My next race is exactly two weeks from now, so time to recap the training in the past three months before starting to taper. So there it goes.
After running in San Francisco I was starting to get the hang of this long-distance thing and to enjoy much more of it. I knew there was a ton I could improve and the solution was to (shockingly) train more. I was ready to start again the Wednesday after that race, but being away at a conference for most of the week meant I needed to wait until the weekend. Still at that conference I registered for the BayState marathon in Lowell in mid-October. I've decided to space races about three months apart so that there's time to improve between two successive ones and that seemed to be the only one near Boston in that timeframe. It was also advertised as a fairly fast course, so no harm in that, either.
A lot of people were recommending that I commit to a training plan. I was a bit reluctant. Half the fun I get from running is being able to say "screw that, I'm going for a run" after a few hours of, say, messing with spaghetti bash scripts. And I've gotten quite a few good ideas about how to deal with said spaghetti on my course near the Mountain View bay, as opposed to on a chair in front of a large screen. But getting serious about running wasn't going to happen only when I needed a break, so I decided to go with something in the middle -- I didn't commit to a day-by-day plan, but set a weekly distance limit. It started off at 35km in early August and slowly crept up to about 50km in early October. The graph below shows how that went -- still not near a reasonable marathon training schedule (maybe ~80km / week), but slowly on the way there.
The other thing I needed to work on was speed. I discovered intervals and tried to do at least one such run every week. A set for me was 800/1600/3200 m at high/mid/low- pace without walking breaks in between. I did 1-1.5 such sets per session, with the aim to go up to 2 before October, but that didn't happen. Also, my pace increased significantly after coming back to Boston -- if in Mountain View I sometimes had trouble maintaining 5:15 min / km for 15 km, I could now do a 4:45 pace for 25 km. Not sure what the reason for that is -- probably the difference between asphalt and dirt roads.
Speaking of pace and Boston, I ended up with a new long-term far-ahead goal. In an email, Kim was advising me to join a charity so that I can run in Boston, because there was no way I could do the 3:05 h qualifying time. I completely agree that 3 hours is well beyond what I could then and can currently do. But it wasn't completely unreasonable a year or two down the road. Before that e-mail, I had never seriously looked at Boston. After giving it some thought, I definitely don't like the charity way -- it resembles buying your way in the race. But having a clearly-defined, albeit long-term target always seems to motivate me (hello PhD?). So, my new goal is to qualify for and run at Boston -- of course, the 2013 window is out of reach, 2014 seems a bit optimistic, but 2015 should definitely be doable.
But back to the short term. My next race is in Lowell, and at some point in end-September I set a target finish time of 3:30 h. The pace of 5:00 min/km seems like a minor stretch, but reasonable, given my latest few weeks of training runs. This is a pretty big change from San Francisco, but that one was a poorly executed race, not to mention, a bit hilly. So... wish me luck on this one...
After running in San Francisco I was starting to get the hang of this long-distance thing and to enjoy much more of it. I knew there was a ton I could improve and the solution was to (shockingly) train more. I was ready to start again the Wednesday after that race, but being away at a conference for most of the week meant I needed to wait until the weekend. Still at that conference I registered for the BayState marathon in Lowell in mid-October. I've decided to space races about three months apart so that there's time to improve between two successive ones and that seemed to be the only one near Boston in that timeframe. It was also advertised as a fairly fast course, so no harm in that, either.
A lot of people were recommending that I commit to a training plan. I was a bit reluctant. Half the fun I get from running is being able to say "screw that, I'm going for a run" after a few hours of, say, messing with spaghetti bash scripts. And I've gotten quite a few good ideas about how to deal with said spaghetti on my course near the Mountain View bay, as opposed to on a chair in front of a large screen. But getting serious about running wasn't going to happen only when I needed a break, so I decided to go with something in the middle -- I didn't commit to a day-by-day plan, but set a weekly distance limit. It started off at 35km in early August and slowly crept up to about 50km in early October. The graph below shows how that went -- still not near a reasonable marathon training schedule (maybe ~80km / week), but slowly on the way there.
| Monthly distances in km. Lines are going up so all is good. |
The other thing I needed to work on was speed. I discovered intervals and tried to do at least one such run every week. A set for me was 800/1600/3200 m at high/mid/low- pace without walking breaks in between. I did 1-1.5 such sets per session, with the aim to go up to 2 before October, but that didn't happen. Also, my pace increased significantly after coming back to Boston -- if in Mountain View I sometimes had trouble maintaining 5:15 min / km for 15 km, I could now do a 4:45 pace for 25 km. Not sure what the reason for that is -- probably the difference between asphalt and dirt roads.
Speaking of pace and Boston, I ended up with a new long-term far-ahead goal. In an email, Kim was advising me to join a charity so that I can run in Boston, because there was no way I could do the 3:05 h qualifying time. I completely agree that 3 hours is well beyond what I could then and can currently do. But it wasn't completely unreasonable a year or two down the road. Before that e-mail, I had never seriously looked at Boston. After giving it some thought, I definitely don't like the charity way -- it resembles buying your way in the race. But having a clearly-defined, albeit long-term target always seems to motivate me (hello PhD?). So, my new goal is to qualify for and run at Boston -- of course, the 2013 window is out of reach, 2014 seems a bit optimistic, but 2015 should definitely be doable.
But back to the short term. My next race is in Lowell, and at some point in end-September I set a target finish time of 3:30 h. The pace of 5:00 min/km seems like a minor stretch, but reasonable, given my latest few weeks of training runs. This is a pretty big change from San Francisco, but that one was a poorly executed race, not to mention, a bit hilly. So... wish me luck on this one...
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