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Entering Race Season and February Recap

Last 6 Runs

7 miles, 6:45 pace | 7 miles, 6:45 pace | 3 miles, 6:30 pace | 5 miles, 6:45 pace | 6.5 miles, 7:00 pace | 5 miles, 7:15 pace

A text I sent to my dad on this week:

Officially into the worst running time of the year. Every time it warms up and then cools back off I am extremely depressed and motivation goes down the tubes

I stand by every word. Case in point: for the second run listed above it was 50 degrees and sunny on the weekend, and I got outside and enjoyed an awesome long run, my second in a row. The next day brought winds gusting above 40 mph, to the point where when I was running perpendicular to the win it was blowing my legs out from under me when they were in the air. Genuinely alarming stuff, so I audibled into a mile repeat workout. Being outside for 45 minutes in that would have been pointless. The next day, from consecutive 50 degree performances by mother nature, we were back down to 32.

It’s such a difficult mental tease. Having a great run and then two days later coming home from work and the temperature has dropped 20 degrees and it’s grey outside…I never deal with it well. Add it to the list of personal and self-inflicted obstacles I face for training effectively.

February has come and gone, and in the shortest month of the year, I turned in a pretty decent performance. 83 miles, which included the disastrous week off from a bachelor party/extended bachelor party recovery. I got my first workout of the year in, and have generally felt my comfort level with sub 7 minute miles come back to me. A jog is a 7:10 at this point. That’s a good sign.

More importantly, the race season is upon me? As you may have noticed in the sidebar, my first 5k of 2019 is happening tomorrow. I don’t have high expectations, but I am excited to set a bar that speed work will hopefully lower quickly as the weather gets warmer and the sun stays up longer. Goal for this race is probably somewhere around 18:30. By the end of this month, I’d like to lower that to 17:30.

Do you have any races or goals coming up soon to kick off the competitive running season?

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Speed Up and Slow Down

Last 5 Runs:

5.5 miles (Workout) | 4 miles, 8:00 pace | 6 miles, 7:00 pace | 5 miles, 6:45 pace | 5 miles, 7:00 pace

That would be a really good week of running rain/snow February for me, but it took me almost two weeks to get those five runs in. What gives? Well, this stuff may have had something to do with it…

A little bit too much sugar, a little bit too much liquor

I attended a bachelor party in New Orleans two weekends ago and while it was a great time, I didn’t exactly come out clean on the other side. I’m not much of a liquor drinker (beer and wine are much more my speed), but it never occurred to me to do anything but enjoy the local fare, which meant filling up on copious amounts of sugary rum drinks. On the final night I ate somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 pounds of shrimp (honestly, it didn’t seem gross at the time, but it is in retrospect), and I don’t think that helped much either. Anyway, the cumulative effect of a four day weekend got the best of me. I got home on Sunday with no ability or desire to do anything, and then spent Monday and Tuesday feeling far from 100%. Six days off it is.

Am I making excuses here? Yes. But it’s also worth mentioning because this won’t be the last time my penchant for a late night and a good time gets in the way of training. I don’t regret having fun in New Orleans and will continue to party when I get to see my friends. But to accomplish my goals, running needs to find it’s way into my routine during those weekends when I’m going to be burning the candle at both ends. One early morning wake up into a 5 mile run in New Orleans and I would be writing about a light week, not one where I almost feel like I’m resetting. All it takes is a little discipline one night and one morning. I’m going to Mexico for a wedding this spring and Colorado for some hiking this summer. Some opportunities to improve.

Enough philosophizing, let’s talk running. The funniest part about the New Orleans-imposed hiatus is it followed my first workout of the year. That’s right! I went for 1,000 repeats, with a slow 1,000 for recovery. The results:

  • Split 1: 4:00
  • Split 2: 3:28
  • Split 3: 4:03
  • Split 4: 3:17
  • Split 5: 4:02
  • Split 6: 3:25
  • Split 7: 4:12
  • Split 8: 3:31

That’s not too shabby! A 4:20 kilometer is right on a 7:00 mile, so staying comfortably below that pace for the entire workout is good. Feeling comfortable enough after running hard to stay at a solid pace (Split 7 did fall off a bit from the others but is still ~6:45) was actually quite encouraging.

The fast splits are pretty nice as well. Aside from the last one, I was pleased with my pace. To put it in perspective though, to hit my goal in the 5k, I need to string together five 3:18 splits consecutively, so there’s quite a bit of improvement required. Luckily, it’s mid-February.

There’s also the mental benefit that comes from doing a speed workout. It breaks up the monotony of distance running and gives you a baseline to build from during a training session. It’s pretty exciting to see what you’re capable of, especially because it’s often more than you realize. I’m certainly a little faster than I thought, and can try to bring more focus into my distance runs to make them faster going forward. And next time I go fast, it’ll be with improvement on my mind.

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Vortex Schmortex

Last 6 Runs

5 miles, 7:15 pace | 4 miles, 7:30 pace | 4 miles, 7:30 pace | 5.5 miles, 7:00 pace | 7 miles, 7:00 pace | 6 miles, 6:50 pace

We have officially run the gamut of ridiculous Ohio weather multiple times over in January and into February. Schools were closed in Columbus due to wind chills dropping below -20 in the middle of last week and so I was relegated to my old enemy the treadmill for a couple days. Can you guess which runs those were?

But then the polar vortex passed and three days later it was nearly 60 degrees and sunny. The temperature has moved from to 0 to 50 to 0 to 50 in the span of two weeks. Ohio is weird, and climate change is coming for us all. In other news, I’m officially an old man whose life revolves around the weather forecast. Honestly, I spend inordinate amounts of time on my weather app preparing for the hours when I might be spending time outside within the next week.

On the positive side of that global warming thing, you do get some pretty spectacular days to enjoy during what would normally be miserable winter. On Super Bowl Sunday I waited until about 2 p.m. when it was about 58 degrees and went for my longest run of 2019. With people preparing for the game, the bike path was emptier than it would normally be on such a perfect day for exercise, and I had an awesome run. Cruising along at 7 minute miles felt easy, and getting a little Vitamin D back in the system wasn’t too shabby either.

These types of runs are necessary for me. After a couple days straight on a treadmill, and a few runs where it was cold and grey and hard to convince myself to get outside, it’s so refreshing to reset with a run where you want to get out and get after it. It’s so encouraging to be running fast, and long, and feeling totally fine doing it. Running is not always like that.

The only way I could follow that up was with a ridiculous rain run the following day. It was still in the low 50s, but temps were going to drop significantly overnight, and I just couldn’t pass that up. So I through on the Patagonia water gear and my Boston Marathon hat (to let anyone else on the bike path know that I was better than them, of course) and headed on to the path again.

It was another great run, and I moved quickly because the rain and wind just have a way of keeping you especially active, but it also had a memorable detour. I was running on the sidewalk between sections of bike path when I car came by and hammered a puddle next to me. I have no idea if it was intentional, but it felt like the low moment in a movie when everything is going wrong for a guy and then a car comes and covers him in water, and I was pissed. I shouted and took off at a near-sprint, trying to catch the car and, I don’t know, knock on their window and shout more obscenities?

Alas, the driver was able to execute a right turn at the red light I was trying to catch up to him at and escape. I’d like to think that person was a little bit shook the rest of the way home, though. I’m an intimidating dude.

I ran 95 miles in January, a pretty solid number. I would have broken 100 if not for that cold/flu I got in the middle of the month. Still, I’m feeling really good about my running, and with only a month and a half of dodging cold weather to go, it’s exciting to feel like I’m in good shape with lots of time to improve. The base is pretty close to being there, and the speed comes next!

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Grey Ohio Winter Misery

Last Five Runs

6 miles | 5 miles | 5 miles | 5.5 miles | 5 miles  all at similar pace (~6:45-7)

A quick note about these Last Several Runs that will accompany the top of each post: The distances will be rounded to the nearest half mile to keep things simple. For example, that 6 mile run was a 10k. On certain key training runs, I may keep the exact distance.

And so we’re a couple weeks into 2019. Winter is an interesting time of year for me in terms of running, because it sucks, but it’s usually pretty important for hitting my goals in a given year. The desire to get outside, run hard and be productive vs. the dread of having cold hands or being outside in general is a battle I go through mentally almost every year. Last year it was the need to start pouring in miles for an early spring marathon; this year, it’s about finding a way to stay relatively fast and in great shape for when daylight savings time is done and real running can begin.

Because let’s make no mistake about it–running in the winter is awful. The weather in Ohio ranges from unpleasant to frigid (although in fairness we did have a warm December this year), and that is only made worse by the nearly-permanent dim grey color the sky settles into through February. Seriously, when the sun is actually shining you get some of your best runs during the midwest winter, because it feels like you have something worth living for.

And none of that includes the most underrated awful part of winter running: you have to do laundry at least twice as often. To deal with the cold, you have to slap on multiple layers of long-sleeved clothing and pants, which then get sweaty and fill up a washing machine much faster than normal clothes. Add to this reality the fact that normal people don’t own as many pairs of running pants or tights and pullovers as they do shorts and shirts, and you have to do laundry more often than normal just to maintain clean clothing. Yes, running in the winter time is the worst.

Anyway, let’s get to the running. It’s likely that there won’t be much variance on the Last Several Runs at the top of these posts until the weather warms up slightly and the sun stays out for longer. Mostly 5-7 mile runs where I’m executing a 6:30 – 7:15 pace over the course of them. I try to add surges here and there for a couple minutes to keep speed on my mind, but it’s nothing really focused yet.

I’ve run 9 of the last 12 days, and 5 of the last 6, which means it was time for nice evening off. The increased workload had my legs tired yesterday while running. That’s a good sign, because it means I’m running enough to gain some fitness. But it also means I’ve got some work to do. 5 out of 6 days running should become the norm, with speed work and higher mileage mixed in by the time spring gets here.

Solid start, but a long way to go, especially with some colder, snowier weather coming to make running outside more challenging. Keep pushing!