Marathon Training: The Heat Is On

So, the two of us are in training for the Twin Cities Marathon, which is on October 1 this year. You know what that means: no booze, carefully calibrated diet, to bed every night at 8:30, sleeping in a barometric chamber, numerous injections of performance-enhancing drugs . . . OK, just kidding. But it does mean long runs on the weekend. This weekend (yesterday) was the 17 mile run, always a challenge.

The problem with long runs is that each one, with a few exceptions, is longer than the last, which means that each long run you reach the edge of your training and then go past it. The last one to two miles of the long run are always tough. But at least they're near the end. If the extra mile was at the beginning of the run, it would be dreadful.

Add to the "ordinary" difficulty of the long runs, this year, the heat. As you may have heard, it's been rather warm lately. Hot, humid, without much of a cool down in the night. So these long runs have been, for the most part, pretty brutal. I tell myself that this will only make me stronger, when the race comes, and it's 37 degrees at the start. But I'm also sure that is just one of those stupid things we tell ourselves to get through a hard workout.

It's interesting training on the C & O Canal towpath here in the D.C. area. There are always so many people marathon training, especially this time of year. Most of the people we see, I think, are training for the Marine Corps Marathon, which is a little later than TC. A lot of the people we see are in one of these training programs, running with a group. I would guess that it's at least 50 people a week that we see--and we run sometimes on Saturday, sometimes on Sunday, so that means it's 50 people, or more, on both weekend days. That's a lot of marathon running folks.

A few weeks ago, we started the long run at 6 a.m. to avoid the heat--but the heat still found us. Trust me. So, about a mile and a half from the finish, passing under the Chain Bridge Road bridge, I could see maybe two dozen runners, a little before or after 8 a.m. Coming off the bridge were a father and teenage son, on bikes. The teenage son looked up and down the towpath and said to his dad: "I can't believe all these people are up so early." Me neither.