Ready!

With the Mount Desert Island Marathon a week away, I completed my last longish run today. It was just twelve miles. I started off easy, but picked up the pace as the run went on. In the end, my pace was similar to my half-marathon time in May. However, today felt very comfortable. It's nice to know that all the mileage this summer has paid off. Maybe I'll try to keep it up over the winter, but I do hate those cold, dark winter days.

Now for the lowdown on the results of my training plan for this summer.

747 miles over 17 weeks, average pace 8:45 minutes per mile/5:25 minutes per kilometer (June, July and August averaged just over 200 miles per month)

Compare this to the year before ...

2009: 690 miles, avg pace 8:58 mins/mile or 5:34 mins/km

Note that the total miles according to the Pfitzinger 18/55 plan over the first 17 weeks are 767. I missed much of one week due to injury, so overall I was happy with my final numbers falling just 20 miles short of the original plan. Also, the training this year included much running on hills, which I did very little last year, so the improvement in pace would have been better had I trained on flatter routes.

I feel better prepared for this marathon than either of my previous two, and I don't think my training could have gone much better. I'm injury-free, and the weather forecast (so far) looks very good. What does it all mean? I'm not sure, given the terrain of the course. I'll take it one hill at a time, and try to enjoy the experience!

Here is a way I definitely will not finish. Check out this incredible video from the end of the Chicago Marathon today:

Track and Field Videos on Flotrack

My Favourite Race

With less than three weeks to the MDI marathon, I've started my taper, but not before finishing my last "really" long run of 20 miles today. That's four 20-milers over the last four weeks, and they have all felt very good.

I did the long run today (Monday) rather than my normal Sunday, because yesterday I ran the Fall Classic 10k race. Coming into the race, I hadn't been very impressed with my speed. In fact, of all the races of I have done this spring and summer, the only one I was reasonably happy with the half-marathon that I ran in Fredericton in May. In retrospect, the weeks following my hernia surgery until I started the marathon training plan were too light on volume. Next spring I'll try to do a better job and get more training in before the spring.

So ... the 10k. Have I mentioned how much I like this race? For a specific race experience, I don't think anything will ever compare to my first marathon in PEI with Mike. But when it comes to races, this is the one. It's home, in the fall, on a route I have run many times, and it's flat. All three times I have run it the weather has been perfect. Most importantly, all three times I have run it, I have been happy with the result.

I saw Mike before the race, and told him I didn't think I would match my time of 47:11 from last year, despite what I think has been a good few months of training. Mike responded with "a race can ... .... ". I don't remember exactly, but something like "it can bring out results". Unknown to me, he predicted to his wife that I would get in at 46 minutes, and he was close. 46:12. Results here. I was happy, and even happier with my pacing. Check out the splits below. I followed a legendary local runner for a while. She had passed me in the later stages of enough races to let me know that her pacing was much better than mine.

Km 1: 4:32
Km 2: 4:33
Km 3: 4:34
Km 4: 4:39
Km 5: 4:51 --> Passed my pacer! Theory: I was creeping her out, so she let me pass!
Km 6: 4:37
Km 7: 4:31
Km 8: 4:36
Km 9: 4:37
Km 10: 4:30

The race was a good confidence booster. I'm tentatively planning on running another 10k next weekend, and I hope it goes as well. Next post I'll do the obligatory summary of my weeks of training, but I couldn't have asked for it to have been much better than it was. I only had a couple of bumps in the road, but the following post on a message board succinctly puts things in perspective:

"Sometime in the next 18 weeks your training will be derailed. That's actually part of marathon training. The best thing you can do when this happens is just forget about it and get back to work where you left off."

Marathon Training Update

An update since my last post a few weeks back.

I'm getting the mileage in. Take away one week in when I needed to take a few days off to heal my calf (see below) and I'm averaging over 50 miles per week over the last nine weeks. Some good runs too, not just junk miles.

I got in 20 mile runs each of the past two weekends, and felt pretty strong through both. While there weren't any monster long hills, I do run a route that includes many rolling hills, with some being quite steep. Last week's run was at a pace of 8:52 mins/mile, and this week was 8:48 mins/per mile. Actually, yesterday's run was 20.5 miles (my longest non-marathon run), and next week I plan to make it 21 miles. I even ran a negative split yesterday, with the pace over the first ten miles at close to 9 mins/mile, and the last ten around 8:38 per mile.

Since I haven't posted for a while, I should state that there was a period when my calf was an issue. During my run two days after the Saint John half, my calf was quite painful a couple of miles into the run. The next day, it didn't feel horrible, and I foolishly headed out for a 10-mile run. Nine miles into it, there was a sharp pain, resulting in me walking most of the remaining mile to my house. I ended up taking three days off after that, followed by a very easy 6-mile run on my "long run Sunday". Thankfully it hasn't been much of an issue since then.

My next race is the 10k at the Fall Classic in Fredericton on September 26th. My first ever race was there, and this is still one of my favourites. I also plan on running the 10k at the Dam Run in Perth-Andover the following Saturday, as a tune up race prior to the marathon.

Oh yes ... I also ran a half-marathon "race" in Truro, Nova Scotia in late August, near the stomping grounds of my youth, that I don't even want to speak or write of ...

Finally, an image showing my pace and elevation from my long run yesterday. Looking ahead to a week of early morning runs in the dark and the rain! Less than five weeks until the marathon, and I'm feeling at ease with my training!

Mr Scatterbrain

Knowing I was getting up early Sunday morning to head to Saint John for the half-marathon, Faith Ann and Cam slept downstairs last night. Here was an e-mail Faith Ann sent me that night, knowing I would read it in the morning:

Don't forget ...
to give yourself enough time to pick up your race kit in the morning.

Why does she think she has to remind me about such obvious things? The answer to that question is simple: I'm such a procrastinating scatter-brain that I need to be constantly reminded.

Let me say that I really don't know my way around Saint John at all. But hey, I have a Garmin GPS unit in the car, and I could just type in the address. However, I soon realized I couldn't find any address or landmark in the GPS that would point me to the race. Wouldn't you think it would have Rockwood Park, or at least the Rockwood Park golf course in there somewhere? Oh, but it was my lucky day, because it did have Rockwood Avenue! Surely that must be close to the race! So I proceeded to Rockwood Avenue, to find out it wasn't the race location at all. No need to worry, I still had twenty minutes before the race started at 8 AM!

A stop in a gas station to ask for directions ... drive for a bit and see the golf course ... go in for more directions, waiting impatiently for people checking in for their tee times ahead of me ("Good morning, we're teeing off at 7:57") ... finally reach the general vicinity of the start area ... jog to the start area ... bother the chip timing guy taking a picture of the fast people waiting in front to ask "Can I still get a chip?" He says "Go down to the bottom of the hill". So I went to the bottom of the hill, and asked a few people (as I heard the national anthem being sung for the race). Finally a guy starts trotting up the hill and gets a woman to come down to me (as the gun goes off for the race to start). She searches for my packet, finally finds it, gives me my chip, which I quickly tie on my shoe. I leave the building and another chip timing guy says "Tell him to run". I'm thinking "well duh ... that's why I'm here" when I realize he means "run to get your chip across the timing mat". So I run up the hill, and cross the mat as they're putting it away. A couple of them said "it'll work fine", but of course it didn't, and I didn't receive a chip time today.

So I started the run several minutes after everyone else. I passed lots of people, including several pace bunnies. Around mile 5 the shoe I quickly tied the chip on came un-tied, so I stopped for a few seconds to fix it. The run itself wasn't too bad, as I was on a pace for about a 1:48 finish, until right around the 10.5 mile point, when I had a sudden cramp in my right calf, quite painful for the first 20 seconds or so, then it lingered for a bit. That has never happened to me before while on a run. I did get a cramp Friday night after my run, and it stuck around in a less evil form for a while that night, but I never imagined it would have happened today. I walked gingerly on it for a minute or so, then started running again, but I still felt it. Great! A couple more quick walk breaks, and I thought it was ok, and I picked it back up, but I was quite disgusted at that point. I took it pretty easy over the last mile or so, wondering why I was bothering at this point to put in any effort. As I reached the final couple hundred meters, I saw a guy now living in Houston who I hadn't seen for several years (although he put in Saint John as his address in the half, finishing in 1:32), and chatted with him for a minute. He looked at my Garmin and said "are you still running?". I said "yeah, but I'm not really racing at this point". I stopped the watch, felt a bit embarrassed, and jogged down the last 200 meters. The clock said 1:58, and my Garmin said 1:51:47 at 12.96 miles, where I had stopped to speak with Dave at the top of the hill.

Given my kilometer splits to the 18th kilometer, I do think I was running a decent and fairly consistent race to that point, and probably would have finished around 1:48 or so. So while it turned out to be closer to a tempo run for 10 miles than a half marathon, it wasn't a total bummer. The calf feels fine now, and I don't understand why it was affected today, since I certainly wasn't dehydrated. I hope the cramp doesn't make a reappearance anytime soon.

Over the Hills and Far Away

We spent the last weekend in Halifax, and I got in runs of 6+ miles on both Friday and Saturday, and an 18 mile long run on Sunday morning. The long run took me from one end of Halifax to another and back, going down to the Armdale Rotary, up Chebucto Road and Quinpool Road, around the Commons and Citadel Hill a couple of times, and back to where I started. There were a few hills thrown in there. Check out this graph comparing the elevation profile on this long run to my typical long run I did last summer around downtown Fredericton.

I found the last couple of miles to be tough. It looks like I'm still in the process of building my endurance.

There were a couple of big races in Halifax over the weekend also, including the MacPass Mile and the Natal Day 6-mile race, but I passed on them both, and simply completed the long run. Maybe next year ...

Last summer during my marathon training, I intentionally tried to find flatter routes to run on. It was bad enough that I was expected to run ludicrous numbers of miles each week, I didn't need the added burden of hills. This year, I try to incorporate hills in most of my runs. Here is the profile from my run tonight - even hillier than my normal route.


Is this helping? I'm not entirely sure. I do have more confidence on the hills these days, but the real test will be in a race environment.

Speaking of races, I'll be doing the half-marathon in Saint John this weekend as part of Marathon by the Sea. I was supposed to run it last year (held about 7 weeks later in the year than this year's version) but I was hurt, and the organizers were nice enough to grant me a deferred entry this year. I checked out the elevation profile, and it doesn't look too bad, but I can't imagine any race in Saint John being very flat.

Here is an interesting story from the Globe and Mail yesterday, about how schools in Quebec base 50% of a physical education grade on a heart rate test. It would be interesting to do follow up studies 5/10/15 years out comparing the health of these people to those in other jurisdictions. If people are "forced" when younger to become fit, will it influence them to carry on the pattern as they age?

Wrap up for July: 200 miles logged, with two of the weeks over 50 miles. I'm guessing August will end up with me logging 50+ miles in every week but one. Continuing to bank the miles, hopefully the results will start to appear.

Backward Caps Are Aerodynamic

Yesterday we returned from a great week in PEI. I was there with all four siblings, their families, and some other family members. In addition to a few rounds of golf, time on the beach, and time spent with Cam and nieces and nephews, I managed to stick to my running schedule.

On the way to PEI, I stopped in Shediac and ran the George Gallant 10k, in a time of 50:31 (another blah performance) in very hot and humid conditions. Here's a line from the local francophone fish-wrap:

L'humidité, la chaleur et la brise soutenues ont été un problème pour la plupart des coureurs. Ces éléments auraient coûté au moins une minute à Strowbridge.

Translated to english I believe it reads "It was stinking hot but Strowbridge still flies because he wears his running cap backwards". I've got to start turning my hat around.

There were lots of pictures of the race on the RunNB site, including what is probably the best running picture ever taken of me.

Sunday in PEI I did 15 miles running back and forth over the last few kilometers of my most memorable run to date, the PEI marathon. Strange how those hills don't seem nearly as bad when they're not at the end of the marathon. I also went back there Tuesday to do another 10 miles. The rest of the week I spent running around Stanhope and Brackley Beach, including a ten mile run with five miles at tempo pace, and a couple of other shorter runs - one of five miles that I did with my sister Aimee.

Back in Fredericton, I ran a tough 16 mile run Sunday. I left later than I should have, not finishing until close to noon, and again it was quite warm. I have been trying to run more hills lately, and today's run was no exception. There were supposed to be ten miles today at marathon pace (8:40 mins/mile?) but I didn't quite hit it. However, with the heat and the hills I wasn't disappointed with the result. I drank three bottles of water, had a gel at 8 miles, and was totally spent at the end. I even shuffled in a couple quick walk breaks during the last mile.

For the week I got in 51 miles. That's about 6 more than the Pfitzinger plan calls for, as I ran six days during the week rather than five. I expect there will be many weeks when I do that additional run, though after coaching the boys at soccer tonight, I just didn't feel up to it ... so only five this week.

Good News, Bad News

A shot from afar of Paula Keating and Ryan O'Shea, who ran most of today's Miramichi Rock'n'Run together, and finished tied for 2nd/3rd at 1:22:53.

Here's a photo of me, somewhere around kilometer 13 or so, dousing myself with a cup of cool water. It felt warmer out there than the temperature indicated, probably helped by the 83% humidity.


An exchange I had with a lady as I was passing her around the 8k point:
Her: How are you feeling?
Me: Terrible. (In fact, I felt just fine ... I just thought I would say what she wanted to hear. I wonder how I looked?)
Her: Grab two sponges at the next stop. (As I said, it was warm, and they were passing out wet sponges at the previous water stop).
Me: What, one for me and one for you?
Her: No, for you. They can make you feel better if you're struggling.
Me: I'm ok. (I might have said this in my natural, not so friendly tone)
Her: Well... it works for me. (In the familiar "What's your problem?" tone I've grown accustomed to hearing from others)
Her (approaching the water stop): Sponge?
Them (water stop folks): Oh ... we don't have any at this stop.
Me: Pretty warm out here, isn't it?

My running story of late is one of contradiction. I seem to be enjoying running more than ever. Some of that may be due to being through only three of eighteen weeks of marathon training - still in the early courting stages, where all seems right with the world. I've got no nagging aches or pains, the days are long and nights are short, my weight is slowly going down, and the weather (especially early mornings) is great. I really am liking it, looking forward to every run. I'm even inclined to bump up my training plan slightly, running six days a week rather than five, and perhaps chucking in an additional mile or two on some of the scheduled runs.

However, as much as I enjoy the training, my racing does not seem to be improving. While hoping to run a 48 minute 10k this past week, and a 1:47 half, instead my times were about three and four minutes slower than that. The 10k course (Grand Bay 10k) was fairly hilly and the temperature for the half today was a bit warm, but those are not great excuses. I think my fitness level just has to improve, and I'm hopeful it will work out eventually by sticking to the plan. I have also been running more hills lately, and will do even more in the future.

We're off to PEI for a week beginning next weekend. If my understanding, generous, giving (and blog-reading) wife agrees to it, I may make a quick stop on the way in Shediac to run the George Gallant 10k ... but perhaps not. If I don't do better there, it might make for a grumpy week on the island.