San Antonio Stroll: Week 1 of 23

Week 1 of my training plan for the San Antonio Rock & Roll marathon. This is going to be a good indication of my commitment to the cause because I'm going to be traveling to Flower Mound all week, which probably means I'm going to have to hit the dreaded treadmill at the hotel. To counter that, I've loaded up the ipod with a bunch of podcasts, including Marathon Talk, This American Life and the Jillian Michaels Show.

I hope it works because I hate the treadmill!!!


Saturday

Required Mileage	Required Pace
12 miles	8:30 to 9:00
Actual Mileage	Actual Time/Pace
12 miles	1:42:39 (8:33 pace)

Notes: 5:30am, 76F, Mueller. A nice breeze this morning, kicked off my season with a relaxed 12 miler with Clea.  Warning to all Austin residents - I suspect most of my runs for the next few months will be shirtless!!!


Sunday

Required Mileage	Required Pace
7 miles	7:59 to 8:30
Actual Mileage	Actual Time/Pace
7 miles	57:28 (8:12 pace)

Notes: 5:30am, 69F, Danish route with Clea.  Another nice run - we picked up the pace the further we went and definitely pulled a negative split.  Once again comfortably in the middle of my pace range without expending too much effort - we never pushed to the extent that we shifted out of conversation zone.  I seem to be in a lot better shape than I was this time last year - this bodes well.


Monday

Required Mileage	Required Pace
4 miles	7:42 to 8:20
Actual Mileage	Actual Time/Pace
4 miles	29:26 (7:21 pace)

Notes: 5:30pm, hotel treadmill at 1.5% incline.  OK, so I cheated and ran faster than I should have, but I hate running on the treadmill so I give it a bit of "hurry up".  Long day today - was on the road at 4:30 this morning to drive to Lewisville.  Checked into the hotel this evening, unpacked and headed straight for the fitness room - had it all to myself, and wondered why it felt so warm.  When I finished, I discovered that somebody had turned the heater on - it was 85F in there!!!


Tuesday

Required Mileage	Required Pace
8 miles	7:59 to 8:30
Actual Mileage	Actual Time/Pace
4 miles	27:33 (6:53 pace)

Notes: Time is a strange beast.  When you're watching your family grow it moves so quickly, when you run a race it can be your enemy, and when you're on the road you sometimes don't have enough of it.  Today I was supposed to run 8 miles, but I didn't get back to the hotel until late so I decided to do a fast 4 miles on the treadmill instead. Managed to hold marathon pace for the whole distance, and beat yesterday's time by nearly 2 minutes.  I still hate running on the treadmill.  Good run though - gives me some hope I can actually go out and hold that pace in November.


Wednesday

Required Mileage	Required Pace
4 miles	7:42 to 8:20
Actual Mileage	Actual Time/Pace
4 miles	29:21 (7:20 pace)

Notes: Beautiful blood red sunset tonight.  I drove into Dallas for dinner and a few beers with my buddy and his wife, so I really had to steel myself to go run when I got back to the hotel.  But I did it!!!  I dialed the pace way back from yesterday and ran really comfortably while catching up on my Marathon Talk podcasts.  Maybe I'll make my weeks away from home my speed weeks.


Thursday

Required Mileage	Required Pace
8 miles	7:59 to 8:30
Actual Mileage	Actual Time/Pace
4 miles	27:21 (6:50 pace)

Notes: Ah, the irony of the treadmill - it makes me push the pace to get done before I die of boredom.  But it seems to be working - tonight I ran 4 miles just under marathon goal pace (6:50) and it felt a lot easier than a few days ago.  I really think that doing these short, hard, fast treadmill runs are helping me.  I think this will become my plan for those weeks I'm on the road.  All in all, pretty satisfied with my first week of marathon training.  Now I'm off to enjoy a real gem of an Italian restaurant I found here in Lewisville.  I ate there Tuesday night, and it was wonderful - the only Italian restaurant I've ever been to that I can confidently say makes a better pasta dish than I do.


Friday
Rest Day

San Antonio Rose

Deep within my heart lies a melody
A song of old San Antone.

Though actually it's more rock and roll than country, because today saw the start of my training plan for November's San Antonio Rock & Roll marathon.  It is my goal race for this year, and my lofty aim is to try and run a sub-3 hour marathon - that equates to roughly a 6:50 average pace.  A pipe dream perhaps, but if you're going to set a goal you may as well aim high. The plan I designed is partly based on the concepts I learned at the RRCA coaching class, and partly on things I know to have worked for me in the past.  It is a 23 week schedule, split into three phases - 13 weeks of base building, 7 weeks of sharpening and 3 weeks of tapering that takes me up to race day.

I have given myself a specific pace range for every run from now until November.  This morning my schedule dictated 12 miles at an 8:30 to 9:00 pace, and I averaged 8:33.  In the base building phase, we concentrate mostly on building mileage, and don't really worry about the pace - that comes in the sharpening phase (though I simply refuse to slow down to the extent that the RRCA recommends and have cheated on my pace ranges accordingly).  The plan calls for me to run 6 days a week (Fridays are rest days), with long run progressions on Saturday and alternating short to medium distance runs midweek at varying paces (I hit the short 4 mile runs harder than the longer ones).  I will add in cross training (yoga, weights, core and the bike trainer) on hard run days as I see fit.

I put a similar plan together for Clea (my regular running buddy), who is also running San Antonio and shooting for a 3:20.  Again I cheated and made all of our weekend runs the same distance and pace (it's so much easier to do those 20+ milers when you have somebody to run with), and left in our fun Sunday morning Danish runs (can I build treats from a bakery into a training plan?).


I'm in two minds about whether or not to publish my weekly training plan/log on the blog.  I did it for White Rock last year, and it worked pretty well for me.  What do you think - anyone interested in seeing how many runs I skip, or reading my sarcastic rants, moans and curses about Texas heat and humidity?

Some you Win, Others Not so Much...

The urban veggie jungle

Yes, it's another garden post.  Been a while since I updated on the status of the veggie patch, and as you can see things have moved along.  The corn is now nearly as tall as me (admittedly not that difficult since I'm only 5'8"), the cucumber plants are just as tall and producing well, and the tomatoes, sunflower, broccoli, basil and parsley are doing nicely.

On the other hand, my star producers - the summer squash and zucchini - appear to have died. I'm not sure what happened to them, but when I got back from Baton Rouge they had shuffled off this mortal coil.

Oh well, at least we got to enjoy them while they lasted (along with most of the birds in the neighborhood).

A plethora of tomatoes, peppers, corn and cucumber

The wandering pumpkins, with the broccoli and the huge sunflower behind

Oh dear.  No more summer squash or zucchini for me!!!

Certifiable

After doing the RRCA coaching class back at the beginning of the month, I've been very busy and spent a lot of time on the road.  But in order to be certified, I have to take and submit the test before June 1st, so this morning I actually took the time to go and do it.  The pass mark is 80%, and happily I scored 99%.  I already have my First Aid and CPR certifications, so I am now officially an RRCA certified running coach.

But while I agree with many of the principles underlying the RRCA approach to training (like the different training phases and hard-easy approach), I do not agree with others, in particular the slow training paces.  While I have no problem with the idea of doing training runs slower than race pace, I am not a fan of slowing down to the degree that they advocate.

So when I sat down earlier this week to lay out my San Antonio marathon training plan, I simply took the bits I agreed with, allied them to things that I know work well from past experience, and discarded the rest.  The class did give me a great framework to pull the plan together though, and I now know exactly how far and how fast I should be running each training run from June thru to the race in November.

In other news, a few weeks ago I got a great deal on a new hi-definition 3D television, and today I actually got around to mounting it on the wall.  That was one item on my honey-do list that I didn't mind doing!!!  It really didn't take much work with a good stud finder, and it amazes me that people pay hundreds of dollars to have it done for them.  We've had our old projection TV for nearly 10 years, and it was definitely time for a replacement.  I also got a deal on a 3D blu-ray player, and tonight we all sat around with some funky glasses and watched some 3D movies.

It was pretty cool - and our living room looks a lot bigger.

In the Shadow of the Mighty Mississippi

Greetings from Baton Rouge. After enjoying a few days in East Texas last week, the Louisiana State capital is my base of operations all this week.  My new job is certainly getting me around a bit, and it's been a delightful trip so far. I'm staying at a really nice hotel not far from the LSU campus, and we've enjoyed cool evenings down into the 40s, and highs in the 70s all week.

Though the week didn't start off too well, as I found myself in a deserted Baton Rouge airport going on for 10pm on Sunday night, missing my luggage, and none too happy that I had to go and meet clients the next morning and all I had to wear was the cargo shorts and ratty t-shirt I was standing in. I was busy trying to figure out if any clothes stores would still be open that time of night, but I've never been anything if not lucky, and of the 5 people who lost their luggage on our tiny flight I was the only one that exited the airport happily reunited with it. I just happened to talk to the guy who had pulled my bag off an earlier flight and remembered it.

Like I say, I've always been lucky.

And it was quite a sight to fly over the swollen Mississippi by twilight. It was supposed to crest early this morning, but I really haven't heard much talk of it around town.

And I've been good today - I actually visited the hotel fitness center and ran on the treadmill.  I'd been a bit wary of hotel treadmills since I maxed out the one in Denver and broke it, but this was an altogether more substantial beast.  So I did intervals, and managed to break out two 5:30 mile splits in a row, which is super fast for me.  Truth be told though, I get so bored on the treadmill I'd do anything to push it along a bit.

Still, I was proud enough that I treated myself to a nice big supper at a local steakhouse, and even indulged in the cheesecake for dessert.

It was wonderful, though I bet it more than cancelled out the treadmill.

From Joe the Plumber to Joe the Runner

It was a very interesting weekend as I attended the 2-day RRCA coaching certification class here in Austin.  Two friends, Leah and Olga, were also taking the class which was an unexpected bonus.  The first day was a ton of theory, starting off with physiology and progressing onto nutrition, injury, psychology, coaching philosophy, skills and ethics.  The second day was much more practical as we learned about designing training cycles and progressions, then broke up into groups to design and present a training program for a fictional client - Joe the runner.

I learned a lot from the class, and it gave me a great framework to map out my training plan for November's San Antonio marathon.  Probably most useful were the tools to assign pace ranges to specific training runs and to know why I'm doing it at each stage of the training cycle (even if some of the pace translation tables reminded me of the old decompression tables from scuba 101).

So I need a guinea pig to test this out on.  Luckily, the good lady wife has been talking about getting back into running, so I may sit her down, figure out a goal race and draw out a plan for her.

It's risky, because the last time I offered my coaching advice she threw a handheld at me.

Fortunately she has a terrible aim :-)