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.