Training Log: Oakland Running Festival Race Week!

My last week of training before the Oakland Running Festival Half Marathon (which is what I ended up running!).
~*~*~Oakland Running Festival Race Week~*~*~

Training Log: 2 Weeks to ORF uhhhhh something or rather

Less than one week until Oakland Running Festival! I am either running the half marathon or 10K, but I'm not 100% sure! But probably the half marathon I think! (When this training week started, though, we were two weeks away--hence the post title.) Think you can guess my finishing time? Stay tuned!

I have to say, I've been really enjoying this little mini training cycle. I am very far from "peak fitness," though if we're honest, I don't even really know what that means anymore, and I kind of don't care. That said, let's look at some facts:

Fact: I've ramped my mileage back up to a few 40+ mile weeks and it's feeling good. There are days when I'm tired, but it's a very reasonable, understandable level of tired that I'm able to recovery from, not bone-deep, existential, mental and psychological exhaustion that leaves me incapable of doing anything.

Fact: Even if I'm tired before a run, I generally start to feel much better once I get started (vs in 2021 when I would often feel worse).

Fact: I'm running workouts now as fast or faster than I was in 2016 when I Boston Qualified.

Fact: I look forward to workouts instead of dreading them or having panic attacks about them. When they are physically hard, it feels totally manageable and like something I am in control of, vs. something that is happening to me.

I don't know how next Sunday is going to go performance-wise (or even which distance I will be running!) but I'm feeling very optimistic. Not PR optimistic, but like I'll be able to put up a strong effort I'll be proud of after, and that's what is important to me right now.

Let's take a look at how the week shaped up despite some unusual scheduling issues:

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.

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.

2022 Goals + Spring 2022 Races!

Now that that half marathon monkey is off my back and I'm no longer haunted by the idea that I will never finish 13.1 miles ever again, I've been having fun thinking about spring races. I have another Spain/Portugal trip coming up in the first half of June, which creates a kind of natural running season + break over the next few months. I've also been ruminating about what other goals I want to take on over the course of next year. Very little set in stone, but here is a bit of an update at least!

Oakland Running Festival 10K (Sunday 3/20). This is a Pacific Association race that some of the other masters women on my team are planning to run, so I'm jumping in! I was originally signed up for the half (deferred from 2020) but I'm dropping down to the 10K to help the team score. My expectations are low -- I ran couple of 10Ks last summer just to kind of see what I could do, but they were both quite slow, in the 50:00 range, so even just under that would be progress. Right before the pandemic I ran a 46:23 on fairly moderate training, so I'd expect that to be about the lower limit of what I could do in Oakland if everything went perfectly.

On my way to 46:23 in February 2020, my last pre-pandemic race (No idea how I ended up completely alone in this picture, I remember being surrounded for most of the race!)

Race Report: Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon 2022

Huzzah! The Kaiser Curse is broken! 🎉🎉🎉 After something like a decade of attempting and failing to both start and finish one of my favorite local races for the second time (the first time was in 2010), I finally managed it this past Sunday and it feels amazing.

Not only did I break the Kaiser Curse, I also brought my more general half marathon dry spell to an end--Sunday's race was my first half marathon *race* since October 2018 and my first 13.1+ mile run of *any* kind since July 2019. Also feels good!

Why did I sign up for this race?

The Kaiser race is super local for me (less than three miles away) and since I do a lot of runs in Golden Gate Park and surrounding SF, I know the course really well. I'd run the half once before, the 10K twice, and the 5K once (not to mention DNFing the half once and signing up & not being able to run it so many times I've lost count, hence the curse). The course is (mostly) nice and relatively fast, the weather is usually pretty good (usually), and with the exception of the bag check pickup in 2020 (it was 2+ hours before they found my bag!), it's always been very smooth and well-run.

I signed up for the half last summer when registration first opened and there was a chance they'd have to significantly limit the field due to COVID. I'd just started training again in earnest, SF case numbers were at an all-time low, and in a burst of optimism about the world that I hadn't experienced in quite a while, I signed up for this and a couple other half marathons, excited to spend the next few months getting back in shape, throw down in Golden Gate Park, and just see what happened.

And then what happened?

January 2022 Reads!

Getting on top of this from the beginning this year! It's been a good month for getting some reading done. Maybe there's a suggestion for you in here somewhere, dear reader?

(1) Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson (2020, 270 pages) (crime/mystery/drama). Audiobook, reread. Years ago, bookshop owner Malcom Kershaw published a blog post listing “Eight Perfect Murders” from literature–murders that he, as a crime/mystery aficionado, believed to be the most airtight in terms of what a person could actually get away with. Now, years later, it seems someone is using the blog post as a to-do list, and the police want his help to identify the killer.

I don’t 100% adore everything by Peter Swanson BUT when he’s at his best in this genre, it’s really something. I remembered this book being smart and riveting the first time around but, as often happens, re-reading something where I already know what happens gives me extra bandwidth to appreciate all kinds of little brilliant details that I missed the first time around. Anyone who loves a good mystery/crime thriller/psychological thriller will enjoy this one, especially if you’ve read a lot of classics of the genre.