Dark Night Reconnaissance

Starting up this half marathon training following the workout plan found here has kept me very busy this week. I'm pleased to say that I didn't miss a workout. I did however have to change a few of them around. The reason being I encountered a few dilemmas along the way.

Since the workout plan is all set up for me, it should be simple, just go out there and follow it. Issue being this doesn't take into account how I'm feeling on any given day. Are my legs doing well, feeling stiff, any aches or pains?

For Sunday I had scheduled a long easy run of 13km. I set out planning to do this and then started questioning myself. Was I starting up this week too strong? What if I get shin splints from the sudden increase in mileage? I should have worked my way into this program and started two weeks from now. This is where the internal debate comes in, pride makes me want to finish the workout so as to not "cheat" at all along the way. Then reason kicks in saying that it isn't smart to push too hard.

In the end reason ended up winning out. I decided that Sunday I would take it easy, and then do my long run Monday so as to have the recovery day off on Tuesday.

That being said I did 8.5/6.5/13.5 km runs Saturday/Sunday/Monday, I feel this is pretty good, but I'm definitely looking forward to my day off tomorrow.

One thing I have come to realize this week, is that if I want to stick to this plan, I will need to plan my days well, I can't just wing it and do long runs every night, sometimes I'll have to wake up and do them before heading into work. Also, I'm going to need to really pay more attention to my body and not beat up on it. I'm really going to focus on stretching and icing right now. The last thing I need is to be all gun-ho in the off season and plague my season with an injury.

Now to the exciting stuff. My reconnaissance mission concealed by the darkness of night. Unfortunately/Fortunately  for this evening, all of my cold weather running gear is black (I really don't know who designs this stuff, they should know by now that winter its dark when you leave for work and dark when you get home, why make the gear all black as well?). The fortunate side of this coin is that my mission which I chose to accept was to break in to the UBC construction side at 16 and Westbrooke and take a peak at the progress on the new track being built there. Rumors have been swirling around as to when it would be finished, ranging from already done to sometime early next year.

With none of these answers satisfying me I decided to check it out myself. This wasn't so much premeditated, I was running by and saw a gap in the fence so decided to detour a little bit. 

Dressed all in black I stealthily passed by the gate, Underarmour sweater with built in hood pulled up for ultimate stealthiness. 

I must say, the layout of the track looks superb! My only complaint is that it looks like it was built in a rush. The track is clearly not flat in some area's and I feel while sprinting that you would have the sensation that the ground is slightly dipping under you. It really doesn't take much to notice this, I remember Lindsay Place High School's floor dipped by 1/8 of an inch on some of the tiles and you felt like you were missing a step sometimes. The one thing I am holding out for at the UBC track is that it still isn't finished. All that was done was the cement base, hopefully when they lay the top layer (Not sure what its going to be, I hope rubber), that they even out all the dips. I'm going to need a smooth surface if I'm going to run a fast mile!

Anyways, that was it for tonight, came home and made myself a milkshake with supper. I think I successfully got 70 grams of protein in me within minutes of finishing my run!

2009 Preview

Now that the new year is upon us I figure its time for a season preview. 

For starters I've made the decision not to do the UBC triathlon this year. Instead my friends and I are forming two relay teams we hope will be highly competitive and hopefully win the overall.

With this race set aside I can purely focus on getting into shape for my first race of the year, the Shawnigan Half Iron. The reason I am adding pressure to this race is because its the provincial championship, and hopefully I can catch people off guard with their fitness and come out on top.

How am I going to accomplish this? Smarter training. Last season I put in a fair bit of hours but I realize in retrospect that a lot of them were junk hours, primarily on the bike. I did a lot of long hard rides but no heavy interval work. The result of which being my biking power plateaued mid season and I found it very difficult to improve from that point onwards. Unfortunately this means a lot of painfully boring time trial efforts out at Iona beside the runways at the airport. I figure that with good targeting mixed with some weight work I should be able to bring my average speed on the bike from 35 up to 37kph.

For the run, the key will be more consistency. Last summer my running was all over the place. Compared to a normal triathlete let alone those training for a marathon, my run volume was embarrassing. Rarely did my running total more than 100km a month, and usually it was closer to 60k. This year, I decided to follow a program for my runs. I was digging through my old e-mails and came across a training plan for a half marathon that my old run coach Rich MacKenzie gave me in preparation for the Ottawa Half Marathon.  I was originally planning on running the Vancouver half marathon on May 3rd as a warm up for the season, but as my mom pointed out, it wasn't worth the risk. I have a bad habit of running too hard in road races and getting injured. This is fine at the end of the season, but 3 weeks before the start of triathlon season didn't seem wise. Keeping that in mind, I decided to train for the half marathon, but not actually go through the injury provoking activity of racing. This way I should be in tip top shape for my first race 3 weeks after this program completes.

I've posted my training plan here, the yellow are days that I have successfully completed according to the plan, and as the month go by I'll update with how its going posting my progress to keep me honest. Days I miss will be in red or something. 

Click to enlarge

I know many people will be training for spring half marathons. This is a good program with very little high intensity training which should be good for anyone trying their first or tenth.

On another running note, I have been reading the book "Bowerman and the men of Oregon" by Kenny Moore. Its excellently written. Kenny Moore having been one of Bowerman's athletes give a really good perspective. When I finish it I'll have a full review most likely in painful detail.

The reason I brought this up is because a large focus of the book is on the milers that he trained, and it got me thinking. How fast can I run a mile. Back when I was in grade 10 I think my fastest 1600 was in 4:48 but I never really trained for that distance (I was primarily a 400 and 800 runner) and consistency was my biggest fault back then. That being said, since I hope to keep myself honest with the added mileage for the half training, I decided to try my luck and see how I could run a mile. There is a new track at UBC that should be finished being built any day now. Once that is done I will christen it with my mile record attempt. My goal right now is to break 4:30, who knows, 67 laps are fast. I may have to re evaluate.

More of that to come though. 

I'll leave out my swim update because swimming is boring and not much exciting happens there. 

WOOT!

Internet Findings

The new promo for next years ITU series is up. Not the most exciting, but still fun nonetheless.

Also, I was wasting time today and came across this website by Elizabeth Kreutz.

Some pretty cool photos on there, this one I liked a lot. Not that I would ever do this, but think its cool all the same.

There is also a pretty cool section of photo's showing Lance Armstrong's comeback effort, check out the shape he is in. That guy is going to need to lose some upper body weight to get back into grand tour fitness, he looks more like a hockey player than a cyclist.

YIKES!

Its supposed to go down to -15*C Saturday overnight, where am I? I thought I had left Montreal cold for Vancouver. Oh well. It will be practice for when I go back east next week

RunningRunningRunningRunningRunning

Woo! Running!

I went back to practice once again today with the goal to complete the whole thing.

The beauty of being the run coach is that you can decide how long a practice is!

Tonights practice started out with a Fartlek workout, roughly a 500m square block where the north south side you ran hard, while the east west sides you ran easy.

The workout prescribed 5 laps of the block (Now I thought this block was longer, as in more the 1km range so we were finished much earlier than anticipated).

I completed this feeling pretty good, absolutely no pain in my foot and legs were holding together which pleased me considering I hadn't done any real interval work in months.

Since we were finished the workout in 20 minutes including warmup and drills, I decided since today was out last run before Christmas break that we would mix things up and have some fun. I decided to throw in a relay race. 

The relay was 1 lap around the 1km loop, tag your runner, and then as soon as your team has finished the 1km loop, do the same for the 500m loop. We were six runners tonight so I just casually split up the teams and hoped that they would be somewhat fair. 

WOW tight match.

After the 1km loop my team was roughly 10 steps behind, a gap that was held steady until the final 500m where Andrew and I were running anchor for our respective teams. I tried my hardest to close the gap, using my old track and field days as inspiration, in the final 100m I put in the real oomph, and managed to bring it to within a few inches, but Andrew held me off.

Long story short, Managed the full practice and felt great doing it. No foot pain!

Granted this was probably the dumbest exercise I could have finished the practice with, but I was feeling good and willing to have some fun. And I think it went over pretty well, people enjoyed it.

Just to give a review, that 1km lap was run in about 3:05....

It hurt!

I'm going to go cough up a lung now, have a good night!

Rollers Update

Alright, now that I've had them for a few days I can give my first feelings on them.

So far so good. I've gotten used to them quite quickly. There is a very quick learning curve, once you get the confidence that you aren't going to fall they are quite simple.

In my first half hour on them I managed to get my water bottle, reach my back pocket to fiddle with my iPod and ride with one leg, then finally no hands. I've ridden for 30 minutes each day since getting them and have simply been working on these skills as along with simple balance.

One of the concerns I had in getting rollers was that I was told you can't do power workouts, you can only spin all the time. This turns out to be only partly true. Fair enough I can't do standing climbing exercises, however, if you drop your bike into the heaviest gear, you can definitely break out a heavy sweat. Some intervals I've been doing have been 5 minutes trying to keep the bike speed above 50kph, and I'll tell you, rollers can make your legs burn.

That being said, there will be a lot of good time trial action going on this winter where I can work on maintaining a constant effort for extended periods of time. I'll just have to work on explosive power at the gym.

17 Days till Christmas!

First Time on Rollers

Alright, so I got my rollers this afternoon, and today was my first time trying them out.

To many of you who hoped I would fall and make a fool of myself, well I'll just let you watch and see what happens. I think you may be laughing once or twice.

Enjoy

Now that I'm done playing on the internet, I think I'll actually go use them for a while



Youtube cut off my HEAD! Oh well, worst things have happened

Rollers

Last week I decided I was going to finally stop procrastinating buying rollers for my bike. What are rollers you may ask. Check them out here. 

I'm excited for them, there are a lot of training techniques you can practice on rollers like balance, as well as getting a really efficient riding technique.

I've promised a few people that I was going to videotape myself on my first time on the rollers, hopefully it will be highly entertaining. I just hope I'm not as bad as this guy.