Holiday Running Update! (Kaiser Half Week 8 of 13)

Hello all, I hope the holidays were kind and you are refreshed and reinvigorated and that your new year is off to a solid start. Mine were a bit chaotic and scrambled. Thanks to work stuff, available venues/facilities, and horrific jet lag (if you've never experienced twelve hours of jet lag or "the full jet-lag monty" as I've been calling it, it is, well, really something), I got absolutely zero running accomplished on my trip to Dubai. I pretty reliably adjust to jet lag at the rate of one hour/time zone per day, so I was there pretty much exactly long enough to acclimate and then get back on a plane and do the whole thing over again. (Again, if you've never been jet lagged for twenty-four full days, it is...really an experience. Not one I recommend, but an experience.)

I arrived back home late the night of Dec. 18th, slept like a log thanks to an absolutely hulking thirty-three-hour travel day, had a great six-mile run on the 19th, then promptly came down with some kind of respiratory virus on the 20th (not Covid, thank Jesus for small blessings). 🤦🏻‍♀️ I always wear masks in airports and on transit now, so I'm going to blame my visit to the Burj Khalifa on Sunday the 17th for whatever I caught. (If I'd been thinking I absolutely would have worn a mask given how crowded/close quarters it is, but for whatever reason it just didn't occur to me, so stupid.) 

Honestly, whoever designed the whole plaza area surrounding the Burj really nailed it. You just cannot take a bad picture here no matter how hard you try.

Anyway, this was absolutely fantastic timing as I was getting back on a plane on the 22nd to fly home to Texas for Christmas. (Again: Insane jet lag? Respiratory/sinus infection/**more** air travel?? An experience! That literally everyone should try to avoid!) Long story short, I spent most of that trip including Christmas sick with something and not at all up to running. So, weeks 6 & 7 were pretty much a bust.

But!! I started feeling better after Christmas, and as of Week 8, started to get kiiiinda sorta back on track. Behold:

 ~*~*~ 🎡 🎡 Kaiser Permanente Half Week 8 of 13 🎡 🎡 ~*~*~

Grand Total: 29.5 miles

🐌 Easy: 16 miles
🏃🏻‍♀️ Moderate: 13.5 miles (at least, if we're going by my heart rate for most of it 🤣)

⚖️ Easy miles vs. fast/moderate miles: 54.2% vs. 45.8% (not ideal but I regret nothing)

NOT DEAD YET (Part 3)

Welcome back, friends. If you missed Part 1 & Part 2 of this little update, you might want to take a skim before continuing on. :)

Last we left off, I was dealing with a wild-out-of-left-field knee injury that took me out of running for five weeks, and had started dealing with it via as much elliptical, spin bike, & swimming as I could psychologically stand. (Which was still only a moderate amount, don't @ me.)

SEPTEMBER
Little by little, my knee did start to heal. I was able to run half a mile, then a whole one, then four in a row. I felt like I was walking such a fine line, trying to balance rest days and cross training with ever-so-gradually inching up the mileage to see if I could even get close to 7.5 and have a hope of finishing 12K. On Monday September 11, I ran seven miles; it gave me just the TEENSIEST little twinge in my knee and so I immediately pulled back, & did only cross training until we got to new Jersey that Friday.

Friends, I ran the race! And you know what? While it wasn't fast (of course I knew it couldn't possibly have been fast), I am still actually really proud of the way I ran it, in that I ran totally by feel, without looking at pace. And given how I felt at the end (ie LIKE DEATH), I feel like I actually nailed the effort releative to my current fitness.

Thankfully we had three other masters women running who (again) ran much, MUCH faster than me and brought home another 3rd place National Champs medal for the team. I ran 8.5 miles total for the day (7.5 race + 1 mile warm up) & had not a single peep from my knee at any point. Friends, I will take that!

Bad Puns, Solid Workouts (Victory Half Week 6 of 8)

There are certain running puns that make my eyes roll so far back in my head I'm in danger of losing them. "In the long run." "Back on track." Anything involving the word "half" when you're running/training for a half marathon.

But here I am, about to say that I am {cringes} "back on track" this week after last weekend's minor shit show. And I wasn't going to say it, but then I was going to write something about how it feels getting back on the track again after a hiatus, and {sigh}...

Welp. Here we are. Back on track.😬

Do You Run With Headphones??? (Victory Week 4 of 8)

Spoiler: I do, most of the time. :)

 

Look closely, they're there! 

These days my headphones of choice are Shokz Aeropex (now listed as Shokz OpenRun), which are bone conduction open-ear headphones specifically designed for running. That means that they don't actually go in your ears, which means you can still actually hear everything going on around you while using them. Yes they're a bit pricey, but I got my current pair on a Labor Day sale in 2021, and given that I use them nearly every single day of my life (not only for running but also a lot of times while working, doing errands on foot, or doing chores around the house), that $141.16 (after tax) amortizes to something like 30 cents a day and dropping, which seems like a pretty good deal. (And also people pay $250+ for freaking AirPods???? 😱 JGDFC.)

Declaring Blog Post Draft Bankruptcy

Hello friends! Long time no post!

One of the reasons I stopped blogging in Fall of 2019 was because I was REALLY GOOD at starting new blog posts and also REALLY BAD at finishing them & getting them up. Turns out, the more things change, the more they they stay the same, sigh.

But also a lot has happened since my last post, sooooo in the interest of trying to not completely disappear into the void again, I'm going to try to just post *some* kind of update, even if it is short and incomplete. So here ya go, a lightening recap of the last, oh, six weeks or so:

Training Log: (Super) Dead Super Shoes + Crisis Averted!

Before we get into this week's training log, a moment of silence please for this amazing (in some respects) pair of New Balance RC Elites that I super enjoyed running in for a little over a year. As you can see I really pushed the envelope in this these things but I think April 3's SacTown 10 was destined to be their last hurrah, and we're calling it at a whopping 216.27 miles according to my nerdy little spreadsheet. I am pretty sure when you can actually see and touch the actual carbon plate that you should not be running in a pair of shoes anymore regardless of how much they cost.

These shoes were a pandemic-era Christmas gift from my mom but I am pretty sure they cost $225 which puts us at about $1.04 per mile. I have never calculated this ratio for a running shoe before but once you get up into the > $200 super shoe category, it really just becomes irresistible.

I've had opportunities this last year to run in a few different carbon plate distance shoes (not the Nike ones, I absolutely refuse on principle) and I have a lot to say about them, so look for a future blog post going into more detail. But for now, just know that I loved these shoes *so much* in terms of feel and performance but was also super bummed at how non-durable they turned out to be (lesson learned).

ANYHOO, let us move on to this week's training log.

Training Log: 3 Weeks to ORF 10K (or half marathon??? )

Hello friends! I'm super excited to be connected back with the coach I was working with last year, now that I seem to have the injury-and-utter-exhaustion gremlins back under control. I actually renewed my subscription earlier in February but apparently it didn't process until the 26th, so I went old school for a few weeks & cobbled together a few weeks of training on my own.

My approach was basically to look back at the last time I ran a decent 10K on mostly easy mileage & just a few workouts (it was Race to the End of Summer, Fall 2016, WOW) & see what I did then. I had a bit more mileage under the belt at that point but not WAY less, so I figured using that workout schedule was probably at least a good starting point while I waited for Coach A to build me a proper training plan.

(In other news: For dumb reasons, it's not actually clear whether I'll be running the 10K or half marathon on 3/20, and I'm kind of fine with that?? Like the training isn't meaningfully different, especially when you've only got 4 weeks?? Oh well! 🤷🏻‍♀️)

This week was a little unorthodox since we spent the weekend skiing in Tahoe, but I still managed to get some quality training in.

Announcing: Goals, MF

It always feels a bit scary to put a goal out there when you are still in the midst of a comeback and not entire sure it's going to take, but what is the point of having a blog (er, sort of?) if you aren't going to share what you're doing and what's on your mind.

So, what is on my mind, you might ask? Nothing earth-shattering; just the Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon, one of the big local SF races that takes place every Superbowl Sunday (Sunday, February 6 this year).

KP was my second-ever half-marathon & typically features a half marathon, 10K, and 5K. I've run all three distances at least once at one time or another, but for the last few years I've most often signed up for the 10K because "I won't be ready to run a half yet," or signed up for the half and then dropped down to the 10K a few days or weeks out because "I'm not ready to run a half yet."

And by "I'm not ready to run a half yet," what I meant was "I'm not ready to run a half in a time I find acceptable," where "acceptable" was probably somewhere in the 1:37-1:43 range. I've never had much interest in running races at an easy pace just to finish, except in situations where I thought it would be helpful to do a supported long run or long tempo workout. Plus, if you looked at a heat map of my long runs, you'd see probably 90% overlap with the KP half marathon course, and paying money to run a casual long run on the same route I'd probably run anyway just felt kind of....not worth it.

The last fast half marathon, 1:41:07 - October 2017. A wonderful day that I did not appreciate nearly enough at the time.

LOOK I'M TRYING OK?

OK, so. Attempting to revive the blog is definitely reminding me of some of the reasons why I gave up a couple years ago! I've probably started five or six posts since the last one, but I have so little time for it that by the time I next sit down to write, my most recent draft feels woefully outdated. Then there is the fact that we went on A FOR-REAL, ACTUAL VACATION for these last three weeks, so obviously there wasn't much happening in the way of running or blogging. We actually booked this vacation two years ago, before it was rescheduled twice. Things were not looking good in Portugal in the spring, but then by late summer the Portuguese government managed to work some kind of miracle, and by the time we left for our trip the country was ~90% vaccinated.

[Related: AMA regarding international travel in These Unprecedented Times^TM.]

Sunset in Sintra, Portugal

Last Workout Before Statuto Race + Race Preview!

Last night was my last workout before Sunday's Statuto Race on the Embarcadero, an 8K put on by the SF Italian Athletic Club going back nearly 100 years. (The first running was 1919, but there was one year during World War II that it wasn't run.) I have never run an 8K, but something small and cheap and right in town in the 5-10K range seemed like a nice summer racing kickoff. It's new distance for me but one I'm kind of excited about, and I can't deny feeling just a bit giddy to race again as I put this last workout away.

The workout was nothing fancy, just some mile repeats at race-ish pace. RunCoach is predicting a 35:06 / 7:03 pace finish for me, but I think I can do a little better than that. Originally, I'd planned to run this race as more of a workout than an all-out race, but after a pretty decent month of training, I decided, what the hell. Let's just race and see how my fitness is. My target race (Wharf to Wharf 6-miler) is still nearly two months out, so there's no risk of blowing that race, and nothing else between now and then that I care all that much about. Also if you're going to get a shiny new automatic PR, why not make it a good one, amirite?

8K is 4.97 miles, close to halfway between 5K & 10K, which is sort of interesting in terms of trying to come up with a goal time/pace. Back in December I ran a strong-for-me 5K at 6:51 pace, even though I had not been training that much or that seriously, but it's been a very, very long time since I ran a fair 10K course in good shape. (I ran Shamrock Shuffle 10K in March in 43:05, though I think we can all agree that that course was closer to 6 miles than 10K, so maybe ~7:10-11 pace.) I think it's going to be a bit of a guess no matter what, but since my training for the last month has been going well, I don't think it's unreasonable to shoot for 7:00 pace for five miles, which gives a nice round 35:00 total.

Tonight's workout was 4 mile repeats this time with 90 second jog recoveries, so I basically went into it viewing it as a sort of 8K race simulator (just 4.36 miles instead of 5--4 hard miles plus the recovery intervals). Since I'm shooting for 7:00 miles on Sunday so I tried to stay pretty comfortably in that wheelhouse, with interval times of 7:01, 7:01, 7:00, and 6:57. I think that's the fastest set of mile repeats I've ever done, so I just hope I didn't push it too hard & am able to recover well enough by Sunday!

6 x mile @ 10K pace

Tuesday's track workout: 2 warm up, 6 x mile @ 10K pace (7:09) / 1:30 jog, 1.5 cool down

Guys, two things. 1) I was absolutely quaking in my boots about this workout for DAYS beforehand. I literally cannot remember the last time I did SIX mile repeats (possibly, never), and 2) I do not not NOT believe that 7:09 is my current 10K pace, even fresh & tapered. At first when I saw this workout, I was like, "RunCoach, you are smokin' some crack."

But then I put my recent 5K time into a (non-RunCoach) race pace predictor and guess what:

Ugh, fine, whatever.

Race Report: Race to the End of Summer 10K 2018

And #fallspeedfest2018 is off and running!

Race to the End of Summer was my first race since Big Sur Marathon over 4 months ago and it felt good to pin on a bib. I'd run this race twice before, in both 2016 and 2017; it's a solid local event, small and low-key but well organized, so it had been on my calendar since last year. I ran it in 2016 as my first tune up for CIM & shocked myself by running just 17 seconds off my PR & snagging 2nd overall & 1st in my age group (it's a small race) after just a few weeks of training (mostly lots of easy jogging) & only three speed workouts. Then last year (during the Bay Area's record-setting heatwave, after two days of moving & a night of basically no sleep) I completely fell apart & ran by far the worst 10K of my life. Clearly I had unfinished business with this race!

This year, as in 2016, I was only a few weeks back into running, almost all slow easy miles, & just three workouts (& oh yeah those eight weeks I took completely off from running after Boston 2 Big Sur). In a way, this took some of the pressure off--this was just my first race of an 18 week #fallspeedfest season, so all I really wanted to do was go in as fresh as possible, run hard, and not wimp out in order to get a baseline for the rest of the fall.

Back to Micro-Blogging...

Hello friends!

Lately I've been starting blog posts and never finding time to finish them. Hopefully I *will* at some point, but in the mean time, just a quick update so that you don't think I've died.

• Running! A thing I am doing! After eight weeks completely off after Boston 2 Big Sur, I'm now wrapping up my 4th week of getting back to running. It's all easy miles right now, with 12.5 miles the first week, 22 miles in week 2, 34 in week 3, and now 40 miles this past week.

  I'm doing my best to stick to my tried-&-true base training protocol, ie, all easy miles & keeping my heart rate between 140 & 150 bpm (which sometimes means walking!). I had sort of assumed that when I ran the numbers (because, data nerd) that two months off would probably result in being in worse shape than at the beginning of previous cycles when I haven't had so much (or any) time off, but this first month of runs has looked pretty similar to previous cycles, so perhaps this is just where I bottom out.

Race Report: Big Sur Marathon

I'm planning to write a separate post specifically about the Boston 2 Big Sur Challenge, but I figured I'd give Big Sur its due & write a proper race report just about that race first. :)

Friends, I must say that post-Boston marathon, I was in rough shape. If you've been playing along at home for a while now, you might recall that part of the reason my Boston training cycle sucked so badly was getting injured badly enough to miss a week of training on three separate occasions, not to mention all kinds of little yellow flags & micro injuries that made it difficult to ever really build up much fitness at a stretch.

I'm pretty sure I know most of the reasons for this (which maybe I'll write more about in a future post), but just suffice it to say that I knew going into that race that I was very, very far from top form and was lucky to even make it to the start. The upside of this is that I wasn't able to run hard enough to be sore after, but I definitely did have a number of body parts screaming at me to DAMMIT WILL YOU PLEASE JUST STOP WITH THIS NONSENSE ALREADY! In all honestly, if it wasn't Boston & I didn't have so many sunk costs already, I probably would have said "Eh, screw it" & stayed in bed.

SJRNRHM Week 6 of 14: Drama-Free Training

I'm sure you've all seen this meme floating around:

Now I am under no illusions that I'm one of the truly fast kids, but I generally finish in the top 5-20% when I race and have podiumed my share of small local races here & there, & that sometimes seems to give some people the idea that I feel like the lady in the top picture when I'm running.

I find this hilarious. Like. I've been long-distance running since the mid-90s and I can count on maybe two hands all the times when I've felt like the lady in the top picture. On a good day I feel a lot like the kid in the bottom pic; on the tougher days, I feel maybe a little more like this:

And you know what? I'm really 100% fine with that. Not feeling fresh and peppy every day is the reality of cumulative fatigue and actually training hard enough, in terms of quality and/or volume, to improve. Honestly, if I started to feel like the lady in the top picture too often, I'd assume I wasn't training enough & needed to step it up.

I definitely went through a phase (around the time I started doing races more frequently and actually making an effort to get faster, ca. 2008-2011ish) of feeling like the lady in the top photo is what it should feel like, at least once you're in decent shape. The running blog world of that time did not help matters, with all its #blessed this and #humbled that and post-workout pictures featuring peppy smiles and perfect makeup and nary a hair out of place.

Seriously, I could not figure it out. People seemed absolutely brimming with joy and bursting at the seams with #gratitude after every [flawlessly instagrammed] run. This was before it was trendy to #keepitreal, and I remember wondering as I perused the internet if I was doing this training thing wrong somehow because where were all the posts about "Eh, today was a run" or "8 easy miles, fine" or even "Ugh, tired today, really wanted a nap instead."

As it turns out, those make for less heart-able Instagram posts.

At this point I feel pretty comfortable in my own running skin. I know I don't look like a lady in a Nike ad, even on my best days, and I don't expect to feel like one either. My bar for what counts as a "good" run is a lot lower. (Did it get done? Am I not injured? #winning) I've embraced my slow, comfy 10-10:30 easy pace, even though most of the time it feels more like a shuffle than really running (because guess what, results, bitches). These days, for the most part, the thick of training for a goal race feels neither fantastic or awful. It just kind of...is.

I was reading on some coach's blog or newsletter recently (though I can't find it now) about how that's how he knows an athlete's training is going well. Their training log notes aren't filled with breathless raves about how magical a run felt or how #blessed they, nor with angsty rants about how terrible it was; for the most part it's just full of miles and ticked-off workouts and quick notes about how most runs were just kind of fine.

He referred to this steady, unremarkable, sometimes boring ticking off of workouts as drama-free training, which I immediately wanted emblazoned on a T-shirt, because yes! More of that! I don't need scads of effortless tempos that feel like I'm flying or spiritually fulfilling, life-changing runs that I can plaster all over Instagram. All I need is the work, mostly slow and steady, plugging away, unceremoniously depositing workouts into the First Bank of Training, one mile at a time. I don't need to feel like the Nike ad. I just need to get it done.

* * * Rock 'N Roll San Jose Half: Week 6 of 14 * * *

Evolution of a Distance Runner: Systems & Process Goals

I wrote a few weeks back about how I'm not really hitching myself to a particular time goal in this race. I've done that lots of times in the past because it's a very bloggerly thing to do ("My A/B/C/D goals for xx race next week are this/that/the other thing!") and because if you're not setting goals how will you ever make any progress ("goals are dreams with deadlines" or some such). Regardless of whether I achieved the goal or not, though, something about defining things that way always felt kind of...off.

There could be a lot of reasons for that. This research, for example, that found that stating a goal publicly can actually make you less likely to achieve it, because "announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed." And if you set a goal and then don't achieve it, how do you understand that? Or this bit from Scott Adams' Secret of Success: Failure:

"If your goal is to [accomplish x], you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize that you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure."

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!!!!

EUGENE WEEK 8 OF 17: My Goals for the Eugene Marathon

I'm still over two months out from the Eugene Marathon, but that's close enough to start thinking about my goals.

Obviously I'm still in the process of ramping up mileage, which pretty much by definition means mileage is not *currently* ramped up, which, combined with the fact that I did almost zero running between August and January, means I can't reasonably expect to have anywhere near a PR race.

BUT! I am trying really hard not to let that push me into the "Eh, just run to finish & do whatever" zone. I did that at NVM last year and I think it was something I needed to do at the time, but it's not what I want to do this year at Eugene.

Instead, I am trying hard to do a mental thing I am really terrible at, which is 1) admitting to myself that my absolute best possible perfect-day performance is going to be significantly slower than I'd like, and 2) committing to going after whatever that best possible time is anyway. I want to race hard and run as fast as I possibly can, knowing that "as fast as I possibly can" is going to feel disappointingly slow.

Eesh. You guys. Super hard for me.

EUGENE WEEKS 6 & 7 OF 17: a race, a climb, & some lovely beach art

I feel like all my time these last couple of weeks somehow got sucked into a black hole. I swear I've been, like, running and doing stuff! You can tell because I typed it on the internet in neat little bullet points or whatever, which is basically the most accountable thing a human can possibly do.

In other news, it is my 35th birthday & I am spending it in a hotel room in LA for work.

So excited I can hardly stand it.

~*~*~EUGENE MARATHON WEEK 6 OF 17~*~*~

Things went well! It was a good week! Accomplishments were accomplished!

Some Numbers:

* 26 miles
* 2:00:00 strength work
* 50:00 stretch & roll

Monday: a.m. strength work / p.m. karate

Tuesday: 1.5 warm up, 2x1600m @ 7:10ish, 2x800m @ 6:45ish, 1.5 cool down = 6.5 total, 20:00 stretch/roll. First track workout in months, and it was glorious. :)

Wednesday: a.m. strength work / afternoon 4 easy / p.m. karate. Skipped leg work since I was racing Saturday but did everything else.

Thursday: 6 easy. Felt a bit tired on this run & wondered if it was Tuesday catching up to me.

Friday: 2 easy. Since I was racing the next day I opted for extra sleep instead of strength work.

Saturday: 1.5 warm up, 6.2 RACE!! (+ 30:00 stretch/roll)

Notice how I am, like, actually running a race
and not sitting around injured. #winning #okayiwasthird #still

You can read my grumbly race report if you want, but one of my big takeaways was that I felt for most of the race like I was red-lining and running really hard for most of the race, but I realized as I got closer to the end that it was just my out-of-racing-practice coward brain playing tricks on me and in reality I had definitely not run as hard as I could have. Seriously, five minutes post-race I felt completely fine. It was a really weird feeling.

Sunday: GO ROCK CLIMBING!! Isn't that what you do the day after you race?

In case you needed more evidence that I definitely did not wear myself out at Bay Breeze, I finally conquered a 5.10a, which I've been working on since December.

~*~*~EUGENE MARATHON WEEK 7 OF 17~*~*~

The big story this past week was my long run. My schedule called for 160 minutes, but a 60% increase over the 100 minutes from a couple weeks back seemed like a bad idea, so I capped it at 140 for a grand total of 14.3 miles.

This was one of those days that just never happens for me when it comes to long runs. I felt like I could run and run and run and, although my right hip still felt a little tight (and probably always will), it felt not effortless but still really good. 14.3 felt great and if I were really stupid I could have gone further.

Out and back to Cliff House, which affords gorgeous views of Ocean Beach.

Also, just total mileage in general. For some reason mentally I was feeling like I didn't run all that much last week, but apparently it was 30 miles, which is another post-injury weekly mileage record and also quietly inching backs towards something that feels like normalcy.

Some Numbers:

* 30 miles
* 2:00:00 strength work
* 20:00 stretch & roll

Monday: Karate. Honestly, I could have run Monday & been 100% fine. Actually I probably could have run Sunday. My body just honestly did not feel like it ran a race on Saturday.

Tuesday: 8 easy. My longest week-day run post injury, and faster & easier than usual. Yeah; totally did not race as hard as I could have on Saturday. Bah.

Wednesday: Afternoon 1 to gym, strength work, 1 home / p.m. karate. Super early work meeting so strength work got shifted to after work.

Thursday: Nothing. This day was 100% packed start to finish and I knew going in that I wasn't going to get any running in.

Friday: a.m. strength work / 6 easy. I'd planned for 8 again but got caught short on time.

Saturday: Rest.

Sunday: 14 long + 20:00 stretch/roll

Less than a month to go until Oakland Running Festival & my first start in the 35-39 age bracket!!!

Still alive, mostly functional!

So, sorry if you've been refreshing this page over & over since last Friday, waiting with bated breath for a new post; it's just been a lot of drama & moodiness up in here, and no one wants a tortured, real-time play-by-play of all the ups & downs of someone else's personal drama unless the person in question is your BFF or significant other (and, let's be honest, maybe not even then). So, maybe a weekly digest of ups & downs is a little more bearable? I will try not to be too much of a drama queen.

Soup. Which I have been eating a lot of, since
I've been sick for nearly a week. BOOOO.

So I signed up for CIM at the end of August & entered the race into my RunCoach calendar, meaning I have an official training plan now (UP!). But, since my busted leg made it impossible for me to actually follow it yet, I've been doing as many of the workouts as I can manage on the elliptical at the gym by my office (DOWN). The only issues with this are that 1) I can usually only eke out an hour on the thing and 2) I'm obviously not driving to work on the weekends, so no long runs are happening right now. (Also, let's be honest; I'm not sure I could handle more than an hour on the elliptical anyway.)

Once I'd been pain-free for a week, I also started to add in little bits of running, usually around half an hour every other day or so of walk-run intervals (UP!). This was going great up until the Sunday before we left, when, the day after running, I was in a rush to get to a local store before it closed & decided to jog it. Bad idea. My left tibia started screaming at me, and I kind of limped home a little (DOWN).

At the beginning of said hike. (Read: Another excuse to post Oregon pictures.)

FINE, I thought. We were about to go on vacation anyway (UP!), where I did not intend to run at all, so for the next three days I went back to elliptical only (DOWN) & figured that that plus a solid week off should be enough to placate my whiny bone cells. Vacation was pain free (UP!), up until the second-to-last day, when Don & I, starving and ready for beer, decided to jog the last part of the trail we'd been hiking. This was fine for about five minutes and then my leg informed me that it was suddenly very NOT fine and we walked the rest (DOWN). To be fair, though, this was after six hours of hiking/climbing that day and about three hours the day before, all with no ill effects. So it may just have been too much time on my feet overall.

That was September 8th, & it hasn't hurt since (UP!). I did ~35 minutes of walk/run intervals the Saturday after we got back just to see how it felt, but since then have been sticking to the elliptical to be safe. The spot on my leg has gone from feeling like a large, swollen bruise early in September to now feeling like a very tiny bruise that's just a bit swollen, so that's progress (UP!). Still, I'd been hoping I'd be up to a 10K this Sunday, which is clearly not going to happen (DOWN). Which is just as well, since I've been sick the last few days (DOWN).

All this has made me start to feel a little antsy about CIM, seeing as that it's only 11 weeks away (which feels unsettlingly soon) and I have yet to run for even 30 minutes without walk breaks (DOWN). (I mean, I probably could. I just haven't because I'm afraid I'll wake up with pain the next day.) And also anxious because, although I can mostly do my speed/tempo & shorter runs on the elliptical as I gradually add running back in, long runs don't seem like something that's going to be happening any time soon (DOWN).

As I've said before, I think there are lots of good reasons to pay some amount of money for some amount of coaching if it's something you can do and are interested in, and one of the reasons why I think it's a good idea for me is because in situations like this, I will work myself up into a frantic mess worrying and end up scouring the internet for advice, which will inevitably all conflict. So at times like these, it's worth every penny of the $40 a month I pay to RunCoach to have pros just an email away (who, at this point, know my history fairly well & have access to three years of workout logs).

Coach Ashley was good enough to remind me that I wasn't starting a new marathon cycle from scratch and that I have a really solid foundation still from the training I did this summer, even with a few weeks of rest/elliptical only/no long runs. So I can't really think about building up to this race the way same way I would ordinarily. She said the elliptical work I've been doing so far is fine, and as long as I have 8-9 weeks of long runs to "re-sharpen", I should be in a good place for CIM. (Also not to worry about long runs at all until I can run 45 minutes with no walk breaks.)

So, that was a huge relief. Part of me was expecting them to be like, "Eek, we didn't realize it was this bad, you should probably just hope for a half in December & target NVM again in the spring." I'm going to try another ~30 minutes of walk/running on Saturday, & if all goes well, attempt to drop back into that progression while continuing the elliptical work. Hopefully within a couple of weeks I'll hit that 45 minute mark!