The Round Table is recorded live with a panel of guests and includes a chat area where listeners can make comments.  This is all new to me, btw, I’ve only ever heard Runners Round Table as a recorded podcast so I’m still figuring out the nuts and bolts of it.  Anyway, I’ll be posting it here in podcast form for those of you who want to give it a listen after the fact.

I’m looking forward to it since I’ve never done anything like it before, plus the subject matter is obviously near and dear to my heart.  My only concern is that I’ll throw out a cuss word since I tend to do that.  Cross fingers for me that I behave properly.

The Weekend In Running
Was fucking great.   But seriously, something clicked this week – my easy runs haven’t felt this fast and light since mid-September.  Wednesday to Saturday’s paces included sub8s to low 8s despite the previous day’s speed or hill reps.  Recovery, shmovery, I wasn’t having any.  Of course, I know better, so yesterday, I followed the law and ran 13@ 8:30 avg.  Total for the week: 67.25 miles.

Here are the last couple weeks of running, Mondays to Sundays.

Now on to today… a “Hard 20″: 1 easy, 18@GMP+20sec., 1 easy.  I’ve been working with 7:30s as my GMP, even though I’ve been waffling about what my goal actually will be.  It’s just an easy number to deal with.  So today’s goal was 7:50s for the 18 portion.

The weather was perfect, 55 and overcast, touch of rain at the beginning and some light wind.  It went swimmingly, ending up with 7:46 avg for the 18, 7:51 avg for the entire run.  With this result, I’m thinking 7:30 is back to being a reasonable GMP, so forget 3:18, sub 3:17 is what I’ll be shooting for.  Yay.

In another reconsideration move, I mentioned I was going to do 90miles this next week.  After some back and forth with one of my favorite posters on MRT, A Muse (whom I consider the Running Buddha at the RW forums with his generous and sage advice) I realized that this was not the wisest placement for a 90.

When I saw A Muse’s peak volume week landed 6 weeks out, I went and looked at Pfitzinger and Daniels and saw that they, too, peak at 6 weeks, so it wasn’t making sense to me to have my highest volume come 3 weeks out, especially when it’s also my hardest quality week.  That’s what I get for following Hudson’s plan as written, I was supposed to think about it and adjust, but was lazy.

So I’m going to keep it around 81 for the third week in a row.  Like I wrote in the Hudson thread, the only reason I’d be going 90 is to assuage my ego and my ego’s not running Philly.  I’ll save 90 for the Boston cycle.  That means I also get to skip the one double in the plan, since I don’t need to split that day up now.

Lastly, I’m subtracting some mileage from my taper weeks because Hudson would have me at 70 the week preceding race week and that doesn’t seem very taperish to me.  So today was my last 20 of the cycle!  Next weekend’s LR will be 17 (thank you,  A Muse).

The week ahead looks like this:
Mon: 8 w/10 hill sprints
Tues: 12 w/8x2min @ HP
Wed:14 last 7 moderate
Thurs: 8 or 9 easy (supposed to be another progression but I’ll see how I feel)
Fri: 14 w/10MP
Sat: 8
Sun: 17

Crossing fingers there’ll be no life drama interweaving said schedule,  just some steady running.   Later, fellow running fiends.

Had a nice 12 this afternoon, 8:30s, nothing special but it was really beautiful outside, some threatening clouds overhead and a bit of wind to carry me home. That finishes off a 298 mile month.  Not a whole lot of quality, but there was that Half on the 20th which required some schedule changing.  Here’s what went on, you can click it for a larger version:

Note that the mileage listed is what I actually went  but some of the workout notes are a tad off so “3 miles easy” at the end of a run might actually have been 2.65 or whatever depending on where I ended up in the park after the quality part…I was just too lazy to correct the calendar after I got home (my detailed logs are kept in SportTracks).

That’s about all I can come up with today, I’ll see you in a couple days, my sweet chickadees.

The move went really smoothly – the film people left a day early so I was able to cart a bunch of stuff on Wednesday morning, then I spent the rest of the day packing boxes.  All that physical labor and anxiety made me think yesterday morning’s MP run was going to suck.  But it didn’t.

The run was 14 w/8 at MP (shooting for 7:30s).  My MP splits went like this: 7:36, 7:32, 7:24, 7:25, 7:27, 7:28, 7:27, 7:24 for an average of 7:27.  But the best part was my HR, which averaged 81%HRR and didn’t climb like a mo-fo.  Here’s my HR in graphic form so you can see that it was pretty steady. With 11 weeks of training still to go, I am beginning to think my goal could really happen.  (providing no hurricanes, snow storms or mudslides, of course)

As for my running these past weeks, I’ve been going like clockwork to where 70′s ain’t no big deal.  Here’s what August looked like (plus an 8 miler on the 31st).  Note the 71s…it’s ’cause 71 is more than 70. 

Click on it for a larger pic.

This week I’m set for 76 with what Hudson calls a “hard 18″ on Sunday (which also happens to be my birthday…48, woohoo!).  By hard, he says MP+10% which comes out to 8:15/mi.  Shouldn’t be too tough but you never know.

OK, I’m pooped but now that I’m fully in my crappy new apartment (it’s got cute points to it but is basically silly small with a lot of street noise) it’s time to start getting back to the forums and see what everyone’s been up to.  Must do some blog reading, too, there’s much to catch up on.

Have a great Labor Day, you Americanos, and as for you foreigners, may your weekend be a goodie.

Occasionally I link to music on this blog and while my main favorite genre is Alternative, I’m a sucker for any style so long as there’s a great hook or a beautiful melody.  Nick made a wonderful slideshow of Vova through the decades with a heart-ripping A Capella song as the soundtrack.  It’s by a Ukrainian group called Pikkardiyska Tertsia (translates to Picardy Third, a type of musical chord).  Using this song was insurance that anyone who saw it would cry their eyes out.  I’m moved every time I hear it and the climax just kills me – doesn’t matter that I’ve no idea what they’re singing.

If my fancy new audio player plugin isn’t showing in your browser (I had to download the newest version of Firefox) here’s a link to the song.

As for running, I had a banner month, reached a new mileage high with 285 and today’s LR finished off a 71 mile week, so things are looking good.  ITBS, I scoff at you (though not too hard in case you come back).

Hudson had a 4-mile time trial listed for Friday, but if there’s one running phrase that makes me stick my fingers in my ears and go LALALALALALALA to drown out the thought, it’d be Time Trial.  I simply don’t do them and I’m at peace with that decision.   Something about running as hard as I can, alone, is comparable to sticking bamboo shoots up fingernails, so it ain’t ever gonna happen.

In its place, I’d planned a 4-mile tempo run, but it was so hot on Friday (dewpoint of 74, Heat Index 87) that I bagged it.  I did want to get something LTish in this week though, so I did a steady-stateish/tempoish progression yesterday before the funeral, middle 4 went 7:15, 7:05, 7:04, 7:00.  7 miles total at 7:45.

Then today, I’d planned 15 and went 16, albeit a slow 16 on Forbidden Drive (local trail) with some rain off and on.  Yesterday I was in high heels all day and had more than my share of wine, so I had no inclination to be anything but a turtle today.  It was so gorgeous with a dark sky (I love ominous-looking rainy days) and all that green on the trail that it turned out to be a slice of heaven.  Ended up with an 8:50 avg.

I’ll leave you with my month in review.  The grey text means it was in the plan but I didn’t do it.  The numbers on the far left are the weeks counting down to the marathon, so week 16 starts tomorrow.  Woohoo!

So then I’m looking at all my books, wondering what training plan I want to follow and not getting excited by any.  Most of them are shy on the quality work, when I know I can handle two a week and Daniels doesn’t even have a dedicated Half schedule, he says you can use the Marathon one, but I wasn’t thrilled with the idea.

Just as I was making the decision to roll my own, swiping a few workouts from this plan and that, I took a second look at my new book, Brad Hudson’s Run Faster from the 5K to the Marathon, recommended by a few people I respect on the Marathon Training forum.

I had only glanced at the plans, but now that I was giving it my full attention, the more I liked what I saw.  Hudson’s plans have quite a bit more work in them than Pfitzinger, Glover and the rest.  All the long runs are progression runs, he’s big on hill reps as a strengthener and injury prevention, there’s fartlek sprinkled throughout (which I thought was lame when I first looked at it, but now looks appetizing enough)…

In a nutshell, it has lots of variety, looks like it would bring some substantial rewards speed-wise and most importantly, looks fun!

It’s a cool book in general, he espouses adaptive training;  instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, you use what works for you and drop what doesn’t.  He also recommends changing your training from season to season to keep the training effect fresh.  The focus is in making you an effective, intuitive self-coach.

What I find super attractive in the plan are those progression Long Runs.  You know I loved Pfitzinger and appreciated that he got me safely to the start line in October, but it wasn’t much a of a push for me, I became used to putting the brakes on for LRs, avoiding a great opportunity for extra improvement.  The way Brad Hudson says “if you can add some quality into your easy runs, why not do it?” makes a lot of sense to me.  I’d been under the assumption that easy must be easy, hard must be hard, but Hudson gives you a middle layer, too.

So I’m in!  Two and a half weeks of freeform ahead and then the new plan begins.

As for the present, the holidays are about to finally do their thing and tomorrow morning, we’ll be leaving for a couple days.  While I’m gone, I may pretend to not have internet access in an attempt to act mentally healthy and be all woodsy-natural, but that’s like trying to keep Amy Winehouse away from the crack pipe, so I’m not confident about it.  Especially since we’re bringing a pipe (laptop) with us.

I leave you with a twisted holiday medley from Straight No Chaser.  I read about them yesterday on CNN.  They formed at Indiana University, disbanded after school, then last year one of them put a 1998 video of themselves on YouTube, that instantly went viral.  Now they’ve got a record deal.  I love stories like that.  Enjoy!

Merry Xmas, Chappy Chanukah and Krazy Kool Kwanzaa to you all!

Anyway, I’ve made one big “Running” Excel spreadsheet that houses each of the sheets I’m about to show you, plus this nifty Daniels Training Tables sheet (which I highly recommend downloading…it has many cool features).

If you must know, this spreadsheet has become such a wonderful training tool and motivator that I print hard copies of the Race Pace and Training Pace pages below, so I can admire their numeric beauty even when away from my computer. The better to think my way faster, lol.

Starting with my planning calendar: this is a free Excel calendar template I downloaded from the Microsoft site and tweaked for my nefarious purposes. I added a column to the right that adds the daily mileage for the week on the fly, so I can play around with adding, moving and subtracting mileage and get instant feedback. I fill it out a week in advance and during the week I’ll switch stuff around depending on the weather or how I’m feeling, so my planning is always fluid. I also added note sections above the days so I can enter the proposed workout as well.

What you don’t see are two more columns to the right that were very useful as I built my mileage, but not too much anymore. One of the columns takes the weekly total and automatically adds 10%, the other column adds 15%. Together, they gave me a great way to figure out the next week’s mileage goal, depending on how aggressive I wanted to be.

The next sheet is my McMillan race-pace compilation sheet (sorry, I cut it in half so you could see the whole page length). It’s composed of McMillan calculator race times based on 5Ks, diminishing in 15 second increments. Look on the top right and see my equivalent 5K after September’s Half was 24:16, then the next one down is 24:00, 23:45, etc.

Each sheet has 6 of these race calculations and I’m on the home stretch with this current one, just one or two sections to go! Then the next sheet starts with 22:45 and culminates in 21:30 (gulp), which I would jump for joy to make by the end of 2008. But I digress…

The point of this sheet is to be able to see the progression I’m working towards on one page, visualize the paces as well as give me an easy reference and comparison as I improve. Also, when I’m getting ready for a race, I can look at, say, three of those sections and figure out a “best” goal, “would be happy with” goal and “if worse comes to worse” goal.

The third sheet is my McMillan training pace compilation. In conjunction with the sheet above, this one has 6 blocks per page based on the same race times, but I’m only showing the bottom 4 blocks to keep file-size down.

The first bit in white has 5K, Half and Marathon times and their respective paces in brackets. The part in blue starts with the corresponding McMillan pace ranges (eg. “9:10 to 10:10”). Next to each of these ranges is the average of that range, the better to see where I actually am in SmartCoach as I improve (which only has one pace listed for each workout, not the fabulous span of times McMillan gives us).

And below the McMillan’s pace ranges are the interval times which again, help me keep tabs on the single paces SmartCoach spouts and shows me what to expect next.

I hope all that didn’t sound like gobbledygook to you guys – it was a lot harder explaining the sheets than making them. I swear, this is about the 15th 16th edit. I’m done now.

And that’s your crazy cool peek into my spreadsheet drawers. I can only hope it makes you as hot as it does me .