A New Year a new Me

That is the plan, finally cleared the house of all its Christmas temptations and got back to a good clean diet again. This coupled with my regular Doctor issuing me with NSAID suppositories my UC/Proctics as abated some bit. On the first week I went for one of those talk to myself runs to try and maybe set a goal or target for the year. Its probably something that has been lacking since I ran Seville last February. Okay their is a goal in completing 50 Marathons (24 more) before my 50th Birthday in August 2016. While it is a challenge in itself, in my opinion it doesn't require me to push on to the next level. Really all it requires is that I stay injury free and get the job done. I had looked at tackling the shorter stuff but the faster interval training does leave me open to injuries. To other option is to go longer, I am kind of flirting with the idea of racing 50K in Portumna in June, not fully committed to it yet but a crack at a sub 4 Hour 50K would fit the bill of giving me a goal for the next few months.

Baseline Test

With this in mind I decided to run a Hadd Test just to get an idea at what level my fitness was at. The results showed that I had lost a small bit in comparison to where I was the last time I ran one. The lower/aerobic running was giving me 740 BPM/KM over 2K. Last year I was lower at 710 BPM/KM but I am now 7 lbs heavier. So all in all I feel a little more concentration on steady/ high end aerobic together with keeping my hand out of the cookie jar should leave me in shape come the end of February to consider having a go at a 4 Hour 50K

Loving the Trees

After seeing my workload for January, my intention of running MCI Marathon in Liliput was gone leaving me with the 3 hour drive to the sunny south east. Luckily I had some in car entertainment to shorten the journey in the form of Mr Enright. Oilgate been our destination for the day and Marie Chapman our host as Race Director with the ever reliable Vincent lending a helping hand. Great to catch up with the usual few and 60 or so runners took on a five 5.25 Mile laps for the Day. Each lap had a downhill start with a gradual climb back to the main road, and the obligatory tree hug halfway. The first lap fly by in the company of Tom and Paul, I didn't even notice the climb. Lap 2 saw the standard pit stop, but thankfully it was the only one of the day. Lap 3 things where a bit tougher but for the third Marathon in a row I finished much stronger. Lap 4 I put in some 7:30 miles to catch up with Paul after some running repairs with footwear, and on the final lap I was pretty much feeling very strong and able to keep the pace up to come home in sub 3:57.

Words to the Wise

Meet Thomas afterwards and I queried him re what type of mileage running will he do in preparation for 24 Hour Championship in Turin. His answer while vague is a pretty sound philosophy that everyone should bear in mind with regard to running and training. “I will run whatever mileage my body can recovery from”. Afterwards the usual presentations say Gillian and Oggie Winters received their 100 Marathon awards as well as a special award for Brenda M O’Keeffe to mark her record for most Marathons 74 in a calendar year for a Female. Clearly these guys have much better recovery ability then my old body.

Tik Tok

Your most accurate Watch ?

Most of us runners possess at least one if not two watches. Well I own two a polar RX3000 which I use for Heart Rate Training/Monitoring and Soleus GPS for measure new training routes and pacing. To my surprise I now own Three, my body/mind.
After finishing Craughwell I had completed 6 Months of Base building long runs with some Lactate Tempo Runs Thrown in here and there, loosely structured around Hadd Training. With Seville approaching before Christmas I switched to the Race Prep section of P&D 55 mile program. I used this program 3 years ago in prep for a crack at 3:30 qualifier for Boston. I never got to the start line as I was not able at the time for this program. This section of the program starts to introduce PMP runs, Planned Marathon Pace runs. I have an issue with Planned Marathon Pace, it most likely is never your true current Marathon Pace. If your Marathon Pace is faster than you are only running at the high end of your Aerobic Threshold and not gaining any real benefit. When you Marathon Pace is slower than PMP then you are doing a long LT training session while it does have a benefit it ends up been a harder session which ultimately may cause an injury or worse still end up overtraining. I tend to do these type of runs at what I feel my actual Marathon Pace is at the time not what I would like it to be. So how do you determine your Marathon pace, that opens up another can of worms altogether, as I have wrote about before this depending on what online calculator/resources you use, it can vary by close to ten minutes or 20 seconds/mile. Having come across this article on Runners World (yes I know not the best source for material) I decided to give it a shot and run it blind. So my first session was 15 Miles with 12 at Marathon Pace. I ran a 5 mile loop which is reasonably flat with the exception of One mile which is undulating. Put on the Polar and Heart Rate monitor and covered over with the sleeve of my body armor. One feature of the polar is you can bring the watch to the chest strap and it will record a lap which I took every 3 miles. Two mile warm up and off I went to try and judge a pace that was not slack but one I felt I could maintain for the duration of a Marathon. The first segments went rather easily and I felt I may have gone a bit too fast from miles 3 to 6. Mile 6 to 9 things where a bit harder but still very manageable. The last Three where tough mentally but the legs where still flying around. On finishing I felt that I may have overcooked miles 3 to 6 which may have made the last three miles that bit tougher and probably slower. Well the results shown below where in stark contrast.

Miles	Time	Average HR	Pace
1-3	0:24:01.1	151	08:00.4
3-6	0:24:06.2	158	08:02.1
6-9	0:23:57.3	157	07:59.1
9-12	0:23:56.9	161	07:59.0

Turns out mile 3-6 felt easy because it was the slowest and the last 3 felt the hardest as they were the fastest. The real surprise is that if I was pacing in a race using my GPS watch and constantly looking at it to make sure I was on target I would have been extremely happy to have hit those splits. The HR readings were about right for my Marathon Pace if not a little on the soft side. My final PMP session is this weekend and I will again run it blind just to see if it was a fluke or not.

Rebuilding Again

Peel back the layers

Was only expecting a rub down on Monday but Leon just could not get Glutes to release, so I got another dose of the needles. This time there was to be no running and a varied single leg bridge was to be done. Went back again on Thursday for a rub down of Glutes and Hamstrings. He also gave the IT a good workout as well. Plan is to gradually increase workout distance and intensity and continue with  the single leg bridge.

On the way Up

Thursday I did 4 miles very easy and all went well. Friday I did 5 miles including 3 * 1600 repeats at 7:20 per mile, got some small pinching in the butt when the pace went under 7:00 and towards the end of the third. I had planned 4 but I sided with caution and didn't do the last one.  Saturday I took a rest day which is a pity because it was the only day recently that you could look forward to doing a run. Sunday another 4 mile easy pace.

A damp run

This evening I was going to step it up to a 6 miler with 4 miles @ 8:00 pace. It was an horrible evening for it, wind, rain and hail. As I had left it late it was also dark so I decided to go to the fairgreen which has a little over a half mile circuit. Some of this is a bit uneven but I would be somewhat sheltered from the elements and have some light while not having to contend with traffic. The run went very well and I had managed to time it that I encountered no showers until I was on the way home. With about half a mile to go some stupid plonker of a driver ploughed through a flood and in the space of 1 second I was saturated from head to toe. I was not a happy bunny for the last 5 minutes of this run. I am really looking forward to the next couple of months when the stretch comes back in the evenings and I can get away from these idiots of drivers around the town of Ennis.

Feburary 1st
          5.5 Miles Interval Run 3 * 1600 @ 7:20 pace w 400m Rec (7:16,7:22,7:15) with 1 Mile
          WU/WD

Feburary 4th  
          6.2 Miles 4.2 Miles Tempo  33:44 @ 8:03 pace, HR 153 with 1 Mile WU/WD

Easy and Slow

Recovery and Racing

Took all of last week to recover from my efforts in Sixmilebridge, but on Saturday Morning there was a charity 5K to be ran. Only about 30 showed mostly ladies from various meet and train groups around the area and it looked at one stage that I was odds on for the win until one of the hares from Ennis Track appeared. I had to settle for a gallant second but was made to work for it all the way. Course was a bit long 5.3K but 8 min mile pace was enough to take it. It felt tough so clearly the Sixmilebridge race was still in my legs. I also meet with a pacee from Dingle who thanked me for helping her to the finish under the 2 hour mark.

Baby Steps

Another Evaluation done in perfect conditions on Tuesday Evening. I was a bit worried about this because of how the legs felt on Saturday Morning. Results showed a slight improvement but again after three laps @ 180 I was hyperventilating badly and pulled up. This clearly shows that I will need to do some serious track workouts if I am to get 5K times improved. Its is probably my biggest weakness and I will have to bite the bullet and join a club if I want to improve the fast end of my running. The main target is still sub 3:25 in Portumna next June. So I will continue with another cycle of Long,LT and Steady runs before I go into a more specific plan for the Marathon.

Date	Temp	Weight	140	150	160	170	180
17-Sept-2012	12°	169 lbs	8:43 (0:44)	8:10 (1:00)	7:36 (1:30)	6:56 (2:12)	6:40 (N/A)
27-Nov-2012	6°	170 lbs	8:42 (0:39)	8:06 (0:56)	7:29 (1:15)	6:51 (1:47)	6:37 (N/A)

The racing Gods hate me

Will I wont I

That was my dilemma all week. I felt my fitness level have really improved since I have got my mileage back up to 40 mpw region. So I should go for sub 45 on Saturday but the 10K specific runs have been curtailed or pace cut back due to tight Hammer was it worth the risk. Friday put paid to that, Thursday evening Resting HR was 65, early warning sign something was amiss. Friday sore throat when I woke up, after work that evening felt like shit so I do what always works for me. Throw on extra duvets on the bed a large hot whiskey with honey and cloves and stay there for the next 24 hours. Arose Saturday evening feeling a lot better.

What might have been

On Monday I decided to do some sort of a test where I can evaluate my progress over the coming months in the winter. Having read a bit on this over the year I have opted to loosely follow a Hadd type training program. He has a test where the runner runs 2.4K at various heart rates with 90 sec recovery intervals. I adjusted this slightly as it was based on a runner who was capable of 5 min miles. So I reckon that this test requires the runner to at least run 8 minutes at any given effort. This meant I would use a 2K interval instead. For the rest I was going to use another pointer which may be useful, recovery time. So I will record the time it takes for heart rate to return to 120 bpm.
My current stats are as follows. Max Hr is 191 and Resting Hr is 47-54. Based on Hadd my marathon HR/LT Heart rate should be between 170-175 (15-20 bpm below Max HR). Something tells me if I did 26.2 at this effort I would no longer be on this earth. Test will run 2K intervals for 140,150,160,170 & 180 b. After each interval I will record the time it takes for HR to return to 120BPM. Results of my test are below with comments on how the effort felt.

Date	Temp	Weight	140	150	160	170	180
17-Sept-2012	12°	169lbs	8:43 (0:44)	8:10 (1:00)	7:36 (1:30)	6:56 (2:12)	6:40 (N/A)

 This was a bit of a mixed bag.

• I was very happy with my 140 through to 160 paces. Felt like I could hold these quite easily and never felt under any pressure to finish them.
• I have in the past run 10K with 175-180 average but I was very glad to see the end of the 2K @ 170.I do not think I could have held this effort for too much longer. 
• The 180 just did not happen got to the start of the 3rd lap where HR was not above 178 and when I pushed it my running form just fell apart and hammer started to feel tight and I was sucking air in like it was no tomorrow.

Typical plodder that I am can suffer through miles 20 to 26. of a Marathon but ask me to go all out for 2K and I wimp out like a pussy. Looking at the numbers and how I felt I reckon the last 12 months my LT threshold has dropped under 160 so over the winter concentration is on getting this back up to 170 region.

To infinity and beyond

Training going forward will be as follows with 3 Key sessions.

• One long run of 2-2.5 Hours @ 140-150 effort/pace.
• Tempo run of 75 Minutes @ 155 effort 
• LT Run of 60 Minutes @ 160 effort.

Currently I have only got the Tempo and LT runs to 4 miles so over the next 5 cycles I will build them up to the required level. Each session will be separated by 2 easy days of swim/easy running and some aerobic cross training. I may or may not take day 10 as a complete rest day. This has been working well for me so far since end of June and I do need the extra recovery time as I am an old fellow.

Sept 20 
           7 Miles 5 Miles 38:35 7:43 pace , HR 155 with 1 Mile WU/WD