running hot

We've had a string of days with 100'ish temperatures, making long runs hard. With all the heat warnings, people think I must be nuts to be out running. Here is what I think (remember, I'm just a crazy runner, not a doctor).

First, I always wear a heart rate monitor, which I think is a pretty good indicator for how much stress I'm under when running. I can't run long at my usual pace on a very hot day before I see my heart rate going higher than normal, so on hot days I have to run slower to keep my heart rate in the usual range. Even then, when it's really hot I slow down even further and take the heart rate down another 5 beats per minute. Finally, on hot days I just don't run as long or as far.

Bottom line: Keep the pace slow, keep the heart rate low, cut the runs a little shorter.

shoes again

Looking at statistics showing how people find this blog, I see one of the most common search terms bringing people here is "Brooks Cascadia 7" shoes.  Obviously, I need to talk about my favorite shoes more!

The Brooks Cascadia 7's have been working great. When they get really dirty, I just pull the insoles out, drop them in the sink and wash them by hand with dish soap and hot water. A day drying on the deck, and they're ready to go again. I do pay attention to new shoes as they get reviewed, but most of the new shoes coming out aren't for me - I don't like change, and it's hard to find some of them in my size. I've got big feet, and I like some room in the toe box. I buy size 15 running shoes to get the extra room.. It's hard to find shoes in size 14 or 14 1/2 in a wide version. So shopping for size 15 (or 14 W) just doesn't leave me with a lot of choices. The current popularity of 'minimalist' shoes isn't helping matters, but I think for a 200 lb runner the Cascadia may be as minimalist as I want to go anyhow ...

time to get going again

I think I'm really recovered and eager to be running again.  The Punxsutawney 50K (Sept 8) and the JFK 50Miler (Nov 17) are the next long runs I'm focusing on. This training cycle I am going to keep the weekly mileage about the same (maybe a little less), and make the easy days easier, the hard days a little harder, and try to eat right. The Punxsy 50K course has always got the best of me, but I think this might be the year I finally get around it in a competent fashion.

I'd like to share some classic YouTube video from a couple of years ago (this is not me though) illustrating some down-hill running technique,  The first one is on the Punxsutawney 50K course.

In this one, Karl Meltzer talks about running down-hill, and explains that "crashing is part of the deal."

Comrades Marathon 2012 report

There are a lot of Comrades race reports on-line, and if you read a bunch of them you get a pretty good feel for the course and race day experience. I'm just going to add a little to all the noise with a few of my own recollections of the 2012 Comrades Marathon.

I set my alarm for 12:30 am on race day - that makes for a pretty early start to the day! The hotel (the Southern Sun, on North Beach in Durban) had a lot of runners, and opened their nice breakfast to runners starting at 1:00 am. I had breakfast, and grabbed a few things to eat while waiting at the start. Here is a picture of me just before leaving the hotel in the morning.

Race day - morning

At 2:00 am, our bus was rolling on the hour-long ride to the starting line in Pietermaritzburg. It was a little surprising to see a bar/club still open right at the start, with patrons standing outside smoking and watching the runners start to assemble. Walked around a bit, viewing the starting line up front, people watching, and exploring the starting corral setup, eventually picking a spot near my corral and sitting on the curb to wait (and eat a bit more breakfast). It actually grew colder during the wait - I had a sweatshirt and full-length garbage bag on as a windbreaker.  I got rid of the garbage bag just before the start, but ran in the sweatshirt for several hours and was glad to have it.

Thanks to the homework I had done, the singing, Chariots of Fire music, the rooster crow, and the cannon seemed like a familiar sequence of events. There is no 'chip time' at Comrades - you start your watch when the gun fires. I had set up my Garmin watch with a 'virtual runner' who took off at the gun running a perfectly paced 12 hour Comrades. My pacing goal was to catch up with him and finish ahead of him.

I ran with a water bottle (with double strength Perpetuem) on my waist, and bunch of Clif ShotBloks. The aid stations on the course are plentiful, I think there was one every 2 km. I drank water from the aid stations to effectively dilute the Perpetuem, and mixed up a second batch of Perpetuem about the 5 hour point. There were plenty of salted boiled potatoes at many of the aid stations, and a fairly sugary drink called Energade.

The hills ... what can I say. Mary and I toured the course in a bus on the day before the race - I'm really glad she got to see it. You do spend a lot of the day going up and down grades, and some of them are long, but less steep then you will find on a trail run. Looking at my pace data, I walked about 9 miles of the course, a lot of that in the second half.

Mike 'smiling' for the finish

I averaged 12 minute miles for the day, finishing in 11:24 gun-to-finish line. I fell pretty hard after the half way point, scratching myself up a bit, practically tearing the number off my chest and biting my lip, finished with no real problems - a little stiff and sore later though. The tour organizer had arranged a couple of large bins with ice baths by the pool on the roof of our hotel - I credit my time in the ice bath with the pretty rapid post race recovery.

We did spend time after the race touring a bit of South Africa (Cape Town / Cape Point, the wine country, and Kruger) which was very interesting. I went overboard in Kruger park, taking over a 1000 pictures of animals.

All in all, as they say, it was a very lekker trip!

looking back on this training cycle

I'm wrapping up this training cycle, spending the remaining time before Comrades doing some tapering the best I can.  I'm happy with what I've done to prepare, but let the second-guessing begin.

These graphs were produced by SportTracks and its Training Load plug-in.  This first one just summarizes my weekly mileage from the start of the year.  It looks fairly well planned - some four to five week mini-cycles of increasing intensity, then an easier week at the start of the next slightly more intense cycle.

2012 - Weekly Mileage

This brown line on this next graph is a sliding 7-day sum of mileage.  Because a value is computed every day, it is a lot more 'jagged' than the weekly mileage chart above.

Daily Training Load

For long runs, I had 31 runs of 10 miles or more, a number of ~15 milers, and one marathon.  Maybe I could have/should have done more long runs, although I am so slow that the hours it takes to do a 15 miler really does qualify them as a long run.

You can see the 'training influence' line crosses zero (and goes negative) today, telling me the time for hard training for Comrades is gone.  My total mileage so far this year has been 914 miles.  January was low mileage, my Comrades training cycle really didn't get going until February.  The mileage total is still high though, for me, and I hope it will pay off.  The mileage, and Mary's new interest in vegan cooking (it's been great but I'm actually not a very strict vegan) were probably big factors in losing the weight that I did.

I did focus on increasing turnover, and ran several short road races that I think helped get me a little more leg speed.  But I could have spent more time with long intervals or tempo runs at the higher heart rates - it's almost like I've created a bit of a heartrate 'ceiling' at about 80% of my max ...

So, am I ready?  Here is a link to a paper I found on the web, that the author (Lindsay Weight, a two-time Comrades woman winner in the 1980's) wrote to summarize the results of a survey taken of Comrades finishers in 2005.  Runners were asked what they weighed, how many miles they did to prepare, what their qualifying time was, and how they finished (and more).  It's nice to be able to compare your own numbers to others who finished.  I note that I still am at the high end of the weight scale of those who finished, but other than that, my stats compare pretty well.

I'm as ready as I'm going to be.  Wish me luck.

running and training

When talking to people about training I have a hard time trying to summarize what I think is the essence of training in a nutshell.  Here are some of the things I wish I would have told them when they asked (though they might have been sorry they asked …).

Basically,

1.  Training (improving your fitness) requires some physical stress.  The amount of training effect is a function of training duration and intensity - how long and how hard you train.  Adequate recovery time has to follow training stress to allow your body to adapt in response to the increased stress and prepare for the next workout.

2.  There is a definite work-reward relationship in running.  As long as you avoid overtraining, the more work you do, the greater the potential benefit.

work - reward

Those two basic principles could inspire volumes. Here are a few comments in the form of Q and A.  I should point out that this may be somewhat opinionated, so feel free to disagree with any of the following …

Q: How many miles should I run?

   Recently I’ve been reading about more studies finding that a few short and relatively high intensity workouts (on the order of 30 minutes a few times a week) provide a great deal of benefit.  This really isn’t surprising, and is consistent in fact with the simple graphic above.  As you start to workout, you can quickly receive benefits.  While gifted runners have performed very well on very little training, you can easily find that ‘real runners’ do a lot more in their training.  Many elite runners regularly run well over 100 miles a week in training. They are at the extreme right side of the cost benefit curve, doing a lot of additional work to eke out the last small increase in benefit (and incidentally incurring a greater risk of over-training and injury).

   Noakes (“Lore of Running”)refers to a table showing the number of training hours required to compete at various levels:  ‘beginners’ run <4 hours per week, average runners <6, good runners <8, top amateur runners <10, with elite or world class runners training 10 to 14 hours or more per week.  To some extent you need to be able to assess how many hours you are able to train before building or committing to a specific training plan.

Q: What is good running form?

   Running seems as simple as putting one foot in front of the other.  But, there are a lot of potentially contradictory and confusing, schools of thought on the dynamics of good running form. For some examples (hopefully good!) take a look at the videos I’ve linked to in earlier blogs.  I feel better when I’m having a hard time trying to resolve apparent disconnects between examples by remembering Ryan Hall’s comment that we’ll finally see perfect running form when we get to heaven.

   It’s hard to change your form.  First you have to form a good mental model of what you are trying to do.  Second, you need to be able to accurately assess what you are actually doing.  I know from seeing video of myself that what I think I am doing is sometimes not what I am really doing.  Finally, you need to change what you are actually doing to match what your ideal form is, and then continue doing it the new way without reverting to something that you have in effect practiced wrongly for so long.  Good luck with that.

   I think the good news is that over time, some running form ‘defects’ that hurt running efficiency are almost naturally eliminated.  Keep your stride rate at 180/minute.  Keep your head up, keep your body aligned.  Avoid unnecessary tension.  Run straight ahead.

Q: Should I run barefoot?

   No.  Well maybe a little.

Q: How should I train my child?

   In my opinion (and I am not a parent), parents should strive to give children the opportunity to experience a lot of activities.  When children demonstrate an aptitude for something, whether it is sports, music and the arts, academics or whatever, it’s natural for the parent to encourage and find ways to develop those skills however possible. However the child may be motivated as much by his need for parent’s approval and attention as he is by actual enjoyment of the activity.  So as with a lot of things, it’s a question of balance, of taking advantage of developmental opportunities and learning lifetime skills while being alert to the possibility of overdoing something.

   Small children should not be doing endurance training.

   Consider the evidence that the best runners in any age group will not be the best runners in later years – if you peak before leaving high school you might just be the subject of a Bruce Springsteen song (cue “Glory Days”).

Q: How should an older person train?

   In an older post (June 11, 2011) I talked about six time Hawaiian Ironman winner Mark Allen’s advice for training older (age 50+) runners.  He would rely solely on an endurance base built with long runs at relatively low heart rates. I adopted this approach – I lost weight, my running improved, I avoided injury.  How could I complain?  Well, I think age 50 is too early for many runners to concede higher intensity training phases. The fall-off in running performance seems gradual until into the 70’s.  Go for it.

   

Q: What if I'm not a 'natural' runner?

   First of all, all humans are natural runners.  It’s just that some of us are more proficient.  We can become better runners by improving fitness as well as form.

   Some people are ‘gifted’ runners, in the sense that they have a greater innate capacity to do work than others.  While we can all improve our fitness levels and body makeups, there may be genetic factors that place an upper limit on measures like VO2 max. 

   In addition to having great physical capacity to do work, great distance runners are very efficient.  They move faster and farther while doing less work than many slower runners.  Running efficiency is a function of good running form as well as body makeup.

Q: What is the role of a running coach? 

   Coach Jack Daniels talks about runners with different levels of ability and motivation – the best case being a runner with lots of ability and great motivation.  There is actually not much a coach can do to ‘coach up’ natural, god-given ability.  A good coach can and will support and motivate runners, but if you don’t have any problem staying motivated, what’s the benefit of having a coach?

   There is a big gap between the basic principles at the start of this posting and determining what an individual runner should be doing this week to move him closer to his running goal.  A coach can help.  You can certainly read a good book like “Daniels’ Running Formula” and build your own training plan.  But I’ve quoted Amby Burfoot in an earlier posting (“ … if you want to know the truth, workouts are like peanuts at a baseball game. Everyone's got them, and they're pretty much the same.  Salazar's workouts are no more magical than those doled out by Terence Mahon, Greg McMillan, the Hanson brothers, the supposedly high-concept Italians, or the low-concept, high-success coaches in Kenya and Ethiopia.").  A coach can help a runner distill all the available guidance into best mix of training activities - the optimal mix of exercise intensity and duration and recovery.     

   When discussing running form, I mentioned the problem with not being able to accurately ‘see’ what your own running form really is – a coach’s observations (or good video) can really help.

   Perhaps the best reason to find a coach is that there is a learning curve associated with running.  Ultimately, I am working with a ‘sample population’ of one person, me – a coach will have had the benefit of working with a lot of runners for years, and will have already learned lessons and (realized a lot of his mistakes) that I learn and make every training cycle.

Q: How should I train for _______ (distance or race)?

   Ask your coach.

on plan ...

Running is going well, I'm on my plan.  The weather has been great.

No real injuries.  I had to wash my Cascadia's after a muddy run two weeks ago, and ran in some old 'road' shoes while they dried out.  Switching back to the Cascadias, I did a long run and was thinking they had a bit more room in the toe box then I remembered.  I realized after the run that I had forgot to put the insoles back in after washing them!  Doh!  The balls of my feet are still a little tender.

Here is a good running video to take a look at - it gives some insight into Alberto Salazar, an old runner I admire.  He's also the only american man to have won Comrades (in 1994) ...

Runner's World video (Alberto Salazar)