Road Racing & Training Thread - Week Ending July 16

OR- Others with more experience can give you training advice.. I used to be the same way and now I enjoy the slower pace runs easy runs. I cant do any faster training if I stay in the MP area dead zone.

10k on August 5th sounds fun. I am doing a 5k that morning. It is supposed to be flat annd fairly fast

Outsiderunner - you are getting some good advice here. You clearly have a lot of talent and if you will get out of the junk/dead zone, ie focus on harder/faster stuff a couple days a week and run easy the rest of the week, you will make a lot of progress. For confirmation that this is a superior approach you really need to look no further than what virtually everyone else on this thread is doing. Good luck my friend.

RRR and Angryjohnny - Thanks very much for the advice and encouragement. I find it so hard to slow down. I just got back from a run. I tried slowing down this morning, but my legs still had some pop in them, and I just could not tone down the pace. Went 8.5 miles at 7:09 overall, in some bad conditions (heat index of 95 coming home).

So, I will try again tomorrow. The only thing that seems to slow me is excessive fatigue. I know you guys are right. Sorry I seem to be such a doofus.

I guess I need a good brow beating from my old buddy, DSP.

All the best to you guys...

One other thing...I find the crazy-fast then snail-pace-slow on/off pattern of intervals to be very abrupt and unnatural. Whenever I do them, it seems weird and that I am asking for an injury (with all of the speeding up and slowing down). I mention this because you mention harder/faster days, and that would seem to mean intervals. Thus, would some type of progression run suffice on faster days, or would it have to be intervals?

All the best and thanks in advance...

OR - I feel you, I used to always wanna go as fast as my legs would allow on every run (when I was younger before I quit for 14 years) . That is the reason when I started back I did not time a run for 9 months, the first being a race.

Now I think when I am put puting around at 745-800 pace "this is what is making me faster, the easy days not the hard days" and now I look forward to the easy runs. I even took today off as upping miles in the humidity has me fatigued..

There are some good articles on letsrun and threads about WEJO and his training when he ran like a 28 10k.. and how easy his wasy runs were.

Progression runs are fine but I don't think you will ever reach your full potential without some intervals and tempo runs where you spend a significant amount of time at or close to your lactate threshold pace.

We all have our own personal goals.

Some to get faster, others to just run for the sake of running.

I think OR is very fast and may be faster with a different kind of training approach, but if he's happy with his running, I think it's perfectly fine :)

J- yep this is very true. I am kind of the same way, I know if I did a lot of intensity and track work in a block I would run some faster.. but I just hate running hard track workouts.

The most important thing is to have fun, be healthy, and enjoy the sport around others who enjoy it as well.

Inlike being fit, and that's probably a primary goal for me at his stage in my running life.

But if we are being honest, I love to beat people in races. I love being adversaries. I like beating strangers. I love beating my friends.

The only way to beat as many people as possible is to log the miles, do the burdensome track sessions and suffer through the pain of the tempos.

Of course, none of that is inconsistent with Jeremy's point of doing what makes you happy. In fact, OR and I have had that exact conversation about his running in the past.

Angryjohnny wrote:

Progression runs are fine but I don't think you will ever reach your full potential without some intervals and tempo runs where you spend a significant amount of time at or close to your lactate threshold pace.

Considering weather and the hilly nature of his training loops, perhaps outsiderunner is at lactate threshold a fair amount of the time. Maybe more than the 5 or 6 miles per week of my more structured training.

I would need to go back and look at his training and race times, but something like 6:20 or so might be his LT pace on a flat course and a cool day. Given the conditions, he may well be approaching that sort of effort.

In any case, what he's doing seems to be working. At age 48, the "rules" start to change a bit. I would love to be running as well as he!

My two bits: OR I don't see anything wrong with your training! You're only doing moderate mileage and certainly not all your running is at the same pace! When you feel good you run faster and when you don't you run slightly slower. If you wanted to, you could "race into shape" via doing some shorter (5k?) races. From my own experience, it can be frustrating to feel like you're training hard and not improving that much. If you can train moderately, feel good and still run at a good clip, I don't see anything wrong with that. May we all be so lucky!

Great comments here, guys. I really appreciate the feedback.

J and RRR make excellent points. At this point in life, I have to enjoy my running. Likewise, Smoove is correct about doing the burdensome things.

Overall, I feel good about how things have gone for me this year. My approach has yielded a 17:58, a 42-second PR, and it has me feeling more controlled (and confident) at certain paces and heart rates.

After a tough, grind-it-out run on Monday, the last four days have been surprisingly good. Thankfully, I have run well in the heat, and I get the sense that I have gotten to another level this week...or perhaps I am back to that level I reached in mid-spring, when I ran 17:58. In any case, it is summer, and I am feeling pretty good. This is always a good thing.

To answer your question above OR, the knee is feeling pretty good. It hurt when I tried to flutter kick while playing in the ocean with my kids this morning, but it generally feels about as good as it has all year. Can still feel something there, but the anti-inflammatories have gone a long way. Now if I could just make myself get started on that strength training that I'm supposed to do . . .

paleale - Thanks very much for commenting, as I respect your running (you are fast) and your opinion. You make an excellent "common sense" argument.

Allen - I have been thinking along the same lines about LT pace. It is important to consider the hills and the weather. That is why when I finished 6:38, 6:33, and 6:22 yesterday at the track, I was very happy. With the heat index of 100, I went home thinking: wow, that was a good run. When doing mileage at the track, I run on the lane1/lane 2 line, and so they were true miles, not 1,600m. Not much of a difference, but it makes me smile even more. :-) I am just that type of guy.

My wife doubts I could ever slow down. She says the way I run simply comes from my nature, from the type of person I am... and that I do everything too fast.

All the best...

outsiderunner wrote:

My wife...says...that I do everything too fast.

Rimshot

This humidity is wearing me out.. so dang ready for fall.

As soon as something clears up, something else flares up...

So Thursday afternoon I started feeling some foot discomfort while at work. I didn't think much of it and proceeded to run on it when I got home. It didn't hurt badly at all while running, but I could still feel a little bit of pain, and it wasn't really going away.

That evening I could feel some swelling on the outer edge of the bottom of my left foot. It's not severe, but it is noticeable. It hurts a little bit to press on it, and walking around makes it hurt as well. Heck, I can feel it as I'm sitting here typing this - mostly a dull ache. It will occasionally go up the outer edge of my calf, though the frequency of this has dropped off somewhat since Thursday. I tried biking on it, but that seemed to aggravate it too.

I've rested it since then, but it doesn't seem to be getting any better (I do realize that it's only been a day and a half of rest, but still).

Any ideas on what this could be? My best guess is peroneal tendinopathy, but I really don't know...

Sounds like some type of tendonitis. When my left foot was bad off a month ago the pain seemed to move around the foot at times and up the PTT tendon. Luckily it heals fairly quick if that's the case.

Laughlin - I hope you feel better soon.

RRR - I am looking forward to fall, too. After a good week, the humidity caught up with me this morning. Bad dew point. I felt decent at the get-go, but the humidity and hills got to me (was on my hilliest route). It pretty much kicked my can, but at least I got in 10 miles. Glad to be indoors now.