The ups and downs

I picked up my hillwork this week, with no running for a couple of weeks I was interested to see what the impact was, in the end there was a four minute difference compare to the beginning of the month, which could be attributed to heat, Tuesday was 20 degrees cooler than Monday and was still 91f!

A warm up, three sets and a cool down and I was done in an hour…my target is to be able to crank 10 of these out, so the plan is to add one a week. It’s 52 days to PCTR Pt Mugu which is basically 5 hills; 5km up and 5km down 5 times!

Tuesday’s fun

My quad is not liking the downs much so I am babying it when I can, my pace is for shit but I am moving forward and that’s what counts right!

Chasing Cyclists!

Monday night…must be Intervals! Today actually marks my halfway point in this training cycle. Tonight was almost a repeat of my first training session a scant 8 weeks ago; time flies when you’re having fun. Now the proof is in the pudding so I thought I would look at Day 1 in comparison to Day 56. Day 1 called for a 1o minute warm up, 8 x 400m intervals at a 400m target pace of 5:45, 400m Rest Interval, 1 mile cool down, in other words something like this, (intervals highlighted in blue);

Started out fast and then slowed, I then I ranged between 7:11 to 7:38, not bad but really nothing special. So eight weeks later it’s a similar workout; 2 mile warm up, 10 x 400m intervals at a 400m interval target of 5:45, the target pace is derived from the tables in the FIRST 10k plan are is based on my 5k PR of 19:42, 1:30 Rest Interval, 1 mile cool down, tonight’s run resulted in the following (intervals highlighted in yellow);

Started out, got distracted on the second Interval, got into my groove, then fell out on number 7, hit my stride in 8 and 9 and then there was this cyclist. They’re great on their beach cruisers rolling along, oh yeah I went for it and chased this bike down the beach path like my hair was on fire and they had the only cup of water in town! I caught them and then I heard the greatest sound in the world, beep beep beep! Interval over! Much closer to the required 5:45 pace and no puking on my shoes…result!

So if the proof is in the pudding I would say that this is a large bowl of it, clearly I am getting faster, just how fast remains to be seen but having got on the scales this morning pudding is the last thing I need, to get to my race weight I need to cut off one leg or one and half arms…perhaps not the best thing for runner, maybe I’ll just skip desert!

OMFG! Every journey starts with a single step...but Intervals, really!?!

Well today I started the FIRST 10k plan; it was somewhat of a rude awakening. Tonight I had 8 x 400m intervals, easy to say, easy to type…just plain painful! Still the scenery made up for things! Without access to a track I use the beach path.

Obviously conscious of my leg I tried to walk the line between not overdoing it straight away and enough effort to make it worth the while. It’s given me a good baseline on my splits which are repeated in some form for the next 12 weeks. I also put the first 6 miles on a new pair of Asics Kayano 16s, so far so good, I'll be reviewing them in the future; probably at the 100 mile mark.

You’ll see below that I was averaging around 1:50…I’ve got some work to do I need to get it down to 1:25!

Afterwards I headed off my Chiropractor afterwards who spent some serious time working on my shoulders which were as locked up as Harry Houdini; must have been carrying all those gels and blocks around at the weekend! Talking of which I am putting together a little Holiday contest to share the wealth...watch this space!

Ongoing Boing!

Well yesterday’s go fast beans managed to loiter a second day, which I am glad to say was not something I was doing, as I put in my 4 x 1 mile intervals. I am always worried that because I have nowhere that’s really flat, go figure living in West Hills; clue's in the name! I am just not getting the quality of speed that I should, but I suppose the rolling road is not a bad thing, as you can see from the elevation profile (the green line) they’re not major hills but they're are just enough to push your average down, although I lucked out on the last rest period and nearly made it up the hill. I actually took the time to program the intervals into my Garmin instead of just relying on the mileage readout, so I had a nice little countdown beep telling me when to transition. The data is below; the average pace is skewed because of the warm up/cool down and the ¼ mile walk in between each mile run, the last one in particular is slow where I was messing about with my iPod under a street lamp, but in isolation it works out at 7:1025, so I am pretty pleased, although I would have really liked one sub 7 min mile, it looks like my predisposition to fast twitch fibers does help!

On another note, I totally scored at Cosco today, book publishers Human Kinetics have a series of books which illustrate what muscle does what when you weight train, do yoga and stretch. There really good in helping you find out how to isolate specific muscle groups etc. Usually you can only buy them on line for around $20 each and then you have to pay another $10 or so in shipping, well I found three excellent books; one on yoga and two on strength training one for men and one for women, (ignore their needs at your peril), I skipped the stretching one as I already have a great stretching book, by them in Cosco today for the bargain basement price of $11.99 each and obviously no shipping so that nets out to over a 50% discount. Gotta love a bargain; flash your card and check them out.

The Hills have ‘I’s Pt 2...I's losing my mind!

Last night was interval night and as per last week I ran the hill loop around my neighborhood, I knew I was going to be slower this week as despite my best efforts the holiday excess has taken a toll. More worrying was that I could not remember if I needed three loops or four; I would like to blame the alcohol but a glass and half of wine in a week is really not the culprit. Not to be one to scrimp I went for the latter. Whoops! The fourth lap was a killer and the time does not really illustrate the pain, but hey pain is just weakness leaving the body at least that’s what my old Sergeant Major used to tell me. The good news was that the downhill sections were faster but this I put down to the snowball effect, that is the rotund tum’ vs. gravity battle. Here are the numbers:


Tonight was Doug'sDay for tempo and I have my new tempo route but I also have the bodyaches /shivers/sore throat etc that precedes one of those stinker colds.

Honey & lemon, and off to bed! I'll pick up the slack tommorow.

The Hills have "I"s

Yes, “I” for Intervals!

So yesterday I ran hill intervals, I actually live halfway up a hill and there is a good loop that I can run around. My schedule called for 3 one mile intervals which I thought would translate into 3 loops…it didn’t. By the time I got to the bottom, the start point, and run two loops, plus a little bit extra to return an errant dog, who thought it would be fun to follow me, back to it’s owner, I was in for 3.8 miles so I called it a day after two, and cooled down with a brisk walk up the hill to home to round out on a total of 4.2 miles. I am concious of not over doing it and over training something I flirted with earlier this year. I get to do three loops next week.

So the ups were, well, up, pretty lung busting but not vom-inducing and the downs, once I had warmed up, gave my quads a pretty good workout. I was definitely getting faster on each lap which leads me to conclude that I really wasn’t leaving it all out there; something else to work on. I manually set laps on my Garmin as per the climbs and descents, they look like this:

The actually profile of the run gave me a pretty wavy line; this is of course a very technical term! See image above. Total ascent was 951 feet, the actual climb lasts 330 feet and as you can see it lasts just under three quarters of a mile.

So now I have a benchmark upon which to start improving against.

One minor milestone for this run, I broke the 1500 mile mark for the year!