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....

  Speed work can be painful. You are hunched over, huffing and puffing. And even when you're going as fast as you possibly can, there is always going to be some elitist randos out there who will dismiss your effort as "slow."  There are some unsavory corners of the running community that are still very "high school" and the last thing you want to do is re-visit those nightmares. What if I told you that not everyone does speed work to get faster? That it doesn't have to be painful?  Here's why you should consider doing speed work: If you spend too much time at one pace your brain will learn to only activate the muscle fibers necessary to keep going at that pace. All the other muscle fibers won't get any stimulus and won't be familiar with being activated. On long enough runs, the first stringers will eventually get tired and when the brain looks for the second string, no one on the bench will be ready to go in. The result? Your pace and pe...

I took 2 weeks off to reflect on this past year. I had tons of fun, no doubt. Over the past year, I ran 2 road marathons, a 50 km ultra marathon, a 50 mile ultra marathon, a 197 mile road relay (Hood to Coast) and just recently I ran a 7 mile trail race. But there was still a part of me that didn't feel satisfied. The arbitrary goal of hitting sub 4 hours in a road marathon eluded me and I was getting increasingly frustrated that I kept falling short. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that I was so hyper-focused breaking 4 hours goal that I ended up skipping steps. I got a little drunk off the allure of the marathon distance. It's an admirable distance for sure, but running a marathon does not make you "more" of a runner than someone who hasn't run a marathon. I spent months chasing after goal marathon pace and completely ignored all my other paces.  I've been preaching "go slow to run fast," which is absolutely true. Turns out if I go slo...