I've spent the better part of the past year training for two marathons, both of which I finished much, much more slowly than I would have liked. But at least along the way I hit a bunch of exciting milestones -- a shocking half marathon PR (2:07), a 5K PR (sub-9 pace!), my first time hitting 15 miles, then 18, then 20.
Now I'm about a month into training for marathon #3 and it feels different and totally awful. I don't feel any closer to my goal of a sub-5 marathon, and all of my shorter distances are going to $!%@ at the same time. This is turning into the summer of truly embarrassing race results. Not "oh darn I didn't quite hit my goal" times but "oh wow I didn't think it was possible for me to run anything I actually considered a race this slowly" and "I wish there was some way to erase this race result from the internet" times. Two half marathons over 2:30. Ouch.
And the most frustrating part is that I can't figure out exactly what happened. It's easy to blame the heat, but I don't think 85 degree weather adds 20-30 minutes to most people's half marathon times. One bad race I could blame on one-off conditions -- I didn't train, I did too much the day before, I went out too fast, it just wasn't my day -- but two in less than two months is harder to shrug off.
I'm going to try the half again in Providence in a few weeks, but I'm increasingly worried that if that doesn't go well I might never want to race a half (formerly my favorite distance) again. All I can say right now is that something really freaking magical better happen in Chicago in October to make this all worth it.
Has anyone else hit a serious running slump? How did you recover?
And now, to make up for this total bummer of a post, here's a photo of what Klaus did after we finally arrived in Chicago on Wednesday night after 18 hours and two scary thunderstorms:
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