Running Notes by HJL

The temperature and wind forecast looks promising, 48F, no rain, and 7MPH wind at 6am, and 61F forecast for noon. Looks like we may have a little fog tomorrow. I drove the course this afternoon to refresh my memory and help prepare for tomorrow’s run. There was an interesting combination of thick fog at ground level and blue skies a few hundred feet above, with wisps of fog curling around the boundary between air coming from the ocean and warmer air coming from the adjacent coastal land.

I’ve been fairly casual this time around, compared with previous marathon training cycles. This will be my 4th outing at Big Sur, and I’m basically just planning to enjoy the run, probably something around 4:30 or even 5:00ish, depending on the weather and how interested I get in taking photos. I took a lot of notes and did a lot of planning the first couple of times on the course, but this time I’m relying more on past experience and being able to look back at previous runs there.

Looks like I’ve averaged something like 35-40 miles per week since the start of 2007 on this training cycle. The graph is slightly misleading as I’ve also been coaching my daughter’s soccer team for the past few months, and other activities which I don’t try to log, but in general I’m running at slower paces than a couple of years ago which tends to hold down the weekly mileage. This training cycle has been pretty similar to last year’s.

I still haven’t gotten any constructive resolution of my “mysterious breathing problem“, other than it’s not life-threatening, and my lung function is still testing in a “healthy normal” range. I find it psychologically challenging, though, in that I always feel like I’m working harder than the pace I’m actually running, i.e. it “feels” like I’m running 30-45 seconds/mile faster, based on my level of effort and heart rate from a couple of years ago.

This year I actually did log a single 20 mile run (versus last year’s zero 20+ runs) although I don’t feel that it’s making me any more prepared at this point. I generally try to stay at 3 hours or less for training runs, and I simply don’t go as far in a given block of time on my current (slower) paces. While we were on vacation in Maui a couple of weeks ago, I had the luxury of extra time and nice scenery, so I got in 10-12 miles along the ocean, several days in a row, and in relatively higher temperatures than I expect to see on Sunday.

The current forecast for Carmel this Sunday says 64 hi /51 low, partly cloudy, 10% chance of rain. A few degrees cooler, and that’s nearly ideal weather for the marathon.

Views like these are basically why I run at Big Sur:

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 I’ve written earlier, this year I wrote off my initial time goals due to training issues, so I decided to just enjoy the run and take some photos along the way.

I’ve posted these and a few more photos from the 2006 Big Sur Marathon in my Flickr account.

Non-runners sometimes ask, “How long is a marathon?”. The answer is that in modern times, they’re all 26.2 miles. This happens to coincide with the mileage posted on this highway sign, which apparently helped trigger the organization of the Big Sur Marathon something like 20 years ago. (Someone usually tacks on the “.2″ when the marathon is being held, which you can see if you click through on the photo.)

The weather is nearly ideal — overcast, cool, and misty, not too much wind.

Well, this year’s marathon training cycle for Big Sur has gone fairly miserably. Regardless, I look forward to running this Sunday. Big Sur is a hilly, but scenic course. Part of the reason I like it is because it’s simply a nice place to run, and the road along the ocean shore is closed only once a year to hold the marathon.

Since training hasn’t really gone as I’d planned, it’s time to assess where we are and come up with a plan to match.

Some shortcomings:
- Breathing and HR are still behaving strangely. The symptoms haven’t gotten worse, but haven’t gone away either.
- Weekly mileage maxed out in the low 40’s instead of low 70’s. Average in the high 20s to mid 30s, vs mid 40s to mid 50s. This is partly due to running slower paces, but I’ve also logged fewer hours on this training cycle.
- Longest runs in the low teens, no 20+ mile runs. Normally I would like to have logged 3 or more.
- Relatively little LT pace training compared to previous training cycles. This is partly related to the mysterious breathing problem, since I limited LT and anerobic training for a while, in the interest of being cautious while seeing how my body is behaving.
- Difficulty getting my mental game together this time around for training at what feel like really slow paces.

Some assets:
- This will be my 3rd time on the Big Sur course, so I have pretty detailed knowledge of the various hills that don’t show on the elevation profile.
- No major joint or muscle problems, partly because I haven’t trained that hard.
- No observed problems breathing while inactive, or at easy aerobic paces. Performance has been pretty consistent with running at altitude, or reduced O2 intake.
- I have no particular time goal, and am willing to DNF if something blows up.
- I have good data from two previous runs at Big Sur, along with training logs from this time around, which give me some confidence in how my body will perform.
- Had some good 10+ mile runs while on vacation in Hawaii. It’s much easier to focus on running without other things going on in the day.

Recent paces:
Aerobic: Most of my easy mileage has been at 10:00 pace, versus previous cycles at 9:00 or even 8:30 pace.
LT: I’m able to hold 8:00 for over an hour, versus something inside 7:30 or perhaps 7:15 at this time last year.
Anaerobic: Not useful for marathons, but I tried cranking up the treadmill and I can still turn over at 5:30 pace, just not for more than a minute or so. This is consistent with my theory that my performance is mostly O2-uptake limited right now.
VDOT: Being able to hold 8:00 pace for an hour+ (i.e. at or below LT) puts me at around VDOT 40, but I am also undertrained at longer distances. VDOT 34 corresponds to a MP of 10:00, which matches my comfortable training pace, so that gives me a range to think about.

Plan:
Run at 10:00 or whatever pace feels very easy. Don’t expect any problems in the first half, through Hurricane Point and Bixby Bridge. I usually find the hills around mile 19-22 mentally challenging, but at this point I know where and when to expect them. Will keep an eye on the HRM and see if anything strange is going on, in particular if I’m at an unexpectedly high HR. During training I have found it pretty easy to accidentally end up at a higher HR than I want, presumably because of the reduced O2 intake, and corresponding reduced outgoing CO2 rates. It’s also likely that I’m going to have a more difficult time after 3 hours / 18 miles or so, due to being underconditioned for longer runs, but it probably helps that I’ve maintained a base of 25-30 miles weekly for the past few years now.

Goals:
Primary goal: finish comfortably in around 4:30 (avg pace 10:18).
Fallback: finish under 5:00. (Course closes after 6 hours. Used to be 5:30, but they apparently extended it this year.)
In general, just enjoy the run and see how things turn out. I may stop and take pictures this year, since I have absolutely no intention of beating last year’s time (3:50).

Continuing to cautiously ramp up mileage and longer runs. The heart rate monitor is returning better data now, after a new battery. Yesterday I logged 9.5 miles on the treadmill, at 9:00 pace. Taking out the warmup and cooldown, the HR data for the middle 80 minutes looks substantially better than a similar run a few weeks ago. I’m still starting out 10 points higher than my 2005 baseline, but I’m not getting the steeply increasing heart rate anymore, and it seems to be tracking about 10 points higher than the baseline all the way out now.

Some of the improvement is just adaptation to having resumed longer runs, but I’m starting to get some improvement in my breathing. It still doesn’t feel great, but it’s definitely not as bad as last month, and I’ve also stopped having random episodes of feeling out of breath while sitting at the computer.

It’s hard to gauge my current conditioning right now, but having the flatter, if elevated HR curves, is encouraging. I may try resuming a little bit of hill and T pace training if things stay like this, working from whatever VDOT seems to fit. The fallback plan will be to just continue on base building.

My goals for Big Sur emphasize having an enjoyable run, as opposed to going as fast as possible, although I’m still holding out hope for improvement over last year’s time (3:50:34). Last year I got beat by a 70-year-old (who turned out to be George Hirsch, founding publisher of Runners World).

I just signed up for the Big Sur Marathon again this evening.

This will be my 3rd time around. Here are my notes after last year’s run, which I finished in about 3:50.

One of the things I like about running marathons is there isn’t really any way to shortcut the preparation. In general you can’t just be athletically gifted and run a marathon course. At Big Sur this is even more true, due to the famously hilly course.