50+ Masters Training and Racing Open Forum

RE: 50+ Masters Training and Racing Open Forum 5/13/2012 10:06AM - in reply to lucKY2b

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Week 50
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A shout out to all Mother's on this day! I hope that you 50+'ers have someone that you can dote on in Their honor. And to the mom's that have graced this thread: Have a Great Day!

For the week, I managed about 52 miles on 7 days (9 runs). Another mix of efforts and paces, but no long runs. My training log looks as such:
Sun: 4 tempo (sort of) in 26:20, with the middle two in 12:30 (I was time-limited)
Mon: 8 easyish w/6.5 on grass
Tue: 6.3 (5.3 steady @6:36 pace, 1 easy)
Wed: 6.5 w/2x(6x(375m@5k pace, 188m jog))
Thu: 11.5 (5 am easy, 6.5 pm easy)
Fri: 5 easy, but with 8 40-50m pick-ups
Sat: 10.4 (4.4 am w/5k XC race in 19:16, 6.0 pm easy)

Two stories:
1) You'll notice the odd distances on the interval workout Wednesday. Well, here's the story on that. Since the University is rebuilding its track, our club has not had access to it, so we've been forced to find another venue to do our interval workouts. Unlike most progressive cities that I had lived in, Lexington's high schools are VERY protective of their turf (they'll claim it's a liability issue; I think they just find it easier to just say no), so the only open "tracks" (and I use the term loosely) are outside some of the middle and grade schools. They are typically very narrow and vary from 200m to 400m in length. The largest one is at Southern Middle School and it has 3 lanes that are each 0.75 m wide. It was laid down without excavation, so it actually has a hill in it (don't laugh); it's not a big one, but you definitely have to increase your effort if you don't want to slow down, haha. So my club mates have been using it since last fall, and they had said it was 400m (as measured with someones Garmin). Well last Wednesday was my first time to the track, so I thought I'd just do some 400m@5k effort with 200m jog recovery. I was also helping out a buddy who is trying to break 19 min. He'd been coming to the track and had been running 10x"400" (@76-77s) with full recovery, I told him he should ease up on the 400's and take a shorter recovery if he wants to improve his 5k time. So I said "lets just run 85's for a while, and see how it goes" and I started us off at what I thought was about the right pace...I thought it might be a tad quick (maybe 82s), which I often do on that first one, but when I came through at 77s I thought "no way". We went ahead and finished out the 12x"400", right at about 83s average, but it felt too easy to me. So yesterday, my OCD finally overwhelmed me, and I grabbed a 30m tape-measure from work and measured the thing. Suspicions confirmed; I measured it to 375.2+/-0.5m; all our times were about 5s short of a 400m. Moral of the story: don't send a Garmin to do a tape-measures job.

2) Saturday's XC race was not planned. Sometime after Wednesday's interval workout, I felt I was ready to take another stab at getting back under 18 minutes, so I looked on the race calendar of our local grassroots shoe store "John's Run/Walk Shop" (the same one that is sponsoring Kevin Castille, btw) for a nearby race to run. Slim pickings, as the past few weeks have seen some big races and marathons in the area, but I found an event in the neighboring town that John's was also timing, so I knew it would be fairly accurate. There was no mention of it being an XC race on the flyer....just to meet at "The Path". Being a church charity event to raise money for their mission work (helping victims of human trafficking), I just assumed "The Path" what they called their church branch. That's been common these days; modern churches calling themselves "The Way", or "Quest", or "The Word"...bad assumption on my part. "The Path" is a 1.5-mile walking and meditation trail loop cut out of a field on a hill. I didn't bring my spikes and it was plenty humid the night before, so the grass had a healthy dew on it, but the ground was firm. There was no real competition with only 66 participants, so once I dispensed with the couple of teenagers that always go out too fast, it was pretty much a solo run for me. They didn't use a course guide, but the trail was easy to follow and well marked, so there was no place to go off course if you just followed the most obvious path. There were no flat spots on the course. The hills were not overbearing (the worst hill was about a 50 ft climb over 1/10th mile), but they were relentless, nonetheless. You were almost always going up, or going down, or running on a slant. The only dicy part was negotiating the slants as you'd charge down a hill, then make a sharp bend at the bottom onto an outward-sloping slanted pathway...on wet grass...without spikes. I don't know about you guys, but at our age, I'm really not thrilled about going down hard on my hip, so I was pretty cautious around those bends. Even with all this, I managed 19:16 (9:30 out, 9:46 back). Not quite sure what to make of the time (it compares favorably with other races run on this course,) but I do think the course is pretty accurate: one of the guys behind me got 3.12 on his Garmin, and I went to USATF's Map It tool to come up with 1.55 for one way (couldn't pinpoint *exactly* the turn-around on map it, so I had to guestimate that a tad.) In the end, I was happy with the run, especially since I felt that I ran hard, but controlled, so I think I'm on a positive trajectory heading into summer racing. Certainly spikes and real competition would have helped, but not sure how much. Finally (I hesitate to put this in, but what the hell), wInning by a minute and a half, I got a real chuckle when one of the young ladies working the finish shoot came up after the race and was just gushing at what a "beast" I was. I tried to tell her that there are plenty of guys my age that can kick my keister....but she wasn't having any of that and just kept going on...so I didn't push it and ended our conversation with a smile and a polite "thanks". Us old guys gotta take our praise when we can get it, right?

OK, I have to say that I just had a lot of fun running this week. It's great to have a week where none of your runs feel like a grind. We're now on 50 weeks of the 50+ thread! We're two weeks shy of a year since going to this format. Thanks to everyone for keeping this adventure/experience/experiment going! You've all been (and remain) a great inspiration!

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