marathon

Eugene Curnow Trail Marathon Training: Week 1

Yes, I signed up for another marathon. I was feeling extremely unsure of myself after running Superior 25K, especially since the Moose Mountain Marathon is on the same course. I will be climbing those tough climbs after 20 miles of running, which is frightening. I decided I couldn’t let my first crack at the distance be on such a tough course. The Eugene Curnow Trail Marathon is on July 16th and starts in Duluth, so I will not need to travel. The elevation profile is a lot kinder than Superior’s, and there are a lot more aid stations. The only thing that will be an issue is heat, and I am definitely concerned about it.

This means I will not run the Park Point 5 Miler this year. It’s just a few days before the marathon, so I can’t do both. It’s kind of a bummer, but I’m not too put out. I am still signed up to do Midnight Sun Midnight Run in 4 weeks.

I am rolling over my training session from Superior 25K, and I hope to get 6 weeks of higher-mileage training followed by a gentle 2-week taper before the race. 8 weeks after that, I’ll have the Moose Mountain Marathon, and then 6 weeks after that, I’ll have Wild Duluth 50K. Unless Curnow goes HORRIBLY wrong, then I might just to the Harder ‘n Hell Half and leave my ultra debut for 2017.

Monday: 5.3 mi, trail (Lakewalk), 133 bpm
Tuesday: rest
Wednesday: 6.3 mi, treadmill (4x 0.5 mi @ 3% incline), 146 bpm
Thursday: 7.2 mi, trail (SHT @ Spirit Mountain to Cody St), 146 bpm
Friday: 8 mi, treadmill, 146 bpm
Saturday: rest
Sunday: 7.7 mi, road, 144 bpm
Total: 34.5 mi

The weather was a bit dicey this past week. Monday I ran partially in the rain, Wednesday I ran inside because of rain, Thursday I ran in mist, and Friday I stayed in because it was cold and damp and awful. Sunday I ran in full sun and 70+ F temps (and forgot sunscreen, because it was cloudy when I left. Oops.)

I felt pretty good Monday but didn’t have much pep in my step, as demonstrated by the low HR. My two treadmill sessions went pretty well, I am getting a lot better at running on treadmills. Both overall treadmill runs were done at an average pace below 15 min/mile, which is really good for me! That pace includes warm-up and cool down, too.

My one road run of the week was done at the cabin my family has rented for the summer. It was mostly done on the shoulder of a county road or on the side of a paved back road. It was really boring and I felt like crap. I had slept poorly the night before, so it’s not surprising I felt like a slug running. I did remind myself to pick up the pace at times, because it was really dragging, and I need to stop running that same, slow, mindless pace I was running in the winter; I’m better conditioned now.

My trail run was slow, but did involve a couple of significant climbs. I felt good climbing, so that is a good sign. I still have lots of room for improvement in my power hiking ability. I also need to figure out how to run faster on the runnable parts of trails. I think I’m going a decent speed and then look down at my watch and I’m running 19:XX. I suppose it could be a watch error but that’s not something I’m going to count on. I have noticed some serious GPS errors lately, both in regard to elevation and location. Take a look:

altitudeprb

Altitude data for an out & back run

outandbackprb

Location date for an out & back run

It is fairly obvious there are some GPS errors occurring, since I ran the exact same route going out as I did on the return trip. The course profile should be symmetric, but instead there are odd skips and jumps. There are spots on the route map that make it look like I skipped over/cut parts of the trail, which I didn’t. I am not sure how to fix it, since I am plugging in and getting updates almost daily.

In the long term, it doesn’t matter. The time on my feet and the time spent climbing is important, not the exact number of miles run or feet climbed. I can relax about the data errors and trust in my training.

I did a few sets of pushups/planks here and there during the week, but my main source of “strength training” was water-skiing, knee-boarding, and tubing. Yes, hanging on for dear life on a tight, fast turn while on an inner tube is quite strenuous. There was a bit of swimming in there too — swimming after the knee board when I fell off, swimming after the tube when I was thrown off and went skipping across the water on my butt, swimming back to the boat when I was beat. It was a pretty good long weekend!

From the Sidelines

I ended up spectating at Grandma’s Marathon today for about an hour. I left the house shortly after the end of the women’s race, got some coffee, drove around for awhile deciding where to park, then walked about a mile down Superior Street following the runners, ending up in front of Pizza Luce, which is somewhere between miles 24 and 25. I think I ended up there right around the time the 3:45 or so runners were heading through (just guessing), and I stayed until the 4:45 pace group had gone by (I saw the pacer, so no guesses there).

As I was walking, I passed a lot of fans and sort of observed. Some people were yelling generic things, some people were clapping, others were calling out specific things (“Go braids! C’mon yellow shirt!” or other distinguishing characteristics), and some were silent and taking it all in. I passed a woman holding a small megaphone, who turned to the other people she was with. “Why don’t one of you say something?” she asked, holding out the megaphone. The others demurred, and she said “They’re never going to see you again, and it might make their day!” (Or something. I just remember the “They’re never going to see you again” part.) I took that to heart, and when I got to the spot where I stopped to watch, I made sure to cheer loudly, even though I was by myself.

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just “Woowoo-ed!” a lot and clapped, and said platitudes like “Looking strong!” and “You got this!” I yelled “GO NAVY” to a guy with a Navy t-shirt on, which he liked. I found it interesting that every once in awhile, my voice really penetrated into someone’s running fog, and I got a smile, or a nod, or at the very least eye contact. I gave a lot of thumbs up, too. I tried really hard to think about what would annoy me if I was running. I figured I’d be annoyed if I needed to stop to walk, and someone yelled at me to keep going or something, so I just sort of clapped and made noise as those folks went by. I also didn’t lie, so I was only yelling “Looking strong” at people who looked strong. And I didn’t yell anything stupid, or try to make jokes, and I didn’t yell “You’re almost there!” because I am sure to people who were struggling it still felt like forever. That’s a lot of thought to put into cheering, I know, but I like to overthink things, it’s the hallmark of an engineer.

Watching a race is fascinating. Watching the different running gaits and postures of runners as they went by was interesting. Here are all these people going the same speed, and they are accomplishing it in wildly different ways. Wearing a wide variety of outfits. Most people wear standard running gear, a few wear costumes (I saw these guys!), some wear as little as possible, a few had no shoes on (one was CARRYING his shoes), and some even appear to be in street clothes. One guy was wearing a button-down short-sleeve plaid shirt. Another woman looked like she was out hiking and stumbled into the marathon, in what looked like camping shorts and a t-shirt. All that matters is it’s comfortable. And doesn’t make one’s nipples bleed, which several more traditional running shirts seemed to do to some poor men. This is preventable! Don’t let it happen to you! Towards zero bloody nipples!

My friend (whose daughters weren’t with her, they were at the Mile 15 aid station probably charming every runner they saw) met up with me a little after the 4:00 pacer passed me. She told me her husband was running with the 4:30 pace group, so we had plenty of time to cheer together before he came, and to chat. As she started to recognize some of the runners she’d seen along the course while she’d been waiting to meet up with him at other checkpoints, she started to get nervous, and we were on the lookout. We spotted SEVERAL decoys, including white people, women, and old men, all who were revealed as not him once they neared (apparently a blue shirt and black shorts is a VERY popular running kit). This made us laugh and kept her from worrying too much as the 4:30 pacer came and went and her husband still didn’t show up. We crossed the street since she said he was running on the other side of the pack. I HATE crossing in front of racers. I think it’s incredibly disrespectful, especially of someone who has run 24.5 miles already. I hated it in my high school sports days (along with varsity skiers skiing the nordic skiing racecourse backwards after they were done with their fast races and had nothing better to do while us peon JV losers plodded through our races), but sometimes a street must be crossed. We were very careful not to cut anyone off.

When we finally saw her husband, we started screaming and cheering for him so he could see us a block away. Her concern was for nothing, because even though he’d lost his pace group, he looked strong and happy and gave us a big smile and two thumbs up. He thanked me as he passed, which I thought was kind. He ended up finishing in 4:38, which I believe he was happy with. I am really glad I was able to cheer him on at the end. My friend actually had tickets to the bleachers at the finish line, but we weren’t sure we could make it there in time, so at least we were able to give him a final boost of energy as he finished.

Part of me felt more compelled to run this marathon, but part of me was a little weirded out. It’s just so many people. It did solidify my resolve to never run the half marathon of this course. If I had run the half (and not gotten swept from the course), I’d have been finishing long after people had lost interest in the race and were looking ahead to the leaders of the marathon. Plus, it starts way way way too early.

Maybe I could run the Grandma’s Double instead? Ha!

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.

Everything Old is New Again

I wrote a few weeks ago about my problems with my current running shoes, and in the comments a reader suggested contacting the manufacturer. It hadn’t occurred to me, so I appreciated the suggestion and took her up on it.

After tracking down a proof of purchase for the shoes (I bought them in mid-November, and I hardly ran at all in December, so that means the shoes didn’t even stand up to 4 months of wear), I’m now boxing them up and sending them off to Mizuno for an exchange (assuming the exchange is approved).

That means I’m stuck running in my old shoes. My old shoes are by Saucony and I don’t even recall why I bought them. Probably because they looked ok and the price was ok. They seemed like they’re about half the weight of my current shoes, so I thought maybe I’d be flying along with them on my feet. They also smelled horribly, to the point where I could smell them while running. At least, I hope it was my shoes I was smelling, and not something else I was wearing. Ew.

I was wrong about feeling like I was flying, because my current shoes are a lot better shock absorbers than my old shoes (I guess that’s where the extra weight comes in). I also used to run with inserts in my old shoes, but I took those inserts out before running yesterday, in keeping with my semi-minimalist plan, so I was wearing lighter, uncushioned shoes and pounding the pavement with my heels like crazy at first. My stride was completely different and I felt like I was stomping. It took a couple miles to get a stride that felt good. I am a little bit more sore today than I usually am, but not as sore as I thought I would be after a stomp-run.

Unfortunately I am stuck running with these old shoes until they either send me my replacement shoes or send me my old shoes back with a note rejecting my warranty claim. It will probably take awhile to get the return processed and the new/old shoes shipped to me, so I expect these old shoes will carry me through today’s “medium effort” run, a 14-miler, hill repeats, a mid-week 7-miler, and a faux-10k race at a minimum. Shoes, don’t fail me now.

I suppose this would be the time for me to mention conventional wisdom recommends alternating between two pairs of shoes. Whoops.

Tired Legs

Well, 11 miles into the week and I’m already dragging. Of course, I don’t think I’ve done 11 miles to start a week this training cycle, other than maybe when I was on spring break. (Well, then I went and looked it up while that’s true, I’ve started the week with 10 miles twice, so my whining is kind of ridiculous.)

Tuesday I did 8 hill repeats. I suffered a bit. My legs were really tight, so when I got to my usual hill, I wanted to stretch, but I had to stretch cautiously. My muscles felt like overly tightened violin strings; one more turn of the peg and they’d snap. Then when I tried to stretch my quads by doing the flamingo-type stretch which I’m sure has a real name, I actually tweaked something in my arm and side. It didn’t last but I was worried for a minute. The repeats didn’t feel that great, but I reminded myself how thrilled I was I’d done all this hill running when I was charging like a rhino up Lake Avenue on the home stretch of the 5K last weekend. I reminded myself of that feeling probably 16 times during the exercise. I had half the run in by the time I was done with the hill workout. I was feeling ok for awhile as I started the rest of the run, but my legs started to feel heavy after awhile, and then I had some lower abdominal cramping that slowed me to a walk a couple times. I spent the whole night working on homework, got home at about quarter to midnight, did more homework, and then couldn’t get to sleep because my neighbors had their windows open and music playing til after 3. I finally shut my window at 3 because I couldn’t stand it anymore.

Wednesday I woke up before my alarm (ugh), was too hot, and opened the window. Then the garbage truck came by, so I couldn’t fall back asleep. I was late to class and just dragging. I finished the homework I hadn’t done Tuesday night, and tried to convince myself I didn’t need to run, or maybe I should swap days and just run the 4 miles slotted for today. I still had a bunch of homework to do that evening, and I had a meeting, and I had been late to my group meeting on Tuesday night because I’d run so slowly, so it wasn’t looking good for getting in my scheduled mileage.

Well, my meeting was canceled, and I managed to wake up enough that I got out and did 6 mucky miles at Hartley. 6 very tired miles. My legs didn’t want to go fast. They didn’t even want to go slow. I shuffled along, getting passed by other runners, and also getting zoomed past by a dog repeatedly. I swear the dog was just showing off. Also I find it odd how many people around here do not leash their dogs. Hartley is still in the city limits! It’s not like we’re on some remote trail. I like dogs, but they really need to be on a leash, for their own safety and for the safety of other people and animals.

I wasn’t in any pain while I was running, so I was just suffering dead legs from the run the day before and from my general fatigue. I got back to the parking lot with 5.5 miles down and thought about calling it quits because I was dragging so badly. Then I reminded myself that I’ll be running on tired legs during marathons (and ultras if I ever get there), so I had better learn to suck it up for one half of a mile. So, I did, and finished at 5.98 miles, somehow still at a similar pace to most of my trail runs and a 146 bpm average heart rate. I do not know how that happened, but I’ll take it. I guess it just seemed like I was running in slow motion.

Week 8 Update

Ah, the cutback week, from which I cut back even more miles.

To recap:
Monday: rest
Tuesday: 2.5 miles, road, hill repeats
Wednesday: 4.3 miles, trail
Thursday: rest
Friday: 5 miles, trail
Saturday: 3.2 miles, road, race
Sunday: 8.5 miles, road
Total: 23.4 miles (Plan said to do 30)

Sunday’s run really really really sucked. It was warm, like 70 degrees, which would not be that bad but I was not used to running in the “heat,” so to speak. I wore a hat to keep the sun out of my eyes, since I don’t have prescription sunglasses yet. I need to get on that. The warm weather would not have been a problem on its own, had it not been for the wind. It was relentless. I spent 2.5 mostly uphill miles running directly into the wind and then I turned about 135 degrees and I was still running directly into the wind. I ended up slowing to a walk a few times because it was so awful trying to run into it. I really could have used a hand-held water bottle, or some mints or something to suck on, because the wind was drying out my nose and mouth so badly. I did stop a little over 2 miles in, just to quick use the bathroom and get a drink of water at UMD, and I’m glad I had that little bit of extra water in me.

I also cheated and stopped my watch when I stopped, which I normally don’t do. Since I was going into the very center of the first floor of a building that’s built into the ground on one side, I figured I would lose my GPS signal and that could end up skewing my results.

I hit a 15:15 pace (15:48 when factoring in the break, to keep it honest!), which, I have to be honest, is pretty damned exciting. Yes, I took a short break, but I also ran in some pretty rough conditions, so I’m going to claim the 15:15. I pushed harder than normal, partially because I felt like I could since I had stepped down the mileage this week, and partially because I wanted to see what I could do. These 16-17 minute paced long runs are valuable, I know. Slow long runs are good. But I have no idea what my marathon pace is going to be. I need to test my capabilities a bit. So I did. I didn’t go all out or anything, but I did end up with an average heart rate of 160 bpm, which is high for a long run. I’m not too worried, since I felt great (as in, my legs/back/hips didn’t hurt, I felt totally gross right after the run because I was hot and dirty), but I don’t plan on making it a habit.

This upcoming week includes 38 total miles and a 14 miler on the weekend. The weather looks fabulous, 60s all week, so I can finally retire my neon yellow hoodie for awhile. Which is good, since the zipper pull broke off on Saturday when I was getting my post-race coffee.

Week Seven Update

Let me pat myself on the back for yet another awesome training week. And by awesome I mean I didn’t wimp out on any workouts.

A quick recap:
Monday: off
Tuesday: 5.3 miles, road, 6 hill repeats
Wednesday: 5.2 miles, road
Thursday: 4 miles, treadmill
Friday: 4.1 miles, Lakewalk, speed work
Saturday: 12 miles, road
Sunday: 2.9 miles, road/trail (Chester Bowl)
Total: 33.5 miles

Friday’s speedwork went well. I hit an overall pace of 12:35/mile, with about 3 miles of “medium paced” running. I feel like I’m in a good spot for my 5k this weekend. I doubt I can hold the speedwork pace for 3 miles (around 11 min/mile) but I think I’ll be able to be somewhere between my A and B goals.

Saturday was my first double-digit long run. It was not the best idea to plan it the day after my speedy day, but Saturday’s forecast was better than Sunday’s, and Sunday is my “desperately catching up on homework” day. So the first couple miles felt slow as molasses. My 2nd mile was the slowest pace (17:11) of the whole run, except for the one where I took a break. I planned an 8-mile loop, back to my house, followed by a 4 mile loop. My hips and my back were pretty sore the whole time, but as I turned off Rice Lake Road onto Central Entrance to head down the hill right before my break, I couldn’t stop grinning. It was a gorgeous day, the lake looked beautiful, and I was high on endorphins.

I planned a break at 8 miles just in case I had to pee or was dying of thirst. I had felt pretty thirsty toward the end of my 9 mile run last weekend, and I didn’t want to carry a hand-held water bottle, so I stopped at home for about 5 minutes. Somehow I still ended up with a “pace” for that mile of 19:23, which is faster than some of my trail running paces.

The last 4 miles felt pretty terrible. I made a kind of stupid route choice, with too much uphill. Maybe I am doing too many hills. That sounds lazy, but I also think it’s a valid question. I finished the run with an overall pace of 16:30 and an average heart rate of 151 bpm, so I didn’t push too hard and only lost about half a minute off my 9-mile pace, even with the break.

Sunday I ran as slowly as I could stand, and took it easy on my body by running down the Chester Creek path from Skyline to 9th. I stopped and took a picture of ducks.

5K on Saturday. At 9 am. And it’s not going to be warm. Blahhhh.