Week 46 Wrapup

On Monday of this week, I went down to the track and ran a few intervals to see if I could do it in my 5k target pace of 7:15/mile. I ran 800m, 400m, then 200m twice, jogging in between, and timing myself every time. The good news is that I was able to maintain the 7:15 pace through each interval fairly easily, but the bad news is that it took a lot longer to recover between each interval than I would have liked. Normally, if you were doing intervals of 800m (2 laps), you might do 400m (1 lap) of jogging in between. I needed a full two laps after the 800 before I felt like I was ready for the 400, then a full two laps before I was ready for the first 200, then jogged a full lap and a half in between the two 200s.

My plan now is to do speedwork every Monday, and spend a few weeks just getting to the point where I can do the required number of intervals, and only use the alloted time for recovery. Then, I can spend a few weeks either throwing in longer intervals, like 1600m, or starting to push the intervals faster than race pace. While I'm doing all this, I'll also be doing the tempo runs, the hills, the long runs and all that which will extend the gains made in the speedwork to longer distances. If I had to hazard a total guess right now, I'd guess that as long as I keep up this 4 day a week schedule, I'd be able to hit the goal of a 22:30 5K by the end of the year (give or take about 3 months).

On Tuesday afternoon, I started feeling sick, and by that evening, I had a full-blown cold. I was still sick on Wednesday, so I skipped the tempo run I had planned that day. On Thursday I felt 90% okay again, but that afternoon, I flew to Vegas to spend the rest of the week there.

I had wanted to get in a long run on Saturday, so I looked on the Internet for good places to run in Vegas. I came across the Las Vegas Track Club's annual Forest Challenge, an 8 mile race on a dirt road way up on Mt. Charleston outside of Vegas. I thought that would be a great substitute for a long run. I had wanted to run 12 miles, but I figured the altitude and the hills in the race would make up for the missing 4 miles and that it would be a nice easy scenic training run. I was right about the scenic part, but definitely not about the "nice" or "easy" part.

On Saturday, I left the hotel at 4:30 AM. I've been in casinos at 4:30 AM before, but only on the wind-down from a long night, never after just waking up. So, it was very surreal for me to see how packed the casino still was at 4:30 with people who had no idea what time it was while I was stumbling through so groggily in my running gear. The drive out to the race site took about 80 minutes. When I got up to the parking area, it was still dark and really windy. It was about 55° out, so I put on shorts, but the wind was so bad I thought about changing into my running pants. The wind shortly died down, though, and it was plenty warm for shorts and short sleeves.

The race itself was an out and back course on a very rough dirt road. Like, covered with rocks, some the size of my head. It was also very hilly, way more than I had anticipated. There were very steep uphills, and very steep downhills. The altitude varied between 7500' and 8200', so it was higher than I had expected as well.

Before the race had started, I was thinking to myself that I'd try to do the whole thing in a 10:00 pace. I had no trouble doing 12 miles in a 10:00 pace last week, so I thought if I swap the extra 4 miles for the hills and the altitude, it would be an even trade. The race started with a gentle downhill, followed by a long gentle uphill. I felt like I was doing fine and would have no problem. Then, the uphill got a little steeper, then a little steeper still. About that time, I started feeling my lungs burning a little bit more. I decided to slow down a little bit and figured that an 11 minute pace for this course was still respectable.

It wasn't long at all before the uphill got even steeper, and I started thinking that maybe a 12 minute pace would be a more realistic goal. Another quarter mile of even more steep uphill left me thinking that I would be proud of myself if I could just run the whole way and not stop to walk.

At about 1 3/4 miles, I thought "forget it" and started walking for the first time, revising my goal to just not coming in last. More feeble attempts at running, followed by more walking. After two miles, I thought coming in last wouldn't even be so bad. I could call it a nature hike and have a picnic lunch at the turnaround point. Shortly after the two mile mark, there was a nice downhill stretch, but mile 4 was almost entirely uphill.

By the time I got to the turnaround, there were only maybe a dozen people behind me. But, after the turnaround, all the uphills were now downhills and vice versa. So, I made really good time running downhill for all of mile 5, then did a little up and down for mile 6, then ran constantly for miles 7 & 8, passing a few people near the end.

I finished in 1:36:22, which is barely over a 12:00/mile pace. I managed to get third in my division, which is the first time I've placed in my age group, but since there were only 47 people overall in the 8 mile race, I'm pretty sure there were only 3 people in my division.

My mile splits look funny, because I have some miles as low as 8:46, and my slowest mile was 16:48. I rolled my foot a couple of time on the rocks, but I was really trucking on some of those downhill stretches, and I'm surprised nobody fell and broke anything.

So, the course was absolutely brutal for me. There were some pretty fast people there that made it look easy and made the rest of us look like wussies, but everyone was in agreement that it's a difficult run. I have had no hill training yet, and my only experience at altitude was Park City, which at its highest wasn't quite this high. The course was beautiful, though, with lots of pines and cedars and things. Every so often, you'd turn a corner and be able to see the whole valley spread out below you.

So, considering the course, and the fact I was sick that week, I did okay, but I'm still really disappointed I couldn't run the whole thing. I applied some conversion factors and did some math to factor out the hills and the altitude and see what this run would be like on level ground at sea level. I determined that this run is equivalent to running about 278 miles at home. My math may be a little bit off there, but it makes me feel better about my poor performance.

I'd like it if I could run that course every week just to see how long it would take me to be able to run the whole thing. But, on the other hand, my legs are in extreme pain right now, so that might not be such a great idea.

Because I was sick for a couple of days, my Thursday weigh in was actually so low that my BMI for that day was under 25, which is the dividing line between the "normal" and the "overweight" categories. I'm not going to care until the moving average gets under 25, but it was nice to be "normal", if only for a day.

The Vegas trip was a lot of fun, although I ate approximately 40 times my body weight over the course of the trip. It will take me several days to poop that out, so I think my moving average weight won't get back to a downward trend for another week or two.

While in Vegas, I bought my first pair of size 34 pants. When I left for college, most of my pants were size 34, but by 1992 or 1993, I was pretty solidly into a size 36, moving to size 38 by 1998. So, I'm nearly 100% positive I haven't bought or received a size 34 pant since 1993 at the very latest. On the trip home, we stopped at the outlet mall, and I picked up another size 34 pant, this time some khakis. The khakis are sorely needed, because the one pair of khakis I currently have are size 38, and look frankly ridiculous on me now.