Archive for June, 2010

We finally got a break today: 67 degrees with low humidity and a breeze.  I mentioned to my 3:20 forum friends how funny it is that in the Spring, I’d have thought 67 was uncomfortably hot.  Now, it’s heavenly.

So…yesterday I did 8 w/hill sprints (been a long time since I did those) and today was 10mi with six 2-min fartleks.  It took me a couple to get to speed and I avoided looking at the Garmin till after each one was over, so paces are goofy: 6:58, 6:55, then 6:35, 6:32, 6:40, 6:37.  Recoveries went from 1:28 to 1:47 (one longer when I stopped to get a drink).  All in all, a fair 12 minutes of speed, not fabulous but good for getting back into it.

More Sleepy Thoughts
Since that last post about sleep, I’ve been reading more on the subject; its recovery properties, athletic articles, regular people articles and I am kicking myself in the head for not paying attention sooner.  This small thing is no small thing.  Though I can’t imagine why I ever thought it was.

Going from 6 to 8 hours is huge!  When you do the math, two hours comes out to 8% of a day, that’s a substantial chunk of life.  Now, I can see that time being more valuable spent awake than asleep if I had kids or a big fancy job, but I don’t.  I’ve been spending that 8% putzing around! What. A. Waste.

Of course, it’s very much a work in progress – adding 2 hours is a lot so I’m currently in the lie-there-forever-before-falling-asleep stage.  Last night, this was exacerbated by an hour of helicopters buzzing around and then some sporadic waking, so I still only got 6-6½ hours.  But I’m ok with this, life changes take time and that is something I’ve got plenty of.

Oh, and here’s an unexpected bonus about going to bed early: I’m eating less.   Getting my ass on the bed by 9pm for 10pm shut-eye means 3 less hours to snack.  And since I’m on this scarily healthful kick of fruit salad for dessert and evening snack, I have a feeling optimum race weight is going to find itself with little or no input from me.  Add to this: improved recovery, alertness, motivation and mood elevation…what’s not to love?

Well, ok, what I don’t love is it makes me feel old going to bed so early, but this will change when it gets cooler in the Fall.  For now, they say to stick to a rigid schedule, which makes sense, so I’ve picked 10pm to sleep and 5:30am to rise, eventually 6am if weather permits.

Who is this stranger inhabiting my body, anyway?  Honestly, I’ve no idea.  I’ve heard she’s a close relation to this bad girl…not sure I believe it, though.
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I’m loving your haikus, keep ‘em coming, folks.  In the meantime, back to running talk…

My plan has already been switched around thanks to the weather (the last couple days were Heat Index 90 and 88 at 6am – killer humidity).  I got through Sunday’s 11-miler a full minute/mi slower than my usual easy pace.  This morning’s 7-miler was 45 seconds slower/mi. and I dumped the scheduled fartleks – it would have been a waste of a workout.

Tomorrow’s supposed to be the last stinkin’ hot day till Saturday, but I’ll do the hill sprints since they’re short.  Then Wed-Fri return to normal temps, so fartleks on Wed, Progression on Fri.

Sleep
I’ve been thinking a lot about sleep, which is touted to be as important to running well as training, yet I never get enough.  While it’s known that we sleep less with age, I also know that it’s not the main reason I sleep 6 or less hours/night.

On one end, I’m like a kid when it comes to lights out, I resist it because I can.  It doesn’t seem normal to me to get to bed before midnight or later.  In my 20s and part of my 30s, my usual bedtime was 2-3am and I could slip right back into that now, if I chose.  But back then I could sleep till 10am, not something I can or want to do anymore.

On the other end, the waking up part: Ever since I started making money with t-shirts, then other web endeavors, I couldn’t wait to face a new day to see what sales occurred overnight and to check a ton of different web stats.  That, and a fresh cup of hazelnut coffee gets me up-and-atom every single day.

So while age likely plays a role, I think my sleeping habits are largely my own doing and that I have the power to retrain myself to get 7½ hours every night, even 8 or more.

The deal is, it’s something I have to be proactive about, the same way I resisted flossing for years.  I always had crappy dental checkups, then about 5 years ago I finally stopped fighting and began flossing about 5 days out of 7 (I’ll always be a rebel) and voila!  Perfect checkups from that time forward.  I can be taught new tricks.

I started a couple nights ago.  Instead of sitting at this computer till the Nth moment, I shut it down and got in bed early and, because I’m still a computer freak, messed around with my wheezing old laptop till laying my head down at 11:30 (baby steps), probably got to sleep at 12.

The next night, I went for 10:30pm shuteye as my goal.  Ended up laying there for an hour and waking up some, but it was still an improvement.

Naps
I usually avoid them because they leave me grouchy.  Plus, I’ve always contended they eat into my evening sleep.  But I’m revising that.  As long as it’s not late in the afternoon, it shouldn’t mess up my night and hell, there’s no one here to receive my wrath, so I can suffer through feeling bitchy if it means being better rested.

So far, so good.  I took a long nap yesterday after that miserably hot 11.  Then today, I took a 45-minute nap at 9:30am.  Not exactly what I’m going for, but if I could reach 8hrs/day cumulatively, that’d be a huge improvement.

Getting better all the time.  Trying to, anyway.

Edit: I forgot to ask but want to know: How much sleep do you guys get?

Summer runs suck ass
making us feel slow as shit.
No Bodyglide? Ouch!

Comments requested in Haiku format.  Expletives encouraged.  Thank you.

Father’s Day was last Sunday and tomorrow would have been my father’s birthday.  I feel really bad that I’ve never talked about him.  Not that I would have talked about my mom, but since she killed herself it eclipsed everything on the family front.  I’ll relink that story here for newer readers but I took it off the menu because it’s not something you want in your face all the time.  Anyway…

Both my parents were New Yorkers and architects.  They moved to Vermont, then DeSilva Island, CA, where I was born.  When I was 4, my dad got a teaching position at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, so my parents, my brother and I moved to the bible belt – a strange place for a family of Jewish athiests/agnostics.  But it became home.

Btw, it’s funny that when I talk about my father, I call him “my father” or “my dad”, but he was neither of those things, he was always Papa or Pop.

He became a professor of architecture; I loved visiting him at work, hanging around those giant marble halls where everything seemed so important and at the same time intensely creative.  He loved technology and I remember him being thrilled when the University got one of those humongous computers where he, the 2-finger typist, could happily entertain himself for hours.  It’s safe to say I get my humor and technological curiosity from him.

His students loved him.  I still have a t-shirt made so many decades ago when his entire 5th-year class surprised him by wearing his face across their chests – the “Mort” shirts.  His friendships were deep, his personality self-deprecating, loving and kind.

When I was 12, my parents divorced, ending that screaming match of a marriage.   He moved just a few blocks away so we were still able to spend quality time together, but abbreviated as it is when you’re not living with a person anymore.  I didn’t notice it at the time, busy growing up as I was.  The suck of it is that I moved to NYC when I was 17 and didn’t go home that often, so my memories are cloudy and mostly through the eyes of a child.

He died in 1988 at age 61 of a heart attack.  He’d been remarried for less than a year which was heartbreaking in its own right.

But I’m not writing this with sadness in mind.  He’d have gotten a huge kick out of all the adventures I’ve had, am having.

Anyway, that’s about all I wanted to say, just to acknowledge him.  Love you, Pop.

That was weird.  I get to the park this morning and find myself in the tail end of a 5K.  Who schedules a 5K at 7am Wednesday morning?  Stinkin’ hot, too.  But on to the good stuff…

My Training Plan
It’s here, it’s here!!  My Half plan for the philadelphiadistancerockandrunhalfmararoll, formerly known as the Philadelphia Distance Run on Sept. 19th.

During my week off, I  Half-fashioned a Half training plan under the guidance of mentor (coach?) Adam/A Muse who patiently refined and shaped it into a really swell, kick-ass plan.  I can’t thank him enough for working on it and hope to do him proud come September.  Thank you, Adam!

The plan is based on an article about periodization (for marathons actually, but applicable to the Half, as well) where Base is followed by a Speed phase, then a Strength phase.

Now, I haven’t followed a periodized plan since I did Pfitzinger’s 18/55 two years ago.  Since then, I’ve used either Hudson’s canned plans, which don’t have real defined phases, or I rolled my own without any thought about that stuff.  I mean, I always knew I should be thinking in those terms, but wasn’t really understanding how to go about it till now.

Base: a no-brainer.  This one is abbreviated because I have a strong base already, just need to build back easily after the heat drama, so nothing hard this week except for a progression run.  The following two weeks include rudimentary quality to get me prepped for the Speed phase.

Speed: this phase features 5K pace interval sessions and tempos mostly at 10k pace.  There are also a couple miler workouts from this great article Adam sent my way.  The tempo intervals on Aug. 6th will be my first taste of Half pace and establishes a baseline.

Strength: this portion focuses on 10k strength workouts. As Salazar says about Half training, “…it’s 75 percent the same as 10K training.”  Also, in addition to the 10k fun, starting in the Speed phase and ramping up through Strength are a good number of race pace runs, very important.

Long Runs: most of these will be on my local trail which gives me a hillier route than usual.

Recovery: this may be listed here after all the fun stuff, but it was the first thing I penciled in.  Recovery (or lack of) has been on my mind a lot these days; my cavalier attitude about it, how I rarely took cutback weeks and when I did, the mileage cut was meager.  No more.

This plan has two major cutback weeks on each end of the Speed phase with a 30% reduction in mileage.  That means taking two days off in each of those weeks.  Seems excessive, but my instinct tells me it’s the right thing to do.

To bolster my point: my friend Jeff is an accomplished, hardcore cyclist, podiums all the time.  A few weeks ago at a bike race, he and the entire 40-45 AG were beat out by a 63-year old, and by a sizable margin!  He spoke to Jeff after the race and told him his success is all about recovery, especially before races.  And he never puts in miles “just to put in miles”, everything has a purpose.  This is nothing I haven’t heard before but this time…I’m listening.

Enough jabber, here’s the plan, full size.
Joking. Click for hugeness.

Two more items worth mentioning, nutrition and sleep:

Nutrition: I already eat cleanly, so no problems with this.  The cookie gorging finished a few weeks ago, then dessert became cereal before morphing this week into fruit salad, which is really weird because I’ve never been a big fruit eater – suddenly I love it.  Yay me.

Sleep: I’ve been as stupid about this as recovery.   I have to stop going to sleep after midnight  if I’m going to get out early to run.  I end up tired all summer.  Will amend this starting tonight.  11pm or bust.

Eh…nothing.  My legs didn’t atrophy nor did I gain weight, I had no inclination to faint in the 79 degree temp on this morning’s 5-miler and my pace was exactly where I left it, requiring me to purposely slow down a few times for prudence.  All in all, I’d say I’m well rested and that tapering will never again freak me out – or way less, anyway.  It was a great week off!

Ankle Saga Continues
When I walked home from the hospital, it was creakier than usual, thanks to having raced a 5K only to be stuck in bed the next 30 hours.  So I went on ibuprofen for a few days to get a solid anti-inflammatory punch and when the weekend came, I went off it so I could see how it felt, undrugged.

Alas, once off Vitamin I, it didn’t hurt per se,  but it was still there in the background, a shadow when I descend stairs or step a certain way.  As usual, there was no visible swelling and I couldn’t even press an area to make it hurt, but just knowing it hadn’t gone despite the week off was a bummer.

So yesterday morning, I started googling on how to deal with it, wondering if I should get it looked at.  In my search, I came upon this collection of posts from an Ultra runners site that, while I’m not suffering from an achilles problem, has some good stuff in there for tendon recovery.

One happy eye-opener on that page was the Nirschl Pain Phase Scale of Athletic Overuse Injuries (here’s more info on it).  I’d say my ankle is Phase 2 which isn’t even at “take rest days” intensity, so unless it gets worse, there’s no reason to get it looked at – I’ll live with it the way many runners live with a constant niggle.  I’m sure I have tons of company on that score.

Still, I want it gone, not just managed.  The supplements in those posts looked interesting (L-lysine and glycine) so that’s something to consider, though I’m at my limit of pill-popping between glucosamine, msm, a calcium chew and now a multivitamin (I stopped taking separate iron, btw, the multi is enough).

My other thought was that maybe I could just take ibuprofen as needed, since it works really well for me and it’s not like I’d use it regularly, but I have that guilt about it, which I think I don’t need to have – it’s not crack, for god’s sake!  Still, in looking for alternatives, I started investigating ibuprofen cream, which ultimately landed me on Arnica gel.

Arnica gel is natural, it comes from the arnica flower, and has been used for hundreds of years in Europe and by tribal Indians.  It’s great for bruising – makes them go away sooner (I never heard of anything that can do that) but what got my attention was the anti-inflammatory properties – better than ibuprofen cream and with less adverse events.

My friend Lara uses it but I thought it was just for pain, not that it actually helped with inflammation and healing.  So when I read it genuinely helps bursitis and tendon issues…Jackpot!  After scouring tons of glowing user reviews at Vitacost, Drugstore.com and Amazon, I flew to Whole Foods to buy a tube.

I started on it yesterday morning (you use it 3 times/day) and knock me down, my ankle feels fab!  I felt just a tiny twinge upon waking today, so I have major hopes for this and will keep you posted as I return to mileage. The fact that it’s available in gel form is excellent – it dries super quick, isn’t sticky and no pills to swallow, yay!

Running Times Fabulosity
I’ve already posted this on Facebook, but after those months defending my position on moving to shorter races vs marathons, there was an article in Running Times this month that encapsulated my thoughts perfectly.  If you don’t get the magazine (I just subscribed, it’s only $10!) you can read the article here.

There’s also a good article on running form in the same issue.  Be aware this is a preview website that lets you view these, so if you “use up” your preview, just try again later.  Otherwise, the articles should end up on the Running Times site in a months time.