Monday, May 09, 2005

THINGS TO WORK ON

I ran an easy 5 miles yesterday. Actually, it wasn’t easy it was slow - very slow. No surprise, my legs were really heavy. However, they weren’t too sore, so that’s a good thing. One of my concerns with doing a 30k instead of the half marathon I had planned was that I’d trash my legs and screw up the rest of my training. I ran 5 miles over lunch today and that felt a lot better. Still slow, but relatively pain-free once I got going.

Saturday’s race made it clear that there are a few things I need to work on over the next 6 weeks.

1) Calming my mind. While I didn’t really have any problems holding my marathon pace, my mind was racing faster than it should have been. I think if there were other people to run with, it’d have been easier to relax and focus inward. Even though this was a marathon paced run for me, the size of this race had me worrying about the guy in 4th and Eric in 3rd. I don’t think that’ll be an issue at Grandma’s since Eric’s not running and it won’t matter if I’m in 75th or 76th place or whatever.

2) Consuming gels during the race. I carried a flask with me that holds 5 gels. My plan at Grandma’s is to take a gel every 4 miles. Given the different location of water stops on Saturday, I had to improvise. I ended up taking a gulp of gel at 6, 9 and 12 miles. When I finished I noticed I only took 2.5 gels. The main thing was to make sure the gels didn’t bother me while running at marathon pace. Sometimes I try to convince myself not to take a gel, even though I know it’s the “right” thing to do. I gotta work on that.

3) Diet. I’m not going to obsess over it, but I think I can stand to lose 3-5 lbs before the race. Right now I weigh 148. At the end of last season I weighed 5 lbs less. So I passed on the Macadamia Nut cookies at lunch today.

4) Core. When my last cold hit I stopped doing ab workouts. If I can get back into doing them a couple of times a week, I think it’ll help.

I’m sure there’s more, but those are the things that come to mind immediately.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Zeke, I never find time to concern myself about those things. I was concerned about picking out the right pace for the day. It looks like you did that at the 30k. Six weeks to go means crunch time for speed/pace work.

Sure you have a schedule, but I found using intervals and 5k runs on the track significantly faster than race pace to help. Throw the odd 20k/half marathon race in and a couple barn burners a couple weeks prior and your set to go. Six-forty seems like a walk in the park after a nice taper.

Chad said...

Double,

6:40 pace seems pretty accurate. I think once the gun goes off on 6/18, I'll be able to run that with a lot less mental energy than on Saturday.

Looking at my schedule, my coach has the last 5 weeks dedicated to pace work. No specifics are listed, so I'll put my faith in him. My next/last race will be a 15k on 6/4. That'll be more of a pace run too, maybe a little quicker.