Nov. 26 - Dec. 16: taper time

Nov. 26 - Dec. 2:
We: off
Th: 6
Fr: 5 plus 6 x 40 seconds hard (about 200m) with jog back recoveries
Sa: 9
Su: 9 plus strides
Mo: 7
Tu: 3 x 2 miles at 6:17/mi. average pace (2 min. jog recoveries), then 45 min. jog
Week total: 52 miles

Dec. 3-9:
We: off
Th: 7
Fr: 7
Sa: 4 x 2 miles at 6:16/mi. average pace (2 min. rests)
Su: 7
Mo: 7 plus strides
Tu: 13
Week total: 52 miles

Dec. 10-16:
We: off
Th: 6
Fr: 3 miles (3 min. rest), 2 miles (2 min. rest), 1 mile averaging 6:21/mi. pace
Sa: 5
Su: 6
Mo: off
Tu: 5 x 1k averaging 3:54 = 6:17/mi. pace (2 min. rests)
Week total: 36 miles

Thusly have I tapered my training for the Pisa Marathon this coming Sunday, Dec. 21. For most of the first week above I was recovering from my 15 mile marathon pace run on Nov. 25. The mileage dropped down that week mainly because of my planned off day on Wednesday. But then on Tuesday (at the end of that first week on my strange Wednesday-to-Tuesday schedule) I failed to complete a workout for one of the few times this training cycle. It was no big deal, though. My stomach was off from eating too many beans or something, so I neglected to take in any gels during the 3 x 2 mile tempo intervals, which otherwise went fine. Afterwards I was supposed to run easy for an hour, but I was wiped out and could barely jog at a much slower pace than I normally do easy runs at. I didn't see much point in continuing to run that slowly when my lower back started tightening up, so I stopped early. Evidently I didn't stop early enough, though, because I've been dealing with a tight lower back and sometimes upper hamstrings off and on since then. It was fairly bad for most of the second week above, even after I got a massage on Dec. 3 (thanks to the timing of my birthday and to my wife for giving me a gift certificate). By the third week, as the mileage continued dropping and my body really set about absorbing and healing itself from the past few months' training, I was feeling pretty crappy. My muscles continued aching and I felt generally heavy and sluggish...from running less. Only on Sunday, a week before the race, did I start feeling better. Now I'm in full rest mode and have four more days to continue gathering strength. At this point the weather forecast looks good: a bit humid early on but no threat of rain, light winds, and temperatures in the low-to-mid 50s. I haven't raced in six months, and my last race was a marathon for which I was not well prepared. This time I've never been better prepared: my training has gone very well (once my plan shifted from Turin to Pisa), and my last marathon is just fresh enough in memory that I'm both able to be realistic about how hard it's going to be and eager to push myself as much as I can. It feels like I'm ready for a breakthrough race. We'll see whether the stars align on Sunday, but in any case I intend to enjoy the experience.

Nov. 19-25: top of the hill

Daily details:
We: 6
Th: 8
Fr: 12 x 400m averaging 87.7 (5:52/mi. pace) with 90 second recoveries
Sa: 9
Su: 9 plus strides
Mo: 7
Tu: 20 with 15 averaging 6:41/mi.
Week total: 67

This week ended with my peak workout of this training cycle: 15 miles at goal marathon race pace. I felt good and ended up running 2:55 marathon pace, which is a bit faster than expected. It didn't feel hard until the last 2-3 miles, and even then I had no serious difficulty hanging on. But hanging on for 2-3 tough miles is altogether different from maintaining a hard pace for the entire second half of a marathon. My coach thinks that I will be able to hold this pace for a full marathon after a few more sharpening workouts and tapering. Maybe he's right, but in any case I'll probably go out slower for the first half and try to run a negative split if I still feel good by 30k or so. Certainly it is encouraging to have run a workout like this while my mileage and intensity are still at their height for this training cycle. It's now less than 4 weeks until Pisa, and most of the hard training is behind me. My weekly mileage will gradually drop from here, and my remaining hard workouts will be of the shorter, faster variety before I enter full rest mode in the days leading up to the race. There's still more work to be done, but I'm starting to think about the race itself and to steel myself for the mental challenge of maximizing the physical capacities at my disposal on race day. In the meantime, I'm also about to reach the top of another hill: my 40th birthday is in a few days. I don't plan on descending down the other side of that particular hill anytime soon but fully expect instead to continue improving at least at distance running for years to come (which is made easier by the fact that I really started running only in my mid-30s, aside from some rare, light jogging before that and, a lifetime earlier, one half-hearted season of cross-country in high school). Running serves me in many ways as a prism through which I can look at things in a more healthy, productive light than I might otherwise be inclined to do. Seen through that prism, turning 40 is an opportunity to be more competitive as a masters-level runner. Don't get me wrong: in races I compete with everyone indiscriminately, and I always want to improve absolutely, not just relative to other people in whatever category. But still, it is more gratifying and encouraging to have a realistic chance of competing for the top spots in some category or other. I look forward to measuring myself against other masters runners in the Washington area when I return to the US and recover from Pisa.

Oct. 22 - Nov. 18: four solid weeks

Daily details:
We: 6
Th: 8
Fr: fartlek: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 min. with equal recoveries
Sa: 8
Su: 9 plus strides
Mo: 8
Tu: 18 pushing miles 3-5 @ 6:19/mi. and miles 15-16 @ 6:28/mi.
Week (10/22-28) total: 69

We: 6
Th: 9
Fr: 6 x 2k with 2 min. rests @ 6:19/mi. average
Sa: 9
Su: 9 plus strides
Mo: 10
Tu: 15
Week (10/29-11/4) total: 70

We: 6
Th: 3 x 3 miles with 3 min. rests @ 6:23, 6:19, 6:17/mi. average
Fr: off (traveling)
Sa: off (traveling)
Su: 6 in Sorrento
Mo: 6
Tu: 19 mile progression run with miles 14-17 in 6:46, 6:39, 6:43, 6:28
Week (11/5-11) total: 50 (planned recovery week)

We: 7
Th: 4
Fr: 3.5 miles (3.5 min. rest), 2.5 miles (2.5 min. rest), 1.5 miles @ 6:12/mi. average
Sa: 10
Su: 9 plus strides
Mo: 7
Tu: 23
Week (11/12-18) total: 71

Allow me to compensate for not updating this running blog for four weeks by finally adding some more photos from Italy. Here is the trail by the Tiber river where I do most of my running in Rome:

Where I usually start running, facing southwest.

Me running on a different part of the trail.

My son using tactics to beat his mother to the finish line.

I've had four solid weeks of training since my last post. Only one workout, on Tuesday of the first week above, fell short of my goals. I was supposed to run 19 miles with 3-mile tempo sections near the beginning and the end, but I fell apart during the second mile of the last tempo section (mile 16) and stopped early. Otherwise I've met or exceeded expectations in every workout. I was especially happy with what felt like a breakthrough 3 x 3 mile workout on Thursday of the third week above, just before I took two days off while traveling in the Bay of Naples during a planned recovery week. With the extra rest I then came back and hammered my long run on Tuesday of that (third) week, starting faster than usual and speeding up from there. My average pace of 7:05 for 17 miles, before doing two more cool down miles, is a hair faster than my marathon PR pace. Three days later (Friday of the fourth week above) I still felt strong and lowered what had become my standard 6:19-ish tempo pace down to 6:12. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, as the saying goes, I should be stronger than ever at the Pisa Marathon nearly a month from now. But the creek - i.e., the Tiber river - did rise on the day I was scheduled to run 23 miles (the last day above). The first two photos show the river at a typical level next to the trail and the late 19th-century flood walls rising ominously beside it. Those walls now protect Rome from the flooding that plagued the city for most of its history. So far the river has risen high enough to flood the trail only twice while I've been here: during my trip to Naples, which didn't affect me, and on the day when my longest run of this training cycle was scheduled (and the following day). But the goal of that run was just to be on my feet running for roughly three hours, without pushing the pace, so it was no big deal to run on sidewalks and streets for part of the way until I got to parts of the trail that were high or far enough from the rain-swollen river to be safe to run on. I finally discovered the end of the trail on this run as well: there are 11.5 continuous miles of asphalt trail along the Tiber river in Rome. It extends further than that to the northeast, but I don't run that direction because the surface becomes rough, uneven concrete. The direction to run from the Borgo area, where I live (near the Vatican and Castel Sant' Angelo), is southwest, past Trastevere and opposite Testaccio, then roughly parallel to Via Ostiense (Via del Mare), as the river travels, until the trail ends nearly halfway to the coast. Along the way you pass suburbs, gypsy camps, stables, and fields, before turning around and seeing it all again in the opposite order on the way back into the city. I'll miss running in Rome when we leave the day after Pisa, but I still have more work to do before then.

Oct. 15-21: Now that's more like it

Daily details:
We: 8
Th: 9
Fr: fartlek: (5, 4, 3), (4, 3, 2), (3, 2, 1) min. with equal recoveries
Sa: 8
Su: 9 plus strides
Mo: 7
Tu: 18 @ 7:17/mi. average, pushing the last 3 miles in 6:44, 43, 40
Week total: 70

The decision to redirect my focus from Turin to Pisa helped me turn things around this week. After last Tuesday's steady 18-miler, my recovery runs were a mile or two longer than they had been in previous weeks. I felt it for the first few days, but mostly I think it just required a mental adjustment to put in a bit more time each day. Friday's fartlek was slow because it was my first non-easy paced run in two weeks since before I got sick, but as usual it snapped me back into form. The next few easy runs were quicker and felt more comfortable, even though by the weekend I had accumulated more miles in any 7 day stretch yet this year. The real highlight of the week, though, wasn't finally hitting 70 miles but nailing Tuesday's long run. One week after averaging 7:38 pace for 18 miles (that is, starting slower and finishing faster than that), this time I started out at that pace and gradually squeezed it down to the 6:40s over the same distance, averaging 21 seconds faster per mile than last week. My coach's instructions were just to run 6:40-50 pace for miles 16-18, but the whole run ended up being faster from the beginning. I suspect that this jump in fitness may be a combined effect of bouncing back from being sick (and resting), and of adapting to the increase in (mostly easy) mileage this week. The plan now is to do a couple more weeks of the same volume with more of the usual types of workouts: another (hopefully faster) fartlek and then a long run with two sets of faster push miles next week. Even though it's late October now, it has felt like summer for the entire two months I've been in Rome. The temperature is usually still in the 80s (fahrenheit) when I run - sometimes upper 70s, sometimes low 90s. But there are signs today that Fall may finally be approaching here. Today I wore (short) sleeves on my run for the first time in months!

Last two weeks' training and a change of plan

Daily details:
We: 6
Th: 8
Fr: 3 mile, 2 mile, 1 mile @ 6:22/mi. average with 3 min. and 2 min. rest
Sa: 8
Su: 9 plus strides
Mo: off (sick)
Tu: 7
Week total: 49

We: off (sick)
Th: off (sick)
Fr: 6
Sa: 7
Su: 7 plus strides
Mo: 7
Tu: 18 @ 7:38/mi. average
Week total: 45

I had higher mileage and some hard long run workouts scheduled for these two weeks. But I got sick and was forced to take several days off and to skip those workouts. My son had been sick for a while before I finally came down with whatever it was that he brought home from school. (My wife has it now). I was really wiped out for several days and couldn't do much of anything. This happened after I had to shorten my marathon pace run the previous week because I was tired from traveling to Venice. Since I wasn't getting key workouts in during the most important training window before the Turin Marathon, my coach and I agreed to pull the plug on Turin and aim instead for the Pisa Marathon five weeks later. Despite getting sick, I'm still in good shape and have had some good workouts. But I haven't had a really solid block of high quality training yet, initially because I trained so lightly during the first half of this year (which may still be affecting me), and then because I've encountered several unrelated set-backs since coming to Rome. Getting in a solid block of high quality training now that I'm in good enough shape to do so, focusing especially on long runs and marathon pace, is more important to me than running just pretty well in Turin. In some ways Pisa works out better anyway. The race is the day before we return to the US, December 21. My wife and I have been to Pisa before, four years ago, and wanted to go back anyway. I've already booked a room at the same hotel we stayed in before, and we definitely know where to eat: La Tana, a restaurant so good that we ate both lunch and dinner there several days in a row and considered making a trip to Italy the next time we were in Europe just to go back and eat there again. The race in Pisa is also much smaller than Turin, which is sort of the main Fall marathon for Italian running clubs. Unlike Turin, the Pisa Marathon caters to foreign as well as Italian runners. It'll be my first smaller marathon (capped at 3,000 runners, but likely smaller) as well as my first one outside of the US. The course is flat and includes scenic views from the coast beginning around halfway when things start getting tough. I'm excited about this new plan, more so actually than I was about the old one, and look forward to some hard training.

Turin training week 9: running on water?

Daily details:
We: off
Th: 7
Fr: fartlek: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 min. at 10k effort with half recoveries
Sa: 8 in Venice
Su: off
Mo: 7 back in Rome
Tu: 13 with 9 at 6:49/mi.
Week total: 45

This was a low mileage week, which nonetheless had a couple of hard workouts. On Friday I ran my first fartlek with half instead of equal time recoveries. Even though I averaged around 8:00 per mile on the short recoveries, I still averaged 6:37/mi. pace overall for over five and a half miles. Fartleks are much harder with half instead of full recoveries, and one thing I've learned from my new coach is that one can gain a lot of fitness from fartleks. Shortly after finishing that workout, I hopped onto a train to Venice with a group of students. I had never been to Venice before and, when we arrived that evening, was immediately and naturally stunned. Nowhere else in the world looks quite like this:

But (since this is my running blog) how does one run on an island where the streets are canals, people get around by boat, and what sidewalks exist are completely mobbed with tourists? On Saturday afternoon I took a bus-boat out to Lido, the barrier island outside of Venice, where there are actual roads and sidewalks but not many people (in spite of George Clooney's wedding, which happened to coincide with our trip to Venice itself that weekend). I ran for an hour on Lido island, but the entire trip took two and a half hours including the boat trips and waiting for the boats to arrive. Shortly after I finished running, my right hip tightened up enough that even walking became uncomfortable, perhaps because of the hard and rough concrete path on Lido that I ran on. So I didn't try to run again on Sunday. Venice is spectacular, but trying to run there is just too much trouble. My hip loosened up enough to do an easy run on Monday and to attempt the workout scheduled for Tuesday, which was supposed to be 12-14 miles at marathon pace (6:50/mi.). I considered postponing Tuesday's workout but ended up going ahead with it, even though I was obviously still worn out from the Venice trip. From the beginning of Tuesday's workout I didn't feel good. I was breathing too hard and couldn't find a rhythm. But I pressed on until a side cramp convinced me to stop after 9 miles. Initially I figured that I'd just take a short break before continuing on. But when I squatted down to get water from a spring, I realized that various muscles were tightening up. So I pulled the plug, walked a bit, and then jogged home. Nine miles is fine for my first marathon pace run more than six weeks out from the marathon, especially when I'm worn down from a weekend of traveling. Ideally the next few weeks will be a notch higher in overall mileage, and I'll revisit marathon pace at least a little bit in each of my next few Tuesday long runs, culminating in another extended marathon pace run three weeks from now. I'll be better rested for that workout than I was for this one.

Turin training week 8: becoming the run

Daily details:
We: off
Th: 8 x 1k with 90 seconds rest, averaging 6:20-1/mi. pace
Fr: 7
Sa: 9
Su: 8 plus 6 strides
Mo: 6
Tu: 20, pushing miles 4-7 and 14-17 at 6:28/mi. average pace
Week total: 61

This week had a couple of good workouts, good overall mileage, and no significant set-backs. I'll take that as an opportunity to get back to updating this blog weekly instead of bi-weekly, at least as long as I have good things to write. Thursday's workout shortened the rest from the 12 x 1k workout a couple weeks earlier. I was breathing harder with 30 fewer seconds to rest between each interval, but that little bit of added discomfort wasn't really a big deal. I felt a little worse but could run just as well and actually ran a tiny bit faster on average than last time (for 8 intervals instead of 12, however). Maybe I was just happy to get back out there and do a workout again after spraining my ankle, which had continued bothering me on all runs prior to this one. It actually still bothers me sometimes when I'm not running but is mostly fine when I'm running now. The big running event this week was Tuesday's long run workout, which I had postponed from the previous week because of my ankle sprain. It had been humid and warm all week, but mercifully on Tuesday morning it was suddenly drier, breezy, and not hot. For some reason the path along the Tiber river where I run was closed beyond a certain point a few miles from my apartment, so I ended up running 20 miles back and forth on around a 3 mile stretch of the path. The wind was blowing all directions: sometimes a strong tail wind, sometimes a strong head wind, and sometimes it just seemed to be playing with me. But running back and forth like that should have more or less averaged out the effect of the wind. The basic idea of this long workout was to push faster than marathon pace for 4 miles when I'm already tired out and have some miles in my legs. So the focus was that second tempo section from miles 14-17. The first one, from miles 4-7, was designed to tire me out, and the next 6 easy miles were designed to put me in a state that simulated the later miles of a marathon. Because of the suddenly nicer weather, I pushed through the first 4-mile tempo section in the 6:20s, slowing down a bit in the last mile when I encountered the closed part of the path. (It's still not clear to me why it was closed). The next 6 miles I ran truly easy in the 7:50s. But then I opened the second tempo section with a 6:16 mile, which I quickly regretted. The next three miles were just over 6:30, with the last couple feeling pretty uncomfortable. Aside from trying to hit certain paces, I was trying to get into something approximating the marathon mental state in those last couple of tempo miles. That's the first time I've been able to get close to that since my last actual marathon (Grandma's). It really is true that a very significant part of distance running, especially marathon (and, I can only imagine, probably also ultra-marathon) running, is mental. Obviously you need to be physically well prepared. Otherwise, why train your body? Why not just, I don't know, meditate? So people who say that marathon running is 99% mental are obviously exaggerating to the point of absurdity. But you really do need to train your mind to not freak out when you keep running hard past 10, 15, 20 miles. I've heard it described in diametrically opposed ways: some people seem to "check out" and disassociate from their body, while others describe it as embracing the discomfort and, paradoxically, becoming comfortable with it. I don't doubt that there are, in fact, quite different mental strategies that are effective for different people, but maybe people's actual strategies are less different than their ways of describing them. I seem to do a little bit of both myself. When things are going well, it's as if I sort of become the run, am absorbed into the rhythms of my stride, so that in a way I'm not really "there" enough anymore to be all that bothered by discomfort. That's an idealized way of putting it, though. For me, at least, it's never quite that way. I think about my pace, about how much further I need to go, and about whether I can continue to handle the discomfort. But the more I think about those things, the worse it is for me. I run and feel better when I think and worry less about it, especially about whether I can handle it. Or at least I run and feel best when I don't overthink those things, as I have a tendency to do. So becoming the run, going someplace (someplace in me, not somewhere else) where discomfort doesn't really bother me, represents the distance running ideal for me. I guess one difference between me and a Buddhist monk in this respect, besides the fact that I'm not very good at it, is that I don't attempt to achieve this mental state as an end in itself. My goal is to run as fast as I can over a certain distance, and to train myself to cover that distance as quickly as possible. Getting into the right state of mind is just a means to that end. Surely I have at least as much room for improvement here mentally as physically.

Turin training weeks 6-7: sinister set-backs

Daily details:
We: 7
Th: off (sore left quad)
Fr: 12
Sa: 7
Su: 12 x 1k with 2 min. rest averaging 6:23/mi.
Mo: 7
Tu: 18 steady
Week total: 62

We: 5
Th: fartlek with 3 x (3, 2, 1 min.) at 10k effort with equal recoveries
Fr: off (sprained left ankle)
Sa: off (sprained left ankle)
Su: 5
Mo: 7
Tu: 10
Week total: 35

Over these two weeks I suffered a series of minor set-backs and annoyances, each of which (by chance?) afflicted something on the left side of my body. During the first week it was a sore left quad, which only forced me to take one day off but bugged me the entire week. It first irritated me near the end of the previous week in precisely the spot that was most sore after Grandma's marathon in June. That turned out to be a pretty good week, though, since I still got in a fair number of miles, a good long workout, and a steady 18-miler. I couldn't believe it when I first saw 12 x 1k on my training schedule, since that's twice as many 1k intervals as I've done before. But it actually didn't turn out to be so difficult, because the rest was generous and the pace wasn't too hard (even though I ended up averaging a bit faster than my target pace). On Thursday of the second week I enjoyed flying through a shorter, faster fartlek than I had been doing. That very fartlek defeated me when I started doing fartleks in July (in DC humidity), but now I'm able to do it much faster without feeling especially worn out afterwards. However, during my cool down jog after the fartlek, I rolled my left ankle pretty badly. I'm not sure how I was able to run sub-6 minute pace just fine during the workout but then lost my footing while running over 8-minute pace during my cool down. To make matters worse, I then had to hobble about a mile to get home. My ankle swelled up moderately and I wasn't even able to walk normally for a day and a half or so. The swelling started to go down, and some discoloration appeared at the bottom of my foot, at the end of the second day after I rolled it. Just as my ankle was beginning to recover, the most bizarre of this series of annoyances occurred. My son had recently begun attending a new school here in Rome, so of course he was developing a cold and brought germs home with him. Somehow my ears got clogged up in conjunction with the bug that I presumably picked up from him. I was almost totally deaf in my left ear for around 48 hours, and my right ear was muffled too. It was surreal feeling stuck in my own head, hobbling around on a sprained ankle, imagining that I looked (as I felt) like a character in a zombie film. Things seem to be improving now, and I'm not sure what more could possibly afflict at least the left side of my body. It would almost be a relief to injure something on my right side. Better, though, would be to remain injury free for a while now and get back on track with a full mileage week this coming week. Turin is two months away.

Turin training weeks 4-5: transition to Rome

Daily details:
Mo: 4
Tu: 5
We: off (traveling to Rome)
Th: off (still traveling)
Fr: off (bags missing)
Sa: off (bags still missing)
Su: 4 (bought running shoes and shorts in Rome)
Mo: 6
Tu: 6 plus 6 strides
9 day total: 25

We: 8
Th: fartlek with (5, 4, 3), (4, 3, 2), (3, 2, 1) min. at 10k pace with equal recoveries
Fr: 8 (my bag finally arrived)
Sa: 11
Su: 6 plus 6 strides
Mo: 6
Tu: 16 mile progression run with last 4 miles under 6:50 and mile 16 in 6:36
Week total: 65

The week I travelled to Rome was supposed to be a recovery week, but as it happened I had more opportunity to recover from running than planned. First, our flight from Washington was delayed because of weather and we missed our connecting flight in Toronto. We were immediately rerouted through Munich, where we had a six hour layover. So we finally arrived in Rome around 24 hours after our trip began, a much longer trip than expected. Then, we found that only one of our three checked bags had arrived in Rome. Luckily, my three year old son's things were all in that bag. We filed a missing baggage claim and expected our remaining bags to show up at our apartment soon, but it was another four days before my wife's bag arrived and eight days before mine arrived (after I had gone back to the airport three times to search for them). Wearing the same clothes for days on end wasn't pleasant, but for me not being able to run was worse. After a few days I broke down and spent 150 euros on running shoes and shorts at a Nike store that I happened to pass by. Running shoes (no matter where they're made) are way more expensive here than in the US. It took me several days to ease back into running after four days off and a generally rough transition to Rome. My schedule here is such that it makes sense to do my most important training run of each week, long runs, on Tuesdays instead of the standard Sundays, as I had been doing. To accommodate this, my coach shifted my schedule forward a couple days, so beginning now my training weeks start on Wednesdays and end on Tuesdays. This past "week," so understood, I picked up where I had left off in terms of mileage before leaving the US, but it took until the end of the week for me to be able to bring the intensity back to where it had been. Thursday's fartlek was on the slow side but helped get me back on track. Tuesday's progression run, on the other hand, went quite well. Since arriving in Rome I've done all my runs on an asphalt path that runs along the Tiber river, which I pick up just a few blocks from my apartment near the Vatican. The roads and sidewalks in the city are nearly impossible to run on, so I'm very grateful for this path, but each time I run further on it I wonder when I'll reach the end of it. On Tuesday I was happy to discover that the path goes at least 8 miles (in the direction of the airport and the coast) and gets better and better the further out I go. In the center of the city there are bar and restaurant tents set up beside the path for evening entertainment (they are all closed up in the morning when I usually run). Then the path runs briefly away from the river through a more residential area, before cutting back over to the river out in the suburbs. It's fairly well shaded by trees much of the way, and there are springs every now and then beside the path where one can get (good) water. I don't think there's a better paved running trail in the DC area. The weather here is better too. It is late summer, so of course it's warm and humid. But it's neither as warm nor, especially, as humid as DC. The weather here is also more consistent, at least so far. So after a longish period of adjustment I'm back on track and doing pretty well running in Rome.

Turin training week 3: last week in the US

Daily details:
Mo: 6.5
Tu: 8
We: 10
Th: 7
Fr: 6 x 1 mile in 6:31, 24, 17, 16, 09, 5:59 with 3 min. recoveries
Sa: 8
Su: 15
Week total: 66

My last full week in the US before heading to Italy saw some of the nicest August weather in the DC area for ages. I was lucky that the nicest morning of all, which felt almost Fall-like, was on Friday, when I had mile repeats on the schedule. I enjoyed running them not only in the fantastic weather but also on my favorite trail around a lake instead of on the track. The heat and humidity are on the rise again now, as is the general stress level in my household as we run around tying up lose ends and getting ready to leave in a few days for four months. I've doubled my mileage in six weeks now and will finally get a recovery week next week as we travel and begin adapting to Rome. My body is still holding up well, though I'm ready for a lighter week before continuing to push harder. Just a short entry this week (and maybe the next), but I hope to be more expansive about my experiences running in Italy soon. 

Turin training week 2

Daily details:
Mo: 7
Tu: 3 x 2k averaging 6:34/mi. pace with 1 min. recoveries, then 1 x 800 in 3:02 before overheating
We: 5.5
Th: 11
Fr: 6
Sa: 6.5
Su: 15, pushing miles 3-5 (7:00, 6:42, 6:34) and 11-13 (6:34, 6:33, 6:18)
Week total: 60

I wrote last week about beginning to feel the accumulating mileage, which has now nearly doubled from the low 30s that I had been running for most of 2014 before Grandma's. The fatigue seemed to peak last weekend and in the first part of this week. In spite of (or maybe partly because of) losing what had been my one weekly off day (Wednesdays) prior to this week, I started feeling more energetic mid-week and especially by the weekend, after two short and easy days leading up to my first long run workout of this cycle. Before that, on Tuesday I did what was supposed to be a workout combining some tempo and faster paced intervals, but the humidity and heat on the track stopped me during only the second of what was supposed to be four 800s (with two minute recoveries) eventually getting under 6:00 pace. The magnified heat on the track, together with the 80 or so high school girls wandering all over the place at lacrosse camp, were enough to deter me from using the track again this summer. I'll do my remaining workouts somewhere more shaded and less busy before heading to Italy, where I'll be unlikely to have access to a track anyway. The main running event of my week, though, was Sunday's long run workout. The second tempo section in miles 11-13 was the main focus. The idea was to push when I was tired out and had some miles in my legs. My target was 6:30 pace. I took things easier on the first tempo section, because it was 98% humidity when I started, from fear of running out of gas early. But my 6:18 last tempo mile indicates that I started out a little too conservatively. It was an encouraging workout, though, and it felt good to dig deep at the end of a longish run while thinking about the last stage of a marathon. I'm all in for the marathon now, though I do miss getting the legs moving faster and was disappointed to miss an opportunity for that on Tuesday. But nothing in running compares with the feeling of running long and (relatively) fast, in my opinion. When you still feel strong, or find a second (or third) wind, after running 15 or so miles and can then actually accelerate while staying loose, gliding faster over the ground long after it seems possible to continue without tying up or just stopping - that, in my opinion, beats the exhilaration of running faster but shorter any day. I won't say that it's harder, in terms of the effort required or the pain to be endured. But both training for and execution in longer races do seem to involve more variables and thus have more opportunities for things to go wrong. I have some memory of reading Desi Davila, now Desi Linden - one of the top US marathoners - saying that in the marathon it doesn't matter how fast you can run; what matters is how fast you can run after 20 miles. I think about that a lot when running. And lately I've also been motivated by the image, seared in memory, of the guy in my running club, Rob Wolfe, with whom I ran the first half of Grandma's, pulling away from me at halfway as he accelerated from around 6:50 pace down into the 6:30s. I later found out that he kept running faster for the entire second half, while I went from barely hanging on to slowing more and more, and finally stopping several times in the final miles. Next time I'll be better prepared.

Turin training week 1 (of 16)

Daily details:
Mo: 7
Tu: 5 x 1 mile with 3 min. rest, starting at 6:27 and cutting down to 6:07
We: off
Th: 11
Fr: 4 mile tempo averaging 6:37/mi.
Sa: 7
Su: 14
Week total: 55

Grandma's marathon was 6 weeks ago, and the Turin marathon is in 15 weeks. So in accordance with the tradition of allowing 16 weeks for a marathon build-up, let's call this week 1 of my training for Turin. I took a week off after Grandma's, then ran 33, 37, 44, and 50 miles in the weeks before this one. During that time I have felt like I'm both beginning to get back into shape after a long period of light training, and beginning to adapt to some of the methods of my new coach, Ryan Vail, which I really like. For the previous three weeks I had been doing a fartlek once a week, which prepared me for the mile repeats and the tempo run this week. They still felt like a significant uptick in intensity, but I was pleasantly surprised at my budding fitness from those three fartleks. The long runs and overall volume are coming along too. It doesn't look like much yet, but 55 miles is the most I've run in a week since last October, and I'm doing more intensity while increasing mileage than I've typically done in the past. I'm beginning to feel it this week, both more fatigue while not running and more strength while running. The latter, I think, comes substantially from including some faster running early in the build-up, so that I'm not just slogging through more and more miles but instead gradually feel stronger and smoother even as I build volume. As for the former, fatigue while not running, I recall in the past a sort of hump that I just need to get over and then I begin to feel better. The magic number for me has seemed to be 50 since I first started running that many miles per week in 2011. Getting up to that level, and getting used to it, was a lot harder than staying there or increasing either volume or intensity beyond that point (at least up to 80, which is the highest I've gone so far), and in fact I usually feel much better once I'm used to running 50+ miles a week than I do when running any fewer. Once I realized this, I largely succeeded at keeping my weekly mileage at or over 50 throughout most of the year for a couple years - until this past calendar year. I'm over the hump numerically now but haven't fully adapted to it yet. I'm looking forward hopefully to not letting the volume slip consistently lower again in the foreseeable future. Another thing I'm looking forward to right now is fall weather. This has been probably the nicest summer weather we've had in the DC area since I moved here six years ago, but the humidity can still be really oppressive. Two and a half weeks from now I'll be in Rome, which is the only place I've been where the humidity rivals DC's - at least it did for the few days I was there back in 2010. I'm interested in comparing the two climates but don't expect the weather in Rome to be an improvement over DC in late August. It very well may be hotter, especially than DC has been this summer, which Greece (where I usually go in the summer) is too. But typically the humidity is low in Greece, which more than makes up for the heat in my opinion. Rome will be more humid than Greece, but we'll see whether it's more humid than DC and how its combination of heat and humidity compares with DC's. This comparison interests me less, however, than the approach of fall weather does. In my opinion, fall is hands-down the best season of the year, for running or anything else. Thinking about that helps me get through late summer, when I sweat so much on longer runs that by the end I'm somehow wetter than I ever feel after swimming. When this coming fall arrives I will be in Italy, no less. For that I can handle a few more - realistically, around half a dozen more - muggy weeks.

New coach and fall marathon plans

Welcome to my redesigned running blog. It seemed appropriate to spruce it up a bit to accompany my renewed training and racing ambitions, now that tenure stress is behind me. After more than half a year of lackluster training and frankly erratic training for years before that, I've decided to fire my old coach (me). I'd always enjoyed coaching myself, so to speak. Figuring out what sorts of training work best for me, learning how to respond to set-backs, setting appropriate goals for myself, and trying to motivate myself to achieve them have always been more than half the fun of running for me. I've never been under any illusion that I'm particularly good at those things, but I enjoy them and couldn't imagine just mindlessly doing workouts, which is what I used to think training under a coach would involve. More recently, however, I've met several people who train with coaches, and I've checked out some blogs by runners much faster than me who have coaches. None of those people mindlessly does workouts. All of them are at least as invested as I have been in those elements of training that I used to think were unique to being self-coached, but they also have additional and often very valuable support, guidance, and inspiration from their coaches. So I have realized for some time that a coach could help me become better at all the things I enjoy about running, including becoming faster and more competitive - if, that is, I found the right coach for me. After running Grandma's a few weeks ago, I was again tossing around the idea of getting a coach when Ryan Vail, who is currently one of the best marathoners in the US, posted on his blog that he is launching a personal coaching business, Prevail coaching. Long story short: Ryan, along with Mike Kilburg, is now coaching me toward my fall marathon goal. So far, after I recovered from Grandma's, we've gradually started to increase mileage with some light fartleks, strides, and hills. I will begin posting my weekly training 16 weeks from my goal race, which is the week after next. Since I will be spending the fall 2014 semester in Rome, Italy, I've chosen the Turin Marathon as my goal race. I'll try to post not just about the details of my training but also more generally about my experiences running in Italy. I might even manage to post some photos, but we'll see about that.

Grandma's Marathon (race report) and update

I haven't posted here in a long time since my training never really got going again after the Philadelphia Marathon last November. In brief, I was too lazy, busy, distracted, and (in late winter) sick to train properly for a spring racing season. But still I had registered for several races and ran them as well as I could. Here are my race results so far in 2014:

March 19: St. Patrick's Day 8k in 36:05 (7:16 pace)
March 23: ChrisForLife Scope It Out 5k in 19:35 (6:18 pace)
April 6: Cherry Blossom 10-miler in 1:05:30 (6:33 pace)
April 27: Pike's Peek 10k in 38:35 (6:12 pace)
May 18: Capitol Hill Classic 10k in 39:48 (6:24 pace)
June 21: Grandma's Marathon in 3:10:33 (7:16 pace)

When I jogged the St. Patrick's Day 8k, which kind of signals the beginning of spring racing season in DC, I had been running again for about a week after having been sick for about a month in February. Four weeks later I let down my team at Cherry Blossom with a sub-par performance on only 5 weeks of not entirely healthy or focused training. My run at Pike's Peek was more encouraging but still slower than both of the previous two years. On the hilly Capitol Hill Classic course, my time was about 20 seconds slower than last year, when I ran it somewhere between race and tempo effort. To put all of this in a bit of perspective, during this time I was not only recovering from a string of February bugs but also buying my first house and nervously awaiting the results of my tenure application (I eventually got tenure). Often in the past I had used running as a way to distract myself from sources of stress in my life, but so far this year I haven't had enough energy even to use running as a distraction. It was at most an afterthought, insofar as I did it at all.

This brings me to Grandma's Marathon. I registered for it months earlier because I wanted to do a marathon before fall but didn't expect to be ready for a spring marathon. So I chose Grandma's because it's in Minnesota, where the weather is still suitable for running a good marathon in late June. But I never got around to training properly for it. My average weekly mileage for the 20 weeks before Grandma's was 34 miles, compared with 65 miles per week for the 20 weeks before my previous marathon last November (Philadelphia) and 61 miles per week for the marathon before that (the MCM in October of 2012). At least my long runs had progressed to 20 miles, and somehow I managed one 20-miler at 6:58 pace 3 weeks before Grandma's. But other than that I was basically just jogging when I could and not really doing any faster running except for the races mentioned above and a couple light workouts in the month or so before Grandma's. So the race became basically a test of two things: my residual fitness from past training, and my new fueling plan developed after Philly and from reading Matt Fitzgerald's book "The New Rules of Marathon and Half-Marathon Nutrition." In short, as I wrote here in my Philly race report, I decided that I hadn't been running up to my potential (such as it is) in the marathon because I hadn't been fueling adequately during marathon races. So my main objective after Philly was to figure out how to get more carbs into my body during marathons. I didn't do much training since Philly, but I did find time to study and practice this. The result was that at Grandma's I ran only 4 minutes slower than at Philly on about half the mileage and probably much less than half of the training effort. Far from being discouraged by my first non-PR in a marathon after seven attempts, I think that I may have found one - I don't say "the" - key to running a faster marathon, for me at least.

Here is what my fueling plan was at Grandma's. Beginning at mile 3, there were aid stations every 2 miles until mile 19, after which they were every mile. At each aid station, volunteers gave out water and Powerade. I ate a gel immediately before the start of the race, and then I ate a gel with water at every odd numbered aid station (miles 3, 7, 11, 15, and 19) until they started coming every mile. At even numbered aid stations in between those I just drank a cup of Powerade. Let's count carbs for a moment. One packet of my preferred gel (strawberry-banana GU) has 22g. of carbs. I figure that the sports drink served on this course gave me about 7g. of carbs per cup. So at 6:52 pace (3:00 marathon pace), my plan gave me roughly 160g. of carbs in a little over 2 hours, which is basically right in the middle of the 60-90g. range recommended by Fitzgerald's book. After 19 miles my plan was simply to go by how I felt. I had 2 more gels in my pocket but ended up just drinking Powerade every mile instead of eating any more gels. So I ate a total of 6 gels, including the one just before the start, and drank maybe 20 cups of Powerade, which adds up to approximately 272g. of carbs over 3:10 or 86g. of carbs per hour. According to Fitzgerald, that's close to the maximum amount of carbs the human body can absorb (90g.). No wonder I had a gut cramp near the finish line!

Now isn't that a bit extreme? Yes, of course. Given my very limited training, I wanted to come as close as I could to testing, as if in a controlled experiment, the effect of maximizing carb intake during a marathon race. The result, I think, is pretty clear. Through 23 miles I was ahead of my marathon PR, such as it is, on approximately half the training. I began fading in mile 17, just as I did in Philly, but not nearly as much as I did then - from 6:52 pace to under 7:10 pace at Grandma's, versus fading immediately to the 7:30s after 17 miles in Philly. By mile 20 I did fade to the 7:30s at Grandma's, but that was 3 miles later than in Philly, which means I was still ahead of my Philly pace, given that I went through the half only 30 seconds slower at Grandma's (1:29:56) than in Philly (1:29:27). According to my Garmin, at the end of mile 23 I was 27 seconds ahead at Grandma's of my Philly time: 2:41:44 versus 2:42:11. Given my pathetic training for the previous 7 months, compared with the shape I was in at Philly, that is incredible and to be attributed substantially, I think, to all the carbs I took in at Grandma's prior to that point. Yes, the residual effect of prior training must be factored in too. But I think that if I had fueled at Grandma's exactly the same way I did in Philly, then I would have finished in a time much slower than 3:10, if at all.

Even taking in maximal carbs does not, by itself, enable you - or me, at least - to run a full marathon well, however. At the 23rd mile marker, I felt dizzy and had to stop. I started running again, or really just shuffling, only when a friend passed me after I had been standing there dazed and then eventually walking for maybe a minute or so. In the final 3 miles I stopped 2 more times: once to walk up a short hill, and then because of a gut pain (probably from all the carbs I had been consuming) shortly before the finish line. I probably lost 5 minutes (versus my Philly time) in those last 3 miles. By 23 miles I was just done, and by then no amount of carbs could compensate for my lack of training. But those first 23 miles were the fastest I have ever run.

So what now? It seems that if I just trained like I did before Philly, and fueled like I did at Grandma's, then I should be able to run a (perhaps significantly) faster marathon than I have done before. That seems so obviously true to me that I won't bother trying to test it as if in a controlled experiment. Of course I will try to take in at least almost as many carbs as I did at Grandma's in future marathons. But I hope to train in the future even better than I did before Philly. My first task, of course, is just to get serious about running again, once I recover from Grandma's. But having done that, I don't plan simply to duplicate the training I did before Philly. That would be too boring. Variables must be manipulated in new ways, and right now I'm inclined to do that mainly by increasing strength work while keeping average mileage about where it was then (which means increasing it back up to that level) but keeping it basically steady instead of taking recovery weeks every few weeks as I did last year. I have ideas about how to do this but will wait to post them when I start putting them into action.

2013 stats (v. 2012)

Total miles: 2687 (2720)
Average miles per month: 224 (227)
Average miles per week: 52 (same)
Average miles per day: 7.4 (7.5)
Number of days off: 59 (55)
Most days off in a row: 5 (3)
Average miles per day run: 8.8 (same)
Average pace: 7:34/mi. (same)
Total number of races: 14 (19)
Number of 5k races: 2 (8)
Number of 8k races: 1 (2)
Number of 10k races: 3 (3)
Number of 10-mile races: 2 (1)
Number of half marathons: 3 (1)
Number of full marathons: 1 (1)

I set new all-time PR's at each of these distances:
5k - 17:58 on 1/6/13 (18:25)
8k - 30:13 on 3/10/13 (30:30)
10k - 37:23 on 4/21/13 (37:48)
10 miles - 1:02:49 on 10/20/13 (1:04:42)
Half marathon - 1:24:39 on 9/14/13 (1:26:34)
Marathon - 3:06:26 on 11/17/13 (3:12:17)

So I trained about the same amount and improved a little at every distance. Remarkably, my modest PR's at two of the three shorter distances were set in the spring on little training after injuring my hip last January. I trained, raced, and improved more at the three longer distances in the fall. That training cycle in roughly the latter half of the year was my hardest and smartest yet. It balanced out the lighter first half of the year to bring my yearly averages roughly even to last year. I ran many fewer 5k's this year compared with 2012, mainly because of that hip injury.