First twenty of the training cycle

Saturday morning I ran an uneventful 20-miler near Vancouver Lake with the Portland Marathon Clinic’s group run. It was hot and the scenery was mostly blackberries and corn, but there were lots of nice people to talk to and plenty of aid stations. It was probably the easiest 20-miler I can recall. I had a little ankle soreness afterward, but it went away the next day. With 10 weeks left before the Portland Marathon and a lot more long runs of 20 miles or more on the schedule, I should be in solid shape, endurance-wise.

This morning I ran six miles before work. This is very unusual for me, but it’s going to be near 100 degrees tonight and something needed to be done. Trying to push myself to keep the speed up while I’m alone and sleepy was a challenge.

Too hot

I ran the usual six miles last night in what I think was the hottest weather yet this year: low to mid 90s, no wind at all, and a bit humid. It was a serious struggle. My legs started out pretty dead feeling. I guess it was delayed soreness and stiffness from Saturday’s 19. After a few miles, my legs warmed up but the heat was just murderous. I found myself trying to sprint through the sunny bits of the trail and linger in the shaded portions. I found myself cursing the fact that such heat training has little practical training effect.

(The big exception being if you are going to be racing in the heat. Heat training will acclimatize you to the heat to some degree and let you run faster in hot weather. However, it is sub-optimal for training for running in moderate temperatures.)

The only good news was that the pace I was running was actually faster than the pace I felt like I was running. The run finished up with a 7:50/mile average pace.

19

I was glad that the Portland Marathon Clinic’s free group run this Saturday was on a nice flat route. At 19 miles long, this run was going to create a high-mileage week for me. Last week’s run had been a fairly hilly Forest Park trail run, and Thursday’s workout had been on steep hills as well.

The run was an out and back from 12th and Couch in the Pearl district, down to the river and across the Steel Bridge, then south on the Esplanade and the Springwater. I switched to the 3:20 pace group this time, but they still went pretty slowly; a 9:20 average pace. It was a surprisingly comfortable run. It was hot, even early in the day, but I kept hydrated and didn’t wilt at all.

Oh boy! A graph! About running!

Race paces, adjusted to "equivalent" 5K pace. Click image to see full size.

This graph shows the progress of my race pace over time. The y-axis shows the pace at which the McMillan Running Calculator says I could have run a 5K, given the actual race distance and time. (Obviously, for the 5K races, no adjustment is needed.) All of my road races are shown; two 50K trail races and a six-hour-race are not. (The running calculator doesn’t handle 50Ks, and comparing road to trail isn’t fair anyway.)

The results as a whole are surprisingly linear looking. I’ve been gaining somewhere around 45 seconds a mile per year for the last two and a half years.  The rate of improvement slowed after May 2008 (plantar fasciitis limited my training) and I seemed to slow even further during my mostly-on-trail training over the winter after that, but my spring and summer roadwork appears to have put me back on the same approximate slope.

Racing uphill in the heat, wheeeee fun

The heat was awful yesterday — low 90s — and the traffic getting to the start was horrendous, but I fought both problems and ran the Goose again yesterday. This time the first two miles were done as a race. My performance was less than impressive. At one point in the middle everything gave out and I was walking for a bit. The two miles (mostly sharply uphill) took me twenty minutes and change. I have a profound respect for the winner’s 14-minute results. I look a lot better than I felt here at the end:

After waiting for everyone to finish the race portion, we continued over to Pittock Mansion where we had CAKE! All runs should have cake in the middle.

Marathon Pace Goal and Boston Qualifying Times

I thought I had the plan for my next two marathons. To recap, I ran my third marathon last May in Eugene in 3:38 (about 10 minutes faster than my previous best). My plan was to try for 3:30 in Portland in October, then take off another bite-sized 10-minute chunk and try for 3:20 in Eugene in May 2010.  That 3:20 is a big important number. For the next five years, that’s my Boston qualifying time. (My “BQ”.)*

My unexpected performance at the flat half has upset those fine-sounding plans. According to my favorite race performance calculator, with adequate training and under the same conditions, I should be able to run a 3:13 marathon. Now, the conditions won’t be the same: the Portland marathon course isn’t flat. The early hills and the nasty ups and downs around the bridge at mile 18 can and will take their toll, as can the big downhill during mile 23. But, still. 3:13! I can’t not go for the BQ.

Right now, I find it scary to go for something that aggressive compared to my previous marathons. I’ve put on a surge of speed over the last four months and I’m still not completely settled down when it comes to training and running at the appropriate paces for that speed. Put another way, I’ve done few enough training runs at a 7:30 pace or faster that it’s intimidating to think of going 26.2 at that speed.

Portland’s still a long way off. I still have 80 days left to train or to get injured, whichever comes first. I’ll be re-evaluating my pace goal again before the big day. But for now, 3:20 is my line in the sand.

*A 3:20 will get me into the 2011 Boston Marathon, when I’ll be 40. To qualify for the April 2010 Boston Marathon, when I’ll still be 39 — by a month — I’d actually need to run a 3:15. There’s an 18 month window for qualifying, so a 3:15 now would technically qualify me for both 2010 and 2011.

One Mile Race

My plans to do the Goose Run regularly this summer haven’t been off to a good start. Last week, out-of-town guests were arriving just as the run was to start. This week, the regular Goose was on hold for stages one and two of the Red Lizard’s tongue-in-cheek Tour de Goose.

Stage one was a “Guillotine Mile.” One mile on the Lincoln High track, starting as late as your dare while still finishing before the time limit expires and the ceremonial guillotine falls. I picked six minutes as my time limit. The running calculator says I should have a 5:44 in me, but that’s based on a half-marathon time, which I think is my best distance.

Four people started at the six-minutes-left time and I settled into second place among them. Racing one mile is hard. After the first (too fast) lap, it felt like a gasping asthma attack for the rest of the way. I lost some steam in laps three and four, but still gasped my way across the finish line in 5:52, eight seconds ahead of the guillotine.

Race Report: 2009 Foot Traffic Flat half marathon

Foot Traffic Flat half official results.

I had a great start this morning: backing out of the garage I side-swiped a friend’s car. That’s the way to start off your race day. (Sweetie thinks the resulting adrenaline helped.) With the wanton destruction portion of the morning done with, I headed for Sauvie Island, a half-hour drive from home. Sauvie Island is a large island along the Columbia and Willamette rivers, northwest of Portland, not that far from the end of the Wildwood Trail. There were two to three miles of lined-up cars getting into the parking fields, but I had left plenty of time (even with the unfortunate incident) and had no trouble hitting up the port-a-potties and getting to the start line with tons of time left.

The course was a loop with one short out and back and, as promised, it was flat. There was one short hump that you might call a hill, and any number of very gradual inclines and declines, but it really was as close to a pancake as a road race is likely to get.  The weather was my main worry. Portland has been having a hot spell. Leaving my house at six am, it was already 55 degrees. But you know what? It turned out to be five degrees cooler on the island! Yay! The sun was turned up to 11, but it didn’t get over 60 before I was done. I’m glad I did the half marathon and not the whole — temperatures were going up rapidly.

My half marathon PR from three weeks ago was a 7:27 pace on a hilly course. I figured that if conditions were good, I’d do 7:20s or 7:15s here and be happy. But I was also planning to just run hard and see what happened.

I did the early miles at a 7:00 pace. (6:59, 6:57, 7:00.) I wasn’t struggling but I wasn’t in a great rhythm. I also didn’t have too many problems with negative thinking. There really wasn’t much thinking at all, except about the moment-by-moment issues of running. This stayed true for the whole race.

After six miles I was still around 7:00/mile. (7:03, 7:02, 6:55.) OK… I just bested my 10K PR (set in April on a pretty flat course) by 10 seconds a mile. Good thing? Bad thing? Was I sure I knew what I was doing? Like I said, I didn’t think about it much. I just focused on keeping up with whoever was ahead of me, and on trying to run the shortest line on the course. I wasn’t feeling all that comfortable at these speeds, but I wasn’t going to worry about that, either.

Mile 7: 7:01. Mile 8: 7:05. Mile 9: 7:01. Was I really going to keep this up? I kept expecting to drop down to the 7:30s. Not that the 7:30s sounded much easier to me! Might as well just keep up the full discomfort. The sun blazed down hard but the heat wasn’t there yet.

After 7:03s for both miles 10 and 11, I knew I could finish it at the same pace. Well, I knew I would try, anyway, and not succumb to the slow-down temptation. What’s running through my head? Breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out how do those guys up there make this look so easy? Count steps one two three four one two three four my toe hurts breathe in breathe out oh look some shade coming up that will be nice after this horrible long exposed straightaway one two three four…

Mile 12: 7:11. My slowest yet, but my average page was still 7:02 or something. I knew, just knew, I’d find a way to pick it up a little in that last 1.1 miles. Just… keep… going. Counting steps forever, until, at last! I could see the parking lot field, and beyond that, the barns and the finish line! I could go bankrupt in my oxygen debt and come out OK. I finished mile 12 in 6:53 and surged a little more for the last desperate bit across the line.

They had strawberry shortcake for the finishers. That was good.

Official time: 1:31:47. 7:01/mile. 5:44 faster than my PR three weeks ago. Nine seconds a mile faster than my 10K PR. A second a mile faster than my 5K PR! What the hell!?  I guess my ad-hoc training regimen is really working. The McMillan running calculator suggests that I could run a 3:13:34 marathon under similar conditions and with appropriate training. It also says I have a sub-20 5K in me right now. Beautiful madness.