Strategy: I Has It

Week 11: 2/21/11 - 2/27/11 (7 weeks remain)

This week was unusual mix of highs and lows the likes of which I've not seen in quite some time.

Monday: Off day.

Tuesday: 10 miles (6 in the AM, 4 more in the PM).

Wednesday: 9 miles, general aerobic

Thursday: Spent all day working in lab - didn't run.

Friday: 11 miles on the treadmill with 9 miles at 7:00 pace.

Saturday: Didn't run today; went to the Ivy+ Scotch tasting from 2 to 6 instead. SO MUCH SCOTCH - DELICIOUS DELICIOUS SCOTCH. Turns out that for the most part, I prefer Speyside single malts (I recommend the Glenlivet 15/18 and the Macallan 15 Fine Oak), although the Laphroaig 25 was also quite nice :-). Got back around 8:00 PM, and then spent the next 2 hours or so guzzling Gatorade and waiting for the room to stop spinning :-P.

Sunday: Woke up at 7:00 to drive out to Hyannis for the Hyannis Half-Marathon. Unfortunately, it turned out that it was snowing when we got there, and there were far more runners than we were expecting. We also got there about half an hour later than we had planned due to increased traffic delays from the inclement weather, so we didn't really have time to properly warm up/stretch/use the bathroom prior to the race. Given this set of circumstances, I decided that I was probably not going to have a very good day (particularly given the lack of speed work in my training thus far), and therefore made the decision just to treat this as a "fun" run/harder LT workout. Bearing that in mind, and the fact that I really needed to use the commode after the 1.5 hour car ride prior to the race, and the fact that we were being chip-timed, I decided that I would just wait in the damn line for the port-a-pottys and start the race late, reasoning that on the plus side, it meant that I would have people to run with for most of the race (in previous longer races, I've often found myself running more or less alone, which is kinda boring/not good psychologically).

So as it turned out, I ended up crossing the start line ~10 minutes after the actual gun went off, and had to spend the first 3 miles or so dodging my way through relatively thick crowds of nonserious runners. On the plus side, having so many noncompetitive guys around gave me a constant sequence of people to pass, and which in turn helped keep the motivation to pass (and correspondingly, the pace) up. (It also helped that there were more than a few really cute girls in running spandex, which is always a powerful motivator to run strong :-P).

Anyway, the point is that by starting 10 minutes late, I inadvertently ensured that there were going to be large numbers of people to pick off almost all the way to the end of the course - I didn't really start to see the crowd thin out until around mile 9, by which point I had started to catch up to the tail end of the semi-serious athletes. Again, since I'd mostly been focusing on passing people up until that point, I hadn't actually been paying that much attention to my pacing - I'd mostly been going by feel, with the intention of getting a solid LT workout in, but without necessarily intentionally trying to run all crazy (for example, I'd caught up to my friend about 2 miles into the race and paused to have a brief chat with her before continuing on). However, at the 9 mile mark, I was starting to feel fatigued, so I thought I'd check the old watch and see how I was doing - and then realized that I'd just passed the 9 mile mark sometime around 55:00. At that point, I decided to just try and hammer the last part of the race in, since this was definitely PR pace.

As it turned out, I actually ended up running (what felt like) pretty even splits all the way from around mile 3 up to the end of mile 12; I even managed to up the pace through the last mile, with a solid kick in the last 600 meters or so. I haven't gotten the official results back, but my unofficial wristwatch time was 1:19:33, which comes out to 6:04 pace - about a 6:00 PR. Not bad given that I'd spent the previous night getting plastered on Scotch and the first three miles being snowed on :-).

However, more interesting to me than the PR itself is the strategic implications of how the race unfolded. The fact that I started late, which resulted in my having lots of bodies in front of me to chase, seems to me to have been an important factor in maintaining focus and motivation throughout the race itself. Now, consider the following facts:

1. In spite of my less-than-stellar speed/LT training thus far, it looks like I've at least got reasonable levels of top-end speed and LT pace.
2. At the Boston Marathon proper, I can also expect that there are going to be lots of runners who are faster than I am, and therefore also lots of bodies ahead of me throughout the entire race.

Up until now, my training goal for Boston had just been completion, as I wasn't convinced that my training thus far could support anything much more ambitious. However, I think that the Hyannis half demonstrates that my level of fitness may actually be better than what I had previously estimated it to be, particularly given the lack of "proper preparation" the night before the race and the less-than-ideal race conditions themselves. Given that the race conditions at Boston will likely be conducive to maintaining the psychological focus necessary to perform at a high level, I think the question before me now is: do I just go for completion as I had previously planned, or should I go balls out for the PR and risk a blowup?

Total weekly mileage: 43 <-- Low, but of high quality :-).

Basic Life Skills Fail

Week 10: 2/14/11 - 2/20/11 (8 weeks remain)

This week kinda sucked, although to be fair, it was mostly due to my own incompetence. I signed up for the Hyannis Half Marathon this year, and thought that it was going to be this weekend (which would have fit nicely into the planned training schedule). However, as it turns out, I misread my calendar, and the race is in fact next weekend. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this fact until I was about halfway through this week's training plan. At that point, I decided to try to switch the remaining portion of this week's workout with the corresponding portion of next week's workout, as next week's workout contains the 22 mile long run (the longest one of my training program), and I really didn't want to miss it. Unfortunately, it seems that the net effect of all this obliviousness/switching is that the overall week was kinda bland/shitty :-/. On the plus side, at least I got the long run in.

Monday: Off day.

Tuesday: 9 miles, general aerobic, on the treadmill.

Wednesday: 8 miles, general aerobic

Thursday: 7 miles, on the treadmill

Friday: 8 miles w/ 2 mile tempo. It was actually quite warm out today: 50+ degrees! Almost all of the snow is off the roads now, so I decided to go out and try for a 12 mile run w/ 7 mile tempo. Unfortunately, right when I started the tempo portion of the workout, it started bucketing rain and all the streets flooded, which made it more or less impossible to keep the tempo pace (at least for me anyway - I've found that not being able to see where you're going/placing your feet is not conducive to my running as fast as possible). Given the totality of circumstances (e.g., not having slept/eaten well the previous few days, general feeling of broken-down-ness, etc.), I decided that this actually might be one of those times to cut your losses due to rapidly diminishing returns. Fortunately, this tempo run actually came from what was supposed to have been next week's workout, so I'll actually have a chance to do it again (properly) next week, when I should not have as much work keeping me up at night. The plan is to prepare properly and do it better next week, 'cause I actually really do need to work on the LT now that the roads are clear.

Saturday: 5 miles, treadmill.

Sunday: 22 miles, long run. This run was the peak-mileage run for this training cycle, so I wanted to be sure that it was a good one. Fortunately, the roads remained clear throughout the week, so I had good terrain, and (aside some moderately stiff winds) some good weather (clear, sunny, ~ 35 degree temperature). Did the Fresh Pond Loop + Commonwealth Ave 18 mile loop, and then got tired of the wind, so I decided to head back to SidPac and do the last 4 miles on the treadmill.

I was pretty pleased with this workout - recently I've been very concerned about my LT fitness, since (due to accumulation of snow on the trails) I haven't had much of an opportunity over the previous couple of months to really get out and do some good (i.e., higher-speed) LT runs, so I was very conscious of my pace while running this workout; in some sense, my goal here was almost more psychological than physical - I wanted to demonstrate to myself that I had the LT fitness necessary to run the race at my target pace. I feel like I did a pretty good job keeping the intensity up on the outdoor section of the run (although it's a bit hard for me to tell, since I suck at gauging pace - I was mostly operating on perceived level of effort). In this vein, I will say that one of the nice things about finishing up on the treadmill is that it enabled me to directly set the pace, so I could measure how I felt running at the end of a long run at a given pace. To that end, I ran miles 19-21 on the treadmill, starting at 7:15 pace and working down to 6:30 for the last mile-and-a-half, just to see how my body was holding up at this pace after having put in 18+ miles already, and I was pretty pleasantly surprised; I definitely felt tired, but not so tired that the pace felt unsustainable - even at 6:30 pace.

That having been said, I'm still sufficiently wary regarding my overall LT fitness and top speed that I'm glad I still have some time left to work on this before the big day :-P.

Total weekly mileage: 59

Getting warmer...

Week 9: 2/7/11 - 2/13/11 (9 weeks remain)

(^OH SHIT - WE'RE INTO SINGLE DIGITS!)

Monday: Off day

Tuesday: Didn't run today; I was working in lab until 11:00 (IN THE PM!) trying to get our robot's map generation software to work - before realizing that the open-source software repository we were using (the ROS octomap_ros package, for those of you, dear readers, who may be familiar with the Robot Operating System framework) was in fact an experimental build, and hence riddled with implementation errors. As a wise man once said, open-source software is only "free" if your time is worthless :-/. On the other hand, I feel slightly less bad about skipping out on today's workout due to the fact that it was meant to be a recovery run.

Wednesday: 14 miles, medium long. Got out to run this afternoon, and was very pleasantly surprised by the trail conditions today: a great proportion of the Charles running trail was COMPLETELY CLEARED OF SNOW! Thinking back to my "calibration" on the treadmill last week, I took this opportunity to hit some long continuous stretches of this run (altogether probably around 10 miles or so) at around target marathon pace (~ 6:45 or so). I was actually quite pleased with today's workout; forcing the faster pace on last week's LT run seems to have shocked my body out of its complacency - maintaining this pace today didn't seem to require as much effort as it did last week, particularly later on in the run (after mile 7 or so) where I finally hit the Zone. God, it's been a long time since I've felt that - I'd forgotten how awesome that feels :-).

Thursday: Recovery day - 6 miles on the treadmill.

Friday: 13 miles, medium-long. Good conditions continue to hold up.

Saturday: 5 miles, recovery day.

Sunday: 16 mile run w/ 12 miles at target marathon pace. We had an incredible stroke of luck - temperatures today were in the mid-40's to low 50's; it felt positively tropical, and a good proportion of the snowbanks around town have now completely melted. You can actually see large sections of the sidewalk all over town :-DDD!

So the goal today was to do a 16 mile run with 12 miles or so at target marathon pace. Unfortunately, it's hard to find a contiguous 12-mile section of trail, even around the Charles, and I'm not sure that I was actually running at my goal marathon pace. My (ideal) target pace is somewhere in the 6:30 - 6:50 range, but frankly I'm not sure I can maintain that pace over this distance yet (partially because I haven't really been able to practice running at that pace over the previous month-and-a-half or so, due to the snow). So although I'm not sure I actually hit my goal pace (forgot to bring a watch with me) I would estimate I probably ran about a 10- 12-mile segment at 7:15 pace or so, which is actually just about the cutoff pace for requalifying.

On the plus side, I was focused on keeping the pace what felt like uncomfortably fast, and research has shown that the actual aerobic benefit you get from a workout scales more or less linearly with the perceived level of effort, so I should still have gotten something useful out of this. I'm actually about to enter the speed-work portion of my training plan, so with any luck, the streets will stay clear from here on out so I can work on getting my pace up.

Total weekly mileage: 54

Blargh SICK

Week 8: 1/31/11 - 2/6/11 (10 weeks remain)

Monday - Thursday: Sick, didn't run.

Friday: 11 miles w/ 4 mile lactate threshold run. I took a few more days off than I thought I strictly needed, just to make sure that I really was in fact healthy before I started up running again (I have a history of coming back too soon and prolonging my time off), but today's workout included an LT phase that I really didn't want to miss. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to actually get around to running until fairly late at night, so I ended up having to do the workout on the treadmill :-/. On the other hand, this gave me an opportunity to calibrate my pacing, which has been difficult to do recently with all the ice and snow on the ground (I often end up plodding more than actually running, since you can't really run full speed through snow and ice). Overall I think it went fairly well for where I'm at in my training schedule, but it's also pretty clear that I'm going to need to take full advantage of the V0_2 max and speed workouts later in my training cycle, as my top speed right now is not what it should be.

Saturday: 6 miles, recovery.

Sunday: 20 miles, long run (also my birthday :-D!) This was actually the first time I'd run outside in a while, and I had some glorious weather for it: it was a bright, clear day and a balmy 40 degrees or so outside. I set out this morning planning to do the Fresh Pond + extended Boston Common & Commonwealth Ave loop.

Unfortunately, in spite of the very nice weather today, the running conditions were atrocious. We had some more snow earlier in the week, which had not been cleared off the running paths. This, combined with the relatively warm (i.e., above freezing) weather we've had the past couple of days, together with some actual rain yesterday night, meant that large portions of the running trails along the Charles consisted of ice sheets with standing water on top of them. It was actually pretty ridiculous - when the snowplows clear the streets, they do so by literally piling up huge snowbanks on the sidewalks, which eventually ice over. When it rains, the water collects on these ice sheets, and ends up melting little channels into the middle of them, which actually has the effect of making it harder to get rid of the water, as it now is not able to run off. This has been a feature here on and off since December or so, but today was BY FAR the worst I've ever seen it. There were some sections where there was so much standing water, and the snowbanks on either side were so high, that you literally had to just run through ankle-deep standing water over ice. The trail around Fresh Pond was particularly bad - it was literally a continuous sheet of ice all the way around the reservoir. Seriously, this shit was deadly.

In fact, as I was coming up the BU side of the Charles to finish up my run, I ended up slipping on an ice sheet when crossing over the River Street bridge and busting my hip (oh the irony! As if I were not already aware of my now-acutely-advanced age!).

Needless to say, my last four miles were not particularly quick.

However, prior to my embarrassing display of decrepitude, I had been more keenly focused on keeping the intensity up than I have been previously on the long runs (as a result of my treadmill calibration a couple of days ago), so I think that that, together with the fact that this was longest run to date for this training cycle, this ended up working out pretty well.

Total weekly mileage: 37 <--Again, not so great :-/.

BONUS MATERIAL: So in addition to today being my birthday, it was also SuperBowl Sunday, and several of my friends in the MIT Media Lab were hosting a SuperBowl viewing party. The Media Lab is definitely one of my favorite places on campus - walking into the building is like stepping into the future, and there's always a ton of really cool shit going on, so I knew this event couldn't fail to be epic. As it turned out, that was indeed the case. Apparently the Media Lab has one room devoted to a gigantic TV called the "4 x 4". I say TV, but really it's a composite display which is itself made out of 16 big-screen TV arranged in 4 rows of 4. In fact, it's actually so large that it's really not in a room as much as it's in a 2 story atrium on the third floor of the building (it's not clear to me that it would actually fit into one of the labs there - it's got a 144" screen :-D!).



BEST. VIEWING PARTY. EVER. :-).