Went to watch the downhill mile race and the turns were just as bad as I expected. It would have taken off 6 seconds easily if they had had a linear course. But the times were still decently fast considering the extremely localness of this race. My club went 1-2 with jordan in first with 4:31 and henry well behind him in 4:46. That is both of their best mile times, but for jordan it is pathetic because he ran 1:56 800 in highschool. If he just put down a consistend 50-60 mile base he would run 4:20s unaided right off base and low 4:20's with speed work on top of the base. I wish I had his talent.
AM: 13.85 long run with jamie. Great run, we went to this bike path north of providence, completed it, got on this other road and ran till it stopped, and then found our way home. We were totally lost but just kept going and it worked out perfectly. I drank too much last night and was hung over but at just the right level to not interfere with the run and the run helped me get over the hang over. The route was actually quite scenic though lacking much soft surfaces, but you just can't find enough for a long run in this kind of city. And it went into MA which is a bonus because you get to say you ran to a different state today, lol.
PM: 6.75 We are trying to figure good routes for 4ish and 6-7ish miles for our morning and evening runs for most days. It is a work in progress. Providence is not a very pretty city nor does it have many soft running surfaces. We must maximize beauty, variety, and dirt while minimizing overlap of the two routes and variation from the desired distances. Ok, now I just need to write a cplex program with those constraints and make some sort of heuristic to apply to google street view images to objectify beauty, variety, and detect dirt. You wouldn't think I am a med student, eh?
PM: 6 Even running at 4:30 its too dark to do any trails at this point. It is gonna be 2 months (a month till the winter sulstice and a month on the other side until we get even a bit of sun again) before it is at all light for my evening runs. Annoying
New record for time holding my breath!! 3:04. And really the effort was not all that bad. I probably could have done 3:15 or so but my goal was 3 minutes so after I gave it a few seconds buffer I gave up. My previous PR was 2:34 so this was a pretty big boost. I think I can improve more still even without improving fitness. It is all a matter of hyperventalating before to decrease blood CO2 and then to stay very relaxed such that your HR drops. I did this on my bed with my eyes closed until something like 2min 24 seconds. By 2:45 I was off the bed and moving around because at some point you have to distract yourself from the growing urge to breath. Another trick is to slowly let out the breath which also seems to help (I think that it counts as long as you don't breath in at all). Next time (not anytime soon, it doesnt feel all that good, a bit like a mile race... mmm total oxygen debt and acidemia).
PM: 9.5 including 7 striders, drills, abs. Didn't really mean to do this much mileage. Oops. Oh well. This will allow me to do only 1 run on saturday and still hit somewhere between plenty and too much mileage.
PM: 5.15 Did not feel very limber today. Could be the miles or the leg workout from 2 days ago. Those workouts are starting to not make me sore which is good, but now might just make me feel just a bit weak. I am hoping that the strength training during base turns into speed during winter and spring track. I miss the workouts already (its been almost 3 weeks since I have done anything fast besides striders). But I must persevere until january when I will start adding workouts back to my training.
AM: 10.67 Felt pretty bad. Might have been the weights yesterday or something like that. Henry was with me and he felt even worse so that made me feel a little bit better. But we got through it and hopefully I feel better tomorrow.
AM: 9.1 I decided not to be a slave to the long run and listen to my body today. I figure every distance run is overdistance when training for the mile, so whats the huge difference between 10 and 15 (except the cumulative effects). Anyway, waking up today thinking about a 15miler alone (jamie is out of town and everyone else in my running club is a wuss) I didn't even want to go for a run. Then I decided that a 5 miler would be fun. So I headed out the door with that in mind and actually ended up feeling great and going for 9.1 including 8 striders. Decided I might or might not go for a pm run today depending on how I felt, how my studying went. So basically I had some mental fatigue because of how bad I felt physically yesterday but its all gone now.
PM: 6 went out for 5 and did 6 because I just felt too good.
Yesterday scared me a bit but it was obviously just an off day. With 2 80 mile weeks under my belt I am expecting myself to feel bad anytime now (I often felt bad over the summer at 70mpw and took cutback weeks every 4th week) but it isn't happening yet. In fact I don't know that I have ever felt quite this good about my running. I am finally accustomed to the weight training enough that I am not getting really sore from it. And I am getting more striders in which is good for speed maintanence and development. If I can keep this up till january and then work in some track and hill workouts and tempo runs and taper for races when they come I should be in about the best position I could be for hitting good times. I can't predict anything until I get on the track for a few weeks and then do some indicator workouts but it is exciting executing the long term plan...
PM: 7.5 including 8 striders and 5x1200 at threshold pace (6:00min/mile). This was just a sanity workout. Get some speed without hurting the base. Lots of people do weekly threshold runs during base. It was supposed to be really easy but it wasn't. It wasn't hard, but it wasn't easy. The pace also was all over the place. The first rep went 80, 100, 91. Then it got slightly better but was still off and then we would close too quickly. Between the 80 mile weeks and weights I am probably just pretty tired. Or maybe I have some natural good/bad cyclic feeling during base that comes from doing workouts every other day during seasons. Saturday I felt horrible and yesterday I felt great. Today I felt medium to bad. Tomorrow perhaps I will rebound again. In any case I will probably be taking a big cutback week next week if I am feeling tired.
Circuit training: crunches, lunges, leg lifts, pushups, arm swings, obliques crunches (both sides), arm swings, pelvic thrusts, jumps. x 3. Just did a reasonable number of each. Nothing that is gonna hurt bad later, but enough to build some strength. I think these are all pretty high yield workouts. Everything is pretty running specific either core or legs except the arm swings which are there because I realized that I don't really swing my arms hard even when doing striders and I will need them for the 800 and mile. And I have seen other good runners doing them.
PM: 5.15 Felt fine. I just really hope that what I am doing is right. I really really want my mile confidence that I had last spring back. It felt so good walking around knowing I could drop a sub 5 minute mile. Right now I don't think that I could. With a taper it would be close. But if I wanna maximize my potential for this season I need to sit here and do distance until january. Patience... Patience. I am not a patient person.
PM: 5.5 including 5 striders, 100m race in 13.69, 200m race in 28.24, 400m race in 62.21 I know I shouldn't have done this in 'base' training but my club was doing time trials so I figured I would get a baseline for my speed. Hopefully over the spring I can bring these down to a 26 200m and a 58-59 400m. That should give me more than enough speed for my goals. Currently by the 'rule of 4's' made by some famous coach I don't remember right now, I should be able to go 4:41 in the mile with my 400m speed if I maxed out my aerobic ability. The rule of 4's states that given a 400m time and maximal aerobic conditioning you should be able to add 4 seconds per 400 for 800m and take that pace and add 4 seconds per 400 to get mile pace. The problem is that I am not maximally aerobically trained, and that is not where my talents (the little that I have) lay. Believe it or not, I am better at speed (despite how slow I am) than endurance. So I will need a bit more cushion to my 400 to mile time than I currently have. I am going to make a standard weekly true speed workout for the spring and hopefully will improve. I know it needs to be fast with full recovery but how fast exactly and how much of it should be done are my major questions. Ive read some on letsrun about speed training and I think its gonna be something like this 5x(200 fast relaxed, 200 all out relaxed) with maybe 400m jogging between 200's and 5 minutes standing/jogging/stretching between sets. The fast relaxed ones will be about 4-6 seconds slower than the all out ones, so right now they would be 32-34. And the all-out relaxed ones will be 99-100% effort with a concious effort to relax and keep form. I used to have better speed than I currently do. I have run a 60 flat 400 wearing trainers in a race when I could only manage 5:10 for the mile. I have run several 69's and one 67! in a 400 workout just because I was feeling it. Right now a 69 feels utterly forced. But I need to keep up 71's for the mile to hit my goal.
PM: 6.6 Pace extremely variable. What some might call a fartlek, but none of the pace was faster than marathon pace for more than a minute or two so I wouldnt call it that.
PM: 6.65 including 7 striders and drills. 2 of these miles were really slow (9min pace) because a guy with us was dieing. He is a sprinter so I guess that excuses it a little.
AM: 94 minutes at a decent clip. Cold-28ish degrees with wind. Felt really sluggish after about 10 miles. I think I might have been low on glycogen. Ate a huge chinese food lunch after the run. Yum.
PM: 6.5 I used to not run the day before an exam. Now I run twice the day before an exam. I guess that shows my commitment to running? Or slacking from studying?
