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Week 250
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Greetings, 50+ers! Sadly, Spring Break has come and gone. So much to do, so little time! Not sure how rejuvenated I am, but glad to have had the break. Now to grade all those labs I wasn't looking at. Surprisingly, the phlegmy cough has persisted through the week (not hacking much this morning, so knock-on-wood we're about done with this!), but I did manage to get back over 30 miles for the week, logging 33.3 miles on 5 runs:
Sun: 8 easy (7:56 avg pace)
Mon: off
Tues: 6.2(w/ only 3 hill repeats)
Wed: 4.1 w/1.6@6:43 pace
Thur: 6 easy trails (8:36 avg pace)
Fri: off
Sat: 9 highly variable pace (8:02 avg)
My legs felt dead on Sunday, so ran fairly easy. I thought taking Monday off would help, but they felt even worse Tuesday. I bolted the hill repeats after 3, and opted just to run a few extra miles instead. Wednesday felt really hard (again, dead legs); my objective was to try to snap my legs out of it, so I ran short and tried to put a little fast pace in there. I think it worked, because Thursday's trail running felt a lot better. Pace was slow because the trails were narrow and fairly technical; they're maintained by mountain bikers who put in a lot of dips and jumps. Saturday felt better, too. Pace varied widely between sub-7 to over-9 depending on who I was running with (or parts where I was by myself). Hopefully, the dead legs I experienced start of the week are behind me. I have a trail relay coming up weekend after next (Ragnar-Fort Knox); I won't be race-ready for it, but it will be fun!
Thanks SoCalCush for pointing out Sean Wades continuing assault on the "official to us" record books. It's sad that the procedure for Masters getting their times ratified is so arduous and that Pete has quit trying to get his times recognized by the sport's authorities. Here are the results from the meet where Sean Wade ran his incredible time:
http://finishedresults.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/BenBrown2016Results.htm
I asked Ken Stone at Masterstrack.com to mention this 15:06.70 result---haven't seen anything.
And on the sub-16 discussion, I guess I had always assumed we were talking about road records, but yes, there is about a 25-30s differential between the roads and the track. So there are many more 53+ yo guys that have done it on the track.
Welcome Tom58, I concur with Rtype and AlanB, there are lots of ways to improve aerobic fitness and speed; there is no one method that's best for everyone. Consistency is probably paramount to slow steady progress; just find passion in what you are doing to keep you motivated and accept that it will take time, lots of it (the older we get, the fewer shortcuts we can "get away" with). There are some general rules of thumb for minimizing risk of injury (10% weekly increase rule, easy/hard day rule, taking cut-back weeks), but you'll have to accept that there is always a risk of getting injured if you want to try and get faster. Adaptation involves stressing the system, which has its inherent risks.
OK, that's enough from me. How are things in your neck of the woods? Any races yet to report? Shamrock Shuffles, anyone?
All the best!
PS-My interesting find for the week was the program for the first-ever US women's Olympic Marathon Trials held back in 1984 in Olympia, WA (I was in grad school at UW at the time). I had squirreled it away in a box of old mementos when we moved, and hadn't looked in there since. As we all know, Joan Benoit was the lead qualifier with a 2:22:43, the next closest qualifier was Julie Brown 2:26:26. There were 267 qualifiers under the 2:51:16 standard. It was quite the spectacle being one of 50,000 or so people that packed into the modest-sized city of Olympia to cheer them on. They would finish in that order in the trials, as Joanie easily pulled away from all competitors. And of course, she would go on to capture gold in LA (Julie Brown was 36th). Aahh! Good memories.