Tuesday 100113

6.6 miles easy slog.

Boston is clearly a running town.  This AM as I headed down the Charles I counted (yes I counted) 174 runners as headed up river.  This was before 7AM.  Men, women, fat ones, skinny ones, young ones, old ones, all shades of brown that we are, people in groups, folks solo, some in tank tops, some in near winter gear, one in a snorkel jacket, slow ones, fast ones, people moving more up and down and side to side than forward, people doing workouts, some with watches, more often than not with some sort of ear buds in, minimalist shoes, and everything else (not a single barefoot runner now that I think of it), and on and on and on.  More runners out training than a lot of races I jump into.

Back to CO today.  Looking forward to a few weeks of being home.

On the bird back from Beantown, I caught up on a bunch of back burnered reads.  Mostly 100 mile race reports I had shelved for when I had more time for ‘em, but also some work related blogs.  A few other reads included this Cornfield article, Friel’s testament on a LCHF diet change (very similar to Noakes’ take), and Friel’s take on intensity being more important than endurance training as we age if we don’t want to stave off a decline in performance (arguably I guess a hidden argument in that article is that part of the reason why older guys seem to continue to perform well in the longer stuff is because there is not a similar to VO2  max depreciation in running economy as we age). 

Just before my son was born, I did a 5k in Boulder.  It was the Thanksgiving Day 5k put on by the BRR.  If memory serves me right, it might have been the only road race that I won in Boulder.  I ran 16:15 – not my fastest time, but not too far off it either.  In the week’s leading up to it, I did two key workouts that I remember well, and indicated I was fit.  The first was 6 x 800, where I averaged 2:29 with 1 minute rest.  I remember this part because Marty K came out for the workout with his young son.  It was cold and his son thought hanging out at the track to watch a guy run around in circles was stupid (smart kid).

I liked the 6 x 800 workout because it was a “predictor” workout, or one of those workouts that helped you dial in pace and predict an expected performance.  Owen Anderson, who had been a writer for RW, had his own publication at the time and he had tossed this one out there.  The goal was to run the 800s at 3-5 seconds faster than you would in a race.  For me to run a 16 minute 5k, I would need to run 5:07 miles or 2:33 per half mile.  800s at 2:29 was right near the mark of where I wanted to be.  I decided to give this workout another crack but rather than trying to crank them out faster, I elected to switch up the rest and did them with 45 seconds as the interval.  I did these averaging just over 2:30.  I felt ready.

It worked out.  A group of us ran the first mile in about 5:15 (I can go look this up) and that felt comfortable.  With more than a handful of guys in the mix I decided to push the second mile and that broke it up pretty quick.  It was actually less of a push and really more holding the pace.  It felt like a push though as I went from comfortable at a mile to working at a mile and a half, and folks dropped off.   I probably faltered in 2 to 2 and half mile stretch but was able to smell the line enough in the last kilo that I erased that. 

That was 13 years ago.  I remember this because of the novelty of a Boulder victory on Thanksgiving day and my son was born four days later.  I don’t bring all that up to stroll down memory lane but instead to toss out the baseline of where I was in 2000 – or almost exactly 13 years ago.  16:15 or 975 seconds.  Or what Daniels calculates as a 63.4 VDOT.  Fast forward to today.  Last week in Broomstock I ran 18:30 or 135 seconds slower (1110 seconds).  Or 12.2 percent slower (975/1110).  Vdot puts that at 54.6.  That calculation (54.6/63.4) nets a 13.9 percent decline.   In either case, it is about a decline a percent per year.  I am going to go back and look for some other baselines and to graph this and see if I can better see where the decline occurred more or less aggressively.  That comes out to about a percentage point a year.  Friel’s article, "Aging:  An Excuse?” puts my percentage point decline a year as smack dab into the middle of where he would say an aging athlete still has a lot potential to improve versus staving off age well.

If I intend to get my wheels back for XC, there are things I need to do that can be considered lessons from my past, and there are things I should in the future – but I am really not sure if I am disciplined enough to do them.  First, from the past … clearly “getting after it” regularly is one of those things.  In those years ago had regular weekly track sessions, and Sunday sufferfest of the “tempo” run.  I ran with the Boulder Road Runners frequently then and the Sunday run would start at the Bank of Boulder.  We’d do an easy three miles (7:30 pace or better I guess) and then we’d do tempo for three miles.  In reality, these were not tempo runs – they were races or time trials.  The group would hit the Diagonal Highway and the starter’s pistol would be heard with the “beep” of Timex watches.  3 miles later everyone was grabbing their knees gasping for air post surges, and kicks.  I’d regularly get my ass kicked on those Sunday runs.  Andrew Crook, Barry Logan, Paige Bodine, Marc Werner … those guys would ease away from me.  Eventually I’d start to get up on them … over TWO years.  Perhaps the slightly less obvious lesson in this training is that it was also doing harder work with others than I could do on my own. 

Also, my mileage at that time came in anywhere from 40-80 a week, but probably most likely to be 55 miles.  Long runs were rarely over 12 miles.  I recall doing a few runs of 15-16 miles and finding them both generally boring and tough.  I was not geared with a GPS then, so I can’t quote my exact pace, but they were more likely to be nudging the line for as long as I could (and sometimes blowing up) versus them being a slog from the door.   I recall a training strategy was specifically a track workout on Tuesday, something else on Thursday (be it another track workout, short stuff, a hill workout, or a more true tempo run), and then the Sunday run.  Some folks would actually taper for the Sunday run but I had some sort of stubborn pride that kept me from that.  Everything else was an easy hour for the day.  Done.

I had some less than stellar seasons in the early 2000s and was slightly .  A friend of mine convinced me to do Imogene in 2005.  As a prep to that, we did the now gone Mount Saxon run in Georgetown.  My running had been shifting over those years anyway, including less runs with other people, less structure training, and slowly increasing the mileage.   Mount Saxon, and then Imogene, got me pretty motivated to check out more of the trail scene.  Runs got longer.  I did PPA as a prep for the 2006 Imogene race.  As it turned out I became crazy enamored with Pikes and disgruntled with Imogene (they changed the course that year because of snow) (although I finished fourth in the race there that year).  The rest starts to get documented here on the blog (it fired up in 2007).  It was not an overnight shift, and arguably, not a 180 shift on any given day – but I think if you looked at what a quarter of training and racing looked like for me in 2000 versus 2013, they would appear significantly different.  So what?  Well, in light of my current goals, the Friel articles, and that I have put in a decade of volume-ish stuff the lessons from the past are:

1.)  get after it regularly (2-3 times a week). 
2.)  worry less about mileage and focus more on appropriate execution of key workouts.
3.)  run with other people if you want to get more out of those key workouts.
4.)  results will come but it takes a good number of efforts being put into the bank.

Some folks would look at that and say, “well you need to do what is fun.”  This is fun.  Training for Pikes was fun (and I am sure will be again).  Training for XC is fun.  Training for a mile race is fun.  Throwing down with folks regularly is fun.  I know that is not everyone’s definition of fun.  No sweat with that. 

Generally, I think I have started to make the shift back on doing the regular workouts.  Admittedly, I am still mentally tied to some mileage numbers.  I think this is less about getting some number a week and more about the mental habit of having my space to run everyday for an hour or 90 minutes.  I think my strategy on it this is that I need to look to cut or cap runs the day before workouts to be more focused on assuring their success.  Getting out with other people is more of a challenge then it was, but that is starting to better round out.

Tying it back to Friel is getting that focus on intensity.  I know I can go out tomorrow and do a 20 miler in 2 and half hours.  That provides a nice little Strava readout, gets compliments on killing it and does something to forward or maintain some fitness.  But it is not specific to the fitness I want to advance right now, and is not the best spend of the training buck.  Much more scary, and hard to execute for me is 5 x 1000 meters where I need to hit each in 3:25.  In part, it is because it is 3:25.  That looks discouraging when it use to be 2:55.  So I am more incline to avoid that and do what I can. 

The lessons learned that I have NOT applied and SHOULD apply to further make improvement gains are obvious but are the tougher ones for me to pull off.  They mean new habits, which is to some extent breaking old ones.  These are really two things.

1.)  losing some weight
2.)  getting in the gym more

The first really means changing how I approach food … either by changing my caloric input significantly (which my mileage consistency seems to help hide anyway), or, as Friel and Noakes propose – going more LCHF.  I will be frank here:  I don’t want to do either.  I like my breads, I like my sugared coffee, I like my pastas, I like my beer, I like going for seconds, I like fruits, and I like thinking that because I run I can eat whatever I want.  Burn the engine hot enough and you can use any fuel.  That adage probably worked better for me in years starting with a 19xx than 20xx.  I need to try but I am not sure how successful I will be.  In other words, I question my commitment on that.

The second I have some familiarity with.  I can do it.  I have done it in the past.  And frankly, I know that I am weak enough in enough places in this regard that it won’t take me two hours a day to do it.  I just tend to not do it.  In other words, I question my commitment on that as well, but not as much as the diet thing. 

Long post I know but that is what you get with a four hourish flight back from Boston with Radiohead going in the earbuds.  More to come, at least how I am tracking to these ideas.  I think it will be fun.