Week of 4-27-09

I'm sort of counting this week 2 ways, Sunday through Saturday, and Monday through Sunday. Sunday through Saturday gives me 100 miles, Monday through Sunday gives me 92.

Sunday 4-26-09: 15 miles AM: Pike's Peek 10k + about a mile warmup (well, very fast run) to get to the start on time: sort of a disaster, wrote about it in the last post, but I ended up running 35:30, 2 minutes off what I wanted. I'm not sure if 33:30 is totally realistic off a track, but I'd like to think that I should've been able to hit 34 if I wasn't still somewhat of a post-Boston cripple. PM: I was angry with myself about my bad run, so I came home and ran another 8 miles in the blazing 90-something degree heat, which was really quite painful since I'm not used to the heat yet this year.

Monday 4-27-09: 13 miles: 3 mile warmup from JHH to fed hill + Shady 7 (started at 7/mile, finished really fast, with everyone sort of just trying their hardest to keep up with Kris Simms and Ben Ingram, hit the finish in 44 high) + 3 mile cooldown. The high of the day was 93 and someone mentioned that it hit the high shortly before we started, so it must've been 93 when I was running over from JHH. I downed 20 ounces of gatorade and 40 ounces of water throughout the 13 miles of running and was probably still a little bit dehydrated when I finished. Man I need to get better with the heat...

Tuesday 4-28-09: 12 miles: 2.5 mile warmup with Jaffe and newcomer Nina to track workout (2 x (mile, 60 rest, 800, 400 jog for rest, 400). Hit the first mile in 5:40, wasn't supposed to be too fast, felt really easy, 800 was in 2:30, felt pretty good, 400 in 71, also felt all right, 5 minutes rest, followed by the next mile in 5:29, still felt good, 800 in 2:34, fell off in the second lap, wasn't so happy with that, 400 jog for rest, 400 in 70, felt pretty good. Most of the team did a 3rd set, but I knew my weekly mileage was going to be high already and I had just decided that morning to do a 5k on Saturday, so I decided to save it. Everyone else said the 3rd set was really what hit them hard, so maybe I should've done it, but no-one else that had done Boston did more than 2 sets, so I guess I can't really be too hard on myself. After the 2.5 mile warmup and 4 miles on track, I jogged home with Jaffe and Nina, but realized when I was within about a half mile that I had forgotten my ipod, so I sprinted 2 miles back, making it a 4 mile cooldown by the time I got back to the track. At that point, I just got a ride back to Hopkins, but had to run home from the opposite side of campus (another 1.5), so my total was about 12.

Wednesday 4-29-09: 12 miles, Canton run, pretty easy, around 48 or 49 for the 7 miles. The warmup and cooldown from JHH were both about 2.5 miles, so the total was 12.

Thursday 4-30-09: 22 miles, Me, being mileage hungry, decided on an easy 15 miler. That turned into a not-so-easy 22 miler. I ran it in just under 2:30, so it just a hair under 7/mile. A few miles were on a fairly technical section of the Robert E Lee trail, so it wasn't really all that easy of a run. Oh, and I found a new section of trail in Robert E Lee that I hadn't known about on the far side from Hopkins. It's not that much extra trail, but either way, there's a beast of an uphill followed by a best of a downhill, so it's a really good way to elevate the heart rate for a few minutes in the middle of a run. As a whole, the run was basically a run to Robert E Lee, the largest loop possible on the inside, cutting out to Falls near the highway, running that little extra chunk I just found, crossing up to Bellona, taking Joppa to the far side of Towson, and then finally running home from Towson. When I finished, I was just getting to that point where I was getting fairly fatigued and happy to be done (not like in a marathon, but maybe how I'd feel about 18-20 miles into a decent marathon), so I pushed it right about as hard as I should've for the distance. I feel like the last chunk of the marathon is usually what does the damage and causes the need for recovery, so pushing until you're feeling about how you would around 18-20 miles in gives a great training run. I was slightly sore afterwards, but not sore enough to really jeapardize my Saturday race, so it worked well.

Friday 5-1-09: 0 miles. I took an off day just to make sure I wouldn't be sore for Saturday's race.

Saturday: 26 miles: ~2 mile warmup plus Fiesta 5k in the morning. That long of a warmup sounds a little obscene considering that it's 2/3 the length of the race, but I really need a lot of time to get a rhythm going, so it's what I have to do... Anyway, the race went somewhat well, in that I took 1st out of 996 runners, but I didn't really feel like I earned a reason to celebrate that much. I ran a 17:02, which isn't really anywhere near what I know I'm capable of, but I got lazy and decided to be satisfied with a healthy win rather than really going all out for time. The course wasn't the same flat fast course as the previous 2 years, so even going all out definitely would not have gotten me the race record (currently 15:58), but I probably should've been able to edge myself to a 16:30 or so there if I had someone pushing me and making me fight harder for the win. As it was, I started off in 1st and momentarily almost lost it when I briefly went off course about 100 meters in, but only 1 guy really stayed with me for long, so I got progressively more lazy as the race went on. It was pretty windy, so some guy drafted off me for the first mile (which we ran in 5:22). After 6 to 7 minutes, I was sick of giving him the advantage of drafting, but I certainly was not going to give up my lead, so I sped up for around 15 to 20 seconds and he just fell off instantly. At that point, I slowed back down to a little slower than the original pace, but he continued to fall behind, so while I definitely had another gear or 2 to kick into, I never really used them. I hit the 2 mile, which was up and over a decent hill, in something like 10:51. I hit the 3 mile in 16:28 or so and realized that I would go under 17 only if I really really kicked the last .1, but I just wasn't feeling that motivated since I couldn't even see the guy behind me anymore, so I coasted into a 17:02 and pretty much instantly regretted not pushing at the end. Either way, a win out of 996 competitors is pretty fun and I have to say, I realized that I really enjoy winning. However, no serious runner is going to say that a 17:02 is a very impressive time, so the fact that I won doesn't really mean that much. In most instances, I'd rather run a 16:30 and take 10th place than run 17:02 and take 1st, but a win is still pretty awesome, so I'm not going to sit here and complain about it too much. Oh, and if it matters, I somehow won by 37 seconds. I don't know why there was no-one faster in a 996 person field, but whatever... Oh, and you might wonder how a 5k and a 2 mile warmup makes 26 miles... It doesn't. I came home and felt bored, so I went for another 21 miles. hahaha... I ran to Hopkins from my apartment, took the Gilman trail followed by Roland and did the same loop inside Robert E Lee that I had done the other day. I then doubled back and took the exit that goes out on the really muddy section near that elitist country club (or whatever it is) that comes out on Ruxton right next to the bridge that hits Bellona, took a left on Ruxton, and did the ultra hilly loop on Circle Road (the uphill here was extremely painful and I was really glad to have a hammer gel with me here...). Next, I popped back onto Bellona, hit another massive uphill going up Bellona and circled back over 695 onto Falls, took the longest route back through Robert E Lee, followed the train tracks out to the left to my sort-of-secret super technical section of trail, took the hill out of Robert E Lee back up to Charles, and then eventually crossed over at Northern Parkway and took Roland home. Whew, sort of hard to keep straight. In other words, to and from Robert E Lee with a loop inside, loop around the back of the outside with a mini loop in the middle of this loop, then another loop on the inside. Complicated, no? When I finished this run, I felt like absolute garbage. My legs were somewhat sore and I was extremely fatigued due to the very high humidity and dehydration from sweat loss. Overall, I hit the run in 2:26, which is almost exactly 7/mile. It was definitely a tough run and it felt a lot harder than Thursday's 22, probably just because I had run somewhat fast in the morning. This afternoon run bumped me to 100 miles in a week, which was pretty nice, since I haven't hit a week that big in a couple months.

Sunday: 7 miles. I took it slow for this short of a run, around 6:30/mile. It was raining (admittedly not terribly hard) and everything was just soaking wet and generally miserable. I would've gone farther, but the weather brought down my motivation low enough to keep my run in the single digits.

Total: 100 miles if you count Sunday through Saturday, 92 if you count Monday through Sunday. I start my weeks on Monday, but it's still important to keep cumulative 7 day stats in the back of my mind, so I'm keeping both stats in my total log just so I remember that I did in fact hit 100 in 1 week at this point.

Next week: I'm debating how much to hit, but it will be at the very least 70 and probably a fair amount more. I'll have 13 on Monday, somewhere around 10-15 on Tuesday, depending on the track workout, and 12-18 on Wednesday, depending on whether the team run is in Canton or Robert E Lee, so I'll be starting the week off well. Assuming I feel good, I'm going to do something massive on Saturday or Sunday (debating between the 39-mile DC run with a train ride back or the 35-40 mile, depending on how I do it, Loch Raven run). In order to hit this, Friday will certainly just be a chump change day and probably one other day will be too, but if I feel good, I'll push for 100-110.


I'm throwing around the idea of splitting my training into very heavy (120-130) and medium (70-80) weeks back to back over and over rather than just consistently trying to hit 100-110, which was my original plan, as I build up for summer ultras, but I guess we'll just have to play it by ear. I do know that I want to shatter my weekly training mileage record of 125 a couple times. Ideally, I'd love to hit a 140 mile week so I can average 20 miles a day for a whole week at some point before August, but I don't really know what kind of toll that would take on my body and I would estimate it being very high, so that's not necessarily going to happen. I've always had in the back of my mind that I would be in "reasonable" endurance shape when I could consider 20-milers incredibly routine and I think being able to do one every single day for a week would constitute them as fairly routine, so we'll see. haha...


One other thing, as far as racing goes, I'm canceling Mohican. I realized that it falls on the Saturday right after I move out to Utah and I am absolutely unwilling to set a horrible precedent by missing my first Friday of grad school lab work to travel to Ohio for running. Quite frankly, having just July's 12-hour and August's 100 miler sets me up better to keep from burning out from too many uber-long races and it gives me more time to just focus on training. I obviously want to destroy Around the Lake's 12-hour course record (66 miles, which I will hopefully beat by at least 10 miles). However, my focus at this point is shifting towards marathons, so I'm treating these 2 races as part of the endurance build-up process so that I will be able to run as fast as possible in a fall marathon. My original goal for the year was to break 2:50, but I've decided to lower than to 2:45 since I don't feel like dropping less than 4 minutes after a summer of training in the mountains and a fall focused on getting fast is a good enough goal, especially if I end up getting a lottery spot in St. George's Marathon, which is MUUUUUUCH faster than Boston, my PR course.

Anyway, this was an absolutely absurdly long post, but what can I say? I love running, I love thinking about running, I love talking about running, I love writing about running... etc... You get the point...