Days, and Weeks, Lost

I was hoping to get through this training program with little or no hitches in getting out there in doing the actual runs. Naive, perhaps, but it still is an improvement over last year, when signing up for the Marine Marathon itself ran headlong into the fact that I was utterly unprepared for sixteen weeks or thereabouts of running. At least this year, I knew there was going to be a lot of mileage put on my increasingly well-worn pair of New Balance shoes.

This year's problem isn't so much the running. I am - or I was - getting out there, four (or at least three) times a week, following the short-medium-short-long plan of training. At the beginning of the sixteen weeks, a run of three miles, even at 11 minutes per mile, meant I was done in a half hour. The long run could still be done in under an hour.

No, this year, the problem is everything else. As John Lennon said, life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. There had already been one lost day out of four, due to the way my fire department schedule worked. Last week, though, everything went completely awry. It all started with buying a car on Monday, from Auto Lenders in Lakewood.  But we couldn't get there before 5PM-ish, and didn't get out until close to 8PM. So there went that day. The next day was the firehouse on limited sleep, and then Newark the next day, which killed the first half of the week. After than, in my undisciplined mind, what was the point?

I had asked that of one of the Marathon Jims, who said, "it happens. Pick up where you left off." So initially, the entire program got shifted forward one week, which meant that I would be short either a sixteen mile run or an eighteen mile run, since it's important to taper properly before the Marathon itself. Now, after reviewing the schedule in the The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer again, I may have miscalculated the start date of the program by a week, or just simply didn't enter it into my calendar as accurately as I thought I had: according to the plan, I'm supposed to have three weeks of 16-mile long runs and two of 18-miles, and my schedule as I originally had constructed it only has me doing two 16s. So, do I drop a 16 and an 18, or two of three 16s?

One of the factors I want to avoid is overtraining. "Ha!", you say, "you're already undertraining, how much do you have to do to overtrain?" Well, it's not so simple. Conventional wisdom has it that one should not increase one's mileage by more than 10% over the previous week. If I calculate wrong (why wouldn't I?) by dropping a week I shouldn't, I could well be adding more than 10% from one week to the next. And that can lead to injury.

On a programming note, Regular readers of this blog - if I might be so presumptuous as to believe that I have regular readers - will note missing entries, especially if you've been following my Twitter feed. I will be correcting that soon enough by adding the entries over the past week or so that I have completed, but not yet documented. To avoid any confusion, the posts themselves will have the date that they should have been written, in addition to the dates that the runs actually occurred. Got that?

Week Three - Day Two, Thursday, August 1st.

Under threatening skies, I headed out not long after seven AM for today's four-miler. I'm not a fan of getting out after six in the morning, since the streets around here get busy early on weekdays. It's either take your chances on the shoulder of the road with some knucklehead who isn't paying attention or run on the concrete sidewalk, which is sometimes uneven, and in many cases non-existent altogether, depending on where I'm running.

On these shorter routes, I don't plan out where I'm going, so much as I make corrections as I go along. Do I go this way, and run a couple of hills? Or that way with less traffic, where I can run towards the middle of the road? The Nike app has a feature that if you set a distance, or a time, it will tell you the halfway point, so sometimes I just find a place to turn around and head back the way I came, or I'll keep going a little farther, maybe an additional half mile before making a turn back in the other direction, so I have a chance to walk and cool down before I get home. If I'm really pressed for time, I'll just retrace my route, with a reasonable expectation that I will make it home around the time I need to be there.

Today was a make-it-up-as-I-go-along kind of day. I headed up OFR to Chestnut, the next traffic light up, then down that toward Hooper. There's a small development on the left that I ran into, since it was off the busier Chestnut, and offered me a way to get out without having to make a U-turn in a cul-de-sac. Back down Chestnut to OFR, then up to Mapletree, where I made a turn into a condo complex to avoid the steep hill before Hooper.

About halfway back along Mapletree, I came to the realization that my breathing wasn't all that difficult, that my legs were more fatigued than my lungs were. So, I figured that if I pushed a little faster, I could probably make the last mile in pretty good time, and my legs wouldn't be all that worse, which did turn out to be the case. Have to remember that for tomorrow's three-mile short run. Still strategizing Sunday's upcoming seven miles.

And finally, just when I was beginning to despair, the Nike Pep-talkers are back. Today was decathlete Ashton Eaton, who told me that "yesterday was good, but today is great".

Got in just before the rain, I did.

Week Three - Day One, Tuesday, July 30th

Shockingly, it's a lot easier to run in 58 degree weather, than it is in 78 degree weather.  Whouda thunk it?

Owing to the fact that I had to be in the firehouse at 6:30 on Tuesday, it was out the door around 4AM again, a nice three-mile jaunt around the neighborhood. Nothing spectacular, just the regular first short run of the week. I was quite happy with my third mile being faster than my first one. At the end, I intentionally went a wee bit farther, in order to make it a 5K (3.1 miles), just to see if I could beat my fastest time at that distance, and I did.

I am getting a little concerned that the Nike Pep-talkers haven't been showing up lately, except for Kara Goucher or Sanya Richards-Ross telling me to "tap now for a power song" (which is "Danger Zone", by Kenny Loggins) when I'm about a tenth of a mile from my intended goal. I wonder if they think I'm slacking?

The run.

What Training App to Use?

In yesterday's post, I displayed some of the stats from my run last night. I'd like to display an actual map of the course, as well as more comprehensive numbers, but unless the reader is a subscriber to Nike+, and also a "friend" of mine on there, they aren't going to be able to see it for themselves. It does display to Facebook, which I could probably link to from here, since most people who'd read this here are going to be my friends there, anyway. That would take care of the map, but not much in the way of stats.

Several of my friends are using MapMyFitness, and still others are on RunKeeper. I'd like to pick one app that would work well, instead of spending the first minute of any run starting three different timers, which will skew the numbers (four if you include the Garmin watch Kim gave me for Christmas).

My cousin Rose's husband Jay pointed me in the direction of linking the MapMyFitness app to the Nike+ one, but if you click on an individual run on the MMF site, it doesn't seem to load the individual run's information correctly. Or maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

Also, does any one app seem to work better than another, as far as accuracy? So far, Nike and the Garmin watch can have as much as half a mile and 30 seconds in pace difference over the three, though both use GPS technology. Nike also said I did 14.1 miles in the Marine Corps' Historic Half Marathon, which would probably be news to the race organizers, I would think.

Suggestions are welcome.

Update, July 17th: I've found that if I go to my Twitter feed, where I also share my runs, I can find the link to a specific run there. So for now, the plan is to copy-and-paste the link and repost it here.