Sun Run 2010: Race week
Posted in Commentary on May 7th, 2010 by Sacha PeterI will put a long story short and will say it will be a miracle if I beat my previous best time of 56 minutes and 5 seconds. It’s not going to happen. I will feel lucky if I beat an hour.
Basically the story is that my training schedule got massively interrupted by childbirth and respective parenting duties. It was to be expected, but at least I have managed to train twice a week, and a few times three times a week (three times a week is what is necessary to keep up endurance in my opinion). For the last month, I have been exclusively running outdoors since the local gym facility that I normally go to transitioned ownership.
Really not helping was that falling down while running incident. Although I’m fully healed from that, it has given me a little bit of psychological scarring running on slightly uneven gravel terrain!
The other issue is weight gain – I guess age is catching up, but basically the body is really good at packing on those pounds, and is not good at surrendering them so easily. If I am to do this next year with a respectable time, I have to watch this and not handicap myself with an extra few pounds of weight.
Going into the race, I am going to alter my strategy somewhat – I am choosing to not wear a watch. I will also be showing up a little bit later, since I think standing out in the open for half an hour, waiting for the waves of people to clear is more detrimental to performance than having to wade through the crowds of people. I recall in previous races that it was quite entertaining trying to get around people, and this distraction might make it easier to cope with the race. I also have a problem with starting too quickly, and having plenty of people around might mitigate this – where I need the endurance is the 40 to 55 minute mark, and most others wear out at this time. I’m probably going to experience the same.
I also field-tested some new shoes I bought two weeks ago, to good success – less aches and pains on the feet when running, and no blisters or adverse effects.
Best of luck for everybody on Sunday. The weather is expected to be sunny, highs of 16 and lows of 6, which is a cool day for the second week of May, but is perfect for running purposes.
Tags: sun run, sun run 2010
“basically the body is really good at packing on those pounds, and is not good at surrendering them so easily”
Since making some dietary changes, I’ve had the opposite problem (I was losing too much weight) while basically sitting around all day on my butt, except for 30 min. in the gym weight-lifting.
Basically, I think trying to lose weight by exercise is crazy. To burn off 1 cookie takes 30 minutes of running.
My guess is that the cause of most people’s weight gain is sugar, and after that more generally carbohydrates.
What’s worked for me: decrease refined sugars (a lot of things on ingredients labels people don’t even realize is sugar, such as “high-fructose corn syrup”) and increase dairy fat, which seems to have an inhibitive effect on my appetite – I’m also now looking into grass-fed dairy products which supposedly have higher n-3 to n-6 ratios.