Wonderland Lake run

It's a beautiful day, and this morning I went out for an easy run on the trails behind my house in North Boulder. The Wonderland Lake Loop is one of my old standbies. Head south on the Foothills Trail, take the loop around the lake, and come back. It's all on well-maintained dirt trails, and it's relatively flat by Boulder standards.

I brought a camera today and stopped often for photographs. Here's a nice view of Green Mountain, Bear Peak, and the Flatirons.

P-daddy-dawg hanging out while his two baby p-dawgs play an engaging game of patty cakes behind him.

Wonderland Lake.

Mt. Sanitas from the lake.

There were tons of paragliders out today. I think they were part of a beginner's class.

Run summary: 4.0 miles in 36:19 (9:05 per mile).

Tomorrow is the big day!

Taper Week Update

It's been a pretty easy week for me. I ran a shorter long run on Sunday, and I've done some easier track workouts in the days since. Here's a quick summary of my most recent runs:

Sunday: Easy long run on the creek path. Total: 9.1 miles in 1:17:02 (8:27 pace).

Tuesday: 4x400 at 10k goal pace (around 96 seconds). This was an easy workout meant to keep the legs moving and solidify my goal pace. I ended up running these in 93.5, 94.2, 94.7, and 95.6 seconds. Although I got slower between the first and last intervals, this was a deliberate effort to hone in on the proper pace. Total for the day: 4.3 miles in 33:08 (average pace 7:42).

Wednesday: 4.1 miles easy, with 5x100m strides. Total time 32:55 (8:01 pace).

Friday (today): 8x100 at a quick pace. I thought I would run these in about 20 seconds, but my slowest turned out to be 18.8 seconds, and the fastest was 16.9. They felt pretty good, but that's the fastest running I've done all year. Hopefully it won't hurt my taper! Total for the day: 4.2 miles in 39:28 (average pace 9:23, although that counts some non-running time between reps).

Weekly total: 21.7 miles

Interesting thing spotted on the run

On Tuesday I saw a couple guys on the tennis court playing a new sport, a "mash-up" of soccer and tennis. It was played with a soccer ball and no hands (just like soccer). One guy would serve by dropping the ball and then kicking it over the net. The other guy had to kick it back before it bounced twice, which usually meant catching it with his feet and dribbling the ball (is that the right term?) a few times before kicking it back. They were keeping score and everything. Pretty cool!

Weekend plans

Saturday I'll be helping my friend Mark celebrate his 40th birthday. Like most Boulderites who've reached that distinctive age, you'd never know it. Earlier in the day, I'm hoping to borrow a friend's kayak and take a few runs on Boulder Creek. I'm planning to sign up for the Ultimate Mountain Challenge at the Teva Mountain Games in Vail. It's coming up next weekend and I really should do some paddling (and mountain biking, and road biking) before this 4-stage race. Sunday I'll go for an easy 3-4 mile run and probably check out the Boulder Creek Festival a little bit. And Monday...well, that's the Bolder Boulder, of course (the whole focus of this blog)!

Why I still think I can do it

I'm obviously happy about Tuesday's race, but here's the deal. My 19:47 5k result predicts a 41-minute 10k. That's still a long ways away from a sub-40. Some would say a really long ways.

Why am I still optimistic? Good question. Here are my reasons (to steal from something I already posted on the Coolrunning forums):

• I wasn't tapered for Tuesday's race. I will be tapered at the Bolder Boulder.
• Temperatures will almost certainly be cooler (and thus faster) at the Bolder Boulder, which has a 7 AM start.
• I paced poorly at Tuesday's race. With better pacing I could hope to run a 19:30(?) on my current fitness.
• I still have almost three weeks before my goal race. By then, the workouts I'm doing right now will be transformed into better fitness. That's the idea, at least!
• I've always suspected the course from Tuesday's 5k is slow, due to the dirt/gravel surface. In 2005 I raced three times on this course, finishing in 21:15, 20:55, and 20:44. That would have predicted a 43-minute 10k, but in fact I ran 40:39 at the Bolder Boulder two weeks later. My 5k splits in the race were 20:19 and 20:20, both faster than any of my 5k races on the dirt course.

Instead of giving up after consulting various race predictors on the internet, I'm just gonna ignore them. After all, those charts don't run the race FOR you!

Today's Run

Another quality workout today. 5000 meters at tempo pace on the track (6:47 per mile). Funny, the schedule called for a 20-minute tempo run, so I was going to do 4800 meters. But why not just go an extra 200 for the full 5k, I thought? I came in at 21:03, running pretty even splits the whole way, and never feeling stressed. Nice. That beat my 5k result from last month, and this time I was running at tempo, not race pace. To be honest, conditions were much worse at the race in April, so it's probably not a good comparison.

I followed that by 4x200 at R-pace. My rep pace is supposed to be 42-43 seconds per 200. Somehow I have trouble hitting that. I'm always afraid I'll be too slow, so I keep the pace high and come in too fast. I finished the 200s at 40.0, 41.1, 41.0, and 41.1. At least I stayed pretty consistent.

Today's totals: 7.2 miles in 1:02:47, including 5km at T-pace and 4x200 at R-pace.

Interesting thing -- on my way to the track, I found the creek path blocked off with police tape. They had shut down the entire high school due to suspected terrorist activities. It turns out a cafeteria worker had seen two guys dressed in camo and ski masks this morning, so police were being very cautious and checking things out thoroughly. I had to run way around to finally get to the track, and all the students got the day off of school, but so far it looks like that's the extent of the incident. Sign of the times, I guess.

Coffee...It makes you poo

Sorry to be so crass, but it's the truth.

I stopped in at Vic's Coffee this morning to discuss next week's trip to Costa Rica with a couple of friends (yes, that's right -- I'm going for 8 days and I'm psyched about it!). We came up with a basic game plan that includes volcanoes, jungles, beaches, and surf. I had a nice big cup of Vic's trademark joe, and I must say it did wonders for my digestive system throughout the morning. As someone who started regularly drinking coffee just recently, this well-known effect is somewhat new to me.

Since I did a 5k time trial on Sunday instead of my long run, I decided to swap the week around and do my 10-mile long run today. I felt light and ready as I hit the path, and the first few miles felt easy and went by quickly. I was determined to just enjoy the run today. It was beautiful, sunny, and 55 degrees out. The birds were chirping, the trees were blooming, and half of Boulder was on the creek path enjoying it all.

Somewhere around mile 4 or 5, my legs started feeling more and more fatigued. My paced slowed, until I felt like I was creeping along. I made a game-day decision to skip my usual striders. My legs just didn't feel up to it. After my turn-around point at the top of Eben Fine Park, I slowly started to feel better. By the end of the run, I was back to my usual pace.

But, my legs are tired, there's no doubt about it. When I finished my run, I had a very strange sensation. Have you ever played that game where you stand in a doorway and push your arms up against the sides of the door frame for one minute, then step away? Your arms feel like they are holding themselves up, like they are floating. Well, when I stopped running and walked for a little, my legs felt like they were moving forward on their own. Weird!

Today's stats: 10 miles, 1:25:09, 8:30 pace.

By the way, looking at the elevation profile of today's run, I think I know why I felt good at the start, progressively worse in the middle, and better at the finish. See if you can guess...

Things spotted on the run:

• A clothesline full of clothes hanging to dry, complete with bike shorts and bike jerseys (that's Boulder for you)
• A mean-looking rottweiler back from a recent trip to the vet; it had a green full-leg cast decorated with delicate pink flowers
• A cat-sized wooden raft on the banks of Boulder Creek (I have no idea if it was built for cats, but it did remind me of the time my brothers and I put our cat on a raft and sent it down the creek, much to its dismay)

The training program

I'm going to be tweaking the program over the next few weeks. I'm taking a couple suggestions to heart, and thus I plan to a) gradually increase the length of my long runs, and b) take some rest weeks. The Costa Rica trip is going to be a rest week for me. I'll run some, but maybe only 15-20 miles. I think I can use the rest.

Sunday Long Run

I feel kind of funny calling today's jaunt a "long run," but for me, ten miles is a few miles longer than average. With my low mileage, a 10-mile run accounts for one-third of my entire week's mileage. Plus, today's run took an hour and 43 minutes. That's long enough for me, at this point!

The ground had dried a bit, but unfortunately I still had to battle a lot of mud. I started with the same loop as yesterday -- out the Eagle and Sage trails, and then north on the Left Hand singletrack. Across Route 36, I ran home on the Beech Trail, a lesser-known but excellent narrow trail that is both flat and in the foothills. That combination makes the Beech Trail one-of-a-kind in Boulder, as far as I know.

I had a few minutes of excitement a couple miles from home. A passing runner warned about a rattlesnake up ahead. Sure enough, just around the bend I heard the telltale rattle coming from underneath a rock beside the trail. Try as I might, I just couldn't spot the thing, and I wasn't about to poke around under the rock. Although I know the Front Range has lots of rattlesnakes, I can think of only one that I've seen in the nine years I've lived here. Today's incident doesn't count.

I added six strides to the run, but overall I felt fairly tired and slow. My average of just over 10-minute miles confirms that fact. I didn't mind, though, as the bike ride I'd done earlier provided a great excuse to run slowly. Tomorrow is a day off.

Strides

I've added strides to my runs the last couple of weeks, based on Jack Daniels' advice. Strides are "20- to 30-second runs at comfortably-fast pace using light, quick turnover," or (if you're later in your base-building phase), "20- to 30-second runs with 1-minute rests at about mile race pace," according to Daniels.

I found an even better description of strides in this coolrunning post by KudzuRunner:

One way of thinking about strides is as those showoffy spurts that runners put on for other runners in the 7-10 minutes before any road race--racing away from the line for 10-15 seconds, then petering to a stop, slowly wheeling around. Those are strides.

The best time to introduce them into your menu of runs is NOT on race day, but several times a week in the several months before race day. But that's pretty much what they look like.

The key, I've found, is to warm slowly into them. Let's say that my 5K race pace is 6:20 and my half marathon pace is 7:00. (As they are, pretty much.) I'm going to run my first stride of the day no faster than HM pace. The second, with the same effort, is going to come in close to 10K pace. The third, same effort, will smoothly approach 5K pace. At that point, on my fourth, I can smoothly--and the operative word is "smoothly"--accelerate to 6:00 pace and below.

That's where I want to be running my strides, given my race paces--sub-6:00--but if I started there, on the very first one, I'd almost certainly feel clunky. The whole point of strides is to consolidate your stride. They should leave you feeling completely in control at whatever pace you run them. Over time, if you do them several times a week, you can begin to test your limits.

I run strides of up to 30 seconds, BTW. They're supposed to be alactic--no oxygen debt incurred--and it's hard to run fast much beyond 30 seconds, I've found, without doing that.

The point of strides is to improve running economy at higher speeds, and to prepare your body for the next phase of training. For me, the next phase of training will involve a lot of repetition work, but more on that later...

I had a good run today, 6 miles at just under 8-minute pace. That's a bit fast for me on my 'easy' runs. It was sunny and just about perfect at 63 degrees. I did six strides, widely spaced out for full recovery, and they felt pretty good, but not great. Both my left quad and left achilles tendon are a bit sore right now.

The most interesting thing I saw on the run today was a dad with a baby stroller, pulled over at the side of the bike path by a cop, who appeared to be writing him a ticket! I have no idea if he was in trouble for anything, but I had to laugh because that's just what it looked like.

This weekend I'm off to Moab, Utah. I'm not going to run the spectacular Canyonlands Half Marathon, as you might suspect. Instead, I'll be mountain biking. It should be great fun, as always.