Posts Tagged ‘Hudson’

My Frankensteinian approach to the next couple weeks (taking Hudson’s final two weeks of his 10K plan and supplanting them in my Half training) looks to be quite a lot of fun, though challenging. This week goes like this:

Today I’m finally getting around to Hudson’s signature workout, Hill Sprints. He loves hillwork but those are the easiest workouts for me to bag, partly because my closest hill is an afternoon hangout for miscreants and partly because I’m lazy. The sprints are just tiny 8-second things, but with a promise of stronger muscles, injury prevention and power gained, I can ignore it no longer. So today’s an easy 6-miler with a few of these sprints near the end. Hopefully, the condom count on the road will be down from last summer.

Tomorrow’s speed session looks pretty entertaining: 2miles easy, then 4x2k@10k pace w/3min recoveries, 2 miles cooldown. I was a little nervous when I first saw 4x2k (5 miles of speedwork is as hard it gets), but the fact that it’s 10K pace and not 5K pace is the saving grace. Still, I’m sure I’ll be adequately miserable by the third one.

Tempo fun this week consists of: 2 easy, 2x10min at Half/10K w/2min recoveries, then 8×200 at 3k pace w/200m recoveries, 1 mile easy. Interesting variety there.

Then on Sunday, I’ve got a 15-mile progression run, last 15 minutes “hard” though I’ll likely change it to “moderate” since at this point in the plan it only calls for a 9-mile LR anyway and I think I may just be a tad pooped by the time Sunday rolls around.

Add to this 3 easy runs and 3 pushup challenge days and that covers it. Oh, but I forgot the sitting. I plan on doing lots of sitting all week. It’s a tough workout, but worth it.

I described today’s tempo run a couple posts down, but upon rereading the plan, realized that Hudson really meant 2 x 15min at Half to 10K pace w/1min rec. Nevertheless, my original plan (15min@Half pace, 1 min rec., 15min@10K pace) sounded really good to me so that’s what I did, along with about 4.5 miles warmup/cooldown.

The Half pace section came in at 7:29/mi, then I jogged lightly for a min and did the second 15mins at 7:09/mi. My HR on the first section averaged 171 (82%WHR) and on the 10K section averaged 178 (85%WHR). According to my fabulous Greg Maclin’s HR Excel sheet, this fits in perfectly with the respective race paces, so…yay!

I still have lots of time to work on my Half pace so that’s pretty cool. My 10K, on the other hand, is just a couple weeks away, so not a lot to be done, but I might be able to make a small dent. We shall see. In any case, it was a strong session today and I’m satisfied with it.

Now for an evening out, a little wine, friends and food and I’d call this the perfect day. Hope yours is shaping up to be a great one, too. Talk to you later, folks.

There’s a High Wind Warning today, 30mph winds gusting to 55 or 60. Considering how the windows are rattling, I’ve no problem taking the day off. Besides, yesterday was a 10-miler that left me hot and tired. I brought my small water bottle but it got up to 65 degrees, so I finished it off too early in the run and of course, the water fountains aren’t on yet.

On the good note, I’m excited because I feel like this is the first solid week of Half training. I got in a great VO2max session, started my first round of midweek medium LRs with yesterday’s 10 and I’ve still got a tempo to look forward to.

I was going to do my tempo tomorrow but the winds are still going to be kicking around 20mph and I don’t need the extra stress. So tomorrow will be an easy and then tempo on Saturday. The only pisser with that is that once again, it will precede my long run, which would be more comfy on fresher legs, but them’s the breaks.

The tempo I’m doing will be a new one on me. I always run my tempos as one continuous section but this week I’ll be doing my tempo ala Hudson: 15 min. at Half pace, 1 minute recovery then 15 min. at 10K pace. I find this a little weird, because I thought that the idea behind tempo intervals is that you run them faster than a straight tempo, which makes Half pace kinda slow. But it’ll be a good exercise to “try on” the different paces, especially with a 10k coming up soon.

Time to go make breakfast, a meal that has expanded into a fun list of choices now that I’m eating better. Used to be I’d always eat a bowl of cereal. Yawn. Today it’s an omelet with broccoli and mushrooms plus a couple pieces of toast with Light Laughing Cow cheese. Tonight I’m making a yummy recipe from my Women’s BQ forum buddy, Jackie…Harvest Time Turkey Loaf with mashed potatoes and zucchini. The eatin’ is good here at Flo’s Diner.

It was a hard, yet satisfying interval session: 5 x 1000 with 2min. recoveries (I jogged the first two, walked the second two).

Before I began the session, I followed Audra’s (aka Doggie Poo’s) swell advice to mark the path with duct tape so I would know where the hell to stop and start.  It worked a charm, thanks Audra!

Cut to the chase, my splits were:
4:19 (6:56/mi)
4:09 (6:40/mi)
4:18 (6:55/mi)
4:13 (6:47/mi)
4:20 (6:58/mi)
Average 4:15 (6:50/mi)

Finally, I am hanging out with the Sixes!! Woohoo!!

On top of this, remember yesterday I mentioned that sub 1:40 Half thread I joined?  In there is a wonderful guy, Mick, who’s deep into Heart Rate monitoring and analyzing the results…the guy knows his stuff.  In looking at my HR data and the fact that I reached 192 at the end of the last interval (supposedly 98% of my Max) he thinks my Max is higher than I’ve been calling it.

I established my max from my first race when it hit 193 and then added a couple points, so 195.  From the HR graph of today’s workout however, he thinks it’s probably 200.  This is wonderful news!  It means that some of the guilt I feel for not holding back enough on easy runs is for naught.   My monitored runs will now be accompanied by a clearer conscience.

As for my current Half plan, I had a fun time last night messing around with the schedule.  As you know, I’m doing a Hudson-type plan (“type” because he’s all about adapting it to suit instead of doing it exactly as written).  I was still hemming and hawing on the next few weeks, because at this point in his plan, he only requires short fartlek stuff for speedwork when I’m capable and wanting to do meatier stuff.

Out of curiosity, I thumb to the 10K plans section of the book, because I have a 10k coming up in 3 weeks.  Lo and behold, it works out perfectly to take the last 3 weeks of the 10K plan and plop them into my current schedule.  Now I feel I have some meat to play with.  What more could a girl want?

I’m not a religious person at all, although when Nick told his friend recently that running is my religion, I had to agree that it is the closest I’ve ever come to having one.  Even so, without a deity in my belief system, I still admit wholeheartedly to believing in miracles.

This week’s Airbus landing in the Hudson River with no fatalities was so jaw-droppingly unbelievable, it most certainly qualified as miraculous.  I kept tearing up when I saw the thing on TV, especially yesterday a passenger being interviewed said something to the effect of, “You know how they tell you to put your head between your legs?  We didn’t.  Most of us looked straight ahead so we could see exactly how we were going to die.”  Jeez, if that doesn’t rip the heart right out of you, nothing will.

I had a miracle yesterday.  Nothing in the comparable realm of serious or life-affirming events, but definitely an unexpected occurrence that seemed to defy the laws of science and nature.

While searching for something in my desk drawer, I noticed my long-dead Ipod Shuffle.  Nick got it for me soon after I started running, in 2007.  That summer I sweated so much, it killed the thing.

A couple days after it died, still deep in denial, I tried one of the “fixes” I’d found online.  Immerse it in a glass of water to let the salt deposits dissolve.  Of course, you’re supposed to do this immediately after it dies before the innards crust over and this was days after, so it didn’t work.  I did have a moment of hope though, when my vegetative iPod’s light turned on, but it was just a tease, the thing was indeed broken.

Soon after, I bought myself a different clip-on mp3 player by Creative, which is still working great, despite an even sweatier summer.  It has annoyances though: playlists aren’t as easy as the Shuffle, if you want to hear the songs in a particular order, you have to use a program that renames the songs on the actual device and also, there’s a tiny wheel for fastforwarding that ends up doing other functions if you inadvertently press it, which you can’t help but do since the wheel’s so miniscule.

So I’m looking at the Shuffle in my drawer, and the fact that it’s even in my drawer and not in some landfill is Miracle #1.  I’m not a hoarder, I prefer living with the least possible crap, and if it hadn’t been for Nick’s inscription on the thing, I would have thrown it out the moment it died. But there it was, looking up at me in all it’s cuteness.

On my desk, recently purchased, is a bottle of electrical contact cleaner.  It’s great for twitchy headphone jacks and noisy pots (knobs) on mixing boards, etc.  So without even a Hail Mary, I squirt contact cleaner into my little blue Shuffle, connect the USB dock and PRAISE BE! as easy as that…I had lift-off!  The Shuffle came back to life.  It’s a miracle, I tell you.

I only wish we’d had such luck with our beloved Canon Powershot camera last month.  The lens suddenly stopped retracting and the pervading advice on the internet was “throw it down or bang it against something…really, it works!”  Unfortunately, heeding this advice, we broke it completely.  We now own a newer model Powershot.

Enough miracle gadget talk though, yesterday’s run was incredible.  Coldest so far, windchill averaging 8 degrees.  Getting dressed was amusing, after all, it’s hard to gauge your first time for a new temp and while I could have used a neck gaiter for my chin, all in all, I dressed well.

The Schuylkill River (how I’d love, just once, not have to look up the spelling of the river I run on every damn day) was frozen in large swaths, with small islands of water surrounded by ice.  I’d never seen it like that before so it was pretty special.  I’d planned on 7 but it was so sunny and lovely, I went 8, averaging 8:40.

Today I’m going out for 8 and then tomorrow (day 14 of my mini-streak) I’m set for 12.  This’ll put me at my highest mileage week to date: 59.25 miles.  Depending on how I feel on Monday, I might keep going with the streak, I don’t have a real reason to end it – nothing hurts and I’m not tired, but that may change after Sunday’s run, so we shall see.

Have a wonderful weekend and (however tiny or goofy) may you find a miraculous happening of your own.

Continuing my between-cycle search for out of the ordinary (for me, anyway) running entertainment, yesterday’s treat was a 7-mile Progression run.  Brad Hudson or Greg McMillan will tell you they’re a surefire way to get a little extra aerobic aerobic improvement out of an easy run without the need for recovery.  Plus, they’re real fun.

Here’s Mcmillan’s Progression Run page, if you’re interested.

A great byproduct of the zippier runs I’ve been up to lately is that they’re introducing me to potential marathon goals for next Fall.   When I trained for Steamtown, the only time I ever ran marathon pace was on the two MP runs Pfitzinger had in his plan.  That pretty much sucks, because if you’re feeling like crap that day or even for that matter, feeling amazing, two tries seems like a dinky sample for such a huge event.

Which is why I’m an official race-pace convert now (and this extends to all race distances).  Whether it occurs in the form of intervals, tempos, steady state or part of a long run, I’m all about rehearsing race pace as part of the training block.

So it occurred to me that my faster easy runs these days double as a kind of audition process for future marathon pace.  I mean, not really truly quite yet, because it’s way too early, but it’s pretty cool to be running 8:xx and think, “yeah, gimme 11 months and I could do this for 26.2″.

Back to reality and the calendar, Hudson’s Half plan was supposed to begin this coming Sunday.  However, because my mileage and workouts are already ahead of his basebuilding phase, I’m going to jump into his plan a bit later, continuing on my own for now, though including his progression runs and hill repeats in the interim.

It’s strange, doing a truncated plan before a goal race – I’m so used to having 16 weeks laid out for me – but I realize that’s a mental thing, it’s not like I won’t be training well these next few weeks – six weeks, actually.  His threshold runs don’t even begin till week 7, so in essence, the main Hudson contribution will amount to a 10-week plan.

Looks like Excel and I will be spending some quality time together as we figure out how best to fill in the blanks.  Good thing I love that stuff.