I decided to take a look at ‘Blogs that Link Here’ and found this entry

http://blog.thisnext.com/blog/when-in-doubt-buy-shoes.html

Someone is using me to pimp Saucony’s shoes. Weird!

Anyone else ever have this experience?

The cat came bounding in to the family room last night with a mouse in her mouth. A live mouse. When I freaked out she dropped it. Nice trick, stupid kitty. We locked her out of the room and were able to chase the little guy out the door. Hopefully someone else’s cat will also catch the mouse but then kill it outside.

Fatty was pretty proud of herself and pretty mad at me. I think it was Susan who suggested that the solution to cat problems is, in a word – microwaves. I was tempted; I really was.

Today I was NOT looking forward to running 20 miles because running 20 miles is hard and it hurts and I’m not built for that sort of thing and I just didn’t want to do it but it was in THE PLAN so do it I did. I wanted to make this 20 miles a mirror of my marathon to see how I would do. Would I make it? Would it hurt? Would I have to test my will? Would the Cytomax make me puke? Would I want to cut my head off and curse the day I ever decided to train for a marathon? Yes, yes, yes, no and yes.

I decided, in my infinite wisdom that the best thing to do would be to run around for a couple of miles and then tackle a huge hill because that’s what happens on the SF course. Here are the elevation maps of my run today(on top) and of the marathon course (on bottom)

Note – The huge hill is that first dramatic bump at about 7 miles – the long climb is pretty gradual and it is only the camel humps that really seem like hills.

I think the scale on those 2 images is comparable and I think it is fair to say that I worked maybe a little harder on this run than I will have to work on the marathon and that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing because my total time (including a couple of fairly luxurious bathroom breaks complete with running water and paper towels) was 4:06.35 and there is no way I could have covered the last 5.2 miles (turns out I ran 21.06) in less that 54 minutes. I was too pooped and my feet were throbbing and it was hot. I did not do the run 5 miles, walk 2 minutes thing and I wish I had. I think that’s a really good methodology and when I did that last time my average pace was 20 second/mile faster.

At the end of the run I was totally discouraged and hating myself for ever signing up for this thing. My feet were killing me and I felt worse than poop on toast. I could barely choke down a string cheese when I got back and I was deeply disappointed in my time. I seriously considered just giving it up and not running the marathon – why bother? Fortunately, a shower and a little rest later I felt okay and decided that if I don’t make a sub 5 hour marathon it isn’t the end of the world. If don’t PR you may never hear from me again but that gives me another 16 minutes to work with so let’s all keep our fingers crossed, shall we?

Parrot predictor calls for 4:55, McMillan calls for 5:11.

Lessons learned –

1). No need to kill yourself

2). Having water bottles along the trail is good (I hid them from view so they were there when I needed them)

3). Cytomax sports drink is manageable as long as the quantity is low

4). Cytomax gel rocks

5). The hotter it gets, the harder it is to run

6). The run/walk thing has some advantages

I thought that my 5 mile run yesterday would be great because I so didn’t want to do it. But it wasn’t great. It was one of those runs that starts out with me thinking it must have been months since the last time I ran because I could hardly breath at the beginning. I hate that. I thought maybe I was going too fast but the Garmin had me pegged at some pokey pace and I just felt incompetent. A couple hundred feet later and Garmina told me I was huffing it at a sub 9 minute pace. So I slowed down and just ran at roughly a 10:30 pace or so I thought. The cool thing about the run, though was that I discovered that the trail I was on has a zillion water fountains. I just never noticed them before.

In an effort to avoid carrying a water bottle tomorrow I just went out in the dark and drove my car sort of along the trail and stopped every once in awhile to leave some water bottles. I hope I can find them tomorrow when I go for my final 20 mile run before The Big Day. I also scored some Cytomax and Ctyomax Gel which is what will be on the marathon course so I’m taking it for a test drive. I hope I don’t spend the rest of the day hugging the porcelain Goddess.

Splits on the 5 miler –
9:39, 10:12, 10:21, 10:12, 10:24 and the last 480 ft at 9:39

so now I have both consistency and symmetry. I hope it serves me well.

I thought that my 5 mile run yesterday would be great because I so didn’t want to do it. But it wasn’t great. It was one of those runs that starts out with me thinking it must have been months since the last time I ran because I could hardly breath at the beginning. I hate that. I thought maybe I was going too fast but the Garmin had me pegged at some pokey pace and I just felt incompetent. A couple hundred feet later and Garmina told me I was huffing it at a sub 9 minute pace. So I slowed down and just ran at roughly a 10:30 pace or so I thought. The cool thing about the run, though was that I discovered that the trail I was on has a zillion water fountains. I just never noticed them before.

In an effort to avoid carrying a water bottle tomorrow I just went out in the dark and drove my car sort of along the trail and stopped every once in awhile to leave some water bottles. I hope I can find them tomorrow when I go for my final 20 mile run before The Big Day. I also scored some Cytomax and Ctyomax Gel which is what will be on the marathon course so I’m taking it for a test drive. I hope I don’t spend the rest of the day hugging the porcelain Goddess.

Splits on the 5 miler –
9:39, 10:12, 10:21, 10:12, 10:24 and the last 480 ft at 9:39

so now I have both consistency and symmetry. I hope it serves me well.

In my email this morning was my weekly come on newsletter from Active.Com for Women. I assume the gents didn’t get this bit of news and that many of the women reading this blog are also not subscribers so I wanted to pass it on because it confirms something I’ve always believed. When all is said and done, listen to your body.

The Article is called The New Rules of Hydration and discusses the veracity of the current conventional wisdom on hydration. The biggest problem with conventional wisdom is that it often changes. It’s a very good read and applies to both genders and hopefully the men don’t need a secret decoder ring to view it.

It has information under headings like:

Old: Drink ahead of your thirst.
New:Drink according to your thirst.
but then there is this:
Old: Use either a sports drink or water for hydration.
New: Use a sports drink instead of water.

So it isn’t perfect because if I drank only a sports drink for hydration I’d spend most of my run hurltilizing the local flora. In spite of its lack of perfection the article comes highly recommended.

In other news:
I almost had to write a post called “Plastered to my Bed” about how much I didn’t want to get up this morning. I only have to run 5 miles which is a piece of cake at this point but for some reason I just don’t want to. I will, though and because I really don’t want to it will probably be a great run. It always seems to go that way.

Or I might have written a post called ‘This Little Piggy” about my out of control eating yesterday. I swam 2300 meters, many of them faster than I wanted to and when I swim like that my appetite goes astral on me. I should probably follow swims like that with a run just to set my body right. I could not stop thinking about food all day. After swimming I ate the following:

Several people suggested new shoes as a way to solve my soreness/pain issues and I thought that was a great idea. My knees are hurting, too and generally speaking, if my knees hurt it means it is time for new shoes. I did something highly irregular, though. I bought a pair of Saucony Hurricanes. I am a dyed in the wool Ascis fan having worn Gel Kayano XIs for a while. This last pair only has about 275 miles on them and I felt I needed new ones – such a clodhopper!

To test the theory (that new shoes make the woman) I put them on today, tightened the laces and went out for a run with no particular committment to length. I was supposed to go to the track to run 10 Yassos which would have been about 6 miles total) but I knew I couldn’t pull that off and I didn’t want to be disappointed with myself (way to go, eh?). As it was I managed a medium fast 3 mile run and I feel okay.

Can I just say how glad I am to be finishing up training? I have a 20 mile run on Saturday and then one more 15 miler the following Saturday and then it is taper time. I’m so sold on taper time that I’m going to do a brick workout on the 15th and go bike riding and swimming with my friends after I finish the run. That somehow feels liberating. I guess you know you’re hooked on something when a multi-hour, multi-sport workout spells relief.

Thanks to everyone for the advice and suggestions. Just for the record, most of my runs are out and backs so I don’t think that is the problem. I’ve only done a couple of long track workouts but next time I will do 1/2 in one direction and 1/2 in the other and see if that helps. Special thanks to TriGreyHound for words of encouragement. I hope you are right!!

As Bold would say Much 4th!

Warning – there’s a lot of hubris baked into that title.

Last week I was almost perfect about my workouts. I swam Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I ran Yassos on Tuesday, tempo on Thursday and 15 miles on Saturday. It went okay. Not brilliant, but okay. The not quite perfect part is that Tuesday I was supposed to run 8 repeats and I only ran 7. On Saturday I was going to toss in an extra 1/2 mile to make up for it but I was hurting so I skipped it.

When I got home Saturday I plugged the numbers into Breaking the Tape and came up a little short for the parrot predictor to do its thing so I made up an extra, slow mile to see what I could see. What I saw was a projected marathon time of 4:36 – which is what I wanted to see. And therein lies the problem.

My target for this marathon is just sub 5 hours. I’ve been training well and consistently (except for graduation week) and it is paying off. Now what were my secret ambitions are bubbling up to become conscience ambitions and the ambition is to go a 4:40 and I need to stop that. I need to focus on sub 5 hours and plan for that because 4:40 is too fast for me. I know that because after Saturday’s okay run I am having problems with my left side. My left glute is sore and I have a shin splint on my left leg. My left knee was hurting yesterday*. Not good, not good. Every time I get overly ambitious I start to show signs of wear and tear that could nuke the whole deal.

Tomorrow is a swim day and Tuesday is supposed to be 10 Yassos. I’m not doing that, though. I may or may not swim tomorrow (it’s awfully late…) but if I don’t swim I will bike. Tuesday I will do something but it won’t be 10 Yassos and it won’t be a 4th of July 10K in under 60 minutes. I have to take it easy so I can keep on going and I have to keep going to hit a just sub 5 hour marathon. Must.stay.on.track!

Thanks to people who suggested Hammer Gel. Much better than Gu. I tried 1 raspberry and 1 apple cinnamon and they both went down well.

Happy 4th!

*what could be responsible for al of these problems on my left side? Stride? uneven legs? What the hell!!??

A couple of people have asked about where I get the log files that show the search results that lead people to my site so here you go.

I use 2 of these nifty utilities – Statcounter and Sitemeter

Sitemeter seems to just give statistics but Statcounter gives you a lot of other information like where people are coming from, how long they linger, how many pages they read, which search engine they use and what keyword phrases they were searching on to find you. Both are free.

As for those amazingly even splits on my 5 mile run – I think I just forced myself to stay around the 10 minute mark on the Garmin. If I looked down and was going slower I sped up and if I was going faster I just kept going. It was a sort of fluke that it averaged out so perfectly. I do, however, pay attention to my breathing and steps and try to hit a rhythm. Maybe I’m better at that than I think.

I was really sore today. I swam this morning which is good but my legs are whooped and sore. I have rolled them and stretched them and I’ve been hydrating all day and tomorrow I run 15 miles. I am not expecting them to be very fast, though. Slow and steady and all that….

Today was a run day and not a swim day and that’s a good thing because I just looked at the swim team calendar and today was ‘Fast 100s’. Ugh – No me gusta. Tomorrow is broken 100s which is probably okay.

Ran like a bullet, too. 5 miles in 50.32. Not bad!
Splits
1- 9:28
2 – 10:03
3 – 10:03
4 – 10:08
5 – 10:34

1 is fast and 5 is slow for the same reason – there’s a big hill not too far from home. The consistancy in the other miles is nice, though! I like that.

Today’s running insight – if your sun glasses get fogged up or wet while you are running, rubbing them with that technical, wicking fabric you are wearing will do you no good at all. The water will just get smeared all over the lenses and you won’t be able to see a thing. You must hope you run past a gas station so you can get one of those blue towels and fix your little vision thing problem.