The Van Cordtlandt Park Thursday night 5K series has ended, alas. If you find yourself in severe 5K trail race withdrawal later this summer, you’re in luck. There’s a new trail race north of the city in Irvington. It takes place on Saturday, August 29 at 9:30AM at Irvington High School to benefit their XC team. More info here.
Filed under: racing, westchester | Tagged: 5k, irvington | 4 Comments »
A fellow runner pointed out to me recently that it’s pretty easy to win certain marathon relays, at least in the all-women’s category. So I’m thinking it’s time to get a team together and plan for something.
Naturally, the most important aspect of all this is finding the perfect team name. I found this potential source of team names. I love Batwinged Bimbos from Hell, although how can you not love Macho Women Armed to the Teeth or More Excuses to Kill Things? I discovered these while looking up the origin of Renegade Nuns on Wheels (which I’d thought was Monty Python). Score!
Are you listening, TK and Flo?
Filed under: humor, racing | 4 Comments »
This week: a little more mileage, a little more speed, a little more confidence.
I ran just shy of 90 miles this week, although it very well could have been 90 or more since I was guessing at distances until Friday, when I at last had my new training partner, Mojo, happily vibrating and blinking on my wrist.
NY was a sauna this week, with little relief, even at night when it rarely dipped below 70F. The dew points were very high some days, which is really where you feel the misery. The worst days were Saturday and today, and once again I was glad I wasn’t running in the NYC Half Marathon this year, as the heat index was already around 80F at 7AM and only went up from there.
I took it fairly easy on my recovery runs, especially yesterday (when it was a brutal 91F heat index when I got in).
I wanted to have a productive run on Wednesday, so I took the LT run inside on the treadmill. The last five miles at LT effort were tough but doable. Although the treadmill’s pace readings are always suspect to me (meaning I always suspect it’s anywhere from 10-20 seconds “slower” in terms of what it’s reporting), I know I was running at the right effort (as I borrowed Jonathan’s HRM again) this time around. And right now effort is more important than pace is.
Like last week, there was the strange pattern of my running recoveries quite a bit faster on Thursday, sandwiched between two speedier sessions.
I did Friday’s 10K repeats on the Bronxville track, which even at 8:30AM was like an oven, with the rest of the run on the running path. But I wanted to try out my new watch, and I wanted accurate speed data, so I braved the weather. On my third repeat I suddenly had an image of myself as a soufflé with legs, rounding the track as the cheese atop my head bubbled, blistered and browned. Still, I was happy with what I managed: Two sub-7:00 pace repeats of around 1200m and one just over 7:00, all at 92% MHR.
The heat yesterday was just insane. I knew today was going to be a big long run, so I ran yesterday’s run extremely slow and at just 63% MHR average. The run, of course, took me forever. The longer I ran, the hotter I got, the more my HR went up, and the slower I went. This experience convinced me to take the long run inside today, since the weather was scheduled to be even worse today (and it was, according to Jonathan, who ran 16 miles up to North White Plains).
And so I ran 18 miles on the treadmill. And I was grateful for it. With AC and fans cranking, I too cranked. After a slow couple of miles to start as a warmup, I ran somewhere around 8:20 for most of the miles, then picked it up to 8:00 or so for the last few. HR% averaged 74% through most of the run and topped out at 79% toward the end. For entertainment, I watched the movie I’ve Loved You So Long (which was excellent) and then finished off by blasting some Radiohead. The 2.5 hours didn’t exactly fly by, but it beat the alternative of struggling outside for 3+ hours instead.
I should note that I’m tiptoeing into things in terms of pace on the harder workout days. Last weekend I did the long run at just under 9:00 pace. This weekend it was around 25 seconds faster (that table should say 8:27 for today, not 8:37). For next Sunday’s 20 miler (if I run it inside again), I’ll probably shoot for trimming off another 15-20 seconds per mile to see what my HR does.
Next week is yet more of the same, although the LT miles come in the middle of the run and the intervals will be shorter and faster (three minutes at 5K effort). Plus five more miles to top me out at 95 miles per week. I don’t know yet if I’ll be running more miles than that during fall training.
Filed under: basebuilding | 10 Comments »
Mojo!
That was among my favorites anyway, not the least of which is because it’s good timing: I got the watch just as I’m getting my running mojo back.
Thanks to all who voted and offered other naming ideas.
Filed under: clothes and gear | 2 Comments »
My shiny new Garmin 310xt arrived yesterday evening. I’ve taken it out for a spin and, dang, I’m in love. This is my third training watch (previous models include a Polar RS300 and a Garmin 305, both of which bit the dust).
It seems a tradition among runners to name their watches. So I’ll jump on the bandwagon, but with your help.
Filed under: clothes and gear | 13 Comments »
Lately I’ve gotten sick of the same old playlists or listening to albums with spotty quality. So I’ve made it a goal to put together at least one or two new music mixes a week to get me through summer/fall training.
Here’s the first one. This features some faster tracks, which I’ll use for anything tempo-y. This list provides exactly one hour of music. Heck, I can do anything for an hour, especially if I’ve got some good tunes playing in the background.
Speedy: 1 Hour
No Cars Go – Arcade Fire
Switch On – Paul Oakenfold
Problem Child – AC/DC
You Shook Me All Night Long – AC/DC
The Silence Between Us – Bob Mould
Run Baby Run – Garbage
21st Century Breakdown – Green Day
Barracuda – Heart
Is It Any Wonder? – Keane
The Lovers Are Losing – Keane
Human – The Killers
Celebrity Skin – Hole
Same Old Drag – Apples in Stereo
The Laws Have Changed – The New Pornographers
Dress Like Your Mother – Sleeper
Cannonball – The Breeders
Filed under: music | 7 Comments »
Okay, people. Now we’re cooking with gas.
This was a funny week. It was the first attempt at doing the summer maintenance plan I was originally scheduled to start a month ago, before a disastrous couple of races and Rip Van Winkelian sleeping patterns necessitated an intervention. So I was a bit nervous and that expressed itself as a tiptoeing into the harder work that started on Wednesday.
My watch is still on backorder (with numerous apologies from Road Runner Sports after my notes of protest), and it rarely worked out for me to borrow Jonathan’s heart rate monitor, so with the exception of Wednesday I guessed at effort all week, as well as distance when it came to the treadmill (which I suspect is way off).
Anyhoo. I started by swapping the Wednesday and Friday sessions for weather reasons. I took it easy on Wednesday, mostly because I did something bad to my right hamstring (right at the insertion point below the buttock; TMI?) during last Saturday’s “let’s see how fast I can run” experiment and didn’t want to aggravate it. Still and all, I cruised along at a respectable pace that was probably in the 8:30 range or faster at an average 75% MHR; I threw in a fast last half mile at more like 7:30 pace, with an MHR that topped out at 85%. So far so good.
The rest of the week just got better and better. My recovery runs were easy and faster too, dipping under 10:00 pace on Thursday. Friday was a good day at the track, with a four mile warmup through the streets beforehand at, again, around 8:30 and then four miles at what felt like something between half marathon and 30K effort.
I woke up on Saturday to temps in the 60s and a dewpoint in the 40s. Ooh la la! My resting heart rate had shown no fallout from Friday’s session, so I decided to take advantage of the fantastic weather and do my planned Sunday 16 mile long run on Saturday instead. I’m glad I did. I did something resembling a progression run (although I have no data). I started out at around 10:00 pace and sped up to finish the last few miles at probably around 8:00. Don’t know what my HR% was, but I’m guessing it averaged in the middle-to-high 70%s.
Today the heat and humidity were back, but all I had to do was 10 miles at recovery pace. So I hoofed it up to the Hartsdale train station at a nonetheless relatively speedy pace considering the weather and coming off of two hard days in a row.
I am pleased.
Next week adds another 10 miles to the total, with another block of lactate threshold running, some 10K pace repeats and an 18 miler on the weekend.
Also, today I saw a groundhog. It was so weird seeing it just out in the open that I thought it might have rabies. But then I remembered that I can play with rabid animals if I so wish. So I shook the groundhog’s little paw and wished him a lovely Sunday (okay, I made that part up).
Filed under: basebuilding | 6 Comments »
Rinus asked recently what I mean by “Weights” in my training logs.
I’ve had an on again/off again relationship with weight training for several years. It’s come down to a question of time and energy. When I have both, I do weight work in addition to running. When I lack one, the other or both, I drop the weights (so to speak).
Since I’ve been on the road to recovery over the past month or so (and trying to lose some, uh, weight — to further confuse this post and its readers), I’ve certainly had an abundance of time and, at least in the past couple of weeks, energy as well. So I’ve dusted off the weights until such time as the running takes over everything once again.
I should come clean right now and say that I rarely lift actual weights. I’m one of those hapless souls who fell for the 3AM Bowflex ad. Yes, I bought a Bowflex. But I’m sure I’m in the extremely small minority of Bowflex owners who actually uses the thing for something other than a temporary resting place for laundry or mail. (I also didn’t opt for the 80 year financing plan where you pay $0.90 a month for the rest of your natural days.) I also have a set of free weights (and a basic bench that a neighbor threw away). Jonathan uses those, but I don’t bother.
Purists will chirp that the Bowflex is not the same as weights. With weights you are working throughout the entire motion and using lots of other muscles to assist and stabilize the target muscles. I know all this. I don’t care. If I was serious about weight training I wouldn’t be a runner.
So here’s what I do with the Bowflex. Two to three times per week (at least for the moment), I perform the following exercises:
That’s it! I used to do something called the “seated ab crunch” but it’s incredibly awkward and I found that I was ending up with an iffy neck the next day. So if I do ab work these days (which is rare, since it’s tedious and painful), I hit the floor mat.
I do these exercises because in any race over about 15 miles I find that I start to have “upper body fatigue” issues. There is enough misery to deal with below the waist in a marathon. I figure if I can make my upper body a non-issue then that’s one less source of angst on race day. I only do seven exercises because that’s manageable. It’s enough that I hit the major areas of my upper body, but not so many that it’s easy for me to bail on the workout because there’s too much to do. If I’m tired or don’t have a lot of time, I’ll do two sets instead of three.
Before I got above 60mpw last week I was doing some leg exercises in addition to the upper body sets. These were all free standing exercises, meaning I didn’t use free weights or the Bowflex. Just me fighting gravity. These included:
I’ve dropped the leg work for the time being because it’s very hard work and I feel it for several days afterwards. So much so that I believe it has a deleterious effect on my running. Were I running lower mileage, I’d keep these as a regular thing. But now that I’m heading back up into 90mpw territory, it makes no sense to do anything other than running for my legs.
Filed under: clothes and gear, strength training | 10 Comments »
Hail pills and rest. All hail pills and rest.
Finally, after five weeks of either total rest or puttering along at a strictly recovery pace and relatively low mileage, I’m starting to feel like the runner I once knew. Who is this mysterious stranger? She sleeps 8-8.5 hours a night without interruption. She looks forward to longer runs. She yearns to run fast. She does not complain about chafing — nay, she celebrates chafing.
I ran nine times this week, again strictly by time and, with only one exception, sans gadgetry. My new watch/HRM combo is on backorder, which hasn’t been too much of a hardship. I borrowed Jonathan’s HRM (which worked fine with my watch) for yesterday’s run. More on that in a moment.
The heat and humidity this week were tough, plus we had a lot of rain. Wednesday was the worst day, like running in a giant dryer vent. This weather pattern looks to continue for at least another 10 days. And, let’s face it, it’s August. So we can probably bank on crap weather for the next six weeks minimum, longer if we’re unlucky.
Fortunately, after one false start (caused by an electrical short from a misplaced wire; oopsie) we managed to fix our ailing treadmill, which seems stable again — it’s no longer throwing random errors and shutting down unpredictably. It’s unreliability made for some very nervous running. How relaxed can you be when the treadmill may suddenly stop at any moment? Running slow was nervewracking enough — going fast on that flakey beast was out of the question from a safety standpoint.
I had some issues with my left side later in the week. The entire left side of my body, from left foot all the way to left shoulder felt achy and stiff. The outer fingers on my left hand were numb too. My suspicion is that my “nervous runner form” on the treadmill was probably responsible for these issues. Things are better today.
But did I let any of this — the heat, the humidity, the schizoid treadmill, the broken HRM, one half of me messed up — get me down? Nope. I was a happy, happy runner this week.
The highlight was yesterday’s run. It was a warm morning, but with reasonable humidity (dew point of around 62). I borrowed Jonathan’s HRM in order to do another round of data gathering. The plan was to clock another 8:20ish mile and see what my HR did for the duration. It held in the 80% range, which I was very pleased to see. Two weeks earlier I ran at about the same pace, but at a much lower dew point of 54, at about the same HR.
I’d asked Kevin if I could do 30 minutes of faster running this week should the mood strike, and it had in a big way. So I ran four miles between 8:00 – 8:20 pace, with the HR% topping out at 82%. Good stuff.
Today I felt no worse for the wear (and my HR was at a cooperative 43) so I went forward with the plan to do 2:15 of recovery running. I would have liked to have run this outside but we had rain and lightning moving through all morning. In the end, I’m glad I did the run inside where it was cooler and drier. I expect I won’t feel as knocked out tomorrow.
Now that I’m reasonably back on track I should be able to get into the rotating three week maintenance plan I was slated to start in June before all hell broke loose. I’ll start this tomorrow, with a week in the 80 mile range featuring some “perceived lactate threshold” running, some 1 minute repeats, and a longer run (16 miles next Sunday). I am so excited to be running long and running fast again.
The next race on the horizon is the South Nyack 10 Miler, one of my favorite races to run. I don’t have high expectations, meaning I’d be surprised if I PR’ed after this significant a pause in training (not to mention the fact that early September is still heat wave season). But it gives me something to look forward to and work toward over the next six weeks.
Filed under: basebuilding, coaching, racing, recovery | 7 Comments »
Races Like a Girl 