Milo and the Calf

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On not meeting goals.

Goals

When I started back in at running seriously this year I had a couple of goals – I wanted to run a marathon again, and I wanted to run a total of at least 1,000 miles for the year. For a while there, things went well. I got the miles in, I was getting faster, and a fall marathon seemed within reach. Then the bar exam happened and I got seriously sidetracked. I decided I couldn’t run the fall marathon and decided to pull it back to a half marathon. I ran a marathon unprepared once, and I do not want to do it again.

Ramping up my training for the half, I got injured again. This time I was injured seriously enough to go to the doctor, that lead to me taking a little more than two weeks off from running. Now I am back, I ran yesterday for the first time in a long while and it fell good – I was a little creaky, but generally I felt good. But in the meantime the hopes of a half marathon have vanished. Now, dead set on not getting hurt again, I have promised myself I won’t add more than 10% to my weekly mileage, a quick calculation of my projected weekly totals makes clear that not only will I not be running a marathon this year, I won’t be hitting a thousand miles for the year either.

I can’t express how disappointed I feel.   I knew that if I was going to take running seriously there were going to be some bumps along the way, but this is way bumpier than I hope for. Still, getting good at this is going to take time, and I have to give it that time, I have to balance pushing myself with not getting hurt and I have to know that if I keep at it, the miles will pile up and my times will go down. Slow and steady, slow and steady.

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  1. smt

    Don’t beat yourself up too much! I think that almost everyone takes a few years (yes, years) to figure out how the hell to train effectively. From what I’ve seen, some people spend years not doing enough training, others try to do too much too soon and just can’t do it. I had 2 years around 2004ish during which it seemed like I was constantly injured.

    Luckily I learned a lot from that and have managed not to have an injury since then, part of which has included giving up marathoning and racing for the last two years, but that’s okay. Seems like this year could be your lesson learning year — which means maybe the next few will be goal meeting years? I don’t know…just saying that it’s virtually a right of passage to have these kinds of years.

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  2. seanv2

    smt, what do you think was the connection between not getting hurt and not running marathons? less mileage or less pressure or something?

    I know you’re right that is takes some time to get a good training program down, but damn it I hate failing.

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  3. smt

    Oh, well, maybe hurt wasn’t the right word. Sick might have been better. Though they are related. Mostly I don’t feel like I have the time to do everything else I need to do in my life, AND train for a marathon the way I want to train for a marathon. I do feel like if I had either more time OR less ambitious goals for marathon running, I could continually do it without getting hurt — I trained for three of them in three years without a single injury basically.

    But my first attempt to train for one was when I wound up out of commission for basically six months (stress fractures + some bursitis thing that turned out to take longer to heal than the stress fractures). TEN PERCENT RULE for sure!!! Plus I found that if i wanted to start adding speedwork to my routine, I couldn’t add mileage for a while. Also…not sure if you do this, but they always say that you should be at your base mileage for like 4-6 wks before ramping up? Another reason I don’t run marathons right now — it’s like a year long commitment!

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    1. seanv2

      Mostly I don’t feel like I have the time to do everything else I need to do in my life, AND train for a marathon the way I want to train for a marathon.

      This is exactly how I felt going into this last marathon. I know I don’t run nearly at the level you do, but I really did not want to end up sucking and getting in the miles just wasn’t possible with everything else going on in my life this summer.

      And, yeah, I will definitely hold to the 10 percent rule AND the ramping it up rule, neither of which I held to this year. Keep me honest when I start spouting off on here about how I can handle a 25% jump in mileage!

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