Back on (the) Track

After a year (!) off for what seemed like a minor injury but just wouldn’t go away, I’m back and starting one of those 10k plans that’s included with my Garmin Forerunner 245. It’s very fancy.

I made my way back slowly, starting with pitiful little two-mile runs three days a week, and dutifully following the 10% rule. So six miles the first week, 6.6 the second, 7.3 the third… and then 12 miles, then 15, then 20, and finally up to thirty.

Okay, I pretty much totally ignored the 10% rule.

But I did take everything slow, which for me is about 9 minutes per mile. After a few thirty mile weeks, with thirteen mile long runs, I decided I was ready for more.

Enter Christmas, where my wife bought me a new Garmin. Surprise! Actually, no surprise at all. My old 220 was dying randomly in the middle of runs, so I gave her link to the 245 and said “that one.”

But it was still cool to get, and there was all this new data. Heart rate! Intensity minutes! A sleep tracker! Steps! And mostly, VO2 max! It made me want to do something besides chug along at conversational pace. I might not be able to set too many PRs these days, but maybe I could at least improve my stats. (VO2, I’m lookin’ at you!) Of course, a PR would be cool, and since I’ve only run a handful of 10Ks, that seemed like my best bet.  

So I looked over the three 10k plans they offered, and signed up for “Coach Amy” (That’s her at the top of this post.) I’m only on week three, but so far it’s been fun. Here’s a few things that have stood out.

• The different plans have different numbers of workouts per week (3, 4, or 5), and different emphases. You also get to select which days will be off, and which day will be your long run. Much easier that re-jiggering a paper plan to fit your schedule.
• You don’t get to see the whole plan at once, so you only know what the very next workout will be. I suppose this is because it’s an adaptive plan that adjusts based on performance, but the result has been that I can’t look weeks ahead and obsess about some brutal workout.
• The particular plan I chose seems to emphasize tempo runs, which have been a real weakness of mine. (Insert dreams of a PR here!)
• The Garmin has a nice pacing feature for such runs. The top of the watch displays a sort of dial, akin to a gas gauge, with a red section on the left (too slow!) and another on the right (too fast!), and a broad green section in the middle. I tried once or twice with my old 220 to use the pace feature, but it was so sensitive that it was giving me warning beeps practically all the time. The 245 has a wide range of acceptable paces (30 seconds per mile?), so it’s pretty easy to get yourself dialed in, and even to decide if you want to run at the upper or lower bound that day.
• The heart rate monitor is cool too. I really had no information about this before so had no point of comparison. What surprised me, though, was the slow and inexorable increase in heart rate during a long steady run. I did a six miler that started out at the lower end of zone 3, and ended up at the higher end of zone 4, but all while I kept a constant pace. Apparently I’ve been pace-conditioned, so even though the whole run felt basically the same to me, my heart clearly felt otherwise.
• Apparently I might need to see a sleep clinic about my O2 levels at night.
• The accuracy of the VO2 Max indicator is much-maligned online, and I suspect mine is even worse since I just use the wrist heart-rate measurement. But it’s still cool. And frankly, as long as it’s consistent that’s all I need to know whether I’m improving or not.
• I bet there are going to be some hill repeats at some point, which is going to be a real issue as there simply are no hills where I live. The closest thing is an overpass.

So right now, I’m a fan!

In the meantime, I’ve got to go obsess about the goal-pace repeats in my next workout. Yikes!

Can You Run a Marathon and Still Have a Life? Or, Marathon Training on 3 (or 5?) Days per Week.

About four years ago, when I first got back into running (decades after a stint in high school track & cross country), I started with the three day/week Run Less, Run Faster plan. The gist of the plan is that the authors argue it’s more effective to replace slow & easy running days with cross training. So I did that. Without the cross training.

Strangely, it mostly worked. This is likely because even three days of running and no cross training will make you much more fit than zero days of running and no cross training, which was the plan I’d been following for the previous twenty-five years.

But now I’m aiming for a marathon instead of trying to trim seconds off my 5k, so will a weekly total of 30-35 miles really be enough? We’ll see.

My first question was a goal time. In my heart, I picked 4 hours because it’s a nice round number, and my comfortable pace for long runs is the 9:00/mile that would put me in at 3:56. Doable.

Looking at the pace predictors, the book tells me my 20 minute 5k should mean I could expect a 3:14 marathon. Hahahahahahahahaaaaaa. No. My 43 min 10k predicts a 3:21. Still no, though I would love it were it true, as that would be a Boston qualifying time. My 1:44 half marathon time predicts a 3:38. Closer, but probably still optimistic (I remember how I felt those last three miles).

You can see the pattern here. As my distances get longer, I get worse. That’s okay. I’m a middle distance guy, and I can live with that. So no BQ for me, but in an attempt to ensure I get under 4:00, I’m going to do the 3:45 plan.

And I have to say it looks pretty… possible. I’m in decent shape now, hitting about 30 miles/week on three key runs (interval, tempo, long) and a couple easy recovery jogs, so I think I’ve got the base for this plan. The speed workouts and tempo runs are largely easier than I’m doing now (slightly longer; substantially slower). The big change is, of course, the long run. My current 10-12 miler is about to be replaced with a weekly progression that goes 13, 15, 17, 20, 18, 20, 13, 18, 20… with most weeks either faster or longer than the previous, until I drill in at 8:35 pace.

That’s going to be some long Saturday mornings. Clearly I’m going to need a few more audio books.

And this time, I’m going to try to hit the bike, play some tennis, or maybe do some easy miles on those off days. Really I am.

Really.