Monday was a 7mi recovery @9:10

Tuesday was my Billat 30-30s, averaged 8:23 for the run.  The warmup miles were quite slow because I was still in creaky mode, but the fast bit went without incident, or rather, a tiny incident.  My inner quad got a little ping about 1/2 through the fast bits, not enough to make me stop but enough that I felt it on…

Wednesday’s run, which I’d planned for 9, but cut down to 6 @ 8:58, figuring better to be safe with the tweak and besides, there’s no loss cutting 3mi from a recovery, yet I’d have been sad to compromise a “real” run.

Thursday, (a.k.a. this morning) I was in a bad mood when I woke up, which is funny since I realized from a post I made last week on Facebook that last Thursday sucked upon waking, too.  But thanks to the beauty of running, like last week, I snapped out of it once I hit the road.  My schedule called for a 13-miler with tempo but because I didn’t want to tempt the inner quad, I figured I’d do regular GA pace and hit the ramp a few times by the museum as a quasi hill run.

I ended up only doing the ramp once and went on the other side of the museum/river for the first few miles, just for a fun change.  As the first couple miles went down, I noticed my energy level was increasing.  First mile was 8:52 but with each passing mile, I progressively got faster till my last 2 were 7:35s, bringing the whole run to avg 8:05.  My legs felt great, my mind felt great, it was just…great!

Tomorrow is a day off and then Saturday, some MP miles and Sunday, a 20.  We’ll see, since Saturday says “heavy rains/wind” – if so, I’ll just run easy.  I’m  in that nebulous place between full effort and slacker mode.  I know I’m putting in some good runs but I’m also not pushing as much as I could which, depending on the day, has me either “eh, who cares? it’s enough” or “oh shit, I’m going to suck horribly in Boston”.  Generally the former wins, the latter seems to be limited to Thursday waking up.

Newsletter

Sent #3 out and must apologize for a lack of editing on the Swedish stair piece, I don’t generally write “experiment” two times in one sentence.  And also, I’m not so sure that is a guy in the Jazzercise video, so my apologies to the woman with the horrible haircut.

I had a voiceover in the morning at a studio that I don’t get a lot of work from, not for any reason but that I haven’t built up any relationships there, though they have my demo and that’s how I got this job.

Now, when you do voiceovers, the client is often there at the session – “client” usually meaning  the ad agency or whatever company has hired you, though sometimes the actual client client is there (meaning the company who hired the ad agency to begin with).  Then sometimes, like today, there’s no one but you and the engineer present, but the client (in this case the ad agency) does a phone patch, so they are able to be with you at the session without having to physically be in the studio.

Today’s session was uber fun because the ad agency fellow was a total sweetie, before I started he asked me all sorts of questions about my background, where I was from and things that didn’t have anything to do with the job.  When it got time to do the spot, they were so happy with it that one of the ad people, remembering I’d said I was from Arkansas, asked me to audition for another spot with a Southern accent.  So I may get another job from this one, plus the impression I left the engineer with was that I’m a pleasure to work with which will surely get passed to the higher-ups.

Oh, and I got a parking spot right in front of the building, which in downtown Philly is no small feat.  Then when I got home, I got a spot right in front of my apartment.  A lucky day.

Today’s run

48 degrees!! Capris and a top…heaven.  11mi w/Billat 30-30s (ended up doing 21 reps).

When I do a quality session it’s usually bookended with a pretty good chunk of miles – today, 6.75mi till I started the fast part.  Because I don’t want to “use myself up” before I get to the work, I always take those miles preceding it very easy – usually 8:45s before I get to the good stuff.  But today was different.

At about 2.5 miles, there was a large group of middle-school boys running on the path.  They weren’t too fast but to get past them, I sped up to around 8:15 pace.  After I passed, I considered slowing back down because I didn’t want to compromise the 30-30s but it hit me that I’ve been spending a lot of time in 8:30-8:45 land these days or sub 8:00s, but hardly any time at 8:15ish, though I did more of that last cycle.

It felt pretty good going that pace, easier than the 8:45s for some reason so I kept on.  Then, when it came time for the workout, I had no problems, in fact I was faster this week than last.  So, many thanks to the school boys, you helped me decide to do more 8:15ish runs in the next few weeks.

Arms and Legs

You know the arm/leg connection?  That if you move your arms faster, your legs will go faster as well?  I’ve known this tidbit for a long time but don’t make good use of it because 1. I always get the feeling that I’m wasting energy using the arms that way and 2. I’m not able to speed my arms up easily, it’s like the pace rut I mention above, making my arms move faster isn’t as easy as just thinking it, when you’re already going fast it seems like they’re moving as fast as they can.

But no.  This time I made a concerted effort to really pump my arms and let it see if it tuckered me out more or what.  The What is that I went fucking fast!  I had a few sub 6s in there, which I never do.  Yeah, it was only for 30secs each, but 5:xx is not something I ever see.  So I’ll be messing around with this again.  It’s not something I think is useful for regular marathony stuff (aside from the Billats, of course) but when I get to do 400s come Spring, I’ll see if it’s transferable.  I still think it makes you more tired but maybe that’s because you end up running faster in general.

So that’s my great day today.  Hope you guys had a great one, too!

When you read about or explain the Billats, it’s human nature to want to compare it to something recognizable, so you think it must be like strides or fartleks.  It’s neither.  It’s an ocean wave of running. 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, 20 times.

The difference between Billats and strides/fartlek is that the latter give you true recovery.  With Billats, 30 seconds goes by in a flash, so while the work portions are fast, the recovery portions are seemingly over even faster.  You literally do not recover, however, you get enough of a break that you can complete another surge.

But enough talk, here’s the dirt:

This is a 5×1000 workout I did in October (I’m using this to compare because I’ve only done 800s this cycle and they compare even less favorably than this one).  My HR for the workout portion averaged 177 and hit 187 Max.  I spent 12:33 at 183.  It was 20:10 of hard running.

Here are today’s Billats (30sec on,30sec off)x20.  I started them at mile 6.75 of an 11-miler.  My HR for the workout portion averaged 181, hit 188Max and I spent 14:48 at 183.  It was 10 minutes of hard running.  Do you see?  I spent more time “in the zone” for 1/2 the amount of hard running as regular intervals! Wow.

Funny thing was, I had a preconceived notion that it couldn’t be as good a workout since 10 minutes sounds so paltry.  Truth is, the recoveries end up being included in the total time since your HR doesn’t have a chance to go down much. Who’d a thunk it?

Oh, and before anyone comments on how hard it’d be to keep track of that many intervals, it’s a simple matter of programming 30/30 or just 30 seconds into your Garmin or Ironman-type watch and setting it to repeat 20 or 40 times.  Easy schmeasy.

Before I close, I wanted to update you on my resting HR after the whole quitting-pot-heart-rate-escalation phenomena.  About a week and half ago, over 4 months since I quit, it finally, finally hit my old normal HR again.  I’m really shocked at how long it was affected but utterly relieved that it’s back to good ole 48, flirting on 47.  Took long enough.

New route = a great find

I’ve mentioned how amazing the Parks dept is about clearing off the bike path so usually snow is not an obstacle, but after last weeks deluge, they surprisingly left it for a couple days so I was forced to change my usual route. No major complaints because they did clear off part of the river path going in the opposite direction so I still got my river fix, but it was a bit repetitive since I had a 2.75 mile loop to work with. I did this for 11 on Thursday and 8 on Friday.

Now, the good that came of it was that in order to get that loop, I ran on areas I’ve ignored in the past, one of which is a ramp that goes up to the museum. It’s about .07mi and Sporttracks tells me it’s 6.5% grade (with the elevation correction plugin since Garmin is an idiot when it comes to calculating elevation), so it’s short but quite sweet as far as adding in some convenient hillishness to my run.

Saturday was a 12-miler and most of the path had been cleared off so I was back to my usual route, though the icy sections made it more like a trail run in places, so again, I was quite pleased about the added difficulty.

Bits of gold in Runners World

That night, I finally cracked open the Runners World I bought. I never read that magazine though their forums are my online hangout, I rarely even look at what’s going on in the rest of their website. But I bought this issue because people were saying great things about the cover article on Kara Goucher. And my, oh my, it really is a wonderful article and I recommend everyone get their hands on it.

To find a world-class athlete has the same mental crap roaming around her brain as us regular runners was truly eye-opening and it hit me like a big fat hug from the Running Gods. Honestly, it gave me a new perspective on races, time and the future.

Another thing in the magazine that caught my eye was a speed workout article about developing a finishing kick. One of the workouts for marathoners consisted of 8-20 200m repeats at 5K pace. Now, that got me thinking about Jim who’s been doing Billats this cycle and seeing real progress with it. If you don’t know about Billats, read this article and this, it’s fascinating stuff. What it boils down to is that by doing short repeats with short recoveries, you actually stay in VO2max longer than if you did a longer workout.

Yesterday I played hooky

I felt enormously guilty about it but it was yet another cold, windy day and I was feeling cold in the apartment and frankly, just didn’t want to brave the elements. I appeased myself by realizing that my supposed cutback week had not really been a cutback at all, it turned out to be 58 miles and since I’m doing low 60s, that doesn’t qualify.  Blowing off yesterday’s 15 (I wouldn’t have blown off a 17-20) gave me 49.75 miles for the week…so a proper cutback.  Nothing lost though I still gave myself crap about it all day.

Today’s Workout, 11.75mi w/26 30-sec hill reps (Hillats)

I am so glad I took yesterday off! Seriously, I had a renewed energy and was rarin’ to run.  Since it’s going to be snowy tomorrow and my planned hill workout will be questionable I decided to do a modified Billat workout on that newly discovered ramp. I was pretty excited about trying something new and the fact that it’s only 30 seconds per rep is low-pressure plus it fits in perfectly with the ramp distance.

I did 7.25mi before hitting the reps (30-30s x 20, though the recoveries were 36-38secs to return to the bottom of the ramp).  When I got to the 19th rep I thought, “oh yay, just one more” but the idea is to do these till exhaustion and my pace was still steady, so I didn’t stop till 26. This means I should have done them faster but it’s hard to gauge that when it’s your first time and there’s uphill included.  Bottom line is I feel great about the workout, it was fun and I ended up with more hard running than if I’d done tomorrow’s scheduled 6 x.25mi hill reps.

Part of me is all “this is really not conventional marathon training” but the other part says “you hate the long slogging, so screw what “should be” and do what’s fun and gets you working hard.”  So I plan on doing proper Billats and these Hillats for the duration of the cycle.  I’m thinking it’ll fight off the slower turnover I inevitably get during marathon training.  As long as I have the tempos,  marathon paced workouts and LRs, it’s all good.

So that’s the latest dirt, sorry this is sooooo long!  I just couldn’t help it. :-)