Competitive Jerks Racing and Training - 2023 (Read 574 times)

Mark - Nice week for having a cold. Doing better, now?

Flavio - Awesome job on getting all those streets. That project didn't seem to take you very long. Efficient route planning?

Dave - High AQI and I'm guessing pretty decent Kiwi Point as well. 6:35/mi seems pretty solid for that, you'll get a nice bump when the air clears and the temps drop.

Steve - Excellent week.

DWave - Thanks!
Good week. That's a pretty massive change in that hill workout. Hills are something I'm trying to put even more of a focus on myself.

Merkle - Thanks. The mile was fun and I learned a lot, I'd really enjoy running another if it popped up.
Sorry about that week. Did anything happen regarding the race? And yeah, sometimes the heat just sucks it out of you. How much water/electrolytes did you have?

I logged my biggest in several months, not just in volume but also intensity thanks to adding in that mile race and a decently big workout.
I think I've decided to work on hills as much as I can during my LRs. If I run a somewhat carefully selected route I can get about the same elevation gain per mile as my goal race, but going up and down a hill for a couple hours obviously gets more. Plus, doing that also lets me stash an extra water bottle. My coach has given me a bit of a progression towards the end of my LR this weekend if the legs are feeling up to it, so figuring out how best to hit a hill for an extended period before upping the effort and just running the roads for nearly the second half (while accounting for extra water) will be interesting.

I somehow turned off my alarm this morning and woke up really late. I'm not certain if I just didn't get it turned on yesterday before bed, or if I turned it off this morning in my sleep and I just don't remember it. Either way, I scrambled to get 3/4 of my planned mileage for my morning run. Getting the balance of those miles plus what I was going to get for a double means I can't do it during my work day today, so I've gotta wait until evening. I'm not exactly thrilled with that.

Weekly for period: From: 07/03/2023 To 07/09/2023

Totals: Time: 13:36:09 - Statute: 94.08 mi - Metric: 151.38 km

Flavio - Awesome job on getting all those streets. That project didn't seem to take you very long. Efficient route planning?

 

As much as I'd love to claim the efficiency trophy, there were a few of factors that made it quicker:

a) I had a head start of about 400 streets which I had unknowingly completed by just being a curious person trying out to run in new streets

b) Porto is quite compact and has the shape of Shell oil's logo, no exclaves or anything like that.

c) I could reach every place in town without ever going into high ways, so I never needed to hop on a car to reach an outer neighbourhood.

d) Due to sheer blind luck, I live very close to the geographical center of the city of Porto. It's a max of about 4 miles from my place to the furthest place in town.

The problem itself is similar to the Chinese_postman_problem, which is an exceptionally hard problem to solve in computer science, but in this case it's even harder because you can't do it all in one go, you have to do it in runs varying from 40 minutes to 2h30 in my case, and always starting from the same place. That means that I will run every street *at least* once, but probably twice, sometimes dozens of times on the city arteries.

So I focused on solving one neighbourhood at a time and that worked quite well in the end.

 

I somehow turned off my alarm this morning and woke up really late. I'm not certain if I just didn't get it turned on yesterday before bed, or if I turned it off this morning in my sleep and I just don't remember it. 

Here's footage of you setting up your alarm:

Keen - I remember you mentioned the Altra Outroad a while back. I checked it out today, but unfortunately it's based on their slim foot shape. So it joins the list of Vanish Carbon, Vanish Tempo and the Rivera as shoes that I can't wear cause they're too narrow.

Anyway, the good news is that Escalante 3 and the Escalante Racer were on sale, so got one pair of each. I also got the Torin 7 Wide to try it out for longer runs. I've been wearing the Paradigms but I seem to do better with the Torins.

Altra foot shapes:

Mikkey - You're spot on, endurance and especially muscular endurance is my weakness. I'm currently in base building trying to push the boundaries a bit on how much I can run within a week.
I've now gotten close to the desired distance of 70 miles/110 km, but now I'm hoping to push it a little further closer to 10h or 120km/75 miles. Seeing as I'm very close to my ceiling here there's no guarantee that I'll be able to push that far.

The plan is to only increase mileage during base building, once marathon training starts the mileage will remain largely the same, so I will only be changing one variable (workouts) during the marathon training block.
Re: the long run, yeah I've been doing a lot of elevation the last 12 months or so and the heart is very strong. But what caught me was muscular endurance, my core muscles (especially glutes and hip flexors) get super tired and I lose form by the end, simply put running takes a higher effort without the core supporting it.

 

 

 

Well I admire your determination to run the best possible time at Valencia because marathon training/races have always been out of your comfort zone!  It’ll be interesting to follow your training as we both have the same sort of strategy and are marathons are on the same date. But I very much doubt I’ll be able to hold 75mpw average over a marathon cycle…but back in my glory days just after World War 2 that number was the sweet spot for me. 

Fishy - “Stealth mode”    Marathon training is boring and basebuilding is even more boring! I ran 200 in June, hopefully 250 this month and then play it by ear in August.  I’m hoping that my training will start getting sexy in September and will post my workouts. 👍

Lovely photo of multiple gold medalist Caster Semenya and wife. ❤️

Lynsey Sharp after finishing 6th at Rio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JeLO8RCtoQ

 

Yup, and Melissa Bishop from Canada came in first woman, but no medal .

 

 

Yep, unless biological women (the ones who don’t have a penis) make a stand and refuse to race against males… then it’s going to get even more ridiculous.