The Long, Hard Road Ahead

First, the good news: I've been accepted to compete in the 2013 Badwater Ultramarathon in July.  I'm grateful for the opportunity to take on this epic challenge for the fourth consecutive year, to raise funds for G-PACT, and to try to surpass the high bar that I set last year, with my 28.5-hour, 8th place finish.

Now, the bad news: 1:11:07.33.

That was my time at yesterday's RRCA Club Challenge 10-Mile race, and the slowest 10-mile race I've ever run, including the Army 10-Miler a couple of years ago when I was horribly out of shape.  (I'm not about to thorougly research this, but I'm pretty sure that prior to this, my slowest 10-mile time was 1:08ish, and that was on a particularly bad day).

And as horrible as that race was, and as horrible as Club Challenge has been in the past, this was by far, all in all, the worst race I've ever run.  From the first mile on, I was getting passed by EVERYBODY.  I was especially getting passed on every uphill.  Even the finishing sprint that I managed at the end wasn't good enough, as one other person managed to sprint even harder past me. 

And it hurt.  It hurt nonstop from the first step to the last, and I crossed the finish line feeling like I never wanted to run another step in my life.  Not exactly the best feeling when about five months from now, I'm going to be in the Badwater Basin, 135 miles away from the relief of the finish line.

What's wrong?  Well, since the last time I posted here, in the remainder of the month that followed, I ran a total of 135 miles (amusingly coincidental number that that is), and so far in February, I've run a little over 100.  And, to be fair, I did run a marathon last weekend, a 3:19:55 at the George Washington's Birthday Marathon, under particularly ornerous (cold, windy, snowy) conditions.

So my training volume has been pretty low, and my times have been slow.  But I've been worse-off training-wise in the past, and performed not nearly as poorly, so this is a little scary.  This is uncharted territory.  Maybe a return to focused training won't get me anywhere, and I'll still be in a similar or worse run five months from now.

On the other hand (the one that I'd prefer to concentrate on), this represents a huge opportunity to work hard and to make what would be (in my mind, anyway) the most incredible running-related comeback of my life.  There's clearly plenty of room to improve in terms of training volume, and, historically, high mileage, almost regardless of quality, results in vastly improved performance (for me, anyway).

So expect to see more training-related posts here in the coming weeks, as I venture out into the unknown, for many miles, at all hours of the day and night, and see if it really is possible to come back from so far down.  (Considering that I'm a bit superstitious, and all of those digits in my 10-mile finishing time are lucky ones, I at least have a vague feeling that luck may be on my side . . .)