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Week 54
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Greetings all, giving my usual bump for the week on this fine June day.
Ahhh, nice to be home from travels and to not be cooped-up in a car for so long. Just started my summer teaching, this Thursday, but that left me with plenty of free time to crank out (relatively speaking, of course) some miles. Happy to have logged 60+ miles this week for the first time in over a year, even if I am a bit sore this morning....but it's a good kind of sore. My week's log looks as such:
Sun: 8 with 5@6:58 pace
Mon: 5.1 easy
Tue: 11.3 with 7.3@6;55 pace
Wed: 6.7 with 4,3,2,1 cut-down laps our the funky 4-laps-to-a-1500 track with a hill.
Thu: 6 easy
Fri: 10 (6.5 noon w/ 2x(2x9 stories stairs) and 2:58 trail half, 3.5 evening)
Sat:13.3 easy (first 8.3@7:33 pace, last 5@8:15 pace)
Notes:
1) I probably wouldn't have chosen to run as far or as hard on Tuesday, but I ran with my marathon buddy, who seems to be keyed in on about a 7 minute pace for most his runs these days. Interesting how our training has become so different, as my paces and distances vary much more than his do. He says he finds it very difficult to go below about a 6:10 pace, which I thought was interesting.
2) Wednesday's cutdown laps were 5:36(4), 4:08(3), 2:44(2), 1:15(1) with 1-lap jog recovery between each. They didn't speed up as much as I'd like, as I started out too fast on the four-lapper (5:36 = 6:00 mile). I was pretty tapped out by the time I finished those. Probably not my best track workout.
3) On Friday, I just felt great. I never got back to talking about the stairs last time I reported doing them, so here it is. Near our house, they've built a 10-story parking garage. It has staircases up the front and the back. Given their locations, I'm not sure how much the back staircase will ever be used in its normal operation; this means its pretty free to use as a training vehicle. So I chose to incorporate stair climbs into my route. In this case, I ran 2 miles, did 2 sets of stairs, ran another 3/4-mile up to a 1/2-mile trail loop in the arboretum (ran the loop hard), then ran back to the stairs did another 2 sets and then reverse-coursed 2-miles back home. The times for my climbs were all 65 or under, which was about 3.5s average faster than I did them 2-1/2 weeks earlier, and I did the hard half in between this time.
Here's a little physics reality check: each story is about 3.5 meters, so the total climb is about 31.5 m and my weight is about 160lbs=710N. This means I did E = mgh = 710N x 31.5 m = 22,400 Joules of work in lifting my body in about t=64s. This corresponds to a power output of about P = E/t = 350 Watts. By comparison, at his prime, Lance Armstrong won a Tour de France time-trial climb up the L'alpe de Huez in about 40 minutes. I estimate that his average power output for the entire climb was 365 Watts. So he could maintain a power output for 40 minutes that was more than what I could hold for one minute.
4) For Saturday's run, I started off to run the whole thing at a 7:30-ish pace, but I started too late in the day, and it was getting warmer by the minute. My wife was involved in a charity fund raiser at the Walmart a few miles from our house. So I figured I'd run about half my run out there, take a water break, visit for a bit, and the run the rest back home. I took a circuitous route out there and reached the Walmart at 8.3 miles. By then, I was pretty dehydrated and was actually getting a little light-headed. I took in a lot of fluids, visited for quite a bit, cooled off in the store to the point where I was feeling good again. But energy-wise, I was pretty tapped, so I took it really easy on the 5 miles home on a more direct route. Still a good day...and a good week.
5) I should mention that I have dropped a few pounds (down to 160) this week with a combination of portion control, and increased activity. I think I'll be back in the mid-150's in a week or so. We'll see how that translates into race times in the coming months.
In racing news:
Props to Keith Miller on both winning the 50-54 division at the USATF 10k National Championships up in Ann Arbor last weekend in 33-flat, and also for being the featured "Age-group Ace" in this month's edition to Running Times Magazine. His story reads a lot like mine, only he's a lot faster. Christine Kennedy (57) also clocked a fine time of 39:20 at the same event (oddly, there is no listed AR for her age division on the USATF website...hmm.)
As was mentioned last week, Pete Magill continues to assault the 5k AR now down to 15:06.83, whether or not it will become "official", but we all know what's what.
Also, the ever-fast Nolan Shaheed has lowered the 60-64 mile AR to 4:53.01 up at the Portland Track Festival. A lot of fine times run there. Any reports?
http://www.sheltoninvite.com/SI/live/6912/
We will be looking forward to Tim's (imarunr) report on his Three Sisters Marathon adventure, no results posted as yet. Any other racing news?
Hope all is well in your neck of the woods. As usual, we'd love to hear what's going on, regardless of where you're at.
Cheers!