Amsterdam 2014: My First Sick Marathon

When I was just starting with marathons, I would have been 100% confident that I'd never attempt to run one if I was sick. Hell, I wasn't even sure if I could do it healthy.

October 18, 2014 was my second day in Amsterdam after an exhausting trip to India. I felt a little off in the morning, and by the evening the illness has progressed to a full-blown fever, headache, and cough. I spent the second half of the day in an airport hotel room, immobilized in a bed under a blanket.

And here I am, on October 19, deciding to race the Amsterdam marathon, starting at my usual marathon pace of 6:10-6:20 per mile.

At first it didn't feel bad at all.

 
Why would anyone run a marathon with a high fever? Here's what motivated me:

• Sunk costs: it is disheartening to keep doing things that lead to nothing, not even a failure. Desire for meaning is another name for the sunk cost fallacy.
• Desire for experience: a long race leaves lasting spatial memories -- one of the greatest rewards of both traveling and running.
• Desire for closure: the season wasn't going well at all, and I wanted it over.
• Other options even worse: not running at all looked like a huge bummer. Running slowly from the start would prolong the pain and take the remaining fun away.

Clearly my reasons didn't include achievement or pleasure.

Shortly after the half point. I'm suffering.

At the halfway point my right lung gave up. Instead of absorbing oxygen it started producing copious amounts of pain, forcing me to breathe extremely shallow and slow down a lot. I thought many times of just quitting the race, but I'd have to jog all the way back to the start, which was almost equivalent to finishing the race.

A couple of miles away from finish. I am in hell.
Also running past the I AMsterdam letters.

Periodically I would run out of breath and walk for a few minutes. I tried to not walk every kilometer, but it was terribly difficult to convince myself not to walk. Should I suffer to save a minute or two from an irrelevant finish time? So I got through the rest of the distance in a crippled half-walking manner.

The first half is significantly faster.

The chart of my pacing above illustrates the pain. Amsterdam was not my worst marathon, but it was definitely my worst-paced marathon: the first half was high 1:24, and the second was 1:45, to a total of 3:10:00. Sane, healthy Ivan couldn't have produced a huge 20-minute positive split.

My cadence, in steps per minute, as measured by a Garmin watch.
The steep drops indicate me walking.
As the chart indicates, I couldn't move my legs very well after 1 hour 20 minutes.

Not counting my sickness, the Amsterdam marathon was an excellent event. Although very narrow in the first couple of miles, a diverse and entertaining course takes runners through the city and the countryside of the Amstel river valley. The weather was near-perfect: chill, a bit windy, and humid. I wish I could run this race in a peak shape.

Training

Through Summer and Fall of 2014 I kept stubbornly biting off more than I could chew. At the time it felt like an answer to, "how much can I chew?"

The single biggest mistake was taking on more than I could handle. A 100 mile week was a lot of fun, but too much distance. Jack Daniels' workouts were barely manageable one-by-one, and week after week they chipped away my reserves faster than those replenished. I fell sick three times through this season -- once before every important race.

My mileage: weeks on the horizontal axis, miles on the vertical.
The drop on 35th and 39th week are (so typical for me) common cold illnesses.

Conclusion: train easy and don't race marathon while sick. Or do -- if you seek extraordinary experiences.