Dare I Write A Blog Post?

No matter how many new and shiny podcasts come out, one of my favorite will always and forever remain "This American Life," hosted by Ira Glass.

In one episode, Ira glass said something that I feel in my soul:

"Today’s radio show is about asking a grown-up for advice. I am fully grown up. And I’m older than I sound on the radio....[O]ld enough that, last week, when I read something by somebody in their 30s who said, well, of course nobody ever fully feels like a grown-up, I wanted to say, no, I actually feel like a grown-up. I feel like a grown-up. I feel my responsibilities. I feel the weight of them. I know when I have lived up to my own ideals for how I want to be in the world and treat others around me, and when I haven’t, I feel it. I feel tired in this way that I definitely did not when I was younger."

I heard Ira Glass say this and I very nearly started sobbing into my hands. Because, young people, yes, you do reach a point where you really, truly feel like a grown up, where you do not feel like you're faking it. Not all adults are just grown-up kids making it up as they go. And when you reach that age, it. Is. EXHAUSTING.

Some Shoe Talk

I don't know if you know this already but I have a lot of running shoes.

STAND BACK: I'm going to try MICRO-BLOGGING

Seriously, guys. I've started about 10 posts since my last one and just never can seem to find the time to finish even one of them. I'll think, "Well this will just be a short catch-up post..." and then 20 paragraphs later I feel like I've barely scratched the surface.

So. While I'm scraping the bottom of the free-time bucket, I'm going to try micro-blogging, wherein I sit down and complete a post & hit 'Publish' in 10 minutes or less. HERE WE GO!!

How I'm Spending My Summer Vacation.

I know technically we still have like another month to go, but for some reason I feel like the Eugene Marathon sort of ushered in summer, maybe because afterward I had a bit of that WEEEEE EXAMS ARE DONE TIME TO CHILL!!! vibe.

And, I have been taking full advantage of it. I took a week off from running (though I did go to karate & do some climbing) and have been getting to all kinds of procrastinated tasks in the afternoons when I'd normally be running. Behold, my car is smog tested & legally registered, my luscious locks no longer make me look like a sheep dog when not tied back, and I once again have professional office lady shoes that are not literally falling apart.

#lusciouslocks ca.2001

We've also had a few weekends recently where we didn't have to get up early or be anywhere specific, and as a result our floors are shiny, our toilets are spotless, and our friends have been well fed on 10 year old cab & 90-day dry-aged sous vide ribeyes.

#sousvide

Basically, perfection.

(Related: Dinner parties are good for floor mopping and toilet cleaning.)

Running-wise, I'm now up to a brisk 4 miles per day, more or less, and feeling pretty darn good. My next big training cycle will be CIM in December (and Folsom Breakout Blues Half in mid-October) which I'll probably start training for in earnest sometime in August. So what's going on between now & then?

• Danville 10K on 5/28. I kind of forgot that I signed up for this! I think trying to actually race it less than a month after a marathon is probably incredibly stupid, but it sounds like maybe I will try to pace my lovely friend Cat to a PR???? I have little experience as a pacer but maybe she will let me hang on for the ride.
• Ireland 6/1-6/14. This all happened kind of suddenly & I don't know all the details, but I have been told there will be amazing food and lots of beer & whiskey and really what more does one need to know. #sláinte
• Jungle Run Half on 7/16. Again, not actually racing, but I have a deferral from last year so what the hell. (Also it's in Los Gatos in July meaning temps will probably be in the 90s so major race goals include not passing out/dying.)
• Another round of base-building, y'all. Honestly, I doubt I'll even follow a real schedule; my only goal is to log a metric butt load of really slow, easy miles.

Apologies if you've read the aerobic base training schpiel before, but ever since I spent fall 2014 & spring 2015 doing almost nothing but running lots of easy miles and collecting data on it, I'm a believer. I mean, I understood the principle in theory, but it's a whole other thing (for me, at least) to use my own body as a guinea pig & watch the hard evidence pile up.

Basically, when it comes to distance running (or any endurance sport), your body works like a combustion engine, and the two things that determine how fast you'll be are 1) power and 2) efficiency.

(Okay fine, there's also a third thing, but it doesn't really fit into the engine metaphor, so I'm leaving it out for now.)

Power is about how quickly the engine can process fuel. A car with a big 5 liter engine will be more powerful than a similar-sized car with a small 2 liter engine, because when you hit the accelerator, it can combust over twice as much fuel in the same amount of time. In endurance sports, the "size of your engine" is your VO₂max. If you have a big engine, your body is able to burn a high volume (that's the V) of oxygen (that's the O₂) very quickly. (The "max" just refers to whatever that fastest rate your body is capable of at all-out effort, which is how it's measured.) The most effective way to increase the size of your engine/VO₂ max is through speed work.

Efficiency is about how much forward motion you get out of each bit of fuel. A sedan that gets 30 miles to the gallon is obviously more fuel efficient than an SUV that gets 15. In endurance running, this is called running economy--how much of the oxygen that you burn gets converted into forward motion. If you can go very far on a little oxygen, you are obviously more "fuel efficient" than someone who can't go very far on that same amount of oxygen, or who needs to burn more oxygen to go the same distance. The most effective way to increase your fuel efficiency/running economy is through lots and lots of easy running (aerobic base training).

Now obviously the fastest people are both very efficient AND have big engines. And when you're actively training for something, you need a healthy mix of easy miles as well as faster running. But, a very very (very) common problem among semi-serious recreational runners is focusing too much on speed work & growing that giant-ass engine and ignoring its efficiency. Which, as I understand the science, is a great way to not make much progress in the long term.

So yeah. In fall 2014/spring 2015 I decided to bite the bullet & do almost nothing but base train. It had been a very long time since I'd devoted any real attention to it, and because I was sure it would be the most boring six months imaginable I decided to collect some data and see if I could actually detect changes in my running economy.

You can read about my methodology here, but these were my results from September 2014 (when I was already in what I considered pretty decent marathon shape) through February 2015:

(r²=.39 for all you stats nerds out there, i.e., damn significant.)

The vertical units are "miles per heartbeat," ie, higher = more efficient/better running economy. Weeks and weeks of nothing but slow, easy running may not sound sexy, but it effing works.

Sadly, in February 2015 I left my HRM charger in a hotel room in San Diego and they never found it. BUT! In January of this year I ponied up for a Forerunner 235, which has a heart rate monitor built in. The upside is that that means I get heart rate data automatically every time I run with my watch with zero effort. The downside is that apparently sometime after March 13 my watch deleted all its data and that was the last day I'd synced with Garmin Connect.

ANYHOO, I was curious to see just how poorly my current running economy compared to that little experiment in 2014/2015, so I added the data to the same graph:

Side-by-side:

When we do graphs in math we ask kids to make "summary statements," ie, what conclusions can you draw by looking at the graph. My summary statements for the right-hand (Jan-Mar 2016) graph are:

• Probably this is not enough points to draw meaningful conclusions from. (We have formulas for this in statistics & I did not do them, but r²=.02, ie probably not very significant.) That said...
• I maybe wasn't starting from *quite* as bad a place efficiency wise this January as I was in Aug/Sept 2014.
• Kinda-sorta marathon training these past months might have improved my running economy by a tiny amount.
• I'm *maybe* kind of in the neighborhood of where I was in say October 2014.

So. Now that I've got a working HRM again, I'm planning to kind of run the same experiment this summer--collecting data & seeing what happens.

(Gotta stave off the boredom somehow, eh?)

STAY TUNED FOR RIVETING UPDATES!!!!

Hey, look what came in the mail!

This is the series (is it a series if it's only two races?) medal we were supposed to get for running both the Foster City 10-Miler & Sunnyvale 10-Miler that I was unable to find out anything about after the Sunnyvale race. It actually exists!

Also this, about which I had no idea:

It's always nice to feel appreciated!

Finally, the package also included a finisher shirt for each race, both of which I already have in one size smaller.

Your guess is as good as mine on that one. Maybe they had leftovers & it was cheaper than more traditional packing material.

Dreams really do come true, yo.

A Long Time Ago, In A Town (not that) Far Away...

...I ran this half marathon.

The year was 2008. I was 27, had just finished my third year of teaching, and in the last six months or so, finally acknowledged that I desperately wanted to get back into running.

Since starting grad school in 2004, I had given it up almost completely because of time, getting in *maybe* 3-5 miles once or twice a week (and sometimes less). After I graduated and started teaching, I joined a local running group on the Peninsula where I lived, and for a little while managed to run maybe 3 miles once or twice during the week and 5-6 on Saturdays.

The exact trail in Redwood Shores/Foster City I used to run with them.

"Do you run a lot of races?" I remember some of them asking me.

"Oh, no, I'm not THAT kind of runner," I remember saying.

A woman in the group had recently qualified for the Boston Marathon, which was big news as no one else in the group ever had. I remember some of them describing to me what it's like to train for and run a full marathon and being absolutely horrified and quietly wondering to myself what was wrong with these people.

"I just like to run a few easy miles now and then to keep in shape," I assured them, silently adding in my head, like a normal person.

"I really like having a race to train for," said someone. "It keeps me motivated and gives me some accountability. You should do a race sometime!"

"Oh, I really don't think that sounds like the kind of thing I would be into," I said, a little worried that someone might try to press-gang me into this appalling business. "At all."

They shrugged. "Suit yourself."

I used to do long runs like that, 10 and 15 miles, but never with a watch. And never for any real reason other than maintaining some kind of basic cardiovascular fitness. And certainly not because I was trying to participate in some kind of miserable race.

The Dish at Stanford, where those sorts of things used to happen.

Eventually, though, I had to admit that I didn't have the bandwidth for being a first-year teacher and karate and polo and running, and since running was the most pedestrian, the most unpleasant, and the least social, that's what drew the short straw. Sure, every now and then I'd go jog a few miles in the canyon behind my apartment, but that was about it.

Toward the end of 2007, I started to miss it.

I was still doing karate but polo had gotten more and more difficult to get out to, and with a few years of teaching now under my belt, work was no longer sucking up quite so much of my nights and weekends. So, I decided I would try to start running again, consistently.

And wow, did it suck. Also, I realized how terrible I was about consistency. (I still didn't have THAT much free time, and when I did, MAN, chilling on the coach felt WAY more appealing than lacing up my running shoes.)

Somewhere deep in my brain, a vague memory echoed. "I really like having a race to train for. It keeps me motivated and gives me some accountability."

"You should do a race sometime."

The idea was at once thrilling and terrifying. I had not the first clue how one found these races, how often or where they happened, or how they worked. Did you just show up and be like, "Hi, I'd like to run in this race," and give them your money?

Thankfully, there was the internet, and Google, and the Dolphin South End Runners and their $5 5K on Sawyer Camp Trail ten minutes from my house. I signed up on the internet and hoped that day in January circled on the calendar would keep me motivated to run consistently through the fall. (And by consistently, I mean three to four miles every other day or so. Which...kind of happened.)

Oh, friends, I went into that race so under-prepared. I knew nothing about distance training or pacing or tapering or any of that. The last race I'd run had probably been an 800m or 1600m on the track, and since I didn't have anything else to go on, I warmed up the same way I used to for those races, lined up at the back (having no sense at all of how I would compare to the rest of the field but preparing myself for the worst), and gave that little race everything I had.

Oh my lord this result is still on their website.

Having never been a distance runner, the time meant nothing to me, but I was pretty psyched, actually, to come in 6th out of the entire field of women. The fact that there were awards for the top 5 re-awakened my competitive streak vis-à-vis running, and suddenly I found myself thinking, "I bet I could shave 9 seconds off of that. I bet I could beat at least a couple of those girls if I tried again."

But then life happened and work happened and I fell back into my habit of running, y'know, 3-4 miles once every week or two.

With summer (and therefor more time to train) on the horizon, I went back to the internet again in search of another 5K to kick my butt into gear. Which led to perusing local 10Ks as well, which led me to the website for The Jungle Run in Los Gatos.

They had a 10K and a half marathon, and I kid you not that I had my finger on the trigger for the 10K when I noticed that if you ran the half marathon, they gave you a medal. Now, at this point I am not much of a medal horse (because OMG how many does a person really need just for not getting lost or forgetting to breathe?) but at that point I had not gotten a medal for running since I'd been killing myself on the track some 8-10 years ago.

I hadn't run over 6 miles since college and in all truth getting back to that point seemed only slightly less impossible than my band getting a record deal (did I mention I had a little band back in those days? I did. For about eight months), but dammit did I want that medal. (And, the race was like $40, which I figured was fair for the medal plus a T-shirt.)

Oh, friends. Did I up my running game? Technically, yes. Thanks to good ol' Hal Higdon, I was probably running AT LEAST twice a week by late spring, sometimes three times, and I'd gotten up to running 4-6 miles at a time during the week. The bad news was that I didn't have much time on the weekends for long runs, and when it occurred to me that the race was in three weeks and I had yet to run even 10 miles, I kind of panicked and just went out one day and did it. (I'm pretty sure that almost killed me.)

Anyway, the day came, and I drove to Los Gatos, had a cup of Gatorade 15 minutes before the gun like Bob Glover had said, lined up at the start, and took off with the pack when the gun sounded.

Now, like I said, I had no idea what I was doing. I hadn't trained with any kind of GPS tool and had zero sense of my pace or likely finishing time or any of that. I just figured, "Hey, we're all running this, so I guess I'll just stay with you guys?"

As I recall, within two miles I hated everything about my life and was pretty sure this was the worst mistake I had ever made. But I finished, and even though it was a hot day & the last few miles were pretty rough, I still managed to sprint the finish on the Los Gatos High School track.

2:16:02, baby!

I pretty much couldn't walk the next day, which is what you get for not training for a distance you haven't run in like 6 years.

Maybe it's a little silly but ever since then, I've kind of wanted a re-match with that race (now that I, like, train or whatever). In 4 years I took 38 minutes off my half marathon time, but I still have a fond place in my heart for that first half because that experience (and getting 6th in that DSE 5K) was what got me interested in running more road races and pushing myself to see just how fast I could go.

My first time A/G placing AND going under 1:40 in a half marathon.
Windsor Green Half, May 2012, 1:39:52

Before I try to PR in the marathon at Santa Rosa, I'm taking another shot at the Jungle Run in July, just to relive my past a bit & see what happens. I was kind of assuming the price would have gone up like every other half marathon around here, but when I went to sign up, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the fee was still only like $50. Way to go, Jungle Run!

It's Los Gatos in July so even though it starts at 7am, it can still get warm, so I don't know if it will end up being a GREAT race, but unless I break my leg or something I should at least be able to better my course record a touch.

Besides, there's always that medal...

Local peeps, if you want to join me, you can register with my referral link if you want. (It discounts me like $5 for every person who uses it.) Or not. I did not actually know this was a thing until they sent it to me.