The Gold Coast Marathon

A test case for Hyponatraemia, 2009

The aim...use it as a training exercise, get the fuel/water ratio right, make sure I didn’t work too hard to hinder recovery, and get the finish so I could move closer to my tenth Gold Coast Marathon. (This was the 7th).

I was relaxed the days before. Spent two days in Melbourne working, and no matter how much care you take of yourself, travel is tiring. Schedules are out of whack, diets get messed around, days are long, and you are often out late.

So Friday and Saturday were about doing as little possible in the physical sense. And Jess, my wonderful friend and dietician, had me do the carb loading..which meant that I kept my usual diet (I am a carb queen) and added lollies...not my favourite food..however, they made me thirsty, so I drank more than usual, which is good. Well hydrated.

Since I wasn’t racing the Gold Coast Marathon, I was very relaxed and had a great night sleep. However the morning was wrenched open with a 5 am phone call from my 18 year old daughter, Natalie, calling from Paris, to tell me her purse had been stolen. Natalie had been having the travel baptism by fire...two days bed ridden with fever, staying in horrible places and being treated marginally by the Parisians. She had only been away two weeks out of 6 months. I felt the whole burden of single parenting crash down, once again..on my shoulders. After a moment of this, I simply had to shrug and get the burden off. This was her time to grow up...and she was intact, not in danger, and had learned a vital lesson about never leaving your valuables unattended. Most of us have learned that lesson the hard way.

We were using the Gold Coast Marathon as a platform to get the fluid, salt and calorie ratio right for me. I have been diagnosed with Hyponataemia I was part of a large study conducted in 1997 at the New Zealand Ironman, and spent the 12 hours following this event in Auckland hospital with a bunch of other people who also had low blood sodium).This condition is not well understood, and has really only come about because of the increase in popularity of long distance events.

It is common for me to get nausea on a long run. If it gets bad, I start vomiting. I loose a lot of salt through my skin, and have trouble drinking any water. I rarely pee at all, although I usually have diarrhea. I have worked on different regimes trying to get my personal formula right. It can change from day to day with a change in the temperature.

For the Gold Coast Marathon we decided to keep everything separate. Water, salt and calories. In the past I have tried sports drinks with extra sodium in the form of gastrolite.

This year at the Gold Coast Marathon here is what I did. Every hour I took an sports gel, every 90 minutes a salt stick tablet And I drank water according to thirst. Well...did I drink water! I was thirsty. This never happens to me. And no nausea. It was extraordinary. I felt good. How amazing. It was quite a warm day, around 20 C. (68 F) so I was loosing a lot of fluid as sweat.

We were also using the Gold Coast Marathon to experiment with Jeff Galloway’s Run Walk Run regime. I had wanted to give this a try for a while, and given this Gold Coast Marathon was not a race for me, it seemed like the perfect event. Plus I had done all my long training on trails, and this was a flat road race. The idea of the Run Walk Run is that it allows the use of different muscle groups from the run to the walk, and as anyone knows who has run a flat road marathon, its the stiffness in the legs that gets you. Breaking each kilometer by walking quickly for 35 secs allowed my legs to not stiffen up so much. And it did work. Because my watch wasn’t working properly, I decided to use the kilometer markers as the point to go into a 35 sec walk. For the first 10 k’s or so we were holding 5 min k/s quite easily. Then we got caught in a very narrow bottle neck and lost the pace and cadence. We slowed down to 5.12 pace.

By 23 k’s we were both stiffening up..lack of long flat road running. I decided to really relax and so I stopped and had a chat to two people along the way.

At the 31 k mark Delina, my Kokoda team mate and Gold Coast Marathon running partner decided to pull out. She had a niggle that had been with her for the week and it was getting worse, so she did not want to jeopardize our main event in two weeks.

I would have happily quit at that time. We had both decided that we much prefer trails to flat road races. More variety, nice scenery, peaks and valleys literally, lovely downhills after the ups...this just went on and on...

However, I hate to quit, and the hard bits are the very reason I run long distance. Who am I that stays the distance? Who am I that fights with my own demons and wins? I couldn’t live with myself if I quit just because I was in discomfort. Choosing the cushy, easy path. The one that ends up on the couch with the remote control, hating yourself because you have no self discipline. Nope...that's not my story. Or the story of all the thousands that crossed the finish line that day. Like Damian, the totally blind runner who trains with us. He ran a 3 hour 25 sec marathon with two guides taking him through a half marathon each. Totally blind...imagine that? Or Craig or Brad, marathon virgins, gutting it out for their first. Or my buddy Toni, on her first marathon. She started running with us in March. Sunday she ran 3 hours 44. A very impressive effort. All with a smile and the quite determination of a warrior spirit. You will be hearing about Toni as she is the captain of our support crew for the Kokoda Challenge. You can count on her like you can count of few people. Now she wants to run the world. And she will.

Are we all crazy, or is it that the challenge of rising above self and mediocrity inspires us? In our over indulged world, where we really do not know hardship like others, running a marathon is a majestic feat. And on the other side of the finish line we are now members of a unique community. You can only know it if you have crossed that line. We walk just that bit taller.

As for me, I finished this Gold Coast Marathon in just under 4 hours. I was back running today, Tuesday, and only have slight stiffness, which is good. That was the plan. To run easy and be able to bounce back.

Now the hard work is done...and it is easy street until 7 am Saturday morning, July 18th.

or...

The Answer is Chocolate..

Who cares what the question is...

From left to right, Delina, Jess, Toni, Anthony, Sonia, Christine

To Return from Gold Coast Marathon to Born to Run

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