Sunday, 9/23/07 (5 mile tempo)
In answer to Matt's list of fruits, here is a list of my favorite fruits, in order of favoritism. Someday I hope to make a similar list, but instead of fruits, it will feature my children.
Here are a few fruits I have either not eaten recently, or not eaten at all, and need to try sometime:
Here are some fruits that I don't especially like. I don't dislike them, but I won't go out of my way to get them. Eating one of these fruits is like riding the monorail at Disney World. Nothing wrong with it, but you know there are more exciting options available.
This is a very small sample of the culinary fruits available on Earth. Wikipedia has a much longer list.
Now that the important business is taken care of, I ran a 10-lap tempo at Lacy, taking a route back through the picnic tables to get closer to 800m/loop. I ran 2-lap splits of:
5:36, 5:34, 5:26, 5:28, 5:20 = 27:24 for the entire run.
This is the same run I did on 8/14/07, about a month ago, just after getting back from Stanford. But today I ran it more than a minute faster at the same or less effort. So I'm very pleased with how it went. I'm also pleased with the way I ran, telling myself to stay cool and relaxed, checking the watch only once per two laps and keeping myself under control and totally focused. It was fantastic. I feel pretty good going into Stanford six days from now.
They say the course is fast (short) but for now I'll just put the goal at setting a new PR, and if I get anything on top of that, it'll be a great bonus.
Saturday, 9/22/07 (90 minutes, strides)
The pattering of rain urged my too-willing body back to sleep this morning. I justified my torpor with baseless suppositions about the poor navigability of the arroyo trail and the futility of attempting a steady state there. Later, Sachith told me it hadn't been bad at all, but I remember many times trying to run in the arroyo during or after rain, and thinking a tempo would be nearly impossible. I think he was probably lying to me. Brown people do that a lot, you know.
I ran alone later in the day, making 90 minutes for the first time in recent memory - a sign that my injuries are recessing in step with my withdrawal from the roads. These two salient features of my recent training - my health and my aloneness (I don't say loneliness.), have been warring in my mind recently.
I would like to run with the team regularly. I enjoy running alone, but I enjoy good companionship even more. This isn't the full reason, though. Running with the team gives me some delusion of higher purpose. I get to think that, having been through four years of a Caltech education, and having improved my running consistently throughout that time, I've become a sage guide for the younger runners. I get to feel like I'm passing on my knowledge where it will do some good. And most importantly, I get something that implies. Because in order to pass on knowledge, you have to know something to begin with. So running with the team, in addition to its companionship and altruistic "do good for others" aspects, also contains an element an ego-boosting element. Not just because at the moment I'm in better shape for cross country than the team is, but because I'm up higher, on a different literal level, than the rest of the runners. There's nothing like having people below you to prove how petty the interior workings of your mind are.
On the other hand, I feel drawn to running alone, as well. Alone, I'm truly in charge. I take issue with some of Scott's training, and for years I've been modifying it the way I want - sometimes to good effect and sometimes to bad. It's hardly a reflection of my opinion of Scott. It's just my personality. I crave sovereignty. I want to be both in charge and responsible, self-motivated, self-coached, self-dependent. For me there's a beauty in aloneness. It's the beauty of simplicity. Whether running, reading, studying, writing, playing, or working, doing it alone forces me to a higher level of introspection of self-knowledge, which I love. There's no need to pretend to be interested, or pretend to laugh, when I'm alone. There's simply myself, and my thoughts. If I have demons, I'm alone with them, too. And I don't mind that at all.
I believe that at this stage in my life, my primary responsibility must be to myself - to understanding myself as fully and deeply as possible. How can I devote myself to others, help them and work with them and derive joy from life together, if I do not first know and appreciate my own being? How can I coach someone to a level I've never explored before myself? How can I become a guide before I've even found one way through?
Friday, 9/21/07 (70 minutes, strides)
Laps on the infield and some strides. Pretty straightforward run. I was having all sorts of gastric trouble because of eating sugar for the first time in maybe two weeks last night. Somehow it lingered all day. It was really bad. I was trying to tutor this girl in math, explaining what "domain" and "range" of a function mean, and I kept having to pause in my explanations and drill questions to squich my face up really tight and try to hold a fart in, because her mom was right in the next room, and there's no way that Asian woman would keep inviting me back in her home if I just keep dropping methane bombs in her daughter's face.
Thursday, 9/20/07 (25 minutes)
I was going to run more, but pyschologically it just wasn't there today. I was feeling stressed out about school, distracted, and I just kept getting the feeling that there was something better for me to be doing than running just then. So I stopped. Later I read Purcell, and suddenly understood a lot of stuff all at once. It was amazingly cathartic, and all because I stopped running. Maybe I'll write more about that later.
Wednesday, 9/19/07 (45 minutes)
Recovery day. North field laps.
Tuesday, 9/18/07 (reps)
20 wu, 6 strides, 2x300 (49, 47), 4x200 (31, 30, 29, 29), jog, 2 strides, 2 accelerations, 2 strides, short cd.
My goal here was to get a bit of training for the paces I haven't hit at all this summer except for strides here and there. Training is a pyramid - most of your time is spent at the slow paces at bottom, and a tiny bit is spent up top. But the whole pyramid is still there all year. Reason being that only a very small amount of work tends to be sufficient to maintain old fitness, while much more is needed to improve, and none at all yields atrophy. So this time of year a huge effort goes into slower paces from distance runs to tempos, but a little still goes into these faster guys. I wanted to run the 300's at date mile pace and the 400's at goal mile pace, but I probably got a little ahead of myself on both counts.
Monday, 9/17/07 (80 minutes, strides)
I started a letsrun thread bemoaning my injury woes. But I managed to get 80 minutes in without falling apart, which is the best I've done recently.
9/17/07 - 9/23/07 "Nice hip abductors. Do you work out?" (400 minutes, 1 tempo, 1 rep workout)
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14 comments:
Since when did you get lazy enough to abbreviate warmup as "wu" and cooldown as "cd"?
who said anything about "warm up"? i did 20 wu's. how many wu's did you do? how many wu's would voodoo blue Jew crew do if you do wu's and poo?
interesting...
then how the hell do you pronounce "cd"?!??!?! is it c-d or ssssddddd or ka-dddddddd
the correct pronunciation is "compact disk"
ooooohhh, The Brain vs. Markkimarkkonnen, the showdown! This will be interesting...
unrelatedly, i relate very much to the running with the brats/running alone debate--or at least i did relate last year when i could run more proficiently. its an interesting question that at least in my experience seems to intensify with increasing time/space distance from one's collegiate years. the freedom from obligation to support a team means you'll feel more of a pull to do your own thing but at the same time you'll miss the team/leader aspect more and more...not that anyone ever listened to what i have to say about running theories or anything... ;)
i take issue with scott's training bc it injures me... but to be fair, my own training seems to injure me too... so i'm re-thinking things a bit right now, however, it always seems to be more appealing to fail doing your own thing rather than to fail following someone else's instructions.
megumi,
thank you for your thoughts thus far. what i'm really interested in is:
what is your opinion on fruit?
hmm.... re: running alone / with the team. No real insightful thoughts, but I definitely feel your thoughts to the running alone side.
my opinion on fruit is that you should follow kangway's advice of eating 5-10 bananas a day in order to obtain an optimal amount of soluble fiber.
if you do this, you will only have to use 2 squares of toilet paper per day (2 poopings x 1 square per poo) which over the course of a year will help save an estimated 4,873 trees.
also, bananas contain a lot of potassium which is good for running because it helps reduce muscle soreness.
thank you for your inquiry into this matter.
p.s. you may have trouble procreating if you plan on ranking your 17 kids in order of favoritism, so you may want to keep that to yourself. alternatively you can join me in Operation Steal Kenyan Babies... but i think i will be ranking them in ascending order of 10K PRs.
Mark, let's both have over twenty kids and raise them according to our style of choice (Kenyan, Ethiopian, Lydiard-style, Coe-style), then when they all turn twenty or so we will have a huge cross country race, my babies versus yours. Okay?
Also Mark, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on "long runs" if you ever have a minute to think about them. I have this idea that long runs, the most basic type are sort of supposed to be done at a pretty easy effort, and that the overall effort becomes medium due to the length but not the intensity. I was thinking about this because it always seemed that monday long runs were sort of at a harder effort than needed to be. Like supposedly the effort was supposed to be "medium," but I think an easy pace coupled with length of maybe 12 instead of 10 miles would have sufficed for a medium effort.
Also I think long runs that are too fast make it easy to injure yourself, especially if you have a tuesday workout.
Anyhow, if you have time, I'd like to hear your ideas.
Sin seer lee,
kangway
yes. yes to all of your wonderful comments. i will bear children from my womb and leave them on the doorsteps of kenyans, stealing from the same households native-born infants. i will train them all, my biological and adopted offspring, in every conceivable manner, building up a vast legion of running-loving underlings, and at last send them out coursing through the hills and the woods, celebrating the beauty of their youth with the praise of feet padding lightly together over the earth. and when i see them all striding smoothly through hills and trails, i will die a happy man.
but as for long runs, i think a strong pace on long runs is absolutely essential. "just getting out there" is probably good advice for a beginner, but at this point i don't think it will bring me nearly the same benefits as a more aggressive pace. Many, many sources I've seen say that long runs are NOT about jogging. I remember reading michael sandrock's book "running with the legends", which describes the training of one after another successful runner. though there were some differences, one thing they all had in common was that they did long runs, and they took them very seriously.
their runs may start out slow, but they would get faster and faster as they progressed. even lydiard says it should not be a slow pace, and that you need to "get fracking". his guys were running 20 miles at better than 6-minute pace, over hilly terrain. steve scott claimed that his group would occasionally run the last two miles in under nine minutes. dick quax said that long runs were the staple of his program, and that the last bit had to be very fast. when runners started to show a lack of freshness from too much speed work and racing, solid long runs were the prescription. khannouchi is said to be unable to sleep well the night before his long run, because he's so worried because of how hard it is. tergat, before running the world record marathon, would finish almost every single long run with a few minutes at under 5k pace (4:10 for him). morceli is said to have really broken through when he finally stopped resisting his coach's entreaties to go do some long hard runs, not just fast intervals. etc, etc.
unfortunately i don't have that book on me any more, having given it away to someone somewhere along the line, but if i get my hands on it again i'll do a survey.
i've also seen the advise of doing both a fast long run and a slow very long run (for instance, joe rubio here
and basically i'm doing the long hard run and skipping the very long easy run. the merits of that are debatable, but for now that's what i'm doing. maybe later on if i start to feel more invincible i'll try to get in both.
damn, i used a verb where i needed a noun. should read, "i've also seen the advice..."
i think the merits of the very long easy run vs. the long harder run depend on where you are in your training cycle. from my very limited experience, both can be managed relatively easily given a solid base. some of my happiest most productive training weeks involved 1 easy very long run 2-2.5 hours (15-17 miles), 1 tempo/progression-y run (10 miles at threshold, last mile hard), 1 hill climb (steep, 45-60 minutes of consistent climbing) separated by easy jogging type days. it was only when i developed this bizarre obsession with 2 mile repeats and track tempos that i became quasi-permanently brokened. gah.
Interesting.
Let me outline some thoughts because I am too lazy to put them into coherent paragraphs:
I like a bunch of lydiard's ideas.
I don't agree with the Khannouchi method of training. I heard he would stay up all night because he was so nervous and would vomit both before and after. But also I heard he would finish the last 3 miles at 10k pace or faster.
I like the idea that you aren't going so slow that your form is getting sloppy, but you aren't going so fast that you're straining.
I like Lydiards "pleasantly tired" goal. Where if you run an out and back loop (and it's flat, no wind), you should be able to return as fast as you headed out. But you should be able to go at some type of max aerobic threshold. Basically you're going hard enough that your breathing is nice and good, but you aren't straining at all, and your pace shouldn't be shutting down at anytime.
I also still like the idea that you should be able to finish runs feeling like you could have gone a bit longer.
I'll think this over more and write more I guess later.
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