50+ Masters Training and Racing Open Forum

70yrsold/48thyeartng

Woke up yesterday with severe pain in my right knee. Of course I’ve really been through for a couple of years but I’ve never quit. I should.

Will probably go with replacement. I will give it a few more days until I call my ortho doc. I’ve had 3 miniscus surgeries ( both) and maybe 8 cortisone shots since 2008.

Mon: 3 mile walk/1 mile walk/2 mile “run”

Tue: 1 mile walk/3 mile run/1 mile walk/.50 mile walk

Wed: 3 mile walk/2 mile walk

Thur: 3 mile “run” (13 min pace) /1 mile walk/.25 mile walk

Fri: 4 mile run/1 mile walk/1 mile walk…woke up Saturday morning with worse pain in right knee. Cortisone shots wearing off?

Sat: 6 mile “run”/1 mile walk.. pain worsens after shower and 3 episodes of Columbo

Sun: Pain 1.27 mile walk/1 mile walk so far. Being retired , these efforts are spread out all day.

Looked through potential surgeons on iPhone

Greetings!

My week was rather average:

Mon - off

Tue - 1:24 including 6x1000 on a treadmill at HR close to LTHR

Wed - 1:26 elliptical and arc, easy

Thu - 1:31 elliptical and treadmill, easy/moderate (50/50)

Fri - 1:22 including a 1 hr "quasi-tempo" on elliptical

Sat - ran outdoors for the fifth time this year. 7 miles including 5x1000 (2 min jog in between reps). Felt loaded after Fri. and did not stress my body beyond what it could give. It gave 4:00-4:03/km only (hoped for 3:55, but ...)

Sun - 1:25 elliptical and arc, easy

Total for the week: 8 hrs and 5 min

Happy and injury-free running to all!

I didn't post two weeks ago because of a computer glitch and didn't post this past weekend because I was busy. I've been hitting mid-40s miles per week each week. My main workout each week has been a 5x1k at VO2 max pace with 2min rest each Tuesday. They have averaged 4:25/k, 4:25/k and 4:21/k this morning. I'm racing a 5k the weekend after next and hope to squeeze under 22:00 for it. If training continues to go well this week and next, that should be realistic.

Good running to all!

This was an odd but solid and very encouraging training week. I only slept 4-5 hours Thursday night (no good reason--just a random bout with insomnia) and Friday night, after lying awake for three hours, I finally broke down and took a sleeping pill. I slept very soundly but for only about 4.5 hours, got up Saturday morning and decided to have a go at the planned long run. I went out the door six hours after taking the drug and felt great! I ran 12.6 miles at a pace that felt very comfortable, which turned out to be within 5 sec/mile of my half-marathon race pace from three weeks ago, at nothing approaching race effort. I have found in the past that not sleeping enough leaves me mentally fuzzy but not only doesn't hurt my athletic performance but often seems to improve it. And while I really try to avoid taking drugs to sleep, it was good to find out that I can still run well the next day after doing so.

I just jogged two miles this morning and ended up with 53 miles for the week. 14 days until my next half-marathon and all systems are go. I just hope it isn't either pouring rain or too hot, either of which can occur in late March.

Happy and healthy running to all!

amkelley: Sleeping less the night before increases my tonus and is usually beneficial for racing.

Had a joyful running week with a further evolved weekly structure which allows me to up quick running. It is sustainable and feel good fun.

Mo 11 km very easy

Tu 12 km easy incl 6x200m with 300m jog

We 12 km very easy incl 6x100m with jog back

Th 12 km steady incl. 3x1500m SubT with 100m/40s jog

Fr 12 km very easy incl. 6x100m buildups with jog back

Sa 8 km easy incl. 5x100m with jog back

Su 12 km steady incl. 10x400m with 200m/80s jog

Tuesday is now a light and quick workout. Should be not demanding and with quick last reps.

Thursday is the usual SubT stuff. Not much volume.

Saturday is a regular recovery day which I have not had for a long time. Great fun.

Sunday is track day and either threshold stuff such as this week or VO2max (last week) or developing into quicker reps targeting 800-1500m virtual race distance.

Stay healthy, BR

Going into last week everything was going pretty well, good mileage and the long run felt fairly easy. I like to do an easy week about once a month, and last week looked like it would be a good time. But I was thinking about skipping it and training hard. But at the end of that week I was doing some deadlifts, and felt some pain in the front of my knee. Not bad, but I could feel it a little when I ran. So I listened to my body and had 4 days with no running last week. I did some other working out, but no deadlifts. Should be good to go again.

First sign of over-training.

Insomnia.

Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) describes the body's three-stage response to stress: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion, with warning signs including physical symptoms like increased heart rate and blood pressure, as well as emotional and behavioral changes.

Here's a more detailed explanation:

Alarm Stage ("Fight or Flight"):
This is the initial reaction to a stressor, triggering the release of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
Physical symptoms: Increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, rapid breathing, sweating, muscle tension, and dilated pupils.
Emotional symptoms: Anxiety, irritability, or panic.

Resistance Stage:
The body attempts to adapt to the ongoing stressor.
Physical symptoms: Fatigue, headaches, stomachaches, muscle pain, and persistent feelings of tension.
Emotional symptoms: Difficulty concentrating, irritability, and reduced emotional regulation.
Behavioral changes: Changes in appetite, sleep disturbances, and social withdrawal.

Exhaustion Stage:
Occurs when the body remains in a state of high alert for an extended period without effective stress management.
Symptoms: Intense feelings of anxiety, symptoms of depression, a profound sense of burnout, and potentially serious health consequences.
The body's resources become depleted, leading to a weakened immune system and increased susceptibility to illness.

I am one of the originals on this thread so I like to check in occasionally.

A good week for me as a 65 year old who is now just a "maintaining fitness jogger, biker, paddler, hiker."

Mon. 2 km hike early. Another 4 km hike late morning then a 50 min kayak session with 20 mins at a strong effort.

Tue. 3 km hiking am. 25 km mountain bike ride 85 mins.

Wed. 3 km hiking. 8 km running with 4 x 400m hill reps at about 5 to 10 km type effort.

Thu. 3 km hike. 60 min kayak session with 3 x 400m strong efforts. 2 km hike.

Fri. 3 km hike. 28 km mountain bike ride 95 mins.

Sat. 5 km morning hike with friends. My wife's 60 th birthday party day. 11 to 4 at our local pub. 70 guests (a dozen staying at our place for 2 to 3 nights). I did plenty of running haha, obstacle racing really chasing my 2 year old twin granddaughters around a crowded pub. Fortunately it's a very family friendly pub.

Sun. Snuck out early and drove up the road to Shadbolts Reserve with it's multitude of rugged hilly trails. Hiked a km then slow jog a km then 12.5 kms of trail running, slow going as it is pretty rough terrain. 85 mins 150 metres elevation gain.

That's a good week for me for now. This past summer here in Central Vic (Australia) has been brutal. The pattern has been temps building from 32/34 C to peak 38/40 then easing to one day of 28/32 before rising again. Nearly every run ride paddle and hike has been done in temps of 30 to 40 deg C (90 to 105 F). I have focused on the path of least resistance. Now hopefully autumn will bring cooler temps soon (not this week though 39 predicted for Saturday). With this I will start to push the duration up a bit more.

Sleep. I wake after 6 hours of sleep regardless I can't sleep anymore than that. Decades of shift work seems to have trained the body to manage on less sleep. 4 hours for me is fine. I do sleep very soundly though.

Keep on moving how ever fast or slow.

Another decent training week with 52 miles in 6 running days and a "long run" of 11.3 miles. Slept fine all week except for the night I was treated to a--holes doing donuts with their cars in the cul-de-sac right outside my house for two hours in the middle of the night. Moving to a gated community is looking like a better idea all the time. The day off was the morning we had a widespread power outage right after I woke up and I decided not to risk running in total darkness, with natural light still more than an hour away (thanks, Daylight Savings Time!). No problem taking a day off once in a while for a good reason.

I feel like I'm really on track for my half-marathon 7 days from now. However, the lead-up will be far from ideal. I'll spend Tuesday through Friday traveling, first to a scientific conference and then a mini family reunion. I'll spend way too much time in cars, have a schedule that doesn't allow adequate sleep, and eat the wrong things at the wrong times. I'm looking forward to going but it's not optimal race prep.

If I bomb out in this race, I have another HM 13 days later.

Happy and healthy training to all!

hope the travel/race week goes well. I'm off racing indefinitely [was pointing toward cherry blossom 10-mile in a few weeks] due to yet another hamstring setback. Mostly cross-training at this point, and I plan to go back into physical therapy. Frustrating.

On a happier note, I got to see American U men's basketball win Patriot League title over Navy the other night, getting us into NCAA tournament first time since 2014. Depending on whether we're assigned to play-in game, 6 or 7 wins away from national championship!

have a great week,

Dave

Ameliaearhart079: Please forgive my speculation, but your response sounded a little like an LLM, maybe ChatGPT or Deepseek assisted? Anyway hope your training (reinforcement learning) is going well.

My current favorite AI is:

sesame.com

Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

At Sesame, our goal is to achieve “voice presence”—the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood, and valued.

Link:www.sesame.com/research/crossing_the_u...

Anyone can try it right out of the browser and it’s, um….uncanny….

For our professors here, I tell ya, these are getting so good they are hard to catch.

I had been plugging along walking, running, and lifting weights but took a wrong step running in the snow and irritated my knee. I tried to “test” it too soon and irritated it more, so I’m a walker for the time being. One of these days I’ll be a runner again.

Have a good one!

I'm a physical scientist and for the most part the new wave of generative AI hasn't had much effect on my teaching. For quite a while there have been "study help" websites like Chegg that allow students to cheat on homework, lab reports, take-home exams and the like, and the only way around it is to base most of the course grade on exams that are taken in class with no internet access. However, ChatGPT and its ilk surely put a new wrinkle into the task of anyone who regularly assigns and grades original writing. Plagiarism has been a problem for a long time but there are good software tools to flag that. It's much harder to flag something that is "original" but machine written.

This will be my last semester of teaching, and I've decided to try something I've never tried before. I'm teaching an upper division elective course with smallish enrollment (19) and I'm having the students carry out a critical review of a published paper of their choice on the topic of the course. Of course I now assume that the students will get an AI to write this. Therefore, half of the grade for the paper will be based on an oral exam. I will have the students come in, one at a time, and answer questions from me about the paper and their review of it. I can't stop them from using AI to do the writing, but at least I can find out whether they understand what it wrote.

The students will probably hate it, but since it's my last course, "I don't care. I don't have to."

I can’t race anymore but running has been my life for nearly a half century so now the game is just to run as much as possible even though it’s incredibly painful

Im retired and a widower, no family so I don’t do just “doubles” , I do “ quintuples” ( is that right)

Ill do one mile before breakfast, 3 an hour after breakfast, .27 ( distant around the block) during commercials watching “ Columbo” and lift weights once a week…

The long run was 6 miles.

Total miles for the week: 40.37

Tried to run one hard mile and the pain was excruciating. Knees, hips and pain seems to make me tired almost immediately….10:12

Over 100,000 miles since 1977, raced…..everywhere

This is my new running life

The curse on me entering local road races continues. For the last 5 local races going back more than a year, I have now been too sick to run for three of them, ran poorly in one, and had one cancelled. Monday I came down with a viral sore throat and definitely didn't feel well enough to run Saturday morning. I am on the mend and should be able to ease back into running in another couple of days. Looks like the Carlsbad 5k will be my 2025 racing debut next month.

Stay healthy!

I went into last week after an easy week with low mileage, but right away I had a little soreness in the front of my leg. I have been quicker to back off when something doesn't feel right, but I really felt like I needed to get miles in for my next marathon. It wasn't much and I didn't have to change the way I ran, so I did my long run for the week, expecting it to be more sore the next day. Instead it was less sore, and fine the day after that. So a good week with the usual cross training and 58.2 miles with some hills and speed. Or at least what counts for speed at 70+.

I will see you in Carlsbad. Shooting for sub- 30:00. First 5k in nearly four years. Taking care of some unfinished business in Southern California, jumping in one of my favorite events while there.