Tunnel Light Marathon

Sunday, I completed my 10th marathon and my fifth fastest time in the Tunnel Light Marathon just outside of Seattle. I finished with a 3:47:46, it was my fastest time since February 10, 1990, when I was 20 years old. I probably weighed 145 pounds if I was soaking wet when I was a freshman at Texas A&M when I ran my personal record of 3:22:16 in the Woodlands Marathon.

Tunnel Light is one of the fastest courses in the entire country due to its entirely downhill course. It also is unique it that two of the first three miles at the start is through a dark and abandoned train tunnel.

I was one of almost 30 runners from the Volte running group in The Woodlands, Texas that made the trip. Several others came to root us on. It was a fun and exciting journey.

It was the smallest marathon I’ve ever run (approximately 700 runners) who came from all parts of the country - many attempting to use the race to qualify for the Boston Marathon. If I heard correctly 13 members of our running group qualified for the Boston Marathon.

My goal is to qualify for Boston at the Houston Marathon in January 2019, but I still have to knock another 28 minutes off my finishing time to reach that goal. My goal for this race was to run a sub-4-hour marathon; something I hadn’t done in almost 30 years but was able to accomplish this past weekend.

My journey back into running started about a year ago.

In February 2017, I was in the worst shape of my life. I weighed 254 pounds and couldn’t run a half mile. One day while at work I bent over to pick up a pen and I split my pants. I was utterly humiliated and decided that I was starting the diet right then. Over the next six months, I lost over 60 pounds mostly due to the Keto diet, but I wasn’t exercising at all.

Last August, my daughter, Allyssa, found a training schedule for a half-marathon online and asked if I would train and run it with her. It was a 90-day training plan, and the Houston Half Marathon was scheduled for the end of October. I agreed, but what I quickly learned was that training and running it with her meant to her was I’ll train on my own, and run a faster pace, but I will ride to and from the race with you.

In the car on the way home from successfully completing the Houston-Half, I challenged Allyssa, to train for the upcoming Houston full marathon. I told her she would never be as close to training for a full-marathon as she was at that moment. She said she would think about it and then got back with me a day later and accepted the challenge.

In January, I completed my first marathon in almost 20 years (the last being in 1999 in the Ft. Worth Cowtown marathon which was one of my most miserable experiences and a large part of why I quit running marathons until earlier this year.

A couple of weeks after the Houston Marathon, Dawn Johnson, a friend of mine from work saw some of my running posts and invited me to come out and run with her running group, Volte. Although I’ve been running on and off for the last 30 years, I never considered joining a running group until this year. A big thanks to Bill Dwyer for founding the group and inspiring us.

Dawn introduced me to Leanne Rosser, one of the coaches and wishing the first couple of minutes she was challenging me with questions about what was my next goal. I told her that I really didn’t have one than to beat my time from the last marathon in the upcoming Woodlands marathon at the beginning of March. However, I was searching for what would become my next goal. I considered a triathlon but had pretty much talked myself out of it, because I’m not a great biker and don’t want to end up like roadkill on the side of the road.

I thought about maybe trying to run an ultra, but wasn’t sure if that was the direction I wanted to go, but I was searching for a challenge. Leanne planted the seed of qualifying for Boston in my head that day. Leanne had already qualified and ran the Boston Marathon and thought it would be a great challenge for me.

Honestly, I didn’t know a whole lot about what was entailed in qualifying for Boston, but it did sound like a worthy accomplishment. I got online and did a little research and then got in touch with Leanne and asked how the coaching program worked.

I finished the Woodlands marathon about 10 minutes faster than Houston, but it was a letdown because I started strong and crashed at the end. I was on pace for a 4-hour marathon at the halfway point, but my legs cramped up, and I had to walk some during the last couple of miles.

After recovering from the marathon, I decided to hire Leanne as my running coach. I thought I was in pretty good shape at the time as I had just come off running two marathons in the last 6 weeks, but I had no idea what I was in for. Training started at the end of May for the upcoming Tunnel Light marathon which was in Seattle in September.

She started increasing the amount of running more than I had ever run before. During the time I spent training on my own for the Houston and Woodlands marathons the furthest I ever ran in a month was 77 miles. In August I completed my first +50 mile week and completed 188 training miles.

I had many terrible runs this summer, in fact, I was almost always one of the last to finish our long runs on Saturday mornings. I’ve never trained in the summer until this summer. I can honestly say it was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. As, someone that enjoys keeping our home a cool 67-68 degrees, I went from being someone that wanted to sleep in and get started as late as possible to being someone that just wanted to get the dang thing over with and start as early as possible to avoid as much of the heat as possible.

Being one of the slowest in the group also has some significant disadvantages. First of all being one of the last to finish means, you spent more time on your feet, and when the sun rises, it begins to heat up quickly. As most of our runs finish running uphill over a bridge and directly into the sun not some of my finer moments. Also, as a real estate agent, I should know my way around pretty well, but there were a couple of weeks where I get left behind and had to use Waze to find my way back to the finish line.

Knowing that I had to cut an hour and 10 minutes off of my Woodlands time to qualify for Boston, I knew I had to change a few things. A few weeks after I hired Leanne as my running coach I was at church and our pastor talked about how all great athletes work their core. As someone who in the past thought working my core meant eating an entire pizza or half of a lasagna (yes, I really did that when I was in college - my brother and I ate a whole Stouffer’s lasagna, you know the one that feeds 12) I knew I was in for a big challenge.

I decided to begin working my core by doing some incline sit-ups. Always the optimist, I put the bench at the steepest setting and started doing incline sit-ups. I made it all the way to 8 before my abs completely gave out. I couldn’t even make do one more so that I could get off the machine. I ended up having to release my feet and slid down until my head hit the floor. Again, I was humiliated only this time there were spectators.

Since I had pretty much subscribed to the Charles Barkley philosophy, “I’m in shape, round is a shape,” but, I knew I wouldn’t last long unless I made some significant changes in my life. I hired a personal trainer to help me with my core.

I also changed my diet and mindset. Whereas in the past I always thought that I earned the double cheeseburger after my workout I began thinking of food as fuel instead of entertainment and started eating clean.

Realizing that weight loss is 80% diet and only 20% exercise I knew that I needed to be more selective about what I was eating. While I was training for the Houston marathon, I made the mistake of trying to go back on the Keto diet to lower my running weight. I ran out of energy way too quickly and had to reassess the diet. I knew my body needed carbs, so I just decided to eat clean and cut out as much of the crap that had been eating and replaced it with protein and healthy carbs.

The next thing I had to work on was my mindset. Typically, I am a very optimistic person and believe that I can accomplish almost anything, running in the summer heat had taken its toll on me and left me feeling discouraged. Although I knew I ran better in colder weather, I am only as good as my most recent run, and most of those were crap.

After some of the Saturday mornings long run, our coaches would give a little talk to inspire and motivate the runners. In one of the sessions, one of the coaches, Mary Carter, recommended reading the book “Let Your Mind Run” by Deena Kastor (American record holder in the marathon & more). I listened to the book on Audible, and it helped me change my perspective and mindset by not allowing my bad runs to overshadow my good ones.

My last two long runs before the marathon were better and I finished strong (my last mile was the fastest) which was something much different from the 12 weeks before then when I limped into the finish line like a dead fish - often walking (many times I felt like crawling). I must be 1/4 vampire because once the sun rises it completely sucks all the energy out of me.

So, my goal is a 3:20 in Houston in January 2019. It is a huge goal and one I may not be able to accomplish, but I just knocked 42 minutes off my last marathon time, so it will happen, God willing, just don’t know when. If I can make it past the Allen Parkway hills, I may have a chance.

I need to knock over a minute a mile off my pace, but I’m in better shape than I’ve been in since my teens. I’m putting in more miles, working my core (100 incline sit-ups daily & 5-7 minutes planking), eating much better, a coach that pushes me further than I believe I can go, and a supportive wife, Lisa Smith, that allows me to train 2-3 hours a day between running and at the gym.

Great running buddies and accountability partners, (I hesitate to mention names because I don’t want to leave anyone out) but you inspire and motivate me daily whether I run with you or far behind you. Also, huge props to Aero Smith (my K-9 running buddy), as well as my two sons, Hunter 15 & Palmer 12, that will run the Houston-Half with me (or in front of me ;) ) in October.

Cheers!