Monday, 5/14... 7 mile trail run today, low humidity and temp in the low 70's. Nice... Tuesday, 5/15... 2 mile walk today, rest day. az... your races are never dull, eh? 2nd A/G in spite of the stomach issues, nice! If the gel you use is those little plastic envelopes, I don't know how you take just half of one. Every time I use the stuff, I end up getting it on my face, my hands, it ridiculous. It doesn't matter how careful I am, I end up being human 'fly paper'...lol And yes, the 5K went better than expected, if I can get training consistently again, I'll be back to being a blur before you can say, "What was that?!"...
Monday, 5/14... 7 mile trail run today, low humidity and temp in the low 70's. Nice...
Tuesday, 5/15... 2 mile walk today, rest day.
az... your races are never dull, eh? 2nd A/G in spite of the stomach issues, nice! If the gel you use is those little plastic envelopes, I don't know how you take just half of one. Every time I use the stuff, I end up getting it on my face, my hands, it ridiculous. It doesn't matter how careful I am, I end up being human 'fly paper'...lol And yes, the 5K went better than expected, if I can get training consistently again, I'll be back to being a blur before you can say, "What was that?!"...
NH: That is so true with never a dull race! Makes each race more memorable, LOL!! My goal was to finish under 4.5 hrs and was going great until that happened. Was bummed out but you just have to redirect energy and focus on finishing. I use to get the gel all over my hands/fingers, and hair would stick to it when I'm wiping sweat off my forehead, and trying to wash it off at A.S. Being a 'fly paper' is realistic when in MN during summer humid days, HA!! I tend to have more trouble tearing the corner of a gel. But I think I perfected it now. Thank goodness I don't use it much especially on trail races since each A.S. usually is a buffet, LOL!! I rather eat real food. Not so in road races.
Runs in the rain
Rich - It is unpleasant and downright dangerous to be caught in a thunderstorm!
Hopefully it was warm enough so you did not get too chilled. I always now inspect the weather radar map if rain is suspected, give a better local forecast than the news which just gives a general one for a large area. Sorry that the heel is acting up, may you get good results with the sleeve. The scythe must work better than a lawnmower or even a weed whacker on really tall grass, wish I had one to try. I know it must be constantly resharpened as the grass dulls it quickly. A previous video I've seen had the guy carry a small sharpening stone with him. My girlfriend also saw a wild turkey, it was eating fallen seeds from under the bird feeder. A squirrel charged it and it jumped up in the air and the squirrel ran completely underneath it! Congratulations on the 1st in AG! The guy you blew past that was in your AG must have been pissed with himself for not paying attention. I did consider heart rate training but now it is just another factor I look at after my runs. I mostly go by how my body feels. The wrist monitor I use can give crazy results if the Garmin is not fastened on the wrist correctly. I think my max HR is like 168 or 169, at least that is the highest number I have gotten on a hard uphill. That is a larger number than predicted by the formulas which predict about 160. A workout with a strong effort will give like a 145 HR. In my recent speed segment run it peaked at 165, close to the max.
Art - 23 mile bike ride is fairly impressive! I haven't ridden mine since the start of winter. I did try to look up your canal path on google maps but saw several paths and was not sure which one you use. Nice that you can get in early morning runs before going to work. When I lived on Long Island I used to like to get up and run at 7 am, then breakfast and get ready for work. A great start for the day!
Ray - Congratulations on the 2nd in Ag in the Horseshoe half! When you say you set a PB is that just for this particular race, or your fastest half ever? Impressive in that you weren't even trying hard and walked parts of it.
Dan - Congratulations on finishing the Door County HM! The scenery sounds amazing, but although it is also near the Great Lakes like I am I think it would be over a 12 hour car drive for me to get there! Speaking of former posters, great that you saw GITO at the race! Hope she visits our forum sometime. Good you did the negative split and finished faster than you thought, even if you fell a tiny bit short of your goal.
az - I am getting tired of congradulating forum members for finishing in the top in thier AG! I feel like I'm the slow one here! Great run in the Shiprock Marathon! Again you show how tough you are by continuing the run after feeling sick from the clear gatorade. Nice to have your niece run it and your cousin and crazy bike riding brother all there! A real family event! Now I did look up the elevation profile , it was not a detailed image, but did not show any major hills and it looked like a 1000 foot elevation drop after mile 3. I am surprised the times were not a lot faster. A nice surprise to get 3rd in AG and then find you were really 2nd, but a bigger surprise for the 3rd place who did not expect a pottery award. 30 books is quite a large series, perhaps the biggest one I ever read. Not sure what the record is but Walter Gibson A.K.A. Maxwell Grant, wrote over 100 Shadow novels for the Shadow magazine. The Shadow was a pulp magazine detective with hypnotic powers, later played by Orson Wells on the radio and more recently by Alex Baldwin in a movie. The writer, Maxwell Grant, would sit at the typewriter and type out a novel like every 2 weeks. Afterwards he would need to let his fingers heal for several days, no electric typewriters back then!. As a teenager I enjoyed reading the Shadow novels and now have quite a few of them reprinted in magazines. I also have a number of the old radio shows. I did meet Maxwell Grant at a Comic book convention and got his autograph.
My runs continue lately to be short ones with speed sections. I find these harder than doing long slow runs and have been taking a rest day after each run to recover. By the end of May it will be like 18 weeks to my marathon, the length of most training programs. I am undecided as to how to proceed. Shall I continue to focus on speed and try to increase the distance of my marathon pace runs? This is how I would like to proceed, but don't know if I will develop the endurance for the distance in time. Last year my concern was more in weekly mileage, but it was hard to be consistent. Still, I found with more miles my pace naturally increased without doing much extra speedwork. Most plans call for a speed workout and a LSD run each week combined with many miles at a slower recovery pace. Some people alternate a speed week with a long distance week. Regardless, I should have done more to maintain my fitness over the winter, I don't think my base is enough to train sufficiently to reach my BQ goal. Anyway, I shall give it a try and learn from the experience.
Long distance runner, what you standin' there for?Get up, get out, get out of the door!
Wednesday, 5/16... 6 mile trail run this morning. I've started doing a quick leg stretching routine at the end of the first mile, it's amazing how much better my legs feel when I get back underway. Feeling good lately, heel's behaving, fitness is improving and times are coming down...
az... running marathons and how your body reacts when you force it to run that far is pretty much a crap shoot. Mixing Gatorade and gel in your gut at 20 miles just adds to the drama, eh? lol I can picture you on the side of the trail bent over with dry heaves and bummed you won't hit your goal of 4:30...lol
Altair5... I wonder if closing in on a BQ at the end of a marathon would be as much of a motivator to run fast as having a thunderstorm bearing down on you from behind...lol After training for 4 months, a mile from the finish line and needing to run a 9 minute mile to get in, it'd be close eh? lol Speaking of turkeys, a couple of years ago I had a couple of large toms under the songbird feeder when a grey squirrel charged one and actually jumped up on his leg. It didn't take long before the squirrel was running for his life...lol As far as your marathon training, I wish I had something to offer. I've already told you my biggest challenge was fueling, I was always in shape to run the distance, but never prepared...
Thursday, 5/17... 2 mile tryke ride today followed by 2 mile EZ recovery run. Phone call from a buddy later in the day to let me know a 1 mile run at the HS track was taking place the next afternoon...
Friday, 5/18... decided to run the trail this morning to see how fast I could run the 1/2 mile section where I know the measurement is accurate. First mile to warm up and stretch, then started down the measured section at an effort I thought I could hold for a mile. I haven't done ANY of this kind of running in well over 2 years and it showed. Worse yet, running at that effort aggravated my testy heel. Not a lot, but enough to convince me that running a mile at the same effort later in the day would be a bad idea. Anyway, I finished 3 miles and called it close enough. I DID spectate later at the 1 mile event long enough to see a decent crowd show up, but left before any racing started. Now I need to start doing weekly interval sessions at an effort fast enough to gain fitness but slow enough to keep from getting injured. Nooo problem...
Altair5... I got a kick out of the different 'lightning rod for runners' pictures you posted. My original idea wasn't so original after all...lol
Nothing Tuesday or Wednesday because of early work.
3 miles Thursday morning.
4 miles Friday morning since I had a little more time to run.
AZ - I tried the GU gels but didn't like them. I like the Hammer gels better. And I also like only certain flavors. Heed is what I use on long runs but it doesn't taste right if it gets too warm. I'm going to look at races this weekend to see if anything interests me. Since we're into warm weather now, most of the local races will be 5Ks. Which is good because that's about all the runs have been.
Altair - Hard to figure out the canal system with all the connecting canals. The 29 mile ride goes East past Tempe Town Lake and the 23 or other 29 ride goes West. I've been planning a longer ride into Scottsdale but that will be done when it's cooler. As for what's better in training for the marathon it's hard to say for sure. For me it would be longer runs and exercises that worked my core a little more. My thinking is training to go faster should be after I had done the longer distances first. I would think since you have 18 weeks left to map out a schedule that increased your distance each week for a long run and then do speed work on another day of the week.
Rich - So with this heel episode, is it one step forward, one step back? Hope it heals quick. Just throw in a couple of moderate bike and tryke rides to compensate.
Art in AZ
Mesa, AZ
Got ready for a run and went outside and looked at my bike and changed my mind. Decided to go for a bike ride. I haven't been on the South route along the canal for a couple of years so that's the way I headed. Wasn't planning on that long of a ride. Just something to get the blood flowing. Ride was going well, weather was nice so went a little further. After 10 miles thought I should turn around. So I got in a 20 mile bike ride. Except for a couple of small sections near where I started, the rest of the way was either paved or concrete. Saw some different birds as I went past the Gilbert Riparian park.
Saturday, 5/19... 4 mile mtn bike trail ride today. Light sprinkle when I started, steady rain by 2 miles, pretty darn wet by 4...lol
Sunday, 5/20... serious cross training early, scythe mowed the neighbor's lot in just under 2 hours, ran a 10 mile trail run later. Early in the run, I counted the number of steps it took to run the measured half mile section, next time out I'll run half that distance and mark it for the interval workouts I plan to do. The distance won't be exact, but will give me a way to measure any progress by running that same distance each time out. Close enough...
Art... the 'deal with the heel' is pretty much under control. I've been like a broken record blaming it on a knotted hamstring and still believe it's the underlying problem that's pulling on my heel. What's different lately is sitting on a hard chair and rolling a softball under that leg to keep those muscles from knotting again. Today's 10 miler and the 5K I ran last week are both good indicators that I'm on the right track. After a run and when I get up in the morning, the hamstring's still effected by muscle memory and tries to re-knot, but it's just a question of time before it accepts the new position I keep rolling it back to. It's nowhere near as bad as it was when I first started this routine, so I'm gaining. Another test will be the first time I try running a 1/4 mile interval session, something I might try tomorrow. I like those longer rides on the bike, nice change of pace from running. Plus those 3 and 4 milers are keeping your running muscles in shape...
Monday, 5/21... easy 3 mile recovery run on the trail this morning. Took the time to mark out the measured section for doing intervals, but that was it. I've been digging out the ditch that runs along the road in front of the house since then, but there's still water running in it and too much mud to deal with yet...
Tuesday, 5/22... 6 mile road run today, covered bridge and 1/4 mile hill beyond before hitting the turnaround. Pace was 3 minutes quicker than the same run a month ago. Progress...
ALOHA!!
Hot here, in the 80s during the day, 70s nighttime, whew!! and HUMID!! Reminds me of MN No mosquitoes or flying bugs, insects tho'.
No dirt trails nearby at all unless I drive about 30-40 miles, and traffic is CRAZY!!
But fitness center is great TM, weights, elliptical, cycle but ran a couple of times on the 'boardwalk' and along the beach. Dodging tourists is NOT fun.
So I found and registered for the Hibiscus HM (road, ouch!!) on Sunday! LOL!! About 1.5 mile from our hotel. Race is held at a popular park. Ran around there a couple of times already.
We drove to the North Shore, ate at a roadside Shrimp Shack, yummy!! Mountains are so GREEN and steep, just incredible. We hiked a couple of areas along the shore.
DH took a surfing lesson yesterday morning! Now he is stopping at every surf shop and "maybe we should think of moving here for a couple of years?" ummm, NO!! LOL!!
He bumped/bruised one of his toes pretty bad while surfing but he's feeling better today. I bumped my right elbow on one of the weight machines, didn't think it was bad, not painful but it swelled up, a hematoma, geeeezzz!! Who knew Hawaii was not safe?!? LOL!!
The humidity is tough to breath in when I run to the park and back, about 6 miles. But I'm sure I'll survive the HM. Counting on the sea level elevation to pull me through
Conference starts Thurs.-Sun. We will return end of the month. Then I have the Thelma and Louise HM in Moab, UT. on 6/3. Then the Extreme Pine 27K on June 9. Glutton' for punishment,
NH: love your new avatar!
Art: it's hot to ride or run there, WTG!
Altair: hope the training runs are going well.
3 miles Monday morning before work.
3 miles again Tuesday before work. Likely the same for the rest of the week. At least I am getting out and getting ready for the rest of the day.
Rich - So the ride in the rain. Did the bike get cleaned or was it all dirty again when you got home? I really enjoy going on those long bike rides just pedaling around to get the exercise and a little workout. Certainly less strain on the legs. You certainly got you workout on Sunday. I hear you on the heel episode. Your times have gotten better.
AZ - No getting around the humidity there. Was there several years ago and did the Hibiscus run then. I was certainly sweating at the end. You should be ready for this. There is some elevation changes going on there. But some of the views make up for it. Good luck.
Wednesday, 5/23... crossed trained today. First up was the tryke, I got to ride it about 200 yards before the stupid back tire went flat. Once I figured out why it was rowing so hard, I picked the rear end off the ground and pushed it back home. Got into the repair long enough to take it apart and find the leak in the tube, then grabbed the mtn bike and rode the trail 8 miles with that. The tryke's ready to go again, but tomorrow morning I'm headed out to do a 200 meter interval session. Don't know how many yet, but I'm pretty sure my butt will be draggin' after the first 2 or 3... lol
az... I bet the food where you're staying is really good! lol And busy with lots of people. Sounds like you're surviving though, in spite of the weather...lol Anyway, good luck with the Hibiscus half and keeping down DH's desire to move...lol Yeah, that avatar's something, I couldn't resist...lol
Art... those 3 milers are perfect for maintaining, plus they give you a little boost to start your day. The bike and the bike's rider both got dirty from riding in the rain, knobby tires, no fenders and wet dirt combined to cover us both. The bike's still dirty, but I've cleaned up pretty well...lol
Thursday, 5/24... practiced being a blur this morning, 1 mile warm-up on the trail, 4 X 20 second strides, then 8 X's 200 with a 60 second break between, then a 1 mile cool down. Not much of a blur, but the pace was quicker than I've run in a while and really all I was after, basically 8:00 / mile pace... 1:02, 1:00, 1:00, :58, :58, :57, :58 and :56. It's a start...
3.5 miles Thursday morning.
Rest day sort of Friday. I didn't run but started work early and that involved a lot of back and forth between the front office and the warehouse. And a lot of standing.
3 miles this morning plus a little exercise when I got home.
Rich - There have been a few times I've ridden in the rain or when the ground was still wet. Everything the back tire picked up was tossed onto the back of my shirt and head. Nothing puts a crimp in a planned bike ride like a flat tire. Nice set of intervals.
justrundan
Short runs last 3 days. Cross training in the yard. Highs in 90’s today and next 3-4! 😬. Even getting out early is warm and muggy. And with all the rain we had earlier in May we have a bumper crop of mosquitoes right now. Just like you remember MN being AZ,
Good job on the intervals Rich. I want to get to our local track once school is done.
AZ- good luck with the HM. What island are you on? When we vacationed there 15 yr ago DW wanted to move there! 😂
Altair- I like the options for running in a thunderstorm. 👍😁
Enjoy the long weekend and remember to honor our military who paid the ultimate price.
Dan