It’s been about five months since I had surgery and over a year since I last did a formal marathon training cycle. And it’s fifteen and a half weeks until Chicago Marathon. So, I guess, it’s time to start a new training cycle.
Going into surgery, I had just run the Dopey Challenge and was crushing as many runs as I could fit into my schedule. I had to stop all of my hormones a month before the ol’ knifing so my testosterone level was starting to come back up and I was finding my body recovering from runs quicker and having no problem chewing up fast miles. I didn’t hate it. Well, the running potion, that is; everything else about not having proper hormones in my body was the worst. Anyway, I went into surgery in excellent running shape. My wife joked that I should not have surgery and instead focus on a spring marathon. I think I’d have crushed it.
Surgery kept me from running for six and a half weeks, but even when I started, it was up and down for a bit and quite inconsistent. It wasn’t until closer to sixteen weeks that I started getting more consistency back into my running schedule. That didn’t leave me a lot of time to build my base mileage back up and properly prepare for marathon training.
When I scheduled surgery, I knew I couldn’t make any firm goals for a fall marathon this year. There was too much unknown. I knew I’d likely not be able to race a marathon, but being able to run a marathon, even just for fun, felt realistic. Having deferred my Chicago entry from 2015, I knew Chicago would be my race. I wished it was a late-fall race, rather than an early one, but it is what it is. This was the biggest factor in choosing a date for surgery.
Ideally, I’d like my weekly mileage going into training to be over 30. I did 28 the other week and then did a step back last week, but this was far from a sustained weekly mileage. The last two weekends have seen ten mile long runs, but they weren’t easy. On the flip side, it seems I didn’t lose quite as much strength as I expected and I’m running slightly faster than I was going into the last marathon training cycle I did. Certainly faster than I expected to be, I’m still far from where I’d prefer to be.
I also don’t yet know how my body’s hormone levels have evened out after surgery (I haven’t gotten labs done yet). My hope is that my testosterone level has moved up into the normal female range—it was just barely above zero prior to surgery which makes building strength and overall training very difficult. My body may be able to do more with less than it has been able to for the last few years. Or it might not. That remains to be seen. What I do know is my body did a lot more than I expected with low mileage and making up a plan as I went along while training for my last two Disney Marathons I’ve done so it could also turn out that my body just works better with plans that aren’t as aggressive and intense.
So that’s where I am and the reality I’m dealing with. I waited until the last possible minute to make a training plan and sat down on Sunday to look over my previous plans and put together something that was going to push me while still keeping me from diving head first into a pool with no water. What I came up with was the least aggressive training plan I’ve done since the first time I ran Chicago, in 2012—six months before starting hormone replacement therapy.
I don’t have a goal for this race outside of having a solid training cycle, building strength, and not getting injured. A BQ (Boston qualifying time) is almost certainly out of the question. This race will be just a little too late for a 2017 BQ and I jump an age group for 2018 so my qualifying time goes from 3:35 to 3:40. I actually think I could get close to 3:40, but going under would be a stretch and going under enough to guarantee actually getting into the race would be even more of a stretch. It just doesn’t make sense to put my body through pushing for that right now. That said, my post-testosterone PR is a 3:44 so a PR isn’t impossible, but I’d be jumping the gun right now if I made that a goal. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
(As a side note, my PR before I transitioned was from that 2012 Chicago race.)
The end result of all of this is marathon training started this week. I’ve got a plan. It’s not super aggressive, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m going to hold off on setting a goal time until much closer to the race and focus on running by effort rather than hitting specific times throughout training.
Wish me luck!
