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Marathon Training: Week 15

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Taken by phelle

This is it… the last hard week of marathon training. And I felt it! 53 miles of running and last week’s 25K race to help start the week! Good times! I felt pretty solid all the way through but was humbled by the 22 miler – which may be a good thing!

Monday: 4-6 easy miles. A 6.2 mile recovery run downtown in 50:23. Most definitely a little tired and I took it easy on this overcast morning with 51 degree temps. I ran part of the riverfront loop on top of my normal 4 mile downtown loop.

Tuesday: 10 mile fartlek. We met at Fort Snelling to run these on dirt trails in the park. My group ended up running 9.12 miles including 11 hard intervals and finished in 1:10:54. It was perfect weather in the mid-60’s and shady down by the river (didn’t see any vans though). These fartleks were more like what a fartlek should be. 1 person set the pace and distance, and they were the only one that knew how far it was going to be. Each fartlek was supposed to range between 1-3 minutes. Recovery was supposed to be equal to the interval time. This was a lot of fun overall. It was interesting that the intervals I was leading were a lot easier than the ones where I wasn’t – quite the mental game. I won’t bore you with all the details of each interval! It was a good time.

Wednesday: 5-7 easy miles. There was no way I was going to wake up and run after last night’s work out. So I ran in the evening with my wife. We rode our bikes downtown and each did our own variation of the riverfront loop. I ran 5.8 miles in 45:55 and felt pretty good despite the windy weather and 67 temps. We had fun “running together”.

Thursday: Rest Day! I was quite ready for this rest day and my legs were too! They were starting to feel a little banged up I think. I’ve also been dealing with some sinus drainage since Tues or Weds so was glad for the chance to rest-up.

Friday: 10 miles at marathon pace. Some how I missed that this was a MP run, but I think since I raced last weekend that its ok to miss the MP part! No reason to do anything stupid at this point. I ran 9.7 miles and didn’t feel like tacking on the extra .3 on a pretty nice morning, and ran it in 1:16:56. It was 58 and like 90% humidity. I ran down the Midtown Greenway and around the Mississippi River crossing both the Lake and Franklin bridges. I felt pretty good and was happy to run it under 8 minute pace.

Saturday: 20 miles. The last long run of the training cycle!! We met at the finish line of the TC Marathon course and ran out and back on it. I guess it is also a tradition that my pace group tacks a little extra on and makes it a 22 mile run. So I ran 22.2 miles in 2:52:40 (7:46 pace)!! I’ll be honest this was not an easy run to finish and I was ready to be done a few times! My slowest mile (excluding the first) was 8:07 and was mile 21. From there it was cruising to the finish and it was a thrill to come around and know that the finish was just up ahead! I can only image how it will feel right there in a few weeks. My fastest mile was a 7:26 for mile 13. It was a great day to run with temps around the 60 mark and a slight drizzle for the last 10k.

Sunday: Cross-training. I woke up pretty tired and a little sore. Today Higdon said you could cross-train or take the day off… I opted for the latter!

Weekly Mileage:

Running – 53 miles

Biking – 25 miles

Hal’s Tip of the Week: What you do in any one workout doesn’t matter. The most important point of any training program is the totality of that program, and the results it brings. A flash speed workout with quick splits may look good in your training diary, but it could bring you to the edge of overtraining. The same with running the long runs too hard. Your time in the final 20-miler won’t count three weeks later. Your success will be measured by, 1) finishing the marathon, if you’re a beginner, or 2) finishing it in a time that reflects your current capabilities, if you’re an experienced runner. What you did while getting there doesn’t count.

[tags] Marathon Training, Hal Higdon [/tags]

Week 15

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Twitter Tagging

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Last week I wrote about the great tool, Twitter. I mentioned it was great for building friendships and community with runners and other people.  One of the great ways to build discussion around a specific topic or event on the web is by using tags.  I use tags all the time on this blog to make sure others looking for something about running can find it easily.

With Twitter you are able to tag your tweets as part of a broader discussion using something called a hashtag. One of the popular uses of Twitter is during conferences or meetings to help broadcast what is going on or for possible meetups. To help facilitate this happening someone decided to start using hashtags to make searching for related tweets easier. A hastag is simply using the hashmark or pound symbol (#) before a series of letters. It was made really popular during the San Diego fire and was being used for the Iowa flooding. If you go to a Twitter search engine such as Summize (now Twitter Search) and searched for the hashtag #IowaFlood you’ll get hundreds of Tweets about the flooding.

Why is this important? Every major group, organization, conferences, etc has a hashtag. As of today I haven’t seen any for running. I think it would be nice to find other Twittering runners and see how their workout went. Most of the runners I follow on Twitter tweet a summary of their daily run or race report.

I was going to propose the already famous ORN be used for a hashtag, but a quick search pulled up some unsavory content – add a “p” to the beginning. So, let’s scratch that idea! Back to the drawing boards, I did some more research and found that some people had already started using #run, but that is a little simplistic and maybe boring! Then I came along a tweet from @runnershigh that #runlog is being used by Twemes to create Twitter Running Meme. Twemes also allows you to get an RSS feed of tweets posted with the hashtag.

Therefore, I propose that from here on out we all use #runlog to tag running posts.

Anyone else have thoughts on a better hashtag?

Used appropriately I think this would be a great addition to our running community.
Step One: For it to work properly you should follow @hashtags on your Twitter account. This will help facilitate the hashtags bot to find your tweet and index it in their service.
Step Two: Start using #runlog.
Step Three: Use the Twitter search engine of your choice to find out how other runners ran today. I recommend Summize (now Twitter Search) or Tweetscan. You can also use the RSS feed from Tweme.

Can you do it? I’ve been using it for awhile now and a few others have picked up on it. You can follow my Twitter Running Log here at Hashtags, or via Summize, or at Twemes.

Note: According to hashtags.org their service has been broken since July 10, due to a Twitter-side error.  You can continue using the #runlog though and it will make it easier to search for.  And the service should resume normal processing eventually!

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Best of Team Cross for July

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What a month! Summer months seem to go by so fast! It seems that we were gone pretty much every weekend this month.  2 of the weekends were at weddings, we should have gone to 2 more weddings and then celebrating my birthday!

Training continues to go well for Twin Cities Marathon.  Weeks 5, 6, 7, 8. Part of my marathon training is raising support for Team World Vision and their great work in developing countries, but specifically in Africa.  I continue to share about my experiences sharing the beauty of Africa, sharing a slideshow of pictures from my 8 weeks in Ghana, the importance of education, the hope and joy found in Africa, and talked about Ryan and Sara Hall.

I reviewed a couple of different things this month, including Blaine Moore’s book on Marathon Preperation and Recovery, running on the Midtown Greenway, Pearl Izumi’s Go Running Shorts, and the Hundred Push-Up Challenge.  Not really a review but I talked about recent research showing that wearing flip-flops can be bad for your legs and feet. And mentioning research, there is a lot of research being conducted on runners right now, find out if you are eligible.

Last Year was a good month of racing for me. I raced a 5K – which turned out much shorter – and a 10K.  I wrote about the infamous and fun to say fartlek run and runners obessions with keeping detailed running logs.

Monthly Mileage: (2008/2007)

Running – 152 miles/143.4 miles

Biking – 85.5 miles/20.4 miles

Swimming – 300 yds

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Race Day: DINO Series #5

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On a cooler Saturday morning 206 eager competitors (89 in the 15K and 117 in the 5K) lined up for a muddy start to the DINO Series 5th race of the season at Town Run Trail Park in Indianapolis. The 15K started at 9am with the 5K following five minutes later. This is a little late for the current weather trend, but stays consistent with the DINO Series 9am start for all 7 races.

I ran the 15K course which is 9.3 miles, except today due to the structure of the trail and modifications by the city the course was actually more like 10 miles, and the 5K distance was closer to 5 3.3. We were dutifully informed of this well before the race start so you had time to mentally engage yourself for the longer distance. According to the Hoosier Mountain Bike Association which helps maintain the trail, the trail was modified due to high levels of erosion.

Town Run is mostly a Mountain Bike trail that is primarily single track throughout the entire course. It winds along the White River from 96th Street goes under 465 and supposedly comes out on 82nd Street somewhere. In the 15K we did a two loop course. We began by running the 5K loop and halfway through our second time around that loop we went straight out to complete and approx 5 mile loop through open meadow and more woods. After completing this grueling loop we finished along the 5K course. This was no easy race.

I started farther back in the pack than I should have and spent most of the first 2 miles trying to get around long “trains” of runners on the single track. After finding a group that I felt comfortable staying behind we got into some semblance of a pace and didn’t have to worry about the single-track much after that. I and some others faded from the main pack and around the 4 mile mark the group I was with completely disintegrated with me staying in the front and running a long while by myself before other runners started catching me. Due to the million switch backs and turn you could see those ahead and behind you at various points, but you couldn’t always be sure how far behind they actually were. I used some Clif Shot Bloks at the 5 and 10K marks, they seemed to help a little bit, but I took half the recommend amount of 6 per hour. They are given away free at the registration table for the DINO races!

I’m not excited with my overall time or individual splits, but this is actually a little faster than my last DINO race and considering the course, my current training, and nutritional habits I am happy with my 1:19:11 (7:55) ten mile time. My splits were 7:50, 6:51, 7:44, 7:43, 7:57, 8:17, 8:11, 7:48, 8:29, 8:17 (ones with similar formatting are approximately the same mile). I was very happy to place second overall in my age group and 23rd place overall.

Did you race this weekend? How did you do? Tell us about it in the comment section.


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