Monday 5-4: 14 miles. 3 mile warmup, 7.25 to 7.5 mile run at Fed Hill in around 6:30/mile (Ben had some crazy route that ran through some ridiculously sketchy areas... I would never have done this run by myself), 3.5 mile cooldown back to JHH (took a longer route to bump up the mileage to 14 or so).
Tuesday 5-5: 10 miles. 3 mile warmup, 4 miles on track, 3 mile cooldown (slightly longer warmup and cooldown in a fruitless attempt to avoid getting muddy in the insane rain). Track workout was 1600, 800, 800, 1600, 800, 800 with 90 seconds rest between each, 140 or so between the 8 and 16. People seemed to think the times would be a bit slow due to the heavy rain and wetness (which subsided as the workout went on), but I still really strong and ran the workout well. My splits were 1600: 5:26, 800: 2:36, 800: 2:35, 1600: 5:16, 800: 2:34, 800: 2:32 and I finished still feeling pretty good, so it was a succesful workout that made me push, but not to the point of serious fatigue, which is what I wanted, given that I wanted to hit fairly high mileage this week and couldn't afford a few days of soreness.
Wednesday 5-6: 12 miles. 2.5 mile warmup, 7 mile canton run in 46:xx (pretty easy), and 2.5 mile cooldown.
Thursday: 5-7: 17 miles. This was definitely the big run of the week. I did a 16.5 mile tempo with a .5 mile cooldown at the end. I went out with the intention of going out too fast and trying my best to hold on as well as I could as a sort of mental trainer for difficult long races. I ended up going out in a little over 6 minutes a mile, but surprisingly, it ended up not being too fast to hold for the whole run and I ended up averaging 6:06/mile for the whole run, which really surprised me. Most of the run (about 13) was on roads and 3.5 was on trails. Both the raods and trails portions contained challenging sections, but I worked my hardest on the trails to keep the same fast pace that I had on the roads. The 2nd half was extremely difficult with hills on both Circle Road and Bellona (absolutely massive uphills), but I was able to hold on and sped back up to a slightly faster pace after the hills were done, hitting a mile that I had tracked out from about 15.4 to 16.4 in 5:50. Overall, I was extremely pleased with the run and I registered for the Stillwater Marathon as soon as I got back.
Friday 5-8: 16 miles: I first did 14 miles around Towson pretty easy. I forgot my watch, but it felt like around a 6:50 per mile. This run was more just to recover from the previous day, so I really tried not to push myself to hard. After the run, I ran into a girl from my church while I was stretching at the gym who was about to go running 2 miles and I was just joking around saying I would pace her, but she took me up on it, so I did another 2 miles, which actually served as a really good cooldown.
Saturday 5-9: 12 miles. I first ran a mile to get to the gym to lift. After lifting, I ran another 11, from the gym along the ROTC trail to Druid Hills, did the longest possible loop around the zoo and then the lake (with a couple cut backs in the trail section), ran back to campus, ran a loop around campus, and then ran home. I couldn't find my watch, but my pace was probably about 6:30/mile and it felt very manageable, which is good considering this is the pace I need to hit for 26.2 miles at the Stillwater Marathon.
Sunday 5-10: 10 miles: I did a very fast 9 mile tempo around Druid Hills from my apartment and then back to the gym before lifting and eventually running a mile back home. I haven't been able to find my watch for a couple days, but I could tell that this was extremely fast for the distance and the difficulty of the course, probably around 5:45/mile.
Total: 91 miles. Overall, this was an excellent week for me. My legs still feel excellent after 2 90+ mile weeks, so I'm feeling really confident going into Stillwater.
I'll do around 70 miles this week, focusing on speed and tempo. I'm definitely feeling like I can top that Boston time and hit a sub-2:50 at Stillwater as long as I'm careful over the next 2 weeks.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
You know you're training well when...
... you feel lazy after 12 miles of running and an hour of lifting. Haha... No, but really, I've definitely cracked back into that incredible "more mileage" mindset where I'm actually training hard enough that I get pissed at myself on days when I barely crack the double digits, such as today. I love when I'm in the zone like that because it means that I simply won't allow myself to get lazy and my training is guaranteed to be awesome. I really think I'm going to be very well peaked for the Stillwater Marathon at this point, and I'm really getting excited to race again. That is all... I just thought it was funny that I felt lazy after 12 miles...
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Mid-week post, doing another marathon in 2 1/2 weeks
Quick post... The training has been going exceptionally well in the last 2 weeks or so and I feel that my truest spring peak is coming after Boston. That means I need to run another marathon soon. I've decided to just drive home to MN the day after graduation (4 days earlier than the original plan) so I can run the inaugural Stillwater Marathon on May 24th. Officially, the goal is to break 2:50 and I'm fairly sure it's doable if I run well. I feel like I'm somehow already in much better shape than I was when I ran Boston, probably just due to the fact that I've finally started doing some good honest speed-work on the track. Additionally, I've been doing most of my runs at or faster than marathon pace, so that helps too. Boston was probably a hair conservative, and my 2:53:46 was obviously 80 seconds slower than it should've been with the bathroom break and all. Stillwater won't be an easy course, but it'll be easier than Boston and running my first ever home-state marathon ought to help my cause. As a whole, even dropping 4 minutes in the shape I was in at Boston would be doable if I ran a very good race, but I think I'm in better shape now, so it should definitely be doable. The plan will be to start in a 1:24 and see what happens from there. Also, I'm going to avoid eating something stupid like Wendy's the night before and I'm not going to consume any dairy for a couple days before the race to see if that can help keep me out of the porta-john while I'm running... I'm going to have an awesome post about this week's training in a few days and I'm really looking forward to the last couple runs of the week.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
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...
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...
Sunday, April 26, 2009
April racing, racing schedule, training
I'm going to start putting weekly training up again since I'm upping my mileage again this coming week for the fairly difficult summer racing schedule I've decided on:
1.Mohican Trail 100 Mile Run, mid-late June
2. Around the Lake 12 hour run, mid-late July (hoping for at least 75 miles, but the 78.6 mile triple-marathon would be really nice)
3. Cascade Crest Classic 100 Mile Run, late-August
I'm debating which marathon I'm going to run in the fall, but I'm leaning towards anything in late-October into any time in November. NYC is fairly appealing, especially since my 2:53 at Boston automatically qualifies me without making me sit through the lottery, but the price-tag on that one (including airfare from Salt Lake to NYC) is pretty ridiculous, so I'm still not sure. I have to decide within a few days since registration closes on May 1st.
As for a summary of my April racing, I had:
American River 50 Mile Run: 7:44:57 (9:17/mile). My goal was really just to break 8, though I secretly kind of wanted to be under 9/mile. I was pretty happy with my time since the course wasn't quite as easy as I expected, though. I'm pretty sure I have a lot more potential waiting to be tapped in the 50 and I think that in a good fast 50 mile road race (this was half fast roads, half slow trails), I might eventually be able to drop to mid 6's or even faster.
Boston Marathon: 2:53:46 (6:37/mile). My goal was officially to break 2:55, so I was pretty happy. I also wanted negative splits, but I didn't quite hit that. My 2nd half running pace was slightly faster, but I ended up going 86:33, 87:13, only because I lost 80 seconds in the bathroom at mile 16. Overall, I'm still happy with it, though I'm sure the time will continue to fall. My semi-long term goal will be to get this down to sub-6/mile, hopefully by 2011 and I think it should definitely be doable.
Pike's Peek 10k: 35:29 (5:42/mile). I thought this was pretty horrible performance for me... I was shooting for mid-33's, but everything went wrong. I wanted to do a 17-minute first 5k and speed up to a mid-16s 5k in the 2nd half, but I ended up doing 17:10, 18:19. My quads are apparently not 100% after Boston yet and I think I now realize why a fair number of more experienced runners were telling me this was a terrible idea. I mentally wasn't in this one at all; I accidentally got directions to the finish rather than the start, so I ended up making it to the start about a minute before the race started (having to run the last 3/4 of a mile in 4 minutes due to closed roads), giving me just enough time to sprint to packet pickup, pin on my bib with a single pin, and jam my chip in my shoe without tying it down. I was still winded as the gun went off and I never felt good throughout the race. The first 5k in 17:10 was only 10 seconds off what I wanted, but I knew pretty much from a mile in that things didn't feel as good as they should've. I guess this is a lesson learned about racing anything, especially speedy stuff, the same week as a big important marathon... On the up side, I have a lot of room to improve, but this was a pretty disappointing 10k debut for me...
As for my near future training, I'm going to be upping the mileage a lot in the next week or 2 and trying to run as much as possible over the next 6 or 7 weeks. I'm going to try to get one really massive run in most weekends since I've found those trainers to be the best for ultras.
My training ought to set me up very well for a late-fall marathon since I'll have about 4 months of huge base training before focusing on speed for about 2 months before running a marathon. I'll definitely be shooting for a sub 2:50 in the fall and if my training goes well, I might even shoot for a 2:45, which I think could be possible given very good training.
1.Mohican Trail 100 Mile Run, mid-late June
2. Around the Lake 12 hour run, mid-late July (hoping for at least 75 miles, but the 78.6 mile triple-marathon would be really nice)
3. Cascade Crest Classic 100 Mile Run, late-August
I'm debating which marathon I'm going to run in the fall, but I'm leaning towards anything in late-October into any time in November. NYC is fairly appealing, especially since my 2:53 at Boston automatically qualifies me without making me sit through the lottery, but the price-tag on that one (including airfare from Salt Lake to NYC) is pretty ridiculous, so I'm still not sure. I have to decide within a few days since registration closes on May 1st.
As for a summary of my April racing, I had:
American River 50 Mile Run: 7:44:57 (9:17/mile). My goal was really just to break 8, though I secretly kind of wanted to be under 9/mile. I was pretty happy with my time since the course wasn't quite as easy as I expected, though. I'm pretty sure I have a lot more potential waiting to be tapped in the 50 and I think that in a good fast 50 mile road race (this was half fast roads, half slow trails), I might eventually be able to drop to mid 6's or even faster.
Boston Marathon: 2:53:46 (6:37/mile). My goal was officially to break 2:55, so I was pretty happy. I also wanted negative splits, but I didn't quite hit that. My 2nd half running pace was slightly faster, but I ended up going 86:33, 87:13, only because I lost 80 seconds in the bathroom at mile 16. Overall, I'm still happy with it, though I'm sure the time will continue to fall. My semi-long term goal will be to get this down to sub-6/mile, hopefully by 2011 and I think it should definitely be doable.
Pike's Peek 10k: 35:29 (5:42/mile). I thought this was pretty horrible performance for me... I was shooting for mid-33's, but everything went wrong. I wanted to do a 17-minute first 5k and speed up to a mid-16s 5k in the 2nd half, but I ended up doing 17:10, 18:19. My quads are apparently not 100% after Boston yet and I think I now realize why a fair number of more experienced runners were telling me this was a terrible idea. I mentally wasn't in this one at all; I accidentally got directions to the finish rather than the start, so I ended up making it to the start about a minute before the race started (having to run the last 3/4 of a mile in 4 minutes due to closed roads), giving me just enough time to sprint to packet pickup, pin on my bib with a single pin, and jam my chip in my shoe without tying it down. I was still winded as the gun went off and I never felt good throughout the race. The first 5k in 17:10 was only 10 seconds off what I wanted, but I knew pretty much from a mile in that things didn't feel as good as they should've. I guess this is a lesson learned about racing anything, especially speedy stuff, the same week as a big important marathon... On the up side, I have a lot of room to improve, but this was a pretty disappointing 10k debut for me...
As for my near future training, I'm going to be upping the mileage a lot in the next week or 2 and trying to run as much as possible over the next 6 or 7 weeks. I'm going to try to get one really massive run in most weekends since I've found those trainers to be the best for ultras.
My training ought to set me up very well for a late-fall marathon since I'll have about 4 months of huge base training before focusing on speed for about 2 months before running a marathon. I'll definitely be shooting for a sub 2:50 in the fall and if my training goes well, I might even shoot for a 2:45, which I think could be possible given very good training.
Monday, April 20, 2009
New Marathon PR at Boston
So let me start by waying that I apologize for apparently being too lazy to write a report for AR50. If you want to know anything about it, just post about it. If you're considering doing it next year, do it, it's a great race, one of my favorites I've ever done.
As for Boston, I hit a 2:53:46 today. My first half was a 1:26:35 and my second half was 1:27:11, so it was pretty even splits. My pace in the 2nd half was actually a bit faster, but I took a huge crap at mile 16 and lost 70-some seconds as a result, putting my 2nd half split a bit slower. My overall pace amounted to 6:37 or 6:38 per mile. I saw it reported both ways and I'm apparently too lazy to figure out what it actually is. I felt pretty good the whole way through and definitely felt like I dropped the hammer throughout the newton hills. I maybe should've gone out a minute or so faster, I think it would've been tolerable. My 2nd half might have been a bit faster, but I felt so good coming out of Heartbreak that I hit mile 22 in 6:02, which definitely caused me to have to slow down a bit from about 22 to 25 until running from 25.2 to 26.2 in 6:10 or something relatively fast. I was pretty happy with my performance, given that it was a bit over a 5 minute PR, though I realized near the end that if I could've shaved less than 2 minutes and gone under 2:52, I would've hit the women's olympic qualifying time for the marathon, which sounds pretty cool, so I'll have to keep that in mind the next time I race. I'm debating racing a marathon next month in May now that I've run a relatively big PR, just to see if I can go faster at this point (I really want to break 2:50 this year and I think it might be possible now given ideal conditions), but I'd have to find a pretty fast course to be willing to commit to doing it since it would interfere with my buildup for summer ultras.
I'll be racing a 10k on Sunday, so it's fortunate that I don't feel beat up whatsoever. After that 10k, if I don't find a marathon for May, I won't be racing again until late June, so I'll be working on hitting pretty high mileage to buildup my endurance again.
As for Boston, I hit a 2:53:46 today. My first half was a 1:26:35 and my second half was 1:27:11, so it was pretty even splits. My pace in the 2nd half was actually a bit faster, but I took a huge crap at mile 16 and lost 70-some seconds as a result, putting my 2nd half split a bit slower. My overall pace amounted to 6:37 or 6:38 per mile. I saw it reported both ways and I'm apparently too lazy to figure out what it actually is. I felt pretty good the whole way through and definitely felt like I dropped the hammer throughout the newton hills. I maybe should've gone out a minute or so faster, I think it would've been tolerable. My 2nd half might have been a bit faster, but I felt so good coming out of Heartbreak that I hit mile 22 in 6:02, which definitely caused me to have to slow down a bit from about 22 to 25 until running from 25.2 to 26.2 in 6:10 or something relatively fast. I was pretty happy with my performance, given that it was a bit over a 5 minute PR, though I realized near the end that if I could've shaved less than 2 minutes and gone under 2:52, I would've hit the women's olympic qualifying time for the marathon, which sounds pretty cool, so I'll have to keep that in mind the next time I race. I'm debating racing a marathon next month in May now that I've run a relatively big PR, just to see if I can go faster at this point (I really want to break 2:50 this year and I think it might be possible now given ideal conditions), but I'd have to find a pretty fast course to be willing to commit to doing it since it would interfere with my buildup for summer ultras.
I'll be racing a 10k on Sunday, so it's fortunate that I don't feel beat up whatsoever. After that 10k, if I don't find a marathon for May, I won't be racing again until late June, so I'll be working on hitting pretty high mileage to buildup my endurance again.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
American River 50
Race report coming soon, but I had a pretty darn good race at AR50, running 7:44:57, 57 1/2 minutes faster than my previous PR of 8:42:25. The first half of AR50 was pretty fast, with me splitting the marathon in 3:26, but the 2nd half was considerably more technical and hilly, so while I was considerably slower in the 2nd half, I didn't really feel that I ran poorly in the 2nd half. I was in 46th out of 650 starters after 26.77 miles and somehow finished in the exact same place. I was worried I had gone out a bit fast after hitting the marathon in 3:26, but I guess my placing shows that I ran pretty similarly to the other runners in terms of first vs second half pacing. Apparently, only 510 people finished, which was a bit of a surprise, since I didn't think it was incredibly terrible other than the last 3.5 miles, which were straight up a mountain (to get from the bottom of the valley to the top of Auburn). Anyway, I'll post a full report in the next day or 2...
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