Sleep is not the enemy

How do I get more sleep while continuing to do the things that matter to me?

I wrote this question to myself last week after once again failing on my promise to get more sleep. The end of the day comes and my good intentions to turn off the lights by 10:30 are abandoned as I play one more game of Tetris 99 or read a few more pages of my book (it's mostly been Tetris 99 over the last couple of months but reading a few pages before firing up the Switch certainly delays bed time). I jotted down a response to this question further down the same page.

View sleep as a component of these goals.

My original note has a question mark at the end, but after sitting with this idea for a week or so, I think it's the right answer. I've been viewing getting more sleep as a competing goal with all of my fitness/reading/general health endeavors. Sleep is a key contributor to success in those things rather than a conflicting obligation. I may lose some time by going to bed a bit earlier, but I will be much more effective with the fewer hours that I am awake. At least that's my current position on the matter.

My performance in my annual 10K relative to other years reinforced the role sleep plays in my efforts to live a richer and fuller life. I did not sleep well all week. My brain felt tired during the race. I went back and looked at what I was doing in the month before my best 10K back in 2017 (when I was about 3 minutes faster). I was getting up later a couple days a week, taking more naps on the weekend, and drinking less beer (partly because I was going to bed earlier on the weekends). My training over both of those years wasn't dramatically different, at least not divergent enough to account for those 3 minutes. Those differences in sleep between the two years aren't much, but it's enough for me to see how making getting sleep a component of my goals could be beneficial.

It's not necessarily the number of hours that I'm asleep that really matters. If I'm better rested, I can push myself harder on training runs. There are way too many times when I'm doing all I can to just get myself out the door. I get in the miles, but I'm not working on getting better. I'm happy to run at a moderate pace and be happy with the distance. That's the right approach for the workout sometimes, but I also need workouts where I am pushing my limits. That's a difficult challenge in the best of circumstances. Stretching myself like that when I'm barely awake is not a successful strategy.

More sleep is a good step to doing more hard things. I've been avoiding books that are challenging to read because I'm tired enough as it is when I do most of my reading. I don't know how much I get out of any book when I'm dozing off in the middle of a page. I definitely have no hope of making it through Proust or War and Peace when I'm just trying to keep my eyes open!

So I'm going to start working my way to earlier bedtimes. I'm shooting for 30 to 15 minutes earlier than normal this week. I will cut back again once that feels normal. If things feel better at that point, I will reassess my sleep requirements.

To and Fro

I should be playing Tetris 99 right now, but the Switch is having fun at a sleepover. I read for a bit before coming downstairs where I can mourn the absence of trying to get my 32nd, 33rd, 34th win. I quickly composed a nifty little post in my head while pouring a beer but as always happens the nice flowing thoughts stopped coming the second I tried to put them down where other people can read them. I guess coming out of the safety of my whirling mind was more than they could handle. I'm not surprised. Expressing myself in this way has become a rarity. I look back in wonder at how much I could get down more years ago than I like to really think about. This kind of thinking was a release. It made me feel better. It wasn't always easy to get started, but once I got on the trail of a good idea things usually feel together pretty easily. It's kind of sad to realize that the biggest drag on that momentum was a poor computer choice. I bought a new computer and everything just kind of ground to a halt. The pad of my thumb would hit the mouse pad and move the cursor. It was minor but annoying enough that it was a drag to get the computer up and running. The always dead battery didn't help.

I was searching for something through all of those words. Repeating a pattern set way back as a lonely teenager pouring myself out to a piece of notebook paper. The answers are out there if you look hard enough, work through enough of the hard stuff. Life was all around but I was pretty busy trying to get all of that action to fit into the way I thought it should come together. Eight years later I don't know if I'm wise or jaded. Maybe a little of both. I've seen the folly in some of my old ambitions, but I've also yielded some of my desire for better and different. I've softened and slide into the mold of the life offered. This has brought me peace with a small dose of complacency. I've taken what's been offered. That choice has made a difference.

Perhaps I'm no longer at war with the truth. I railed against the truth about myself, my job, and where my career was taking me. I could see the light that everybody else was missing. It was so obvious, why can't they see it? Reality has slid between me and my view of the abstract that fired all my musings about the role of R&D in a business, my potential for change, and what I really needed in my life. Writing a bunch of stuff on the internet is easy. Changing what goes on in reality demands more. Nine years ago I spent most of my time running samples at the bench. Now I'm in charge of the people running samples at the bench (and making the stuff that gets tested at the bench). The answers aren't so clear from this view. People don't react the same way as molecules in a flask. Molecules will tell you their secrets if you ask nicely enough. People refuse to share their truth. You have to piece it together from hints and clues scattered in their wake. It's taken me decades to really understand my wife. How can I ever really know the people I work with? Have I really tried?

I used to come here to flee what I feared. Disintegration. Insignificance. Those were just shadows. My fears were real enough, but I was afraid of a pile of clothes. As I was just about to write that putting together these posts was the first step in rebuilding myself, I have to realize that in many ways these posts were preventing me from moving beyond my fears.This is where I reinforced my mistaken notions of how the world worked. I had to set this self-focused process aside and really engage with the reality of my life before I could realize the unreality of my fears. I came here to patch holes in the walls that I used to keep the bad feelings away. I faced the truth every now and then. Maybe that's where the growth finally started. It's all scattered in here. But that's just looking back. There is still plenty ahead. That's where I should focus. These little forays into my decision making record are marginally useful, but I can't let looking back replace moving forward, always forward.

Marathon #2, what went right and how to do it better next time

Never again. That's all I could think as I finished the 2018 Marine Corps Marathon. All that time and effort put into my training just to get a pretty good chunk into the race before everything really came off the rails didn't seem worth it. I've done this distance twice. I've proven that I can do it. Why do it to myself again? 

Well, I'm feeling a bit differently 5 days later. The marathon is starting to emerge as a challenge to be solved. It's pretty clear to me that I have a few changes to make in my approach to this distance if I'm ever going to hit the times those online predictors say I am capable of based on my 10K time.

Before going into what I need to do better, I would like to highlight some things that went well. The first, and most important, successful aspect of my training that was the fact that I completed the training. This is the second marathon that I've run in the last two years. That means I've spent the last two summers training for a marathon. I ran 420-430 miles in each of these 16 week training cycles. I can remember a long walk back to my car after a 10K several years ago where I was in so much discomfort I thought there was no way I could ever do much more than 6 or 7 miles. I've gone well beyond that, multiple times, while avoiding injuries. Avoiding injuries should not be dismissed. That's a big deal. Injuries popped up pretty regularly when I started running 3 or 4 times a week. Plantar faciitis took away a few months of summer running one year, I had calf issues that plagued me for most of 2014. I lost most of late 2016 to a knee injury. Injuries are part of running, but as I have gotten more experience, I have learned how to keep my body healthy and active. This is a significant accomplishment.

I made it much deeper into the Marine Corp than I did into Richmond before things were a real struggle. The wheels really starting falling off between miles 15 and 16 during Richmond. I was well above 20 when the same thing started happening last weekend. I crashed really hard in the last two miles of the Marine Corp, but that's just something that I need to work on.

Another success, I avoided significant chafing. I had a bit on my stomach, which is the first time I've ever had chafing in that spot. The combination of the tight shorts under my running shorts and liberal application of lube did the job perfectly. This is a significant advance as walking around all day with chafing after a long run is miserable. 

So what changes do I need to make with my approach to training for these long races? I need to improve my endurance. That means more longer runs. I've gotten very comfortable with distances up to 15 or 16 miles, but once I get above that I really start to struggle. Going past that point more often and making sure that I keep running a reasonable pace will make those last 10 miles of the marathon less of a struggle. A key point in overcoming this endurance gap is developing an appropriate fueling strategy. My body runs out of fuel after those first dozen or so miles. I need to find a way to keep a steady supply of calories coming in during these long runs. I may have to try gels despite my inherent aversion to them. I need something that I can carry in bulk. Regular food just takes up too much space. 

I need to really train during my runs and not do what I can to just get through them. I was too happy with just getting the distance in on some of the shorter runs while not worrying about pace or form. I know that I fall into the camp of doing my slow runs too fast and my fast runs too slow. I need to push it more on the intermediate distances and make easy runs really easy. I get too impatient to run slow and lose a chance to recover and develop more cardiovascular capacity. I'm also reluctant to really push myself on my 6-10 mile runs. The early mornings required to get these in are a big part of the equation here. It's hard to go into the painful part of running when I'm barely awake when I head out the door. My best results have come when I push myself to run in an uncomfortable space during training. I need to get back to this place if I'm going to grow as a runner. 

I do plenty of upper body weight training. Bench press, shoulder press, pull-ups, lat pull downs, I do these several times a week. I never do squats or dead lifts or anything else that strengthens my lower body. Building up strength in this area is vital to increasing my abilities as a runner. I already have the habit of going to the gym. Now I need to add some lower body into the mix. 

More rowing. I've been consistently getting in 5000 m or a week, but that's just doing an easy 10 minutes at the gym before I lift. Adding more rowing to my routine will result in better running. It's not hard to know why. I did 5000 m at a reasonable clip on Sunday. I could really feel it in my left butt cheek. Rowing works muscles that help me run but do not get worked out much when I run. It is not a coincidence that my 10K PR came a few months after I completed the holiday rowing challenge. I rowed over 100,000 m between Thanksgiving and Christmas. That requires consistently getting out and rowing 5000 m or so. All that rowing resulted in better training for the 10K. I did not complete the holiday rowing challenge last year. My 10K time was well off my PR pace. There are more factors at play than the absence of rowing a bunch in December (a super cold winter was a big part of that), but rowing builds a solid running foundation. 

Those are the main highlights and lowlights of my training cycle for the 2018 Marine Corps Marathon. I could eat better and get more sleep, but those are pretty much constant refrains that could be applied to numerous aspects of my life. When it comes to doing more marathons, I need to do more miles and find a way to keep myself fueled. Those are both pretty simple statements to make but they involve so much energy to execute. That's the point of putting myself through these marathon cycles. It's a way to get better and learn a bit about who I am at that moment. It sucks in the moment, but it's a highly rewarding experience.

Oh, and one more thing (that I will just add a couple of months later), I need to just flat out run more. I graphed my weekly distances from 2017 and 2018 in a single chart. I did not run enough in 2018, especially during marathon training. The 2018 line was shorter than the 2017 line pretty much every week. All those skipped Friday runs, shortened long runs on Saturday, and doing the short end of the recommended distance rather than the longer side on Monday and Thursday added up over the course of the training. Running a 16 miler this year that I missed last year closed the total distance, but that one run doesn't make up for all the shorter runs.

Now that I'm a couple of weeks into 2019, I can provide a way too early progress report on my efforts to implement some of these changes. Rowing more is definitely helping. Ramped up rowing in December has brought better running in January. I'm doing my shorter runs at under 8 min/mile pace. That's a nice step over last year's January efforts (following a December where I bailed on the Concept2 Holiday Challenge halfway through the month). That faster pace is also attributable to a conscious effort to push myself. Last year I was too satisfied with simply doing the workout. I'm digging deeper this year (both running and lifting).

There is no marathon for me in 2019. I may train up for a half, but I'm relieved to be taking a break from the crazy long runs all too integral a part of marathon training. I'm trying to reach 1000 miles in 2019 even with no runs longer than 13 or 14 miles over the course of the year. Steady effort will make the difference.