Training Archive: iamsinhtIn the 31 days ending 2008-03-31:
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| S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | T | W | H | F | S | S | M | |||||||
Sunday Mar 30 | ||
| Event: NEOC Rocky Woods | ||
| Orienteering race 2:48:27 [3] *** 8.3 km (20:18 / km) | |
| spiked:8/19c slept:8.0 shoes: NB ABZORB EX 11.5 | ||
| After a night of spontaneity, I ran my first blue course, and the first major orienteering event of the year. I'm ambivalent about my performance; some of the course went really well, whereas some of it was disastrous. Jeff Shapiro set up a solid course, particularly given how small the park was (about 2 km x 2 km) at the Rocky Woods Reservation.
I manned the registration booth until 1 PM, so I started last - leaving at 1:30 PM. Fortunately, Jeff Shapiro knew I had been working on improving in the fall and was ambitious, so he wasn't concerned when I wasn't back relatively late in the day. What went well: - My compass worked great - I was strong on about half the course (controls 4 - 11, 13, 14), navigating and running pretty well. - I didn't give up. While this may be a trivial point to note, I was considering abandoning the course after I hit the wall. What went poorly: - There were four controls with tremendous error - 1, 2, 12, and 15. With a fifth control - 18 - I amassed 86 minutes (just more than half my total time) over about 30% of the total course length. What's particularly distressing is that I missed controls 1 and 2 - setting an unpleasant, diffident tone for the rest of the course. - I stopped running intermittently on the way to control 15 and a bit afterwards. What I need to work on: - My pace was unacceptably low. My target is 10 min/km. - I need to eat much more before a race; that morning, I ate half a peanut butter sandwich and a few cookies at about 10 AM. I should obtain goo or some other mid race calorie source. - Better route choice. Several of my errors cost me much elevation - for instance, control 12, wasting much more time than even a distance error. - Consistency: following the set procedure on each control - plan route to next control, memorize control code, and so on. - Psychology: encountering other runners in the woods has always been a great weakness of mine. There were few runners in the woods as I ran, and I didn't actually know any of the other blue competitors, but had I encountered the usual crowd - Brendan, Sam Saeger, Ross, and so on - I would probably have been thrown off even more. - Better distance judgment and intuition on a 1:15000 map. I'm glad I ran this course, even if I wasn't quite adequately prepared for it. Now I have a (very generous) baseline against which to improve and prepare for the 19 April Middle Distance Champs. I'm done running classes that are not M-21. | ||
Blue - Splits | ||
Saturday Mar 29 | ||
| Cross Country Skiing 3:00:00 [3] 15 km (12:00 / km) | |
| *Went to Waterville Valley, NH to cross-country ski with Lori. We left a little later than planned and then got lost along the way, so we got to Waterville Valley about an hour later than we wanted to. It had snowed about 8 inches the day before we got there, so the snow was really nice. We were planning on doing a longer loop, but my pole broke, so we decided to turn back a bit early.
*The source for this entry was the 29 March 2008 training log of attackpoint user Lori. | ||
Tuesday Mar 25 | ||
| Road running 34:00 [3] 6.88 km (4:57 / km) | |
| shoes: NB ABZORB EX 11.5 | ||
| After 36 hours of respite, I resumed my regimen with a brisk morning run (ambient temperature 27 F, -3 C). I planned a staple route: a 7 km loop around the Esplanade, but running counterclockwise - opposite to my usual method. I really need to diversify my running routes, with emphasis on running in parks with maps and similar orienteeringesque terrain, but time constraints make this a logical choice.
My target pace was 8.5 - 9 minutes per mile (I still think of pace comfortably in english units), [5:15 - 5:30 per km], but unsurprisingly, I pushed harder than I planned. I think this was exacerbated by a stiff headwind (15-20 kph) while running along the river; I didn't want to give up. I was encouraged by some poor kids in crew shells rowing along the river preparing to face the agony of drills - as they faced their challenge, so should I. I pushed my breathing rate to a steady 3 steps/breath about a third of the way through the route, leading me to believe that my breathing rate strongly influences my pace. The running pace given by four steps per breath feels slow, but that's probably near my training objective of a steady 9 minute mile. I felt strong throughout the run; my muscles felt good albeit tight, stamina was solid, and breathing was consistent - if more labored as I pushed the pace near the finish. I am far from ready for the blue on Sunday, but at least I'm reacquainted with the challenges I face as a runner. My original plan was to run a long midweek, but as I ran a longer route than planned on Sunday, my goal is to run 6-8k for the next three days, then take Saturday off for the meet on Sunday. As skiing plans for Saturday solidify, I may take Friday off instead. | ||
Sunday Mar 23 | ||
| Road running 1:20:00 [2] 13.5 km (5:56 / km) | |
| shoes: NB ABZORB EX 11.5 | ||
| I have very infrequently seen the coast of Massachusetts, despite that I've lived within ten miles of it for almost five years now. So, I ran to Fort Independence Park - a nearby location overlooking Boston Harbor - via Summer St. It was a good run - I alternated between three and four breaths per step, and felt generally good throughout the run. The pace was much gentler than my miserable reintroduction to running and pain yesterday. I paused for a few minutes at Fort Independence to take in the sight (which although obscured by some islands, was serene and charming) and read the South Boston Korean War memorial.
In the vein of the memorial, I adamantly believe that there are some things worth fighting for, and that at times war is a reasonable recourse. However, the Civil War General Sherman - a master of warfare - aptly put it when he said "War is hell." To some extent, especially in the United States, war has been sterilized - war is a push of a button, a list of names in the newspaper, an article about bombs going off and people lives somewhere far away. Even the Iraq war, while it has brought personal loss and economic hardship at home, and calamity and chaos to Iraq, when compared with World War II abroad and the American Civil War domestically, has brought only a fraction of the misery and death. How much of this hardship is a direct consequence of avoidable factors? How much does our own stubbornness, stupidity, and unwillingness to acknowledge other groups and ideas as meaningful contribute to the steady grinding of resources, men, and values into oblivion? While there are things worth fighting for, how much cause for war do we ourselves create? Anyway, I listened to a sermon on Colossians 3 and the Enchanted soundtrack. Ran in my black running suit. I carried an orange from my start, and ate it at Fort Independence. It was satisfying. Afterwards, I had a slurpee. It was magnificent. | ||
Saturday Mar 22 | ||
| Road running 31:00 [3] 6.5 km (4:46 / km) | |
| shoes: NB ABZORB EX 11.5 | ||
| After a 20 day hiatus from running, I have started a new regimen with the intent to run the blue course on 30 March - the first o-meet of the year for me. I haven't planned well.
I was much more fatigued than I expected, and apparently, I've lost my pacing calibrations. I thought I was running a 9 minute mile pace (5:30 km). This might account for my weakness. Unsurprisingly, everything felt terrible today - my breathing, my muscles, and my endurance were all more pained and weak than any run in recent memory. Seven days to go! Consider this name for a pet (dog, cat, or quite possibly guinea pig): Field Marshall Siegfried von Wilhelm | ||
Sunday Mar 2 | ||
| Road running 36:00 [3] 6.61 km (5:27 / km) | |
| shoes: NB ABZORB EX 11.5 | ||
| Question to the readers: how do you manage your breathing when preparing to run and actually running? To add focus, my goals are increasing my flow of oxygen while I'm running; I very deliberately breathe at a particular rate while running - partly to pace myself, but do you suggest any breathing exercises or other training techniques?
Today's workout was a brief morning run. My training had stopped over the past week, predominantly due to overcommitment. It should not seem surprising then that my performance and condition on this workout did not meet my typical expectations. I felt fatigued; the Longfellow-Harvard loop, which has become somewhat routine for me, was very taxing. I ran at 3 steps/breath for most of the workout; I usually feel that my breathing, rather than my muscles are my limiting factor, but today everything was constraining. My expectation for pace is some linear function of running time; for a thirty minute run, my target pace is 5 minutes per kilometer (8:05/mi). I will have to take more measurements of my capabilities before more precisely modeling my target pace, but I estimate a pace increasing by about 1 minute per kilometer per hour, for times less than two hours. While running, I improved on the design of an experiment for quantifying tone color of a French horn, which I mean to run once I've worked out the hardware and execution details. I will make a spread of long tone recordings, then submit them to horn professionals and other musicians for a quantitative map (i.e. on a scale from 1-10, how warm is this, etc). I will then map the Fourier and phase measurements to the qualitative assessments from the musicians. Should be exciting. | ||