Forums >Racing>2024 Advanced Training and Racing Thread (still competitive jerks)
Cobra Commander Keen
Route 66 marathon gets beat out in the 3rd round by CIM. I'm okay with this. OKC Marathon gets eliminated in the first round by a marathon I never knew existed. Can't say I'm surprised.
Today is a "bug" day. First I can't add a course to a planned race in Garmin Connect, and next I find a bug in my company's software during a live demonstration of the affected portion of that software. *facepalm*
5k: 17:58 11/22 │ 10k: 37:55 9/21 │ HM: 1:23:22 4/22 │ M: 2:56:05 12/22
Upcoming Races:
OKC Memorial 5k - April 27
Bun Run 5k - May 4
Ok that marathon bracket is pure silliness. But I'll comment anyway.
- Air Force beats Houston - WTF?? Many people would put Houston in the Final Four.
- Honolulu over Napa - I'd rather vacation in Honolulu, but I'd much MUCH rather run a marathon in Napa.
- Blue Ridge vs Eugene - F the belt buckle, you want 3500 feet of elevation gain? No thanks, it's nice flat Eugene for me.
Dave
Pain is my friend
I find you can push the pace fast late in a race. Running fast and running slow use your muscle a bit different. My fastest mile was an 8:47. It was also my first mile. Most of the time it was so easy. It is sometimes hard to hold back. The recovery has been mush like a 100 miler. A bit sore and tired. I find by the 3rd week I am back to normal. What ever that is. This time I have a bit of pain in my right knee. I am not too worried. I know I stressed things more than normal. I get more sore from a 50 miler or shorter than this race. Energy levels pay the price with 100 miles plus.
Thanks everyone for your kind words. I Love it when a good plan comes together. I am ready to get back to steep trail running and some speed work.
I have run St George Marathon 6 times and CIM once. The views on St George marathon are amazing. CIM is faster.
I know I'm skipping over a lot of other things I want to reply to, but I just needed to get it out there. Thanks for the report, Krash (yes, I, for one, am very happy it's more than 4 lines!) You did a great job describing the worst parts of the race, but it sounds like you got a good amount of great moments too (6:30mpm 36+ hours into a race? uh... okay :-)) How has the recovery been? Is it worse than the shorter ultras you've done?
ATY 24 141.445 2019 1st
Bear 100 22:08 2021
Jackpot 100 Feb 14:59 - 5th
Pulse endurance 48 hr 175.3 miles
Bonnevile Backyard ultra
Ute 100 Aug
24 hour loop race?
Krash - I'm honestly amazed you can smash those distances let alone be back to normal 3 weeks later. Awesome stuff.
3,000m: 9:07.7 (Nov-21) | 5,000m: 15:39 (Dec-19) | 10,000m: 32:34 (Mar-20)
10km: 33:15 (Sep-19) | HM: 1:09:41 (May-21)* | FM: 2:41:41 (Oct-20)
* Net downhill course
Last race: Waterfront HM, 7 Apr, 1:15:48
Up next: Runway5, 4 May
"CONSISTENCY IS KING"
Congrats, Krash! Yes that 48-hour Demon is something else, eh?
You would know Bob! What I know now, there is many things that I would do different. Pacing, sleeping and .....More Dew!!
Now back to our regular program.
How's the speed work going? Who has a marathon coming up? Boston anyone? What's Your training tip for an old slow guy like me? I can go the distance but need to work on my speed. Who is this Competitive Jerk you speak of?
I got in 30 miles this last week. 10 miles being my longest today. Did an uphill treadmill workout one day. 3.5 miles at 1-2% grade and then 5% for the last half mile. Ran it at a 9 min pace. I am going to do an uphill TM workout at least once a week. It is time to switch to more climing.
Another big week of training in the bag (with another 2x doubles) and the legs were sure letting me know about it by the end of the week. Oh well, a bit of race week magic will surely fix all of that.
Intl. correspondent
Keen - You're now "that guy" who found a bug during the demonstration LOL
me - Interesting week.
It started well with an 800m time trial on Tuesday morning. I warmed up with 400s in 1:35 and 1:23. The track was wet with some puddles on one of the curves forcing me into lane 2.
2:33 - splits 36, 38, 39, 40 . Not bad for the conditions. Of course 2:33 is a couple orders of magnitude from 2:19, but I'm confident I can at least run low 2:20's with enough workouts down the line.
Tuesday's barbell squat session went much better than the previous week, it sounds like I'm back to pre-marathon strength already on that department.
But then on Thursday the dead lift went really bad. What happens is that I lifted a PR of 130kg just before the marathon, and now the coach has adjusted the weights for that.
The thing is that I'm really, really better at lifting the weight from the ground, but I'm really bad at lowering back down once the bar is past the knees. I believe it to be a combination of bad dorsiflexion on both sides + relatively weaker glutes in comparison to the quads + still being a bit sore in the posterior chain from Tuesday's squats. The session was a disaster with me struggling to lift the weight and nearly injured my lower back too. I'm gonna campaign to ignore my current PR and lower the weights for next week.
Because of that I just ran easy the rest of the week.
On Friday I took another look at Citystrides and noticed that they built 2 new streets in the city of Porto (so annoying...), so of course I had to go and run them to keep me at 100%.
Here's the course and elevation profile for next weekend race. Honestly it's not the elevation that's my main concern, it's the technical aspects of the trail as I know muscular endurance is my major weakness.
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/course/256017885
It includes a major 120m climb from km 12 to 13. But when stalking strava pages for last year's race I can see that that's not even the worst part of the trail. At this point I'll be happy with a top 50 placement as I have exactly zero idea how long it's gonna take.
M: 63'E
T: 60' w 800m time trial in 2:33
W: 40'E
T: 50'E
F: 60'E
S: 76'E
S: 71'E
PRs: 1500 4:54.1 2019 - 5K 17:53 2023 - 10K 37:55 2023 - HM 1:21:59 2021
Up next: some 800m race (or time trials) / Also place in the top 20% in a trail race
Tool to generate Strava weekly
Problem Child
You would know Bob! What I know now, there is many things that I would do different. Pacing, sleeping and .....More Dew!! Now back to our regular program. How's the speed work going? Who has a marathon coming up? Boston anyone? What's Your training tip for an old slow guy like me? I can go the distance but need to work on my speed. Who is this Competitive Jerk you speak of? I got in 30 miles this last week. 10 miles being my longest today. Did an uphill treadmill workout one day. 3.5 miles at 1-2% grade and then 5% for the last half mile. Ran it at a 9 min pace. I am going to do an uphill TM workout at least once a week. It is time to switch to more climing.
Old slow guy?????
tios would be a day of speed workouts (200m-1,200m) with recovery equal to 50-100% of the hard run period. second workout would be tempo.
pretty much what you do on hills, but now on the roads. Are you doing a road marathon any time soon?
Many of us aren't sure what the hell point you are trying to make and no matter how we guess, it always seems to be something else. Which usually means a person is doing it on purpose.
VDOT 53.37
5k18:xx | Marathon 2:55:22
My week was a little ragged following my impromptu marathon last Sunday. I don’t regret doing it, there’s still plenty of time before my goal race. I gave myself a few days to recover, and pushed out my usual Wednesday midweek workout to Thursday. Even then—it was not great. It would normally be 6x1 mile tempo intervals, but I wasn’t getting anywhere close to tempo pace, and I didn’t feel like prolonging the agony, so I just cut it off at 5. But then only one recovery day after that before my intended MP workout on Saturday. The goal in my head for Eugene is 3:12 or 7:20/mi pace. I meet up with my running group on Saturday mornings; two others had said they would join my workout. But when the time came, they bailed. So I was running with a nice fun group, and after 10 miles I had to be a good soldier and break off to do my MP miles solo. However I could not hold 7:20, I was able to keep it pretty steady, but around 7:25-7:27. That still gets me a 3:15, which I’d be OK with. I suppose when nicely tapered, if the weather cooperates, anything can happen.
Next Saturday I have a 10k, which I plan to race all-out. We’ll see how that goes!
Weekly for period: From: 03/25/2024 To 03/31/2024
Mother of Cats
63 miles and 1500 yards swimming
M: 8 miles very easy (9:13) and streaming yoga. T: 10 miles, including a track workout of 800, 1200, 1600, 1200, 800, 400 in 3:39, 5:23, 6:58, 5:07, 3:21, 1:40 (recoveries in 2:3x-2:4x, except for 5:14 recovery after the 1600. Followed with leg strengthwork. W: 7 miles very easy on trails (9:45) and 750 yards swimming. Th: 8 miles very easy (9:24) plus drills and strides; streaming Pilates and foam rolling in evening.F: 4 miles (9:29) and 2 miles (9:29). Sa: 10 miles, including a ~10K tempo/race thing in 46:44 (7:49/7:46/7:37/7:22/7:16/7:04/1:50 for last .27). Followed with streaming pilates. 750 yards swimming in afternoon.Su: 14 miles easy to moderate (most averaging 8:47, last 2 miles picked it up to 7:42 pace), followed by upper body weights/core.
I was planning on a 10K race as a tune-up (the only one I could find on Easter weekend). It ended up being sparsely attended - only 10 people showed up, and none of them were near me pace-wise (one guy casually jogged it in 38 minutes to win, everyone else was several minutes behind me). I really just couldn't get motivated to solo time trial a 10K, so I just used it as a chance to practice running at marathon pace or faster while navigating inclines and declines and a crowded trail (there was a 5K with a lot of walkers that started 10 minutes before the 10K).
[in response to one obvious comment - the results for previous years showed that this was a small race, but generally there were 1-2 people in the 42-44 minute 10K range, which would have been enough to spur me into a race effort]
Everyone's gotta running blog; I'm the only one with a POOL-RUNNING blog.
And...if you want a running Instagram where all the pictures are of cats, I've got you covered.
dw - wow, 10 people! I wouldn’t be too motivated to run it at all. But practicing MP is as good a use as any. I had to check my log to find my smallest race—it was 31 people, also a 10k. And in fact I won it, the first and probably only time that’ll ever happen. That was despite running an extra ~0.25 miles due to making a wrong turn, while running completely solo somewhere around mile 4.5.
Krash That was a truly interesting read, thanks for sharing. Congrats on the multiple achievements. Your love of Mountain Dew cracks me up.
MrMattM I appreciate your two cents there on the high volume running. Volume really does seem to result in a lot of strength.
Flavio I agree 2:20 is going to be doable in a few weeks after you lift more and do more speed work to rebuild after the marathon. I think the time trials you are doing now primarily serve the purpose of introducing you to the effort of racing/TT-ing those distances.
dw That decision makes sense.
My Week
Played a couple full court pickup basketball games Friday afternoon which was a decent workout. It left me sore, so I guess it counts as a speed and plyometric session? I'm in the tapering and weather checking phase. As of now the temperature looks good, but there seems to be a strong wind coming from the North West, for the third year in a row lol. I'd love it if that wind could back off just a bit.
mmerkle so is the Iliotibial Band being nice now?
'
Darkwave a 5k starting before the 10 k, on the same course tells me how serious the run was. Was this supporting some cause or organization?
DavePNW It's amazing a man your age can be such an INSPIRATION.
Flavio don't get hurt lifting weights. Lower back issues are for old folks and perhaps some bhyperextensions are in order. I did these ONCE to failure as a set of 3. I will never impersonate an old person with lower back pain again. I was young and learned a lesson the hard way. I might have been holding a 25 lb (11.3kg) plate on my chest.
Overweight per CDC BMI
First track meet this weekend for the person in my family with actual running talent. Nolan had a full slate with 1600, 400, and 800 in that order and we got a really hot day with a high of 79F. He was in the fastest heat of the 1600 with 18 other runners so he wanted to be careful to not get amped up and go out too fast. He paced himself really well and as he came across the finish line seeing he was going to break 6:30, his arms went up in celebration like he had won the race. His 6:28 was 15th overall but seeing him celebrate breaking the 6:30 barrier brought a tear to my eye. His two teammates finished 1st and 2nd with times of 5:53 and 5:56.
In the 400, he did pretty well with a 1:22, winning his heat but he was in the outside lane and held the visual lead the whole time so he didn't really have anyone to race. I think he will get around 1:18-19 with a more competitive heat. By the time he got to the 800, he was worn out and got cramps on the first lap. He was in the 2nd fastest heat so on paper, it looked like he should win the heat but didn't have much left. He improved his 800 time from last year by a few seconds but he got beat by two 2nd graders on our team (he is 4th grade) so that at least left a bad taste in his mouth for motivation for the next meet. He has a baseball conflict Saturday so he won't run the 1600 and will have more energy for the 800.
Memphis / 38 male
5k - 20:39 / 10k - 43:48 / Half - 1:34:47 / Full - 3:38:10