Fraser Darcy

On the road again

Firstly, in big news for the blog, last month’s total views count was just under 2,500 which is the biggest ever. 663 people visited the blog with an average of 3.69 views per visitor. That’s a lot of people and more than 6 times the amount of subscribers so people are finding the blog through Google, my name being mentioned on podcasts (thank you) or various other methods. Pretty cool.

Secondly, in good news for myself, I pulled up pretty well from Ballarat Marathon last week. Perhaps it was all the training I did to prepare well for the event, or perhaps I didn’t go hard enough. We’ll never know. What I do know is that on Monday morning following the Ballarat marathon I left the Dohnt’s house in Brighton around 7am to drive back to the airport and fly home. It was a pretty cruisey drive, I opted to go via St.Kilda, Port Melbourne and the ring route as opposed to the direct route through peak hour traffic. Walking around the airport to do all that type of stuff I felt pretty good, a little stiff after I had sat down but once moving, not too bad. No sore joints, no sore muscles, just stiff.

I enjoyed a good flight home to Adelaide preparing last week’s blog for most of the flight and didn’t suffer any sickness like on the way over. Georgia picked me up from the airport, we made it back to Mum and Dad’s and I had a big lunch. I wished I could’ve just relaxed for the whole next week but unfortunately that’s not the case.

I could relax a little bit. I didn’t have to stress about what time I was going to run at Ballarat or how the race would go, or what my stomach would do, what the weather was going to be like, would I crash the hire car, would my flight get cancelled etc. etc. No, none of that stress anymore which was nice, instead it was just a stress of finishing the blog, publishing The Blue Line for the weekend, maximising the exposure of my result in a positive manner on social media (sharing posts, replying to comments and messages) and finishing off the programs I am responsible for with RAO. I ticked a few of these items on Monday arvo but with a whole week to get to the programs I pushed them to Tuesday. I almost didn’t get out for a walk or a stroll in the arvo on Monday but made it out in the end at 5pm. The first run/walk post a marathon is always very nice mentally because I can reflect on my success. It felt a bit crap physically but I was surprised with how good I felt except for my high left hamstring.

I was worried that my hamstring would still be sore on Tuesday morning but at 6:30am as I jogged around at the RAO session it wasn’t too bad. I actually felt very good. I made it to an hour and then called it there, happy to not worry about going further for more training or stressing about my afternoon run. The only thing I was stressing about was ensuring I continued to recover well and got back into the program writing game. Plus, there was a few house related jobs I had to take care of which took up 1-2hrs of my time. Busy man I was! I thought about going for a sauna and in a perfect world probably would have, but there is no perfect world so instead I went for a nice walk. Still a great option and saved me $10.

Onto Wednesday, I organised to run with Jess and gave her the play-by-play of my marathon race at Ballarat. It was good to share it with her and get her comments on a few things. Again, I was feeling pretty good, 70 minutes of good running three days after a marathon is a better turnaround than any of my other marathons I think. It almost felt better than when I did that special block a few weeks ago. I wrote a few programs from The RunHouse and then hopped into the gym for a light session. This did not feel as good which makes a lot of sense to me. My muscles are conditioned well to running at marathon pace and asking them to do some strength work is hard for them. However, getting them to do some strength work ensures that all my stabiliser muscles switch on and stay in good condition (these are the ones that are not necessarily used when running) whilst also keeping me mentally sharp. If I can do strength training and suffer through that then I can surely go for a run which is a bit easier. Which I did of course, later in the afternoon after some more program writing. The autumnal weather was just too good to refuse a quick run. I kept it light and still had a grin on my face reflecting on what I had achieved at Ballarat.

Thursday was another day of the same. Easy jog in the morning, more program writing, more TBL writing, replying to emails, all good stuff to keep me occupied and distracted from thinking about the possibility of running another marathon…

Yes, having alluded to it at the end of last week’s blog, I was tossing up whether to run the Adelaide Marathon all week. On offer, as I write this on Saturday arvo before the race, is the chance to tick a bucket list item of running two marathons in a row like Yuki Kawauchi, CJ Albertson or a few others have done, at Adelaide Marathon. The risks are that I get injured from so much high intensity load, or that I mentally burn out. The rewards are that I get even more conditioned for the marathon, can experiment with a few different things regarding tapering and fuelling, continue to challenge myself as to what I think is possible and find my limit, and finally, $2500 is the prize money on offer for first place. A pretty handy sum when I have a couple of overseas trips planned for later on in the year.

A decision around racing or not racing had been weighing on my mind all week and by Thursday it was starting to get pretty close to actually having to decide. The trouble is, if I decided I was going to race, I could always change my mind and not race. Same goes for the other way. I therefore relaxed into the idea that I’ll prepare as normal for my weekend long run, not really taper and not really carb load (starting it on Saturday instead of Thursday night) and prepare only mentally to race a marathon. If I can just start the race and continue running as long as I don’t feel I’m crossing too far over into the danger zone of hurting myself physically or mentally then that’ll be a good plan. If I cross into the danger zone at 20k, so be it, maybe I’ll pull out and not risk damaging myself for next week’s training. If I cross into the danger zone at 42.1km, well, I’ll finish it off and hopefully be able to claim first prize. Either way I’ll have learned more about myself and about running by choosing to race and giving it a go.

Something else minor to consider though is that I may lose my favourite of stat. By choosing to race, and risking having to DNF, I am risking the fact that I have finished in the Top 3 Australians of every marathon I have ever done. I’ll be sad if I lose that stat but if I consider that up until 2021 I had only run one marathon and that stat hadn’t meant anything to me for the first 27 years of my life then it probably doesn’t need to stop me from doing something. A stat like that is both reflective of my choices to race appropriate marathons at appropriate stages of my running career which is a product of my training and thought process. If I believe enough in my own training and thought process that what I am doing by risking that stat and running two marathons in close succession is a worthwhile risk, then that only strengthens my thought process for future marathons. If you don’t test the breaking point of things, you’ll never know how far you can push it.

Anyway, enough philosophical waffle. The rest of Thursday was pretty cruisey, another walk and then watching some of Essendon v North Melbourne on TV. Lucky win for us really…

On Friday at the final RAO session of the week I chose to do 15 minutes of light work. If I could hit the faster work and recover fine from it then it was another sign I was ready to race a marathon. I eased into the session because I wasn’t mentally that switched on but ended up with some good splits. I also recovered pretty well so knew that the marathon double was potentially on. I carried this positive momentum into finishing off the rest of my programs during the day and then going out for another jog in the afternoon because the weather was again, very inviting.

Finally, that brings us to Saturday. One last easy jog, this time with Alice in Belair which was nice, and then a very busy morning/day of; preparing my drink bottles for the marathon, dropping them off at the InterContinental (worst location ever for a bib pick up), voting, buying some groceries before Mum and Dad returned home, eating 500g of pasta, cleaning the house before Mum and Dad came home and then putting this blog together.

Then it was of course Saturday afternoon and an even more poignant time for decision making. Was I actually that serious about racing? It’s so much effort to get up at 4:15am, have breakfast, drive to the event, warm up and start at 6:30am. I desperately wished that I could’ve just run 1.5-2hrs instead on some nice country roads reflecting on Ballarat and listening to my own music. But this isn’t a perfect world of course, and I was going to attend the Adelaide Marathon Festival in some capacity so I may as well start the race for my long run anyway. So would I DNF the marathon if my long run went bad? Or was the opportunity to run two marathons like some of my idols just simply too good to refuse? All this was rattling inside my head which made me realise that this scenario is challenging me which is good. Life is all about approaching challenges and coming out the other side, good or bad. So I had a mental challenge on my hands and if I decided to race, a physical challenge too.

As the day continued on I became more and more invested in the idea of racing. What’s there to lose really? I don’t have to prove anything to myself, I did that last week with my 2:18 run. What’s there to gain? The idea that I can complete two marathons in back to back weekends which may be a powerful factor when I line up for my next marathon. It’s also going to tell me if I am able to train at this level like I have seen other runners do. There’s also the fact that winning the Adelaide Marathon as an Adelaide local is pretty nice too. I was disappointed last year to finish 2nd to Kaleb who was a better runner on the day than me and I didn’t want anyone who I thought I could beat, even despite my fatigue from Ballarat, just getting an easy win. I wanted them to earn it.

So if you haven’t worked it out yet, I’ll spell it out for you: I was pretty unsure of how this marathon would go not only in the days leading in, but also at the start and for most of the race! A good omen to let me know I had made the right decision of choosing to race was that as I walked to the start line I bumped into Robert ‘Deek’ de Castella and one of the IMF runners Charlie who I had met earlier in the year at the Cadbury Marathon. Deeks, who is above 60 years old, is of course the former NR holder in the marathon and I jokingly started a conversation with him by asking ‘you’re not having a run today?’. We got chatting, he was impressed with my 2:18 at Ballarat and I was impressed Charlie remembered me, and I realised that if I didn’t choose to race I would never have crossed paths with him on that morning so it was a nice little coincidence!

To continue my good start to the day I met a fellow RAO runner from the NT, Tim Hewitt, who had a 2:25 marathon to his name and was aiming for somewhere around that and maybe a touch slower on Sunday. The course is a bit tricky in Adelaide after all so it’s hard to run a PB at that level. We warmed up together and it was good to break the ice and just chat casually. As one of my main competitors I didn’t want to have to run silently next to him in the race so just talking about running and the plans for the race was a good way to ease into the day. There was another runner who may or may not have been starting I was keeping my eye out for but in the end they never appeared on the front of the start line so that was good. It was basically just going to be me and Tim.

After a kilometre, Tim and I already had a 5-10s lead so we didn’t bother looking back anymore. We clicked off the first few km’s around 3:30/km pace and things felt pretty good. One of the things that makes running Adelaide Marathon nice is that all the roads and footpaths I train on are free of any car traffic on the day. There’s the odd pedestrian to dodge in the first lap but mostly it’s pretty nice just running 3:30/km through a pretty scenic part of Adelaide. As we passed through different parts of the course I ran past a few familiar faces which was nice and felt a bit bad for Tim who wasn’t copping much love from the fans. I decided to run the first half with Tim even though at times I was getting a little gap on him when going up slight inclines. If I broke off too soon I knew it was going to be a long race of wondering where the fuck is this guy? Is he still back there or is he catching up? So instead, I chose to sit up a little bit and just run with Tim knowing where he was.

That was all going well for the most part until I had to take a piss. Yep, in all my big marathons I’ve never had to stop for a piss but today, that happened. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t putting much pressure on this race and was looking for an ‘out’ or maybe I just really needed to go. At the point where the thought of holding on became harder than the thought of finishing the race I knew I needed to stop. So I did, watered some trees a little bit for Adelaide City Council and then caught up to Tim in the space of the next two km’s. It was also nice to just check I can run a bit faster if I needed to.

Coming into the end of the first lap we were still together and still on the same pace of 3:30/km (around 2:28/2:29 marathon pace). I knew that if I pushed the pace slightly up the hill at the end of War Memorial Drive I’d be able to get a substantial gap. So I did. It was about time that I tested myself a bit more and see what I could actually do. The CJ Alberston’s and Yuki Kawuachi’s of this world run pretty fast marathons back to back but for me, running 2:28 pace is actually 10 minutes slower than my PB so should be more than manageable given their back-to-back marathon experiences. I kept my foot on the gas for the next few km’s up until the 26/27km mark. I had developed a bit of a lead and was now going to be running through congested crowds for the rest of the race. It would be hard for Tim to make up any time on me as working your way through the crowds not only adjusts where you can run, but also upsets your mental rhythm.

When I made it to 30km I was pretty relieved. I was in the lead by about thirty seconds and felt physically better than I was at this point last week but mentally wasn’t in great shape… when is this going to end… It was also starting to get a bit warm and windy so I was nervous that I’d drop the ball late and start to cramp.

Despite those negative thoughts I just kept ticking the km’s off. Part of the reason for doing this marathon was seeing if I could handle this as a training exercise in future. I ran 2hrs 40 for a marathon in training a month or so ago and now I was on track to do 2hrs 30. Hence, when I go into ‘training’ mode in my mind, I know I can just keep ticking off the km’s because the more I tick off, the better I’ll become (in my mind at least).

That attitude got me to 35/36km’s and by this stage the congestion was really bad. I would’ve killed for a clear road and the ability to listen to music to zone out but instead I had to do battle with what I had in front of me. It’s not a perfect world after all I guess. Coming into the 40th kilometre there’s a good turnaround where I could spot Tim and see how far back he was. The gap between me and him had been growing steadily over the last 5km’s and by now it was over a minute and a half. I’d have to really blow up to lose this race I thought. I put it into ‘nurse’ mode essentially and nursed myself up and over the Morphett St. bridge. When I came into War Memorial Drive still feeling relatively good I was pretty happy. Yes, I am actually going to win this race again. I enjoyed the relatively large crowd as I crossed the finish line in 2:28:34. Job done.

So what was it worth it? How did I pull up?

I think it was worth it when you consider the positives of:

• Ticked off a bucket list goal of doing two marathons in two weekends. Probably won’t be keen to do that again. Nor do I feel compelled to race Adelaide again having now become a two-time winner.
• Experimenting with a marathon as a training run. I’ll have to wait and see how I pull up to judge whether it’s benefited me.
• I won $2500. That’s always nice.
• I challenged myself to do something I was unsure of. And hopefully acted as a role model in doing so. Some of the motivating figures in my life are people who challenge the status quo and with this double marathon performance I was aiming to do that too. Something that helped with challenging the status quo and completing this challenge was believing I could. The scene below from The Dark Knight Rises (which I watched with Alice this week) highlights the power of belief.

And how did I pull up? Well I guess I’ll know more about that next week. So either subscribe and read along next week or keep this link bookmarked in your browser. Thanks for reading and thanks to those people who then take what they have read here and apply it to their own running!! Yes Mr.Galpin I am talking about you!! Enjoy!