Running Notes by HJL

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.

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).

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.

Here’s a comparison of today’s 60 minute treadmill run with an identical workout a year ago.

I haven’t been having very good workouts for quite a while, mostly going back to a round of something like bronchitis back in October. It was sort of like the flu, then got better, but never completely cleared out. I’m fine sitting around in the office, but in general I haven’t been breathing right for a while. My resting heart rate is 10-15 points high, and I feel like I’m running uphill or at altitude all the time.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have any “acute” medical symptoms either. I finally made an appointment to see a doctor last week, explaining it to the appointment desk as a followup to the bronchitis back in October. He seemed a bit puzzled about why I was there at first, since I look perfectly healthy and my vital signs look pretty typical. The health care system isn’t really set up for “consultative” visits, but one piece of data that turned up was that my peak flow rate for breathing is down about 25% compared with a visit a couple of years ago. (I had come in with a lingering cough and chest congestion after a trip to Beijing, which has notoriously bad air, so I wasn’t breathing very well then either.)

Apparently, my current peak flow rate is reduced even further than that, which partially explains why I’m fine sitting around at the desk and why my normal easy aerobic paces are driving my heart rate up into LT-training range.

I’m doing various tests to get a better handle on how to address this. They mentioned that I could try an asthma inhaler, but I wanted to understand what’s going on before throwing medication at it, since I haven’t had any problems before other than seasonal allergies. In the meantime, I’m sort of an odd bird in the pulmonary lab, since although I feel crummy, my blood O2 is fine, my peak flow rate is still within “normal” ranges, and my spirometer test (lung capacity) is apparently still well above “normal”.

I’m going ahead with training for Big Sur, based on the fact that nothing major seems to be wrong, and the doctor seems confident that at worst we could treat it with an inhaler. In the meantime, I think I’m going to treat this a little like training at altitude, and dial down the paces and intensity so I don’t spend all my training time in high aerobic or LT ranges.