6000

Yesterday I did a 20 mile trail run that had 6000 feet of gross elevation gain. Half of that was in the second five miles. Completely unplanned and totally sick. The top of Mt. Diablo just didn't seem that far away. Running through a mid-calf-deep stream that criss-crossed the trail 10 times at the bottom of the mountain felt great. I can't say that my quads are happy today, but I promise you that I'm going to do that again within the next two weeks.

Zen

I had a lazy winter (my apologies to those that are still experiencing winter - here in the Bay Area, winter was about three weeks long, with lots of rain and lows in the mid-30s - it is now sunny and in the 70s again). I only ran about 15 miles a week and packed on about 10 pounds. As you saw from the elevation profiles below, that particular program won't work for what I have on my calendar. Two weeks ago, I started ramping up my miles.

Going from 15 miles a week to 45 miles a week is not recommended. Surprisingly, I'm simply weary and a little tight. Maybe muscle memory does last longer than a month. Or maybe I'm just going to break down in another week.

My training for the April 12th race is simple:

M - 8 mile hill run (two massive hills)
Tu - 6 mile flat recovery run
W - 10 mile hill run (two massive hills and one smallish hill)
Th - 6 mile flat recovery run
F - 6 mile flat junk mile run
Sa - 14 - 22 mile hill run
Su - off

No tempo runs. No speed work. No watch. That's right, no watch. Either someone else has a watch or I map out the run beforehand to figure out the distance. I don't plan on picking up a watch until after the June 21st 50k. It's all about getting a large mileage base in preparation of going under 3 hours in a fall marathon.

For past marathons, I've relied on a 16 to 20 week program, again going from 15 to 45 miles in a week, lots of speed work, and my genetics to get me to the finish line in under my goal time. That almost worked last year at St. George, missing 3 hours by 2:07. I'm not leaving it to talent this year. My entire running year is dedicated to crushing 3 hours.

Six months of base and strength building followed by three months of sharpening and speed work should do it.

New Plan

April 12th - Mt. Diablo Marathon. Something to keep me busy during the winter.

June 21 (tentative) - Pacifica 50k. Maybe a family event.

$7B

"FRENCH TRADER'S PROBLEMS UNCOVERED

FRIENDS of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike.

"But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat, and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier.

"At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he'd been working for almost six hours."

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns.

At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception.

Last night a spokesman for Sócíété Générálé denied that Kerviel was overworked, insisting he lost the money after betting that the French were about to stop being rude, lazy, arrogant b.....ds."

Next

Mt. Diablo 50k in June.

Here's the elevation profile:



That'd be 8900 ft of elevation gain. Ouch. That'll build me a nice base for a fast fall marathon.

BROOOOKLYN!

This is a picture of the young men that I was responsible for in Brooklyn. We'd have a Xbox night at my place every 6 weeks or so. Order pizza. Have extra TVs and Xboxes.

Here in the Bay Area, I have also been asked help with the young men. However, the activities and make-up of these two groups are very different. First, we went ice skating where not only the girls, but the boys knew what they were doing. Second, when I was giving a few of them a ride home, one boy told me that he lived in a mansion. I smiled. Then we pulled up to his mansion. Four people, 8000 sq ft home. Six cars in the driveway, including a Maseratti, a Porsche, and a cheap old Acura. And those were the ones that didn't make it into the garage.

SGM Pic

I realized I never posted a picture. This is me right before Mile 23. Right before I decided that I couldn't take the massive amounts of calf pain anymore.

Pool Review

I was checking out the official length of my pool and ran across this review of another community pool that isn't too far away.

"Good News: Outdoor, 25 yards, kickboards, clocks.

The Bad News: TEN dollars. In (blank). You bastards are lucky I'm in this shit town to begin with and I have to pay ten bucks to swim? You should pay me for bringing some life into snoresville. But I digress.

Details: Bring some sandals, because you have to walk over the rock-embedded, foot-thrashing concrete that surrounds the indoor pool to get to the outdoor pool. Some negligent mother let her kid wander into my lane but I showed him who was boss in this town in no time. I'm doing fly, kid- take that! I don't pay ten dollars so I can be polite to some commune-raised hippie brat who calls his mom "Sarah.""

So Serious

I went swimming for the first time in over three years this morning. I found out that swimmers are just as anal as cyclists are. Apparently you must inform the other swimmers in your lane prior to beginning your laps that you will be swimming in their lane. Additionally, if there are only two people in your lane, you stay on the same side of the lane. If there are more than two people, you circle, which is how I swim if there are at least two people. If you don't follow these rules, they'll stop you in the middle of the pool just to let you know that you've broken the rules.

Also, don't pay cash to get in or the entire line will groan. Finally, a speedo is required or you are laughed at.

I'm glad that I now have two sports whose participants I don't like. I was getting bored only hating cyclists.

Just swam an easy 900 this morning. I'll probably be swimming twice a week until I start training seriously for a race again, at which point I'll drop swimming for the boring exercise that it is.

Sakae Sushi

Just in case you were wondering, Sakae Sushi has the best sushi I've ever eaten. That includes all the sushi I consumed in New York and Japan. Granted, I didn't have the pockets to go to the uber-nice sushi places while I was in Japan, but still, I ate some pretty quality sushi.

My favorites:

- Barracuda - flown in from Japan daily - very rich and meaty
- Bluefin Red Tuna - also flown in from Japan daily - almost steaklike
- Uni - shipped up from Monterey daily - super sweet with a texture that wasn't too firm and wasn't too slimey
- Oh-toro - This place has three grades of toro (fatty tuna belly). This grade is the fattiest. As I eat it, all I'm thinking is that I want to rub it all over my body and then lick it off. It's that good.

Who am I kidding, it is all outstanding.

Ageism

The other day I was running in the foothills with a friend. We wanted to do 11 miles and didn't want to run over the same ground twice, so we stopped at a trail map to check out where we could go. As we investigated the map, we heard runners coming. I couldn't see them, but could tell from their voices that it was a group of women. My friend looked at me and said we better go so we wouldn't have to pass them on the trail. So we headed up the trail.

About a minute later, the voices were right behind us. We were in a canyon, so I figured it was just acoustics of the canyon that made it seem as if they were right behind us. After another minute, I finally figured out that they were right behind us. Embarrassed, I moved over to the right, heard a little "Thank you" and watched three young girls run by us.

They couldn't have been more then 14 or 15. And they were blowing past us. Now let me say that were were not trying to run fast. Leisurely 8 minute miles through the hills. We'd also been running for 5 miles with 6 to go and they probably had only been running for 1 with 5 to go (we were on a popular 6 mile loop). However, we still got blown by by three teenage girls.

My friend and I were silent for a few minutes. I broke the silence by saying that that was unexpected. He responded by saying that the girl in the lead "looked good". I was a little shocked. He noticed my shock and quickly said, "You know, her running form. It looked good."

Yep, these are the kind of people I run with.

Weight Loss

Apparently the best way to lose that last 5 pounds that you've wanted to lose for the past year is to cut your mileage by 75% and drink cases of Diet Dr. Pepper, both of which I've done in the past three weeks. It's the new South Beach.

So Close

3:02:06. A PR of 6:40.

I was on track for a 2:58 through mile 17. At mile 18, my calfs began to seriously cramp and I couldn't get much push. I would do 7:10s uphill and then 6:40s downhill. At mile 23, I was on track for a 2:59, but my calfs began to scream. No push at all, but all I needed was to go at 7:00 pace for the last 3.2 miles. It was not to be. I had nothing left.

I'm not disappointed with the effort because I gave it everything yesterday. I'm a little disappointed with my preparation. Not enough LT runs or downhill training.

I'll probably take a week off and spend the following six weeks training for CIM on December 2.

Taper Madness

When running a marathon, you get to experience something called the taper. A taper is what you do two to three weeks before your marathon. Essentially, you chill out on your mileage in order to give your body time to heal and to store up glycogen.

For this training cycle, I chose a two week taper. Much of the literature out there says that if you're running less than 60 or 70 miles a week, which I am, then you only need a two week taper. Last week, I ran 53 miles. This week, I have cut my mileage back to 29 miles. Next week I'll only run about 17 miles before the marathon on Saturday.

Now tapering is a difficult thing to do. My body is ready for a race. It's been training for almost 19 weeks and is in the best shape of my life. Seriously, the best shape of my life including high school. Cutting back on miles is difficult. I feel lazy and feel like I'm losing speed. At the same time, I have aches and pains that are telling me that I don't have what it takes to go under 3. My shin splint in my lower left leg is telling me that it's a possible stress fracture, when I know full well that it's just a shin splint.

Finally, I am having to think about what I eat. When you're running 50+ miles a week, you can eat whatever you want and I do. When you're running less than 30 miles a week, you can't eat that much. In addition, cutting out the grease and fat becomes essential in cleaning out your system. Going to bed hungry because you're used to 1000+ calorie dinners and you just ate 500 calories with no ice cream is somewhat dissatisfying.

As you can tell, I am slowly going crazy and I need to race already.

24 Miler

My last big training run was this past Saturday. 24 miles. A friend from San Mateo came up to run it with me. It was about 65 degrees and raining. In other words, almost perfect. I like running in the rain, as it cools me down. I felt great the entire time and we finished just under 3 hours. I wasn't trying to push it and felt that I definitely have what it takes to go under 3. Two weeks to go time.

JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge (3.5M)

I wasn't planning on running this race, as I haven't raced anything under a 1/2 marathon in about 7 years and haven't done anything under a 10k in about 16 years, but my firm, more specifically, my office, appealed to my ego and asked that I represent my firm/office, as they knew that I could easily beat the fastest time from all of the other offices (24:50). So I decided to do it.

6:30pm last night at Crissy Field right next to the Golden Gate bridge. Very flat, simple 3.5 mile loop. I arrived and as soon as I got out of my car, I knew that I'd made a mistake in not bringing warmups. It was about 20 degrees colder than where I live and there was 20mph wind coming in from the ocean. Nice. Fortunately, we started and finished with a tailwind. However, the middle 1.75 miles were a little onerous.

Before I get to those miles, let me back up. This was not a chipped race. The only clock was the race clock, which meant that I was fighting 5000 other people to start up front. Lots of elbows. I was about 3 rows back, which was fine because there were some serious runners out. Like sub-5 minute mile runners. The last thing I wanted to do was get in their way.

The gun went off and off we went. First mile was at 5:58. I wanted it to be faster, but congestion and some tight turns slowed me down a little. Then we turned into the wind. I tried drafting, but the wind was whipping too much and each person I tried drafting off of was either too fast or too slow, so I ended up running the next 1.75 miles straight into the wind. Not too fun. I don't have my exact splits, but looking at my finish time, I'd say they were in the 6:25 - 6:33 range.

As I was approacing the turnaround, I saw the leaders headed back and they were seriously flying. I heard afterwards about the tactics employed and was pretty impressed. Apparently about a 1/4 mile before the turnaround, a breakaway into the wind occured. Then once at the turnaround, the 3 leaders really took off since they now had the wind at their back while everyone else was still headed into it. Smart tactics.

At the turnaround, I finally got the wind out of my face and picked it back up. At mile 3, I really picked it up because I wanted to beat 22 minutes. With about a 1/4 mile to go, I wanted to vomit and remembered why I don't really enjoy these shorter races. I finished in 21:48 for a 6:14 average.

I didn't push as hard as I could have, particularly during the headwind portion of the course and raced it more like a 10k, but was still ok with the time. I probably finished in the top 150, but won't know for sure for a couple of days.

EDIT: I finished 101st out of 5200

Clueless

I seriously have no idea where my fitness is. If I had to predict a time for St. George, it would be anywhere between 2:58 and 3:15. This might just be because I've been training for 17 1/2 weeks and my body is completely broken down. It might also be because I'm just getting older, but I only have one fast day a week in me and my right glut is pretty sore all the time. I'm going to push it tomorrow, omitting the hill, and see where I'm at. Two more long runs (an 18 and a 24) and then it's off to the races.

Nocturnal Rack

As I began my 22 mile run at 8:30pm last night (again, I have problems), little did I know that I would end up witnessing one of the most glorious racks that I'd ever seen on the Iron Horse Trail. Truly, it was magnificent.

Usually on the trail, I don't see many racks at all. In fact, I don't recall ever seeing one. I didn't expect to see one last night either. It was after all perfectly dark (there are no lights on this trail), but when my headlight spotted two eyes up ahead (and at eye level), I was stunned to see an 8 point buck standing in the middle of the trail just watching me go by.

I'm very glad that he didn't decide to lower his head and charge, as it was at about mile 18 and I was pretty beat.

Getting home a little after 11, icing for an hour, then finally eating dinner around midnight while I watched the History Channel is all something I'd rather not repeat next week, particularly because next week's run is 24 miles.

Sharpening

It's finally happening. This sharpening thing. This past Saturday on a 20 mile, very hilly trail run, I had a reserve of energy and speed that I didn't know existed. At one point, I was actually sprinting up a hill, at mile 15 feeling great. Today, during my speed workout (6 x 1600s), I ran my last 1600 in 5:44. The only reason I didn't do a 7th was due to time. It just might all be coming together.

1:27:44

That was my 1/2 marathon time on Saturday. 6:42 average. I'm moderately happy with this time. In order to run a sub-3 hour marathon, all of the calculators say that you need to run a 1/2 marathon in 1:25, which I really wasn't close to. However, I didn't taper for this race and actually ran hard on both Thursday and Friday. So, moderately happy. I have hope.

I also now have a blister on my left big toe that pretty much encompasses the entire right half of the toe. That's what happens when you wear your racing flats. Shoes that you haven't worn in about 3 months. I needed every advantage I could get for "race" day on Saturday. "Race" because it was only four of us and we weren't racing each other, only the clock. Everyone seemed pretty happy with their times.

I'm thinking of wearing my racing flats for the marathon. I'll run in them during my interval workouts and maybe my medium long days (10 - 13 miles usually on Thursday) and see how it goes. After the "race", I took my flats off, put my trainers on, and ran another 5 miles. My trainers felt like bricks. Bricks do not enable one to run fast. I might try thicker socks to stem off the globe-sized blisters.

Three of the next four weeks have me running in the high 50s, low 60s for mileage. Let's tear down this body even more.