Working Class Runner

I have finished 4 weeks of Vancouver 2022 training, and this was a stepback week. I ran a 10K at Floyd Lamb Park on Saturday, then an easy 8 miler Sunday.

I’m not really all that sore, and the 10K not only went about as well as expected but somehow I finished 3rd male overall.

I had not done any focused training for the 10K and it was just a ‘show me’ race to see where I was at. Though my right hamstring hadn’t bothered me at all the last couple weeks, I also wanted to be careful about aggravating it with a faster pace.

Like the Triple Crown races late last year I ran the 10K by power, monitoring my Stryd readings and looking to maintain a minimum power level. After having run out the last 10K in the 240’s, I believed I could at leats maintain the low 250’s, though I wanted to see if I could go a bit higher. Going by pace is tougher at Floyd Lamb with part of the course on dirt, plus it was somewhat windy with 15+ mph crosswinds.

Incidentally, because it was blustery outside and given the timing of the year, we didn’t have many starters. So unlike previous races I was almost immediately by myself on the course. Often I would ran a bit harder out of the gate to navigate and create space between others before settling down. But with immediate space, I just settled immediately into a comfortably fast rhythm, and was pleasantly surprised to notice that a 260s watt pace felt rather comfortable.

Plus, with the cold air and the high wind, I had virtually no risk of overheating, the most likely thing to slow me down early. Even with the stiff crosswind I simply focused on maintaining a consistent effort and cadence.

The hard part was the back end of the course loop (the race was two laps on a 5K course), which turned north directly into the wind for a bit before a turn back west into relatively easier stiff crosswinds. My effort stepped up into the 280’s and up for these sections but that didn’t feel too much tougher. It might have actually been harder to dial back my effort as I’d have to work that much harder against the wind to stay upright and moving.

After clearing the first loop in well under 28 minutes (I had run my last 10K on this course in 58:26), I found and kept a steady high 260’s effort back through the course again. I don’t think I looked at my watch for anything beyond the distance covered, the wattage readings, and the mile splits as the watch beeped them off.

I actually started feeling a bit weak in the last mile, probably from the sheer effort of maintaining my effort in the stiff crosswinds all that time. But I just kept moving at pace and decided that I’d only slow down if it felt really dire. It never did.

Once I saw the finish line I just went for it and actually had a pretty good kick that last 100 meters or so, crossing in 55:18 for a substantial improvement on my last effort. However, my watch only showed 6.18 miles, and Garmin unfortunately won’t count a 10K PR unless you run a minimum of 6.21 miles, so I ran a bit past the finish to get at least 6.22 and ensure it counted as a Garmin watch PR (even if it’s not my actual 10K PR of 52:39). My prior 10K PR on the watch was pre-Corona and wasn’t particularly fast, plus my previous races hadn’t counted because Garmin measured all three of them slightly short. I got to 6.22 in the grass with little trouble and stopped the watch at 55:41.

Unlike the previous races, while certainly gassed from probably my toughest effort ever in a 10K, I didn’t feel physically beat up much at all. Best of all, my right hamstring never bothered me at any point in the race. It was never an issue.

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The next test was the following day. Even though 8 miles is a big stepback from the double digit long runs I had done previous weekends, this was the first time in a long while I was taking a long run the day after a race. Common among scholastic athletes, I had done it now and again in Chicago but had yet to do it in training here in Vegas.

Unlike previous runs I decided not to monitor my wattage or pace effort, as I typically try to start slow and then make sure the finish is a faster easy pace. I’ve been following the Pfitzinger approach of starting at 1.2 times my goal marathon pace, then finishing at 1.1 times the goal pace, and it had worked quite well each time. But this time, having run the race the day before, I took it purely by feel and the pace would just be after-data.

It turned out the hardest part of the run was running past the church near my starting point. It was Sunday and this church incidentally was letting out a service as I started (bad timing!). So I had to carefully avoid foot and vehicle traffic while also trying to avoid running through the nearby shopping center, where there was more vehicle traffic. Once I zig zagged beyond trouble, I just had to deal with breathing a bit harder than I would have liked. But 8 miles went fine and again I had no soreness or serious fatigue.

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Stryd tells me my critical power has substantially improved, from a measured 257 to 268. Stryd’s race calculator believes I could run Vancouver in under 4:10:00. I’m not totally sure about that. I did average a steady 9:38 in a pace workout a week ago (which would be a sub 4:15 pace), but while do-able over 6 miles I have my doubts about sustaining that particular effort over 26+ miles, and that course was a bit flatter than usual. My goal pace is in the 9:40’s-9:50’s and that’s felt more comfortable. I’m still working on settling naturally into pace range, even though hitting the pace hasn’t been super difficult.

Today is a rest day, and I’m a bit surprised at how much energy I’ve consistently had the last few weeks, even though I’ve run 5 days a week and not missed a run workout. This may be because this is the first marathon training cycle where I’ve minimized everyday competing stressors like having to walk everywhere like Chicago, because I’m eating probably the cleanest and most consistent diet I’ve eaten on a training plan, and because I’m making sure to take rest days, follow the plan and just the plan, and not do much of any extra anything.

Over the last couple years I’ve been doing a lot of cross and strength training, and this month I’ve cleared out anything that isn’t specifically related to the training for this race.

Now, that said, I’m looking to resume strength training this week with two easy 20 minute sessions in the mornings, and chasing them with the yoga sessions that I’d been getting results from.

This will also be a tougher volume week, as I stretch out the midweek mod-length run, the Saturday run that’s been hanging at 6 miles for a while, and push the long run into 14 miles, past the half marathon barrier I somehow haven’t pushed past in three years.

Making all this go according to plan is this week’s hurdle in training. More to come.

Three weeks into Higdon Intermediate Marathon 2, and am thrilled to report that I haven’t missed a single run workout. Every scheduled day, every pace run day, every long run, I’ve gotten the run in.

This could be ridiculous to celebrate, but as I’ve mentioned I’ve had all sorts of challenges in life sticking to a pre-written training plan. And being able to do it plus seeing the progress I’m making in being able to do it is almost like a kid having a new toy.

Not to mention, after all the injury problems in 2021 it’s great to get through extended runs without problems and feel okay in the hours/days afterward. Never minding injury… just getting through a long run and not feeling beat up physically in the day or so afterward feels great. I had to go to Target in the afternoon, hours after a 13 miler, and running from the car to the store I didn’t feel all that sore. If I had to run another 4 miles easy right then I probably could have (of course, I didn’t).

Now, I also have not been cross training and it’s been about two weeks since I’ve strength trained. The only other exercise I’ve done outside of my runs is walking during work breaks. I didn’t intentionally stop: I played each day by feel and decided most evenings after work to just go home given fatigue, hunger, and whatever else. The added recovery from not doing those things has probably helped with adapting to the restored training load, though I’ll probably re-introduce strength training and yoga this week. I’ll probably keep it to one session a week, though.

The next gateway in training now is to get the long run past the 13 mile barrier, as 13.4 is as far as I was able to go during the ill fated Indy training, and it’s now been over a year since I’ve gone farther than the Half Marathon distance. Not running a marathon in three years will do that you! At least now it feels totally reasonable to do, and I’ve gotten myself physically back into a better place to handle higher run volume.

I don’t think all the cross training of the last 2.5 years was bad, though at this point and time it’s probably not what I need now. I need to be running as much as I reasonably can. And that also means I don’t need all that much speed or tempo work now. Medium length pace runs every week or two, the occasional speed play on fresher Tuesdays, and the occasional required sprint across a street are probably all I need.

Thanks to a race this week, this upcoming week will be somewhat lighter on run volume, and this week’s long run will drop back to a now-rather-easy 8 miles. While a maybe-monthly race may be all the serious fitness-testing I need aside from pace runs, I’m thinking of sneaking in a mile time trial or an interval session here and there, depending on how much other demanding running is on that week’s schedule. Tuesdays work for these because those scheduled runs are shorter, easy, and coming off a recovery day on the schedule (Higdon schedules cross training, though as mentioned I’ve been skipping it and making Monday a rest day). The following days’ runs are easy, and the longer Wednesday run following this matches the weekend pattern of a challenging moderate run followed by the long run.

So we’ll keep this moving and see how it feels. More to come.

Today I planned a 6 mile run right after work at a nearby park. However, after commuting across town and sitting down for coffee, I looked down and discovered I hadn’t equipped my Stryd footpod.

While I could do the run at the park anyway, I’d not only lose crucial power data that I use to track ongoing progress, but I’m now in a place where those real-time power readings are for me crucial to maintain proper effort levels through the run and not screw up future workouts.

Admittedly, in prior years, if I found I forgot something important like this and couldn’t easily get back home to get it, this would have pissed me off and thrown off my entire day.

But today, having (hopefully) grown a bit wiser and more knowledgeable since, I rolled with it and figured out what I could do to not only adjust and do the run after getting home from work tonight (and retrieving the needed pod), but also figured out adjustments I can make to effectively use the extra time to best aid recovery before and after the run.

Instead of having to ensure I’m fueled and ready at 5pm, I can take it a bit easier on nutrition after lunch, I have more options to fuel right after work, and the meal I eat at dinner tonight will be better utilized for run recovery since it’ll occur right after the run.

Generally I avoid evening running near home because I’d have to do it later in the evening and it can mess with my sleep, because I’m doing it on streets and have to be more careful with traffic, plus even with street lights my routes are somewhat dark, and being closer to arterials and the freeway there’s a bit more pollution which doesn’t help with breathing.

I also avoid the treadmill for reasons I’ve gone into before (injury risks, higher indoor temperature than desired, the monotony of the treadmill, difficulty setting an appropriate pace to match outdoor conditions). But for tonight, at a steady pace (previous treadmill sessions were a bit faster), near places where I can get food afterward, I don’t think a treadmill session at the gym will be a big problem this time around.

I also could, if feeling okay, get in a strength workout following the treadmill session… as I’ve actually not gone to the gym in a week. I’ve made a point to go home after work, in part because my oft-weary body is adapting to current training and not feeling up to it, and in part because New Year’s Resolutions are still crowding gyms in these initial January weeks so working out may have been too difficult anyway. Crowds may be a bit thinner by now, but even if not the treadmills should be readily available.

I haven’t missed a run workout on my current training plan yet, and I don’t plan to.

With a “stepback” week in the M-3 plan, I stopped work-break runs after hitting my November mileage goals, and my right hamstring (which had been bothering me on and off the last month) feels a good deal better. I didn’t feel any difficulty on 3 mile runs in hilly terrain this week, and the only remaining run is a 5 miler on Saturday. Get through that 5-miler without any aggravation, and I should hopefully feel 100% or close to it going into next week after a couple of easy days.

I’m spending more time on the spin bike after work, not just for a Garmin badge but also because traffic coming home during rush hour has gotten pretty bad in recent weeks. So going to the nearby gym for an hour or so provides ample opportunity for rush hour traffic to clear up and make that commute easier (not to mention strength train on days I need to do so). Plus, I’m near a Whole Foods and other places to eat, which allows me to grab dinner a bit more easily afterward. When I was still commuting to the southwest end of town for the gym I’d get home around 8pm, but this allows me to finish up a bit sooner.

I also am experimenting this month with reintroducing some basic yoga, in lieu of the stretching routine I had been doing after workouts. The routine was fine, but another Garmin badge (one I usually ignore) gave me the idea to try yoga instead for a while. I’ve certainly done yoga before, usually in a classroom context (e.g. life in Seattle with dancers and other artists), so I have a fairly decent idea of bsaic poses and what to do. It’s just never fit what I needed in recent years.

But Garmin has a basic 10 minute yoga routine called the Shoulder Relaxer that I find do-able. So I made a point to do this each evening at the gym after the spin bike and my leg swings. I’m doing an old Steve Pavlina style 30 day trial, where I decide to do it everyday for 30 days and if at the end I don’t like it I can dump it. But I have to do it everyday for 30 days first.

The biggest challenge hasn’t been the poses, which for me are not hard at all, but remembering the routine and how to do them. The Garmin program will name the poses and count down time but won’t show you what to do, plus for some of the poses they use different names than I remember for those poses. I went in before yesterday and added basic descriptions to show up on my watch during the routine, and that certainly helped some.

I’m only into my 3rd day of doing this for the whole month, but so far so good. I’ll do the yoga routine after whatever else I’m doing at my last session at the gym that day, whether it’s spin bike work or my strength training.

This also means I have to go the gym every day this month, which I had already been doing for a while until recently (I’ve made a point to take some days off from the gym, especially if I ran that day). I won’t go to the gym just to do a 10 minute yoga routine, so I have to couple it with something else. It just means I get to do a little extra cross training, if nothing else. An extra spin bike session while reading isn’t exactly hard on me.

Though it’s cooled off and I can run after work once again, I may also run more in the mornings before work. I’ve been leaving home early and going to coffee a lot in the mornings, so getting up early isn’t a problem. Running in the dark while it’s cold might be, though, and since I’m training for a late spring marathon I don’t need the acclimation to cold for that.

Still, a drive across town and a 6-7 AM easy or moderate run on the outskirts in higher altitude before work might be less stressful than going to a park right after work and risking a later evening on an evening run in possibly-smoggier conditions.

We’ll see. I’ve avoided the need to make a decision so far because all my midweek runs are 3-4 miles, which were do-able during lunch. Now, the scheduled midweek runs are getting longer, and I can’t do those during a lunch break, so it’s time to find out how the morning runs feel.

Instead of the intervals I had previously planned to do, I spent this week weight training, walking through my work breaks, and waiting for my hamstrings to feel more normal.

A week off did the hamstrings good, and in the interim I researched through different training plans ahead of Vancouver 2022. This time around, I am looking to not improvise or handwrite any plans and am looking to follow more of a specific plan.

Though I had hoped to trickle in the easy interval approach, I can see the curve to get in condition for that probably isn’t going to work right now. But I also want to start running and training soon, and want to set myself up for being in good marathon condition.

Go figure I accidentally find what might be the right marathon plan for what I need right now, early this morning over coffee.

I’ve worked with Hal Higdon‘s traditional training plans in the past while developing my running abilities, and they’d done me good for what I needed. I dabbled after that in other different training approaches and kind of left Higdon’s specific plans behind, but I’ve always come back to his basic principles, and I had in fact considered one of his marathon plans for Vancouver before exploring other templates.

While looking over his intermediate marathon plan, which is okay but is a little light on tempo, speed and pace work… I didn’t see any mention about how he’d fit in strength training, and went googling to see where he discusses it.

The results ended up showing me a marathon training plan of his I hadn’t seen: Marathon 3.

Marathon 3 is a recently written training plan of his that more closely resembles the FIRST template, where you run 3 times a week and then cross train on other days. Higdon though does have you run easy for most of his run workouts, rather than FIRST’s approach of making you go hard each time. Also, back to my original point, Higdon mentions that you should strength train on the Monday and Wednesday off days in the plan.

M-3 also has you run longer and easy on most of the midweek runs, plus run a lot of tune up races, which I like. And the quality midweek workout cycles between different workouts (tempo runs, pace runs, easy runs). Also, the plan is 24 weeks long, longer than Higdon’s other plans and most others. You also cap off the week with a long cross training workout, instead of the medium distance run followed immediately by a long run.

Incidentally, for the plan’s 24 week timing to work, I would have to start the plan this week. So I considered it a sign and penciled the plan into my schedule. And it turns out the schedule fits mine particularly well. So, that’s what I’m going with going forward.

Since it’s a long plan, what’s great is that if M-3 isn’t working for some reason in the first few weeks, other plans are shorter and I can just switch to the start of one of those if I need to.

However, I went with it because the schedule leaves days between runs, which I may need at this point given my struggles with more frequent running and with random injury problems.

I made a couple of mild modifications, extending the length of the midweek cross training workout since I’m already comfortable with going 45+ minutes, and adding a strength training workout to the Friday rest day so that I strength train Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I would avoid strength training weekends.

Conveniently I had just finished a 5 day strength training cycle, which is the best time to recalibrate my swolework plan.

I have to consolidate to three strength workouts, so I have to axe some exercises that I don’t need right now. The bicep curls and tricep extensions are gone, as are the hamstring curls.

I was doing the Overhead Squats twice per 5 day cycle so I’m only doing them once per week now, on Mondays with the leg presses. I’m front loading leg-based exercises to the Monday workout since the next run after that is easy and that gives me at least a couple days before I have to run fast or long.

The 3rd workout in the 3 day cycle are exercises I don’t need as badly, since there will be some weeks where I probably can only strength train twice. While the lat pulldown can be important, my lats are a bit overactive which indicates I don’t need to strength train these as frequently. Face Pulls are valuable for posture but I don’t need a ton of heavy sets of these, plus the equipment needed is often taken at the gym. I’m already doing decline bench presses in the 2nd workout, so the incline bench presses are not as necessary. Thus I do these exercises as the 3rd day workout, and some weeks I won’t have a 3rd strength training day.

Starting tomorrow the plan is to run 3 miles easy, with 3 steady miles Thursday and then see how 6 miles feels Saturday. I would strength train today, Wednesday, and Friday. I’d ride the spin bike Wednesday and Sunday.

If all goes well, then we’re well on our way with a training plan.