Short Wednesday swim

Lurking beneath my other thoughts today was a covetous desire for a lovely run outside - the weather was beautiful - but in fact, though I'm feeling much better, my head and my stomach still aren't back at 100%. Common sense, plus a host of other obligations, said I should have just a short swim this evening and wait another day before picking back up on the running thing...

(ARGHHHHH, my poor marathon training, I was doing so well last week! But rationally, I do not think this can be a real hindrance, I should just conceptualize it as giving my legs a much-needed break?!?)

This is one of only a handful of weeks in the school year where I actually could have a lane to myself! It was the last half-hour of lane swim, and school doesn't start for another two weeks, and it was very pleasant to be there quietly swimming up and down - I was in the mood for long-axis strokes, I felt I needed to stretch out my core muscles from the lingering effects of stomach-ache, usually I cannot do backstroke at evening lane swim because of crowding!

2 x (100 free, 100 double-arm back)

100 back, 100 IM (fly drill), 100 back, 100 free

Then: 2 x (3 x 100 as 100 IM, again with fly drill, 100 back, 100 free)

All pretty much at warmup pace, though frankly when one is a relatively inexperienced swimmer there is not really such a thing as zone 1 swimming, just as there is not really such a thing as zone 1 running unless it is a cool day and one is running on a flat surface with a much slower friend! Call it very easy zone 2.

1400 yards total

Triaspirational woes

I have been laid low for the last couple days (startling stomach-ache while watching women's marathon on Saturday night made me realize, with hindsight, that my stomach had been slightly off from Friday night onwards) with some sort of virus, more stomach-based than not though nothing dramatic, that is preventing me from doing anything useful or interesting - I cannot write my wretched novel, I cannot run, I cannot work out, I cannot swim, I cannot even read a book for more than ten minutes without feeling like maladjusted binoculars are squinching up my eyes in a motion-sickness-type and mildly stomach-turning way! I will hope to feel better tomorrow...

On a brighter note, via the Bookforum blog, I learn that Peter Hessler's article on Ryan Hall is now online in its entirety. The whole thing's well worth reading, but it was the personal reminiscences in the middle that really struck me - I'm pasting in a whole string of paragraphs because I thought they were so excellent & will be of interest to readers here:

In 1971, my family moved to Columbia, Missouri, one of the few towns in the Midwest that sponsored a 26.2-mile race. A local boxing trainer had founded the Heart of America Marathon in 1960, as a way of forcing his fighters to get in shape. None of that trainer’s athletes actually finished the inaugural race, but somehow the event survived, and a small community of diehards trained for it every year. My father became fascinated by the challenge, and as a professor of sociology he liked the weirdness. His training partners included Vietnam vets and religious fanatics and oddball academics; the only thing they had in common was a desire to run as fast as possible. They competed in local races, which tended to be poorly organized. Before the start, they’d give the stopwatch to whoever was expected to be the best runner. If he got passed, he handed over the watch to the new leader. They left a clipboard at the finish line, and it was the winner’s responsibility to pick it up and record the times for everybody who followed.

“Nobody knew what the heck we were doing,” my father told me recently. “But after Shorter, that changed everything. It became a whole lot easier, with equipment and everything.” Shorter came out with a line of specialty clothing, building on his experience of Olympic improvisation. Many of the early runners were tinkerers. Ron Hill, a British marathoner who finished sixth at Munich, was a textile chemist who experimented with mesh shirts and reflective materials. Bill Bowerman, the track coach at the University of Oregon, messed around with a waffle iron and created a new type of shoe sole. Soon, the company he co-founded, Nike, was selling models specifically designed for the marathon. Races became better organized, and publications like Runner’s World taught people about élite training methods. In distance running, an athlete with some natural talent can improve quickly if he trains right, and by 1976 my father had come close to qualifying for the Olympic trials in the marathon.

Health had little to do with this initial wave of runners. “I didn’t know anybody who did it for health,” my father said. “You became intensely aware of your body, but it wasn’t like, I want to live a long life. It was more like, What can I get out of this machine? It was very competitive.”

For a marathoner, though, competitiveness tends to be directed inward. In training, the long buildup to a race may be similar to what a boxer goes through, but the focus is completely different. A boxer prepares for a specific opponent; a marathoner prepares to push his body to the limits of endurance. At the élite level, marathoners are well aware of their competition, and tactics are important; but everything begins and ends with individual fitness. The most crucial opponents are found within: the accumulation of lactic acid in muscles, the depletion of glycogen. A marathoner worries about hitting “the wall”—the moment at which glycogen stores are so low that an athlete can become disoriented.

During the seventies, runners became obsessed with learning about such physical limitations. In Dallas, a doctor named Kenneth H. Cooper conducted a test in which he put athletes on treadmills, connected tubes to their mouths, and ran them to the point of exhaustion. By collecting all the expelled air, Cooper calculated the volume of oxygen consumed, in relation to body weight. This figure, known as the VO2 max, quantified cardiovascular fitness. Cooper tested élite athletes like Frank Shorter, and the results became well known in the running community. Even today, in the airport of Eugene, Oregon, a town famous for its track tradition, a small display notes that the Oregon native Steve Prefontaine had the highest VO2 max ever recorded in Cooper’s lab.

Periodically my father participated in such experiments. In those days, serious runners imitated whatever the élites were doing, even in the lab. One of my father’s running buddies had a Ph.D. in cardiac physiology, and at the University of Missouri he and his colleagues conducted tests on top local runners. My father was an ideal subject: he ran a hundred miles a week, and he had an inquisitive streak. He also had an appetite for pain. They tested his VO2 max, and they conducted lactic-acid experiments, which involved running him hard and then drawing large amounts of blood. They did a muscle-fibre test in which they extracted a chunk of my father’s thigh. The moment they snipped the tissue, the muscle contracted so violently that the doctor had to stand on my father’s leg in order to yank out the sample. “And then they said, ‘You’re ninety per cent slow-twitch muscle fibres,’ ” my father recalled. “Well, brilliant—so what?”

One year, physiologists designed an experiment to test whether it was best for a marathoner to wear a mesh shirt, a solid shirt, or no shirt. In order to discover this elusive truth, they put my father and other runners on a treadmill for an hour at a fast pace, in a laboratory with a controlled temperature of ninety degrees Fahrenheit and ninety per cent humidity. They weighed each athlete before and after, to calculate lost sweat. They also tracked body temperature with a rectal thermometer. They didn’t anticipate, however, that a human being running at a pace of ten and a half miles an hour naturally expels a rectal thermometer. Taping it in place didn’t work. Finally, my father had to reach behind him and hold the thermometer while running at full speed. He did this a total of seven times, always for an hour, sometimes with a mesh shirt, sometimes with a solid shirt, sometimes with no shirt. Recently, I asked him why he had agreed to participate in such a study.

“I figured what the hell, I want to know what’s better,” he said. “I wanted to get my time down.” The results indicated that a mesh shirt was best, followed by a solid shirt, then no shirt. (“It’s like a radiator,” my father explained.) Nowadays, at the age of sixty-six, my father runs ten miles a day, six times a week. He still has a scar on his thigh from the muscle-fibre test. He says that if a doctor told him that running would shorten his life he’d keep doing it.

Long run #4

It was tough but good - it's turned into a beautiful later morning, but it was super-humid and sunny out there first thing.

I barely slept last night, so I wasn't feeling so great when I started, but now it's good...

I ran over to Central Park and down to the mid-70s, then turned around and ran back up north to meet C. We did pretty much the whole park loop together, only I peeled off partway up Harlem Hill - my HR was fairly solidly in the 160s, I did not see any good reason to escalate!

Then I did a slower last couple miles back over along 110th St. to Riverside Park, down to 96th St. and up through the park home.

Pace data's a bit patchy: I stopped my watch as I was leaving Central Park (a lady asked me the time, and of course with these fancy devices it takes some doing to get that information!), which is why it's split into two, but sometimes the miles get broken up a bit awkwardly. I didn't stop the clock at lights, either.

(I haven't recalibrated the device, but I was poking around and realized that actually for some reason I had set the calibration factor at a 'minus' level, as it were - some fit of overscrupulousness on the part of my past self, I am assuming! I took off the calibration factor altogether and will figure that this at least is a fairer estimate.)

But let us say it was along these lines:

Part 1: 9.3 miles

c. 11:00 (lights)
10:46
10:47 (152 HR avg)
10:10 (156)
10:14 (156)
10:06 (157)
9:48 (162)
9:44 (162)
9:12 (162)

Part 2: 2+ miles

11:27 (at least 20 seconds just waiting at one long light, though!)
10:43

11+ miles total

Notes to self:

In future, please remember to use Bodyglide to prevent underarm chafing!

New hair elastics needed: nothing more mildly and minorly irksome than the ponytail sliding down the head due to elastic fatigue. (It is my one complaint about triathlon, that the ponytail has to go low on the head due to the constraints of the bike helmet! Otherwise a high-up ponytail seems to me preferable both in terms of comfort and aesthetics.)

Total mileage for week 4: 25+

I am very pleased with this week of marathon training. I really enjoyed it - some pretty challenging running in there. I'm not doing a high-mileage plan, so it's good if I can keep some intensity, even on the long run. It will be great when the weather's not so warm...

Water gluttony

At the intersection of lawns and Lance. This one's for Bigun!

Thursday gym/run

A good workout with M. earlier, plus three treadmill miles. I would say easy, only it is always so hot in there!

There was no doubt in my mind that it was appropriate not to do a speed workout this evening. My legs are still feeling it from Tuesday's run, and my huffing and puffing system got the 1-2 whammy this week: though Wednesday's run wasn't fast (legs got nicely flushed out, in fact, and felt less stiff afterwards), it was hilly and humid. My cardiovascular system was, like, You are not thinking that you are again going to run 5 miles with HR in the upper 160s, are you?!? But I was...

What Phelps eats

The Wall Street Journal links to the New York Post's account of what Michael Phelps has been eating every day:

Phelps lends a new spin to the phrase "Breakfast of Champions" by starting off his day by eating three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise.

He follows that up with two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

At lunch, Phelps gobbles up a pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread - capping off the meal by chugging about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

For dinner, Phelps really loads up on the carbs - what he needs to give him plenty of energy for his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week regimen - with a pound of pasta and an entire pizza.

He washes all that down with another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

(Hat tip: GeekPress.) Bonus link: a swim lit post I wrote last summer that includes a scanned page (scroll down) of the food coach Sherm Chavoor asked his young swimmers to consume in the 1960s...

Wednesday run

5 miles in Central Park with Triathlete L.

I am laughing at myself now, because I cannot have it both ways: I can do slow running by myself and never get any faster and grumble about it but on the whole enjoy it; or I can seek out training partners who are faster than I am and fight to keep up! Triathlete L. (as distinct from long-time training partner L.) has running times that sort of sound like mine, only I get mine by training ultra-scrupulously and she gets hers by being an incredibly talented all-round athlete with a serious background in cycling and swimming!

It is good, we won't run again till September but I'm thinking I can line her up for a solid mid-week running commitment for the foreseeable future - that is the way to stay on-program with training!

(It is very warm and muggy, we were not actually running very fast, but I was definitely working hard. Harder than I would if I'd been running by myself, for sure, on a hot evening in particular; good.)

Two funny links of utter randommness

From a New York Times profile of Neil Diamond (courtesy of Ed Park):

“I want to know what marathon runners do,” Mr. Diamond said in his dressing room, where the few items on his dressing table included a bottle of Gatorade, a tin of gummy lozenges and a glass of red wine. “Because I do the same thing. I run a two-hour marathon every time onstage. So I have my electrolytes kept at a certain level, and I do my carb-loading after the shows for the next night.”

From the Manhattan Island Foundation's newsletter, in a profile of an Australian long-distance swimmer whose first attempt (in 2000) to complete the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim was thwarted when he hit a pier eight hours into the race and had to be taken to hospital, but who completed the race successfully this year and is currently preparing for a second stab at the two-way Channel crossing he wasn't able to complete last year:

Stephen hopes to try again — solo — but he'll need to fatten up for the cold water, and that's proving difficult: "I eat huge amounts of muffins, ice cream, potato chips, Mars bars, and drink gallons of Guinness leading up to swims to gain weight, but to no avail."

Bonus links (I am having swimming deprivation!): wild swimming, including fifty great outdoor swimming locations in the British Isles; summer reading for swimmers (via Wendy).

Tuesday run

A great run just now - I feel like I have finally done a really solid hard effort to be proud of, only I have lost all confidence in data from the Polar device - I was looking forward to providing some more respectable mile splits on-blog (they have been so slow, I have not been giving 'em!), only you will just have to trust me when I say that distance and pace readings are not correct!

(Device says 10:30ish average pace, but I am thinking it was for at least 3/4 of the run more like 8:45-9. Hard work - it's a nice evening, it cooled down a bit while we were out, not humid, but still in upper 70s.)

HR average in top of 160s, right at queasiness-inducing edge of lactate threshold and roughly 15bpm higher than I have mostly been running - because I am very happy to say that training partner C. is back in town, and that guy is just a much faster runner than I am!

His Garmin was saying 8:40 pace, anyway, and I think we were at or under 9:00 miles for much of the time. We ran down to the turnaround point below the 70th St. pier and then up along the Hudson to where the path temporarily ends at 125th St. Walked up the steep hill to upper Riverside Drive, then ran the last bit home.

Will recalibrate distances at earliest convenient opportunity, only I am not quite sure when that will be. I had a calibration factor programmed in, and then I got fed up and unprogrammed it - but now it is definitely giving me numbers that are close to 10% off for distances, that is no good...

c. 6.5 miles, tempo pace

Monday gym

A solid workout with M. earlier, only the gym was unprecedentedly crowded - for once I was actually very glad to get out of there...

(A funny side note - first time through on core stuff, somehow we missed the pushups that usually come between the cobra and the quadruped - M. didn't say to do 'em, and I wasn't going to suggest it! But the second time through, we got to that point and he gave me a skeptical look, like: Pushups - what happened to them the first time round?!? I said we would have to make sure I did the missed set at the end, and he jokingly said I should just do thirty now all at once rather than just doing 1 x 15 now and 1 x 15 later. I can never resist a challenge, so I did do 30 in a row, and it was good - I could do more than that, I think, only my lower back was a bit sore from running over the weekend, that was the limiter. I have been feeling mildly guilty at not following through on the Hundred Pushup Challenge - I told my sister-in-law I was up for it, only I feel that I have enough mental challenges right now anyway and it was one too many things to worry about! But pushups are good - I should try and do 'em three times a week, and see if I can get up at least to fifty or something like that. Since I never could do even one real pushup as a child suffering through penitentially awful gym classes, this would give me a great sense of accomplishment.)

ARGHHHHH, it pains me that the pool is closed this week! I don't have the time to go elsewhere, I've got a lot of work stuff on board right now, but I am thinking that if I can finish my index by Thursday that a good reward would be a Riverbank State Park pool swim (50m!) on Friday afternoon. It is only allowable if I have done an adequate amount of novel-writing for the day, though...

Sunday run

5+ miles easy

Very nice, too - it is not an especially pleasant evening, it's overcast and humid - but it's in the sixties, that's amazing...

Total miles for week 3: 19+

'Long' run #3

To my chagrin, I only had 6 miles on the schedule! It is a beautiful day, and we ran at super-easy pace - I met up with old friend P.'s wife K., who is also training for her first marathon this fall (she's doing Chicago), and joined her for the last 6 of her first sixteen-miler. We thoroughly egged each other on with rousing and inspiring running ambitions - we won't be able to run again together till September because of various travel plans, but it will be great if we have some nice long ones then, I have been in need of good running companions!

I did a short bit of hard effort at the end, but it really was an easy run, so I will have no compunction about using tomorrow to make up the 5-mile run I missed on Wednesday. Next Saturday I get to do 11 miles, this will be a treat, I am slightly starved for long runs; if only it could be nearly as nice weather as it was today...

6 miles easy

Friday swim

Utterly blissful. Blissful because I wrote this morning, blissful because I have not swum as much as I'd like this week, blissful just because and blissful because - regrettably - I had the nostalgia-in-advance pain of knowing that this is my last structured workout in that pool till late September.

ARGHHHHHH!

Next week the gym's completely shut. It opens up again the week after, but only with the regular (lane-rage-inducing) open swim hours - the separate dedicated lane swim program doesn't start up until some weeks into the semester.

There are a couple other places where I can sneak in a swim if I have the time to get myself there, but I'm really under the gun on two significant deadlines this month, and I need to protect my last bit of summer writing time - between that and marathon training, I can't see this next couple weeks being a great time to explore alternate swim workout options that involve travel time (a.k.a. opportunity to give myself minor work-related nervous breakdown while waiting on subway platform for train to come).

In September, though, I think I'd better look - that's when it starts being super-crowded in the evening at the CU pool, and I am counting on swimming for cross-training purposes. Hmmmm, will ponder...

(Fortunately I will be in the land of delightful sea swimming for the last bit of August, so at least I know I will have 3-4 great swims there, barring unforeseen calamity...)

Warmup: 200 free, 4 x 100 choice as 25 kick-50 drill-25 swim (I did strokes in IM order)

200 free on 4:15

2 x 100 free on 2:10

4 x 50 back on ?

8 x 25 fly, odds drill and evens fast, on :45 rest

12 x 75 as follows (it was 16, but I ran out of time - 4th set obviously would be as back-breast-free, also on 1:50):

1-4: 75 free as 50 smooth, 25 hard on 1:35

5-8: 75 fly-back-breast on 1:50

9-12: 75 free as 25 smooth, 50 hard on 1:35

2300 yards total

Thursday gym/run

OK, this is good, I had an excellent workout with M. this evening. Warmed up beforehand with 1+ treadmill mile, then did a good 20-25-minute treadmill interval workout with him pushing the buttons and finished out the rest of the hour with the usual core and upper-body stuff.

I have been having very poor running morale - not poor in terms of the thing itself, in fact I am very pleased and relieved to have switched over from triathlon to marathon training for the rest of the season, and I am always enjoying running both in theory and in practice. (Especially after the run is over!)

But I have been having a very bad mental state of feeling again like the slowest runner in the world (I have already dwelled here on the reasons - lost fast running partner S. - high mental and physical comfort level with exclusively zone 2 training - New York summer weather - etc. etc.), and of course if you feel like that it is very hard to persuade yourself to go out and do harder/faster workouts...

This was a very good mental boost. In fact the intervals were really all too short to be doing anything much physically for marathon training. But the mental benefits seem to me enormous. The last bit we did was 5 x 30 seconds run and 30 seconds rest at 8.5mph (which this handy chart tells me is 7:05 pace), with the last one of the five at 9.0mph (6:40).

I was, like, OH! Really I am not the slowest runner in the world, I could have some fast running goals again - I need to just put in the miles for marathon training, but I can be doing some stuff that will make me be able to run a fast mile also. Like it would not be impossible to say that I have a goal for 2009 of running a (horrible & couldn't possibly run even a hair faster if someone held a gun to my head) sub-7:00 timed mile under race-like conditions... I do not know if I can actually quite get it down that low, but I certainly should be able to run an uncomfortable but tolerable 7:30 mile, this is ridiculous, time for me to start doing some faster workouts! Because doing regular couple-minute intervals at 7:30 pace is what makes 8:20 become a lovely hard but comfortable tempo pace!

3 miles total plus gym stuff

Rest day

I dallied all morning; I wrote all afternoon; I landed up without enough time to fit in my run (but perhaps I was better off without it, I was probably due a day off) because I had to go downtown for a book publicity event. Photographic evidence: the only triaspirational connection is that if you click on the photographs and look closely at the neck area, you will see a red mark that is the result of sports-bra chafing!