Fight or Flight
Decision making when injury or illness interrupts your marathon training
By Kevin Beck
As featured in the June 2005 issue of Running Times Magazine
Other injuries are more difficult and really cause problems with attaining the goal. Injuries like ITB syndrome seem to just not want to go away. Others, like Achilles, calf, hip and knee problems, often require a very, very gradual return to your training program. In these cases, there is usually some biomechanical/strength/flexibility issue that needs to be addressed to get at the root problem. If this is the case, you may have to scrap the goal race and begin looking farther down the calendar for an event. It really comes down to how quickly the runner can return to full training."
What was your pre-layoff fitness level and how was it reached? If you’ve been running consistently for years, all else being equal, your fitness won’t erode as quickly as it will if you’re relatively new or have had other recent setbacks. The more consistent you’ve been leading into a break, the more "savings" you have to draw on, within reasonable limits.
How experienced are you? No cheating. If the answer is "not very," just getting yourself to the starting line healthy is your best bet, with "must-do" time goals tabled until another day. If you’ve done numerous marathons and have a realistic sense of how your overall preparation relates to the effort you can expect to put forth in a race, then it’s worth taking a close look at your schedule and figuring out how you can make things work in your favor despite possibly having to abandon a crack at your dream time.
A real-life example: Last year, I was aiming for the Jacksonville Marathon, with plans to run Disney "at 90 percent" three weeks later. In October and November I raced well at 30K and 50K and knew I was rounding into PR shape. But between traveling, a minor injury, and other annoyances—including a 48-hour stint in an iced-in airport—I missed a significant chunk of training at a critical time. With a back-up race effectively already on tap, I decided that racing Jacksonville would be a bad idea and set about devising a plan for the four weeks leading into Disney.
I considered all of the above variables. I’d been out long enough to be sucking a bit of air, but seemed healthy enough overall. I’d logged steady weekly miles in the two months before stumbling, so it was reasonable to expect I could slide into the Magic Kingdom on a fairly well-padded aerobic cushion. I’d done enough marathons to be realistic but not fearful—I was confident of being able to race rather than just survive.
All of this was contingent on not going overboard in an effort to compensate for missed time, an attractive but illusory concept in the marathon world. "The most important principle—which I learned the hard way—is not trying to make up for lost workouts," says Pfitzinger. "This will almost always backfire if your time off was caused by injury or illness, although you can occasionally get away with it if you missed a few days due to severe weather."
Looking at where I’d been and where I hoped to be very soon, I thought it best to structure my preparation around specifics: a 20-miler three weeks out with 1/3 of it at a good clip, a half marathon at 90 percent effort two weeks out, and short bursts of faster running during my taper, to keep the neuromuscular systems honest. On other days, I’d run as slowly as I needed to in order to recover, but would throw in two to three miles at my expected marathon pace when feeling springy. I acknowledged that the last 10K of the marathon would be unusually difficult regardless, but aimed to offset this with an especially conservative start.
Optimal or not, I was pleased to run within four minutes of my best on a muggy day. Pfitzinger himself missed nine days training with bronchitis six weeks before winning the 1984 Olympic Trials Marathon and 10 days with bronchitis three weeks before finishing third at the New York City Marathon, so even highly tuned elite runners can succeed despite setbacks.