March 28th, 2009 Base Builder 3

Yes, another base builder run.  This one was much like the first.  The only real exception was this one was run wearing my new shoes.  Oh, these new shoes are light!  They weigh much less than the Mizuno shoes did.  The run started out really well.  I had managed to run more than 2 miles well above my race pace and things were flying along.

In total, 8.3 miles for an 8:26 pace burning 833 calories.  Much like the run on the 24th, there really wasn’t any burning up the course, though I really wished it hadn’t happened.  After having my shoes too tightly laced for the run yesterday, I had them too loosely laced for the run today.  I now have dime sized blisters on both arches that will likely now affect the race.  I’ll have to see as I taper next week.  I do know it means Sunday won’t be a running day as I try to give them the chance to actually heal enough that I won’t notice the blisters.  I really thought I’d gotten beyond this hurdle, and I am hoping it isn’t the Asics shoes.  I’ll see.

The run was one I like to call a chaser.  Only because in my evil mind, it chases away anyone that starts to run next to me.  Why you may ask?  Only because I am running speeds few at the gym will attempt on a treadmill and then I’m also running for significantly longer than most do at the gym as well.  I take a sick sense of pride in watching someone get onto a treadmill next to me only to leave before I’m done.  This one was even more satisfying, because a guy came up to the one next to me and then his ego started trying to write a check his body could not cash.  He set his pace in between my zone 2 and zone 3 pace, though he had no incline set while I run at a 2% incline at all time, and proceeded to look over at me as I sped up and slowed down.  He kept an eagle eye on my display, and internally I just giggled.  He couldn’t hang, wound up having to slow down well below my zone 2 pace of 8 minute miles and then got off the treadmill at 20 minutes, while I’d been running 20 before he got on and showed no signs of slowing.

Oh but that damned blister!  I can feel the sting in my foot.  I know it’s going to be bad.  I just hope it doesn’t tear inside my sock until I can get home to work on it.  It was quite a distraction and what started out an awesome run had dropped into focusing on how badly my left foot was hurting, how my right foot had started stinging, and whether or not it would impact the race one week from today.  DAMNIT!

Cheers!

March 27, 2009 Zone 2

Ahhh, Zone 2 runs.  What are the closest I get to an active recovery, which was an older run that had me in mostly zone 1.  It’s sort of mellow, at least in terms of the heart rate, so I consider this an easy run though any running for 70 minutes can hardly be considered easy.

The housekeeping:  7.6 miles, average pace of 9:12 per mile, 791 calories.  Like I said, an easy run. LOL  It is fascinating to say it that way, because it was less than a year ago that anything below 10:00 per mile was something I thought was out of my league.  Now that’s an easy run.  Amazing what running 4 days a week can do to perspective.

I got a new pair of running shoes.  I don’t know how often I really should change them, so I’ve arbitrarily set the limit at 300 miles per pair.  That means right now I’m looking at needing a new pair every 10 weeks.  That’s a ton of money on running shoes, but I also can tell the difference.  That is, of course, if I lace them correctly and don’t tie them too tightly.  They were comfy right until about mile 5 when I noticed that my feet were really tight inside the shoes.  By the end, I wished I could have jumped off the treadmill and taken them off to let my feet breathe.  I guess I’ll have to fix them before the next run.  At least I’d learned the lesson well before the next race.

Runs that involve no heart rate changes can be mundane.  I find my mind wanders quite a bit and had it not been for the shoe issue, I probably could have run much faster pace.  I’ve managed 8 miles in zone 2, barely, and while 7.6 isn’t shabby, it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I started the run.  I watched quite a bit of TV, as there was a tornado that touched down well East of our house and the gym, but it still caused all the weather gimps to have quite the weather-gasm and the Doppler 5000 and 3D Doppler radar sweeps were in full effect as local weathermen played with their Windows based storm tracking applications.  It is funny to watch as an IT professional, though the gravity of the matter is somewhat lost as I absorb the pure technical aspects.  I didn’t read any of the closed captioning, so I can only hope there were no serious injuries.  At least the run ended without much ceremony and I was able to get to stretch and contemplate the idiocy of my lacing as my feet throbbed like Jim Brown’s did in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.  If you don’t understand the reference, for God’s sake, rent the movie somewhere.  It is a classic.

To add insult to injury, so to speak, I came home to discover I’d left myself more than 2000 calories left in the last 5 hours of the day!  That’s a lot of eating, which means I effectively had three supper entrees and two desserts, plus my protein shake and staple of low fat cottage cheese.  I’ve got to do a better job of spacing my food intake.  3500 calories is a ton of eating and leaving most of it for supper isn’t wise.  I was surprised to learn that this week’s weigh in (I track my weight and only weigh once per week sort of like ‘The Biggest Loser’) I had actually dropped 2 lbs.  This was after gaining one per week for each of the last 5 and cresting at 160.  I hadn’t really been concerned about the increase.  I was taking in a ton of extra calories and in theory the weight gain should be all muscle mass.  It feels like it and yesterday I actually was able to fit comfortably into 30 waist pants again!  That would mean I’m exactly the size I was when I graduated high school in 1985 (Hello SHHS class of ‘85 if any of you are actually reading) and it frankly shocks me.  Of course, so did getting to 230, so I guess it’s better to be surprised this way.

I have 4 more workouts before the race on April 4th.  I have no idea what my goal for this race is.  I’d had my mind wrapped around a goal for the race May 10th, and this one sort of distracted me from that goal.  So, since my first 10K was 45:48, my goal for this race is going to be what my goal was for the May race; any time below 42 minutes.  That’s a LOT of time to suck out of my run.  228 seconds over 6.2 miles means I’ve got to drop my average from 7:23 per mile to 6:46 per mile.  That’s 8.87 miles per hour, and I haven’t done that over any significant length.  Eh, who knows?  I had planned a time below 50 for my first and smoked it.  Maybe I will smoke 42.  I won’t know until I cross the finish line.  I just want to finish in the top 20 runners overall.  That’s reward enough for someone that hasn’t run seriously longer than 18 months.

Cheers!

March 25th, 2009 Zone 3

Tonight’s run was a Zone 3.  That means after the 5 minutes of warm up, I run for 60 solid minutes keeping my heart rate in target zone 3.  It is by far one of the most brutal workouts so far, because to start my heart rate in zone 3, it means I’ve really got to pick up the pace.  Well, I could raise the incline, which is still what Colleen suggests, but doing it that way doesn’t seem to help me work toward my pace goals.  Hard to say really.

I suppose now is the best time as possible to start the discussion about what these heart rate targets mean.  Generically, there is a heart rate maximum that is based on your age group and you work backwards from that maximum heart rate in 10% decrements.  That would mean that zone 5 goes from 91% to maximum heart rate, zone 4 is 81 to 90%, and so on.  Now, that’s the generic model.  I have taken three tests called a Metabolic Assessment Profile (MAP) test.  This is by some accounts a gimmick, but I’m a believer in the snake oil, so I don’t hear the natter of the critics.  Basically, for those of us addicted to TV, the MAP test was shown in Gatorade commercials at one point, and involves wearing a mask while running on a treadmill.  It uses Volume Inspired Oxygen metrics and some other components to determine how well the body burns fat while exercising.  In this model, zone 1 begins at the point when the body stops burning fat and starts burning sugar (carbohydrates) for energy.  Zone 2 begins at the point from there where the ratio is 50% fat, 50% calories.  Zone 3 ends at the point where fat burning stops and the energy is produced exclusively from carbohydrates.  It is a bit of voodoo, in that they split this range in half literally to determine where zone 2 ends and zone 3 starts.  They then determine failure point and call that maximum heart rate.  My current maximum heart rate was calculated at 208 beats per minute.  That’s almost 30 beats per minute higher than the average for my age.  My zone 1 begins at 130 beats per minute, meaning that at any lower intensities, I’m burning all stored fat for energy.  NICE!  Anyway, the ranges are:

• Zone 1:  130 – 140
• Zone 2:  141 – 156
• Zone 3:  157 – 173
• Zone 4:  174 – 183
• Zone 5:  184 – 208

So, with this background, my training focuses predominately on zone 2 and 3.  The premise is that if I can increased the amount of fat burned in those zones, I’ll close the gap.  High end athletes like Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps have very narrow distances between Aerobic Base and Anaerobic Threshold (the start of zone 2 and end of zone 3 respectively) but it is mostly because they will burn fat more often than not and don’t really start burning pure carbohydrates (which produces lactic acid and the muscle pain most of us feel) until very, very intense heart rates.  Warm up and cool down are always in zone 1, just so that I can get the joints loose and that I can get my heart rate to slow.  OK, enough of that mess.  This is just the frame of reference for what it means when I say my training is zone 3.  I’m running for 60 minutes where I keep my heart rate in that interval.

Now, I’ve avoided some of the part I promised for each posting, but there’s a reason for that.  Last night, 9.1 miles, 881 calories, an average of 7:41 per mile.  Yes, that’s right.  Last night marked my first 9 plus mile run EVER!  OK, 9.1 isn’t exactly smoking past 9 miles, but when I consider that literally 16 months ago I couldn’t run 5 miles in one session, 9 miles is a pretty big deal for me.  I was impressed and it actually was an exceptional feeling of accomplishment at the end of the run.  This should also be the point where everyone understands I don’t think that I can’t run 9 miles.  I am firmly convinced that my current fitness level would allow me to run at least a half marathon right now, possibly even a full.  The reason I say these mileage distances as milestones is that it is a velocity statement.  For those readers that may not remember their high school physics, velocity is a function of distance over time:

• v = d/t

Which is how you get 60 miles per hour in a car, etc.  That’s velocity.  To say I could run a half marathon right now would mean that I’d have to allow time to shift, which means my velocity drops.  I am keeping time fixed in this equation, and that means that if I want distance to increase, my velocity has to increase (basically v * t = d, if you do the math.)  My goal has been velocity all along.  I’m targeting 7 minutes per mile as my goal for the half marathon, which reverses the units ( t/d instead of d/t) which translates into 8.57 miles per hour.  I don’t know if that’s realistic or not, but it is my target.  Since I’m running 7:15 – 7:25 right now, I figured it was a reachable goal, but that may be asking a lot over the distances I’m telling myself.  I can’t really say.  As you can see from the raw data above, 7:41 is a LONG way from 7, but you also have to remember, I’m running the first 5 minutes at what so far has been no faster than 8:57 per mile and the last 5 minutes at what has so far been no faster than 10:00 per mile.  That 10 minutes means to hit a 7:00 average over the entire 70 minutes (remember t is fixed in this madness) I am going to need to run 60 minutes at an average of 6:39 per mile!!!  The fastest I’ve managed has been interval training where for 1 minute slices I can run 6:31, but that’s hardly endurance running. LOL

OK, enough of the math, formulas, and numeric discussions.  The run itself was odd for me emotionally.  I ran the first three miles in zone 3 at 6:58, just under my new goal pace and I was elated.  For the first mile, I hadn’t even been able to get my heart rate into the target zone 3 and that meant this was going to be a GOOD run.  I realized, however, that I’m probably overtraining a bit as my legs just felt gassed and while my heart rate said I could continue longer at that pace, the muscles in my quads and hamstrings said otherwise.  So, I slowed down to my current race pace of 7:13 for the next three miles.  Those seemed easier on my muscles for sure, but emotionally I had allowed self doubt to creep in and I had convinced myself that I might never make my target.  At one point during this section, I’d considered just giving up and going home.  Of course, then I cross over 35 minutes and realize I’ve reached the virtual point of no return.  Now, that’s a myth in treadmill training.  I can stop at any point I want.  I haven’t gone anywhere.  Still, part of my psyche tells my body that I’ve run 35 minutes already, 25 more won’t hurt as much as I think it can and I should “shut up and run, stupid!”  Which is of course what I wind up doing.  The last bit of my run (just under 18 minutes for the zone 3 hour) was at 8:00 flat.  Pretty slow, but my heart rate had been creeping toward 173 and I have learned that if I hit the top of the zone, I spend the rest of my run slowing down and fighting the zone boundary.  Anyway, I realized as I entered this phase that I’d done bad math in the middle and that it would likely be somewhere between 8.5 and 9 miles by the time I entered cool down.  Maybe it was the endorphins, maybe it was the knowledge that I might actually make what I’d set as my next near term goal, but realizing that I might actually make 9 miles bolstered my energy and I was running effortlessly.  Of course, that was a myth as my heart rate crept very close to the boundary and I just managed to finish the 60 minutes without dropping my speed one last time.

Cool down I pushed a bit more than I should have, because I didn’t want there to be any question of completing 9 miles.  I can’t really run after 65 minutes at 10:00 per mile and let my heart rate drop into zone 1 effectively.  I just wanted that 9 so badly that I wasn’t going to let it evade me.

When I done and back to the house, I realized something else odd about this run.  I was predominately unaware of what music had played on the Nano during my run.  That really means little, since I am reading TV as much as the crappy closed captioning allows.  Just as a side note, I find that the typed output is LAME.  Does a deaf person really use that and if so, do they think TV is horrible?  I mean, a couple of the channels simply couldn’t even do basic spelling and those that did a good job of spelling and transcription did a horrible job at keeping up with the video.  Anyway, if I don’t remember what I heard, then it is likely I was either focused on the run, which isn’t a goal, or I was too distracted by my surroundings, which is most often the case.

I’ve got to do a better job of calorie distribution.  I had almost 1500 calories to eat for supper and that’s WAY too many.  I don’t like having to eat like that at night.  Still, I am convinced that having less on my stomach prior to the run helped make it a better run.  Hard to say really.  I also had to take another moment to consider my intake.  My current targets are based on a 700 calorie workout average.  881 calories isn’t 700 and I allow myself to worry that I should be making that adjustment and consuming 3600 or more instead of the 3450 on training days.  After “starving” my body once, I’m now concerned that I’ll manage to do it again.  The test was 2 months ago and in those 8 weeks I’ve busted a lot of tail.  Can my calorie point have changed that much in 8 weeks?  I don’t know.  Just more things to feed my mania, and of course the gym gets paid every time I take one of these tests, so I have no doubt they plant that seed to facilitate making more on repeated testing.

Tomorrow is a day of rest, so there won’t be a posting again until after the training on Friday.

Cheers!

March 24th, 2009 Base Builder 3

So, today was my first workout after I started this new blog.  The title shows the date of the exercise and the type of exercise I’m doing.  For those of you that haven’t actually asked up to this point, if anyone is actually reading, all my training is actually cardiac training, where I am pushing to train my cardio systems to burn fat more efficiently at higher heart rate intensities.  A base builder 3 is an interval exercise where I have 5 minutes of warm up, 60 minutes in a 3 minute repeating pattern of 2 minutes in heart rate zone 2 and 1 minute in heart rate zone 3.  Basically 20 repetitions of that exercise.  Then, I have 5 minutes of cool down.

I can exercise however I want to get my heart rate up into the target zone.  Colleen typically uses incline, while I use speed.  Speed allows me to push myself to faster times in road races, which only fuels the fire to accomplish more.  In the end, I completed 8.3 miles in the 70 minute interval for an average pace of 8:26 per mile.  Since my races to this point have been in the 7:20 per mile range, I’m obviously training well below race speeds on the average.  I do, however, attempt to run significantly faster for as many of the early intervals as possible and had some where I was averaging less than 6:30 per mile, but only in 1 minute slices.

For the housekeeping I promised, 8.3 miles in 70 minutes as I stated above, cooking up 849 calories in the process.  Since today was also a strength training day, I did another 30 minutes of strength training for an additional 297 calories.  This poses an interesting challenge for me in general as I try to balance nutrition into the equation.  About 7 weeks ago, I discovered that I was actually starving my body.  For more than a year, I’d been on roughly a 1750 calorie a day diet.  I was doing so intentionally as I moved into what I considered phase 3 of South Beach which is considered maintenance mode where no foods are off limits, just minimize the quantity.  Well, one of the trainers at the gym looked at my physique and suggested that I needed to have a calorie point test done.  This is a Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) test, which is used to determine how many calories your body burns when basically doing nothing all day.  His explanation was that my build seemed to suggest that I wasn’t eating right and this test would help establish what I should be doing.  It turned out that if I was in bed all day, I’d burn 2050 calories!  That means my 1750 wasn’t enough to sustain even doing NOTHING!  Ouch!  They do an odd estimate that says based on my normal lifestyle, I’d burn an additional 700 calories over the course of a day, which means my daily intake alone should be 2750.  On training days, at the time, I was burning around 750 calories for a workout.  That meant on training days I was supposed to be taking on 3500 calories!  OH MY GOD!  Turned out that my body was desperately hanging on to fat in the one place men hang onto it most, in my midsection.  It explained why I was thinner than I’d been since High School (I graduated at 155 pounds) yet still had a slight spare tire (OK, so perhaps it was just a bike tire, but it was still spare.)  Anyway, the point of all of this is that I had to slowly start taking on more food.  I couldn’t just go from 1750 to 3500 in one day.  That would cause my body to definitely store it as fat.  So, I had to add 200 calories each week until I got to my 2750 for non training days and then once I’d reached that point, start taking on 3500 on training days and 2750 on regular days.  Now, that is where my conundrum kicks in.  As you saw above, my housekeeping indicated I burned 1146.  Does that mean that I should now be upping my caloric intake on training days to 3850?  So far, that answer has been no, but I am worried that it should be yes.  Hard to judge really.  I think perhaps after this next race, I’ll look into it.

This interval training run is “easy” in my mind.  There is enough changing of speed and challenge that I don’t notice I’m running an hour solid.  I just have 20 repetitions to complete.  I watch my miles pile up and it always makes me laugh that less than a year ago, my warm up speed was once my top speed.  I also laugh that I am now able to run 6:36 mile pace, even if just for short bursts, when before that was too much for me to believe I could safely stay on the treadmill.  I think it took the IBM 5K last November for me to really come to grips with how much my fitness had improved and the 10K in February to come to grips with my endurance.  I think it was the success of my first 10K that convinced me that I was even ready to consider a half marathon this year.  Originally, my plan had been for 2010 (there’s a huge race in Virginia Beach around Saint Patrick’s Day that looks really good) and after running that 10K and feeling like I had more to give to the race after I finished I am now considering accelerating the plans.

I also added some additional weights to the lifting.  A few of the exercises had been getting easier and that is a sign I needed to up the weight.  We’ll see how sore I am over the next few days and go from there.

Got home and uploaded my workout data into the tracking application.  I use a Polar Heart Rate monitor with an infrared link to a PC application.  It keeps my mileage, pace and heart rate for each exercise which then I upload to the PC application to look at cool graphs and trends.  That’s part of what got me hooked, honestly.  The heart monitor has high geek factor to start, and having an application I can use to see the results only feeds the geek in me. LOL

I also synched my iPod.  I have an 8GB Nano and a playlist I call my work out Jam.  My MP3 library is roughly 40GB total, and this playlist intentionally rolls songs off to see exactly how much of the library I’ve actually listened to.  So, it becomes a part of the process to remove and add new music almost daily.  New only in the sense that it hasn’t ever been played as far as iTunes knows.  It means there’s a very eclectic mix of music and I never know what will pop up.  Some songs wind up being almost de-motivating, but it is just part of the process for me.

Well, that’s enough for my first run post.  We’ll see how this goes.

Cheers!

Apologies, Greetings and Salutations

Keep the pace hold the race
Your mind is getting clearer
Youre over half way there
But the miles they never seem to end
As if youre in a dream
Not getting anywhere
It seems so futile

Iron Maiden – The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Yes, first let me apologize to Iron Maiden, I ripped them off for my title.  Still, it seemed appropriate since the song is all about running and what seems the complete futility of it all.  So, I like the song (I grew up on Heavy Metal, no apologies for that) and I liked the title.  I hope it doesn't get me into any hot water with them.  I somehow doubt it.

Second, let me apologize to my wife and my friends.  I’m not lonely, and that shouldn’t be implied by my choosing to write this new blog.  Running, especially in today’s iPod enhanced world, is a very solitary sport, if it can even be called a sport.  I just wanted to chronicle my training and the solitary nature of what is for me a very odd new hobby.

Now, with all those disclaimers out of the way, I’ll welcome whomever decided to be crazy enough to actually read this thing.  I’ll be posting the link on my Facebook profile, so I assume that someone may actually decide to read it, but I never expect anyone to be out here.  Blogging for me is cathartic and more about being mildly self indulgent than it is about readership and coy witticism.  In the end, I put down what I feel, what I’m going through, and if it entertains, so be it.  I suppose I should apologize to Christian Slater as well.  ‘Greetings and Salutations’ is his line from Heathers, and while that didn’t manage to make my 5 all time movies I’d watch over and over (though in retrospect it should have bumped Dune that pretentious piece of celluloid) I still find it a movie that never fails to entertain.  I’m just a pop culture junkie and I’ll rip off whatever reference I think suits my mood.

The premise of this blog, as opposed to Derek’s Rants, is to really just lay out what I’m going through each day I train.  I never intended to be a runner.  I never planned to start running long distances.  I discovered, however, as my fitness got better (I went from a whopping 230 lbs after my honeymoon to a rail thin 155 in 3.5 years) I was able to run longer and longer.  I also discovered that as my fitness increased, my speed did.  I have now decided that I’m going to train for a half marathon, and have still clung to a goal of running a full marathon before I’m 45.  Considering that two years ago I couldn’t run two miles without barfing up a lung, I consider this a stunning turn of events.  So, the blog will cover some of the housekeeping.  I’ll list how long I ran, how far I ran, and what my heart rate targets were during the training.  But, at the same time, I’ll talk about what I felt, how I felt, and what the run meant to me.  In the end, I doubt it will be worth the read.  If you’re still here after all this drivel, all I can suggest is to hang on for the ride!

Cheers!