Week 1 of Marathon Training

So here I go again.  Week 1 of an 18 week training plan starts this week to prep for a first week of May marathon. Some updates. I've been building up the mileage for a bit and should be okay starting the trianing though I haven't done any extensive LT work so the first run which is supposed to include 4 miles at LT pace might be a bit of a wake-up call.  Have been pretty good with the build-up of mileage until this week where I've been eating nothing but turkey leftovers for the past 4 days.  Finally done and now I can get back to some normal food. 

I still haven't gone in for a follow-up to do my ECG, because it's quite weird as I haven't had the HR problem crop up for the past few weeks until yesterday.  I'm starting to think there's a mental component to this since when I don't seem to care whether the HR spikes, it doesn't, but when I start to think about it, it does.  It could also be because I'm getting more sleep these days, so that's something new.  In fact, these past two weeks, I think have been the longest I've gone in the past year without the HR spiking issues which is a good sign.

I've been giving some serious thoughts to buying a new GPS watch.  While my current one is fine,  I've really been eyeing the Polar M400 which is currently 20% and is just over $200 and comes with a HR monitor strap.  It now has lap pace and will display the HR when it's paused which are two things that my current watch doesn't do and annoys me to no end.  As an additional benefit, it also functions as a fitness tracker if you're willing to wear it all day and sleep with it.  It also syncs wirelessly with your phone.   I'm sort of on the fence about buying it since it appears that's it's still a bit buggy and the GPS performance isn't getting good reviews and it doesn't work with android phones yet. They say that updates to the firmware and software are coming, but I've been fooled by the "Give us your money now and we'll fix it later" line from some tech companies when they don't ever both fixing anything so I'll wait and see. The fitness tracker thing is interesting, but I'm more inclined to wait for the Fitbit Charge HR which looks like it's going to be launced towards the end of January where it will track HR all day long. I'm certainly looking at buying one of those.

30 Days 30 Posts, kinda

Made it through to the end, with a few days of cheating, but hey I've posted more in the past 30 days than I have in the past 4 years so you take the good with the bad.   I won't be as prolific now that it's over, but at least there won't be any more cat videos.

I've spent some time trying to decide what races I want to do next year.  Think I will stay local and either do the Mississauga or Toronto marathon next year (May 3).  Learning towards doing Around the Bay 30k (March 29) and may do Harry's 8k, but that's the week after ATB so may not be in shape to do that.  Also looking at the Chilly Half (March 1), but I think that will be a week before decision depending on the weather.  There's also an MEC race on April 12 which I will probably do as well cause it's cheap. 

All this of course means that training starts the last week of December so I have to try and get my mileage built up prior to then and find a gym hopefully to get me through parts of the winter.  It's on!

Getting More Zzzzz.

So I've decided to try and do some experimentation on this HR thing and the first thing I"m going to try is to make a concerted effort to  get more sleep.  I'm already off to a bad start today since it's just before midnight, but I'll start tomorrow, I swear.  Going to aim for at least 7 hours and maybe 8. Going to try for a week and see if the HR thing improves.  Again, it's a bit random, so I have no idea if there's a one to one correlation, but I suppose that's what the experimentation is for. 

As a footnote on the fitness trackers, most are able to keep track of how well you sleep and try and estimate how much deep sleep and REM sleep you get which would be helpful I suppose.  I don't have a fitness tracker yet, but I found an app for my phone which does something similar.  You turn it on and put it beside you as you sleep and it uses the accelerometer in the phone to detect movement and the phone tries to wake you up when you're in the lightest phase of sleep.  It has a two week trial before you have to pay so I guess that should be enough time to get a feel for how well it works.  It seems to have gotten pretty good reviews so I'm hoping for the best.

Fitness Band

It seems that fitness bands are all the rage these days.  With Apple coming out with their watch, I suppose it's becoming the new next big thing, being able to monitor your daily physical activity.  These things are little bands you wear on you wrist that have motion sensors in them and monitor your  physical activity and sleep patterns. Lately, they've been coming out with newer ones that can track your heart rate as well, but don't require a chest strap.  They have a little optical sensor and light that detects minor changes in your skin which represent your pulse.   Looks interesting. I'd love to know how well they work though.  Fitbit who I guess are probably the leaders in this area have the new FitBit charge HR which I'd like to try, but it seems it won't be out till the new year.  Bad marketing as I'm sure they'll be missing out on the big sales prior to Christmas.

Getting heavier

Stepped on the scale this morning. 149.5 pounds. A month ago, prior to race day I was hovering around 144. Yikes. Need to go on a diet, or at least run more or at least stop buying Costco packs of snacks.

I think I pulled a muscle in my hamstring on Wednesday. It was right after a run and I bent down to pick up a branch that was on the sidewalk and my left hamstring just sort of tightening up or cramped or something. It's a bit sore now.  I think it has something to do with weak hamstrings.  It kinda feels the sames as it did in New York last year which at the time I attributed to not running and the muscles starting to detrain a bit.  With the reduced mileage and only 3 days of running a week, I think I may be suffering the same problems.  Hopefully, it won't get worse and I can baby it for the next few weeks.

Polar Running Index

Yippe, a non-back dated post!

I'm going to get a bit technical now.  I run with the Polar RC3 GPS running watch.  When I finish my run and hit stop, it reports something called a Running Index.  This is supposed to estimate your level of fitness based on the pace and HR during the course of the run.  Over time, the number gradually increases as you get fitter, so I thought it would be interested to see how well it is able to judge running performance based on my training.  

For some basic info and a cheesy youtube video, you can find more about the Index at Polar's site.

Basically the Running Index is supposed to be able to predict your level of fitness and race times. From what I'm able to gather, it takes your max HR that you enter and uses your HR data and pace data from a run, figures out where on the sliding scale of your HR that you are at and then tries to extrapolate what pace you would be able to run at a percentage of your HR max that is indicative of various race distances.  Sounds good in theory.  The polar website I linked to has a table of estimated race times for a given Index.

So what Running Index am I at? Well that's hard to say.  See, the HR issue I occasional have really screws up the Running Index calculation since my regular maximum heart rate is probably around 187 I'm guessing which is what my watch uses to calculate the number.  The problem is when my HR spikes it sometimes gets to that number even when I'm running relatively slow and sometimes goes even higher than that.  For an example, the marathon I ran where I encountered the HR spiking issue for almost half the race, calculated an index of  46 which according to the above table means I should have run the marathon in 4:24, but the run that was used to calculate that number was actually a marathon itself that I did in 3:25. So runs with the HR spiking can't be used.

Also, relatively short runs also don't estimate the Running Index accurately. For example, the 5k race I did back in September where I ran 3.18 miles in 20:46 gave me an Index of 54 (even though my HR didn't spike) which means I should have run the distance in 23:20, again not correct.  This I can kinda forgive though.  From what I understand, the watch doesn't start analyzing your data until the 12 minute mark of the run. I guess it's to allow a warm up so the watch only had about 8-9 minutes of data to work with. It doesn't know that I already ran 12 minutes at a faster pace so it assumes that since I'm at or near my max and that I only ran at that pace for 8-9 minutes that I couldn't sustain that for another 10 so it underestimates my performance.

On the other hand, slow recovery runs tend to overestimate the Index. The highest index I saw this training cycle was 66 which was obtained on a 5.1 mile recovery run two days before the marathon where I averaged 8:52 min/mile pace.  On a longer run back in September, I was able to get a 65 on an 11 mile run where I averaged 9:00 min/mile. These predict a 3:05 marathon. Yeah, not happening.

So the best combination is to find a moderately long run at a slightly fastish pace and see what Index was calculated from that.  Marathon pace long runs would have been perfect for that, but all of my marathon pace runs suffered from HR spiking issues (foreshadowing of race day, I suppose) and so the Index predicted from those is fairly low. The best run I could find that fit the bill was an LT run that was done as part of a 14 miler. This was done back on August 20th where I averaged 7:57 min/mile pace for the whole run with 7 miles done at 7 min/mile pace. This resulted in an index of 60 which predicted a marathon time of 3:20.  Now considering that this was done two months before race day, it's probably about right as I felt I could have done at least 3:20 if not for the HR issues on race day and of course I was aiming for 3:15 which I think was doable.

My runs lately have me at a running index of  55 which is probably due to the fact that I donated blood a few weeks ago, have put on a few pounds and am doing low mileage.  I think I'm going to try tracking this a bit more closely going forward.  At least I'll now have a point of reference for future training.

NaBloPoMo Cat Video

I'm running on empty here so here's a cat video. Warning. It's 25 minutes long.

Pan Am Games

So in a little under 8 months, Toronto will be hosting the Pan Am Games.  Today, they announced they would convert some of the lanes of the highways into High Occupancy Lanes reserved for only a select few.  As much as I would love to see the games run smoothly, I think it's going to end up being a major clusterfu?k for traffic and getting around.  Traffic is bad enough as it is now. Can't wait till they start closing down streets downtown. 

I thought about getting some tickets to events, but I have a high suspicion that tickets will become cheaper as the events grow nearer.  The truth is that Toronto is very much an apathetic town when it comes to sports. There are people that will support the Leafs, but will support the other sports teams only when they are winning. I suspect that in an effort to fill half empty buildings, the tickets prices will have to come down eventually. Not that the tickets are that expensive, but it's hard to get an idea of what tickets will be good to have.  It's not like deciding you want to watch the gold medal hockey game at the Olympics.

They put out a commercial trying to excite the local populace about the event.  Nice production values.  Song is kinda catchy, but it does get annoying after awhile.

HR issue revisited

So getting back to the tachycardia HR issue. I've spent some time googling around trying to see if anyone else has had these types of problems. Salty is a fastish runner who has blogged about the matter with her and went so far as having the ablation procedure performed as did the Vegan Heart Doctor. There is also a tumblr thread on the issue. Other discussion threads I've found that talk about the issue are at:

http://www.patient.co.uk/forums/discuss/supraventricular-tachycardia-and-exercise--216514, http://www.firehouse.com/forums/t85631/,
http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/forum/health--injury/paroxysmal-supra-ventricular-tachycardia-svt/140810.html.
http://www.medhelp.org/posts/Heart-Disease/Bradycardia-and-exercise-induced-Tachycardia/show/254634,
http://forums.bicycling.com/topic/54635607120706496
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=2819298 
http://www.steadyhealth.com/Exercise_and_SVT_t124733.html
http://www.coolrunning.com.au/forums/?showtopic=32248

So it seems that this happens to a lot of people.  As for my trip to the GP, I have to wait for some blood tests before I get a referral and I have to wait a bit to do that in light of the blood donation a few weeks ago.  I ended up trying a new GP. My previous one moved his practice out of the city so I'm trying a new family doctor. I'm not so confident of the guy. He's about 50 and new to the city and country and is originally from Iran and only received his Canadian license in the past year, but has been a doctor in Iran for over 20 years. He's at least got some experience so I don't really have an issue with that. What kinda bothered me was the clinic he was working in is computerized and while typing my history into the computer, he would do the one finger pecking thing on the keyboard.  In this day and age, a part of me doesn't quite trust someone with today's modern medical technology who can't type without looking at the keyboard.

In any event, he wanted to do a normal ECG reading and if that didn't show anything, he wants to do a 24 hour monitor which I suppose is what I was actually hoping he would want to do in the end, so maybe he won't be that bad.

Warming up

Another back dated post.  I'll try to remain on schedule. There's only about a week to go.   You may get some youtube cat video posts though.  So after some winter, it's warmed up to about 10C which is normally shorts and a t-shirt weather, but I find that I get weird looks when I go out like that in the colder months, even if the temperature says it should be so.  Knee length shorts and a long-sleeved T. 

I've started to notice some little aches in my legs, probably due to me not stretching and the lack of core and leg strength work.  I'm going to have to start that back up again. I also have a Bosu Ball that I purchased about 7 years ago that has been sitting in the closet for a while.  Back then, it was all the rage and ridiculously expensive for what it was, half a stability ball on a plastic base.  Supposed to help you utilize your stabilizing muscles which makes you stronger.  The thing is I never actually knew how to use it.  I could do squats on it and push ups, but didn't really feel that it was doing much and wasn't sure what else I should use it for.  That's all changed with the advent of youtube.  Do a search on Youtube for Bosu Ball and there are a ton of hits for various exercises. In fact, you can do a search for any fitness related thing and you'll find something about it.   Handstand running? That's out there. Bellyflop diving? Yes. Triatholon Juggling? Yep. In fact, I thought about the craziest running related thing I could think of, putting lipstick on while running and guess what? That's out there too.  In fact, she puts on all her make-up while running.





Weird, eh?

Whopps

Whoops. I slipped off the NaBloPoMo bandwagon so I'm going to cheat and back date this post. So had the first few winter type runs this past week where it's was below zero and there was snow on the ground.  Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. So maybe I won't need a gym membership.  But it's still early and we haven't received any of that -20C garbage that we got last year.  Also, we didn't get that 6 feet of snow that Buffalo appears to be digging out of. Even though we're farther north than they are, they seem to get far more snow than we do.  They call it lake effect snow where cold arctic air blows south over Lake Ontario and picks up moisture that gets dumped when it encounters land. 

In regards to running, I'm trying to get maintenance miles in and trying to decide what races to do next year. There are the usual suspects for spring marathons here in Toronto, Mississauga and the Toronto one.  I'm also thinking of Around the Bay 30k and Harry's 8k race. Also I'm intrigued by the MEC race series, which offers no frills chip timed races. No shirt, no medal, no high fees. Typical race fees are $15.  May try a few of these next year.

A loser again.

So didn't get in to the Berlin marathon.  That's three times a failure for New York, (getting automatically on the fourth), and one failure each for Berlin, London and Tokyo.  Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket.  My luck's got to change eventually.  Now, the question is whether to try and go for a tour for either.

Cadence Revisited

Ran outside in what I would call the first winter run of the season. -8C, some snow and some ice on the ground. Wasn't too bad.  Noticed that my cadence rate was still above 90/min even though I was running relatively slow and more importantly not while I was thinking about it.  It could also be that the fact that I was counting the rates subconsciously forced me to increase my cadence. Not sure.  I'll try the footpod thing again and get some more info. 

In other news, I'm waiting on results from the Berlin marathon lottery.  I had applied for the Tokyo  one in February earlier and didn't get in and now applied for the Berlin one and the results are supposed to start coming out tomorrow.  I was hoping to find out about the Berlin results and then if I didn't get in, I was going to think about doing Tokyo through a tour group, but there appears to be a waiting list for that now so that's a no go. Maybe that's for the best though and I would probably should have already started training for that if that were going to happen.

Snowy Day Aborted

So first potential running day of winter was a fail.  It was too windy this morning and there was snow on the ground.  Had intended to do it in the evening, but it was still too windy and cold.  I know I just have to force myself out there eventually and deal with it.  Excuse I gave was that I got the flu shot on Monday and I need time to let my immune system do it's thing.  Maybe, (probably) tomorrow when there's expected to be more snow. 

Snowy Day

Winter's a coming. It toyed with us a bit on Sunday dropping a few flakes that didn't stick. Today was a bit more and some of it covered the ground and partially melted.  It's supposed to get cold overnight so depending on how many people bothered to shovel their sidewalks, running tomorrow might be a bit dicey.  Guess the winter running's got to start sometime, even though it still won't be technically winter for another month. 

I've started giving some thought to gym memberships again with perhaps signing up but only if I can do so for the winter months.  I have no interest is signing a year contract, knowing full well that come April I will never set foot in the gym again till next winter.  My workplace has a gym that also requires a membership fee, but it's pretty cheap. I think it's about $15 a month and you can sign up by quarter.  It's not a big gym, but it has fitness classes and all the equipment you need. It's just that they don't have that many treadmills and there's a 30 minute limit.  Almost no one uses it after hours, even though it's technically open 24/7 so I suppose anyone can use it for however long you want assuming no one else is waiting in line.  It's just it's a bit far for me to go to do a long run there on a Sunday and I'm sure it would feel kinda weird going into work on Sunday, not to work. 

There are some no frill gyms around me so I may try and see what they're like rather than go to the more established, chain type gyms or I could just suck it up and force myself to run outside come hell, high water or the next ice age.

HR Issue

So I thought I would write a post about the HR issue in more detail in case people are googleing around finding similar symptoms.

The marathon has had me thinking a lot more about the HR issue now.  It's always been something I worried about, but it obviously hasn't caused me serious harm to date, but that's not to say that it won't.  I've read about Ryan Shay and Danny Kassap who were both high level professional marathoners who collapsed during races due to the heart issues and would later die. In fact, I heard that someone collapsed 10m from the finish line at the Hamilton half marathon and that the individual was an experienced runner who also died. Part of me worries that I might suffer the same fate.

The technical medical term for this phenomenon is a tachycardia and depending on what is causing it can mean it's extremely dangerous or just annoying.  

When it happens to me, I barely notice and most of the time, I only know because the HR display on my watch is telling me. The polar info I posted during my race report is one example, here's a better more clear example from a run.  This was from a  8 mile run that included 3x1600m interval session I did back in October.

It actually happened twice during this run.  It happened near the start, about 6 or so minutes in during the warmup when the HR (red line) jumps from a little over 125 to over 150, I ran with it like this for a few minutes and then started to walk when it then comes back down on it's own and then I continue with the warm up. I then get to the track when I immediately start into the intervals.  The first one is fine and the HR tops out at about 180 at the end of the interval, proceed with the recovery which involves a slow jog and as soon as start the second one, the HR jumps to over 200, after this interval, I start a walk recovery because I realize the HR is spiking, I think it actually recovers during the walk, but my pace dropped to 0 for a while and if I recall correctly, I think I did the squat maneuver just to make sure that it was low, I then proceed to walk the rest of the recovery and then do the third interval which is fine where the HR tops out at 185, and the HR issue doesn't return.  All three intervals are done at roughly the same pace so the drastic difference between interval 2 and the first and third isn't a result of pace difference.

While it happens randomly while I'm running, it most often  happens when I come to a stop after running and then restart suddenly (like with interval repeats), this makes stop light stops a pain in the behind because it will usually trigger an event.  I can usually get it to stop by doing the walking/squatting thing. This isn't a problem on long runs or intervals where I can throw in a walk recovery, but it becomes an issue when doing tempo runs where I like to do continuous running for between 4 and 7 miles. Breaking that into pieces to throw in a recovery isn't so great.  I was lucky enough this training cycle that I didn't have any HR issues when doing the tempo runs, but I did notice that the HR spikes seemed to be more frequent this training session during long runs. Other ways of getting it to stop involve what are known as vagal maneuvers which force the vagal nerve to send signals to slow down the heart, they involve holding one's breath or dipping the face into cold water or bearing down like you're having a bowel movement.  These are all difficult to do while running. I discovered the squat method while trying to do the bearing down thing. I'm not sure how one can pass a stool while standing up so the first couple of times I tried it, I would squat down, but I found the act of squatting was itself enough to get it to come down which I'm kinda thankful for.

Over the years, I've tried a number of different things to try to mitigate it. I'm constantly eating salt, which supposedly causes an increase in blood volume which supposedly helps to prevent it. I've been taking calcium&magnesium supplements which supposedly prevent it. I've cut out caffeine completely from my diet  which is supposedly another potential cause. Another potential cause is not getting enough sleep and this is one thing which I have difficulties with.  I can usually get by on 6 hours of sleep, but I find it hard to sleep for longer than that.  My body just naturally gets up after 6 hours.  I guess I need to figure out how to reprogram the internal alarm clock.

I did attempt to get this looked at a few years ago. Family doctor referred me for an echocardiogram and a stress test.  The echocardiogram did not reveal anything abnormal about my heart, and the stress test wasn't able to reproduce the HR spiking symptoms so the doctors' diagnosis was everything's fine, but I knew that something was still not quite right. I purchased an ECG monitor a few years ago on ebay, hoping that some blatantly obvious ECG problem would show itself, but while it's easy to spend $200 on an ECG device, the $100,000 medical degree that allows one to interpret it isn't so easy to come by. But hey if you're curious and can see a difference.

Normal at rest -HR 56

Tach, jog HR 176

The only difference I see is the tachycardia one is just faster.  The shape of the waveforms look pretty much the same. Ideally, I should have captured the ECG running at the same pace, both when it's spiking and when it's not.  It's just not easy to do since I have to run while carrying the ECG monitor with wires hooked up to my chest.  I did this experiment only once while running around a track back in June and I was excited to capture the tachycardia event with the monitor, but I realized after I should have planned it out a bit better. I'm thinking maybe I should try it out on a treadmill.  

The cause of tachycardia is usually a result of extra signal pathways in the heart that cause extra signals to make the heart beat faster.  The way to cure this is through an interesting procedure called a catheter ablation where they use drugs to force your heart into the spiking mode and a catheter is sent into the heart and the tissue that generates the extra signals are basically burned off. This is kinda scary cause after all this is your heart and if they get it wrong, there's a chance you're wearing a pace maker for life.  I've been reading recently that they've introduced a new technique where they use liquid nitrogen to first freeze the tissue to see if it solves the tachycardia problem first. If not, they let it thaw and start looking elsewhere so this at least offer the possibility of a do-over but it still seems kinda risky. 


In any event, I've decided to try and get this thing looked at again from a medical viewpoint and will hopefully get some more information this time around.  First appointment is tomorrow with family physician to try and get a referral to a cardiologist. 

Graffiti

Day 15, so half way there. This is going to be a bit of a filler post since there's only a couple of hours left in the day and I don't feel like thinking too much right now.  Here's a pic of some graffiti that I saw in an alley somewhere.  I don't remember where exactly, but thought it was pretty cool. 

Cheating at the Marathon

By now, you've probably heard the story of Tabatha Hamilton who was disqualified at the Chichamauga Marathon this past weekend.  She crossed the finish line first in a not to shabby time of 2:55 or so. She had a really good day and ran a 1:18 negative split.  That is, she ran a 1 HOUR and 18 minute negative split.  That's right. After crossing the half mark in 2:06:51, she then proceeded to run the second half in 48 minutes. To give you some reference, the men's half marathon world record is 58 minutes and change. 

Now she claims that the timing half timing mat was wrong and that she crossed at about 1:36:51 which put her second half at 1:17:30. That's still a 19 minute negative split. I'm sorry, but you don't accidentally run a 19 minute negative split.  It's fairly obvious that she cheated. Now I will admit that I've given some thought to how best it would be to cheat at a marathon. Not that I would ever do it (or so i think), but it's an interesting mental exercise.

Here are some tips that I think might be useful if you want to cheat at a marathon.

1) Don't set a world record.
This is fairly easy.  If you're cheating at the marathon and want to get caught fairly quickly, be sure that you run the race, or portions of the race at a pace that's faster than any other human being has run in the past.

2) Don't win.
This is another fairly easy rule to keep in mind.  Leaders of a race usually have a bike or escort of somekind.  If you suddenly pop up in front of the escort without the escort seeing you pass them, it's a definite red flag.

3) Know the course.
Knowing the course ahead of time allows you to plan your route, you can easily see where you can cut portions of the course if you need to.  Marathons will usually post the course route on the website.   Course that have out and backs are good to cheat with as are courses with loops, as you can cut out portions of the race but still generally be around where you need to be. The caveat being that if the race has a timing mat in the loop, this can get you into trouble (see point 4).  Courses that are point to point in one direction are harder to cheat at unless you have "alternative" transportation.

4) Know the location of the timing mats and do the math.
This is what ended up betraying Ms. Hamilton.  If you know where the timing mats are, you can plan exactly where you have to be at certain times and cross the mats at those times to give the illusion that you are running continuously.  I would say that you have to be fairly precise about this. Your pace between the various mats has to be fairly consistent.  For some races, this is generally easy as they will have a mat at the half and finish. So you need to figure out what time you want to run, head to the half mark and cross the mat at about half what your goal time is and then head to finish and cross the mat at your goal time. Some races may only have a mat at the end so it's really easy to cheat at those races.  A race like NY is going to be very hard to cheat at, just simply because they have so many timing mats and they aren't all advertised.  Also some of the mats are on bridges and they will be generally hard to get to unless you are running in the right direction.  Also the mats aren't precisely positioned so even though you may figure out that you need to cross the 8 mile mat at a certain time, if the mat is actually at 8.3 miles and everyone elses times is delayed by that, a "proper" 8 mile split will still out you. If you haven't run the course before, you can find out locations of timing mats by looking at the results of previous races. 

5) Figure out your alternative transportation.
Even if a course has out and backs and loops, the presence of timing mats at the turnaround portion can seriouly affect your ability to cheat as you will need to travel to the turnaround point to cross the mat. This is of course, why they have the mats there in the first place.  While you could just simply run there, which is what you're supposed to do, you need to get there faster so you will need some form of alternative transportation.  Rosie Ruiz had the Boston public transportation system at her disposal which I think runs parallel to the route so that would have worked out well. I think you might be able to do it with a bicycle or if you have an accomplice with a car, that might work too.  Again, this would be highly dependent on where the race is.  If it's in an urban setting with lots of streets that are blocked off, a bike might be the best option.  If you're running in Boston with a lot of roads than run parallel to the race route, a car might work better.  It would certainly leave you more room for error.  


6) Try to blend in.
One of the trickier parts I would think would be how to casually join the race to get onto the course so you cross the mat and then how to casually leave the course in an inconspicuous manner.   The easiest way I think would be to join the race at a portapotty stop.  No one on the course is going to question a runner that appears to join from a portapotty.  Likewise, no one is going to question someone who appears to be stopping for a bathroom break.  If no portapotties are around, if you can plan it ahead of time, you might find a store or a fast food restaurant that you jump into/out of with the excuse that you had to stop to use the bathroom.  One of the potential problems I see is not so much with runners, but more so with spectators.  Runners on the course are constantly coming and going so the likelihood of anyone questioning you is low. On the other hand, a spectator who has been standing in the same spot, might notice that you've joined the course, crossed the mat and then left the course again which leads to my next point.


7) Conceal your bib.
The point of cheating at a race is not to get caught and in our world of smart phones and camera's, it's extremely easy for someone to get a pic of you if they suspect you're cheating.  Of course, having a picture of you is only half the battle since they still won't know who you are. If they get a picture of your bib number though, the battle is lost. With that, they can figure out your name, what your finish time was and any past results to see if anything is up.  With Ms. Hamilton, her previous fastest marathon was 4:25. Visible bib number's also allow race photographers to indirectly map your progress which can be helpful to prove that you were at a certain point at a certain time, but they can also be a detriment since if there aren't pics of you at other points of the course then it potential raises some questions.  Now you don't necessarily have to not wear your bib. You just have to show enough of it so that people know that you aren't a bandit. You could fold it in half or pin half of it to the lower part of a shirt and then cover up the top portion of the bib  with a fuel belt or a jacket or something.

8) Don't be too aggressive in your goal time.
You should pick a time that allows you to run a pace that you can actually hold for a few miles. This is for a few reasons. It will be likely that you wont be able to join and leave the race at the timing mats exactly so you may have to join and leave the race some distance away from the mats.  If you can't maintain the pace you're going for, you will stick out like a sore thumb to spectators as everyone is streaming by you.  For Ms. Hamilton, her average "pace" was to be 6:42min/mile. I have my doubts that she could maintain that pace for 400m, let alone for 4 miles. Her time goal was too aggressive.  Also, it helps that if you can run with a few other runners and are seen by spectators as these act as potential witnesses to your athletic feat. 


Well that's pretty much all I can think of. This is fairly common sense stuff, yet cheaters seems to be ignore these obvious pitfalls.  I guess if you want to be lazy at running a marathon, you might as well be lazy at cheating in a marathon too.

Running on Air

So the past year, on trying to increase pace, I tried something slightly different. If you've ever registered for anything on the runner's world website, you've probably been spammed with their book entitled "Running On Air: The Revolutionary Way to Run Faster by Breathing Smarter".  I was intrigued at the idea of gaining speed by just changing breathing patterns so I borrowed it from the library.  I realized that I have too many  running books that I haven't read yet and figured I could get a look at it and see if it was worth buying. 

In summary, probably not worth buying.  The basics of the breathing pattern is described on their website at http://www.runnersworld.com/running-tips/running-air-breathing-technique?page=single.
In the actual book, the basics of the breathing is within the first 50 or so pages and the rest of the book is just general running stuff that you can find in any running book.

Basically the gist of the method is to coordinate when you breath out with alternating foot strikes so you switch back and forth between which side hits the ground when you exhale.  This is good at preventing side stitches which is  something I learned long ago.  The problem with the breathing technique for me is that it's very unnatural. I've tried to practice the 3-2 breathing pattern for long and recovery runs,and I feel that I'm just not getting enough air in.  On LT runs though, I do naturally alternate between sides in a 2-1 pattern which is good (breathin in for 2 step, breath out for one step).  The other thing I learned from the book is a different way of breathing during short fast races like in 5k and 10k which is basically to breath in a 2-1-1-1 pattern where you breath in for 2 steps, out for 1 step, in for 1 step and out for 1 step. It's a bit awkward at first since you basically have to force the breathing pattern and it's not symmetrical, but I think it works. Towards the end of races, I had generally have done a 1-1 breathing pattern, but I always felt like I was almost hyperventilating. This 2-1-1-1 still allows me to get the oxygen I want but not be panting like a dog. This technique worked out well for me in the 5k and 10k races I did. 

Glad to have read it, but not going to be buying it.

More Random Thoughts

Ok, 12 days into this National Blog Posting Month thing and I'm already starting to struggle for ideas.  I think I've put on a couple of pounds since the marathon, mostly due to the all the chocolates I've eaten since Halloween. I had a 100 pack of mini chocolates that was unopened. I probably should have thought about trying to return it, but I thought I would be able to manage it. Nope. One look at my garbage pail of discarded chocolate bar wrappers and I realized yeah I'm going to be a bit heavier.

I was thinking of doing a race this weekend just for fun.  There's a 10 miler close by that I've done before, but a few years ago, I had decided I would only enter races if I was actually going to race them.  I had figured out that I was spending so much on races for fun and much of that was going to tech shirts and medals that I don't really.  Anyways, I probably won't sign up since I don't think I would be able to run it particularly fast.   Plus they are forecasting snow for this Sunday. Winter's a coming.

I am looking at maybe doing a Boxing Day 10 miler towards the end of December since that would coincide well with the start of another training cycle leading up to an early May marathon.  Just got to get used to running in the cold again.  For now, it's just recovery runs to try and maintain some level of fitness.  Will probably start working in some strides and some short tempos in the next few weeks.