And in full use! Whee!!

Pictures here: (not in any order, but completed photos are the end of the group).

Last week was a big training week. Good volume, lots of running and some nice results. Tuesday’s interval session called for 7×4.5 min/1min jog Z4. I figured out how to program the Garmin 305, then went outside for the run. All the intervals were under 7:00/mile.

Friday through Sunday were big, big days for me. This week started my Friday, 3-a-day sessions. Swim in the morning, (following a 4:00am alarm) lower body weights at noon, run in the afternoon. The Friday swim was a 5,000 yd set:

• 400 w/u
• 200 swim/200 paddle pull
• 300 swim/300 paddle pull
• 400 swim/400 paddle pull
• 500 swim/500 paddle pull
• 200 c/d
• 1600 straight swim, 1:30 pace

I took it a bit easy on the lower body workout, and skipped the core sets. I figured the pull sets in the morning were enough.

The evening run was a 1:30 run, with 40 min of marathon pace at the 45 min point. However, once I got onto the run, my pace was just a bit above marathon pace, so I just kept pushing. Here are the laps (per mile, pacing session starts around mile 5)

The kicker here is that my avg HR was spot-on for the pace, even with two workouts earlier in the day. I was stoked after this run.

Saturday morning, I had planned to ride with Liberty Cycle. The alarm went off at 6:00am, and I heard thunder and rain. So I went back to bed until 8:00. When I got up, the rain had stopped and the sun started to peek out. I found a 40 mile, B pace group ride from Bed One with MAFW, so I threw the Surley on the car and drove to the start.

When I took the Surly off the car, one of the other riders commented that I must be a strong rider to bring an SUV to a B paced ride.

Once we got on the road, the B group broke up into a B+ and B- groups. I decided to see how long I could hang with the B+ guys, given the extra weight and road-resistance of the Surley. As it turns out, I was able to hang with them quite well. I got blown out the back on any sort of climb, but I was able to hammer the descents and flats to get back with the group. My bike fitness isn’t close to what it needs to be for IMLP, but base aerobic fitness and the ability to hammer and recover quickly is right there.

I finished the 40 miler with a 17.5 mph average, then headed out on my hour run to finish the brick. Nothing noteworthy about the run, other than the temps were climbing and it was pretty darn humid. 6.2 miles, 9:46 pace on a slightly rolling loop.

Sunday was the “big day” on my workout calendar: A 3:15 Z1-Z2 run was planned, but I wanted to meet up with the NJRRC and run 20 miles on the NJM course. I have demons to slay on 4 May, and I wanted to visit their lair prior to the big day.

So another 4:00am alarm got me up and moving. I got down to Long Branch w/out any problem, did my “business” and lined up to run the course with a bunch of other runners. My legs were pretty shelled from Friday & Saturday, and I was feeling a bit run-down. My plan was to pace at 10:00-10:30 per mile and see how I felt.

After a couple of miles the legs started to open up a bit, but they never felt “good”. I just kept a nice smooth pace, focused on memorizing the course, and ignoring anyone who passed me. I also wanted to nail down my nutrition. I had to pee at the 3 mile mark, and again at the 13 mile mark, so I knew my fluid intake was pretty good. I took 4 hammer gel packs, some Endurolytes and Anti-Fatigue caps. In hindsight, I would have liked to have had one more gel for the 20 miles, and will definintely need 2 more for the full marathon. Depending on the heat, I may not need all the Endurolytes, and I should only need 4-5 AF caps.

I was crusing along around the 14 mile mark, where I saw three people who started the run with me earlier in the morning. They were about 1/4 mile up the road from me. They had dropped me when I stopped to pee at the 3 mile mark. I decided to stretch my legs a bit and see if I could catch them in the next mile, but only increase my pace to 9:00/mile. To my surprise my legs answered the call. In fact, I started to feel better from the small acceleration. It felt good to just lengthen my stride a bit. I caught them with no problem and cruised along to the next mile marker. I shut it down at that point, and went back to my normal pace for the rest of the run. I ended up with a tick over 20 miles, 9:54 pace.

I did have some problems with my left shoe. I started getting some pain in the tendon at the top of my foot. This started on Friday, and got worse on Sunday. I stopped to adjust it, and finally just ignored it as it came and went. Most of the time there was no problem, but occassionaly it would be a sharp pain. After I got home I noticed that the base of the tendon, where it met my foot was pretty sore and swolen. I’ll need to get this checked out before the big day.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the marathon on 4 May. I know that anything can happen on that day, but I feel good as I head into the taper.

Stumbled on this…
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Too fun…

Hmm, Takeda seems to be picking off some of my companies partners..
to Buy Millennium For Nearly $9 Billion – WSJ.com

umm, it’s called compromise…

What is triangulation?

From Wikipedia…
In arguments, compromise is a concept of finding agreement through communication, through a mutual acceptance of terms—often involving variations from an original goal or desire.

It’s what we do in a democracy..

Posted without comment..

Some updates..

(1) Posted a bunch of photos to the Go ahead and look. You know you want to see what Weazer & I have been doing. (hint: Easter celebration, new bathroom, trip to Key West)

(2) We are headed out to Mesa AZ for my step-mothers wedding. Yeah, I know it sounds weird. You have to understand my family tree. It’s pretty weird. I’m scheduled to do a 3 1/2 hour run on Sunday. That will have to change to Saturday. The heat will certainly be a factor. I’m thinking that I’ll have to do multiple loops in an area with access to water.

(3) My new gig has me learning a bunch of new stuff. Like SAML, and Semantic Web, and Open Innovation. All very cool stuff, but a HUGE amount to learn. In my last 8 years managing IT projects in the Pharmacovigilance space I’ve lost touch with technology advances. I feel like I’m training for a second “mental” Ironman. The upside is that our big projects in this space don’t really kick into gear until Q3. I’ve got a little time to get prepared.

A couple of weeks ago, the TRI-DRS Friday 5 included listing the top ten ‘to-dos’ on your bucket list.

That got me thinking about my list:

1. Dive the Great Barrier Reef
2. Dive Truk Lagoon
3. Own/Race historic cars (Lotus Super-7’s rock my world!)
4. Sky Dive
5. Learn a second language
6. Learn a musical instrument
7. Quality for & race at Kona
8. Live out my days on an island in a sunny location.
9. Hang Glide
10. Bicycle across USA

I’m not too sure about the order, and this is certainly not the total extent of my list. There are a whole bunch of other goals mixed in here.

But the concept of a list got me thinking about how little time I really consider the quickly passing days, and making the best use of the days to come. I’m not a long term planner. The extent of my active planning is about a year. Beyond the next 12 months, I’m not all that sure what I’m going to be doing, in any sort of detail. I’ve got some general ideas about retirement and a second career, but nothing solid. More like a bunch of dotted lines heading off in different directions, starting from differing points in time.

It’s probably another feature of my ADD; too many distractions to focus on on a single path to the future. I’m not sure if that lack of focus is a good thing or a bad thing, but I’m ok with it, and it seems to work for me.

Something must have happened to me at the E Murray Todd 1/2 this past weekend.

I went out for my Friday run around 1:30pm. While I had several good bikes & swims, I hadn’t run since the 1/2 mary on Sunday. I still had a lot of nagging soreness in my right arm, shoulder and right calf through out the week. I have a tendency to get sick if I push my workouts too fast after a major effort, and there have been a LOT of sick folks at work. But I really needed to run today, so I figured I would just suck up the soreness and run my usual 1:15 route.

Here is what happened:

Lap time dist avg max
1 8:55 1.00 131 144
2 8:42 1.00 142 147
3 8:30 1.00 143 151
4 8:18 1.00 145 151
5 8:14 1.00 145 149
6 8:33 1.00 147 152
7 4:34 0.54 150 157
8 7:45 1.00 156 161
9 6:57 0.89 162 169
10 4:59 0.58 153 163

Lap 7 is where I started my 15 min acceleration. Lap 9 is where I ended it. Lap 10 was last 5 minutes… 8:21 for 9 miles, AVG HR 147. Solid aerobic pace, Here is the kicker.. It was a SOLID 22 sec/mile faster than I’ve ever run this route for the same level of effort.

At about the 5 mile point today I felt like I was standing on the other side of a brick wall. There was a gaping hole about the same size and shape of my body. At my feet were broken brick and dust. There was a weird glow all around me. I think that’s called a breakthrough. Damn, that felt good.

Since I’m lazy, tired and it’s pretty early in the morning, I’m going to post the e-mail I sent my about the race:

E. Murray Todd 1/2 Marathon Race Report..

I’m feeling pretty good about the race in general. I would have liked to hit 1:45, but I’ll take these results. No shame in a 8+ minute PR!.
Pacing was tough. I felt really strong through about 7 miles, then it felt like the wheels came off:

Mile 1 7:41
Mile 2 7:58
Mile 3 7:55
Mile 4 7:54
Mile 5 7:49
Mile 6 8:01
Mile 7 7:54
Mile 8 8:23
Mile 9 8:17
Mile 10 8:57
Mile 11 8:16
Mile 12 8:45
Mile 13 8:22
13.1 7:55

1:46:54 211/501 total, 33/59 AG

Now these aren’t bad numbers, (for me) but it just seemed like a hit a big brick wall. One minute I’m cruising along, and the next I couldn’t get my legs to spin any faster. What’s weird is my HR stayed at 160-162. Once again, when I tried to push past 164-166, I started to get nauseous. I had a good breakfast, took 2 Race Caps (30 min before race) and 3 Anti-Fatigue caps (1 hour before race). I took a Hammer Gel right before the race, and another right past the 7 mile mark. I used a similar protocol prior at the 24 hrs of Allamuchy last year, and had good results with my first two laps (about 2:15 total race time). So I’m thinking that something in my normal diet is causing the nausea problem. I never felt like I was even close to a bonk. I’m going to really focus on what I’m eating between now and NJM, and see if that helps.

The 2nd half of the race, and most of the race past 10 miles felt like I was beating my legs with a small bat. I’m pretty sure that’s because I’ve done a LOT of treadmill running. I was really, REALLY surprised at how tight and sore my legs felt during the last 3 miles. I’m pretty sure that’s because almost ALL my Z4 runs have been on the treadmill. I need to get more Z4-pavement miles and weight-work into my legs to deal with the pounding.

It probably sounds like I’m disappointed with the results. I’m not. I was damn close to the stretch goal I set for myself. I’m pretty sure I know what I need to work on for NJM. I’m feel great (relatively) and am focused on the next goal…