2023 The Waltons: Racing & Training Thread (Read 301 times)

 

 

Fred, were you essentially on your feet for just under an hour before starting the race? Nice job. Is the last marathon due to the time commitment?

 

Pretty much, but that's not too unusual.  Part of that time was standing in a port-o-potty line.  Some of it was last minute adjustments and fueling.  No big deal.  Yes, there was a lot I didn't do this past summer because of training and I don't want to do that again any time soon.

Fred - nice RR.  The major marathons are very hard with all the logistics.

Half - yes, watch was 20:59, official 21:00.

Well, it looks like Atlanta will be cold (by my standards) on Thanksgiving morning, so I signed up for this Saturday's local half instead.  Light rain is forecast, but it'll be 15-20 degrees F warmer than it would be in Atlanta, so I'm ok with that.  May wind up wearing my light Gore-tex shell.  The course doubles back near the start about a mile in, and DW's 5K doesn't start until 30 minutes after the half, so she'll be standing by in case I want to drop off jacket/beanie/gloves/etc.  A handful of the people signed up should be within 5 minutes of me either way, so I might have someone to run with.

Fred - that is a beauty, that medal. Hope it will get a special place within the large number of medals that you have earned already.

James are you going to gun for 90 minutes? What does your training look like? What are your current training paces for the long run and the half marathon and do you spend a lot of time on the track to keep that speed up?

James - good luck tomorrow!

1:33 flat in light-to-steady rain with some wind.  2nd overall out of about 80, which is the first time I've podiumed in several years.  The best part was that I had someone to chase almost the entire way.  RR later; need a hot bath.

Congratulations!

Beat the Bird Half; Saturday, Nov. 11; Columbus, GA, USA

This is a long report, but I only run four races a year and so want to give a lot of color.  The “birds” in this half and 5k are runners wearing turkey costumes.  (The U.S. Thanksgiving holiday is a week from this coming Thursday, and turkey with pumpkin pie is the traditional meal.)  There were 5 birds this year, and three won their age groups despite the costumes .  The lead bicyclists had horns that sounded like turkey calls, and the post-race food included small pumpkin pies rather than the usual bananas and orange wedges.  Now that I think about it, each of the last nine races I’ve run over 2+ years has been a little strange in one way or another.

In part because rain and wind was forecast for all morning and temperatures were expected to fall from 58/14 to 54/12 during the race, I used the time saved by running less during my taper to plan my race day to a degree more appropriate for a minor military operation.  I put together a timetable ('4:40-5: Eat 1/2 banana, 1/2 cereal, watermelon, beet juice w/Claritin, maybe sinus medicine, and check weather') and listed exactly what I would put on & take off at what time.  I like to get up 3+ hours before a race, and this sheet assured me that I would do everything I needed to without having to wonder if I was forgetting anything at 4-something AM.  I also planned out the help I would need from DW, who was running the 5K that started 30 minutes later.  I’ve helped her & her friends in other races, so the support isn't all one-sided.

To stay out of the rain as long as possible, I did my short shakeout run on our building’s treadmill and then drove 12 minutes to the staging area, which was a high school parking lot.  After doing strides on the residential street where the race started, I gave DW (who had come later in her car so she didn’t have to get up as early) my watch and car key and huddled under her umbrella until the start.  

I had decided to wear a short-sleeved technical shirt under my thin rain jacket, with a visor under the jacket’s hood to keep the rain out of my face.  I wore shorts over compression shorts, as well as thin gloves and a finger watch, which is lighter and better at recording splits than my regular watch.  I had been a little concerned about how my Endorphin Speeds would handle the water, as I thought I had read before buying them that they lacked traction on wet surfaces, but I decided that I had bought them mainly to use in halfs and wasn’t going to wait another six months or a year to try to get their benefit, so there wasn’t any point in looking for that information.  This all turned out well.  The rain jacket kept me warm enough without overheating and was tight enough that I didn’t notice any air resistance.  I didn’t have any serious traction trouble, and although my shoes and socks were soaked, I didn’t feel any blisters during the race.

Having people to run with & chase makes a big difference in how much I enjoy a race, so before deciding to register on the last possible day, I had checked out the other runners on Athlinks and in the results of this year’s larger local 5Ks.  One, Ben, looked to be a bit faster than me unless I ran a perfect race, and another, Jose, had run a 1:34-something in this race last year so probably was slower.  A 19-year-old woman had run a 1:35 a few months ago, and I thought she might have improved.  There was a 15-year-old boy who had beaten me in my August 5K and presumably had improved during his cross country season, but he didn’t show; I assume the weather was the reason that almost a third of those registered for the half either didn’t run or switched to the 5K.  Those and one of the birds were the only people I thought might be near me, and I wasn’t going to worry about anyone in a waterlogged full-body turkey costume.  I didn’t know any of them, but I found Ben’s and the bird’s pictures on Facebook, and Jose ran in a jacket with his last name on the back.

At the start, we went up a slight hill and headed west on a gently curving residential street.  Right away, Ben took the lead with Jose behind him, then a young woman (not the 19-year-old, who apparently had a bad race), then me.  After a few hundred yards, Ben opened a small gap and I eased past the woman.  That first three stayed pretty much the same for almost all the race, and Ben gradually pulled away from Jose & me.  Maybe 600 yards in, we made a u-turn onto a bike path and headed basically east for the next 6+ miles before turning around.  As the path got close to the staging area, my hands were no longer cold, so I took off my left glove and tossed it to DW, who was taking pictures and had forgotten that I might give her things.  I suppose I looked strange running in one glove, but the finger watch is difficult to put on, so I wasn’t going to chance taking it off to get the right glove off.

One of the nice things about having nearly all the race on a bike path was that the path was fairly straight, so I could always see Jose and didn’t lose sight of Dennis and the lead bicyclist until almost halfway through.  It felt like Jose was going about as fast as I could safely go, and several things made me think that I might eventually pass him: his times were a bit slower than mine, he had inefficient-looking left-to-right movement in his arms, he rarely ran the tangents when the path curved, and his jacket looked a lot heavier than mine.  He seemed very friendly, thanking the volunteers at each cross street and after we turned around cheering the runners who were behind us.

Since I don’t have a gps watch and there was only one race mile marker, I had to use the occasional distance markers painted on the bike path to try to guess how far we had gone or had remaining ('the turnaround is near path mile 9.4 and is about 6.7 miles into the race, so subtract 2.7 from wherever we are and that’s about how far we’ve gone').  Even though this wasn’t all that precise, the calculations did give me something to think about.  After a couple of miles, a military-looking guy (short hair, muscular, lightly dressed, tattoos) came up and ran beside me.  Soon afterwards, we passed what I figured to be about three miles, so I checked my watch & guesstimated that we were going a bit faster than 7 minutes per mile, which was as fast as I was comfortable going that early.  When Jose pulled away from us, I figured he couldn’t hold that pace and let him go.  The military guy dropped off after a while, and Jose never got more than about 30 yards ahead of me.  For most of the race, I slowly yo-yoed between being a few yards behind him and 20-30 behind, and I’m not sure which of us was holding a steady pace and which was changing speed.

The rain varied from light to steady but probably was a bit worse in the first part of the race, and the visor helped keep most of it out of my face.  It stopped not long before the end of the race, though it was hard to tell because the wind kept blowing drops off the trees.  The wind was noticeable at times (around 10 mph, with gusts of 20) but didn’t feel as bad as that sounds, and it was mainly in our faces on the way out and at our backs coming back.  Trees lined the path almost the entire way, and at times we had to run through clouds of fluttering yellow leaves blown off the trees by wind gusts.  All the yellow leaves on the path made it difficult to find the yellow path mile markers.

As we approached the turnaround point, for about half a mile the path ran next to a park where I ran cross country races in high school.  At the turnaround, I was only a few seconds behind Jose, so I figured I would catch him soon.  To my surprise, he pulled away again, and I began to think that he might just stay ahead of me the whole way, especially since I was starting to feel my left glute and my hamstrings.  We didn’t cross paths with the fourth-place runner for a good while, so I thought that as long as I stayed close to Jose, I would almost certainly podium.  It helped to look at all the runners behind us heading towards the turnaround, and I waved to several I knew.  There were also random non-race runners on the path who cheered us on.

Almost always in the first few miles of a half, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to sustain my pace without blowing up, or sometimes without injuring myself.  In some of my early halfs those concerns were justified, but in recent ones I've usually realized somewhere after halfway that I’ll make it ok.  This time the realization came with about four miles left.  With about three left, I noticed that I was getting closer to Jose again, so I made a sustained push and passed him.  For a while I could hear his wet shoes slapping on the pavement behind me, but after half a mile or so, I forgot about him when my lungs started feeling tight.  I gasped for breath a couple of times, eased off a little, and realized I could keep going, and the tightness gradually went away.  I assumed that Jose would pass me back but that I would still podium.  

With a little over two miles left, we left the bike path and turned into our city’s university campus for a loop about a mile long.  Unlike the gently sloping and gently curving bike path, the university part of the route went from sidewalks to parking lots to bike paths, with lots of turns and some short uphills and downhills, including one short S-shaped section up a hill sort of like San Francisco’s Lombard Street.  That was actually useful, because it let me see that Jose was still a ways behind me without my turning around and giving him hope.  It also wasn’t marked very well, or maybe I was just getting too tired to focus, because in two parking lots I headed off at a wrong angle even though I had a general idea where to go.  Both times Jose yelled out the correct direction, which may have prevented him from catching me (I thanked him afterwards and took pictures of him and his family).  After we ended the loop and turned back onto the bike path for the final mile, I had a little more lung trouble, but I eased off briefly and was ok until the finish, though I had a final episode soon after finishing.  I assume the cold was at least partly responsible, and maybe all the wet leaves too, as fall allergies may have been behind last week’s illness, which hadn’t totally disappeared by race time.

I wound up second out of 58 in 1:33 flat and won (what else) a turkey.  Averaged 7:04 before the turnaround and 7:08 after.  Ben was a minute ahead of me and won a bigger turkey, and Jose, who must have faded late to finish 40 seconds behind me, got a large pie, I assume pumpkin.  DW, who hadn’t run since injuring her Achilles a couple of weeks ago, finished the 5K in 38-something without aggravating the injury and had a good time with several friends from her Y exercise classes who ran one or the other race.  The race organizers kept the finish line clock on the time for the 5K finishers, who started 30 minutes after we did, so one woman I knew was really impressed by what she thought was my time (if the age-grading is accurate, 1:03 would’ve broken the world record for my age by about 9 minutes).

I was pleased with the effort and reasonably pleased with the time.  It was a bit slower than my last five halfs, four of which have been close to 1:32, but I don’t know how much of a difference running in wet, heavy shoes & socks made, or whether there were any lingering effects of having been sick recently.  On the other hand, I assume the plated shoes helped my time, and having someone to chase almost the whole way was a great help (and something I’ve only had in my two small halfs, not the six larger ones).  This was an age-graded best for a half at 77.3%.  I’ve been over 82% for my goal 5Ks the last couple of years in better conditions, and even the calculators that take into account my lowish mileage say I should be able to run a faster half.  I’ll have to try again next year.

James - nice RR.  Your times are so impressive for your age.

Mark - nice week, and well done on the biggest week of the year.

My week started bad.  I had some PF and calf tightness, with my left being worse than my right.  Probably caused by the previous Tuesday track intervals plus ParkRun.

So Mon & Tue were off.  Wed was some mobility work.  I got back running on Thu.  Fri involved a drop off and pick up from the car mechanic so I sort of tripled that day.  Saturday my club (Trentham Harriers) had it's annual event it hosts on, being a trail race event (7km, 14km and Half).  I was a Tail End Charlie for the Half runners, so it was a mix of walk and run.

Weekly for period: From: 11/06/2023 To 11/12/2023

Totals: Time: 05:26:53 - 🦅Imperial: 28.66 mi - Metric: 46.11 km