Snow Intervals

Tuesday is interval day. There was a good two inches on the track - more than yesterday, and it was still snowing with a little wind during the workout. One mile warm up and one mile warm down, and 4 x 400's at 80 seconds.

SNOW

One more day of running in the snow. An easy long run on Wildwood / Marquam. The best part of the whole trail system is from Marquam Shelter to the Stone House, covering both Council Crest and Pittock. Hills + trail + mileage = excellence.

From 16 to 61 Miles a Week

Supposedly, you're supposed to increase your mileage no more than 10 percent each week. Or, something like that. Baby steps; work, but give your body time to rest so you can get stronger and faster. However, if you already have a hovering fitness level and have been sandbagging for months, you can sort of take your chances cranking up the pace. The bottom line is, listen to your body, and learn to do what works for you. Not overtraining is something that has to be learned, but that doesn't mean it has to be difficult.

Ten Easy Miles This Morning

Ran ten miles - more mileage is good mileage.

Tuesday Intervals

Run 6 x 400's at 90 seconds at 5:00am, plus a little mileage on the front and back.

Interesting Discovery

Ran a couple easy miles this morning - it's my rest / recovery day.

I ran into a nice subject for my March editorial. Training is the theme, and it just happens that the popular acronym LSD has been used to represent Long Steady Distance and Long Slow Distance. What is the difference? Well, that would be explained in the editorial. It is cool, though, to know that Wikipedia gets stuff wrong sometimes. I've used it a lot in rouine fact-checking, and I always hear how it's not always accurate, but seldom would I know the difference on any given random subject.

Nike Air Zoom Elites

True - it's simply not possible to not run fast in them. Ten easy miles in 70 minutes.

Shopgirlz

Dave and Paula always hire the cutest women to work at Portland Running Company. But what to do if you need to pick up a pair of Nike Air Zoom Elites and a jug of Espresso flavored Hammer Gel after a muddy 3-hour run? I used to drench myself in cologne, but that's no longer necessary, thanks to my Tom's of Maine Aluminum-Free unscented Deodorant Stick. I know what you're thinking: unscented and no aluminum? how does it work?!? With the magic of hops, that's how! Tom's original formula contains active ingredients from hops that naturally fight odor. Plus, you smell like a freshly-poured glass of beer, and who can resist that?

weekly mileage

Here's a typical week at this point - aiming for 42 to 57 miles.
Sunday - 15 to 20 miles on trail
Monday - (rest) three to four easy miles
Tuesday - intervals (400's, 800's or mile repeats) 3 to 4 miles
Wednesday - 8 to 10 miles
Thursday - variable speed (35/45's, fartlek, etc) 3 to 4 miles
Friday - 8 to 10 miles
Saturday - 5 miles easy, kickbox

Mid-January Brings Something Special

It's that time of year - mid-January, where all the devoted Resolutionists who've decided to get up every morning and run for fitness start to look bedraggled. They're still hanging in there, chugging clock-wise around the local track, but they're starting to bend and sag like a rubber raft that's not quite air tight. When the initial shock of increased exercise begins to wear off and elementary exertion requires more mental strength, simply focus on proper running form. Relax and let your form do the work, and you will feel both mentally and physically refreshed. And, take pride in knowing that you're 1/24th of the way done.

mathmatics

Yesterday I ran four miles - today I ran five. All I have to do is add one mile a day, and in a month I'll be running 30 miles each morning.

switching gears

Ran about four miles easy this morning. I'm averaging about 16 miles a week, and need to crank that up to around 60. Can it be done? Yes, it can be done easily enough by simply switching gears.

my wonderful blog

I brushed my teeth today. Not that that's anything extraordinary. I just thought you might be interested. Oh, and the training's going real well, also. I'm going to get out and do some of that soon.

strength training

Standing Crunches, 3 sets of 10.

Standing, rise and balance on your toeboxes. Using a forward arc in your arms for balance, pivot your hips back, bending your knees, until your back is parallel to the ground (or simply go back as far as you can without falling over.) Hold, and then slowly rise back up. That's one crunch. Make sure your heels never touch the ground.

upcoming running schedule

Ran lots today.

Basically, I have two weeks to get in race shape for the White River Snowshoe race January 25th, then seven more weeks to get my speed up for the Shamrock 15K. (The US Snowshoe Nationals is March 8th, but I'll be volunteering.) The Snowshoe race is the best thing to get me mentally prepared to race the Shamrock, and the Shamrock is a tempo race designed to set me on target for running a marathon PR in Eugene seven weeks later.

After the marathon in Eugene, I have 15 months to train for the Circumnavigation.

10,000 hours - talent is overrated...

Great material here with the Science of Sport guys: Nature vs Nurture.

The discussion comes on the heel of a post regarding the Matthew Effect, the phenomenon where a disproportionate number of elite level sports people are born during the first few months of the year, which comes about as a result of a confusion between ability and maturity, and the selection of those children into regional or school teams based on their ability at a young age.

This led to the Nature vs Nurture argument, as it was suggested that unfair selection might leave out certain kids with talent - if you work hard enough, smart enough, and put in your 10,000 hours, then the Matthew Effect doesn't matter. Success depends on a combination of nature and nurture, but the exact order of this is still yet to be defined.

In regards to training, how do you know ahead of time what you can achieve? Talent is something you can only see through hindsight. If you hit that world record, you have talent, because you beat out other people who tried just as hard as you did. But is "talent" anything more than a nice way of explaining why someone else's performance is better than yours?

I Wanna New Drug

Here's a press release from the new journal Drug Testing and Analysis: "A new test will help sports officials stay one step ahead of the game by allowing them to screen for [some of these] emerging drugs, as well as others in the same class that have not yet reached the market. The test detects a core chemical structure belonging to a class of compounds called benzothiazepines. These compounds stabilise protein channels that would otherwise “leak” calcium from muscle cells during strenuous exercise. Calcium is needed for muscle contraction and this "leaking" effect weakens the contractions and is a causal factor in muscle fatigue. JTV-519 and S-107, benzothiazepines currently in development for the treatment of heart abnormalities, are known to increase endurance in mice. Although they have not yet entered human clinical trials, both can be detected using the test. “As soon as these drugs enter human clinical trials, there is a huge potential for them to be misused in sports. This preventive research lets us prepare before these compounds are officially launched,” says Mario Thevis, Director of the Center for Preventive Doping Research at the German Sport University of Cologne, Germany, who led the research."

My question is, who cares?

I mean, it's great that they're discovering new ways to treat heart abdormalities. It's also great that we can scientifically investigate what helps and what hinders athletic performance. But who cares about making new rules to stop athletes from "cheating?" Does it really matter?

It's only cheating if athletes take a banned substance, and substances are only banned if they cause an obviously unfair advantage. So, while every athlete looks for every advantage they can get - technical, nutritional, and otherwise, as long as it's legal and permissible, the drug police are looking to get a jump on testing for substances that aren't even banned yet. Sounds to me like the drug companies and researchers would like to have found the next big thing, so they can sell it to amateurs.

If pickle juice really worked to increase physical endurance, wouldn't you want to know how the science behind it? And if pickle juice was found to increase athletic performance consistently by a great amount regardless of peripherial factors, then wouldn't its usage constitute an unfair advantage? Would pickle juice be banned from races, and would winners have to have their blood tested for pickle juice? And everywhere across America, age-groupers would be popping pickle-juice packets so they, too, could be world class.

Other People's Blogs

I'm reading other people's training blogs and seeing how they differ from the private ones they kept 20 years ago. A friend of mine would write "Ran 3 miles, felt shitty" for page after page, just putting in something to fill in the gaps between races and productive training sessions, not thinking he'd be reading these training logs years later. In present times, however, more athletes are using online training tools to not only keep track of their progress for themselves, but to share with others for information and inspiration. And not only are they attempting to write more for entertainment, but they are keeping tighter records. And this leads to the training logs with exacting details of every nuance of every workout - possibly several workouts a day, sent in through their laptop or updated on their cell phone. If we want to tell the world what we're doing rignt now, at this very second, and exactly how we feel about that, we can. And, I think that's pretty awesome, because we can not only learn about these other people we may not really know, but we can also make sure that they're doing the workouts they set out to do. Big Brother is keeping us on track.

Ran 3 miles, felt shitty.

January training frenzy

I'm taking notes on all the trainers and joiners in the first half of this month, riding the "American Psycho" Resolution trend to start up that program and shape up. Now they're all writing in their blogs about how they like to start the morning with an ice pack and a facial peel before doing their crunches, "I can do a thousand, now." But soon, they'll be standing in an alley, trying to feed a cat into an ATM machine with a hand-gun. And where will their training program be then?

Terwilliger to Soon Clear

One of the biggest races in Portland is the Shamrock, and I plan on doing the 15K as a test-run before the Eugene Marathon in May. The Shamrock is Sunday, March 15th, so I became almost concerned when I noticed that Terwilliger still isn't open from Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway to Barbur. The house that slid down the hill ten weeks ago is still blocking traffic. Part of the problem, apparently, is Farmers Insurance declining to pay for any damage, leading the house owners to file suit against the insurance company. Also, there has been treacherous weather since the landslide, including the Blizzard of 2008, and conditions continue to be a deterrant. However, as reported in the Southwest Community Connection, the city is planning to have the boulevard open by late January.

So, good news. You can plan on running the Shamrock with the Shamrockers.

more snow

And we're back running in the snow.

ninja stretching basics

Start standing with your legs comfortably apart, arms straight up, and roll your shoulders forward and dive downward into a stretch. Hang there as long as you need, letting your torso and legs relax and stretch. Lift your arms back up over your head and lift your torso up perpendicular to the ground. Hold, reaching out and stretching, and then drop back down. Bend your knees slightly before uncoiling to stand.

Next, reach all the way down, bending your knees, and touch the floor with the palm of your hand. Stretch here for an instant, and then push with your fingers and extend back up into a standing position. Do several of these while balancing on your toe box, and then do several of these while standing flat on your heels.

While in a standing position, widen your stance, and tuck your pelvis in, keeping your back straight. Lift your left toe up, pivoting on your left heel so your toe points out ot the left. Put your weight on your right toe box and lower yourself over your right foot, extending your left leg. After you go all the way down, push yourself up with your right leg until you're upright again, and pivot on your right foot, extending your right leg, until your weight moves over your left toe box. Completely extend your right leg, lowering yourself all the way down to the left. Push yourself up, rotate and repeat. Position your arms in the air for balance, and gently raise and lower yourself from one side to the other several times.

Then, bring your feet in to a normal width and stand on the edges of your feet. Keeping your back straight and your chest expanded, and holding an arc in your arms for balance, twist and lower, until you're sitting on the ground cross-legged. You may have to turn one foot to the instep to go all the way down. Touch the ground gently with your hands and raise to standing before twisting the other direction, gently lowering yourself to the ground in the same fashion, and then back up. The key is to keep correct posture while maintaining controlled, slow movemet.

In any of these exersizes, if you can't go all the way down, or need to grab on to something solid for balance and / or use your arms to lower or raise yourself, do what you can. Simply following the movements will add strength, and you will progress quickly in a matter of weeks. You don't want just stretchability, you want flexibility.

first tracks on the track

Beautiful Friday morning run in the snow.

2009

Wet from steady rain and snow melt, the trail was a river cascading.
54:22 tempo