Training

Be The Match 5K Goals

It’s Monday, and I have a race on Saturday, so I had better start planning some stuff.

I am running reduced mileage compared to what I was running in April when I did the Fitger’s 5K (I guess you could call it a taper… HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHA!), but I am also stronger than I was then, and I think the course will be a little easier. Not that the Fitger’s course was hard, but I did have to plod up a hill twice to get over the freeway. I’m pretty sure since this course is around Lake Harriet it will not have any large hills like that.

So, here are my time goals, bearing in mind my most recent 5K was 37:00 even.

A Standard: 36:00
B Standard: 36:30

These goals are much closer together than they were last time (36:00 A Standard and 40:00 B Standard), since I was just guessing last time. My A Standard is still the same since I didn’t make it last time and it’s only been a month. I think it’s still maybe a little bit out of reach, shaving a whole minute off my time in just a month is a lot to ask. Maybe? I don’t know.

It’s cold and rainy today so I will probably be on the treadmill for today’s run. It depends on if it is actually raining when I get ready to go. I wanted to do hill repeats today after the deer ruined my opportunity on Saturday. I rested Sunday, as it was crappy out and I was lazy.

Here’s the plan for the rest of the week leading up to the race:
Monday: either hills or treadmill torture
Tuesday: easy road run (junk miles, if you are a running snob)
Wednesday: mild speed workout
Thursday: easy road run and then massage
Friday: very short and easy run at some point since I am traveling
Saturday: burn up the pavement

Now I just need to execute the plan, which for me is easier said than done!

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry

I love that poem so much. Never mind that I came across it because Alan Alda quoted (and misattributed) it on an episode of ER and I… well I would say I Googled it but I don’t think I used Google in 1999.

Friday and Saturday I got out for shorter runs, proving that it only takes one day to get back into the habit of running, even after taking several days off.

Friday I rewarded myself after a crappy day at school with a run through Hartley Nature Center. It was precisely what I needed mentally. Since it has been warm here and we’ve had some rain, the trails were starting to come alive. Little shoots and buds of green were everywhere, and it smelled lovely. The sun was shining but it wasn’t too hot (I didn’t start until early evening). More trails are open now, so I got to take a different route this time around. The only downside was hiking up the back side of Rock Knob and looking up to see a couple of guys peeing. I mean, the trail was right there, guys. Come on.

Saturday my plan was to head out and do some controlled hill repeats, instead of my usual “run as fast as you can stand” hill repeats. It was early evening again when I ran (6:30 or so), but still plenty light out. I did two repeats and held back a bit each time, then jogged back down. I made sure my heart rate was under the requisite 142 by the time I got back to the bottom, which in the past had sometimes required walking back down.

I was halfway up the hill for the third try and I saw a deer. Then two more. I see deer all the time when I am running, and they just go on their merry way when they see me. If they don’t, I usually say something like “Hello, deer” and sort of wave my arms a bit and they trot away. Two of the deer edged away, but this other deer wasn’t bothered.

The deer was closer than it looks in this photo, in which it is almost indistinguishable from the background. I paused my watch for a bit while I took a picture and thought about what I was going to do. The deer started to slowly move toward me and that’s when I turned around for good and got the hell out of there. (I started my watch again, because I had my wits about me!) I got across the street and the deer was still following me and looked like it might consider crossing the street, so I booked it up the hill, looking over my shoulder every so often to see if the deer was trying to catch up. It wasn’t, so that was good, but it was still a weird experience. I also saw some kind of dead, half-eaten bird and a dead raccoon, so that was nice.

I really do enjoy seeing (live) animals while I am running. I saw a bear last summer about two blocks from my house, a very exciting occurrence. It was the middle of summer, so I wasn’t really that concerned and ran right by it. This lady in her truck was yelling at me to warn me, but a bear by itself that has been chowing down on garbage and pick-a-nick baskets all summer isn’t going to eat me. A bear in early spring or a bear with cubs would frighten me. I also found a cat on the Lakewalk last fall, which I didn’t enjoy because it was clearly domesticated and had no claws (which I know because I carried it 2 miles) and had obviously been dumped there by the dregs of humanity. Other than the poor cat, the flora and fauna of the northland are part of what makes running up here so pleasant.

Back At It

I ran yesterday, so that was nice. I stopped the streak of days off at 4.

I ran pickups. On the treadmill. That was less nice, although in some ways it was good. I ran on the treadmill because it was drizzly and cooler, but so humid I could see my own breath, and since I have my first and most difficult final tomorrow, I didn’t want to wear myself out or get so chilled I couldn’t function.

In order to keep from dying of boredom, I had the Montreal-Tampa Bay Stanley Cup playoff game on, but muted, and then I had a “butt rock” (aka 80s hair metal) station playing on Pandora. I did similar intervals to last week, except I did the correct 8×0.25 instead of miscounting and doing 9. I did the first 4 at a 5.5 mph pace and the last 4 and a 5 mph pace, and then I slowly jogged/walked (3.5 mph pace) in between to recover.

Running the pickups on the treadmill was beneficial for a few reasons. First, it kept my speed under control. When I did the pickups last week on the road, my pace was all over the place and it always died off at the end because I went out too fast (or because I hit a hill AND went out too fast.) My paces were more conservative (10:55 and 12:00) and I was more in control. Second, I was able to keep the pace consistent, not just because I was running a more achievable pace, but because the treadmill was making me. I am not very good at keeping a consistent pace, and I need to train my legs to do it.

I did core exercises too, and I need to be more consistent about doing them. I need a strong core and strong arms to keep me going, but for some reason I’m either too lazy to do them when I’m done running, or I’ve got a zillion other things to do once I’m done running and don’t take the time. Now that I’m not running all these crazy long runs, I have no excuse to skip the push-ups and sit-ups. Washboard abs, here I come. Or at least reduced batwings.

Time Is Not On My Side

Yesterday I whined about the amount of time it took me to train for Grandma’s Marathon. I did some math.

During the 11 (well, 10, as one week I completely skipped running) weeks of this aborted training cycle, I ran 254.24 miles in 68.26 hours, or 4095.6 minutes.

That’s an average pace of 16:07/mile.

Ok, not terrible. That’s actually faster than I thought it would be.

At a 15:00 pace, I’d save 4.7 hours.
At a 12:00 pace, I’d save 17.4 hours.
At a 10:00 pace, I’d save 25.9 hours.
At an 8:00 pace, I’d save 34.4 hours.

I’m probably never going to run at an 8:00 pace for marathon training runs, so that was more to compare to a speedy person. I’m also probably not going to hit 10:00/mile for training runs (but maybe for an actual race?), so that was to compare to a mid-packer. I don’t think I’m out of line to say in a couple years, barring injury, I could be running 12:00 paces for training runs. If I was that fast now, I’d have spent 1.7 fewer hours/week working out, or about 17 minutes/day. Of course not every run was at the same pace, nor of the same distance, but it gives a bit clearer picture.

I actually thought I’d save more time, so that’s a bit depressing. I did have a fairly low-mileage training plan, so I have to consider I’d be saving more time over a training cycle if I was running a more standard plan. (And, guess what, I will be running a slightly higher mileage plan next time around!) I do expect my training pace to decrease by the time I am ready to roll on the next marathon, but not to something silly like 12:00/mile, I’m still going to stay conservative. Patience!

Week Eleven Update

I’m not running Grandma’s Marathon this year.

Now for a recap of my mileage for last week:
Monday: rest
Tuesday: 4.6, road, speedwork/pickups
Wednesday: 7.1, road
Thursday: 4, road
Friday: 4.6, 2 miles medium effort, road for speedwork, trail for recovery
Saturday: 7.9, road
Sunday: rest/homework
Total: 28.3

I decided about 4 miles into my run on Saturday (a run that was supposed to be 16 miles) that I was not going to continue to pursue an entry into Grandma’s Marathon this year. It made the rest of the run suck really badly, as I was really down on myself about the decision.

I haven’t run since Saturday, and it’s now Wednesday. I planned on running today but I feel sort of gross. I mostly haven’t run because I have had a bunch of homework to do. That was part of the reason why I cut my run in half on Saturday. The guilt of taking over four hours of my Saturday to run, when I knew I had a ton of work to do, was the final criterion I needed to pull the plug on marathon training for now.

I know I said at the beginning that I was going to do a full training cycle whether or not I ran Grandma’s. I am not, I’ll save the full training cycle for the Mankato Marathon.

My plan right now is somewhat haphazard, but I am going to:
1. Finish up my last few days of school and my finals.
2. Do some speed work and medium runs in preparation for my race on May 16th.
3. Start an 8-week 10K training plan in preparation for the Park Point 5 Miler.

I think focusing on speed for awhile might do me some good. The single biggest issue with marathon training was the time commitment. It will always be a time commitment, of course, but if I can shave some seconds off my comfortable training paces, I can make the time commitment more manageable.

Thus ends the Week XX updates for now.

Pickups

So today was a nice hard workout. By nice I mean now that it’s over I can look back and be like “Nice job.” It kind of sucked a lot while I was doing it.

In my quest to find new routes to stave off boredom and also avoid hills, I decided to park at school, head off in a new direction, and then get some work done in the computer lab while stinking with sweat. Because I live in East Hillside (please don’t stalk me), I’m kind of stuck with the same old routes because Central Entrance cuts me off to the “west” (Duluth west isn’t exactly west) and I do not want to run down the hill because that means I have to go back up the hill. It’s pretty friggin’ steep. So I must go east. Or “east,” rather.

From school, I headed “east” on Woodland and then down the hill on Arrowhead. That was a dumb choice because the streets are all cut off by Snively, the road I actually wanted to go on. I ended up at a dead end but that led me to Snively anyway. I thought that was going to be great for starting my pickup intervals, but the sidewalks ended when I was less than 2 miles into the run. So, that was annoying. I also left the house when it was cloudy and somehow the sun came out in the 5 minutes it took me to get to school. I didn’t have my hat so I was squinting and miserable for half the run.

I might be running my pickups too fast. Which is hilarious, because it’s not like I am zipping along at a cool 5:00/mile pace, but I mean too fast over my slow run pace. I was running at a “hard effort” as the training plan suggested, but I don’t know, maybe I should have been running at my 5K pace instead of hitting some single-digit paces for the beginning of the interval and then fading. Next Tuesday I am going to try to focus on hitting a consistent faster pace rather than trying to run as fast as I can.

I finished the 4.7 mile run at a 13:49 average pace and 164 bpm average heart rate. With those kinds of results, I am definitely going to give the walk/run strategy a try.

Week 10 Update

I’m pretty sure I’m actually better off as a 5 day a week runner. Right now I have no time to do any cross-training, because I don’t have time to run AND do some other kind of workout, and I believe a rest day is a rest day, not a day off from running where I do some other kind of physical activity. I also wouldn’t mind an extra day to get homework and work done.

A quick recap:
Monday: rest
Tuesday: 4.3 miles, 8x hill repeats
Wednesday: 6.9 miles, road + a little bit of trail
Thursday: 4.1 miles, Lakewalk, slightly pushing the pace (14:08 average)
Friday: rest, dead tired and concerned about a cold
Saturday: 3.9 miles, trails at Bagley
Sunday: 13.8 miles, road, Park Point and the Lakewalk
Total: 33 miles

This upcoming week I don’t have hill repeats anymore, I have pickups. I’m supposed to do 6-8 repeats of either 0.25 mile or 2 minute hard effort intervals within a 5 mile workout. This is fine, although I don’t know which to pick: 0.25 miles or 2 minutes. For someone like me, those are vastly different things. I’ll probably go with 0.25 miles because I have a need for speed (meaning I am slow, not meaning I crave it). We’ll see. I also have a 16 mile long run which I now MUST do on Saturday because I need to spend ALL DAY on Sunday working on this dumb report for a rocketry competition I’ve entered. Sunday’s 4 mile workout will probably kill me.

It’s supposed to be in the high 50s or the 60s all this upcoming week, which is great, because I am sick of wearing the same yellow hoodie every freaking day. I need a couple more cold/cool weather jackets/hoodies/whatever so that I am not wearing the same stinky thing every day. I am hoping to get by with just light long-sleeved t-shirts (at worst) from now until… like, October. I did get that green long-sleeved t-shirt for running Fitger’s 5K, but the one time I considered wearing it was Thursday when I ran on the Lakewalk, and I’m glad I didn’t, because there were like 3 other people wearing it.