Running Notes by HJL

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.

Here’s a look at the past year’s weekly mileage (2006). Total miles for the year are roughly 1316, average of about 25 miles per week.

This hasn’t been a great running year for me. I’m still having chronic breathing problems, even after making the rounds over at the Palo Alto Clinic. The good news is that after pulmonary, cardiac, and CT exams, they’re pretty sure I don’t have any life threatening problems and my weight and blood pressure look great. The bad news is that while I’m technically “healthy”, my lung function is testing well below where I was a few years ago when I went in with allergy-related breathing problems. So I’ve been feeling relatively short of breath and sluggish all year, and there aren’t any obvious avenues of investigation to follow.

At the moment my easy/long workout pace is still around 10:00, and I’m starting to mix in some 9:00 pace as well to see how it works out. My legs turn over at higher paces without any problems, but I go anaerobic pretty quickly at anything above 7:30 now. This is generally discouraging since before this I was at 8:30 for easy workouts and 7:00 for weekly T runs. It looks like I may be stuck with these lower paces for the foreseeable future, though.

I ran Big Sur in April on my downward-adjusted target pace of around 10:00/mile, plus time for picture-taking stops. This was a “personal worst” for me, but I always enjoy the course and I got some nice photos.

For most of 2006 I’ve basically been in a holding pattern while investigating the mysterious breathing problem, just running enough to maintain a modest aerobic base and stay on a daily training routine. At least I’ve avoided gaining weight, despite the large reduction in weekly mileage since mid 2005. As of today I’m exactly flat for the year. I’m starting to rethink the plan for 2007 based on not seeing an improvement in my breathing and assuming that this may be a more or less permanent condition. Yuck.

Nike and Apple recently came out with the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, an accessory which turns an iPod Nano into a running training device. The main component is a small pod containing an accelerometer that attaches to your shoe and transmits sensor data back to an attachment on the iPod’s docking connector. Some Nike shoes apparently have a special pocket to insert the pod, but there is at least one hack for attaching the Nike+iPod sensor to non-Nike running shoes.

This week’s EE Times has a teardown showing how the pair of devices are put together. The retail price is only $30, and the sensor pod is sealed, meaning that when the lithium battery runs out you get a new pod. They apparently last for a while, though.

I don’t run much with an iPod lately, but if I switch to an iPod Nano at some point this might be an interesting running gadget to try out.

Logged another long run with hill intervals today, increasing the pace from 10:00 to 9:30 but staying with the 5% incline. The faster pace appears to have resulted in a 5-8 point increase in HR during the steady state portion of the run, ending up at around 145 compared with around 139. This is the longest run on this cycle

One of the reasons I like using the heart rate monitor and data recorder is to get a quantitative view of how training is going. The hill interval portion of the graph is more interesting to look at. Part of what I’m after at the moment is to get a better sense of what my current LT (lactate threshold) pace is.

One of the objectives for longer interval training is to improve the body’s ability to function in the presence of lactate. The higher level of effort raises the body’s energy demand beyond what can be generated through primarily aerobic metabolism, and the anaerobic systems become more important. The body’s aerobic energy systems are much more efficient than the anaerobic systems, but have a limited rate of energy release. Training for endurance sports, such as marathons or triathlons, focus on developing the body’s cardiovascular system to increase its aerobic capacity, and also on increasing the lactate threshold, which allows sustained physical effort at a higher, partially anaerobic level.

During incline or pace intervals, you’re moving the body’s energy production in and out of mostly aerobic and mostly anaerobic modes. It is important to select levels of effort that allow recovery to an aerobic effort and also pushes into the anerobic range, but without requiring one to stop. If you simply continued at an anaerobic level of effort, you’d have to stop fairly soon, but an interval workout allows you to spend more time training at a useful level of effort. The first few intervals typically feel easier than the last ones, but the goal is to find the level of effort is difficult but can be maintained. I usually try to do at least 3 repetitions.

The adaptation we’re after is an improvement in the body’s ability to buffer lactic acid. This increases the sustainable level of energy output for longer distances. If you spend too much time too anaerobic during an endurance event, you typically exhaust the readily available glycogen (”hitting the wall”, “bonking”) which is unpleasant and dramatically reduces the energy available to skeletal muscles. The LT pace corresponds to a level of effort that is faster than comfortable, can be sustained for an extended period of time (an hour or more), and if exceeded, would quickly require that you slow down to recover from O2 debt.

Part of my current planning challenge for this year’s Big Sur Marathon is that my physiological performance is very different (worse) than where it’s been over the past few years, so I don’t have a good sense of what my sustainable paces actually are. I also don’t have a clear sense of the root cause, other than some test data showing that my breathing is slightly off.

Based on today’s data, it also looks like I can hold 9:30 pace without any problems for two hours. The HR graph isn’t trending up, either, so I may already be able to manage 9:00 pace for two hours, especially if I’m not starting off with hills.

On this training cycle, so far I’m not having any sore muscles. All of my training issues (other than not breathing well) have been with mental fatigue and elevated HR. At my current level of O2 intake, I don’t think I’m pushing the muscles very hard. We’ll see what happens with longer runs and faster paces. Although allergy season is starting, I think the medication is helping more than the allergies are hurting.

Today I ran a set of hill intervals on the treadmill. I like running intervals on the treadmill since everything is completely repeatable and doesn’t depend on my ability to manage pace and effort. The data from the heart rate monitor is also relatively interesting to look at afterwards.

This is the first set of intervals I’ve run on this training cycle. I find it psychologically helpful to complete at least 2 miles of 5% incline (today I did 3 miles) on a hill day, as this roughly corresponds to the ascent at Hurricane Point, the longest hill on the Big Sur Marathon course.

I normally run my intervals for 5 minute duration, rather than by distance. For hill interval days, I pick an “easy” pace and only change the incline between 0% and something between 5% and 8%. Whether it’s hill intervals or pace intervals, I normally try to keep a fixed level of effort for each rep. A 5% incline seemed to work out ok today. Unfortunately, at the moment, my “easy” pace is around 10:00 instead of 9:00 or 8:30. Today that put my HR at around 135-140, while the last couple of hill intervals ended up close to 170.

I’m still baffled by my elevated HR compared with log data from past years, but at least I’m continuing to make progress on this training cycle.

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).

Here’s a look at last year’s weekly mileage (2005). The year started off pretty well, up through running Big Sur at the end of April. After that I spent much of the year doing more cross training instead of running, trying to get rid of some lingering aches which were gradually getting worse.

During the fall I usually run less lately until soccer season is over. This year I also picked up bronchitis or something which is still giving me problems around mid-October.

Looking back, I see I haven’t logged a full week of “normal” running since May 2005. On the plus side, my joints and ITB are all feeling pretty good, and I’ve kept up the cardio workouts on the elliptical, stairclimber, and rowing machines. So if I get some improvement on the breathing problem things look generally positive, and even if things stay the way they are now I can probably manage OK at Big Sur if I reset my paces slower.

At the moment I’ve dialed down my “easy” pace to somewhere between 10:00 per mile and a fast walk, which is enough to bring my HR up to low aerobic range. At this rate I may need the additional finishing time they’ve allowed this year before closing the course. They close Highway 1 to vehicle traffic to run the marathon, so there’s a hard stop after 6 hours, which is a 13:40 pace. Hopefully I can do better than that, even if I still can’t breathe properly by April.

The replacement for my old Timex data recorder arrived. I don’t have the Timex Trainer software loaded on this computer, I’m hoping there have been some bug fixes since the last time I tried it.

In my experience, the data recorder and software usually works pretty well, and is a great improvement over trying to log workout heart rates and paces manually. However…

I purchased my first data recorder shortly after they went on the market, having already gotten the Bodylink heart rate monitor and the predecessor Ironman GPS unit. At the time, both the hardware and software seemed a little buggy, but still pretty amazing for the price point, just over $50. The lack of user interface makes the data recorder a little challenging to use sometimes. There is a single button and a single LED which flashes timed patterns in red or green to indicate various conditions, which can be difficult to see in bright sunlight and can take a while to interpret. In particular, it’s easy to miss the red-and-green flash which indicates low battery, which soon leads to the unit shutting itself off.

The most unfortunate experience I had with the data recorder was using it at my first time running the Big Sur marathon and having the Timex Trainer software choke while uploading the 4 1/2 hours of data. I had the speed smoothing function turned on and I’m guessing that it hit an exception somewhere while chewing on missing or spurious location data. I was fairly annoyed about this, since I wanted the training data, and actually worked out the HR part of the data using the flash memory dump feature in the Timex software.

Hacking the data out of the firmware wasn’t my first choice, I actually contacted Timex to see if I could either have someone rescue the data from the memory dump or send some documentation so I could do it myself. I got as far as extracting the time and heart rate data, which was moderately useful in planning for the next time around.

There’s now a project on SourceForge, sponsored by Timex, which provides the logger.dll code used to interact with the data recorder over USB. I haven’t gotten around to trying it, partly because I haven’t had a data recorder for a while, so I may give it try sometime.

My notes on hacking the Timex data recorder are posted on the main blog in the running category:

• Hacking the Timex Bodylink, Part 1
• Hacking the Timex Bodylink, Part 2

1/1/2006 through 1/7/2006 totals: 24.36 miles, longest 7.36 miles.

Aside from the mysterious breathing problem, I’m still evaluating how things look for this training cycle, getting ready for Big Sur in April, and shifting back to more running and less cross training. I’ve been logging more time on the stairclimber, elliptical, and rowing machine for a while. Just trying to get into a marathon training mindset at the moment.

I find Jack Daniels’ VDOT tables useful for setting target training paces. These can also be used to identify a theoretical target time for events at different distances, based on equivalent level of effort and training. The general idea is to quantify how fast you can go for a given rate of oxygen (O2) uptake. Higher numbers are better.

Some of the physiological contributors to the training improvements:

• Increased mechanical efficiency as your form improves
• Increased heart stroke volume (chamber becomes larger and stronger)
• Increased lactate buffering capacity (lets you sustain near-anerobic pace longer)
• Increased capillarization (you develop more capillaries which get O2 in and CO2 out faster)

Unfortunately, your basic starting point is largely genetically determined, and there’s a limit how much improvement can be obtained through training.

My ability to gauge paces is slowly improving over the years, but I’m remarkably bad at “running by feel”, which is one of the reasons I tend to rely on instrumentation. I also find it difficult at times to tell how hard a “moderately hard” level of effort is, which is where a heart rate monitor can be useful.

Right now, it seems that I’m getting less oxygen in than normal. I’m guessing that my present state is around VDOT 35, based on an 8:00 mile. I’m currently running no faster than 9:00 pace for daily runs, and am mostly going slower than that to stay in the middle of aerobic training range. In comparison, last spring I was in the vicinity of VDOT 46, based on a 6:15 mile pace.

The big question mark at the moment is whether or not I’m going to be breathing properly reasonably soon. During the first few weeks of the training cycle I usually just try to build up the mileage and don’t worry about speed at all, so it doesn’t make much difference yet. I’m not too excited about actually running the event in this condition though.

There is a much longer discussion of the VDOT model in Jack Daniels’ Running Formula, which I highly recommend.

Since my training paces are all off due to the mysterious breathing problem, I’ve ordered a new data recorder to make tracking and logging heart rate and pacing data easier. I’ve been using the Timex Bodylink system since it came out, but haven’t been using a data recorder since last spring when the previous unit went missing somewhere in Maui.

They’re not perfect, but I like being able to compare one workout with another, especially during a training cycle, and even more so now, when none of my usual training paces yield the expected level of effort.