Running Notes by HJL

I’ve been putting it off, but it’s the end of January and tomorrow the registration fee for this year’s Big Sur Marathon goes up by $10.

I’m a bit ambivalent about it, mostly because I still haven’t found a solution to my ongoing mysterious breathing problems, and I’m not too excited about the resulting slow paces.

On the positive side, I logged a 10 mile run this weekend at 9:00 pace without any problems. I remembered to find the Vanilla Gu from the pile of last year’s training stuff in the drawer. Popped one at about 60 minutes. Wasn’t quite as sleepy afterwards as the week before without it, although my conditioning is probably improving slightly from week to week.

As noted previously, 2006 wasn’t a great year for me in terms of running and health. One personal goal in 2007 has been to assess where things stand and make improvements from here, rather than focusing on where my previous benchmarks have been.

On the positive side, the mysterious breathing problem that started at the end of 2005 doesn’t seem to be life-threatening and hasn’t been getting worse over the course of 2006.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve increased the volume of running workouts and have begun increasing the duration of my longest weekly run. Yesterday I logged a 9 mile run for the first time in months, mostly at 9:00 pace with a couple of 5 minute segments at 7:30 pace to check it out. Part of my training task is to work on the psychology. I’m running more slowly now, and it simply takes longer to cover the distance. Or put the other way, since I usually run for a set time, I’m logging shorter runs in the same time as before.

I’ve kept a base training level of around 20+ miles per week during the latter half of 2006, with relatively short weekly longest runs of 5-6 miles. I’m encouraged that I can still crank out 9 miles without a huge effort, and I seem to be OK holding 9:00 pace. On the other hand, I’m de-trained enough that it’s been making me sleepy all day yesterday and today. Next time I’ll bring some gels if I think I might run longer than an hour. I have a bunch of Vanilla Gu in my desk drawer somewhere left over from last year.