Kate O’Neill: A Long Way to Lisbon … and Back
(Elite Athlete Blog - Entry #5)
Posted March 19th, 2008 at 10:00 AM by Kate O'Neill
Section: News & Results, Elite Athlete Blogs, Kate O'Neill
Hi, this is my blog in TFS’s Elite Athlete Blog Series. Bookmark http://kateoneill.thefinalsprint.com/ and check back every other Monday for my latest entry as I strive for the 2008 Summer Olympics!
As I write this blog, I am on my way back from the Lisbon, Portugal. My plane is about to land in Frankfurt, Germany where I have a five hour layover before my 11 hour flight back to the US. So I still have a long day of travel ahead of me! On the bright side, the change in time zones will make St. Patrick’s Day seven hours longer for me! As someone who is 99.999% Irish I’ll try to find some joy in that fact, even though St. Patrick’s Day hasn’t really been the same since I moved from the East Coast and started missing my parents’ annual corned beef and cabbage dinner.
I was in Portugal for the Lisbon Half Marathon. Year after year, this race has produced some of the best times in the world. When Haile Gebrselassie announced that he would be going after his 25th world record at this year’s race (just two months after his last marathon!) the race started to get even more attention than usual. More and more people started committing to the race. Around that time, I was trying to decide if I should do a race before the Olympic Marathon Trials. During the training for the Chicago Marathon, I had raced a 20k and not performed very well. The adjustment to the high mileage and new types of workouts had not left me with very much energy for racing. This time around, I had felt more energetic and had recovered better in between workouts. I started to get excited and decided that I could handle a race during marathon training. When I heard what a great field the Lisbon Half Marathon had assembled, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to test myself against an international field.
Unfortunately, the race didn’t go as I’d planned. The field was great, the course was fast, and the weather was ideal. It was the perfect situation for running a fast time, except for one little thing – I was really tired! I had my heart set on running under 70 minutes which is about 3:20 pace per kilometer. (Because the race was in Europe, the course was marked every kilometer, rather than every mile. When Jo Pavey - an English runner in the race – and I asked if the course would have mile marks in addition to the kilometer marks, people laughed at us! Our system of measurement is certainly not very popular!) Within the first few miles of the start I realized that reaching my goal time was going to be difficult. My legs felt heavy and I was breathing harder than I should have at that point in the race so I shifted my goal and decided to aim for a time under 1:10:40 That would have still been a minute PR, something I thought I was certainly capable of based on my workouts. Sadly, things continued to get worse and I continued slowing down. When I finished and saw that my time was actually two minutes slower than my PR, I was disappointed beyond belief. Just two weeks ago, I had run a 12 mile tempo at altitude at the same pace.
Looking back on it, the travel to the race and the jet lag may be what did me in. I know I’m in much better shape than I was in January when I ran faster at the US Half Marathon Championships. I’ll just have to chalk this up as another learning experience. If I want to travel overseas to race the best in the world over long road races in the future (and I certainly do want to do that!), it was good to learn that I should give myself a few more days to adjust to the time change and recover from the travel.
On the bright side, I did get to do a little sightseeing after the race. My coach Terrence and I took a cab downtown and walked around the market places. We also saw the Elevador de Santa Justa which was built by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Eiffel Tower. At the top of the elevator, you have an amazing view of the city. At the end we walked around Castelo de São Jorge (Castle of St. George). The castle was at the top of the tallest hill in Lisbon and I was certainly glad that we didn’t have to run up that incline during the race. It was hard just to walk up it. Adding to the difficulty, most of the pavement up there was cobblestone. My feet were aching by the time we finished touring the castle, but most of the other women walking around up there were wearing high heels. I cannot imagine how much more their feet must have hurt or how they kept their balance over the rough footing.
Later while we were eating dinner, Terrence noticed a dessert on the menu called “chocolate salami.” We were curious if salami was actually an ingredient in this dessert or if that was just the name. Pork, prosciutto, and other pig products do seem more common in the Mediterranean so I would not have been shocked if the dessert actually contained salami. It turned out to be a flat oval shaped chocolate cookie with white speckles so it looked a little bit like salami, but tasted much better.
I’m trying to end this story with some sort of comparison between my race and the salami dessert … Something about how the race originally left a bad taste in my mouth, but the lessons from it will sweeten the memory. Similarly, a salami dessert at first sounds terrible until it turns out to be a chocolate cookie. This salami/race comparison sounded better in my head. Either the analogy doesn’t make any sense or I just cannot make any sense of it since I have been awake since 4:30 AM!
- Kate
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Tags: chocolate salami, elite athlete, elite athlete blog series, elite runner, haile gebrselassie, irish, kate oneil, kate oneill, lisbon, Lisbon Half Marathon, Mammoth Lakes, marathon, olympic hopeful, Olympic Trials, portugal, st. patricks day, team running usa, tfs elite athlete blog series, the final sprint elite athlete blog series, thefinalsprint.com elite athlete blog series, track and field, u.s. olympic track & field trials, u.s. olympic womens marathon trials
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The Final Sprint
Hi there Kate, I was wondering if you had tried Agel products before during and after your races, theya re truly a new and innovative technology for energy and muscles and joints. It is using suspended gel technology, which is absorbed into the blood very quickly unlike energy bars and pills and they are 100% natural ingredients. There are a lot of athletes using this now.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:09 amCheck it out and let me know if you are interested.
I am a professional skydiver that uses it for my joints and the energy pak mid afternoon when I want to go for a bike ride and still have a lot of energy at the end of the day with my son and the results are amazing! let me know at gitteliss@yahoo.com
Hi there Kate, I was wondering if you had tried Agel products before during and after your races, theya re truly a new and innovative technology for energy and muscles and joints. It is using suspended gel technology, which is absorbed into the blood very quickly unlike energy bars and pills and they are 100% natural ingredients. There are a lot of athletes using this now.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:09 amCheck it out at www.agel.com and let me know if you are interested.
I am a professional skydiver that uses it for my joints and the energy pak mid afternoon when I want to go for a bike ride and still have a lot of energy at the end of the day with my son and the results are amazing! let me know at gitteliss@yahoo.com