19 posts tagged “training”

Last Saturday I was supposed to run 13 miles.  However, when I woke up, I felt very tired and didn't feel very good.  It felt like I had a fever and some stomach issues although I did not have a temperature.  I decided to sleep a little longer promising myself that I would get up and run 13 miles before a Runner's Brunch I had to attend.  That didn't happen.  However when I went to the brunch I learned that my gamble had paid off. 

One good thing about leading a 8 mm group at the CARA Monroe site is that the groups are usually so small and the egos are so big that by this time in the season, everyone skips the cutback weeks.  They figure anything under 13 miles can be done solo even if it is done later in the day when it's warmer.

I contemplated skipping the mileage completely because I didn't want to run on Sunday morning and thought perhaps that a few extra days off might help refresh my legs.  Instead, I ran 10 miles in the heat around Portage Park.  I promised myself that I would only do as many as I felt comfortable, but wanted at least 8 to make the week's mileage come out to at least 30.  But once you do 8, adding 2 more isn't so difficult.  I didn't try to do 13 though because I was still trying to take it easy. 

I didn't get up and run this morning but that is okay because I got most of my mileage in on Monday and Tuesday this week.  That allowed me to use Wednesday as a rest day and while I would have loved to have completed my 9 mile tempo run this morning, it's more realistic for me to do it after work.

This weekend is a cutback 13 mile Long Run and the next three weeks after, my weekly mileage will really pick up.  I hope to be up to 50 MPW by the time of the Ready to Run 20 miler --the only 20 miler I'm doing is going to come on Sept 21 and then I will cutback to only three runs per week including the Saturday LR.

One of the components of my marathon training is the tempo run.  There are several schools of thought on what a tempo run should be.  One theory is the Ladder, where you start out with a warm up mile, then -- depending how deep you are in the season and that run's mileage -- you might do a mile at marathon training pace, then marathon race pace then lactate threshold pace and finally 10K pace.  Then you come back down. 

Another idea is that you just pick a faster pace and run most or all your miles at your tempo pace.  Finally, a less popular idea is to simply run for a set amount of time at a faster pace, e.g. warm up for 10 minutes, then run tempo for 40 minutes, then cool down for another 10 minutes.  I'm sure there are other variations but you get the idea.

Whatever style you choose, you need to find a place to run those miles.  Running on the lakefront path during the week isn't an option for me these days.  And running through the hood isn't ideal for speed work either.  Luckily I've found a place where I can get the distance and speed needed without too much hassle from pedestrians or cars. 

Portage Park is a short drive from my place and I'm usually halfway there after work because I park my car near the Irving Park blue line station.  So as long as I remember to pack my running clothes in a bag and leave it in my trunk, I can use the pool facilities to change and then do my tempo runs around the park.  The perimeter comes out to about .95 miles so the more mileage I do, the further I move from my starting point.  It's kinda a little game to keep things interesting, at least as interesting as a long tempo run can be.

It's always hard to succinctly describe how a race goes for me, so I'll simply say that today's run was very good.  I set a new course Personal Record for the March Madness Half Marathon of 1:37:51.  I learned that I have the ability to run at my BQ pace for 13.1 miles.  I've actually run faster half marathons but this particular course gets its own distinction.

It's not called March Madness because of basketball.  It gets its name from the fact that running in the middle of winter in the Midwest is crazy.  The race has a history of being held during blizzards or rain storms with ice or sleet and cold and hills to boot.  I've been very fortunate that each year I've run it (2005, 2006 and 2008) the weather has been moderate.

Establishing a new PR makes it hard to plead my case: that I'm losing my speed as I get older.  Even though I set a new record for myself, gosh darn-it if I don't feel like I had a better experience two years ago.  Today I had to concentrate on each mile to make sure that I either didn't go too fast or pushed myself to keep a particular pace.  Whereas two years ago, I seem to recall that my pace was more natural and I simply cruised through some of the same miles that gave me struggle this year. 

Technically, I ran these 13.1 miles at the pace I need to qualify for the Boston Marathon.  However, I know that this is no guarantee that I will do it in three weeks in St Louis.  There's still work to be done.

In the short lived series Daybreak, Detective Brett Hopper (Taye Diggs) lives the same day over and over.  Each morning when he wakes up, Hopper writes down things he remembers from the previous iterations of his day so that he can skip to the next step.  Since joining the Consulting Firm, my life has been a little bit like Hoppers.  Between long hours at work and trying to get my marathon training in either before work or after, I don't have a lot of free time before I go to bed to get personal things done.  So sometimes at work, I'll open up notepad on my laptop or jot on a real piece of paper, things I have to try and finish before I got to bed.

It's kinda of a tug of war.  My job keeps interfering -- directly and indirectly -- with my non-work life and I keep insisting on having a life outside the office so I have to keep coming up with ways to work around or subvert the system as necessary. 

This week my schedule has been the most relaxed its been in a while. The only conflict came Monday when I had to stay late to work on an upgrade.  Even though we ran into a setback, the upgrade would have been finished in enough time for me to go to a very late spin class at my gym, except one of the partners who wanted to be part of the upgrade didn't get off the phone until 5:30, which pushed everything back a half an hour. 

Not a huge deal although I think I really could have used a spin class to squeeze the last of the lactic acid out of my legs from Sunday's 20 mile run.  On the other hand, it was a struggle getting out of bed yesterday to hammer out a measily 5 miles and this morning my body wouldn't let me get out of bed.  Between the cold and the disrupted sleep schedule, my body needed more bed time and less running time, so I complied.  That's part of the give and take that it takes to train -- sometimes you have to force yourself to put on the running shoes and sometimes you have to let yourself slack off a little.

You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them. Michael Jordan

At this point in the marathon training season, I start to plan my post-race party to celebrate qualifying for Boston.  I think about who I will invite and how they will interact with my other friends.  Maybe a person I haven't seen in a while or someone I kinda know but only see once a week at a run or an event.  Or extend an invite to an acquaintance in hopes of upgrading them to friend.

Then I go on a 20 mile run like this morning and reality comes crashing down: this may not be the year I BQ!  It wasn't a horrible run as far as long runs go; I've certainly had worse.  And it did accomplish what a 20 mile run is supposed to do: set the benchmark for where I am today and NOT be a predictor of how I'm going to do in 5 weeks in St Louis. 

Having said that, I was a little disappointed in my performance because I wanted to see how I would do trying to maintain a 7:30 pace for 20 miles.  I couldn't.  My Garmin GPS says my average for the run was 8:30 or so, which doesn't tell the true story.  I started to hit a wall before I even hit the halfway point.  Perhaps I started out too quickly but I'm not sure because the path was slippery with ice and snow, so we did take the first couple miles easy.  

My friend Carol said that I always seem to set my objectives for a run so high that I always seem disappointed with results that she would be proud of.  She is right that I set the bar very high.  But I'm not going to BQ by playing small ball. 

Some good things I can take from this morning's run is:

• I never got that "okay let's bag it and give up" feeling
• Even though I was struggling, there were some late miles that were sub 9 minutes
• During the post-race massage, my PT said that my gluts and hamstrings were tight but apparently not as bad as they were a year ago -- yoga must be helping

This week my leg muscles will regenerate and become stronger.  I will run an easier LR next weekend and then I will start to mentally plan that party again.

No one from my pace group showed up today so I ran with a guy from the 7:30 mm pace group.  It was a cutback week and we were running 10 miles, which is a good distance to run, but a manageable distance that most experience runners can run solo if need be.  That is probably why the two consistent runners I've had this season choose to sleep in. 

I'm use to leading small groups.  When I was a pace leader at the downtown CARA site, there weren't many people who ran at the 8 minute per mile pace I led.  Most weeks I had one or two runners, not always the same from the previous week.  The only time I had a larger group was when I led at the Montrose site two summers ago. 

So I had the choice of running solo, running with the 8:30s or running with this 7:30 mm guy who's group leader didn't show.  I decided to run with him but asked that we take it slow on the way out and he could take off on the return if he wanted. 

Little did I realize that I would end up running at his pace for the majority of the run!  For one thing, I ran six miles yesterday morning before work for a rare Friday run.  When I saw our time for the first two miles -- 7:38 and 7:23 -- I thought okay, I can do this on the way out but on the way back it's gonna catch up with me.  It never really did.  We did our 10 mile run averaging a 7:36 pace. 

The other thing I figured was that if this person ran with the 7:30s, than chances are he actually runs faster and would want to pick it up even more on the way back.  In fact, he was secretly struggling a bit because he wasn't hydrating or layered properly.  His youth got him through the run but at times I was the one pushing the pace on the way back more than he had on the way out. 

It helped that the running path was, for the most part, clear of ice and snow.  We also had a warm day, at least warm for Chicago Winter.  It probably also helped that I did a lot of cross training this week and ate healthy, bringing my weight down to 188 lbs.  Shockingly, all my runs during the week came in the AM before work. 

So I'm proud that I was able to "lead" a 7:30 pace group for 10 miles.  I know that I couldn't do it for an entire season even though I ran the Soldier Field 10 miler at a 7mm pace last year.  While I was keeping pace, the last couple of miles were depleting all my reserves and if I had to run more miles after that, I would not have been able to do so. 

Maybe that's the secret: run the last couple miles of all the long runs all out with nothing left for the return trip.  There are six weeks left before my next marathon.  I must not waste them.

This has been one of the hardest week of 2008 yet.  Not so much in terms of my job or my social life -- those have each had their own special Week of Hell that won't go away -- but with regard to training for my next marathon.  I've said before that training for a spring marathon is rough because you do the lion share of your running in the winter, when it is dark in the morning, dark at night and cold all the time. 

I caught a cold this week.  When I woke up Monday, I felt the congestion in my chest.  That day at work I fought the oncoming coughing and aching chest as best I could, with cough suppressant and CVS Airborne-equivalent during the day, and Nyquil cocktails at night.  It was a warm night and I decided to go for a run to loosen things up.  It wasn't very easy running through all the slush and puddles but now I'm glad I did because that is the last time I was able to run.

Tuesday was a rest/cross training day and I only went to yoga class.  The weather was rainy and cold but we didn't get the full on snow we were supposed to, so I set my alarm for early this morning so I could knock out a 6 mile tempo run.  Unfortunately, I was at the peak of my cold today and couldn't bring myself to get out of bed.  Instead I took the extra two hours of sleep and then dragged myself to work. 

It also Ash Wednesday so Catholics are supposed to fast although being sick does exempt me from that.  These days, fasting amounts to eating one meal with two smaller mini-meals whose sum is not equal to the full meal.  Since I'm always training for something when Lent hits, I decided years ago not to make myself crazy trying to adhere to these traditions but also to try and observe them the best I can.  I opted to skip breakfast and lunch, nibbled on a few jelly beans at one point, and then came home and made some tuna fish sandwiches.  Then I went to bed. 

Part of me is wondering if I shouldn't have forced myself to get a run in tonight.  If I don't get up and run tomorrow AM, I won't have a chance to run again until Saturday when I do my long run.  The more rational side of me knows that fighting a cold and not eating all day along with the late afternoon snow storm would have made for a tough evening.  And missing a few runs here and there aren't gonna have much of an impact as long as I don't do it too often.

The reason this is such a conumdrum for me is because it is so hard to balance my training schedule against my work schedule and the weather.  I have such a long commute that if I don't get out and run by a certain time in the morning, I have to push the run to the evening.  And the flaky weather makes running outside difficult, but I can't always make it to the gym even if I do convince myself that running inside on a short track will suffice.  In the last couple weeks I was finally gaining some consistency and felt like my speed and endurance were returning.  Now this cold comes along and I fear that I'll regress a bit.

Rationality won out tonight.    Hopefully it continues so.

It's already 73 degrees Fahrenheit here in Chicago on an October Sunday at 4:30am.  That doesn't bode well for today's race.  Secretly, I was kinda hoping this one would be a re-do of 2003.  In 2003 the Cubs were in the playoffs with the World Series in sight, I had a girlfriend who was supposed to come watch me run and I thought for sure I'd Boston Qualify. 

Of course none of those things happened.  My girlfriend decided she couldn't come watch me run and it was an unexpectedly hot day, so I was lucky to be able to finish -- a BQ was out of the question.  And the Cubs choked in Game 6 of the NLDS.

And while this year sort of felt like 2003, it wasn't of course.  No girlfriend and the Cubs post-season hopes ended yesterday.  You cannot live in the past and you cannot script October. 

Today is going to be hard on everyone and it's going to take doing something harder than BQing.  It's going to require running smart.  It's going to require the discipline and just plain good sense to run slower and not overheat.  To put your ego aside and listen to your body before it is too late.

A friend asked me today if I was ready for Sunday's marathon.  This will be her 3rd or 4th marathon and the following is a paraphrase of my recollection of that conversation.

"Yeah, I'm ready," I said, surprising myself a little at how confidently I answered that question.

"Everyone has been asking me that all week and I'm sick of it," she said.  "Yet here I go and ask you the same thing."

"I know what you mean," I said.  We went on to talk about how we are as ready as we can be at this point since there is nothing we can really do at this point except watch the wacky weather reports that have gone from cold T-storms to hot, humid and sunny for Sunday.

The things is, when a runner asks another runner one of those common, trite questions -- Are you ready for the marathon? |  How do you think you'll do | How has your training gone -- we grant one another an exemption from the annoyingness that non-runners sometimes unintentially invoke when they ask about our marathon preparedness.

Part of it is because we understand where the other person is coming from.  But a bigger part of it is, we are actually looking for something in the answer that we can take for ourselves.  For example, when Jane asked if I'm ready and I said

"Well it was a tough training season and the forecast calls for hot weather so I'm just gonna go out and do my best." 

Jane would take that and compare it to how her training season faired.  If she had a tough summer, then she would give herself permission to relax a bit and not worry as much about her racing goals for Sunday.  Or if she had a good training season then she might decide that she would at least have a better experience than I might.

If I had said "well I feel pretty good about the work I've put in, especially with all the distractions this summer."

Jane might have decided that she too had some distractions this summer and reflect on how much that impacted her training.

*******

I really don't know how Sunday is going to turn out.  While the weather forecast calls for hot and humid, there is still enough time for one of Chicago's famous Weather 180s.  Even if it is a repeat of 2003 (and the Cubs are in the playoffs for the moment), I'm hoping that it won't heat up too quickly.

In past seasons I've felt like I trained well for 9/10ths of the season and then slacked off at the end.  I don't quite feel that way this year.  Sure I had some rough patches and weeks were my results were not what I felt I needed to be on pace for Boston Qualification.  But I also feel like I have made adjustments and hung in there when the impulse would be to mail it in.  This is the best I've felt during Taper Week that I can ever remember.

I think what I'm trying to say is that I have more control over Sunday than I have acknowledged in the past.  I'll know in the first few miles if I have it or not, or if the heat is going to be a factor.  It will be up to me to make adjustments so that I can turn in a good marathon experience even if it means not BQing.