My mom sent me last Sunday’s Duluth News Tribune’s coverage of Grandma’s marathon. I thought the article on the elite men was funny. One Kenyan was complaining about the heat, while another was complaining about the humidity. I’m not sure if the writer interviewed them both at the same time or not, but I just picture these two scrawny Kenyan runners getting into it.
“It was hot out there.”
“No, it was the humidity.”
“Heat!”
“Humidity!”
The paper said it was 59 degrees at the start (7:30 AM) with 67% humidity. At the finish (10 AM) it was 57 degrees with 100% humidity. I guess I don’t understand the whole humidity thing. I thought it represented the amount of moisture in the air. If it’s 100% shouldn’t it be raining? I’m more of a dew point guy. I know if the dew point reaches 60, it’s sticky; 70 and it’s tropical.
Speaking of the weather; yesterday was a good day to be in recovery mode. It got up to 95 here. It seems like that came out of no where too. I think it was “only” about 85 the day before.
I am back to running. Wednesday night I went out for 3 miles. It’s no surprise that my legs were really heavy. At least they weren’t sore. Yesterday I jumped on the treadmill during lunch for 4 miles.
The thought of doing Whistlestop in October, along with Doubles comments recently have fired me up. Not the “I’m going to hammer a 10 miler this weekend” fired up. It’s more of the “sit down with a calendar and pencil in what I did in 2002 and see how I can incorporate it into 2005” fired up.
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One thing that really helps me in "free wheel" training is trying to run well on the good days. Having a weekly plan of easy/hard allows a person to try and feel a bit better on those days, but how often does this happen? Sometimes you grind through it and other days you have to adjust. If I'm out on an easy 8-10 mile run and after 2 miles I'm cruisin' I will let it go and do 5-6 miles at close to race pace. I think that should come naturally. That's how I treat my bread and butter workouts which are the longer runs. Generally I will be at 7:20, but when good days come I will run all the 6:20 - 6:30 miles I have in me that day.
The last year or so I have started to not time some intervals if I'm not sharp and just run my "best day effort." I also run more on the roads of 6 x 4:00 or 10 x 1:30 stuff. When I'm ready to blister my body I head to the group track workouts and practically race the repeats. You race some of these guys through the summer and you want to put some doubt in their minds.
If I look back I probably get close to 15 miles a week near or below race pace. Some feel this is too much, but this works well for me for short training cycles.
I'll have to research the numbers and see how close I am. I would consider anything at sub 6:30 (2:50) race pace because I'm running on tired legs and anything around 6:45 or better on long runs to be near race pace if this makes sense.
I think I need to do more of the "free wheel" training. The summer before breaking 3 I did a lot of runs with my college friends. These tended to be harder, longer runs for me. It's hard for me to simulate these when I run by myself. The easiest way would be to do them on the days I feel good, rather than forcing them.
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