Race Report: Oakland Twilight 5000m 2024

Why did I sign up to run this race? 

No joke, I have been trying to get a track race in since 2017! I tried twice that summer to run a track 5K and both times had to pull up short with a sudden calf strain. Since then I'd mostly been focused on other things, but a few years back, Tracksmith started their Twilight 5000 summer series, in which the company hosts a series of multi-heat 5000m track races around the country. When you sign up, you enter an estimated finish time, and then based on those times, they organize everyone into heats of ~40 people or so. (Estimated finish times range from 45:00 to sub-15:00 and there's also a kids' 500m heat, so definitely a heat for juuuuust about everyone who cares to run.)

Last year (2023), I signed up to run the San Francisco edition, but then--no joke--strained a calf muscle during a track workout a week before. 🤬 It had improved somewhat by race day but not even close enough to consider racing, so instead I cheered on my teammates and took photos. Having missed out, this year I signed up (as did many others) for both the Oakland and San Francisco iterations.

A couple of shots from SF Twilight 2023 last July

And then what happened?

NOT DEAD YET (Part 2)

Heyyyyy you came back! Always a good sign.

If you missed Part 1 of this little update, you can find it here.

Onward, shall we?

JUNE, CONT'D
When we left off, I had just run one of my slowest 5Ks ever despite not terrible training. The next race on my docket was Tracksmith Twilight 5000m on the track at Kezar Stadium on July 19th. We had a vacation scheduled for early July, so I thought, "Maybe Stow Lake was just a bad day, let me get a bit of rest and some solid speed workouts in, and then I'll run one more 5K before we leave & see where I'm at." I picked the Stars & Strides 5K in San Jose since it was July 1st & we were leaving the next day. 

Not much else of note happened in June, BUT I did make this delicious cherry clafoutis!

Mental Health Talk: Less Thinking, More Running (1 Week to Stow Lake 5K)

Someone created this to help kids handle their anxious feelings better but spoiler, it's occasionally useful for certain 41-year-olds as well

***CONTENT WARNING***, mental health talk ahead.

So, some years ago I started getting treatment for anxiety, not like horrific life-altering can't-function-in-the-world-on-a-daily-basis anxiety but a kind of constant, low-grade-but-sometimes-*less*-low-grade anxiety that, when I stopped to think about it, I had really suffered from for basically my entire teenage & adult life.

There were some ways in which it manifested in running, mostly around perfectionism and catastrophizing about races and psyching myself out, then super beating myself up if things didn't go at least acceptably okay. (Not productive, do not recommend.)

And then there was a period of time (~2017ish to ~2019sih?) where I started to have some weird issues every time I'd go to the track, which historically had always been my favorite workout of the week. I was telling my therapist about this once incidentally, how sometimes I would be warming up and not even doing anything hard yet and my heart rate would shoot up really high and I'd have this ringing in my ears and a sensation like ice water running through my veins, and my hands would shake a little and suddenly I'd feel lightheaded and have a hard time catching my breath. Weird, huh? So yeah, anyway!

And my therapist was like, "Uhhhh back up there chief, do you think maybe you were maybe having a little panic attack?"

And I just scoffed like, "What? Now that is ridiculous. Of course I wasn't having a panic attack. I think I'd know if I was having a panic attack."

And she was like, "Uhhhhh are you sure about that because I am a therapist whose job it is to know these things and tbh it kind of sounds like a little mini panic attack."

And I was like, "Madam. Please. WHY on EARTH would I be having a PANIC ATTACK before my track workout?"

And she was like, "EXCELLENT QUESTION MY FRIEND, PERHAPS YOU WOULD LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IT, PERHAPS TO SOMEONE LIKE I DUNNO ME, UR LITERAL THEREAPIST????"

Training Log: 4 Weeks to ORF 10K & uhhhh doing nothing has made me faster???

Remember weekly training logs? I am bringing them back. Honestly when I started blogging lo these many years ago, I never could have anticipated how useful it is to be able to look up EXACTLY what you did during a particular stretch of training and EXACTLY how you felt about it at the time. Strava is great & all but if there is one thing I have learned by now it's that splits never tell the whole story.

With four weeks to go until the 10K, it seemed like a good time to at least start doing some kind of speed work. Now, if you don't remember, I was really, REALLY struggling with speed work last summer and fall, both from a staying-healthy standpoint and also just a getting-faster-and-feeling-not-like-ass-everyday standpoint. On 9/23, two days before Wharf-to-Wharf three miler, I pulled my hamstring at the track running 200m's after months of that hip joint feeling off and doing a ton of strength and PT work that just didn't seem to be helping. Things have really been going much, MUCH better after taking 3.5 months almost completely off, but I was still feeling a bit nervous about going to the track for the first time since pulling that hamstring.

Oh and did I mention I pulled that hamstring on 200m rep #6 of 12? And this past Tuesday's workout was 8 x 200m? I did! And it was! I could tell you I wasn't perseverating on this a little as I jogged to the track but that would be a big, fat lie.

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!

One More Gear

It's cut back week over here, so today's track workout was a luxurious six miles, just a handful of 400m's at increasingly faster paces to work on turnover and I guess the neuromuscular stuff:

1.5 warm up

2 x 400m @ 10K pace / 1:00 jog
400m jog
2 x 400m @ 5K pace / 1:00 jog
400m jog
2 x 400m @ 3K pace / 1:00 jog
400m jog
2 x 400m @ mile race pace

1.5 cool down

Really, not bad at all. A quarter mile at 5 or 10K pace is not a big deal. 3K pace is pretty fast but still shouldn't be TOO awful for just a 400m. But man, I'd be lying if part of me wasn't a *little* nervous about those last two 400ms.

I haven't raced a mile all-out since high school but, extrapolating a bit, my (very) theoretical mile race pace is probably somewhere in 6:10ish range. AKA, a pace I haven't seen in my workouts in quite a while. Every now and then 300m repeats show up at 6:11-6:14ish, and on a good day my 200m repeats are usually in the low 0:40s / ~5:30ish pace, but what I'm saying is IT'S BEEN A WHILE and I was curious what it would feel like (if it were even possible).

I became even more curious when I found myself struggling more than I would have expected to run even a 400m at 10K pace. I mean, like, I could do it, but part of me was definitely going, "Wow, I feel like this should be easy and it is definitely kind of work, I am so confused." I also kind of felt like I wasn't even sure I could run any faster than 10K pace that day for whatever reason, but hey, I was there to try, so.

And, funny thing, if this workout had a theme, that theme was called, "Surprise! You always have just one more gear." After the two 10K pace laps (7:01 & 7:03 pace, OK FINE NOT 10K PACE), I hit the 5K pace laps just fine (6:50 & 6:45 pace) but definitely was thinking "Well, that's it; no way I can run any faster than that." Yet a 400m jog later, I hit those two laps at 6:31 & 6:28 pace. "OK fine, but that was *definitely* the top speed I'm capable of today," I thought, before running the last two at 6:10 and 6:02 (!) pace.

Honestly, at the beginning I was thinking that if somehow magic happened, *maybe* I'd eek out a couple of 6:15 pace laps.

So, yeah. Apparently there's always one more gear, so don't count yourself out til you're out.

"What just happened. You know what, who even cares, someone just get me some better sunglasses."

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.

Fall Speedfest, Week 1 of 18: Let the Fall Season Commence!

Well, I went back to the track for the first time in four months this evening, so I suppose that means my fall season is underway!

Michigan.

This past Monday I logged into my RunCoach account to find this waiting for me:

My RunCoach speed workouts for the most part are usually pretty simple, x number of x00 meters @ x:xx pace with x:xx jogs, or sometimes two of those with 30-40 minutes at marathon pace sandwiched in between. In any case, pretty easy to glance at, quickly commit to memory, & execute without too much thought. We don't tend to do "ladders" or "pyramids" other fanciness very often, so this one threw me off a bit.

Race Report: Tamalpa Runners Track Meet 5K

BACKGROUND:

To summarize some semi-relevant stuff I've posted in the past, I've only really ever run one 5K in my adult life where I was healthy and in good shape & training kinda-sorta heavily (to the extent that I ever train "heavily"), which is where I set my current PR (20:44/6:40 pace) in May 2012. It was so much faster than nearly every other 5K I've ever run that after a while it didn't really feel real, like "WHO ME RUN MULTIPLE 6:40 MILES IN A ROW? Phhhbbbt, that's not a thing that actually happened." Well, after massively PRing the marathon in December, I figured, what the hey? Let's take a crack at thing and see just how sturdy that dusty old PR is.

So, I registered for PrideMeet on June 17. (ProTip: If you want to run a fast, accurate 5K, do it on the track. Just don't weave too much.) I was in 60/40 not bad shape going into it in early May, then spent about 6-7 weeks adding some serious speed workouts. The workouts were tough but made a nice change from marathon training, and other than a sketch right calf muscle, I felt good going into the meet.

One sentence race recap: I ran a 6:52 mile which felt weirdly easy, then a 6:41 mile and still felt good, then proceeded to pull my calf so badly I couldn't put weight on it for several days. {Shakes fist at sky} Sure, I was bummed and frustrated, but another part of me could not believe I had run those splits and felt so good doing it. Sure, the plan had been to run this one 5K and then get serious about San Jose half training (10/8), but somehow I just could not let it go. What if I let the calf heal and run another?? Could that seemingly-untouchable PR seriously be about to fall??

And you know where this leads.

Tuesday, July 18 was soon circled on my calendar.

Race Report: SF Track & Field Club Pride Meet

Photo credit: SF Track & Field Club

TL;DR - I was having a GREAT race until pretty much right at mile 2 when something in my calf felt like it just popped and I nearly fell over due to the ice pick-like stab of pain that went screaming through my gastrocnemius. It was an instant race ender, which is super disappointing, but there's also some pretty amazing silver lining.

THE LONGER VERSION:

I'd been excited about this race for a couple of months now. I've wanted to dip my toe back into the world of track racing for a while now, but the timing has never worked out -- I've either always been injured, recovering, traveling, or aiming for some other big race that conflicted with the Bay Area track meets I knew about. This was finally the year!

Pretty Sunsets + My First Track Meet (...in ~20 years)

Hello again!

We made a valiant effort at coming up with some sort of plan that would keep us from having to return to the mainland, but alas that whole pesky bill-paying thing kept coming up, so finally we surrendered and shuffled onto the plan. I'll post a few more Big Island pics here & there once I've had some time to go through them, but there are a few down at the bottom of this post.

But let's be real, you don't come here to read about my vacations. The big news lately is that I just signed up for my first track meet in nearly 20 years, the 10th Annual PrideMeet on June 17, put on by the SF Track & Field Club.

Anticipation Fatigue: It's A Thing.

This Tuesday's track session was a not-insignificant 2 mile warm-up + drills/dynamic stretches, 10 x 1K / 200m jog, 2 mile cool down. The target for the 1K's was pace was 4:34 (7:21 pace), just a bit slower than I ran my 10K in a few weeks back.

This is what Kezar Stadium looks like at 4pm. By 6pm there are approximately 700 people on it.

Something I've noticed in both long, hard workouts as well as races is this phenomenon I've started calling "anticipation fatigue." With anticipation fatigue, you are preparing to do something sort of frighteningly hard like run a scary pace for longer than you feel confident about, or do a freaking shit-tonne of hard intervals, or something of that nature. And regardless of how easy or hard this feat *actually* is, the thought of it kind of terrifies you, and for some nonzero portion of it, you are absolutely 100% sure it's going to end up being a PW or otherwise completely awful.

Interestingly, I don't think I would have ever noticed this phenomenon except that I've written so, so many race reports that start with me thinking, "This is impossible, I feel so awful, what if I can't even finish," and then by halfway or two thirds through, thinking, "THIS IS AWESOME AND I AM AWESOME AND PHBBBBTTT THIS ISN'T EVEN HARD." And the only conclusion I can arrive at is that a not-insigifnicant part of the perceived effort involved with distance running is mental, and when our confidence is not in the stratosphere, it is possible to mistake mental exertion (race tactics, managing pace, balancing how you feel now with how you think you might feel x miles from now) for physical exertion.

(I remember experiencing a version of this at Race to the End of Summer, my first all-out race in quite some time. In mile 2-3ish, I found myself thinking, "Man, this is hard." But when I really pushed myself to think about it--"But is it actually, physically that bad now?"--I realized that "Actually...no." It was just the mental work of maintaining the pace and managing scary thoughts about how many minutes were left. To be honest, the actual physical discomfort & pain didn't kick in until the last mile or so.)

Looking at Tuesday's track workout on paper beforehand, my reaction was pretty much, "Well this is going to be balls," because 1) in the past when I've done "K" track workouts I've made the mistake of thinking a kilometer is super short (probably because 5Ks are "short" and 1K is only 20% of that) and then partway through realizing that oops, no, a K is actually pretty significant in terms of speed work, and 2) I ran 4 x 1600m on the treadmill at the same pace a week ago, which was also balls, and while 1000m is significantly shorter than 1600m, 10 is MORE THAN DOUBLE 4. #mathmajor.

Add to this the fact that I was still not sure how my battered knee would respond to speed work on the track, and yeah, I was more than a little nervous about this 11.5 mile workout. Like nausea-and-cold-sweat nervous.

SCARED WHO'S SCARED

The first intervals did not feel good. My legs felt tired and just generally non-responsive. There was a lot of cold sweat and I feel like my heart rate was probably a lot higher than necessary, which of course made everything feel harder than it should have. Two intervals in and "EIGHT MORE OF THESE ARE YOU SERIOUS????"

Generally at the track I run by feel and easily beat the targets without working too hard but this time I was 100% going out of my way to run exactly the pace prescribed and no faster. Mentally I kept trying to tell myself, "7:21 isn't even fast. 7:21 isn't even fast. 7:21 isn't even fast," but my legs didn't care. It wasn't that I felt I was working that hard; it was just my legs being like "Yeah; don't wanna. #sorrynotsorry."

And then, as I found I actually was able to run K after K between 4:31 and 4:34 with no problem and no pain from my knee, something in my mind or body or both kind of flipped, and they really did start to feel not that fast and also not that hard. Like, I actually found myself zoning out & sometimes losing track of which interval I was even on. "Oh, this interval is over? I almost forgot we were running one!"

I finished all 11.5 miles feeling hungry and kind of low blood sugar but otherwise fine. Knee pain was maybe .6 out of 10 -- I could feel that it wasn't 100% normal, but it was more just weird pressure from time to time, not really pain.

(And, definitely worse running in the "correct" counter-clockwise direction. Kezar is generally too busy for fast intervals in lane 1 in the "wrong" direction to feel safe, but I did my warm-up & cool down in the clockwise direction, which was definitely a little easier on the knee.)

Am I crazy? Does anyone else get "anticipation fatigue" early in a race or hard workout and then end up crushing it? please say yes

Track Magic, Y'all.

"How beautiful it is to run fast, and then rest afterward." ~Runner Proverb

Last week I wrote about my first *proper* speed workout (ie, on the ground & not an elliptical machine) in many months, & how running mile repeats at a pace that should have felt "comfortably hard" (7:20ish) left me sucking wind & completely baffled at how I could have run a 21:50(ish?) 5K in December.

This week, I ventured out to the track for a fairly similar workout (1 mile @ 7:21, 2 x 800m @ 7:05, 1 mile @ 7:21), & based on what happened last week, I don't think you can blame me for feeling SUPER nervous, especially with a 10K coming up this weekend.

Kezar Stadium, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Still, I was so, so happy just to be back out there. It was sunny and gorgeous and not too warm, so if the running part sucked, I reasoned, at least I still had that.

It was one of those afternoon/early evenings when alllll the local middle & high school track teams are out practicing, so I had to be a little creative with my warm-up laps so as not to interfere with their various dynamic warm-ups. But the warming up felt good, so I started my first mile feeling sliiiiightly more enthusiastic than I had been!

Fair warning: This is where it gets weird.

Remember last week when I mentioned giving myself a little time to settle into a pace that felt right & then being shocked to see 8:30 on my watch? Well, I did the same thing this week, and was stunned when I hit the first turn to see 6:15-6:20s showing up.

Which is, frankly, absurd.

I gradually slowed it down, wary of GPS gremlins & such like, but I still finished that first mile in 7:06 and it felt easy.

The 800m's proceeded in much the same fashion--I was meant to do them at 7:05ish pace, but what felt "right" was 6:00ish. I tried gradually slowing things down little by little, but still finished the first one in 3:22 (6:44 pace) & the second in 3:23 (6:46 pace). (Yes, I could have run them slower in order to end up closer to the assigned pace on average, but I didn't actually want to go slower than the assigned pace, & that's just how averaging works.)

Even the last mile, which I started significantly slower in an effort to not run it 16 seconds too fast, ticked off in 7:11, which felt just ridiculously easy.

Probably not that I'm going to run a sub-45:00 this weekend at Bay Breeze, but with the longer game in mind, I WILL TAKE IT. #bodiesareweird #runningisweird #tracklyfe4eva

(Also, MY GOD, track workouts are like drugs. I had seriously forgotten how great I feel after a good speed session. More of this, please.)

SRM WEEK 11 OF 20: Adjusting........

When I finally decided this past September to devote a good chunk of time to base-building properly, I set some goals for myself, one of which was doing long runs more often and more consistently. The goal was 1) getting better at them physically but also 2) getting better at them mentally so that I didn't dread lacing up my shoes every Sunday.

How I felt about long runs on a good day.

And I really feel like I did accomplish this during my NVM cycle! Having a strong base for the first time in years made the runs physically easier, and that, along with just sucking it up every weekend that I could, helped flip a switch in my brain from "ohgodohgodohgod" to "meh, still not my favorite, but whatever." I really do think this played a HUUUUGE part in my being able to run 26 miles at Napa not just without some kind of disaster, but--dare I say it--comfortably (both physically and mentally).

So, it's been annoying to find those runs starting to feel kind of tough again. Not a slog the way they used to, and I'm still in a much better place mentally about it, but instead of finishing 16-17 miles & feeling pretty good, I definitely find myself counting down those last miles & feeling a bit beat up after.

I know this makes perfect sense, now that I'm for-realsies training and not "fake training." I've done my best to ease into it gradually, but the last couple of weeks have marked the return of the "monster" track workouts, totaling 10-12 miles each (in addition to another shorter speed or tempo session). I'd kind of forgotten what it feels like to be at the track for that long; you arrive, you warm up, watch other people arrive, run some intervals, watch other people arrive, run some intervals, watch those same people leave, run some intervals, watch more people leave, run some more intervals, and by the time you're done you realized you've watched, like, three distinct waves of runners arrive, do their thang, & leave again.

Last week I did 3 x 200m, 30:00 @ GMP, 3 x 200m; this week was the same except 2 x 1200m's instead of 200m's. These workouts are hard, yes, but not awful. (For this, I actually credit all my nutrition changes. In past training cycles I only got these workouts maybe once every three weeks & they pretty much destroyed me for the rest of the day; this time around Tom has been assigning them almost every week, and I arrive back home actually feeling like a normal person & able to, like, go out for dinner & hang out with friends & stuff.)

On the other hand, they do contribute to the overall cumulative fatigue of the week a lot more than my easy base-building jogs did, even the long ones. Running 17 miles after doing nothing but comfortable, low-heart rate runs all week is a lot different than running 17 miles on top of two track workouts!

Thankfully, my body seems to be acclimating. This week I ran higher mileage as well as *slightly* harder workouts, and felt better all around. My easy runs actually felt easy, and though my 17-miler was hard, I felt marginally better than I did after last week's 16. (Also, it was hot out, which didn't help.)

This coming week I will do one more "monster" track workout & then take it easy for a few days leading up to Sunnyvale 10-Miler on Sunday. I am in this weird situation right now where RunCoach is calculating my workout paces based on my NVM time (since that was the last race I logged), and since I ran most of that race at an easy comfortable pace, all the workout paces are slower than they should be. Since I haven't all-out raced in over two years, though, I don't really know by how much slower. So, I've been trying to do the intervals by effort and stick to what feels about right. Hopefully I'll have a good race in Sunnyvale & will then finally have updated workout paces to work with.

~*~*~SRM WEEK 11 OF 20~*~*~

Grand Total: 42.1 miles

* 14.6 easy
* 7.5 speed
* 3 threshold
* 17 long

AND, 2 x 45:00 strength sessions! #progress

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

Tuesday: 2.4 warm up, 6 x 600m / 200m jog, 1 cool down = 6.4 total

Another night with SF Track Club. Again these were slow enough that they were more in my threshold zone than speed work.

Rockin' these bad boys. Review coming soon!

Wednesday: Karate

I intended to go to the gym for strength work Wednesday morning but I woke up at 6:00 feeling absolutely awful with a splitting headache, so instead I slept another hour.

Thursday: a.m. strength work / 8 easy

SOOO much better than last week's easy runs. My legs felt a little stiff & tired at the beginning, but things weren't bad good once I got going, & even felt pretty good afterward too.

Friday: 1.75 warm up, 2 x 1200m, 30:00 GMP, 2 x 1200m, 1.5 cool down = 10.7 total

Another big track workout like last week, except with 1200m's instead of 200m's. Going by effort, these were ~0:15 seconds slower each than I've done them in the past in good shape, so I'm hoping that after a few more weeks of speed work I'll be able to ratchet that number down a little the next time I do 1200m's. On the plus side, whereas in last week's 30:00 @ GMP I was struggling to maintain an 8:05-8:10 pace, this week I found myself cruising right along like, "This feels about right," & then frequently seeing numbers in the high sevens. MORE OF THIS PLEASE.

Saturday: Rest

Sunday: 17 long

Next week, it's all about race prep.

SRM WEEK 10: Big Track Workouts + Blah blah Week 10 blah

First, this:

#howitis

Second - If you caught the previous post, you know that there is not much to say about week 10 aside from the Achilles tendon drama I managed to inflict on myself in Vancouver:

* * * WEEK 10 * * *
(5 to go)

Grand Total: 24 miles, all easy

(Also you get no bar graph because I added new stuff before I got around to writing this. Trust me, it was pretty lame; you're not missing much.)

Monday: Massage / rest / pack.

Tuesday: 8 easy

Wednesday: work work work

Thursday: 8 easy, strain Achilles tendon

Friday: 8 easy, make Achilles strain worse

Saturday: come to senses / rest / feel terrible about self

Sunday: rest / fly home

Ugh. Moving on.

* * *

The real issue with Vancouver and my travel schedule this month in general is that I'm into the part of the cycle where things alternate between a tough week & small long-run increase & an easier week with a bigger long-run increase, and my every-other-week travel schedule has been synched up so that I'm on the road for the tough weeks. The Tuesday I was in Vancouver, I was supposed to do an important 10-11 mile track workout, which didn't happen for both time & logistical reasons. This week that I'm home, I had an easier 7 mile track workout scheduled, then another 10-11 monster next week when I'm in LA.

Since I didn't do much last week, I made an executive decision to shift the tough workouts forward a week so that I can be sure to get in the key speed & tempo runs while I'm at home. So yesterday, instead of the easier 7 mile track workout, I decided to take a shot at the monster 10 miler from last week:

• 2 miles warm-up + drills & strides
• 3 x 800m / 200m recovery
• 20:00 @ goal marathon pace
• 3 x 800m / 200m recovery
• 2 miles cool-down

(You might think a track workout would not be the best one for testing out a sketchy Achilles tendon, but actually, the track is a GREAT place for that because it's really easy to stop at the first sign of trouble.)

When I got to the track I couldn't remember exactly what pace the 800m's were supposed to be at, but for the most part I do my speed work by feel anyway, so I just figured I'd just try to hit about the right level of effort & that would be fine.

I now present my observations from this workout:

1) Shit ain't called a "Key Workout" for nothing.

2) Totally ran the first 800m too hard. Not only did I positive split the first set of 3, but I also found myself taking rather unnecessarily long water breaks during the recoveries.

3) The hardest part of a "Key Workout" = whatever part you're currently doing (including the cool down).

4) Knock on wood, but I *THINK* my Achilles tendon is better? I mean if something was going to cause trouble, you'd think 10 miles on the track would be enough to do it.

As you can see, I managed to rally a bit towards the end, which probably either means I sandbagged a bit on the middle reps or took slightly longer water breaks than were strictly necessary towards the end.

On the other hand, after kind of lamenting how hard these 800m's were & (for some completely random reason?) feeling like I should have been able to run them a bit faster, it was gratifying to get home & check the schedule & see that officially these were supposed to be ~6:55ish, so averaging around ~6:30 was kind of knocking it out of the park (for better or worse).

My online schedule doesn't know that I've shifted things around, so when I logged my workout I received the Exclamation Point of Disapproving Caution:

Eh, whatevs.

Seriously, all I want to do is break 50 miles this week. I'm way past ready to do it; time to make this shite happen.

HALLELUJAH A Decent Track Workout + Impending Races.

On Tuesday I met Kimra at Kezar Track for an evening speed workout. Given last week's suck-tastic track session and how concerningly sore & exhausted my Sunday 11 miler left me (particularly in the hips/hip flexors), I'd been stressing about this workout for days. What if it sucked? What if the stress fracture place hurt? What if I couldn't hold the pace? What if those ass-hats started stretching in lane 4 again???

All this was compounded by the fact that the Garmin 310XT I got (for 40%!) last fall suffered a crack in the housing this last weekend that made it so that the strap wouldn't stay attached to the watch part, which meant that I had to go exchange it at REI. And this is why you buy your GPS watch at REI, btw; if anything happens to it within a year--seriously, ANYTHING--you get a free replacement. Unless they don't carry that item anymore, in which case you get the amount you paid for the item as a credit towards a similar item.

Since they don't carry the 310XT anymore, I ended up paying the $87 difference for a Forerunner 220 because it was the closest thing they had (that wasn't $450), and as of Tuesday track time, I had yet to figure out exactly how to use it.

Garmin Forerunner 220

Except for the fact that it's not a multi-sport, the 220 is supposed to be pretty comparable to the 305 & 310? I guess? I'll give it points for being thinner & lighter, but I do not like the display or the way navigating through the different options & settings works. I've only had it for two days, though, so it may just be that the 305/310 interface is burned into my brain at this point & it's just going to take some time to get used to something else.

Like last week my Achilles/lower calves were a bit tight & I did stop a couple of times during my warm-up to stretch & shake them out, but everything else felt great. Kimra & I briefly kvetched to one another about the evils of sports bras & heart rate monitors & then took off on our intervals. (I'd insert a picture here but we were kinda busy, y'know, marathon training or whatever.)

My plan called for six 400m repeats at 6:40 pace (so ~1:40 each) with 90 seconds jog recovery. I couldn't remember for sure off the top of my head but 6:40 sounded slower than I usually do these, but honestly I'd already resolved to run them by effort, so I wasn't too concerned about the numbers.

Curse you, repeat #5! I was *this* close to perfect negative splits!!

All six intervals definitely required not-insignificant effort, but counting to 90 in my head between each one (apparently faster and faster) was plenty of time to recover in between, and I finished the set feeling like I could have easily run more if I'd had to. So yeah; GIANT win in terms of track workouts that feel the way they're supposed to, without making you feel like you want to die.

I did look back in my RunningAhead log to see how fast I've run this workout in the past, but it turns out that the last time was Nov. 12, 2013, otherwise known as the Day that Will Live in Infamy, ie the day that after repeat #4 of 6 I discovered my duffel bag had been stolen. So I only got to four 400m's that day, but I was apparently doing them in the 6:00-6:10 pace range & I don't recall them being that hard. Then again I wasn't running all that much at that point, so the difference between then & now is probably partly attributable to fitness but also partly attributable to working much harder now than I was then.

(Oh, and the group with zero track etiquette only expanded their circle to lane three today, so I was able to avoid getting almost-kicked by people swinging their legs around in the middle of the track. Small victories.)

IMPENDING RACES:

I am registered as a sub-seed in the San Francisco Marathon 2nd Half on July 27, for the second time in as many years. Unfortunately last year I couldn't run it since I was busy regrowing a muscle & learning to walk up stairs, so I am super pumped to finally do it this year. I was registered for it way before Santa Rosa, so it made me happy to learn that a solid four weeks lies between the two races.

Being sub-seeded kinda-sorta makes me feel like I should actually RACE-race, but since a) I haven't been training for a half and b) I care a lot more about Santa Rosa, I'll most likely end up running it in the just-fast-enough-to-have-fun range rather than balls-to-the-wall-effing-kill-it range. I'm supposed to do a 16 miler that day, so depending on logistics I'll either do a 1.5 mile warm up & a 1.5 mile cool down, or jog an easy 3 miles to the start & BART home from the finish.

Also, this week is Pride Week in San Francisco, & I've run the SF FrontRunners Pride Run 5K or 10K every year since I've lived in SF except for last year (see above-mentioned regrowing of muscle/regaining of basic motor skills), so I would really like to run it this Saturday as well. I need to run 7-8 miles that day, so I think if I ran it I'd end up doing an easy run on Friday instead of a tempo/threshold, then running a 4-4.5 mile warm-up before the race & then running the 5K at just-fast-enough-to-have-fun pace.

And....I got another pair of shoes. (I KNOW SHUT UP.) They came on the recommendation of a couple of different friends, cost me $40 on giant super clearance, and they are black. (I have never owned a pair of black running shoes before & it feels very strange.) I've only run in them twice, but so far they feel pretty good, so things are off to a promising start.

Who Moved My Cheese

First off, if you somehow missed The Oatmeal's latest genius because you live under a rock or something, you're welcome.

Genius, I tell you.

Secondly -- hoo boy, did the speed work spank me on Tuesday.

Generally, track workouts have always been my favorite of the week. Yes, sometimes it takes a little more functional brain power to gather everything up & drive to the track vs just putting on running clothes & heading out the door, but for the most part I find speed work more interesting and more rewarding than just putting in easy miles.

Tuesday was different, though. I won't say I was dreading my track workout all day Tuesday, but, unusually for me, I was most certainly looking forward to it being over. Partly I think it was because of the distance; my last track workout had 1.5 miles worth of intervals while this one had 3.5. Plus most of my runs lately feel significantly harder than I'm used to. Also I pretty much constantly worry about my calves. (It was during a track workout in December when the stress fracture in my left leg went from "Well this is pretty uncomfortable" to "HOLY JEEBUS someone get me some crutches.")

Usually my favorite place...

My assignment was a 2 mile warm up, one mile in 7:10 / 1:30 jog, two 800m's in 3:26 / 2:00 jog, another mile in 7:10, & a 1.5 mile cool down. As with my previous two speed sessions, I had to break the warm-up into half-mile chunks because long run + karate + 48 hours of no running apparently causes my Achilles/lower calf area to tighten up like shrink wrap. A couple minutes of aggressive stretching & shaking them out seems to do the trick, but as a result my warm-up ends up taking nearly twice as long, which is annoying.

It was a less-than-promising start in other ways as well. It was hot & I was sweating & chafing everywhere like a mofo (even in my nose), and on top of this some running group was doing their circle-of-bffs-and-stretching thing on the track while there were about a billion people running on it (ok like 30).

Seriously. They were taking up four lanes. And they always do this. I nearly got kicked twice by the same dude getting his dynamic stretch on in the middle of lane four. Some shrieking & wild slapping may have occurred. In my defense that is what you get if you stand in the middle of the a track & nearly kick people who are trying to run. There are like infinity other places in that stadium where people can stretch; there's just no excuse for doing it on the track while other people are trying to use it.

Things did not get better once I started running. Since I've been running pretty much all my runs at faster paces than my schedule says completely comfortably, I figured I should probably bump these up a little too. In the past I've interpreted the paces on this workout as 10K pace & 5K pace respectively, so I figured I'd just go by feel & shoot for those levels of effort & try not to kill myself.

And it hurt. God it hurt. Which was weird, because the part of my brain that stores these things in muscle memory was going, "Yep, this is totally how that pace should feel" while the conscious part was going "Really? But it feels sooooo slooooowww" and the emotional part was throwing a little tantrum & going "It huuuuuuuurts, is it oooooover yet??" For a while I wasn't even going to look at my watch during the intervals so that afterward I would have an unbiased idea of what pace those levels of effort correlated with. At least that was the idea; eventually I couldn't resist looking and to my dismay my pace was all over the place. During the first mile alone I think I saw every possible number between 6:20 & 7:20 at one point or another.

I had a hard time jogging the recovery intervals too (though it ended up not mattering because I had to stop in between anyway to stretch out my stupid Achilles & remind myself that no, I wasn't getting a stress fracture again) which made me wonder if I was running the intervals too fast. By the last 1600m I felt like my right glute/hamstring wasn't firing quite right, and I could tell my muscles were getting tired because it was getting harder and harder to stay out of my calves. My rule of thumb is to always finish my last interval feeling as if I could run just one more with no problem, and that was definitely not the case after that last mile. It was all I could do to brow beat myself into doing the cool down (again, stopping for a stretch break every half mile).

If I'd been running these intervals in a vacuum, I'd say those paces were maybe fine, but it was hot, and there was a crazy headwind down the backstretch so realistically they were probably a bit too fast. I mean they didn't kill me, but still. By the time this workout was over I was BEAT.

One of the perks of recording all my track splits is the ability to go back in time & compare what I can do now to what I was doing at a certain point in the past when I have an idea what my fitness was like. It turns out the last time I ran this workout was March 5, 2013, about halfway through my training cycle for Mountains 2 Beach Marathon. At that point I was in pretty good but not amazing shape, & whipped out the following:

I was hoping I'd written something useful about this workout in that week's training journal to put it in context ("Woo, super easy!" "Ugh shoot me.") but apparently all I did was lambast myself for not writing the workout down & gypping myself on a minute of recovery time. Which probably means it was more or less fine & not awful.

Since these numbers aren't drastically lower & it was probably not 75° that day, I'm probably not *that* far off of my fitness at that point. But I am clearly waaaaaay out of practice at running the right paces with some amount of consistency. Though, this being my 3rd track workout of the cycle, I can forgive myself for that.

Still, I'm used to leaving the track feeling relaxed and satisfied and confident, not dragging myself to the car feeling physically like ass and also generally confused and insecure about what just happened (oh and also kind of still wanting to strangle people with no track manners). It's a good thing I have good friends who had a cold glass of white wine waiting for me when I finally got to dinner.

One of Those "Keeping It Real" Posts

During my time on the internet, I have learned that it is very important to blog readers that bloggers "keep it real," which means maintaining a careful balance of posts expounding on how awesome-sauce/amazing your life is vs. how "real" (ie shitty) it is. With this post I hope I am doing my Bloggerly Duty re: the rainbows-and-unicorns-to-realness ratio.

So. Ahem.

Tuesday was the stupidest day ever. First, I had to drive 40 miles to get to the South Bay butt-early in the morning for the second day in a row (!), which means I couldn't do my a.m. bike ride & there was just no way I was doing that in the afternoon and then going to the track. Then, although it was bright & warm & sunny in my neighborhood, it was cold & windy & dark at Kezar Stadium.

What it was like in the Mission.

What it was like in the Sunset three miles away.

To add insult to injury, the track was closed, which meant I had to do my speed work on the upper concrete track, which I hate with the red-hot passion of a thousand suns. AND THEN, my run totally sucked ass.

Beforehand I was like, "Cool, just 2 hard 1200m's. Easy." But then, although I had been instructed to run them at 7:10 pace, I accidentally ran the first one at 6:55 pace, which meant that I couldn't really do the easy 1:00 recovery jog I was supposed to do in between the two & also (I was pretty sure) that I would totally tank on the second one. I tried to slow it down closer to 7:10 but (even though I thought I was actually going to die) ended up running it just slightly faster than the first one. I am not really sure how this happened.

The worst part was that my cool down utterly, epically sucked. I finished the 1.5 miles, but not without resorting to stopping every quarter-to-a-third of a mile to shake out the burning in my legs. Also that stupid pain in my right calf was back.

So I guess what I'm saying is:

Yeah; that about sums it up.

Keeping it real, yo.

I promise not to make that horrible pun about how I am "back on track."

Admit it, a little bit of your soul dies every time someone does that. I kid, I kid.

On Tuesday afternoon I dipped my pinkie toe back into the world of speed work for the first time since last December (when my finished my workout by limping off the track with insane pain in my left calf), and what a gorgeous day for it.

My main goal, really, was just to not collapse and die, and my secondary goals were to maintain structural integrity in the calf regions and not embarrass myself. So winning!

My workout was two sets of 3 x 300m at 6:15 pace (so about 1:09 each) with 100m recoveries. When I'm in decent shape I shoot to do this workout at 6:00 pace (or 1:06ish each), and when I'm in REALLY good shape I can do it in the 5:30-5:40 (1:01-1:03ish) range.

The 6:15 pace was based on my Spring Forward 5K time, so I didn't know how hard or easy it was likely to feel at this point. I do, however, know that I have a bad habit of running intervals too fast, so I decided that I would just try to run them by effort & take it just a tiny bit easier than normal & not try to kill myself trying to hit specific numbers my first time out this year.

Kind of all over the map, but really not too terrible in general! Overall, I was pleased.

I still have a bit of a twinge in my right calf. It hurt a bit while I warmed up, felt totally fine running fast, & gave me just the slightest dull ache during the recoveries and cool down. Nothing too overly concerning so far, but you better believe I am stretching & rolling the heck out of it every night.

Of particular note to SF folks, I also learned from Coach Ken (who coaches a kids' track & field team from the Tenderloin every Tuesday evening) that apparently the city will finally (FINALLY!) be refurbishing the thirty-year-old track at Kezar Stadium later this summer. It will be open through July, then closed for three months while for construction. AND we're getting an extra lane! For me the timing works out fairly well; after July I'll only have 3-4 more speed workouts before Santa Rosa, & it's no big deal to do those somewhere else.