Back on track

Every time I have a bout of bronchitis I seem to get slower. I'm still coughing now and then but I'm about 95% recovered this round. So I went over to the track to get a little slightly faster jogging done today.

But I just didn't have it today. (It was unseasonably warm, too: 63*F and windy). Mile repeats were:

• 12:33
• 10:44
• 10:40
• 12:59

The "fast" two in the center were about the times of my slow two in September. Oh well. It's all good. I just have to stay healthy and keep laying down the miles and they'll come around.

Whew, I have a 15k race on Sunday - I haven't run that long in ages. Last year I cramped up so badly on this course that I had to stop - I'll take the first couple of miles pretty slowly this time out there. Slow finish times are better than DNFs.

Intervals are hard

I was going to take a nice bike ride today - only to find out my poor new tire had a blowout inside the shed. Hopefully just a pinch flat, but I didn't have time to change it and still get in much of a ride.

Decided to do some work on foot instead. Warmed up one mile. Ran half mile hard, walk one tenth, repeat for four work intervals. Finish it off with a couple shorter jogging intervals to warm down.

I hope that helps since I have nothing in the way of long runs to count toward my Steelhead half Ironman preparation. Going to have to just wing it on "muscle memory" and a few short runs.

Quarters

I have a one mile track race on Sunday. I'm dreading the Big Hurt. I wouldn't do it except it's part of the local Championship Series and I need the points to maintain my lofty 4th place in the age group standings!

Today to get my legs warmed up to the challenge I did quarter mile intervals on the track. The fastest one I managed to do was 2:12, but I truly doubt that I could do four of those in a row. Garmin says my best quarter was 2:09 for a an 8:40 min/mile pace, but I'll believe the actual track before I'll believe Garmin. Then again, you never know what's going to happen on race day with some extra adrenalin in my system!

My maximum heart rate didn't get above 174 today. I don't think I'm able to get it well up into the 180s any more - I think my maximum has dropped. But we'll see.

Track work

OK, today I went over to the track to try to regain some of my long-lost speed as part of my 2-week Solo Training Camp.

One of the best things I like about doing intervals with my Garmin is making nice little plots of the row of even peaks in intensity (heart rate and pace) from the intervals.

This was not one of those days.

You can't tell from the plot, but this workout consisted of:
4 laps (1 mile) warmup jog
4 laps of (100m fast, 100m slow, 100m fast, 100 m slow)
4 laps (1 mile) warmdown jog

Those paces were all over the place, weren't they?

Quote of the day

". . . just increasing the amount of mileage that you run, up to about 40 or 50 miles a week, is going to help you get faster. . . . I've never done more than three miles worth of interval training."

-Olympic gold medalist and Masters duathlete Frank Shorter, Masters Athlete 5(3)2008, p. 24.

Quarter mile repeats

I was all set to get on the bike today, but the wind gusts and chilly temperatures dissuaded me. Bike training will have to wait. I headed to the track to work on my speed (so to speak) instead. So I did quarter-mile repeats inside of a jogged 5K (total time 32:44):

• 2:15
• 2:16
• 2:18
• 2:23

Have to get those down more toward two minutes flat to get the kind of 5K time that I want to hit this year. Actually, that I want to hit in three weeks at the Eastern Shore Senior Games, but if I do the 40 km bike race in the morning I'm not too confident of my running speed in the afternoon. I'll just have to run as best I can.

Our Biggest Loser YMCA program initial weigh-in is tomorrow, too, so I haven't been limiting my intake very much this weekend. How is this for backwards self-defeating thinking: It's to my advantage in the Biggest Loser competition to be heavier going in. Of course, it's NOT to my overall advantage, but anyway. . . .

Back to the track

I'm still coughing a bit with my remnants of a cold, but it was time to get back to the track to tune up my "speed" (such as it is) for my half marathon in a week. Doing some hard intervals is just the thing to make a sustained half marathon pace feel a lot easier.

We took the girls over to the track and did one lap with them. Catherine can run about 3/4 of the way around, and Elisabeth ran probably half of the distance and finished her lap in 4:55. That's pretty good for those short little legs! In two weeks we're going to attempt a one-mile walk/run event at our Y, so they're in their final training for that.

Then I was on my own. So it was a set of 8 100s on the straightaway of the track with a jog around to complete each quarter mile. Yeah, there's some drift in the signal, I wasn't really running crazily through the bleachers:


The pace signal is still sampled too infrequently for this type of workout. Oh well.

More speedwork

Well, that didn't exactly work as planned! I went over to the track with my Garmin and did 8x100 (warmup and then one fast 100 within each quarter-mile lap of the track), and motivated myself by thinking of the lovely plot I would have with 8 beautiful little dips that went deep into Single Digit Pace Land. Unfortunately it seems that the Garmin doesn't record pace very frequently and my speediness was so quick it missed several of the sprints.

Oh well, I'll wear the heart rate meter next time which has a higher sampling rate and shows more detail.

My LEGS know that I've done some speed work (and that's what counts), even if my pace plot doesn't show it.

Mile intervals

. . . on the bike today. Even miles hard, odd miles moderate-easy.

Kind of lost concentration in there a few times, but I still ended up getting in a lot more higher-intensity work than if I had just ridden it steady-Eddie.

I was just looking at the new Annapolis Triathlon course that I have coming up on September 9th. They took the most difficult parts of the local area and rolled them all together for this one. I wonder how Buttercup is going to like riding UP a steep cobblestone street? Not much, I'm guessing. We don't even get to ride DOWN it again since T2 is at the Navy-Marine Corps stadium at the top of the hill. And then the run leg goes up some hills that I've never yet been able to keep from walking on. Ouch. This is going to be fun, right?

Hard is too hard, easy is too easy

On the bike, that is. I did some more intervals on the bike today - 5 minutes at about 140 bpm alternating with 5 minutes at above 150 bpm.

Here was my usual route for the 26.2-mile loop:

I discovered that during the "easy" segments that even though 140 bpm felt like an easy, sustainable pace, it was very simple to let my heart rate drift way down under that when I wasn't paying attention. I think I've been taking the "easy" parts of my rides way too easy.

Likewise, during the harder 150 bpm segments, it's still much, much easier than my shorter intervals at higher intensity. I've probably been doing my shorter intervals a bit too hard. I'm guessing that I could maintain 150 bpm on the bike for an hour time trial, but not much longer than that.



I had encounters with two imbeciles on the bike today.

One was a group of about ten teenagers riding together on the highway shoulder, probably some sort of club or church group. They rode along with cars whizzing past at 60 mph directly adjacent to them, and all of them had their helmets slung from the handlebars. The only one wearing a helmet was the "adult" chaperone riding along in the rear.

The second was when I was going through town and turning left down a side street around a truck that had pulled too far into the intersection, blocking my sight down the road. As soon as I turned I nearly slammed head-on into a gap-toothed crackhead pedaling an old beach cruiser along on the wrong side of the road that had veered around the truck directly into my path. I exclaimed, "You nearly made me crash! You're on the wrong side of the road!" and naturally instead of an apology, that was simply met with a long string of derisive epithets from the strung-out moron. Whatever.

Riding intervals

My training buddies were all over in Columbia, Maryland today doing some hill training at a "brick-n-pic" workout with a bunch of local triathletes all training for the Columbia Triathlon in 3 weeks. It didn't work out for me to accompany them, unfortunately, although I could really use the hill training they'll be getting today!

Ack, that's coming up fast! While I've gotten some good results from concentrating on my running so far this year, I feel like my cycling and swimming are way, way behind where I was last year. I don't have hills nearby to train on, but I was able to get Buttercup out on the roads for some 26 miles of interval work. Here's what it looked like - every 2 miles I did a quarter-mile pickup in the cadence and pushed the intensity. That got me 10 good little bursts of intensity, with a bonus right at the end!

Uh, that first little dip in the speed at the beginning was where I fell over while clipped in again today while stopping for a stop sign before turning onto the busy highway through town. Good thing there wasn't a car behind me. Sigh. I hope that's my only clipped-in-fall for 2007, in the books. And I hope my legs confuse interval training with hill work.

Quarter mile intervals on the road

Today I replicated my track workout from last Saturday on the roads, just to see if it would work. It did! 1 mile warmup and then 4 intervals, go faster every even-numbered quarter, jog the odd-numbered quarters (and then a bit of slow recovery jog at the end). The red line is the heart rate, blue is the speed.

The Garmin picked up the pace increase during the intervals a bit better than it did on the track - the readings from there are a bit scrambled, although my final 5K finishing time was nearly identical, within 20 seconds.

That's probably my last significant run before this Saturday, when I'm doing the National Half Marathon in Washington, DC. I'll let the legs rest up. They'll need it! This one is a bit hillier than my last half marathon from a couple weeks ago, plus it's going to be substantially warmer on race day. Plus not having my two escorts to draft behind (they are running it, but probably at their much faster race pace), and my finishing time is likely to be a bit slower on this half. Even though this is the first one for which I actually had to submit a qualifying time!!!

Plus my babysitter won't be here on Thursday, unfortunately. She's going to Key West for a couple of days! I almost fired her on the spot out of sheer envy. Instead I gave her an extra twenty bucks just for fun. If she were just a couple years older I would have told her not to drink it all in one place.

Quarter mile intervals

I just got back from 5K on the track. It's COLD today! I did some 1/4-mile intervals to try to give myself a little speed boost. I tried to do the auto-lap function on the GPS to get my interval times but it didn't work, it was still recording 1-mile autolaps. I did a 1 mile warmup and 4 intervals, go faster every even-numbered quarter, jog the odd-numbered quarters. Let's see, off the watch they were:

1 - 2:40
2 - 2:37
3 - 2:34
4 - 2:33
5 - 2:57
6 - 2:25
7 - 3:02
8 - 2:26
9 - 3:06
10 - 2:29
11 - 3:09
12 - 2:21
13 - 1:29 (1/8)

I think that's a pretty good workout for me, considering anything under a 2:30 lap for me is working pretty hard! At least I don't have to walk for recovery any more, I can actually maintain a jog and still get some muscle recovery. That's progress!

Off to the bath now and then to our local Yacht Club with the girls for a late lunch!