Frankfurt 2014 – Dam-Busted (Part 1)

I’ve purposely not rushed to write this report. Marathons often take a lot out of you, more than the physical strain that covering 26.2 miles in one go places on the body. Ever since the race, my mind has been a swirling mess of thoughts and emotions which I’ve found hard to put into words. But here we go.

The best laid plans can often go completely breasts-aloft. Earlier in the year I’d had it all worked out. Training for Thunder Run will stand me in good stead for 12 twelve weeks of concerted training before Frankfurt. Having found a new home we wanted to move to back in January, we were due to move in June/July. This was also crucially away from Frankfurt prep, nothing was going to distract me.

Fast forward to the end of July. The training for Thunder Run had been a bit punishing. The double sessions at the weekends, whilst valuable, had taken their toll. The Thunder Run event itself was also a bit of a bruiser with the horrific temperatures and moments of team distress. Also, we had no signs of moving house, with obstacles and delays galore. Still, I was ready to start training.

It has to be said, I had a great August. I was consistently running 55 miles+ every week and was ailing the sessions. I had some great company on my long Sunday runs and things were looking good.

This run continued into September, buoyed by my success at Lake Vyrnwy Half Marathon. There were a few events coming up on the horizon, but I was ready to take them in my stride.

The amazing weekend events in London at the beginning of October have been documented already on the blog. What hasn’t been yet is my trip to St Mary’s University for a little Physiological Testing (I promise I’ll write that up soon).

The one down side to all that was that I really felt like I missed an important weekend’s run. Nick was cool about it all and adjusted my training plan accordingly, but there was a nagging voice in my brain berating me for going ‘off-piste’ so close to race day. About that time it also became clear that the house move was imminent and a lot of time was being taken up with sorting stuff for that. Also, news came through of an incoming reorganisation at work, nothing like a restructure to relax the mind…

I was trying to train as much as possible, but some runs were suffering. It culminated in a Wednesday session and I felt my left calf go. I knew it was a little tear an only rest was going to cure it. This was a couple of days before I was do to do the longest and most important run, the 35Km Shit on a Stick. I had to put it off and ended up trying to do it midweek (after a full day in work, in the pissing rain). Suffice to say it was possibly the worst run of my life. Code brown after 6 miles, I had to dive home, got out again and fucked up my Garmin. Twice. In the end, after 17 miserable miles I gave in and rang Steve from a phonebox to come and get me. I’d never done that before and it bit hard, but everything kind of came to a head and I realised I just couldn’t do everything at once.

Just to top it all off, I then went and had a crash with a bike. It was an ordinary Monday recovery run, two weeks before race day and was almost game over. No one was seriously hurt and I limped a mile home, nursing my right leg and got to my Physio as soon as possible. I’d got away with a ‘dead leg’ with a lot of pain and some mighty brusing. The Physio said that it was only my quads that stopped me having a broken femur (thank you Rowing). Another few days off didn’t do anything for my rock bottom confidence. In the week before the race I manage to get out a couple of times with some residual pain on my neck and back (maybe whiplash?).

We ended up moving house on the 17^th, one week before the race.  But that was lovely, hard work but lovely . Soon it was time to travel to Frankfurt.

As I’ve said many times before, I love Germany and I love Frankfurt. I’d forgotten how cool it is being in a city during marathon weekend. The buzz is electric. We busied ourselves with race preparations and sorted out things like race number collection.  I had a lovely last run along the river on the Saturday morning. It was just me and the Kenyans *gulp*.

We tried not to spend too long at the expo, but managed to catch up with Nick and Tom there. After resting in the hotel in the afternoon, I headed over to Nick’s hotel of a bit of a pre-race briefing. If you’ve not had one of these you are missing a treat and I was grateful for it. I’d told him that given the events of the previous few weeks I wasn’t here for heroics, just keep it steady as possible. A great Italian meal in the evening and it was time to get some rest before the race. 

I didn’t sleep too badly, but felt fidgety on Sunday morning. We headed over to the start and it was soon time to go. I had decided to stick with the 3:14 pacers for as long as possible and see what happened. This was slower than I’d been running in training, which I thought was probably a good thing. Of course the pacers were German, and I was too shy to say hello, but I kept close to them.

The race started and off we went, the two 3:14 pacers went off like bullets, one was slightly in front of the other and I decided to stick with the second one. The first few Kilometeres went by and to be honest the pace felt slightly feverish. I was manual checking off the Kms on my Garmin. Now I know that 3:15 pace is 4:37/Km. By my reckoning we were going at more like 4:30/km. I tried not too think about it too much at the time, but post-race it has annoyed me somewhat. Going round the inner city streets, it felt quite hot. I reasoned that was because the buildings were close and high. There were quite a few water and sponge stations so I tried to keep cool as best I could.

As we headed out of the city, the race fell into something of a pattern. Our pacer was running the race on the left hand side of the course, however most of the water stations were on the right. Therefore, in order to get water (in paper cups at Frankfurt) you had to cross the width of the course, pick up the refreshment and then try and get back into position. I would find myself 100-150m down on the pace group after every station and would have to work slightly harder to get back with them. I was conscious that it is generally easier to run in a group than alone so was keen to get back into position.

I was kind of forced to take a tactical decision just after the 20Km mark. My race number started coming off and I didn’t want to be disqualified so I had to stop and readjust. I also took on some water that was there and got going again. I was probably about 300m behind the yellow balloon of the pacer at this point. Looking at the starts after the race, I crossed the halfway point still within 3:15 pacing. With a stop. That’s how much the pacers were overclocking it,

I carried on, now alone in my thoughts…