Viet’s Blog

I've bonked at every marathon I've ever run. Every single one. Going into Vernonia, I was mentally bracing for it again. I was going to feel good but right at mile 18, Lucy was going to grab the football right as I was about to kick it.  Except this time I came to realize something: I was Lucy. I was sabotaging my own efforts. Whenever I ignored my fueling plan, whenever I surged to pass people or weave around a crowd, whenever I picked up my speed to negative split the back half of the race, the football was long gone before I ever started running to kick it.Good Grief! The bonk wasn't something that just …. happened. It was something I did to myself. It’s me. I’m the bonk.  For Vernonia I was determined to break the cycle. The first thing I dialed in was effort. I was determined to maintain a consistent effort the entire way through. Part of maintaining that effort was locking in my cadence. I chose music that was 180 bpm on the dot to maintain running efficiency....

So I was doing a threshold repeat workout where I'd run for 4-5 minutes at effort and then do a walking/jogging recovery in between reps.  I happened to be finishing one of my intervals and it just happened to be in front of the school where there were about a dozen high school kids doing something unrelated. Right as I was finishing off a rep and slow to a walk I hear some cheering.  "KEEP GOING!" "HUSTLE HUSTLE HUSTLE!" "YOU GOT THIS!" I mean I was maybe about 50 meters from a "no parking" sign. So maybe they thought I was almost to the end of my interval. But then i thought "wait a minute, I'm not going to be bullied into extending my interval for a bunch of kids." Mildly annoying, but I threw up a thumbs up in acknowledgement of their unsolicited encouragement and went on with the rest of my workout. I took this experience to Facebook, expressing that it was mildly and secretly annoying to me when people think that maybe I w...