Busy weekend!

I have picked up a cold and am not feeling well!  It is a bummer to be sick during marathon training.  I had a crummy run yesterday and am wondering how much longer this thing will hang on.  I probably should have taken a day off yesterday, but I really wanted to get out there.  Do you take days off when you are sick? Maybe Terry could do a "more meat" post on the theories of running while sick (that's a not so subtle hint).

Back to the title of this post...it was a busy weekend!  Thanks to Erin/ET for hosting a fun TRY shindig on Saturday.  There were lots of laughs, and I enjoyed the company of running mates.  I hope everyone else did, too.  Thanks to Ivy for bringing the fun game :)

Sunday was a busy race day!  Sunday morning was the Teal Ribbon 5k in the Inner Harbor.  It was a beautiful morning for a race!  Erin/Escalade, Terry, Ally, Catherine, Jake, Katie, and Erin's parents participated in the event.  It was Erin's first 5k, and Jake gave a great 5th place showing.  Make sure to congratulate Erin, Jake, and all the participants.

Terry and Catherine also participated in the Strathmore Run 4 miler Sunday afternoon.  That is a double race for them!  I can't wait to hear how it went.  I can imagine it was a tough course with the hills in that area!

Did I miss anyone in the races this weekend?

This week I am doing half mile intervals.  I plan to do a 1 mile warm up and cool down with 0.5 mile intervals as follows:

• 0.5 mile at speed
• 0.25 mile recovery
• 0.5 mile at speed
• 0.25 mile recovery
• 0.5 mile at speed
• 0.5 mile recovery
• 0.5 mile at speed

That will be a total of 5 miles.  I would recommend anyone that raced this weekend to do a 2-4 mile recovery run based on how you feel.  For people who are newer to running, I would recommend cutting the half mile repeats down to 2 or 3 for a total of 4 miles.  Let me know if you have any questions!

Erin/ET's birthday is tomorrow so try to show up and wish her a happy birthday!  I would imagine there will be a group outing after running to celebrate :)

Out of Topics

I can't think of anything to write about today...surprised?  Not really for me!  Terry wrote another post (includes meat sweats).  Make sure to check it out.

This week we have Erin/Escalade and Terry doing the Teal Ribbon Run on Sunday.  Is there anyone else with races coming up?

This week Aaron and I will be doing a 5 tempo run since we have a 20 miler coming up this weekend.  That will be 1 mile easy, 3 miles at a faster pace, and 1 mile cool down.  I would guess Erin T., Adam, and others will be up for 0.25 mile repeats.  I would recommend 6 of those bad boys :)

See you out there at 5:30 as usual!

More Meat Volume 3 - Smorgasbord

Meaty morsel 1 - pace calculators:

Ally, Kelly and myself have been having some fun recently with race pace calculators to determine what pace they can realistically expect to run their fall marathons in. (I tend to be more aggressive with their goals - and I must say it's a lot easier to be aggressive when you are not the person running that has to deal with the repercussions of flaming out at mile 22. :-)

I realized that some of you (especially newer runners) may not know about the concept of pace calculators - they use formulas based on empirical evidence to allow runners to plug in one race distance and time and estimate what an equivalent pace would be for a different distance. They also have built in pace recommendations for shorter speed work and for your long distance runs. So, every one of us could get some good information by using them. For those of you running race distances you have never done before - this is a great way to plan for what you can expect.

There are two I've been using this week. This first one is from "McMillan Running" and has a very nice summary page. I liked this one! Page is here.

The only drawback I could see is that it did not have a way to do a random distance, so I had to use the Runner's World calculator to enter my Corporate Challenge time since it has a unique race distance. This one needs some extra clicking to see all the output. Page is here.

Another fun use for these is to compare your times in different races you've ALREADY run, just to see what the calculator considers your best race. It was easy for me to see what the fastest of my few 5k's as this year, but how do I know how to compare ALL of my finishes? So, I plugged in my fastest 5k (ironically, when I was leashed to 4 other people at Paige's), my corporate challenge, my Boilermaker, and my Mountain Goat times to find out that my best performance of the year was actually at the Corporate Challenge. Some time I'm going to go back through my PRs at different distances over the years and figure out my best ever performance! (I know, I don't have a life. But you are reading this, so what does that say about you? ;-)

Meaty morsel 2 - The mythical "meat sweats":

This came up at my families Memorial Day party as some non-family members had never heard of the "meat sweats". This surprised me, because it is a term that we've used often. People confused at the term led me to look up the definition online...and I was shocked to find out, that the "meat sweats" don't exist scientifically!

Then, Duerr started throwing the term around at the TRY mid-summer play night picnic and I promised him to put some information in writing at some point, just to share the shocking truth:

There appears to be no proof that the meat sweats are a real phenomenon. :-(

And for this reason, Wikipedia will not allow a page on the meat sweats to exist! Wikipedia is too good for the meat sweats! Details:

Urban dictionaries best definition has it as:

To consume an obsene amount of meat resulting in perfuse sweating.

"I went to the brazilian bar-b-que restaurant, w/ 30 different types of meat, and got the meat sweats!!!."

And it was even "The Urban Word of the Day" on August 27th of this year! That's pretty funny. But searching for a definition on Wikipedia only leads to a deleted page. And in order to get details on why it was deleted you can go to this explanation page. To save a click, it says "cannot be sourced by a credible source." and " it appears to be a newly coined neologism which might merit a mention in competetive eating but not its own article" . Doing a general search does show that the term shows up exactly once in a Wikipedia article when talking about man versus food. And since I wasn't sure of the meaning of "neologism" I had to look that up - "is a newly coined term, word or phrase, that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language."

Interestingly, the generic google search that I did, turned up a blog entry that had occurred while the old Wikipedia entry was still up. Here is the blog entry, but the best part it here - "Ali mentioned that he was having an onset of "meat sweats". I'd heard the term before, but didn't use it myself. I went on Wikipedia to learn about them, and learned a couple of interesting points. First off, veggie burgers can also give you meat sweats, which is lame. Vegetarians ruin everything - now they are ruining cool terms like "meat sweats". I hope no one changes the term because of that. ".

(I may or may not have used that just for the vegetarian hatred.)

Conclusion - the meat sweats, as real as they may seem on backyard picnic on a hot summer night, are not scientifically proven. To the point that the definition of the term is scrubbed from having a Wikipedia entry (which I did not even realize was possible until originally looking this up back in May). For those of you who want to still use the term - know that you are on the cutting edge of the English language, (and perhaps human evolution?) and through your diligent eating of meats and sweating large amounts of sweat afterwards, can someday make this world make a little more sense.

Why do you run?

I was reading a running blog, and the author asked a question.  Why do you run?  When I thought about it, I came up with a lot of answers.  I run to stay in shape, to prepare for a race, to get outside and see the sun during the winter, stress relief, to sweat out all my winnings (hahaha), to improve myself, or to get to buy lots of shoes.  There are a lot of reasons.  But the best reason?  Because running makes me feel great, and I love it.  Plain and simple!  I might not always want to get out there and do a long run or a hard workout, but at the end of the day, it feels awesome to get out there and get it done.  I hope I am always able to run…I want to be one of those 80 year olds finishing a race.  Fast or slow…it doesn’t matter to me.  As long as I can get out there and do it!

Why do you run?

Congratulations to all the racers on a great weekend!  Ally is the proud owner of a new PR (1:45:26) at the ARC half marathon.  Awesome time!  Terry ran the 5k and didn't PR, but it looks like he had a good race.  Aaron and I also did the Finger Lakes Triathlon (Olympic distance).  We both had great races and were very happy with our run times.  Did I miss anyone who raced this weekend?

All right…this is supposed to be about this week’s run.  We’ll make it a little different this week at Aaron’s request.

• 1 mile warm-up 
• 2 x 1/2 mile repeats with 1/4 mile rest between each, total 1.5 miles 
• 1 mile Indian relays – Run in a line at a pace that is easy for everyone.  The person at the back of the line sprints at full speed to the front of the line and then slows to the pace of the group.  It is a fun way to get in some sprints. 
• 1 mile cool down 

Let's hope for a good turnout.  Indian relays are a lot more fun with a large group :)

Rainy day

I hope everyone had a nice weekend!  Did everyone get their runs in?  Saturday and Sunday were tough days.  We definitely suffered during our runs!  Today is a rainy day, but I am enjoying it.  It is a nice day to relax and finally get some stuff done around the house.

This week I'm planning on running a 1 mile warmup, 2 mile tempo at 10k race pace, and 1 mile cool down.  Ron will be leading a shorter run.  I'm sure Adam will be up for 4-6 x 1/4 mile workout if anyone is interested.  I hope we have a nice turnout for a little cooler day.  I know I'm looking forward to the cooler weather!

This weekend Aaron and I are doing the Finger Lakes Triathlon.  The ARC 5k and Half Marathon on are Saturday.  Is anyone doing that race?

Don't forget to check out the next post.  Terry made another informational post :)

More Meat Volume 2 - Getting Off on a Tangent

The second meaty entry is all about racing smarter and not harder.

Certified race courses are measured on the tangents (the straightest line between the corners -- while still being on the pavement or trail). To not add anything extra to the race distance, you want to take the inside of every corner and a straight line between alternating corners. Crowded races make it hard to do so, but even in the Boilermaker, I have plenty of places on the course where I shake my head wondering why the racers are such sheep? Why do they make such baaaaad in race decisions?

Well, it is sheepish, but it is human nature as well. We tend to follow the group in front of us. Plus we are so used to driving on the roads, that we take a similar path that we would in a car - and pull into that right hand lane and run in that lane as soon as we turn a corner, instead of looking up at the next turn in front of us and running directly towards it (and staying in the left lane for a while in the process.)

To demonstrate just how much difference this can make, I did a test at Onondaga Lake Park. I did multiple loops of "Angela's Try-angle" with two different mindsets. The first was to run it as if it was closed off to traffic and I was running it attempting to do the shortest path possible. The second was to run it as if it was a training run and I was being polite and staying to the extreme right at all points. I did just over 3 loops each - just enough to get to 1.25 miles for the optimum path case. The results are very telling.

First check out the optimum (tangential) case:

And then the right hand side case:


Click around on those pages to see the details. I attempted to have them as close as possible but went a few steps further in the right hand side case. It worked out that if I had stopped at the same point I think I would have nailed the exact time for both, but this was close enough.
The summary -
Optimum path: 1.26 miles in 10:15 or 8:10 per mile.
Right hand path: 1.32 miles in 10:17 or 7:49 per mile.

If this was a race course I would have gotten credit for crossing the same finish line in both cases. But just on the choices I made - I added .06 miles to my race distance. That may not seem like that much, but it is a huge difference - I'll round down to a 4% increase. In a 5k that would be an extra 1/8th of a mile. In a half marathon that would be over an extra half a mile. Then obviously for a full marathon that would be over a mile extra that you would be adding.

The other way to think about it this is even easier to visualize the difference. I finished the same exact race in the same exact time but due to the path I ran, the dumber me had to run almost 20 seconds faster per mile faster than the smarter me just to keep up. If I had thought ahead I would have wore my heart rate monitor to show exactly how much harder my body was working, but I didn't, so I'll just say that there was a major difference. Sadly, I was basically dieing in the dumber case and couldn't wait to stop. (Even Escalade could have seen how much I was huffing and puffing.)

The test I did was extreme and I wouldn't expect anyone to actually make that bad of decisions in a race, but from what I see people doing, I have no doubt that people add 2+% to some race courses. (Depends on the number of turns taken and the width of roads, etc.) For those of you with GPS watches, you quickly learn that you need to run further than the race distance to finish the race. The goal is to keep that extra to a minimum.

Since you are an enlightened TRYer if you are reading this, please do yourselves a favor for me. When race day comes, don't run the roads like you drive them, or even how you train on them. When the roads are closed off, they belong to you. So, do what you can to run the optimum path through the course. It can easily make the difference between finishing a long race strong or fading at the finish. And it can even more easily make the difference between a PR or not. The best part, is that the gains are for free. You don't need to do anything extra to save 2-4% other than to use your head. Your legs take enough abuse on race day, lighten their load by abusing your brain a little too. :-)

(Unrelated comments - for those of you who don't have a GPS watch, definitely click around on the page that "View Details" takes you to. The map and the splits and the details available can be really helpful to keep track of your training and your racing -- and as I said above I forgot to wear my heart rate which would have been a graph as well. So, think about what you are missing out on and realize that the price of the GPS watches like mine - are dropping by the day.)

[Editors note, as I proofread the entry above, I decided that it wasn't quite meaty enough, so here is an addition to bulk it up.]

For a more real world example, I grabbed a portion of the Boilermaker course where its cleared out enough to maneuver and where I always see a herd of sheep as I round the corner. The lesson, once again, is don't curve into the right hand lane just because the person in front of you is. Or because that is what you would do in a car. (Don't be yellow!) Turn the corner, look up, and pick as straight of a line as you can for that upcoming right hand turn. (Be red!)



As for the blue line on the map? All I can say is, "It's electric! Booogie-woogie-wooogie-wooooh!" (But unless you are dressed up as a cow, you don't want to be that guy either. Line dancers make for some of the least efficient course runners you'll ever encounter.)