IM Canada: Week 6 – Chen’s version (i.e., Don’t drink and swim, kids… plus an abbreviated Oakland Marathon Race Report)

Posted by Chen

This week started off with an interesting lesson learned on Monday morning: Don’t swim when you’re hung over (and potentially still drunk). Brandon and I had gone out to a ridiculously good dinner at Bar Crudo Sunday night, which included several glasses of delicious wine. It seems that we may have been a bit too ambitious with said wine consumption, given that it was technically a school night.

Nomtastic meal. Seafood chowder, crudo sampler, lobster/arugula/golden beet/burrata salad, and grilled octopus. Highly recommend the arctic char crudo with wasabi tobiko if you ever go!

I actually woke up feeling normal (albeit exhausted thanks to getting far less than 8 hours of sleep), but the hangover became evident when I got in the pool and started swimming. It was as if I couldn’t keep track of the direction in which I was moving, and it felt like I could have fallen asleep at any moment. My pace was sluggish and my motivation low, so getting to 2200 yards felt like it took an eternity.

Afterwards, I got on the stationary bike for an easy 65 minutes. My legs were slow going at first given the weekend long ride (and lingering hangover, I’m sure), but things eventually loosened up, and by the halfway point in the workout, I deemed myself sober again.

Go Monday.

The rest of my weekday workouts were relatively uneventful (recapped below), though I did get to finally run on the newly resurfaced Kezar track! They expanded from 8 to 9 lanes and installed new water fountains that actually have water pressure, which is downright delightful. I’m definitely looking forward to utilizing the track more over the coming months!

Finally, the week concluded with Rachel’s and my fifth consecutive running of the Oakland Running Festival marathon. I’ll be writing an abbreviated race recap here since I know Rachel plans to devote a full post to it.

We’ve always used this as a training or fun run, since the course isn’t exactly conducive to a PR, as it kicks off with over 10 miles of climbing.

It’s actually downhill to flat after mile 11, but the up front climbing is no joke

Our easy pace combined with ridiculously awesome crowd support always makes this my favorite race of the year. The race organizers do a great job of planting various entertainment stations along the course, and the city of Oakland itself has an uncanny way of coming out and making its runners feel extremely welcome and supported.

Before we get to this year’s recap, I thought our readers might enjoy a pictorial summary of our previous 4 years:

2011. This was before we met Sandi – otherwise, she would have been right there with us. Rachel and I used this as a training run for Boston, and it was the first time I finished a marathon feeling fresh and energized. We were hooked. 4:05:27.

2012. Rachel, Sandi, Will and I all ran together, and our goal was to help pace some friends to a sub-4:00. While we sadly lost the friends we were pacing along the way (they just fell back; no friendships were ruined in this process), we managed to come in at 3:58:10

2013. The three of us spent a comical amount of time going through our shorts collections to find pairs that most closely matched one another’s. Think we nailed it with the dark magenta hue. 3:46:12.

2014. We planned ahead this time and went for matching hot pink shorts. This was also the year that Matt and Katie decided to bandit the race the night before during dinner. It was an amazing moment of irrational decision-making. 3:47:57.

Given that we didn’t want this race to disrupt our IM training, our goal this year was to run somewhere around 3:55-4:00. I was really curious to see how my legs would feel at the end of a long week of training.

Morning pre-race activities included a reasonable wake-up time of 6am (which I actually consider “sleeping in” these days), food consumption, and getting pumped up to some Pitbull and Macklemore.

I’ve literally only ever worn these hot pink booty shorts during the Oakland Marathon. I’ve determined that they’re too bootylicious for real life.

We headed down to the starting line at 7:15am, and by 7:30am, we were off. Aside from a random bathroom pit stop during mile 2, the first few miles flew by, and we kept having to remind ourselves to slow down (read: Rachel kept yelling at me whenever I accidentally sped up. She’s good at keeping the rest of us overly eager fools in check).

Although the first ~11 miles are mostly uphill, the real climbing doesn’t start until mile 7. We’ve run this part of the course a bunch of times now, and it always seems to drag on forever, so I was surprised when all of a sudden, it was time to climb the final hill and start our descent back down.

The middle miles were relatively uneventful (except that the crowd support continued to be amazeballs!), and things felt relatively easy through mile 20 or so. After mile 20, while I didn’t exactly feel horrible or anything (and my cardio state actually felt just fine), I could definitely tell that my legs were feeling the ramifications of a low volume, 3 runs per week schedule.

They started to ache in what I call “rookie” places, and it was as if they were trying to say “OK, guys. We get it. You like running. You can stop now, though. Kthx.”

Still, I managed to not fall off pace and was able to pick things up for the end. We ran strong up the final incline to the finish and crossed the line with an official time of 3:51:57 (~8:47 Garmin pace, ~8:51 official pace).

Overall, I’m really happy with how this race went. It’s comforting to know that we can run a relatively strong marathon while un-tapered at the end of an Ironman training week. Of course, a long training week is still nothing compared to having just swum 2.4 miles and biked 112 miles immediately before starting a ‘thon, but I suppose that’s what the next 18 weeks are for :-P.

A big thanks to the race directors and volunteers for yet another fantastic year!

26th 26.2 finish!

IM Canada Week 6 Recap:

Monday: 

• AM: Swimming 2200 yards (lazy, random, and possibly inebriated) (average pace of 1:49/100yd)
• Immediately followed by 65 minutes easy on the stationary bike – 65 minutes, 18.15 miles (16.8mph)

Tuesday: 

• PM: Swimming 4000 yards, including a 500 in 8:57 and 15 x 100 (all between 1:39-1:42)
• Immediately followed by 6.2 easy miles on the treadmill (~8:49 pace)

Wednesday: 

• PM: Trainer ride with fast spin intervals. This was my first time using my new Garmin speed and cadence sensors, and I loved it. It’s so much easier to do a fast spin workout when you don’t have to count your revolutions! On the flip side, I found it much harder to go fast on my trainer, at least compared to the speeds I hit on a stationary bike (though one could argue that stationary bikes aren’t all that accurate anyway). 18 miles in 1:05:25 (16.5 mph)

Thursday: 

• AM: Running 8.1 miles to/from/at Kezar, including 4 miles at the most half-assed tempo pace imaginable (7:43, 7:47, 7:48, 7:43). With a marathon in 3 days, I didn’t want to push it hard, plus I had no choice given how tired my legs were from doing an interval bike workout 12 hours earlier (~8:19 average pace overall)

Friday: 

• PM: Swimming 3800 yards, including 3 x 500 in 8:41 (fastest ever!), 8:50, 8:51, and 3 x 100 in 1:35, 1:34, 1:31 (also fastest ever!) (average pace of 1:48/100yd)

Saturday: 

• AM: Swimming 2900 yards with Katie and Matt! Was great to have company after doing all of my swims solo (average pace of 1:48/100yd)
• Followed by a mostly flat ride around Oakland with Rachel and Sandi: 27.45 miles 15.8mph

Sunday: 

• Oakland Running Festival Full Marathon: 26.4 miles 3:51:57 (~8:47.2)