Some group of researchers are doing some critical analysis on why humans were able to run with bare feet and avoid injury. Which part of the foot touches the ground first is apparently a critical factor – modern running shoes encourage the heel to the ground first, while barefoot running has the forefoot striking the ground first.
The first day of the “week 7″ schedule asks for a 10 minute run, 1 minute walk and repeat this until you’ve done it 4 times or have run for 5 kilometers. At the treadmill pace of 6.6 miles per hour, this works out to about 28.4 minutes of running. The last time I attempted this was back in December 21 and it failed miserably. This time, I fared better. I did the 30 minutes of running, with the observation that exactly after I started the 3rd 10-minute leg, that my calves started getting tight again. It wasn’t bad, but after the 30th minute, my feet really started feeling numb. It didn’t affect my running performance.
I wanted to continue onto the 40 minute of running mark (an “extended mission”) so I lowered the treadmill down to 3.0 miles per hour and walked 4 minutes, and my feet felt a lot better. Then I ran another 10 minutes, but the feet got semi-numb when that was concluded.
I have no idea what is going on in my legs or feet, but it was better than last month. I do historically note that I tend to run better when my feet are numb during the actual race day, but this probably isn’t a good thing.
A positive note, however, is that my cardiovascular performance seems to be quite good – I was never out of breath throughout the entire running procedure.
The last note on the training session was that they had the Food channel on one of the televisions and they had a show of this guy making his own fresh pizzas from scratch with various toppings on it and sprinkled with fresh Mozzarella cheese – and baked inside a wood burning oven stove (which is the only true way to make pizza, in my opinion). It looked sooooooooooo good while running. I love the Food channel, but the only problem with it is that while watching it you get so hungry even when you’ve just eaten!
My “week 11″ (based on the week 6 training schedule) began on January 16th. The January 18th session was done outdoors because it was a sunny day, which was my first outdoor attempt. As I pointed out earlier, I will have to make sure that my shoes are “correct” since I suspect they make a huge difference while running.
This was a four-session week with Saturday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday being run days – I wanted to get back to the Monday-Wednesday-Friday cycle. I just repeated Wednesday’s run for Friday (January 22). I noticed my legs on Friday’s run were a bit more “tired” after running, specifically with the feeling of tingling on the bottom of the feet, but it was not severe. What was a little more disturbing was that my legs still felt noticeably sore for most of Saturday, but this went away on Sunday. I am wondering whether this is normal or whether I’m doing some sort of real damage to myself – I hope it is just regular soreness, but if it continues I will do some more research on it.
I hope after resting for two days that Monday’s (today’s) run goes well with the Week 7 cycle. I suspect that the pounding on the feet and legs is amplified with increased body mass over the past few years, so I am fairly conscious of the holistic nature of running – if I shed 5 pounds, that’s 5 pounds less that my legs have to carry with every step. And since the ideal pace is 180 steps per minute, each 10km race ideally should be 10,080 steps. This implies that each step should be a meter!
Although the beginning of January was disrupted by vacation plans, I resumed running at the regular three times a week schedule and started off again with some maintenance running, with about 30 minutes of total running load, dispersed with 1 minute walks every 3, 4 and 5 minutes. I started to go by “the book” again, starting at week 6 on January 16th, a Saturday.
The runs have been proceeding fine with respect to cardiovascular impact and also the feel of the feet.
Yesterday, however, it was a nice day outside and I attempted to run outside for a simple 3 minute run, 1 minute walk, repeated 7 times. I was wearing a different set of shoes (I was not at my usual location on the treadmill) and noticed around the 15 minute mark that my calves were feeling very tender. It could be either due to me not wearing these shoes for awhile, or that I am not too accustomed to running on asphalt (opposed to treadmill rubber). I will be experimenting with this by wearing my old used shoes that I normally train with and see if it causes as much trouble. I am also curious whether my actual pace is the normal 6.6 miles an hour that I keep the treadmill out – I would suspect I am slightly faster than this outside.
I’ve got roughly 15 weeks to get to the point where I can run 55 minutes straight and to also try to improve my speed such that I will be able to do it at an average speed of 6.7 miles per hour, exactly.
The Christmas holiday is always disruptive to exercise schedules for two reasons – travel and food. I basically have written off trying to keep to the schedule during this time and just get to the gym whenever I can and do my “maintenance running”, which I try to keep to a 30 minute load, and in 5-minute chunks space by 1 minute walks. The first disruption was during Christmas Day where the gym was closed, and the only opportunity I had to work out was on December 28th. Surprisingly it felt fine on the treadmill although I encountered the same issue with the right calf, but it wasn’t that much of a hindrance.
I also missed the December 30th run due to some other commitments, while on January 1st the gym was open and I was able to run again – this time I ended the run with 10 minutes of straight running. Oddly enough I did not encounter any difficulty with the legs or even on the cardiovascular side of things, so it appears that maybe resting my legs on a light-load schedule might be worth it.
I will not be around for the next few days and as a result I will not be packing my running shoes. However, I will be very close to a swimming pool so I will attempt to at least keep in aerobic shape by swimming in a couple days before resuming my running on Thursday, January 7. I will be starting from week 6 of the schedule again and hopefully build up to the point where I can reach week 12/13 and be able to increase my speed. It will be interesting to see what an effect this will have on my endurance.
I have finally gotten out of my summer mode and November was the month I started to concentrate on the next Sun Run. I did the first training today. The game plan is to follow the “Learn to Run 10k” program to the letter. Because of the 2010 Olympics, the Vancouver Sun Run will be on May 9, 2010, compared to the usual start time of the third week in April.
Just to recap, my running times were as follows:
2006 – 57:14 (race recap)
2007 – 57:08 (race recap)
2008 – 56:05 (race recap; this was an exceptionally draining attempt)
2009 – 58:53 (race recap)
I have taken an unconventional view that the Sun Run represents more than a simple 10km race, rather it represents a barometer of age. Since people get slower as they age, it is truly a race against mortality. If you can beat your all-time best time, you are still turning back the clock.
My goal in 2009 was to beat my 56:05 time, but I absolutely ran out of gas during the race and had a very lame performance. This year, my goal is to gun for the 56 minute and 4 second mark, although my analysis would suggest that I would be lucky to break an hour.
Here are some initial thoughts going into the training regimen I will be putting myself under:
1. I seem to have gained a bit more weight than in April 2009; likewise, I weighed more in 2008 than I did in 2007. While this trend of increasing weight is not favourable to better race times, I believe proper weight management through exercise, and disciplined nutritional intake will be a critical variable. Generally speaking if I got back to my 2008 weight I will be happy – it is not a dramatic reduction in weight, about 10 pounds from present.
2. Higher weight puts an excess strain on the feet, knees and joints in that area, especially as you are pounding your bones with more force. I am getting older and have to be very aware not to exercise in such a way that will injure myself.
3. I should really buy a better quality pair of shoes for running before commencing longer duration runs. I know getting better shoes is just like giving me a thousand dollar set of golf clubs to improve my golf game (i.e. it will have no effect at all), but I am more conscious of getting padding on those shoes to avoid potential injury. I know if I ever feel like I’ve injured myself, that it is too late – the goal is to prevent one.
4. What really killed me in 2009 was when I caught the flu and never regained my training regimen to the strength that I had in 2008. If I get sick with the flu (or heaven forbid, H1N1), I absolutely need to be disciplined in getting back to speed again.
5. Heat management will also be important – as the race is starting a couple weeks later in May, it will be warmer and this means more sweat. My body sweats quite a bit even when during trivial amounts of work (and this has always been the case since I have been little). I also know, through experimentation, that my output is a heck of a lot better when I stay cool. I don’t know how this can be managed, but it is something to think about.
6. I definitively can certify that high-cardiovascular exercise improves mental functioning, and look forward to this side-effect of Sun Run training.
7. I am rather proud of transcribing the race results, and documenting this. Keeping a weblog active for a long period of time has huge information retention benefits, and this is worthy of a future post as it has little to do with the Sun Run itself.
Finally, in the style of Anthony, I will be using this weblog as an accountability mechanism and report back periodically on the results of the training.
Today I did 8 minutes of total running; consisting of 1 minute runs, and 2 minute walks, repeated 8 times. The runs were at 6.8 miles per hour, while the walking was at 3.8 miles per hour. Because they were showing Survivorman, I walked for about 15 minutes after performing the official training. I generally felt good, despite the fact that I haven’t really done any heavy cardio-type exercise since the previous Sun Run (April 2009). Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.
I received a phone call from them today after mailing them the following letter on Monday. I will be receiving my shirt!
These guys clearly know how to run an event, so full complements to them.
To the Vancouver Sun Run,
I picked up my race package on Saturday, April 18, 2009, at 3:45pm. The process was fast until I reached the station where it was time to pick up my shirt. At the shirt collection tables, there was a collection of people, and the volunteers that were distributing the shirts explained that “We are out of shirts – there is a truck arriving with more shirts.” After being asked if they knew when the truck was arriving they replied they didn’t know.
As I was not in a position to wait an indeterminate amount of time, I decided to take my race bib and chip, and leave BC Place to go on with my business for the day, without my Sun Run shirt.
On Sunday, April 19, I finished the race, and the rest of the logistics were excellently planned out and executed.
I am writing to request my shirt that was not available on April 18. Attached is my race bib (Green #9909). In the event that the Sun Run shirts are no longer available, a shirt from Canwest (or the Vancouver Sun) would be acceptable.
I can be reached by postal mail, E-Mail (sacha.peter@gmail.com) or via telephone (778-878-9223).
I will be adding myself onto the Google list of search terms when somebody types of “miserable failure” since my effort this year seems to have translated into that.
My finish time was around 58 minutes and 50 seconds, give or take a few seconds (update: final time was 58:53). My goal this year was to beat 56 minutes and 5 seconds (my last year’s time), but I got nowhere close.
There were a few problems this year, solely attributable to myself. One is that I got sick once in February and twice in March, and this really ruined my training rhythm as all three instances really cut a week out of my training schedule (despite the fact that I started training in November).
The second problem was I just ran out of energy. Around the 20 minute mark, I felt like I was already running out of gas, and my “second wind” never kicked in after the Burrard Street Bridge, which is where previously I made up a lot of time. I recall making it to the 4km mark at around 22 minutes and 30 seconds, but just didn’t feel good at all when climbing up the hill to get on the Burrard.
Finally, while on top of the Burrard Street Bridge, I had a feeling that I’ve never encountered in training – nausea! I felt like I had to puke around the 7km mark. I’m guessing this may be attributable to losing too much energy. When I looked at the stopwatch around this time, there was no way that I could have beat my previous time even if I had renounced my citizenship and became a Kenyan.
I’m not sure what caused this loss of energy – I got a decent night’s sleep, and I had pasta for dinner the previous night. I’m just guessing that my big problem was the training regimen and also just I might have gotten up from the wrong side of the bed.
Finally, a word on crowd control – there were more people starting from the “Green” bib zone than I recall last year. Dealing with the volume of people is part of the race and I’ve come to accept that.
To gauge what my performance will be next week, I went for an early evening run outside and did about 10 kilometers. The cycle was 5 minutes of running and one minute of walking. The weather was nearly ideal – no wind, cool but not cold, and partly sunny.
The trick was not to start too quickly – as long as my body can ‘ramp up’, I can maintain a fair rate of speed throughout the middle and end of the race.
Attached is a map of where I ran through – some of the terrain was hilly so this would have skewed my actual time. Unfortunately I didn’t time myself, but the run felt quite good. It really did feel like I could go 15 kilometers at the rate I was going today. But I stopped around 10 kilometers.
I think my illnesses in March really cost me a lot of training momentum, but I have been trying to make up for this. I am not at all confident I can break 56 minutes at this time, however. My issue is being able to ramp up my speed when I need to – the most important time to pick up speed is after crossing the Burrard Street Bridge and not lose it even as you continue to climb up the Cambie Street Bridge.
A positive indicator is that my weight is actually lower now than it has been since the last federal election (which caused me to literally gain 10 pounds).
2009 has been a record year for the flu. Once in January, and twice in March – the last training I had was exactly one week ago and it went relatively well after reaching over the ‘energy wall’. Unfortunately one day after that, I must have got caught something and it resulted in major headaches and sweatiness (but no fever, oddly enough – my temperature was a smooth 37 degrees). As a result, I generally couldn’t function properly during half the day although a few times a day a good “window of opportunity” without headaches came, and I was mentally productive then. But I mostly stayed in bed and tried to fight it off that way.
The miracle solution I found out was taking a couple Tylenol or Advil (whichever was handy at the time) and it would provide some relief in an hour, but it had the side effect of making me even more sweaty, even when I wasn’t physically doing anything. It was like my body had a problem with its temperature regulation or something.
Either way, today I finally snapped out of it and went running on the treadmill for the first time in a week.
It wasn’t pretty – I initially did a 15 minute warmup (after taking a suggestion of a previous commenter here) and then ramped up to a 5-minute run and 1-minute walk routine. I got through about 3 cycles of this before my body just gave up and I decided to walk a bit and then resume the run. I did a cumulative amount of 30 minutes of running, but it was interspersed with walking breaks. I just felt like I was completely out of gas, but I’m guessing this is because I didn’t get a good night’s sleep yesterday and my general lack of training for the past week.
I’m generally getting concerned that these sickness-related interruptions to my training schedule is going to seriously compromise my ability to beat my last year’s time. I don’t have a lot more time to train (four weeks until race day), so if I get sick once again I’m probably toast on my attempt to beat my time.