By Brian Sawyer

In Pain, Mile 18

All of a sudden, this Sunday in the park was no longer just a Sunday in the park. For the first time since beginning training (including a 22-miler, a couple 20-milers, 18s, etc.), I started to get muscle cramps. My calves seized up on me every few steps and I had to decide whether to stop and stretch (I worried that stopping would seize them up for good) or work them out by running through them (I was worried that would make them worse). I settled on a combination of these approaches, alternating based on what I thought my calves needed, but this would be a serious issue for me from around mile 17 to the end of the race.

In the moment, I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong and attributed the pain to the hills, which were indeed tougher and longer than the ones I’d trained on (though not by much, really). But after talking to runners more experienced than me, I realized a more likely cause, one which I’ll keep in mind for my next race. It’s actually pretty simple: I wasn’t hydrating effectively and I didn’t get enough sodium. During training, I’d stop at regular intervals for my planted water and electrolytes and always knew exactly how much I consumed, matching each amount with what worked in the previous long run. But in the race, though I paused at every water stop, I only gulped down as much as I could without having to slow down too much. I didn’t feel like I wasn’t getting enough, but I had no way of knowing, and I’m pretty sure now that I wasn’t. Plus, you just need more salt when you get beyond three hours of running. At least I got a little potassium along the way. To the woman handing out bananas somewhere near mile 20: thank you!

At the 20-mile mark, my time was 2:51:22, my overall pace slipping out another 9 seconds to 8:35.

Here’s where I got another surprise, though this one worried me more than the fasties passing me back at mile 14. Right after the 20-mile mark, I was running by myself, but I saw someone about 100 yards in front of me, going straight down the road we both were on. After he passed a cop, the cop stepped out behind him and motioned for me to turn right. He was opening traffic to the road and diverting me off the course! This late in the race, I didn’t have much brain capacity to grasp what was happening, but I also didn’t have the ability to make decisions for myself, so I just went the way he told me. All by myself.

I know I should have paid more attention to the course map before the race, but I didn’t see this coming. If you look at the map, you’ll see dotted lines where the “course alternates” between different sections:

"Course Alternates"

I’m sure this is a necessary traffic-control solution, but it scared the crap out of me. I’d assumed the course was the course and hadn’t anticipated running a different way than the guy in front of me. Thankfully, the two routes matched up again soon after that, averting a heart attack when I joined other runners and realized I wasn’t running off on my own into the bay or something.

Going back to the hills again, you’ll notice another cliff in the elevation map at mile 20, another effort at controlled falling that my now-cramping calves appreciated even less than they did 10 miles earlier. This was painful. “But after that,” I hear you saying, “doesn’t the elevation pretty much even out? It looks like it flatlines after a dip at that point.” It does look like that, doesn’t it? All I can say is that the elevation map must not be on a small enough scale to really give the right impression. Perhaps it represents an average across a short distance, but it sure felt like there were steep inclines and downhills nestled in those deceptively flat lines of the map. Or maybe the hills just got bigger in my mind the more tired I got. Either way, regardless of what was happening with elevation, my stamina was going downhill.

Stay tuned for the dénouement …