Just turned 20. Went to sign up for the city 10K just for kicks the day before the race. Was not a runner at the time. But the next table over was the sign up for the marathon. On a whim, i said what the hell and signed up for that instead. Had a bad free spaghetti dinner at the venue, went home to bed, and was at the start line the next morning at 6:30.
Gun goes off. Adrenaline pushes me through the first half of the race in about 1:45. This marathon stuff isn’t that hard!
Then my legs gave out completely. The second half of the race was a humiliating odyssey of jogging, walking, and limping (mostly limping) in blinding pain as grandmothers and fat old men left me in their dust.
But I powered through to the finish line in…4:50! Still have the photo finish to prove it.
Could not walk for an entire week afterward.
Thereafter, I competed in a few Olympic distance triathlons, which was more to my taste (was an excellent swimmer, OK mid-distance runner, indifferent cyclist), but never ran another marathon, and I doubt I ever will.
Busy Saturday morning in the gym. Same trainer at it again. When I got there they had left their shit in one squat rack, the others all busy. So I just unracked their stuff and got on with my sets.
About 20 minutes later they come do another few sets in another squat rack with their trainee, and they leave that one as well! Wtf
10 minutes later as I’m pondering whether unracking their shit twice in one day is excessive, a guy comes up and is looking at that rack, obviously wanting to use it.
For some reason at my gym the crunch machine will sit there empty during my entire leg workout, and then become insanely popular around 8:30 when I want to use it as part of my last superset where I do crunches, hypers and shrugs (yes I know I should never be doing any of that, and somewhere Mark Rippetoe silently weeps).
Last night I watched as three guys in a row came and sat down with their giant duffle bag of shit in tow. I swear people move in to that machine and set up residence.
One woman parks her shit on the seat while she does some kind of HIIT cycle where she also mixes in rowing machine, then squat jumps, then 5 minutes on the treadmill and maybe something else I’m forgetting. Kind of abusive imo.
My local gym as a 15-minute rule for all the free weight stations and there’s always the same grouchy old guy front-running me on the station I want to use–and he makes use of every one of those 15 minutes every time. Out of spite, I’m convinced.
My warm up squat sets would easily take over 15 min alone.
I also would take long breaks between worksets (at least 5 min), but at a globogym when I’m using equipment, I’m right there the whole time. Also for at least the first couple of min, I’m generally looking tired and breathing heavy. Most of the rest of the time I’m reviewing vids of the set.
Don’t disagree. The problem is that this gym is tiny, and there’s only one squat rack, one Smith machine, one regular bench, and two inclined benches. If you get unlucky, you can be waiting a long time for each of these stations.
Gym costs about $150/year so figured it would be a good opportunity to start lifting again. But yeah, I much prefer to have my own equipment in my own home.
Working in doesn’t seem to be a thing here. Especially not at this town gym where the average age of the other gym rats around me is probably 75+ and I’m the lone foreigner.
Did this two weeks ago and forgot to post a Mini-trip-report. I had missed my last 100k+training ride two weeks before the race, but didn‘t feel too worried. One of the great things about cycling as opposed to running is that you get less obsessed about numbers - with elevation and wind every ride is so different, that I just went by feelings and only had a goal to increase my weekly long ride by 20-30 minutes.
The race had several distances and the 150k started at 8am. My group got to start a few minutes later and it turned out to be a great day. I was able to hang on to the two fastest riders in my group at the start and I averaged the first hour with 29.0km/h, which is pretty fast for me, but wasn‘t unreasonable. I lost them when we had to ride through a city and took things a little slower from there.
The race had refreshment stations every 40k or so, so I never had any problems with water or hunger. After 90k the hilly parts started and since I am one of the heavier riders (104kg on race day) I was overtaken on the slopes, but did Not lose dramatically compared to people who were close to me before. I had teamed up with one more rider and he waited for me for a few minutes at the top of the longest climb (~1000ft elevation gain). For the Last climb my left foot started hurting, so I took an extra Break of a few minutes and made the Tour in 7,5 hours (including breaks). Total elevation gain was around 1200m (3500ft). It was a lot of fun and I definitely want to do it again next year. Maybe I will do the 200k then… we will see.
Good luck to everyone training for their marathon or any other fitness goal.
when i was coming to the gym 7-8 years ago, i benched 285lbs once, though i’m sure the guy spotting me helped. he said he didn’t, but he did.
quit going like 6ish years ago, been coming again since last summer. started lifting around january or so. couple weeks ago, guy had me start doing 10/8/6/4/4/2/2 reps going up 10lbs each time. last week i did 185/195/205/215/225/235/245lbs. the last 2 felt pretty good and there happened to be another guy down here so i asked him to spot me.
did 250lbs once. did 275lbs once. did 285lbs once. felt good, tied my all time record (only this time, spotter was nowhere near the bar). was feeling myself so i tried 300lbs. nope.
so i just got done doing the same reps and weights and the same guy is down here so fuck it right?
did 275lbs once and felt good. put 290lbs on. and was gonna be real disappointed if i didn’t get it. been kicking myself all week for not just trying 290lbs last week to set a record…
boom.
definitely wouldn’t have gotten maybe even 295lbs, took what felt like a looong time (lol 1 second prob) but i pushed through it
i’m gonna try to avoid doing sets of 1 at the end next week (i only do heavy weights mondays) to get stronger and try for 295lbs in 2 weeks. obviously 300lbs is the goal.
but yeah, feels good man. i’m 44 and stronger than i’ve ever been.
JFC what a week. After an easy 6 mile run on Tuesday morning, I started peeing Hawaiian Punch in the afternoon. Went to urgent care and got sent to ER to get tested for rhabdomyolysis. After sitting in a hospital bed with an IV for a few hours the tests came back negative and they let me go home. Skipped my speed run on Wednesday and saw my usual doctor on Thursday. He said it was benign bleeding and could have been caused by a small kidney stone. Got some more tests that didn’t show any more blood in urine and everything else looked normal. Ran on Friday, yesterday and today, with today’s 16 mile run being my longest ever. It actually went pretty good and I didn’t feel like death in the last mile. I’m tired AF right now but in a good way.
This is going to be a gut punch for several thousand people:
For the last 2 years, if you met the Boston Marathon standards, you were guaranteed entry. So even if you only beat your standard by a few seconds, you still qualified:
But this year (applications for the 2024 race), qualifying applications jumped enormously, and far above capacity. 33,000 runners submitted applications, and they only have room for about 23,000. So about a third of qualifiers are going to find out in the next couple of weeks that they didn’t actually qualify. The way they do this is by establishing a cutoff time that applies to everyone, so that in order to actually be accepted, your time has to be faster than the official standard minus the cutoff time.
I can’t imagine how disappointing it would be to beat your Boston time by anywhere from 0-5 minutes only to be told that it still wasn’t good enough.
