Four weeks after successfully running my first sub-20-minute 5K and beating my younger brother in the process, on a whim, I decided to run my first half marathon. I didn’t have a training plan, and I had never run more than 8 miles before. However, I was in peak physical condition, and I was running about 20 miles per week. How hard could it be to run a 13.1-mile half marathon in a race environment?
I had been sharing my newfound love of running with my co-workers and detailing my recent success at the 5K when one of my colleagues suggested that I run a local half marathon coming up that Saturday that he had signed up for. It was a Thursday when he told me about the race and even though there was little notice and no time to prepare, the idea intrigued me. Maybe I was a long-distance runner. Even though I did not have a training plan and only two days to go before the event, I signed up right away and began to work on my racing plan.
I had not yet discovered online race predictor calculators which I’ll discuss in detail in a future post, but I did have some training baseline to consider. I had just run a 19:49 5k which at 3.1 miles meant that I had averaged 6 minutes and 24 seconds per mile. I had regular weekly mileage of about 20 to 25 miles per week on my legs, and I had just run 8 miles in 60 minutes during a hard training session which meant I had run 7 minute 30 seconds per mile over that distance. Based on these data points I figured that I should be able to run sub 8-minute miles over the duration of a half marathon. 8-minute miles over the course of 13.1 miles is just under 1 hour and 45 minutes which sounded like a nice round number and became my goal.
It turns out that my co-worker had the same time goal, so we met up on race morning in St. Charles, Illinois on June 6th, 2004, and ran together at the start. St. Charles is an affluent suburb about 40 miles west of Chicago and is situated in the Fox River valley. The course was point to point starting on the east side of St. Charles at a local mall and ended on the west side of the town on the other side of the valley. That’s right, located in a river valley, downtown St. Charles is at river level while each side of town is quite a bit higher. The elevation difference is about 100 feet or the equivalent of a ten-story building. While the first half of the race would wind down to the river, the second half would be uphill! Not an ideal situation for a first-time half marathon with little to no preparation.
As the race began, my co-worker stayed with me for about the first half mile as I settled into my pace, and he quickly fell behind. This was still before I bought my first Garmin running watch, so I only had the mile markers on the course to guide me. I don’t have a log unfortunately of my mile split times, but I do know that I managed to keep every mile under 8 minutes, and I never pushed too hard. It was my first time attempting this long of a distance, and I didn’t have super high expectations, so I really enjoyed the race and even managed to keep my speed up in the 2nd half of the race as we climbed out of the river valley. The best part of the course was that after climbing completely out of the valley around mile 12 we headed back down to the downtown area which made for a very nice and fast finishing mile.
When all was said and done, I finished in 1 hour 41 minutes and 37 seconds with an average pace of 7 minutes and 45 seconds per mile. I was ecstatic! I decided I was a long-distance runner and signed up shortly after for another half marathon scheduled for September. I found a 12-week training plan at Runner’s World and set out to get fast!
At the beginning of 2004 I resolved to run a 5K under 20 minutes and to also finish ahead of my younger brother while doing so. I circled May 8th, 2004 on my calendar which was the date of the Apple Blossom 5K in Bartlett, Illinois. This would be only my second race having run my first 5K on the same course in 2003 as I wrote about in my last post. At my inaugural 5K, my brother had served as my pacer and motivator. He would still be my motivation in 2004, but this time I wanted him to eat my dust while aiming to take more than 5 minutes off my 5K PR.
I’ve always been competitive and maybe that was a result of having only one other sibling. That said, my brother and I had our own niches as we grew up. We both loved sports, but I was more drawn to tennis and marching band, while my brother was good at baseball, basketball, and exceptional at running. His mile time of 4:24, 2 mile of 9:28, and 5K of 15:30 put him in the elite tier of cross country and track runners in the state of Illinois. So, when I say I wanted to leave him in the dust, let’s say that I knew that was a stretch goal. 12 years had passed since he graduated from high school, but I had no doubt he would find his speed once he accepted my challenge.
We both signed up for the May race and began our training in February. We never ran together, but in addition to logging our weekly easy run mileage we both agreed to run a simulated 5K time trial every Saturday to gauge how we were improving. This served as our speed work and also for me was a barometer both for whether I was on track to break the 20 minutes barrier and how I was measuring up to my competition.
February and March can be quite cold in Chicago, as well as snowy and slippery outside, so our weekly 5K time trials were performed indoors on treadmills. I had purchased my first treadmill around Christmas and my brother was using one at Lifetime Fitness where he was a member. I’ll have a future post about treadmills or what many in the running community refer to as dreadmills, but for me, as long as I have a TV in front of me, I can literally run for hours on a treadmill. I had read in Runner’s World that in order to account for the lack of wind resistance on a treadmill, you should keep the incline set to 1.5%, so I made sure to do that for all of my indoor running.
In the weeks leading up to the May 8th race, my brother would run his time trial and I would run my time trial and then we would compare notes. Every week, I would improve by about 30 seconds, but every week, my time trial would be about 1 minute slower than my brother’s. It was quite uncanny. We both improved by the same amount week after week, but I stayed about the same distance behind him. I kept in mind that he was a seasoned veteran with an established track record (pun intended) while I was a relative newbie and that finishing ahead of him was truly a stretch goal. My main objective really was to break the 20 minute barrier, and I could feel myself getting closer. In fact, the week before the race my 5K time trial on my treadmill at home was just under 20 minutes, and yes my brother again was about a minute faster than I was. The question though was whether road racing would be the same or harder as running on the treadmill.
On May 8th, 2004, the weather definitely cooperated with us. The temperature was in the 50s, the sun was out, and there was just a light breeze. It was a great day for a race. I had not yet purchased a garmin watch, but the course was marked at each mile which also included a timing clock so I would have a good sense of how fast I was going only after the first mile. The butterflies I felt were very strong and my adrenaline was at its peak as the gun went off to start the race. I would later read in Runner’s World that it’s a common mistake to go out too fast in a 5K race as everyone’s collective pent-up energy is let loose, but I had not read that warning yet and without a GPS to guide me I fell victim to a very fast start and my brother was right there with me.
I had formulated a race plan based on my sub 20 minute goal and my time trials on the treadmill. In order to run a 5K which is 3.1 miles, you need to keep an average pace of about 6 minutes and 27 seconds per mile. In my trials, I had found that I could run about 5 seconds faster than that pace in the first mile, take it easier in the 2nd mile running about 5 seconds slower than 5K goal pace, and then pushing hard for the third mile and really going hard for that last tenth of a mile. The key would be not to go out too fast and burning out.
My brother and I were running side by side for that first mile, and I started to get this feeling in the pit of my stomach that warned me that I was going too fast. Sure enough, as we turned a corner on that neighborhood course, and the first mile marker came into view I could see why. We crossed that first mile in 5 minutes and 50 seconds! That was 30 seconds faster than I had planned to run the first mile. I knew there was no way I could keep that pace for another 2.1 miles, so I backed off a bit. My brother must have been feeling some discomfort as well because he dropped behind me after the first mile no longer at my side.
During the second mile I was still pushing, but I was also making sure that the feeling in the pit of my stomach stayed at bay. I kept to my strategy of the second mile being the easiest and made sure I would have some reserves in the tank for the final 1.1 miles. I didn’t dare to look behind me for my brother but just imagined that he was playing with me and would surge at any moment. As I crossed the 2 mile mark the clock showed 12 minutes and 50 seconds. I had now run a 7 minute second mile, but I was still on track for my goal of breaking 20 minutes as my average pace was 6 minutes and 25 seconds for the first two miles which was still 2 seconds ahead of my goal pace. Now the question in my mind was whether I could speed back up in the last mile and finish strong.
During the third mile I pushed harder. I continued to run imagining the whole time that my brother was right behind me and about to overtake me. The year before, he was there at my side encouraging me at my first 5K race as I worked to reach my goal of breaking 25 minutes in the 5K. This year, in that third mile, while I didn’t see him, I imagined him on my heels ready to get the last laugh in our sibling rivalry as he passed me at the finish. The thought kept me going and pushing. The feeling in the pit of my stomach had gone away as I slowed during the second mile and even as I turned up the speed during the third mile the feeling did not return. If I was pacing correctly, I had a good chance of reaching my objective and running under 20 minutes.
As I hit the third mile marker there wasn’t a clock, so I just turned up the speed knowing there was only a tenth of a mile left to go. I was sure that my brother was about to turn it up as well and would pass me at any moment. I was running frantically and somewhat fearfully as if an attacker was just behind me. The finish line came into view, and I gave it all I had. I saw the clock at the finish and felt a sense of elation as it grew nearer and realized that I was going to reach the finish before the clock turned to 20:00. In fact, I crossed the finish line in 19 minutes and 49 seconds, and then I quickly turned around to look for my brother, but I didn’t see him.
I wound about waiting for about one and a half minutes before he crossed the finish line finishing with a time just over 21 minutes. It turns out that first mile did hit him hard too, and he wasn’t able to recover. Still, I was a bit puzzled about how this result had happened. Sure, I was definitely excited that I had broken the 20 minute barrier and had run faster than my brother in the process. What about all those time trials though that we had run leading up to the race where he was always one minute faster than I was even as we both improved week after week? Sure, it could have been the fact that you never know how you will feel on race day, but I had this feeling there was another reason.
I don’t remember now if it was that day that I talked to my brother about the treadmills or whether it was sometime shortly after the race, but I did ask him some details about his treadmill training as a hypothesis formed in my mind. I mentioned above that I always ran on a 1.5% incline on my treadmill to simulate wind resistance. I asked my brother what incline he ran his time trials on at his gym and his response was that he ran at 0% incline. That had to be it! Regardless, I had won the race between the two of us. Never in my years of running have I even come close to the fast times that my brother has run. At my age now, I’m past my peak and never will, but for one day in 2004 I was a little bit faster than he was, and more importantly for me, I broke the 20 minute barrier for the 5K.
My first attempt at running was when I joined the cross country team in 8th grade. I’m not sure why I joined, but my younger brother was already running 7 minute miles in the 5th grade and I thought it would be a good idea if I started to run as well. I remember a handful of meets where I think we ran a total of 2 miles. I was consistently the 2nd to last person to finish, trailed only by one of my friends, and at the end of the season I hung up my running shoes. In high school I was not involved at all with cross country or track focusing instead on marching band in the fall and tennis in the spring to keep active. My brother however, went on to become a very successful high school runner. I think his PR in the 5K was 15:30 and he ran the 2 mile in track in 9:28 and the mile in 4:24. Yes these are very fast times, and I knew there was something in my genes although it would be another 15 years before the running bug bit me.
I struggled with my weight during college, not only putting on the freshman 20 pounds, but another 40 pounds on top of that. A steady diet of pizza, potato chips and beer with my only exercise consisting of walking to class resulted in a very poor physique and difficulty in climbing stairs without running short of breath. By the time I graduated in 1994, my 6 foot 3 inch frame was carring 235 pounds of weight. There were a few times I would go for a run to try to get in shape, but the extra weight I carried resulted in tremendous pain and swelling in my knees and so those bouts of motivation would only last a week or two at a time. It wasn’t until my post college career that I began to make healthier eating choices and found low impact cardio exercise options that brought my weight down where I could conisder running again as an option.
Rollerblading and limiting my daily caloric intake to 1500 calories per day is what led to my initial weight loss of 60 pounds in the mid 90s. Unfortunately, I had not yet learned how to keep consistency in both my diet and exercise, and so my weight crept back up to 220 pounds in 1998. This was also the year I proposed to Lynn, now my wife of 22 years, and I became motivated to lose the weight again before we were married in June of 1999. I joined a 12 week weight watchers program at work and bought a stationary exercise bike for cardio work. Through weight watchers, I learned how to eat healthy and limit portions by using their system of points. This appealed to me, since as a very math oriented and results driven person, I enjoyed being able to track my calories in and calories out through exercise and actually see the results. Who knew that a 500 calorie deficit per day could lead to 1 pound of weight loss per week? It was like magic to me! While I no longer use weight watchers, they put me on the right path and if I ever start to stray and see some weight gain, I know it’s time to start another round of MyFitnessPal to track not only my calorie intake, but also my calorie ouput through a connection to the Garmin app. But I’ll get into more detail on that in a future post. So in the early 2000s I was back down to 175 pounds, tired of indoor cycling, not ready to spend seven grand on a road bike and ready to give another shot to running.
I remember my first time as an adult running down the street. I ran 2 miles and I pushed very hard. I remember the odd sensation of my brain seeming to rattle around in my skull with every step I landed. My ankles seemed like they were brittle and feeling the impact of the asphalt. My lungs burned as I past the 1 mile mark and started the 2nd mile. If I had used a heart rate monitor at the time, I’m sure I would have been above 95% of my max heart rate. I finished the 2 miles in about 16 minutes and thought I had never run so hard. My calfs were extremely tight right after I finished and would remain so for days, but I had such a sense of accomplishment that I knew this was just the beginning and I never looked back. Well, almost never. There would be some ups and downs, but through these blog posts I’ll share my running journey in detail and hope that you will find some nuggets of wisdom along the way.
Hi All! I’m Business Controller by day and a runner by night and this is my website where I’ll capture my adventures in running. I first started running regularly in 2002 while in my early thirties as a way to stay in shape. I often say that I’m running from the shadow of my grandfather who died of a massive heart attack while visiting my home when I was only 11 years old. This has motivated me to train consistently and over the years I’ve run more races than I can count from the 5K to the marathon. Along the way, I’ve had some interesting experiences. From funny, to motivational, to informational, to sad, I hope that you will enjoy the stories that I have to share and that you too are inspired to hit the road.
