LOST is back!

So haven't been posting much. There was a small possibility that I would be going to California (Beverly Hills) for a work related thing this week, but that's not happening.

Went to the gym on Tuesday and did 9 miles total with 4 at LT pace at 8.3 miles/hour. I figure I gotta be able to get my LT pace up to about 8.8 miles/hour if I'm going to be able to have a realistic shot at BQing in May. Was supposed to do a 5 mile recovery run today but my left knee has been giving me some problems and is sore. I'm going to try to do 10 miles tomorrow. It's weird, it doesn't feel like I'm marathon training yet, even though I'm now into week three of the plan.

So I'm watching Lost right now which is back after a long hiatus. It's going to be interesting to see how things play out.

Week in review

Wednesday: 5.1 miles recovery
Thursday: 10.2 miles
Saturday: 4 miles recovery
Sunday: 15 miles

I did 15 miles on Sunday and was it ever cold. -15C and -30C with the wind chill. I had bought a face covering thing on Saturday in prep for the long run and it helped a little in keeping my face warm, but I found it quite uncomfortable. Tough to breath through that thing. I had used boiling water to make gatorade in the hopes of holding off the inevitable freezing of my water bottle, but it didn't help much. The nozzle froze up about 45 minutes into the run and by the time I finished, I had a solid block of ice in my hand. I ran the last hour and a half with no liquid intake. I do have another problem and that is dry feet. I have cracks now on the bottom of my feet due to the dry cold weather and they're a little painful. I've been using moisturizing lotion but it doesn't seem to be working.

I ended up doing about 10 laps around the shopping mall parking lot. I had originally set my mind on trying to find a new route, but I figurered that it wasn't a day to be experimenting. One thing about my long run was it seems that my HR came down compared to previously and my pace is getting a bit quicker. It's been a while since I averaged faster than a 9 min/mile for a long run so it seems to be coming back. I think it may have something to do with the fact that I've been running in slippery conditions for a while which forces me to be very efficient with running. The parking lot roadways were bone dry and the increase in efficiency shows.

Lap	Lap Time		Lap	Lap Time
1	09:05.40		9	08:09.30
2	08:49.90		10	08:33.80
3	08:43.10		11	08:27.70
4	08:58.00		12	08:35.30
5	08:29.90		13	08:39.20
6	08:39.60		14	08:44.30
7	08:44.00		15	08:28.40
8	08:28.70

Did a little under 42 miles this week.
This next week is looking to be more of the same cold weather, which I'm really starting to hate. This was about my limit in terms of weather.

Tagged.

Ok So i was tagged by Jen. This little game was originally designed for the triathlons bloggers and it's kinda made it's way into the marathon blogger realm so I hope not to upset the delicate balance between the two worlds. I've not done a triathlon, so here's my thing for the marathon.

1. Describe a memory from your first tri/marathon ever.
Having to really really pee within the first 10 km of the race. Thankfully there were a whole bunch of others that had to do the same. Kinda funny seeing a whole bunch of mostly guys lined up against a concrete wall doing their business while streams of people are running by.

2. Describe a memory from your most recent tri/marathon.
I actually don't think I have any. Chicago was just a big blur to me. I do remember pulling up behind, Perry, and seeing something about joggling on his back. I kinda wished I stopped to chat.

3. What's the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you in a tri/marathon?
At my first water stop in my first marathon, I tried for the first time to drink while running like you see them do on TV. I nearly drowned myself coughing the stuff out.

There also this picture from Chicago.



4. What's the most thrilling thing that's happened to you in a tri/marathon?
Finishing faster than my expected goal.

5. What is something you discovered about yourself by doing tri/marathons?
That when training, I actually can get up at 5am in the morning if I want to.

6. What is The Big Goal that you're working towards?
Qualifying for Boston!!!

I won't tag any first time marathoners since you may not have a lot of experience to draw from so I will tag Ryan, Audrey, and mg.

LT run repeated

Headed to the gym after work today to get my run in. I was supposed to do 8 miles with 10 strides but it's hard to do strides on a treadmill. So I redid the tempo run from last week to see where the HR is at. In total I did 7.5 miles including a 5 minute cool down since the treadmill limits me to an hour. It included 4 miles at 8.2 miles/hour (7:19 pace). HR slowly drifted up during the LT portion. I also had the HR problem at the beginning. It could have been the monitor being finicky since it will usually shoot way up if it's the fluttering thing. The HR seemed to drift upward during the LT portion which could have been because I didn't have any water with me and so I ended up getting a little dehydrated. I also wore my Halo Headband to the gym for the first time. For those that tend to get sweat in their eyes, this thing is amazing. I highly recommend it.

Week 1 of marathon training

Did a 4 mile recovery run yesterday and did 14 miles today. Averaged 9:27 today. It seems my HR is back under control, at least it's now below 160 which is what I've been trying to get back to. Pace is way down though.

Lap	Time
1	10:08.20
2	09:43.30
3	09:39.30
4	09:46.60
5	09:16.10
6	09:18.60
7	10:09.60
8	08:59.20
9	09:04.40
10	09:37.20
11	09:06.40
12	09:04.40
13	09:06.30
14	09:21.30

So there was a few cm of snow on the ground and I tried to do my normal route which includes a couple of miles around a local track but the snow there was a bit too deep for my liking and the sidewalks and roads were still a bit slippery since they haven't been plowed yet. I ended up running around the parking lot of the mall that I usually do my LT runs around. 9 laps around the parking lot. Man that was boring. I"m not sure what happed in lap 7. I think the garmin just had a hiccup. I had a brief HR spike again during the 11th lap and i checked again and it does seem that my heart goes into some sort of fluttering mode which might be an arrhythmia of some sort which probably isn't good. Considering that I've had these problems with my HR monitor before, it might be a chronic thing. I have to get it checked out. Anyhow I stopped for about 30 seconds and it went back into normal beating mode.

Just over 40 miles for the week. By the way, I'm pretty much done all my work things that are due at the end of this month. I have some last minute things I have to do today. I tried to do them yesterday but the server at work crashed. The IT guy is looking at it this morning. Hopefully it'll be fixed by the time I get in.

Thanks for reading all.

Crunchy Snow

So I didn't get around to doing the 10 miles I had planned for yesterday as I couldn't get up in the morning and it was too cold and too late when I got back from work last night. Since it's the first week of marathon training and I really didn't want to have to report that I was skipping runs during the first week, I decided to to do it today. The temperature was -18C degree outside this morning. Really cold, but thankfully there was no wind.

Lap	Lap Time
1	09:19.50
2	09:14.60
3	09:15.70
4	09:54.00
5	10:10.70
6	09:17.80
7	09:32.60
8	08:53.50
9	08:38.60
10	08:54.80

HR is still up, but it's coming down a little. The 10 min/mile were around a slightly snow covered track. I like the sound of snow crunching under my feet as I run. It has an almost hypnotic sound to it and gets me to zone out at times. I'm also finding that running on snow and ice forces me to be more efficient with my running. It should pay off when the spring time rolls around.

Though I was generally warm while running, I think I have to buy something to cover my face if I'm going to keep running outside in temperatures like this since my face was dry and chapped when I got back.

I'm going to try and do 4 mile recovery tomorrow morning and a 14 mile long run on Sunday.

Recovery Run

4 miles recovery outside today. About 10 min/mile pace.

First LT run of this cycle.

Did 8 miles with 4@LT pace. My HR is still up. The sidewalks aren't quite clear of snow/ice so I went to the shopping mall to do the LT portion around the parking lot which is pretty good cause it's clear and it's lighted which helps cause it's still dark outside in the morning. The good thing about doing Pfitz plan again is that I can compare my performance now with what I did last time. The last time I did this workout was back in July. Unfortunately it seems that I'm doing the same pace, but at a higher HR, which is probably a result of my 2 week layoff. Hopefully my paces and HR will come down soon. My Boston pace is 7:15 so a 7:30 LT run just won't cut it. Heck I averaged 7:30 for a the entire marathon back in October so I'm kinda disappointed with this.

Lap	Lap Time
2	07:27.10
3	07:24.20
4	07:32.70
5	07:26.70

I had a HR problem in the first lap. I'm not sure if it's the monitor or if my heart really is beating that fast. I stopped after the first lap to try to adjust the HR strap and tried to measure my pulse and it seemed to be fluttering. It settled down after than, but it's something to try and keep track of.

Marathon training begins!

I didn't get out like I had planned on Friday morning. Just couldn't drag myself out of bed. Did do about 3.5 miles yesterday at really slow pace and did a 12.8 mile long run this morning. It's been almost two weeks since I last did any sort of running and it definitely shows. I think I've lost a lot of fitness. I've noticed my resting HR is up and my run today was not that great. My HR was going beyond my upper limit for long runs at a pace that I've been able to manage at recovery HR over the past month. On the plus side, my blood pressure has dropped since I started being a bit my conscious about my salt and water intake.

Mile	Lap Time
1	00:09:10.80
2	00:08:59.80
3	00:08:59.40
4	00:09:28.20
5	00:09:27.20
6	00:09:20.70
7	00:09:16.60
8	00:09:32.40
9	00:09:24.40
10	00:09:21.40
11	00:09:24.00
12	00:09:30.80
12.8 mile	00:07:55.90

It was -12C when I headed out today. I don't think I've ever run outside when it was this cold. Last year, I would have gone to the gym with this type of temperature but long run treadmill running at the gym is a bit tough cause the treadmills automatically shut down after an hour which means I have to restart which I rarely do if there are people waiting. i guess I jsut feel guilty hogging the thing. So I bundled up and was actually pretty comfortable running outside. it was sunny and it helped that there was no wind.

It's now 16 weeks to a May 13 marathon which means if I want to possibly BQ, I've got to start training now. I considered the 12 week Pfitz plan and though it'll allow me to finish in reasonable shape, I don't think it'll give me enough training to get me into BQ shape. So I think I'll just jump into the 18 week Pfitz 55 mile week plan at the 3rd week. It's probably not the wisest thing to do, cause Tuesday has a 4 mile LT run and I haven't run at that pace since a race back in November, but I guess I'll have to see how the body handles it. I'm hoping that I can regain my lost fitness relatively quickly. So plan for the week is:

Tuesday 8 miles general aerobic/4 miles LT
Wednesday 4 miles recovery
Thursday 10 miles general aerobic
Saturday 4 miles recovery
Sunday 14 miles long run.

Checking in.

I had a couple of things due in january that I had to get to, one of which was due tomorrow and was finished today. Put in a very long day yesterday. Left work at 11:30pm havening pretty much finished and headed to my car to find that it WOULDN"T START. That's what I get for buying a crappy little saturn. It's barely a year old. Anyhow, I ended up calling a cab to get home cause I wasn't sure what else to do. I did some reading last night on the internet and it turns out it was the Passlock theft deterrent system. Apparently when it gets really cold, the lubrication inside the ignition solidifies a bit which throws off the security system causing it to go into lockdown mode which prevents the car from starting. If I had waited about 10 minutes, it would have started. Anyhow I checked it this morning and it works fine. Still I got to take it into the dealer to get it looked at.

So work has cooled off for the moment. I still have two more deadline for the 30 and 31st of the month, but that's almost an eternity away. As for running, I haven't headed out for about a week and a half and I hope to at least head out tomorrow morning just for a quick run to remind myself what it feels like.

Salt and Blood Pressure

I had wanted to do 14 miles on Sunday and I only ended up doing 12. I had slept in 30 minutes longer than I had wanted and had to cut the run a bit short. I'm quite busy at work putting in some long days and haven't run since and there's a good chance I'm be able to do any major runs for at least a few weeks which bums me out cause an 18 week Pfitz plan for a May 13 marathon started this week, don't think I'm going to be able to start or get into it. I have to reevaluate plans. there's a 16 week FIRST plan but I'm not sure whether the mileage is high enough. it tops out at about 35 miles a week, though it does say that i have to cross-train. I'd just rather run than cross train. There's also a 12 week Pfitz plan which looks tough.

As for blood pressure, I was doing some more reading and it seems that my water theory holds some water. Apparently salt causes high blood pressure as it causes your system to retain water. More liquid in your blood, higher BP. I realize that since I started the serious marathon training a few years ago, I've been religiously drinking V8 twice a day at work since my office provides it for free. Checking the label, each bottle contains 900 mg of sodium! That's almost 2 grams of extra salt each day on top of whatever salt I eat with my regular diet. So I've stopped drinking the stuff and my BP has dropped somewhat. I"m going to go back to drinking more water and see if I can keep the BP low

I may not post much in the next few weeks because of work so I apologize in advance if I kinda disappear for a little while.

Dehydration and Blood Pressure

On thursday I headed to the gym to try and do 6 miles. It was raining semi hard so doing it outside wasn't in the cards. I haven't been there since last year (ha ha). Actually middle of November. Another reason I hate running on a treadmill is that it's so warm at my gym. Even though I was running relatively slow, keeping the HR low, I was sweating like crazy after 1 mile. I guess my body just got use to running outside in the cool weather and didn't like being back in 25C temperatures. Anyways I cut the run short and did about 4.5 miles.

Just got back from a short 4 miler outside. Couldn't keep the HR down. Got back and weighed myself and i was down 3 pounds from my normal weight. In my experience, this is usually because I'm dehydrated and anytime I have a crappy run, I can usually correlate it to a lower body weight. I usually drink a lot of fluids so this usually isn't a problem, but I've been reading a bit about blood pressure lately and mine have are a bit on the high side. Not hypertensive, but in the 135/85 range. Normal is 120/70.

Two years ago, I was normal, in fact is was exactly 120/70 cause I remember the nurse saying it was perfect. It has creeped up slowly over the past few years to its current level. Anyhow, I was reading that dehydration can cause low blood pressure, so I started thinking, that over hydration can probably lead to higher blood pressure which because I drink a lot of fluids could be a partial cause of the higher blood pressure. I've started to cut back on the fluid intake, but of course, it leads to dehydration that results in crappy runs. I just measured my bp and it was 120/80. The bottom number is a bit high though acceptable and I'd like to maintain it at this level. Hopefully I won't have to be at this level of dehydration to maintain it though.

I'm going to try and do 14 miles tomorrow. Will try to drink a bit more today.

Thanks for reading.

1st run of 2007

Did a 9 mile run this morning. I haven't posted a graph lately of my runs since it's quite boring looking with these low HR runs. But here you go. Tried to keep HR below 150.

So I converted to the new blogger and I suppose like everyone else, my last 20 or so posts will magically become unread in people's blog readers so I apologize in advance. I figured new year, new blogger. I got kinda jealous that some of you can now tag your entries with specific labels so I wanted to be able to do that too. Not sure what to tag this post with though.

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.

Training Update

Did 12 miles today and 4 miles yesterday. Total for the week at about 22 miles. I was hoping to get back to about 40 miles a week before the end of the year, but life is just sort of getting in the way and it's been tough to get out. I noticed today that my HR is still way up at a slower pace. I'm hoping that if I put in the mileage that it'll come down eventually.

Okay, about the nasal mucous picture. I'm still not going to post the whole picture as things that get posted on the internet have a way of multiplying and I don't think my ego could handle that, so here is a close up of the nasal area. You'll just have to imagine the rest of me. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I actually have TWO pictures with the stuff hanging out.





I still may end up posting the whole picture, but I'll probably have to be good and drunk first.

Chicago mailings.

I did 6 miles on Tuesday. Don't think I'm going to be able to run again until the weekend due to work commitments.

I did get some Chicago related mailing this week. I signed up for the newspaper delivery at the expo. I kinda got caught up in the heat of the moment and realized after it was a stupid thing to do cause I could just pick up a newspaper the following day. Anyways that came on Tuesday, almost a month after the marathon. Neat seeing my name in it.

I also received yesterday my CD with my race pics and all i can say is that I think I like the small thumbnails from the website better since I now am in possession of what may be the worst race picture ever taken. I think there was only one time during the whole marathon where some nasal mucous (ie: snot) came dripping out of my nose. Yeah, I know it sounds a bit gross. Well let me tell you that I now have that exact moment saved for posterity on CD. I'm running, waving at the camera with a 1 inch string of mucous hanging down from my nose. It is by far the funniest picture I have ever seen of myself. No, I won't be posting it, so don't ask!