one, time, pace and average pace on page two, and heart rate and zone on page three. As I came up Kilauea I was telling myself that things will get back to normal when I out onto the highway, but I also started looking more often at page three. Sure enough, my heart rate was high and topping zone 4 whenever I felt like I had to stop running.
When getting past the gas station failed to bring any improvement I tried a new plan. (Remember what Sagan said.) I would do my run/walk based on heart rate. I would run until my heart rate just reached zone 4, then walk until it just fell into zone 1. I kept this up until the halfway point, where I finally realized that this was not sustainable. In three miles I had done a dozen LTHR intervals, with insufficient recoveries. I was slowly dying.
Not literally, perhaps, but I actually was concerned. I get a physical every year, and although my doctor says I am as fit as anyone could be I do have a heart murmur and my heart is more likely than average to miss a beat. It seemed to me that my heart was misbehaving. Nothing like this happened in those eighteen weeks of training. Why now? What was different? I had no idea. What I did know was that to continue running in this condition could result in me finishing in the ER.
It was at this point I switched to a new plan. Just walk, like everyone around me had been doing since Diamond Head. The deal I made with myself was that I would walk as fast as I could. I was concerned that because I did not practice this way my muscles would give out. Nothing could have been further from the truth. With my heart now under control I found that I had a lot of strength. I was passing a lot of people and nobody passed me. Hydration and nutrition were fine. I felt good.
When I sat down to review the data for this post it wasn't long before I spotted something. Temperature at the start was around 80 and remained there until we turned onto 18th. Remember it was there that I suddenly felt sweat coming down my face? Temperature shot up to 88. When I was doing my ultra-short LTHR intervals it was hitting 90. Later, on the way back over Diamond Head, it reached 100! And all this time, no wind. No wonder!
I had some hot days on my long bike rides, but we must not forget that the bike creates its own cooling breeze. My long runs were all early morning. During Base and Build-1 on Saturday morning starting a 6:00. In Base-2 the Saturday runs and Sunday bikes got too long to do back to back without an intervening recovery day, so the long run moved to Tuesday mornings, starting around 5:00AM. In eighteen weeks I never ran for long in this kind of heat.
That about does it for this race report. In Part 2 I will go into more detail about how I planned my training, and if I ever get to it, Part 3 will look to the future.
One small thing to be thankful for. Along with no cramping or sore shins, I did not lose a toenail. Yet. But I see no sign of trauma there. I have Danny Abshire's new shoes to thank for that.
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