Shamrock Training Update

If you follow me on Instagram (where I share most of my daily training and much more frequent fitness updates), you already know what I’m going to share in this Shamrock training update. I have decided to drop from the full marathon to the half.

As you might know, my goal for the Shamrock Marathon was sub-4. This is a goal I’ve been chasing since fall of 2017 and while I’m close, I’m still not quite there yet. After I began rehabbing my ankle / achilles injury I was hopeful that I’d still be able to line up on March 17. My recovery has gone generally well – I can run back to back days without pain and as long as I do my exercises, I am generally (but certainly not always) pain free. However, I simply don’t have enough time to be ready to go for a sub-4 marathon in March. And frankly, I don’t want to run the marathon just to run it. So I am dropping down to the half marathon and will run that mostly for fun.

I thought seriously about shooting for a May marathon. But I don’t think that is realistic for my schedule. I have an incredibly busy April, with lots of travel and I know that travel will make it difficult to train hard during that month – it’s part of the reason I chose a March race. I’m already signed up for a local DC half marathon in May as well. I think I will just run those races and probably take the year off from the marathon.

Is there a change I decide to give it a go at a fall marathon? Of course. In fact, I’m in the lottery for the NYC Marathon because I just had so much fun last fall. But I have NO desire to train for a marathon over the summer – I have trained for marathons for five summers straight and the DC summer heat and humidity has just worn on me. I think I might be taking a 2019 break from the marathon – and I’m totally fine with that. This is all very subject to change of course and I’ll keep y’all posted.

Finally, for the past month or so, I’ve been struggling with vertigo. I finally went to the doctor because at times the vertigo was terrible enough to the point where I couldn’t go about my normal everyday activities. I wrote about this on the gram here, but in short, my doctor thinks I am suffering from vestibular migraines. This is essentially a nervous disorder. I’m working on fixing this issue but it has caused my running to take a bit more of a back seat because there have been mornings where I could not walk straight, never the less run. I’m proud that I’ve been stringing together some solid runs in the midst of all this, frankly. This is all (like life) a work in progress and I’m learning as I go.

Who else will I see at Shamrock? Anyone else suffer from vestibular migraines?