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.
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.
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