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.