2006 - Year in review

I hope everyone's holidays went (are going) well. I realized that I have a whole 4 blog posts for the month of December. Not good.

Christmas was fine though it was the first time in a few years that we didn't have a white Christmas, so that kinda sucked. No running related gifts this year, though I wasn't expecting any. Normally, we would have the week off between Christmas and New Years but I have a lot of deadlines in January so I ended up going into work, starting on the 26th. With very few people being around, I thought I'd try and see how much of a beard I could grow. That's a weeks worth of growth. Yeah pretty pathetic. I shaved it off yesterday.

Well i squeezed in 40 miles this week which is what I was hoping to get back to by the end of the year. Almost all of it again at low HR. I haven't been able to successfully keep track of my pace at low HR cause it seems to fluctuate a lot. Today I did 13 miles and my three lap track test had me at a pace of 9:22@ a HR of 150. About a month ago, I was able to do a pace of 9:06 @ 150. Earlier in the week I was just under 10 min/miles for that test, though I'm sure that the Christmas gorging had something to do with that.

As for the year 2006, I managed 1864.9 miles for the year which included 2 marathons, a half marathon, a 30k, three 10k's, and a 5k. I'm quite happy with the progress made this year, being able to set PR's in all the distances on pretty much nothing but marathon training. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to top this mileage in 2007 though, as I found I had very little spare time.

What does 2007 bring? I'd like to try and BQ but I haven't quite decided when the attempt will be. I've pretty much decided on doing a spring marathon on May 13th that will either be Mississauga or Forest City. Not sure which one yet. I'll have to see how the training goes. If I think I have a realistic shot at achieving my BQ time, then I'll do Mississauga which is net downhill and I've run previously, otherwise I'll do the other one. I also plan on a fall marathon, but haven't figured out where yet. It will really depend on whether I can BQ in the spring. I'd also like to meet some goals for the shorter distances,. Ideally ones that match my BQ time according to McMillan or Daniels Vdot tables.The Vdot tables are a bit more conservative for predicting times for shorter distances based on a longer distance so I'll go with them.

2007 goals

3:10:59 - marathon (BQ)
1:31:41 - half-marathon
41:24 - 10km
sub 20 min - 5km

So there it is. I hope everyone's holidays went well and that January 1st will bring you all a prosperous new year and faster race times!

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Festivus

I wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a festive seasonal greeting.

Some presents for you all:

1) I know some of you are or thinking of doing Pfitz' plan. I download these spreeadshets a while back that have the pfitz plans all laid out with some general guidelines of paces. Since the original site where I got it from no longer appears to have it, I thought I'd post it here. Pfitz' plan

2) For the voyeur in you.
The Toronto Santa Speedo Run

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbbO9LtZlOM

You can see more at http://www.torontosantaspeedorun.com/id10.html

3) Lastly, I thought I'd share my Chicago m'thon dvvd with you all in case anyone was thinking of buying theirs and wanted to know what it looked like or if you're just generally looking for some inspiration for next year. It's very similar to the one that's on the website and in fact I think they recycled the background cheering from last year, but still inspirational. It can be accessed here.

Insert Interesting Title Here.

Okay, so i've been a bad blogger. I haven't posted in over a week and though I've been reading off and on other blogs, I haven't commented on any. The only reason is I came out of the woodwork is because I was tagged by Kristi. Weird game. I'm suppose to:

1. Find the nearest book.
2. Name the book & the author.
3. Turn to page 123.
4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
5. Tag three more folks.

1) Nearest book has been sitting on my nightstand for the past 6 months which I haven't touched in a long while

2)"Reason for Hope, a Spiritual Journey" by Jane Goodall with Phillip Berman.

3) Okay

4) Problem. Page 123 is the last page of a chapter and there are barely 6 lines on the page, let alone 8 sentences. This is from page 122.
"And many scientific experiments have shown that aggressive patterns, at the very least, are easy to learn. In the early 1970s, when I was an associate professor at Stanford, the psychiatrist Robert Bindora was conducting an experiment to test how readily small children learned aggressive patterns. He produced a dummy human figure, set it in front of a group of kids between two and three years old, then proceeded to beat, pummel, punch, stamp on and kick it.

5) I'm not sure who to tag since I'm uncertain who will actually read this, but I'll go with Mike, Steve and Perry. If anyone else wants to get into the game, consider yourself tagged.

Oh yeah I did a little over 30 miles of running, though not all of it at recovery HR. I did some of it at LSD HR. I did 9 miles yesterday and will try to get in another 9 miles tomorrow. I hope to get to 40 miles next week.

Good running to all and thanks for reading.

Low mileage week

Just a quick update. I did 9 miles on Tuesday last week and 3 miles yesterday for a whopping grand total of 12 miles last week. That's the lowest mileage week I've done since I came down with the flu in March and skipped a week.

I wanted to do a longer run today and the weather was nice, but I gave blood on Thursday and found that the 3 miler yesterday was real hard. I couldn't drag myself out of bed this morning and ended up skipping it.

My computer crashed last week and wouldn't boot at all. I ended up having to reinstall everything which included my RSS reeder. While waiting for things to reinstall, I discovered the Google RSS reader which I think is a little better than Bloglines.

More slow running

Did 37 miles last week, all at recovery pace trying to keep the HR below 150. Did a little over 9 miles each on Tuesday and Thursday, did 6 miles on Saturday and did a 13 mile long run yesterday. Weather was pretty good. Last Thursday was downright balmy when I ran outside in shorts and a t-shirt for what will probably be the last time this year.

I'm going to try and track how much I improve running slow. Each week, I will run three laps around a local track trying to keep my HR at just under 150 and figure out what my avg pace was. During my long run this week, I did it 3 times and generated this neat graph of pace vs. HR. (I finally get to use my engineering graphing skills). pretty good correlation between the three paces. Don't know how extrapolatable it is, but if I plug in my recent marathon pace, I get a HR of 170 which is just about right of what it should be, so maybe it's a good predictor. Anyways, it predicts a pace of 9:06 at 150. I was hoping to get that down to 8:30, but that seems like too much of a stretch in 2 months. I will be happy if I can get it to 8:45.

It's also about time for me to donate blood again. I try to do it twice a year. The last time I did it, my runs sucked for about 2-3 weeks. If I do it this week, I should be recovered in time for the new year.