Training blog August 21 to 27, 2017 moving forward

Monday Off- drove back from Cincinnati.  Left about 4am actually made great time and could have snuck in a run on the home end in the late evening but I had made the decision to  take an off day already and just went for a 2 mile walk to try and uncurl the body.

Tuesday AM road 10+ with Pat Rich around Topsfield, nice loop, hot day,1:07:28, did some light strides after.

Wednesday AM At Phillips, 3 mile warm up, drills, strides, 200m in 31, 600 jog.  Then 4x800 meters run HARD and stupid, ie out very fast and rig up and die.  This is to drive the latic acid as high as possible with each rep rather than run them as fast as you can.  Basically I ran each of them like I would have in high school.  Out in 30/31 for 200, there was a decent wind in the 2nd 200 so I'd be 64/65 at the 400 and then just a war from there to the finish.  After each 800 I would take 2 minutes recovery and then do 4x10 hill sprints.  My hill was at best 30m so I added on a bit of flat at the bottom and top, jog down recoveries after each hill repeat.  After the last rep I would take 2 minutes before the next 800.  This obviously included the jog back down the hill and over to the start on the track.  I ran the 800's in 2:13.6, 2:14.0, 2:14.7, 2:15.0.  After the last 2minute recovery I did 4x500m where I would run the first 200m in 33 then go straight into bounding the next 100m then I would TRY to run the last 200 meters in 33- I think the closest I came was low 34 on the last one.  The bounding 100 took me about 25 seconds each time. I would take 4 minutes recovery with about 200 meters of walking after each. I did them in 1:34, 1:31, 1:29, 1:28.  I was then completely running late so I did a 1k cool down.  This is a base phase mas lass workout from Canova's stuff for 3k to 10k running.  This is the first time I have done it and it was VERY intense.  I was almost afraid to start the last 800 because it was getting so painful...
PM road 5 with Uta, too hot for her so we were slow, 36:47

Thursday AM road 10, 1:08:16, very sore and tired
PM road 5 with Uta, very sore still, 36:15

Friday AM road 10, 1:06:40, tired but not sore.
PM road 5 with Uta, 34:46, tired.

Saturday AM road 5 with Uta, 34:39
PM At Chelmsford rail trail, 3 warm up, drills, strides, 5x2miles- with 3 minutes of drills for recovery.  The rail trail is very flat but it is sort of false flat uphill one way and false flat down hill on the other.  Not enough so most people would notice but if you put a tennis ball down it would roll.  Reps 1,3,5 were 'down'.  Reps 2 and 4 were 'up'.   I ran 10:11, 10:19, 10:04, 10:18, 10:00.   This actually felt really good. 4.5 mile cool down- was doing 2 miles but toward the end I ran into Kara Haas and really wanted to see how she was progressing on a recent injury and so I ran with her.  Now I had breakfast after the first run but because this was an early PM workout I hadn't had lunch.  By the end of the extended cool down I was pretty well tuckered out as the whole thing was over 18 miles and drills burn a lot more energy than their mileage indicates.  Plus that was 10 miles of work in 50:52.

Sunday AM road 10.1, 1:07:57.
PM road 5 with Uta, 35:13

Summary   95 or so miles for the week.  Two very good workouts.  After Rye harbor I couldn't help but be worried.  I didn't have very high expectations but I thought my training had been moving in the right direction and I was very disappointed to run that poorly.  As I have pointed out a number of times base work should improve your workouts much more than your racing but to be over 32 minutes was still pretty crushing.  That starts to look like a poor tempo run rather than a race.  If I had gone out hard and died I would have paid little or no mind to that as when you go out too hard it is impossible to gauge what you could have accomplished with smarter running other than to know you are not fit enough to go out at the pace you went out in.  However I had run quite sensibly and still really struggled.  I mentioned in last weeks blog that it sort of hit me on my tired warm up for the hill repeats that I felt anemic and that anemia could be a real good explanation for why a 32 minute 10k hurt that bad.  I don't want to disparage a 32 minute 10k too much it is just that after college I have only run that slow a handful of times. Once in 2008 on super tough course with Anemia.  Maybe once in '05 or '06 on the same very tough course with very tough heat as well.  After that I ran like 40 minutes for a trail/mountain race in Vermont during mud season and I ran 32 mid at Lone Gull last fall off of some light jogging and yoga coming back from that stress fracture.  All this is to say that since about 2004 even when I have run bad over 10k I have generally been able to salvage a 31.  Anyway warming up for Saturday's workout I felt quite tired and it seemed like either I hadn't eaten enough or I was feeling anemic.  I have been taking iron since Monday and been eating a good bit of red meat as well. As soon as I hit the first split on the rail trail at 1/5 of a mile in 5:00 pace and feeling good I knew I had been right about the iron being low.  I felt great.  In fact in the last quarter mile of the first 2 mile rep I was feeling so good I couldn't resist checking my heart rate, 118.  Now I'm assuming it was up higher than that for much of the rep but even to settle down like that late in a rep I must have been pretty relaxed.  I was still worried about the full workout.  Often with longer aerobic workouts when my iron has been low and is just starting to come back I'll start the session feeling normal again and then somewhere midway the wheels just come off but today was great all the way through.  I never really pushed, though I will admit my legs were tired on the last rep.   This is really good news as I really want to slip under 31 at Cow Harbor in a 3 or 4 weeks and 32, even though it was solo, did not make that look to likely.  This weeks workouts and the 15:10 solo a couple weeks ago line up with being ready to do that by the middle of next month so I'm happy that the poor time at Rye seems to have been a blip.
  This week school starts up again so I have a weird schedule.  I think I have an open house Tuesday night and I'm not going to be ready to workout again until Tuesday so I'm going to have to try and sneak in workout from school and try and track down a shower there before parents start arriving. I have also become quite inefficient with my time as summer went on and with the start of the school year I won't have anytime to waste if I'm going to get everything done so the first week is always a rough transition.

Training Blog July 24 to 30, 2017 Getting Stronger...

Monday noon road 10 miles 1:08:34, tired, spent most of the day catching up on yard work and errands...

Tuesday AM 5.3 miles with Melissa and Uta, 39:25
PM at rail trail 3 mile warm up, drills and strides, 4x2 miles with 2mins of drills recovery, 10:22, 10:27, 10:15, 10:09.  Actually started to feel good by the last one which was nice.  Getting a bit of endurance back.  2.2 mile cool down

Wednesday AM 7.1 miles in 54:24, pacing Melissa through her 2x2 mile, in 12:40 and 1xhalf mile in 2:55 workout.  We also did some drills and strides during this.
PM 8.1 miles on roads solo, 55:27

Thursday AM at Phillips Academy, 3 warm up, drills, strides, 10x300m with 300m jog, ie full recovery and then some.  This is muscular work so the first one basically felt the same as the last one except I had bit of fatigue in the quads and calves, no acid burn etc...  Averaged 46.9 with fastest at 46.5 and slowest at 47.3, jogs were very slow, mostly over 2mins.  3 mile cool down

Full disclosure I went fishing instead of doing a second run, pretty lazy choice but it was a really nice afternoon and I'm trying not to go too crazy with the mileage...

Friday AM road 10 mile solo, 1:05:37
PM 5.1 miles around Phillips fields with Melissa and Uta, 42:11

Saturday PM 3 warm up, drills and strides, 5x mile on rail trail, 5:21, 5:08, 4:59, 4:52, 4:50.  Goal was to be in the 5:20's then 10's then 0's then 50's then 40's.  Given my current 5k fitness, ~15:00 that was a fairly big ask and by being on the low end of the first 4 reps I pretty much screwed myself.   The first 3 actually felt pretty good I was even having delusions of grandeur that I would bust out a 6th rep in the 4:30's but by the half mile in the 4th rep the reality that running much under 5min pace is pretty hard for me right now settled in.  Rests were 2mins with drills. Actually the rests were exactly 1:59 for every one which I find a little funny, I'm not usually that consistent. 3 mile cool down.

Sunday AM with Melissa on rail trail.  This was here long run/workout.  So we ran 11.6 miles with no stopping 3 miles easy as warm up, then 5 miles of 3/4 in the 4:30's, 6:0's pace, with 1/4 slow jog recovery then 3.6 miles easy at the end, 1:30:16 for the whole thing.
PM road 8.2 solo, 55:19, saw a deer very close up, about 15 feet.  Finished off a good week for wildlife.

Summary 102 miles for the week, three nice workouts.  I'm starting to get to a point where I can see my body wanting to get back to 'normal' paces and abilities.  I'm not there yet but hopefully over the next few weeks it will happen.
  The weather this week was crazy nice, probably the nicest whole week I have ever trained through in a Massachusetts summer.  Generally we have very high humidity and very high dew points so that even 80 degrees tends to feel like a death march.  This week not only was the temp in the high seventies and low 80's but it felt cool.  It really was a nice break.  It looks like the humidity is going to be back this week so we'll see how I handle it.  Generally it doesn't bother me too much for a single session but it grinds me down and I have to start putting in more rest days.  We are however coming into August and often the mornings and evenings are cooler in August giving a chance to work around the heat more effectively.
  This week I'm going to do a couple of workouts and a 5k race.  I'm planning on trying to start racing into shape over the course of this month.  Just hopping into some local races and running hard.  I'm ready for that.  I still don't know for sure what I'll be focused on for the fall, that is going to depend on how the next 6 to 8 weeks go but it is time to start trying to hurt a little for real.
  This weekends race will be the John Leclerc Memorial Wind Turbine 5k in my hometown of Templeton, MA.  It raises money for cross country program which was a power house for many years but fell on hard times right after I graduated with the addition of a lot of other sports, Narragansett is a tiny school.  From the programs inception in 1963 through to 1998 they never had a losing season and won state titles in 1966, 1979, 1983, 1995, 1996.  The titles in '79 and '83 were when Massachusetts didn't have divisions so that was beating schools that were 10 to 20 times larger. Since then they have struggled.
   My expectations are pretty low.  I'm going to aim for 15:00 but I'm not feeling confident that I'll be able to run that.

'back in the day' front page of the local paper from the first state champion team I was on at Narragansett

My Current Training Plan

  This is an outline of my training schedule for the near future.  Basically until I get really fit or come up with a goal race.  This is a base phase or general fitness schedule.  This is not targeting racing well.  It is targeting improving my overall fitness.  It isn't too different from good half marathon specific training but I'm not doing it with a specific half marathon race in mind though I will likely run the New Bedford Half Marathon in March as well as the Jones 10 mile in February and a 15k in early April.

  This schedule is designed around four main goals.  In no order to return general aerobic fitness, to improve lactic threshold, to improve muscular power and efficiency, and to touch on every major training speed and effort in each two week cycle.  The workouts I selected were selected based on two main criteria.  First did they accomplish the training goal and second they had to work with the training resources and limitations I have currently.  Ie, I need to be able to do them without a track, in a New England winter, and in the dark as 11 out of 13 of my runs each week from early November until March are generally run in the dark.

  I like repeating a similar or even identical micro cycle a few times through a phase of training.  Partially because I can gauge how my body is progressing but also I'm just a very habital person who if I didn't give a damn about performance would probably do the same double every day over the same routes at the same effort. I like what I'm doing to be a bit mindless so I can focus entirely on doing it well.  Or at least that is the excuse I give myself.  

  Without further B.S. here is the schedule

For both week one and two I do an easy morning run, almost always 4 miles because of time constraints, Monday through Saturday.  On Saturday the run maybe done as the afternoon session and it maybe longer.

Week 1

Monday in the afternoon I'll do 10 miles at a steady effort- generally between 6:00 and 7:00 per mile, depending on conditions and how I'm feeling.  This is a fairly hilly run as there are a lot of hills around here.  After the run I'll do either Squats, dead lifts or box jumps.  The run is for recovery and general aerobic fitness, the exercises are for range of motion in my hips, power in my ankles and glutes and to increase strength as a means of increasing efficiency.

Tuesday in the afternoon I'll do a Mona Fartlek (http://nateruns.blogspot.com/2015/01/monaghetti-fartlek.html) This is most importantly a bounce threshold or alternation session.  I would actually prefer to do Aussie quarters, (http://nateruns.blogspot.com/2014/12/workout-wednesday-australian-quarters.html) right now to be able to focus on specific paces but with no indoor track option that isn't happening.  The secondary focus of this session is to touch on a bunch of quicker paces 5k down to perhaps mile.   After this session I'll do either squats, deadlifts, or box jumps.

Wednesday in the afternoon I'll do a medium long run.  Right now that is only 12 miles I'll build it up to 16, I should go up to 18 but frankly 18 miles after work in the dark is a tall order particularly when sandwiched between two workout days. Physiologically this workout is for basic aerobic fitness and there is a time on the feet efficiency training effect for the leg muscles but for me it is much more plainly about building up my ability to run longer without coordination problems.  Finally you guessed it I plan on doing either squats, deadlifts or box jumps after the run.

Thursday in the afternoon, short hill sprints- max effort very short, 10 seconds give or take. I'd prefer to keep with the 100's and the like but without a track that isn't an option and I don't have much for flat areas with good footing so short hills it is.  To be honest as a general rule I like short hills better anyway but right now I want to focus on my form on the flat so I'm sorry to lose that.  These are obviously a muscular exercise though they do also help increase the stroke volume of the heart.  I will start the winter only doing about 10 of these but I'll increase that by 2 or 3 sprints each time.  In the past I have done 30 or more sprints though I doubt I'll get to that many.  It will be key for me to keep good form on these which is a struggle for me on hills but I have been improving so hopefully it will be good practice. squats, deadlifts or box jumps after

Friday 10 miles, same as Monday.

Saturday 4x2 miles at Half marathon pace. with 3min recoveries with drills.  This is for lactate threshold and muscular endurance at speed.  The drills help with the latter and with improving form.

Sunday Long run- I'm around 13/14 miles now will try to push out to 20 to 22.  Long run is for basic aerobic fitness, efficiency and muscular endurance. I may do squats, deadlifts or box jumps after this.

Week 2

Monday same as last week

Tuesday 3 mile tempo, half marathon to marathon pace, 10x30 second hill repeats at a good effort, but not max, focus on form putting weight of stride on glutes and quads. Try not to hunch at shoulders. This is for lactate threshold and muscular power and efficiency.

Wednesday same as last week

Thursday 6 x mile at 10k pace with 2 to 3 mins recovery with drills- bit of threshold, lot of muscular efficiency and muscular endurance.

Friday same as last week

Saturday 20 to 30 x 20 second sprints fartlek style, meaning I'll just put them in on a run where the footing looks good. Full recovery.  This is for muscular efficiency and endurance.  Though it is also good for stroke volume but not as good as the hills.

Sunday fundamental tempo run in the 5:25 to 5:50 per mile range over rolling hills.  Hopefully as the coordination improves I'll be able to increase the volume on these.  This is my single favorite type of workout.  I have since beginning the form work I have been able to to up to 22 miles like this but only on soft surfaces.  So on the road I've been stuck in the 12 to 15 mile range on a good day.  I'm going to start in the 9 mile range and try to build up.  I may play with stopping for drills and continuing on in an attempt to 'teach' the body to hold the form that doesn't lead to coordination issues.  This is for aerobic fitness.  Sessions like this can lead to huge jumps in general aerobic fitness as well as your threshold.  I actually don't know exactly why perhaps it is simply that it is an under trained area or it is that threshold is impacted well by not going over it but by testing it from below.  I can tell you that these workouts changed my life as such for me I simply believe in them as an article of faith.  Also as I mentioned I love doing them.  Running for a long time at a quick pace is to me the single most enjoyable training experience.

Odds and Ends

 In weeks that I race I'll just drop the hard effort from the weekend.  If I race on a Sunday I'll skip the long run as well.  I'm planning a few races over the winter.  A 5k on the 1st.  A 5 mile, a 10 mile and a track 5k in February and a half marathon in March.  Hopefully by that point the winter is coming to an end and I'm getting fit and I'll be able to move onto a new training program with more specific goals.