Inspiration

I saw a great poster yesterday. It was a photo of a woman running alone along a remote and dramatic stretch of road, and I wish I could remember exactly what it said, but it was something like “Running never gets old because I like the woman I run with”.

I’ve never seen anything that captures so accurately and succinctly the way I feel about running (I mean besides the fact that it portrays a woman and I am a man… the poster wouldn’t have worked with a guy anyway). For me running is a solo activity, but it’s not a lonely activity. I like the occasional group run or going to the track with Jen but, and perhaps it’s because I’m naturally pretty introverted, running by myself on trails is one of the most enjoyable things that I do. I empathize with what the poster says about self reliance and motivation, but also about enjoying one's self, one's own company, even through challenges.

Whoever came up with this poster (presumably it was somebody at Brooks Sports, Inc.) really understands something fundamental about running. Or maybe he/she just put some words together and got lucky. I don’t care, I’ll take it.

How fast?

The training methodology that I am using (Crossfit/Crossfit Endurance) emphasizes strength and shorter, faster runs. The biggest drawback to this methodology, in my opinion, is that I have no idea how fast I can/should run Skyline.

I’ve run enough races and workouts between 5K and 10K that I know about how fast to start out those distances. The correct pace just feels right. Sure, I might be off by 10 seconds-per-mile, but more often than not it’s just an indication of how good my legs are feeling that day. But the longest training run I ever do is 15K, and I do that less than once a month. The only time I run farther than that is in a race (my last was the Mt Diablo 25K on June 6).

Of course I’m competitive (at least with myself) and I don’t want to turn in a slower time than I am really capable of. But the real fear is that I start it off too fast and the last ten miles are excruciating, (or simply not achievable). I’ve been in this horrible place before in marathons, and I can tell you that it’s not a fun way to run a race. That conflict between ambition and ability that all athletes face is particularly troublesome in endurance races: going out too fast can easily mean a DNF.

What makes this process even harder for trail running is that a 50K on a flat and rolling course is a completely different race than a 50K that goes up to the top of a mountain and back down.

What I do have to go on is my previous performance relative to my peers, as well as my peers’ previous performances at Skyline. Fortunately most races post results online, and the Skyline 50K in particular is organized enough that they report split times at every aid station. Why is this useful? Well, it makes it easy for me to estimate what my time is likely to be if I run a reasonably good race. I do this as follows:

In the Mt Diablo 25K I placed 43rd overall. There were 182 finishers in that race, which put me at about 23rd percentile (23% of the racers finished before me). If I look at the 2008 results for Skyline, there were 120 finishers. The person at the 23rd percentile in that race was someone by the name of Adrian Jue, who finished 28th at 5:12:20. If I look at the 2007 results, the person in the 23rd percentile was Layne Kemp, finishing in 4:57:35. A quick glance over previous years shows that most of the times are in this range (except for 2005, perhaps it was really hot that year?).

From this I can speculate that I should target finishing in the 5:00 to 5:10 range. But how do I break this down further? If I take a look at the split times for 2007, I can see runners’ times at each of 6 aid stations (plus the finish). I want to be hitting the split times for the people who run at the pace I’m targeting, so I’m looking for folks who finished in the 5:00 to 5:10 region. Another piece of data that is provided is the person’s current place at the station. This is important because I want to use times from runners who gradually improved their overall place throughout the race. Why? Because I’m guessing those folks that are getting passed in the last half of the race are in pain and are not running the race they wanted to run. I know this race is going to hurt, but I want it to hurt on my terms, not on the course’s terms.

So I pick five or six of these “well-paced” runners and average their split times to get a sense of where I want to be. Now I have a rough plan for my race that I think is reasonable and has decent level of granularity. If I had more data on myself, I would use it, but given what I do have I think this is pretty good.

The most important thing to keep in mind with this sort of analysis is that it was all based on statistics (hand-wavy ones at that). And the thing about statistics is that while you can be reasonably sure that things will work out the way you’ve predicted, some percentage of the time you’ll get burned (just look at the 2005 results). So it’s important that I continue to keep my eye on the weather forecast, ask myself how strong I’m feeling as the race approaches, and have a backup plan in case things aren't feeling right out on the course.

Almaden Quicksilver County Park

The workouts I look forward to the most are the trail runs. You can cover a lot of ground when you're running, which means you get to see a lot more stuff than if you were hiking. The constantly changing terrain requires you to be mentally alert, preventing boredom, but you generally don't have to be so engaged that you can't enjoy the scenery.

Jen and I went to Almaden Quicksilver County Park yesterday to get a few miles in. It was great! The weather was warm but not hot, so I put on a long-sleeved thermal shirt to get a little heat training in. Jen took off up Senador Mine Road, and I hopped on New Almaden Trail. Eventually I met up with Mine Hill Road and got some good climbing in. I made it up the steep face of Mine Hill and then turned around to meet up with Jen. The views of the Guadalupe Reservoir, Mt Umunhum, and San Jose were amazing.

I took the route back down that Jen had taken up, hoping to catch her before the end, but then I was surprised by a nasty little hill after Guadalupe Road bottoms out. My climbing legs were burned out so I just had to plod slowly through it. By the time I made it back Jen was drinking cool water from a Nalgene and playing video games on her iPhone.

This run reminded me a lot of what happened at the end of the Mt. Diablo 25K a few weeks ago. There are a few short uphills in the second half of that race, and I had to walk all but the smallest of them. I don't know if it's the sustained downhill that kills me, or if it is just that I'm really out of uphill gas. In any case there is a pattern here that I'm going to need to learn to break if I want to survive Skyline.

I was excited to post some great pictures that I took in the park, but I learned my camera phone (an old Motorola Razr) has the annoying feature that if you don't explicitly press the 'save' button, it assumes that you meant to delete it. The frustrating thing is that those images still exist in the thumbnail view in my phone, but if I view them or send them in a pic message they just show up as gray. Grr! If anyone knows how to get those pictures out please let me know. Anyway, here is the only one that survived, Jen getting ready to tear up some dirt. Also, Bay Area Hiker has some good photos of the park here.

Dr. Tabata, I Presume

This morning I did Tabata intervals. If you’ve never done a Tabata workout, you should do yourself a favor and try it out. There’s lots of info online about Dr. Izumi Tabata’s research, but the short of it is that Tabata intervals are one of the best, if not the best, means of quickly producing both aerobic and anaerobic adaptations.

It can be applied to many activities, but a simple formula for running espoused by the CFE guys is as follows: hop on the treadmill, set the incline to 12% and the speed to a little slower than your 5K pace. Twenty seconds of running, ten seconds of rest, for eight rounds. If it’s not all you can do to keep from falling off the treadmill on the eighth round (unlikely), you’re not doing it fast enough.

I try to do Tabatas every couple weeks or so, and I always get a little nervous beforehand because I know it’s going to hurt. Today was no exception. It’s amazing how intellectually you can know that you only have two twenty-second rounds left, but physically it may as well be another hour. The first time I did it I briefly fell asleep on the floor of the gym when I was stretching afterwards. It doesn’t seem like four minutes (really 3:50) could really do much for you, but I urge you to give it a shot. Whatever your training philosophy may be, I think you’ll agree that Tabata intervals will kick your ass.

Kicking things off...

This blog documents (or will document) my forray into ultra running. It officially kicks off, if things go as planned, with the Skyline 50K in Castro Valley, CA on August 2.

This is all an experiment for me. I ran on and off in my twenties, did some 10Ks, some marathons (3 to be exact). I had some successes that I am proud of. But it seemed like running and I were always in conflict. My marathon PR is 3:17, my 10K PR is 39:35, and training for those times was, for me, a serious commitment. It was physically and emotionally draining, though at the time I viewed that as the sacrifice necessary to be a better runner.

In retrospect I was probably doing some things wrong: I didn't know how to fuel properly, in training or in races. I didn't know a lot about current training techniques. In any case running inevitably became more of a burden than a hobby. The emotional draw began to impact other aspects of my life too.

This time I'm doing things differently, focusing far more on strength and interval training via crossfit and crossfit endurance. I don't know what the result is going to be- like I said, this is an experiment- but so far I am happy doing it.

It would be cool to see those PRs fall as I work towards ultra distance, but I'm going to try to not worry about it too much. Enjoying running is the most important thing to me right now.