Posts Tagged ‘hills’

As I’ve mentioned, I came away from the Baltimore Marathon with a lot of things to say. I wanted to keep my race report to the point and focus on how I felt at the time – I had to let things sink in, as well as taking time to celebrate getting a sub-4 marathon.

It’s important to me to write these things down to make the next race experience of any distance even better.

Study the course map

I knew Baltimore had hills, but I got overconfident that my constant hill running would make those hills look small. That’s partly true, but the hills in the marathon were a lot different. They were longer in distance with gradual climbs; while the hills I usually run on have a steeper grade, they’re not as long when it comes to distance. Just look at the first few miles of my Garmin data with that steady climb.

Had I looked at the map closer, I would have ran more mountains or found roads that had hills longer than a half mile.

Longer short runs

If When I train for a marathon again, I need to incorporate the “middle” distances more. While training in the heat was highly beneficial this summer, I didn’t have enough distances in the 6-8 mile range. I definitely had benefits of doing doubles a few times, but from an endurance perspective, I need more longish runs mid-week.

Cross training

I still need to cross train more, especially with weights. I have drastically improved my routine with core work and some weights at least once a week, but I need to do it twice a week. All that made a huge difference this time around, but I believe with more I’ll only be stronger in the final miles.

Start even slower

I need to start farther back. I still feel like I ran the race I wanted to – I didn’t start too fast and I never felt like I hit a wall. However, I wish I had started a little farther back to slow down a little bit more in the first few miles. My first 3 miles were 10-15 slower than my goal pace at 8:36, 8:35 and 8:45, but I feel like I should have been a little slower. Between mile 3 and 4, I passed the 3:40 group, who I thought was going too slow, but obviously they were doing something right.

I should have started near the 4-hour pace group and been more conservative. I can’t beat myself up for that – with the way the wind was that day coupled with my cold, I don’t know if that would have made any difference with how I felt around mile 22.

Wind training?

I need to train in the wind. In the fall and winter that’s easy, but in the calmer summer months I’m not sure what to do.

* * *

So there you have it. There are no failures with running — it’s always about learning lessons and make it better next time around. As for “what’s next,” I’ll have a post on that … eventually.

As I approached my second 20-miler of Baltimore Marathon training this week, I’ve been doing some reflecting on the past few months, and even years, but I’m also staying focused on the final weeks of training. I’ve been continuously paranoid about a re-injury occurring, but at the same I’ve been extremely excited about my progress.

I’ve made a promise to myself to stay quiet about a lot of things, so don’t expect many deep thoughts from me through my taper. Yes I’ll still post blogs, but I have a feeling there will be some more randomness to things.

So what about that 20-miler?

It was pretty good. I hit the middle miles a little too hard and the humidity got to me more than I was expecting. Overall, though, it was a good run — 2 minutes faster than a couple of weeks ago, no major pains and no crazy animal sightings for once. And with Bedford’s Centerfest setting up, I got to see things like this:

Yesterday’s run also included a road to one of the highest points in Bedford, as you can see below in the spike around mile 7. The hill didn’t seem all that big at the time, but thinking back is was definitely pretty big. Comparing this 20-miler to two weeks ago, yesterday’s had 100 more feet of elevation gain.

“Tough.”

“OK.”

“Miserable.”

“Not so bad.”

I’ve had a variety of descriptions of yesterday’s long run of 16.2 miles. In hindsight, nearly 36 hours later, I’m not sure how I feel about it. I at least covered Bedford, Va., fairly well:

And it was hilly as usual:

I got it done with no major side effects today. That’s a good enough victory to move on to another week of running.

I do know that I’m not running a race and running long the next day again, especially in the summer when the weather can vary so much day to day. Perfect for Saturday’s 5k; 91% humidity at the start of Sunday’s run … yeah, not fun.

This week is shaping up to be my third consecutive week of mileage increases before a recovery week next week. At one point I had hoped for my first 40-mile week ever this week, but I’m not focusing on that. I want continued good runs and Hurricane Irene to stay away long enough to avoid torrential rain on my long run. We’ll see how I feel come Sunday on a recovery run what the final mileage will be.

Now that I’ve soaked all this up, it’s time to mark it off and move along …

Back in April, I wrote a post titled “The final disappointment” about missing the Blue Ridge Half Marathon in Roanoke — it was sort of the final thing that I couldn’t do because of my ITB injury.

Today on my lunch run with a few co-workers, we did a point-to-point run from the top of the mountain back to our office. I didn’t talk about today, but doing this run felt more important to me than any of my PRs have this year. I really enjoyed running in the mountains the first half of last year — there’s a huge sense of accomplishment of going both up and down a mountain.

I mean, really … it’s a mountain. It’s not a hill. It’s a mountain. Say what you want about this being the downhill part of the mountain, but 2 miles downhill is brutal. My quads were on fire at the bottom.

The great thing about this was keeping a steady pace in the second half of the run that looks flat, but certainly wasn’t.

I’ll be climbing a mountain again eventually, but I believe that the importance of going downhill is bigger than uphill. Downhill is when the pain started in October, plus it’s really hard on the legs on longer downhills. Plus the Baltimore Marathon has a downhill finish — running down mountains certainly will help prepare for that.

Just like yesterday with two great runs and passing 100 miles for this month, today is yet another milestone in my training journey this summer. Now I need all the pieces to come together to avoid a repeat of this past weekend’s long run.

Today was the last day in my current job and I will soon be headed in the opposite direction in a different city for my new job. For those who don’t know where I live, I’m in Bedford, Va., which is pretty much in between Lynchburg and Roanoke. After a little more than 18 months of making the commute to Lynchburg, I’ll soon be headed the other way on U.S. 460 to what I hope will be the last new job in a while.

Anyway, since I haven’t gone for a run at work in the time I’ve been there, I thought it would be fitting today to head up that monogrammed mountain in Lynchburg and bid farewell. It’s not that I won’t come to Lynchburg anymore, but it’ll certainly be for different reasons than work. Unfortunately the views weren’t the greatest today, as you can see below. On a clear day, you can see a lot more than this, plus the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. This just looks very BLAH.

I also struggle to use the word “mountain” for this — it’s more than a hill, but it’s not quite a mountain either, at least to me. It was pretty much a mile straight up Candlers Mountain Road, then into Snowflex and then a little bit of relief before the final peak. I stopped for a few minutes to catch my breath and to take in the skewed view and then headed back down for a few more miles. Here’s a look at the elevation profile:

The entire run was a good mix of road, gravel, dirt, trail and some sidewalk. About 3 miles into it, I felt some rain … then I felt some more rain … and then about 4 miles it was pretty steady. No problem — I don’t mind the rain at all, although it did make for two days in a row of some kind of rain. But about mile 5 it thundered. Then it thundered again. I’m not going to be out in a thunderstorm, so I ran about a mile less than I wanted to today, but I certainly am not going to complain.

The intensity of the uphill and downhill was something I haven’t experienced in a while. I needed it. And with the thunderstorm, it was a very fitting way to say good-bye.

Here’s a little known fact about me — I very rarely plan my routes. I usually just have a general mileage range in mind and then run wherever I feel like it. I do have certain routes that I know the exact mileage of and have actually been sticking to them lately in my recovery process, but today was different — it was time to run with absolutely no plans beyond getting to at least 6 miles.

So instead of starting from home, I drove to the local middle school to start my route. Then the goals starting coming to mind — hit some long hills, both uphill and downhill. Considering three months ago I was told to avoid hills as much as possible, I wanted to go out of my way if I had to in order to run hills.

Another goal was to not worry about my time at all. When I looked at my watch I made a promise to myself to just look at the distance and avoid looking at the current pace or time elapsed.

I also wanted to make sure I enjoyed this run — for the first time in a while I stopped and took several pictures, including this pony behind the Elks National Home in Bedford:

Things were going great and a few miles into it I decided I needed to do something to help my mind — run the hill where the pain started in October. So I ventured to that part of town and stopped and took this picture of it:

I posted it to Twitter with this simple message: “The hill where my knee pain started 5 months ago. Time to make it mine.”

I made it mine. And I made this entire 6.2-mile run mine. I ran it like I wanted today. I had fun. I didn’t think about my knee. I hit so many little goals along the way that I almost let my emotions get to me. It was like the finishing line of a big race.

Today I crossed a hurdle — I’m not injured anymore; I’m not in recovery either; and while I am training for a 10k in a couple of weeks, I am officially ready for the rest of the year with all these lessons learned in my brain ready to be utilized. I am, as many people on Daily Mile keep telling me, back.

Pictures always make hills seem so easy. This is about halfway down the first hill I tackled today.

One of the biggest things that I believe leads to injuries, and part of what led to mine, is falling in a comfort zone. Same pace, same route, same thoughts, same EVERYTHING. One new piece of advice I’ve developed in the past few months, but haven’t really said is: Don’t get too comfortable.

By that I mean to change things up. It doesn’t have to be all the time. Just make sure a couple of times a week that you do a run isn’t comfortable. Do something different, take a different route, run at a different time of the day. Something.

As my confidence continues to build, today I once again did something with running that I haven’t done in a while — hill repeats. While no run of mine can avoid hills, rarely have I done hill repeats on my own. I’ve done them in training groups and I did them in high school track 16-plus years ago. In my almost 4-year-old blog, the term “hill repeat” comes up in just four posts (five including this one).

That’s a problem that get it’s first fix today.

I was going to do a trail run today for the first time since my DNF in June. When I got to the trails, I realized how bad of an idea that was after so much rain this week, especially since I had my dog. After I got to the bottom of a hill of the trail I took, I did most of my run in grass. I then did four hill repeats on a hill that was just under a tenth of a mile long. Then I ran about a tenth of a mile over to another spot and did two more on an even steeper hill of about the same length. Then I went along some rolling hills and circled back around and did one more. After running back toward where the trail dumped me out, I ran up one more a nice long hill of about two-tenths of a mile back toward my vehicle. I finished the run off on some gravel and pavement for about a half mile.

It was pretty humbling, but very rewarding. My dog was dragging pretty good, too. All told, it was only 3.1 miles, but definitely the toughest 3.1 miles in a while.

I have to add hill repeats to my workouts. HAVE TO. While the hills are very tough around here, it’s a pretty awesome feeling to tackle them more than once. I know the benefit I get from them … I just have to do it.

I don’t have much to say about a 5k I did yesterday … one of the steepest hills I’ve encountered in a 5k absolutely killed my time. That being said, I ran a solid 25:12 in the first-ever 5k at Lynchburg College’s Homecoming.

I was on target for about 24 minutes until the route came back onto campus. Apparently the entrance has a name that didn’t exist when I went to school there — Entrance Hill. According to my Garmin, just after mile 2 I was at an elevation of 629 feet; at the peak of this hill just past 2.5 miles, I was at an elevation of 791 feet. The race had a total elevation gain of 367 feet.

To show at that hill killed my time, my splits were 7:28, 8:10 (which included a nice uphill of Faculty Drive in Lynchburg) and 9:33 in the final 1.1 miles. It was my slowest 5k in almost 5 years.

I’m certainly not complaining or disappointed. I’m happy with how things went and would not do anything different. It was awesome to have a race at my alma mater with about 40 other alumni, many of them former track stars in NCAA Division III athletics. And if they keep doing this every year, I have a new course record to break.

The first time I trained for a marathon, my one and only attempt at running 20 miles failed. This time around, though, my non-plan planning arranged for a few 20 mile runs instead of just one. After getting sick a few weeks ago, I re-planned my non-plans and settled on two 20-mile or more runs. Anything would be better than what happened 3 years ago.

Today, I did it. 20 miles. 20 rough, hilly miles. It wasn’t pretty, but I did it. I finally have a moment in this training session to not say “longest since” and say “longest ever” … today was my longest training run ever.

This run had its ups and downs — literally and figuratively. All told, I had 1,200-plus feet of elevation gain and about the same in elevation loss. The hills really got to me after about 15 miles. I really wanted to call it quits, but I was clear across town from where I started — it was at least 2 miles to get back home, so I kept my head up, avoided as many big hills as I could and got it done. 20 miles.

It was so tough mentally to do this by myself. While the first 5 miles were with my dog, it just got really tough to concentrate after a while. But I got it done.

With 6 weeks to go to the Richmond Marathon, I couldn’t be happier to get a 20 miler done now. When I go out for it again in a few weeks I’ll know that  I’ve already done it once. There’s such a mental victory with that.  And next time I hope to step it up more. Today was about logging the miles; the next time should be about more than that.

For now, though, I’m happy just knowing that I have a 20-mile training run under my belt for the first time ever.

Day 1: 5.5 miles. Day 2: 5.1 miles. I’ve had two pretty good runs to kick off month No. 9 and get last week’s bad week behind me.

This week I finally created a Garmin Connect account, thus giving me more numbers to analyze in a more accurate fashion than trying to map the run myself. For example, in the two runs this week, I’ve had an elevation gain of 674 feet, with about the same in elevation loss. It’s nice to actually see the hills that I’m running in those numbers and more accurately on a map. While I love Daily Mile, the self-mapping feature wasn’t cutting it. You can view my Garmin Connect profile here. (There is an embedding feature that I can’t quite figure out with my site right now.)

Now all I need to make this week complete is a solid long run Saturday morning …