Any other college runners feel like they race every morning????

fhafhafh wrote:

You are completely wrong on several counts.

No, you are:

#1 - Lactic acid will DECREASE your body's pH, not increase it. Acids are low pH, bases are high.

Thanks genius. The point of easy runs is to RAISE the pH from acidic back to the blood's equilibrium, which is basic. You lower the lactic acid value from its natural resting state of 1.0 mmol down to 0.6 mmol at a slow pace. Try not to spit out vengeful nonsense when you don't know what you are talking about.

I say goes with what works with you man. If you feel the need to go 8 minute pace on recovery runs in order to have a quality workout session then that is what you should do. If your coach has a problem with this then I guess you just have to make a decision. I feel a quality workout session(whether its threshold, VO2, Repetitions, Long Run) is far more important than a recovery run no matter what the pace when you are in mid-season. Your 70 miles a week over the summer should have given you a good aerobic base, now its time to focus on workouts, long runs and races, not recovery runs.

people that go 8 minute pace are just pussies...run faster and you'll race faster. 8-9 minute miles are just retarted.

just an fyi. i never said i was good. i don't ever expect to get any better, especially at 5K. I ran 2:23/22:30 in high school. guess what, three years later I run 2:10, and sub 5. I could care less about my 5K, i have raced it on the track like twice. and i run 50-60mpw, Quality not quanity. i never said i was going to be an all-american or win a major conference meet. but then, again, I am also 5"4 and weigh 120 so what do i know about being a good runner. sorry you are not a woman and withstand more pain. I have run with a broken foot and compartment syndrome, so now yes 10miles at 6:45 does feel easy.

interesting thread... steve spence mentioned to me a long time ago that he basically had 7 different training paces, one for each day of the week. i wasn't sure what he was talking about then, but over time, i understood that you're going to feel different every day depending on the previous day's workout or training volume. i've noticed on days i'm exhausted, i just plain run slower. my body just slows down naturally. other days, i'll feel fresher and run about the same effort but just be faster. pace never mattered. just getting the volume in and being able to accomplish the goal of the next training session was all that mattered.

as for the college female runner that posted, i think her basic points were good that if you race faster, you'll probably be training faster as well with the same effort as before. fitness tends to make every run faster, to a point of course. you'll still have your slow days when tired from training, but overall your training runs will be faster.

racing female wrote:

just an fyi. i never said i was good. i don't ever expect to get any better, especially at 5K. I ran 2:23/22:30 in high school. guess what, three years later I run 2:10, and sub 5. I could care less about my 5K, i have raced it on the track like twice. and i run 50-60mpw, Quality not quanity. i never said i was going to be an all-american or win a major conference meet. but then, again, I am also 5"4 and weigh 120 so what do i know about being a good runner. sorry you are not a woman and withstand more pain. I have run with a broken foot and compartment syndrome, so now yes 10miles at 6:45 does feel easy.

Machismo and testosterone coming from the ladies tonight...you are so tough. I wish I could be like you. I fear that you have severely missed what people are saying. It is uncomfortable for me to run at this speed, but I can do it if I want. I could do it so often that it is natural. Do I not do it b/c it would hurt? Of course not, if that were the case I would be doing 6 by mile workouts and the like. I run slower to produce better race performances. I will lay out what the problem with most people advocating fast mileage all the time...YOU TRAIN IN ORDER TO TRAIN. Training is a means to an end for competitive athletes. It is not an end in itself. Yes, it is nice when trying is satisfying, but I will not do certain runs or avoid certain runs in order to be tough or in order to avoid pain as my main objective. The main objective for competitive runners is to race fast. Therein lies your problem.

I ran under Vin Lannana and Michael Reilly for two years in college. And most things were done according to our v-dots. Now "Easy days" should be done at 6:30 pace if you are a 14:55 5k guy or a 31:00 10 k guy which would correlate to a vdot of 70. Now if you are at a decent D1 Program I imagine that you would be able to run as faster or faster then those times. And 6:30 should feel very easy at that point...anything slower would be beneficial just not as beneficial. Now Kennedy is definitely very fast but he literally does his easy recovery runs at 5:30 pace (this correlates with his vdot as well) So while it sounds fast your body is definitely recovering. Even at any respectable D3 program all recovery runs are oging to be done at 7 minute pace or under. You only have to be a 4:38 miler to run 7 minute pace for recovery.

That is an egregious misinterpretation of the vdot values. Jack himself has come on this board several times that the vdot paces, especially easy run paces, are just a suggestion and feel free to run slower if that is better for you. In fact, in his first book, the easy pace was actually a speed limit, no faster than that for an easy run, NOT you have to run at least that fast. However, in his second volume he changed the easy paces and put them more in the middle of the range that he feels are appropriate. However, still he says to go slower if one wants. Maybe Jack will read this and clarify for you.

What do those charts estimate recovery pace as per 5k times instead of mile times? 5k/10k times are far more indicative of aerobic fitness than mile/1500m times.

Thanks.

Trackhead makes another important point. Most impressionable people who are reading this are most likely in high school or college and most likely underdeveloped aerobically. Their mile times are probably much better than their 5k times. Jack suggests not just going by your best vdot value for all of your training paces. There will often be a downward or upward slope of your performances on his chart. He advises to adjust accordingly. If you run a much better mile than 10k comparatively then you are screwing youself over by doing tempo runs and easy runs at the suggested pace for your mile time.

racing female wrote:

For example, (now i am a girl-so take what i am saying with a grain of salt, hear the sarcasm i hope), I am an average d1 runner, 2:10, 4:35, 17:30. My long runs (10-12miles) are typically 6:45-7min pace, my recovery runs are just so, but they end up being like 7-7:15pace, and it feels fine, morning/shakeout runs will start at 7:30 and end up a bit faster as my body wakes up, .

Didn't mean to rip on you, but that's maybe a reason why you are stuck at 17:30 5k with 2:10 and 4:35 speed, instead of 16:40-50, possibly even better. Your endurance is suffering most likely by your inadequate pace on distance days.

Just some food for thought.

Having read through this thread the one thing that crept into my mind is that I bet collegiate coaches really hate the internet.

I know it was bad enought getting the HS prima donnas into line and away from their HS coaches. Now every kid is going to tell you why they can't do a certain workout because it doesn't correlate with something they read on Letsrun.

My god how did we ever run w/o a Vdot or knowing our exact HR rage.

"just an fyi. i never said i was good. i don't ever expect to get any better, especially at 5K. I ran 2:23/22:30 in high school. guess what, three years later I run 2:10, and sub 5. I could care less about my 5K, i have raced it on the track like twice. and i run 50-60mpw, Quality not quanity. i never said i was going to be an all-american or win a major conference meet. but then, again, I am also 5"4 and weigh 120 so what do i know about being a good runner. sorry you are not a woman and withstand more pain. I have run with a broken foot and compartment syndrome, so now yes 10miles at 6:45 does feel easy."

I didn't mean for you to take my comments personally - I wasn't saying you weren't good - obviously 17:30 is more competitive at the college level for girls than 15:45 is for guys. 2:10 is good, but this is, again in comparison to the best in the world, like a guy running 1:57. Again, don't let the lack of depth in women's running fool you. I am simply saying that on a world-best scale they are equivalent and one reason why (and I have observed this running with many girls at your level and faster) is that girls UNIFORMLY run their easy days way harder than they need to and compensate for the fatigue by not making an effort to experiment with higher mileage to find their personal sweet spot AND by not running enough workouts at a properly challenging proper volume, pace, and shortness of recovery. And they also don't do AT pace tempo runs (or parts of runs). I would argue that speeding up one or two of your runs (or parts of runs) each week considerably while slowing the others (and making them longer) will be more effective than the training monotony of running medium hard daily. Someone needs to dredge up the interview with David Krummenacker where he talked about improving by adding mileage and more strictly delineating hard from easy runs.

For example, I am coming off a mild injury and haven't been able to work out for a few weeks. This morning, I did 12 miles on a hilly measured road course that has 10 miles that corresponds to a local certified race course. I ran the first 8 at just normal run pace and it was like 7:15 pace and that was just normal - didn't feel as slow as I know I sometimes run. Did the last 3 miles fairly hard in 5:20 each. Don't see how on earth you can call 6:45 easy if you can't just at random speed up 80+ seconds per mile. 6:45 for 10 miles is "easy" but 5:45's for 5k is race pace? Hogwash.

This "quality not quantity" s*** is just wrong as has been noted. Runs are either aerobic unless they are fast enough to be AT. High-end aerobic runs are no more "quality" than low-end aerobic runs (there are a few exceptions such as the second half of long runs where you can con your body into getting AT-type adaptations at high-end aerobic paces) and if higher mileage gets you injured, it is because you are running it too hard. I don't care if you are a miler, you would benefit by periods of higher mileage and some real AT work. It only appears not to make sense on the surface if you don't understand what is going on at the cellular level.

Next time you enter a base period and aren't going to be asked to race for a while, I challenge you to add about 20 miles/week to your regimen, slow 5 runs down to the 8:00 pace range and speed up two to the 6:10 pace range and see the difference.

CN wrote:

"just an fyi. i never said i was good. i don't ever expect to get any better, especially at 5K. I ran 2:23/22:30 in high school. guess what, three years later I run 2:10, and sub 5. I could care less about my 5K, i have raced it on the track like twice.

I was going to let it slide the first time, but this is the second egregious use of the English language. If you can care less, THEN DO IT...CARE LESS.

My mistake, the last poster was simply quoting the first time when she said that. Still. I had to read it twice which bothered me.

To the original poster of this message, I would say that you should do your own thing, save your own bacon.

If you feel like you need a real easy day, just tell the coach to f*** himself and go 10 minutes a mile.

It's ok.

I don't care if you are a miler, you would benefit by periods of higher mileage and some real AT work.

Yep, exactly. Milers should be doing almost the same training as 10k people do in their base with just minor variations. This has been shown to be correct from Snell to Walker to Ovett to El G.

I always say to people that run too hard for them on their easy days who think they're not pushing the pace to put on a heart rate monitor to really see what they're doing. No one has yet; they know what they're doing, it's this Prefontaine mentality that somebody was talking about before.

At 18 I ran 2:00, 4:22 and 9:16 doing every non-workout non-tempo day at 7:30-8:00. For the next four years I ran 6:00-6:20 pace every day because that's what the coaches liked and I didn't want to be the one guy on the team who wasn't doing the same program as the rest of the team. I had about 4 decent races in college and the best time I ever ran was a 14:37 5k, which is not even the same pace that ran for 2 miles in high school. The high school to college transition also changed my mileage from 55pw to 70-85pw.

The lesson for me was that if my body doesn't recover at 6:00 pace, I can't make it, even if I try for 4 years.

Now I'm 26, barely have time to run, do 30-40pw, usually 6:4-6:55 and I am as fast as I was in college.

"College runner," I'm curious, was your coach ever a competitive distance runner? Have his teams ever had the success that their talent would warrant?

For those training for 5k/10k, Daniels' E pace is described as 6:14 to 6:44 for a 14:55/30:59 runner; 14:03/29:13 is 6:00-6:30, and 16:48/34:50 is 6:50-7:20.