Category: Running

The stars aligned, and I had a really good race. In my last post I said “I would be happy, now four years older and well on the far side of 50, if I could better my 4:24 time from 2012. I think that’s definitely possible, and if all goes well I could cut quite a bit off.” I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t knocked ten minutes off. So 4:14 was my primary goal.

My secret goal was sub-4:00, partly because it’s a round number just begging to be cracked, but partly because for my gender and age-group, it’s the Boston Marathon Qualifying Standard (BQ). When I slotted myself into the Hansons Marathon Method, I picked the training paces that targeted a 4:00 marathon. I completed all the training according to plan, so if the Hanson brothers were right, I knew I had what I needed to beat four hours. If things went well on the day.

And they did. I’d been sick with a sinus cold for almost a week beforehand but I woke up Sunday feeling better. The weather was forecast hot but the breeze off the ocean kept the heat from being too much. I hydrated adequately but not too much; I didn’t have to use the porta-potties along the way. I wore the right clothes. My new shoes didn’t give me blisters. The double-salted licorice Fiona had given me for my birthday replaced the salt that began caking my cheekbones and shoulders as I sweated.

So I ended up with a net time of 3:51:13, cutting 33 minutes off my previous time, and qualifying handily for Boston. When people started asking me if I would be going to Boston, I said no, having never even considered it. I had really just wanted the accomplishment of knowing I had reached that standard.

But then I remembered that Erin had qualified for Boston on violin and would therefore be living there, potentially saving me a $400/night hotel room. And Fiona and I had already been talking about how we really wanted to go and visit her in order to see the city. So … maybe…

T minus ten days to the marathon. Because the training schedule I’m using has a short taper, and I further offset it by two days to fit my weekly schedule, I still technically have one more tempo run to do. But I’m going to scale back the intensity on it. Basically the hard work is done, and I mostly did the program as prescribed.

I re-installed Rubitrack on my MacBook to get some pretty graphs. The bars below show my weekly mileage (I’m only half done this week, so the right-hand bar will be bigger by Sunday). You can see my calf-strain break in the second week of March. The biggest week was 94 km, with most of my recent weeks ending up somewhere around 75 km. That’s not a huge amount of mileage for a marathon, partly because this plan included only four runs longer than 20 km. But what you can see very clearly from the colours is how much of my running is being done at higher intensities: yellow, orange, tomato and red. Those colours are all faster than my target race pace. The greens and blues are slower than my target race pace. Once you factor in that my warm-ups and cool-downs all lie in the blue/green range, it’s clear that there isn’t that much easy mileage in the meat of this training program.

That’s the flip-side of not doing a ton of long runs: mid-length runs are often higher intensity runs, and they aren’t flanked by rest days. Here’s a typical three-day stretch: a 12k set of strength intervals, followed by a slower (bluer) 9k, and then right onto a 16k tempo run the next day.

The logic here is that while I’m not doing long runs very often, the mid-length higher-intensity runs stack right up against each other without recovery time. This means that from a training standpoint my 16k on the third day works very much like a the second half of a long run. The principle is that cumulative fatigue thing that I mentioned before. It means you go out running, and hard, when your legs are still grumbling about what you did to them yesterday and the day before.

Reinstalling Rubitrack has let me look back on my training from 2012, when I ran the same marathon. It was a more conventional approach: it had weekly high-mileage runs, most over 26k, and only occasional faster workouts. So you see very little orange in these bars. And look at how long the taper was! It was only supposed to be two weeks, but I got bored and tired of the training and I gave up 3 weeks before race day.

Who knows whether this will translate to results on race day. Anything could happen: I could get sick, or I could under- or over-hydrate, or have digestive issues, or the weather could be way too hot, or I could cramp up or get nasty blisters. But I would be happy, now four years older and well on the far side of 50, if I could better my 4:24 time from 2012. I think that’s definitely possible, and if all goes well I could cut quite a bit off. But I’m in it for the experience more than anything.

This week is proving very difficult to fit my training in. I’ve had to give up cross-training on the bike because I’m out of town. But a combination of meetings, symphony rehearsals, performances, driving across the province and the impending onslaught of Music Festival is making it impossible to fit in everything I had scheduled.

Maybe it’s not a big deal. I’m breaking in some new [road] shoes, and I’ve got a niggle in my knee that I don’t want to annoy. If after I get through this week I can get in a solid 10 days of training before I start tapering for the marathon, I’ll be fine.

Yesterday and today I ran the asphalt rail trail in Cranbrook. I’m a trail runner at heart, but heading into a road race. This paved trail is a great compromise: flat, scenic, and still suitable for my shoes and good preparation for the race.

I’ve managed to fit 67km into this week which isn’t bad: it’s within 10k of what I had planned. I have no idea how I’ll fit next week’s Long Run in, but we’ll see what happens. And I am still setting PRs on my tempo runs. This week:

Clearly I’m running too fast for these training runs. I need more practice running at 5:30-5:35/km effort, which is what I’ll be shooting for on race day. But it’s hard to do that, since all the terrain I run is so rolling.

My trail runners from last winter have almost 1000k on them, and have a far more aggressive tread than I need for a road run. The new shoes are by a company called On. I had never heard of them, the but the model I got, the Cloud, is an ultra-light road shoe with a “transitional” (i.e. somewhat minimalist but not quite) amount of cushioning, which is what I was looking for for this longer race. They’re white: I look like I just arrived from a tennis match. Not what I would have chosen if I’d had any choice, but hey, they’ll be dirty soon enough.

 Ah, I was right. I’m getting faster! My weekend run was a 14.5k tempo run. It was sunny and I was feeling good, running at a moderate exertion level. About 5k into it I checked my Garmin and noticed that my average pace was putting me on track for a 10k Personal Record. So I kept the heat on enough to do that. What I didn’t realize was that I’d already broken my 5k record, and had enough juice to also PR at 15k and 10 mile distances. Yay me!

Oh boy this past couple of weeks has been tough. First I pulled part of the soleus muscle in my right calf. And then within hours I got sick. It’s all good now, but it’s been a heck of a couple of weeks.

When I strained my calf, I babied it for a few days. I ran only short distances at an easy pace on the treadmill and put in the rest of the time on my bike trainer. Dang, the thing did not get any better! So I took three days off completely. Blew my streak of more than two months of daily workouts. Skipped a tempo workout that I normally would have considered crucial. Missed my weekly mileage goal by a lot. I iced my calf, rolled it, stretched it, rested it. I was sick too. Coughing through the night. Coughing all day. So tired. I guess it was good that this happened during the week I had to take time off anyway.

And miraculously the strain healed. My simple injuries never seem to behave simply, but this one did. I went back to the treadmill & bike combination and everything felt normal. Hit the pavement again the next day and seemed to be free and clear.

While still coughing all night I managed to pull off a 26k long run. Twenty-six kilometres is as long as the Long Runs get in the Hansons program, and there are just three of them, so I didn’t want to shortchange this one. I put on my winter tights and a light jacket and went up the pass, which made for almost 700 metres of climbing. Met winter up there. Hello, blizzard. Wished I’d brought gloves.

Came home, feeling like I still had gas in the tank, putting in a couple of 5:20-pace kilometres on the flat section at the bottom, so it felt like a pretty successful run. Part of that might be that I took water and food with me. I’ve been pretty lazy about this; when the weather is cool I don’t really need to hydrate for runs of under 10-12k. But now a lot of my workouts are 16k+ and I really should be carrying water and SportBeans or something. I ate and drank a bit along my 26k run, and it made a big difference in how I felt during the last 5-10k.

I woke up with an inflamed Achilles tendon the morning after the long run to the summit. Crap. Having just taken a week to heal the soleus muscle I was darned if I was going to take a week to rest the gastroc/Achilles. But I think it must have just been the punishing downhill from the summit the day before … it got better as I continued to do normal daily runs.

Today was strength workout #2. Having got 6 uninterrupted hours of sleep last night I felt almost human, and my legs are entirely back to normal. I had a great run. It was supposed to be 2.4km at 5:30/km pace, with an 800 metre recovery jog, repeated four times. I did the 2.4 km at 5:02/km, nice and consistently. Felt strong. Sun was out.

Something I realized. My best recorded 5k pace is 5:05, but today I ran a Grade-Adjusted Pace of about 4:50 for two 2.4km segments, (and around 4:57 for the other two) and I felt like I didn’t need the 800 metre recovery interval. So I’m pretty sure I could set a new 5k Personal Best if I wanted, likely breaking the 25-minute barrier. I’m definitely wired for endurance more than speed, so a sub-25-minute 5k isn’t that impressive in comparison with most other runners, but it would represent a significant milestone for me. I might try for that in a couple of weeks if I’m still feeling good.

This week:

First truly long run (23k) done.
Fifth and final set of speed intervals done.
These were big mental hurdles for me, especially the speed intervals.

The speed interval training I’m doing reminds me of the Couch-to-5k program I used six years ago to get started running. Back then it was “jog a short time, then walk a short time” which progressed gradually to “jog a longer time, then walk a short time.” In other words, the easy slow intervals became gradually less frequent over the course of training. In the case of the C25k program, they eventually disappeared altogether, so that you were able to run the entire 5k.

This time around the slow intervals are a jog, and the fast intervals are run at a pace just barely below the anaerobic threshold. For me right now that’s about 4:55 per kilometre (7:55 per mile, 12.2 km/h). The total distance run at this faster speed is about 5 km every week, but the first time that was split up into 12 separate short sections. Week by week the fast chunks got larger. Because I love graphs, here’s what the progression looked like:

Eight weeks down, ten to go. Nearing the half-way point my training. That would feel like a big accomplishment, except that training is always back-heavy. The second half contains most of the hard work. Deep breath.

The weather has been crazy warm and spring-like for February. The lower-level trails are already clear of snow, which is amazing. Normally this doesn’t happen until mid-March. There’s been a fair bit of rain. My shoes are almost always sopping wet when I get home. Up on the drying rack they go.

When I ran my marathon in 2012 I remember how momentous the Sunday long runs felt. They increased relentlessly by 2k per week from 10k all the way up to 32k. The final phase, when every Sunday meant a run of more than 20k, wore me down. By the last month I started cheating. I was burnt out. I completely skipped one long run and starting cutting corners all over the place. My taper started 4 weeks out, instead of 10 days. Gah. I was just so ready to be done.

So it was interesting today to look back at where my mileage was at this stage when I ran my first marathon. In 2012 I had run 481 kilometres by February 24. Really? That seems nuts. This time around I’ll have done a measly 360 kilometres. I wouldn’t have guessed it was so much less. It feels to me like I am running lots. Like really lots. I haven’t taken a day off in more than 6 weeks. Most of my runs take about an hour now and that “cumulative fatigue” thing is real; I feel it in my leaden legs the day after an SOS workout. I wonder if I’ll feel as burnt out by the beginning of April as I did in 2012.

I hope that because the long runs aren’t as long this program won’t leave me feeling as burnt out. My longest runs this spring will peak at 26k; there will be just three of them, and they’ll be spaced two weeks apart. I think I can do this.

I’m surviving the speed workouts. They’re still the hardest, but there are only two more to do. They’re progressive, so on paper they’re getting more challenging, but they’re not feeling any tougher, so I must be improving. With these I notice what a huge difference tension makes. Efficiency of form is so important when running fast. After the speed workouts are done I switch to intermediate-paced longer-interval strength runs. For me I think these will be easier.

As soon as I left home I could hear them: shells exploding, dropped by a helicopter as part of avalanche control efforts along the highway. So I wasn’t surprised to see a line of cars waiting to be given the all-clear to head up the pass. I had to turn back and do a couple of back-and-forth kilometres, killing time until the road opened.

Fortunately it didn’t take too long before we got waved through. It was a lovely sunny day, so I didn’t mind the delay anyway.

There was a little avalanche that had come down the chute at Nature Boy. I actually smelled it before I saw it … the scent of mud and fresh spruce and pine. This is where we had a big avalanche about seven years ago that closed the road for several days. Today’s was just a tiny thing that didn’t even reach the road.

I’m proud of my 28 black boxes. They mean I have done some sort of aerobic workout (running, biking or both) every day for the past 28 days.  My total time spent exercising is going up by about an hour a week, with most of that increase due to running (the green bars).

This was the first week of SOS workouts. My first speed workout was really tough. My first tempo workout was fine; even with rolling hills I undercut my target pace by about 10 seconds per kilometre. The “long” run this week wasn’t really any longer than I’m used to (13k), so it hardly counts as long.

Next week will hold fairly steady for duration, intensity and distance. There will be another nasty speed workout, fewer intervals but slightly longer ones. The rest will be the same, which is nice, because it’s a Symphony weekend. I’ll probably even ditch one day on the bike trainer.

This is where I really start training. It’s no longer about just building mileage through daily runs.

SOS stands for “something of substance” and it refers to runs that have a particular training focus. There will be three of these every week from now on. One will focus on speed (or later strength), one will be a tempo run at my goal marathon pace, and one will be the Long Run to extend my physical and mental stamina.

Speed is where I struggle. My legs probably have about six fast-twitch muscle fibres between them. I’m a slow-twitch gal through and through; that’s why I can add mileage so easily. So the speed interval workouts over the next five weeks are really going to challenge me. Based on my longer-distance performance, I “should” be able to run speed intervals at a pace of 4:53 per kilometer. I did it today, but even though the intervals were short, it was hard. I’m not at all sure I’ll be able to maintain that pace as the intervals get longer. Today’s only lasted 2 minutes: eventually they’ll last 6! Because today’s were short I had to run twelve of the damn things… and I lost count in the middle (on the graph that’s where I stopped and my heart rate dropped) and realized I had to do two more than I had briefly thought.

Tempo runs and long runs will probably be fine. I accidentally ran a 10k at almost tempo pace earlier this week and it felt pretty easy. And I know I can do long. Speed, though, speed kills.