Training Totals – 11-08-09

RECAP: I had a week of serious ups and downs. I had some bad news which means I will have almost no time to post here for a while, and some very good news – I got engaged. Both of these meant that I didn’t have the time to work out as much as I would have liked, and frankly, I won’t have the time to work out as much as I would like from now until March. Life sucks. Anyway, reworked plans are to try and keep up my steady progression of mileage and basically forget the rest. I will still row some, but not as much as I had wanted and weight lifting is for now out the window.

Weekly Data:

Average Weight – 188

Running Miles: 8 miles in 1:12:05 hours

Row Meters: 10,000 (6.2 miles) in 47:57

Total exercise time: ~2 hours

Review of Last Week’s Goals:

1. Increase mileage by ~10% to 14.5 – FAILED

2. Increase row total to 20,000 meters – FAILED

3. Do body weight work three days – FAILED

4. Keep to schedule regarding limited alcohol consumption – FAILED

Goals for Next Week:

1. Increase mileage to 14.5

2. Maintain paleo diet

70s Hero: Ron Hill

Some lessons learned from the runners of the 1970s stick with us today. Perhaps the two  most important are:

1. You need to get in the mileage.

2. Short shorts are most comfortable.

Nobody epitomized getting in the miles more than Ron Hill. Hill won the Boston Marathon in 1970 in 2:10:30 and the Commonwealth Games in 2:09:28. And he looked good doing it:

Since December 20, 1964, Ron Hill has run every single day. He has run as much as over 120 miles plus a week and as little as twenty.  What I wouldn’t give to see his logs from the early seventies. He has got in the miles, no matter what happened. Now I am not saying that we all need to follow Hill’s compulsion. But when it is raining and cold and you just don’t want to lace up the shoes, remember Ron Hill has laced them up in far worst conditions and gotten out there.

Check out Hill’s website for more info on the man who broke 2:10 in a mesh shirt and puts all other running streaks to shame here.

Nativist / Racist / Enough of This

For the people out there who know me in real life, you know I am a pretty political person. I have spent most of my adult life working in political organizations. But this blog isn’t suppossed to be about that, it is suppossed to be about running. And then, Meb Keflezighi has to go and win the New York Marathon, churning up a whole bunch of nasty “he isn’t really an American” crap.

No to all of this. First of all, Meb has been running in the U.S. since high school, which means he has been an American runner longer than I have. And no one would ever say someone with my skin color and name isn’t an American, no matter when they started running here. But that isn’t the point. I wouldn’t have cared if Meb had moved to the U.S. the day before the marathon. This is a country of immigrants. We are at our best when we are welcoming to people who want to come here, bringing their talent and hard work with them. We are at our worst when we start setting up criteria for who is “American”. So lets call this for what it is – nativism and racism. Nativist envy that someone who came from to this country with so little has done so well. And racism because I am willing to bet this wouldn’t be news if his name was Tom Smith and he had immigrated here from Canada at age 12.

So, when you’re reading a running forum, or chatting about this at a social event and Meb’s “american-ness” comes up. Speak up for him. He just did a great thing and we should be proud of him.

Training Totals 11.01.09

Recap – I had a really great week exercise wise. Joining the local gym was the best investment in fitness I have made in a while. With my running so limited recently, I need to be working out in the gym or I am going to get enormous and out of shape.

Anyway, the take away from this week is I crush my goals rowing wise, and I think if I can manage my schedule properly, the holiday challenge shouldn’t be a problem. Check out the numbers below.

Training numbers for the week ending 11.01.09

This week’s training numbers are brought to you by the pain felt in my butt after rowing 10,000 meters.

Weekly Data:

Average Weight – 188

Running Miles: 13.5 miles in 2:01:01 hours

Row Meters: 17,000 (10.6 miles) in 1:16:58

Weight Training and Bodyweight work: sets of push ups, pull ups, dips, crunches, in a total of ~ 45:00

Total exercise time: ~4 hours

Review of Last Week’s Goals:

1. Increase run mileage by ~10% to 13.5 – DONE

2. Increase row total to 7,000 meters – DONE

3. Do body weight work three days – DONE

Goals for Next Week:

1. Increase mileage by ~10% to 14.5

2. Increase row total to 20,000 meters

3. Do body weight work three days

4. Keep to schedule regarding limited alcohol consumption

New York Marathon

Congratulations to

Lindsay from Chasing the Kenyans setting a new PR in  3:33:02

Derartu Tulu winning the women’s division in 2:28:52

Meb Keflezighi becoming the first American in 27 years to win the NYC marathon, finishing in 2:09:15

I am especially moved by Meb’s performance. The American running media has expended gallons of ink on Ryan Hall (a great runner, no doubt) while Meb has not gotten nearly as much press. To have someone with his life story be the first American to win the race in 27 years is incredible. He should be really proud. As should everyone else who was out there yesterday.

New York was my first (and so far only) marathon, and I loved the experience. Man I am looking forward to getting back there.

70s Hero Bill Rodgers

A couple of weeks ago, a friend forward me the outrageous and funny weightlifting site 70sbig (warning – sexism abounds on this site). The site is basically an ode to getting really big to be able to lift heavier weights. It’s funny, and I love the motif of 70s weightlifters.

Anyway, 70s big got me thinking about sports in the seventies, this was the time of the first weightlifting boom, and also the time of the first running boom, when lots of people started getting very interested in getting fit. Marathons became major events; running books were on the best sellers list, and suddenly lots of people were interested in getting fit.

I’ve been doing some research into this era in running history and love the place it holds as time when people began taking running seriously, but where the study of running wasn’t as scientific as it is today. Many of these men and women were training in a near vacuum of scientific information, they experimented in how much they run and how fast. They test different types of diets. They were their own guinea pigs in attempts to get fast. I have really only just started to dive into the history of this time, but I bet there are a lot of great stories from those times, and I hope to document some of them here every now and again.

This week though, we’ll start off a little late, with Bill Rodgers American Record 2:09:27 finish at the 1979 Boston marathon. Amazing performance.

Asked in a 1979 interview with Boston Magazine (pdf) about how he trains, Rodgers said “I’ll get up in the morning, and just maybe have a cup of coffee. Then we drive down to our store on Cleveland Circle and in the late morning, I’ll go out for a ten mile run… [I’ll usually train] at a six or six and a half minutes per mile. . . But in the evenings I will sometimes run a fast eight miles instead, at about 5:30 per mile.”

In the year leading up 1979, Rodger’s says he average 125 miles a week. Look like it paid off. Here’ s his finish:

November Experiments

November is going to be a big month of experiment for me. With my running limited, but the fear of getting out of shape and putting on the pounds terrifying me, I’m going to be doing some experiments in eating, drinking and working out. Every year I do a race in my hometown on Thanksgiving morning. This year I was hoping to crush my previous time, but this stupid foot injury is limiting my training.  I just won’t be able to get in the miles I would have liked.

So, if training needs to stay constant, what other way is there to get faster? Lose weight.

In November I am going to do two things to try and drop five or so pounds.How am I going to do this? First, I’m not going to drink as much. E and I have wine with dinner most nights, I am going to cut that back to a weekend treat. Second, for the middle two weeks of the month, I am going to give the much ballyhooed paleo diet a try.

I have some friends who are deep in the crossfit world who have had excellent results on the paleo diet. They have lost weight, felt better, blah blah blah. These guys are serious athletes, very strong and very fast at short distances, and this diet has worked really well for them. For me, I don’t think it’ll work long term. Despite all the injuries which have keep me from the marathon, I am (or want to be) a distance runner. That means I need to log big miles, and if I am running a lot, I need carbs. However since I can’t log the big miles right now, I feel like this is the perfect opportunity to experiment with a diet that has been successful for others and see what it is all about. Its only two weeks. If it sucks, It’ll be over quickly; if I like the results, perhaps I can adopt certain aspects to a more carb friendly diet.

So, the November schedule of fun events include:

November 1 – November 26 – cut out weekday booze.

November 9 – November 23 – paleo diet experiment

November 26- December 24th – row 200,000 meters as part of the holiday challenge.

Should be a fun month!

Additionally, I am thinking of using twitter to track some of this. Does anyone else out there use twitter to track their running?

Barefoot Running

I have been following the recent craze in barefoot running pretty closely, but I haven’t yet jumped into it myself. I have two main concerns, the first is that it seems a new running fad comes along every couple of years and takes (especially the online) world by storm. Chi-running, pose method, whatever. Barefoot running definitely seems to make more sense, but the risk of injury also seems higher. Second, I’m a larger runner running in an urban enviroment (currently weighing in at 188 pounds) and I think that while the body may have been built to run barefoot, my unshod ancestors where almost surely a lot lighter… and not running on pavement.

Still, I’m curious. This thing is definitely getting big. All the online message boards I look at have sections devoted to barefoot running, and this weekend, when I watched the Marine Corp marathon (a friend’s brother was running, and he finished in 3:33!) in the pack that was on pace to finish around the 3:30 mark I saw two guys in vibrams, and one completely barefoot. That definitely peaked my interest. People are running marathons, and they are running them pretty fast, with no shoes. Maybe I should give this a closer look.

Oh, and to show you how mainstream this has gotten, here’s (another) article mentioning barefoot running in the New York Times. And here’s a video of google founder Sergey Brin talking smart while wearing his vibrams.

Holiday Challenge

As this lingering foot issue is keeping me from running the miles I want, I’ve been hitting the concept2 rower again with some frequency (logging 5000 meters this morning, longest row yet!). I love the variety it offers from running and man do I break a sweat on the thing.

Now, because I can’t do anything “just for fun” I’ve been poking around on the concept2 site and decided that I am going to go for the holiday challenge this year, 200,000 meters between Thanksgiving and Christmas. That is roughly 7,000 meters a day. Everyday. A commitment, sure, but not insane. I’m wondering if anyone else out there in internet land would be interested in joining me? Knowing someone else was out there logging the meters would be a great incentive to keep me on the machine.

 

Notes from an early morning gym visit.

1. Spotted – the mayor’s dad. Our mayor, Adrien Fenty is born and raised in my neck of the woods, his parents own a running store in Adam’s Morgan and his dad is a bit of a fitness nut. He was the first African American to ever run Western States, thank you very much. He is also, apparently, a member of my gym.

2. Spotted – a guy wearing a Barack Obama for State Senate 1996 t-shirt. That shirt is like the political junky equivalent of the Beatles butcher album. I wonder if the guy worked that campaign, if he bought it off ebay, or if it is was even original. Yes people, I spent that much time wondering about a political t-shirt.

3. More generally, the look and feel of different gyms is always fascinating. When I lived in New York I worked out at a crunch gym on the edge of SoHo. That place was full of the model pretty, skinny ladies plugging away for hours on end on elliptical machines and guys trying to walk that fine line of being both emaciated and slightly muscled. When I moved down here I worked out in both the Georgetown gym, which was roughly divided into Type A people who were super serious about lifting weights and Type A people who were super serious about running/cardio in general and a crossfit gym which was full of people whose lives depended on being super fit cause they did things like “worked in extraction” and “worked for the department of defense”. Nothing makes you feel closer to the world of covert operations that showering with it. Now at this gym, I feel like I am finally working out in a normal environment. Some people are super fit (like Fenty’s dad) and some are clearly new to the experience, but most are just there to get in their forty minutes of cardio, maybe do a couple of crunches or use a machine. Its all very civilized and it is quite a change from my other gym experiences.