Weekly Summary: 9/22/08 9/28/08 (sick)

Sick most of the week. Nothing much to say. I ran about 100 minutes towards the end of the week.

Monday, September 29, 2008 (55 minutes)

I was about to get pretty upset. I was stung by a bee on the bottom of my right big toe just a few minutes shy of my one hour goal. This after a mild hamstring injury that I'm not sure is 100%, a bad race, and illness. It seems common that these things clump together.

Normally I swell up with a big red welt when I'm stung, but it's been eight hours and still looks fine. Good thing when I got stung I immediately stopped and yanked the stinger out in a graceless flurry of monoleg locomotion and pathetic yelpings of pain. Score another one for the vertebrates.

Here is a comic I stole from the internet. SCREW YOU, INSECTS!

Sunday, September 28, 2008 (NFTC)

Membership in the North Field Track Club (which is training for cross country and meeting on the South Field) has dwindled to just me and Dennis, but it was a good week nonetheless. 40 minutes of running, then some lifting and a Rosarito's burrito.

Saturday, September 27, 2008 (~35 minutes)

Spectated at Riverside. I'm not feeling nearly fit enough to race at the moment. But watching the race and seeing a large fraction of the SCIAC run pretty well (Dennis ran 28:05 and was the 31st SCIAC finisher, with Whittier and Redlands absent) had me feeling a bit impatient to at least get on to some real training. Instead I just let Kangway take pictures with my camera and threw a bunch of rocks at the mysterious metal things. Amazingly, Scott and Katherine didn't chastise me about this dubiously-safe activity.

Friday, September 26, 2008 (30 minutes)

The general pattern has been feeling worst in the morning, getting better as the day goes along, and then regressing slightly towards evening. Around 5:30 I was sitting in the library, realizing that my cough frequency had fallen unusually low, and my congestion was down to just one nostril, so I went for a short run on the infield. Later I did 8 minutes on each leg on the balance pad, which is almost back to old form.

Westmont XC 2008 (28:05, 15th)

Splits about 5:12, 5:33, 5:45, 6:00, 5:35.
I can't believe I actually ran a 6:00 mile inside a five mile race. I'm pretty sure that when healthy I can run 20 six minute miles in a row.

I went out too hard, not wholly realizing it. In fact my pace that first mile was faster than the average pace of the race winner, who I knew was well out of my league after watching him race at Irvine. I wanted to stay close to Luis (who is clearly in excellent shape and took second), and sacrificed smart pacing to that goal.

I didn't realize during mile two how much I was slowing down. Once I saw the time, I knew that the leaders were long gone, and basically I hit the off switch and cruised in. I did not care at all when people passed me.

I need to run some hard workouts. I want to know that I have the ability to push myself. In order to know it, I have to do it. And in order to do it, I have to practice it.

So once I'm healthy, well, and have returned to full training, it will be time for some actual, faster-than-race pace hard work once in a while. The sort of thing I shy away from far too much.

Discovering New Ground II

The new ground I've covered recently has been to experience, for the first time in my life, waking up to the inability to open my eyes, since my own body nocturnally caked them shut with dried mucus. Honestly, I'm a little excited about going to sleep just now, because I want to see whether it will happen again tonight.

So haven't been running this week due to the illness that makes my ears throb in pain, my throat sore, and ocular boogers ooze liberally across my face. However, I've gotten to the point where I'm not especially concerned about throwing off my running schedule. Since it's clear I won't race at Riverside on Saturday, I don't have anything pressing to work towards.

When I do have a race coming up shortly, everything feels rushed. I worry that there's not enough time to get in a good workout, that I need to rest for it, that a certain injury will not heal and will be re-injured, that I haven't prepared well enough recently.

When I don't have a race, I simply understand that if I haven't prepared well, it'll just take me longer to get into peak shape. No problem. I'll wait another month.

The good part of a clear and immediate goal in front of me is that I work harder towards it. The bad part is that I pander to it. So the thing to do is to extract those good elements - a dedication to training rather than running, which sometimes slips away over the summers, and a sense of directed purpose. But to leave behind the fruitless worries and angsts.

Discovering New Ground

Megumi's comment on my post from a couple of days ago has been in the back of my mind all day. There, she wrote that when running well

every step down a trail i've never been before, every minute longer than i've ever run, every loop run faster than i've gone before, is like this cool new thing that is fulfilling in some way that's totally independent of everything else... i found out new things about the world and about myself, and it just so happened that becoming faster was a side effect of that.

But, persistent health and injury problems have kept her from training consistently. And although she's now resumed regular, organized, goal-driven training, her performance and general fitness, critically including the feel of running, are not approaching her previous levels. She describes the effect as:

now it's kind of like i'm in this no-man's land. since the year off, everything i've been doing training wise kinda feels unsatisfying. it's almost always slower, shorter and more tiring to boot. i so very much want to discover new ground again... but there are days when that seems ridiculous since my body won't even cover the old ground anymore... and then i feel discouraged and discontent.

There's a strong element of arbitrariness and inexplicability in running. My experiences with injury are the opposite. My best race ever was probably my 15:28 5000 at conferences my senior year. I dropped my PR 18 seconds in that race. The eight weeks immediately before that were six weeks of being injured, a 16:04 5000 at multi-duals (I don't remember why I went from not running at all to racing, but I did), then two weeks of regular short runs never exceeding one hour, three track workouts thrown in, and then 15:28.

I was similarly injured for most of senior cross country season before running two PR's at the end. Overall, I think I've had at least six layoffs of at least a month, and maybe two or three layoffs of three or more months. Each time I've returned to top shape in about half the time I spent being injured.

Ian seems to be the same way. He hasn't gotten back to 15:07 shape since 2001, but he's been back to 15:45 shape regularly, despite highly-yoyoing training levels (we occasionally bonded by aqua-jogging together while simultaneously injured).

Kamalah seems to return to high fitness very quickly; Gustavo does not.

Then, some people are more injury prone. I've had a full gamut of injuries, but recovered every time. Ian's had a full gamut and still struggles with them. Matt seems hardly to get injured at all. An old running friend of mine, Stuart Calderwood, was up to something like 22 years of running every single day, last time I checked.

Some people are naturally fast. Some train regularly without really improving.

Who knows? So much of deciding to be a runner is just this ridiculous crapshoot. We have a lot of control over our performances, but are also largely at the mercy of forces that are either random, or presently far beyond our understanding.

It appears to me that if so much of what allows you to run fast is a meaningless dice toss, then it doesn't make sense to judge your success at running based solely on performance. This last sentence carries an even-more-deeply ingrained but dubious premise: that running is an activity in which we should judge our success at all.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 (medium long, plyos)

AM: 90 minutes, dodging the grass-mowing guy
PM: Susan's plyos, lifting

I'm glad I didn't attempt a full-length long run this week, since I felt depleted to the point of weak legs and odd something-about-my-entire-body-is-not-quite-right sensations by a simple 90-minute run. I guess I had about a 13-hour gap between my last meal (salmon cooked by Kangway) and the beginning of this run, so I was simply on low fuel reserves. Still it was a little unsettling to be so wiped from a fairly-easy run. I took a two hour nap in the afternoon despite sleeping 8 or 8.5 hours the night before.

Lots of people think they'll have a "bouncing baby boy", but Susan's will be the bounciest. I tried hard to keep focused for her plyo session, despite anything she might tell you about my smart-aleck remarks. I'm clumsy at these. I focused more on "doing it right" than "doing it well", i.e. bound smoothly, not far.

It's hard for me to say whether or not I think these exercises have value as a distance runner. Certainly they are secondary or tertiary training. But as to whether they're helpful, it's impossible to say because I don't do them enough. We do plyos three or four times in the cross country season, and then that's it for the entire year.

Their stated intent is, I believe, to help the efficiency of your stride. There are other forms of plyos that should help your peak power output or speed of movement, but that's another story. There's no doubt in my mind that practicing the plyos would make me better at doing them. But as far as I can tell my stride is pretty good - not a thing of beauty, but it seems to get the job done, and people occasionally comment to tell me that I look like I'm putting out less effort than other runners at the same pace.

After eight years (I'm now a quarter way through my eighth year of running), I don't think my form will change drastically, although it's possible it could, especially at faster paces which I run less frequently. On the other hand, changes in efficiency could also result from physiological changes that don't necessarily manifest in the stride.

The plyos do make me tired - that much is clear. So they're an investment. I'll try to keep up with them through the winter and see whether it's a worthy investment or not.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008 (3xarroyo tempo)

I came to practice the way I used to go to the buffet at Sizzler as a kid - unsure what would be waiting there but pretty much willing to go along with it regardless. Scott had the guys running more hill repeats over the roads, which was among the short list of workout I was not willing to do. Instead, I drove the van down to the arroyo (the hill repeats were on San Rafael), and did 3xarroyo tempo, intending a fairly-relaxed 9:00 pace.

My splits were:
9:18, 8:32, 8:31 = 26:20 total

This wasn't what I expected or planned for, but I'm satisfied with it nonetheless. On the first lap, my perception was that from my cadence and stride, I was going faster than I wanted, not slower. I felt a good rhythm, but was just counting the tempo wrong. I would have expected 8:40 rather than 9:20. But when I looked at my watch, it did make sense that my time was slow. I was much too comfortable for an 8:40 lap. Apparently my lungs know my pace better than my brain does. I had figured my legs were simply feeling very fresh due to several easy/off days recently. But they were feeling normal, and my brain had just adjusted itself to get used to slow-osity

After the first lap, I decided I could crank the pace down a lot. Which I did. I felt strong and controlled over the next two laps, which is a bit surprising considering that I thought I was going fast on the first one. I wasn't strained, though. My heart rate was only about 180 at the end. It frequently gets to 190 on tempo runs.

I returned to the planned rendezvous with the team at 8:00. They were half an hour late, so I got some unplanned meditation in as well.

In the afternoon I jogged down to Lacy with the guys and bullshitted for about twenty minutes before jogging back, too fast. Then we did a preposterous ab workout, that lasted almost half an hour. By the end of it, I don't think anyone was really getting much out of it. We were just thrashing around on the grass like flipped over turtles, but without quite so much striation on our belly sides. I think this sort of preposterous over-volume workout a symptom of the warped mentality, "if one cookie for dessert is good, then ten cookies is MAGNIFICENT!!"

But no, one cookie is plenty. Except sometimes you should take two, unless you want to be really really good. Then you can take three, but it's risky. Also, if you work up to it gradually over the course of years of training, you can take six or seven. That would be magnificent.

Monday, September 15 2008 (easy)

60 minutes on the North Field.

I was thinking a bit about training today, leafing through a book or two, and I was reminded of the following story a wise man once told me. Not that's it's super-relevant. But it's a good story. Also, Kangway's mysterious illness probably primed my memory.

There was a man who for many months had ailed from an unknown disease. He had seen many doctors, none of whom could heal him. Then he began visiting traditional healers and trying new-age therapies, but nothing worked. At last he heard of a specialist who might be able to treat him.

When the specialist met the sick man, he sat him down on his examination bench, talked to him for a few minutes, and immediately diagnosed his illness. The doctor explained the man's illness to him, told him how to treat it, and wrote his instructions down on a piece of paper.

Although other doctors and healers had claimed they understood his illness before, the man was sure that this time he had finally found someone who knew the true solution. So he grabbed the doctor's instructions tightly and returned joyfully to his home. He built a small shrine to the doctor in front of his house. He decorated it with flowers, and placed an offering of fruit on its small altar. He walked around the shrine 100 times, bowed low to the ground three times, took out the doctor's orders from his pocket and began chanting, "One pill in the morning, one pill in the afternoon, one pill in the evening. One pill in the morning, one pill in the afternoon, one pill in the evening..."

Weekly Summary: (9/8/08 - 9/14/08 385 minutes, long run, mountain run, sub-tempo)

M: long
Tu: mountains
W: easy
Th: sub-tempo
F: off (hamstring)
Sa: off (hamstring)
Su: easy

This was a down week, since by Thursday I decided I should just take a couple of days completely off and make sure to take care of my hamstring. I trying to cut down on running-induced delirium, such as the delirious need to get in 12 runs every week.

Despite not working out much, I'm happy with this week of running. I got in an easy run with Matt on Sunday in the middle of helping him move out of town. Hopefully he'll still be back in Pasadena once in a while, but even so I was glad to have an easy "last run" before seeing him off.

I also got in a workout with Kangway for probably the first time ever on Thursday, and a great mountain run with Ian on Tuesday. The long run was good as well - 105 minutes. I'd like to push this up to 120 minutes and be comfortable running that duration at 6:30 pace or so before Huntington Beach. 13.1 is a long way to be running fast - I don't want my endurance to let me down in the last two or three miles when my fitness is strong enough to run 5:20's.

Next week, I'm planning on racing at Westmont. I'll do gentle workouts on Tuesday and Thursday, just keeping pace with whoever is up front in Caltech's workouts, and then let it rip (not literally, I hope) on Saturday. At this point it felt totally normal on my easy run today, but I didn't press it at all.

Approximate Schedule:
M: easy
Tu: AM: light workout PM: jogging, lifting
W: AM: easy PM: jogging, core
Th: AM: light workout PM: jog, core
F: AM: easy PM: course jog
Sa: race
Su: NFTC

I'm pretty flexible about all that if someone was dying to get in a run with me...

Thursday, September 11, 2008 (sub-tempo)

AM: 5x5on, 2off with Kangway in Lacy. Actually, I ran pretty much stride for stride with Kangway all day. Pace was a bit slower than tempo, but was just about as much as I thought my hamstring could take. It was good to work out Kangway, because as far as I can tell it's the first time we've done a workout together.

PM: 30 minutes easy on the south field, then some good lifting

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 (easy day)

AM: 20 minutes easy on the south field
PM: 30 minutes easy on the south field

Tuesday, September 9, 2008 (mountains)

AM: 85 minutes with Ian up Brown Mountain. I felt pretty good, even though my knees and hamstrings were both worrying me a bit beforehand.

PM: Spent the afternoon job hunting, then furiously working on my preparation for an interview with Brian Greene. Didn't get around to running.

Monday, September 8, 2008 (long run)

AM: 105 minutes on the South Field.

I paid careful attention to the hamstring, and it felt fine. Only near the very end where I started to get below 6:00 pace did I feel that any faster might be troublesome. So I simply didn't go faster.

I felt pretty strong on this, even at the end of the run with 1:40 of running already behind me. Waking up briefly at 4am and eating a Clif Bar might have helped, along with the enormous pasta-and-bread feast with Kangway late last night.

PM: About 20 minutes of easy running, warming up with the team before plyos. I skipped the plyos in favor of a solid core workout.

Sunday, September 7, 2008 (NFTC)

30 minutes of jogging, then a pretty good upper-body lifting session that left me sore by the next morning. The hamstring I pulled slightly on Friday seems to be doing better, although I'm still avoiding striders and fast running for the next few days.

Weekly Summary: 9/1/08 - 9/7/08 (525 minutes, steady state, long run)

This was a decent second week of the cross season. Both of my best runs were with Ian - a long run including Brown Mountain on Monday, then a steady state on Friday. My steady state run was excellent - controlled, steady work at just about the right pace. 5 arroyo tempo loops averaging 8:51. I felt stronger on my long run than I previously had.

I would have liked to get some faster running in this week. That's essentially what I'm missing - VO2 max type fitness. So I want to at least sprinkle in some faster fartleks here and there, rather than just running tempo all the time.

I tweaked my hamstring slightly on the steady state, so I'll have to be careful about this. I've also been running with the team less and less because I can feel what the roads and sidewalks are doing to my legs and I don't like it. I wish I could run with them more, because I like all the new prefrosh, (and the older guys as well), but I'd also like to have a season where I have no injury problems.

Plan for next week is contingent on how my hamstring feels, but will probably be like this:
Mon: AM long; PM easy, core
Tues: AM medium-long; PM easy, lift
Wed: AM easy; PM easy, core
Thu: AM fartlek or tempo (with team if they stay off the roads); PM easy, lift
Fri: AM easy, strides; PM easy or off
Sat: AM steady state 6xarroyo in 54:00; PM off

The goal is to keep working on the endurance and threshold stuff like I have been, but if the hamstring allows to get a little bit of work in at paces below 5:20.

Just Watching

I like to tell myself stories about other parts of myself, but they aren't normally true. One story is that I'm not especially motivated by competition. The idea here isn't that I avoid competition. It's that I have some sort of higher goal of personal excellence, and that I view competition solely as a vehicle towards that goal. But it's a lie. I want to win things, too.

I watched the race today, and when I saw that they were going out at 5:20 pace, I thought there was a good chance I could have mixed it up with the leaders. When Oxy's new frosh won in 26:45, I began to wish I had found a way to enter that race - not for the sake of racing, but for the accolades that would come after doing well.

On the other hand, over the course of the last 15 hours my reptile brain has been slowly sinking back from the fore. Now, my thoughts are different. I think that if I had run today's race, and even won it, I would not feel very satisfied with that. I know that my summer preparation was sloppy and lazy, regardless of whether it was sufficient keep me in shape to win the slow race today. The point of running is that it's a personal quest. The great part is that you're in control of your own actions. You have choices. Part of running is making the choices about what the best preparation is. Another part is making the choice about whether or not you'll execute that preparation with a whole-hearted approach.

I've only been putting in that full effort these last two weeks, and maybe not even then as evidenced by my sporadic updating of the log and a couple of missed runs.

I would say that my goal for the immediate future lies deeper than particular race performances, and instead lies in a display of improved self-control, improved dedication, improved self-understanding, improved love of the sport. But a wise man once told me this:

You cannot set out to fall in love. If you go out making an effort to fall in love with someone, you'll eventually find a romantic relationship, but it will likely be forced. It will be with someone else who set out with that same goal, and both of you will be deluding yourselves into thinking you're in love.

On the other hand, if you set about your daily activities by fully engaging yourself and living in the way you think is best, you'll inevitably come to share that with like-minded people. Soon, you may wind up falling in love with one of them. But that can't be the goal - only the consequence.

Similarly, my goal shouldn't be to achieve breakthroughs as a runner. It shouldn't be to run much better or much faster or much smarter than before. That's too big a picture - too global. Instead, the goal is just to do, each day, what I think is best to race my next race as well as I can.

I'm not sure whether this will sound profound or ridiculous in the morning, but I had five beers before I realized Matt had simply fallen asleep while sitting up next to me watching a movie, and I don't really have much better to do than drunkblogging at the moment.

Lost Days on the Log

There's no internet at the apartment yet, and consequently it's been a while since I updated anything. As best I can remember, here's what I've been up to:

Sunday August 31
NFTC - 30 minutes easy, some light lifting.

Monday September 1
Brown mountain with Ian. Pretty awesome medium-long run, including what turned out to be a pretty respectable ascent on the fire road, and my first-ever trip down the El Prieto trail back. The uphill climb seemed shorter than it used to. It's been a while since I ran it, though.

Tuesday September 2
AM: hard to remember. probably 30 minutes easy.
PM: ran at Lacy. I was going to do fartlek, but my legs tired, so I just did 40 minutes steady there, place Lacy long way and four Pattons all out.

Wednesday September 3
AM: I'm pretty sure I just ran on the south field, but I don't remember how long. One hour seems about right.
PM: Jogging with the team, about 25 minutes, then lifting. Katherine destroyed me in a game of h-o-r-s-e afterwards, but I did get one letter on her with a shot from behind the backboard, meaning I won on awesomeness.

Thursday September 4
AM: 20 minutes. It might actually have just been 10 minutes, since I wasn't timing it and Chief and Dennis said they ran on the south field as well, but didn't see me there. Basically I wanted to get it done and go back to sleep. Which I did.

PM: 80 minutes. I felt bad about running so short in the morning, and so went pretty long in the afternoon. It was hot and I was horribly dehydrated by the end of it.

Friday September 5
AM: 5xarroyo tempo with Ian. A very good workout; certainly better than last week's. I ran pretty steadily, with splits around
9:06, 8:44, 8:49, 8:49, 8:46 (44:14 total)
I felt pretty calm and controlled on this, and it was just one lap shy of what was probably my most impressive arroyo tempo, from March of this year, shortly before my three 5000's.