Personal Marathon Disaster

It might be a nutritional issue. Did you hydrate properly the last week, especially the last 48 hours? I like to weigh myself prior to the race as a final check - if light, I presume I'm low on fluids.

Were you in Chicago? That race was somewhat more than not perfect.

Not Chicago.

Also, funny someone mentioned the weigh in. I carbo load and usually gain 3-4 pounds during the load. Somehow I lost a pound this time. I pumped fluids as usual but there is a chance that somehow it wasn't enough.

Thanks. Love to hear other ideas as I have a revenge marathon to schedule and don't want to f it up twice in a row.

Tapeworms!

having just dnf'd this weekend myself (I was in chicago) and wanting to correct that fluke...how long do people generally wait before running another marathon?

do you scrap the training that one has done for the past one and start all over again, or look to get a short turnaround (i.e. several weeks to a month). Having not dnf'd before I have no idea (this might mean i just never pushed myself hard enough)

not only do i never dnf, but i have run marathons everyday. maybe you need yo read my book.

This week will be fairly light but other than that, I count yesterday as a long run and will try to race another fall marathon.

The marathon is a mysterious race... I've had the same thing happen a couple of times but I've never Dnf'd... One year at Boston I lost 8 minutes in the last 3 miles. I was well trained and ran a very smart conservative race but still blew up in the end... Could have been any number of things... Sometimes it just happens....I call the last 10k of a marathon the mystery miles...

I rememeber an article Don Kardong wrote in The Runner magazine sometime in the late 70s which dealt with his sudden and inexplicable inability to run the marathon nearly as well as he'd once done. It's been ages since I read it, I'm guessing it's in his book now so maybe someone will be able to elaborate, but I seem to recall the article as a much larger version of your post, i.e., "I did all of the same things that used to work, then I experimented with changing things and neither worked."

I've got some totally unprovable theories about this sort of thing, it kind of happened to me in the early 80s and the theories tend more toward psychological explanations than to physiological ones.

On the other hand maybe you just had an exceptionally bad day.

revenge... wrote:

having just dnf'd this weekend myself (I was in chicago) and wanting to correct that fluke...how long do people generally wait before running another marathon?

It depends on at what point you DNFed.

For point of reference:

I dropped out of Boston this year at 30k. 3 weeks later I ran another marathon and got a personal best.

The week after Boston I went immediately back into normal training, as if all I had done was a hard 30k workout previously. I hit 94 miles in the monday-sunday period after the dropout (including the dropout itself since Boston is on a Monday). Then I did 60 miles the next week. Then my final week of taper.