Author: Miranda

Well thank goodness. I was just getting sick. That was why I was feeling so tired. Two days and three nights of low-grade fevers, aching legs, headache and fatigue. Then … nothing. My immune system seems to have won.

So, this is my bike trainer. I got it last summer, used, for $150. It’s a CycleOps Fluid2, which attaches to my rear axle and has a flywheel with silicon-fluid resistance. It’s amazingly quiet. I can watch episodes of The Wire on my little MacBook and can easily hear everything through its wee speaker. It has a really natural feel to it. As I increase my pedalling speed, the resistance goes up, just like wind resistance would go up in real life. It is stable, and smooth, and doesn’t slip.

What I can’t do is ride on Zwift, which I had really wanted to do. It’s a virtual social riding app which plops a Virtual You into various simulated cycling courses, with the scenery whipping by you in immersive virtual reality. Sadly they don’t yet support 650C wheels, the size that I have on my slightly smaller than typical road bike. And they don’t account for the aberrant decrease in viscosity of fluid silicon as it nears the 0ºC temperature of a Canadian garage in the depth of winter. That’s a double-whammy that means is that the calculations they do in order to determine my virtual speed and virtual power err on the side of the exceedingly generous. Because of the social nature of Zwift, the result is that when I drop my avatar into the environment — as I did during my free trial — Virtual Me begins merrily whupping all the other riders on the course. Which a few of them don’t take kindly to.

I changed my username to Sorry 650C-Tire. But people still didn’t get it; a few of them still nagged at me to “fix my power settings,” which unfortunately there was no way I could do. It would require some considerable explanation about my set-up to make them understand why, not something I wanted to have to do repeatedly in a tiny chat box, during a ride. And I couldn’t ignore the comments and just enjoy myself despite the snark, because I hate having negative vibes aimed at me. Too bad, because I really really loved the app.

A $600 power meter would fix the problem. Or a $1300 smart trainer like the Wahoo Kickr. But, well, no, not happening. Someday Zwift plans to build wheel size options into their app.

Until then, it’s okay. If I was riding long hard distances five days a week in my garage I’d be desperate for it. But I do at most three short easy rides a week, and that’ll be dropping as my running mileage increases. So I watch episodes of The Wire and I’m fine.

It’s a good thing, supposedly. At least in this case. But I’m feeling it today!

The idea is to train your body for endurance without doing outrageously long or difficult workouts, but by simply doing them frequently enough that your body doesn’t recover completely in between. By pushing your body to do more work before it is thoroughly recovered, you are encouraging it to adapt to these new, tougher conditions.

In preparing for a marathon I need structure. This time I’m basing my structure on Hansons Marathon Method, from the book of the same name. I’m now 5 out of 18 weeks through the program. The first 5 weeks are about building a base and acclimatizing to daily running. The next phase adds speed intervals and tempo runs, as well as longer easy runs. The third phase changes speed workouts for strength-based runs, and the final 10 days are of course a taper to the race.

Having finished the first phase the meat of the program hasn’t really begun. I’m doing pretty well; I find the easy runs easy and I am not experiencing any over-use symptoms from running every day. But because I’m combining the six prescribed runs a week with three bike rides a week on my trainer, I’m starting to experience the fatigue.

There’s no doubt I’m going to have to give up the bike rides soon. The alternative would be to use them as substitutes for runs rather than additional workouts, but except for the fact that I can watch Homeland episodes on the trainer, I prefer running.

So far, haha.

I took the plunge the other day and signed up for a marathon at the beginning of May. The idea had been rattling around in the back of my head for at few months and I didn’t feel like I was getting any closer to committing, but then on a whim I clicked on an email link and within a couple of minutes that was that. Gulp.

The last time I wrote about running, I was pondering relatively low-mileage marathon training. I’ve kind of shifted my thinking since then. While I’m going to keep my Weekly Long Runs fairly short, maxing out at 16 miles, I’ve been getting into the habit of running (or alternatively riding my bike trainer) every day. I’m finding that it’s easier to start my day asking myself when I will do a workout, rather than whether I will do one, and if so, when. As the length of my daily runs builds from 5-7 km to ~ 8-20 km, that means my weekly mileage is going to end up being pretty typical for marathon training, peaking at around 90 km in March/April.

Here is where I’m running four days a week. It’s a perfect route, flat as a pancake near the lake with a bit of elevation loss and gain getting to and from the green-dot start point (which happens to be where Fiona’s dance studio is). It’s about half well-trodden footpaths and half roads-and-sidewalks,. The lake tends to moderate the temperature, helping to melt snow fairly quickly even along the footpaths. A single circuit along the red route totals ~7 km, but by using the blue section I can create perfect 2.0k loops in the park to add to that. Until the snow is gone from the rail-trail, likely in early April, this will be my main Nelson stomping ground.

I’m home in New Denver on the weekends when I do my longer runs. I’ll have to run on the highways there until spring. “Highways” needs to be interpreted in a Kootenays context, of course: they’re two-lane winding mountain roads that are very scenic and little-travelled. I shouldn’t complain. But they’re full of hills, more open and much less interesting than trails, and there are no options for loops: always just out-and-back. So I’ll be very happy when the trails open up in the spring.

I’m vaguely thinking about running a marathon again this year. Maybe the one I ran five years ago in Vancouver. It was a nice route, and by running the same event I’ll be able to see how my fitness is holding up over the years. Also I have a kid attending school nearby and another one who is going to be performing the Brahms violin concerto with an orchestra in the area around that time.

Right now I’m just trying to figure out if I have the time and (more to the point) the energy and motivation to enjoy the amount of training I’ll have to do? I decided to mock up a schedule training program for November and December to test the waters. I created a schedule of about four runs and one or two cross-training workouts a week. Nothing too demanding in terms of length or speed, just an attempt at consistency. I figured if I ended up feeling tired or unmotivated with the near-daily workouts, that would be a sign not to build to a marathon. But so far it’s going well. My no-workout days feel weirdly empty, and I’m enjoying my runs a lot despite the gross November weather and the early sunsets.

A typical marathon training program has runners build the length of a weekly Long Slow Run from 10 to 32 km over about 20 weeks with a bunch of easier shorter runs filling out the week. A few of those shorter runs will involve intervals or speed, but a lot of them are just “easy 5k’s” or whatever.

But I know some things about myself and about the science behind distance running that are going to lead me to diverge from that typical plan. First, I’m not a beginner, so I’m starting at a higher mileage level, about 30k per week. Next, I know that I am one of those people who can push my distance pretty easily at any point. For instance I ran a really solid trail 25k in 2012, having not run anything longer than 8k in the preceding several months. I have little doubt I could finish a marathon tomorrow if I really needed to so I don’t need high mileage to build my confidence. Those really long training runs tend to mess with my running mojo when they come week after week. So I’ll avoid most of them.

I also know that slow runs between 60 and 90 minutes train your body to burn fat, the endurance fuel, and that there’s a law of diminishing returns on this count for runs of longer than 90 minutes. Not to mention an increase in the risk of injury. So I plan to do two or more slow runs in this middle range per week (or even, occasionally, the same day), rather than one massive run on the weekend.

And I know that my old stand-by workout, the 5k medium-speed run, is pretty useless from a training standpoint. It may be good for my state of mind, and it works the kinks out and helps burn calories, but from a training standpoint I’d be better off doing short runs of intervals or hills, or cross-training, or even taking a day off. So I’ll try to minimize those non-specific purpose-less runs.

Weird thing I noticed this week: my resting heart rate is really low. I got a new HR monitor after not having a functional one for a couple of years, to help me maintain my run intensity in the “low” range during endurance runs. I was lying down messing with my phone just before heading out for a run today and happened to glance at my Vivoactive watch. My HR was 46. I’ve never seen a reading lower than 50 in the past, more often around 52. Maybe my heart is just unwinding and will eventually slow to zero and that will be that? Ha, just kidding. I’ll take it as a sign of improved general fitness. Who knows why or how, but I’ll take it.

My six-year runniversary, celebrating the start of my informal middle-aged commitment to running, slipped by without me noticing. When I began running at age 46, I was really excited by the whole endeavour. I enjoyed the milestones, I liked noticing my progress in mileage, speed and endurance. I ran a few races, I had a few injuries, I logged everything using apps and spreadsheets and loved watching the graphs I could generate. I participated in online and in-person running communities as much as I could.

And then for a couple of years I swung the other way. I ditched all the fit-tech, the races, the goals, the groups, the tracking. I just wanted to enjoy the process of running by myself, the zen of being out there, not focusing on the numbers my activity would generate.

Now my pendulum has swung back. I’ve just replaced my old Garmin Forerunner 305 with a swanky Garmin Vivoactive. It has some smartwatch features that work with my phone, is small enough and comfortable enough to wear as a day-to-day watch, does accelerometer-based fitness tracking, talks to a heart-rate strap, and most importantly to me has a GPS chip in it that tracks all my self-powered outdoor travel. It does the tracking without the help of my phone, and because it’s waterproof I can take it pretty much anywhere without any worries.

I’m not training or setting any goals at this point. But I enjoy seeing my numbers improve, particularly since I’ve just introduced regular road-biking into my life and that’s changing my fitness. Cranking up the steeper sections of the mountain roads here several times a week is building my muscle mass, for sure.

I do have a chronic running-related injury in my left ankle/heel stretching back three or four years now. It has defied all my efforts at repair and rehabilitation. It’s always there, but if I limit myself to at most 3 or 4 times a week, totalling 20-25k maximum, mostly at a 6:00/km pace or slower it stays under control. So the cycling, which doesn’t bother the heel at all, is filling in the rest of my exercise week really nicely. I can alternate an easy run with what are for me harder days of hill-climbing on the bike. This works beautifully and will continue to be a great way to stay in shape at least as long as the snow is off the roads.

Now that I’m both running and biking regularly, there’s a niggling voice in the back of my head muttering “tri, tri, tri.” But I am not a good swimmer, nor do I much like swimming,. And the lake is too cold 10 months a year. And the pool in Nelson is about to be closed for months for asbestos removal. And, and, and… So I’d be surprised if a triathlon ever happened for me but I suppose you never know.

Here’s a cool result from a nifty if fairly crude tool. The worldfitnesslevel.org calculator quizzes you about your age, gender, size, weight, resting and maximal heart rates and exercise habits, and gives you a “fitness age.” I come out looking pretty healthy these days.

Just for fun I repeated the quiz with what I think were my stats just before I started running. I came up with a fitness age of 40 vs. a chronological age of 45. I’ve definitely widened the gap since then!

Lately my life seems to go like this: Cooking, cleaning, computering, RUN! Cooking, cleaning, computering, RIDE! And repeat. Whatever. It works.