Cough and wife... stopping me from my 40k

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Ok, thats a lousy excuse... but I have been coughing and not feeling 100% to go out for a 40k run. My wife has been threatening me with a divorse if I went out and did the run anyway! I figured it is better for me to take a short break and maybe do it next weekend. I wanted to do some research on distance that can be run as part of the training for the marathon:

1. Here is what Patric McCrann, author of the Irondistance Run Training eBook and a seven-time Ironman finisher and avid endurance runner had to say: 3 hour is the limit if you run for more than 3 hours then you are doing more damage to your body than train it.

2. Marathon Training says DO NOT run the whole marathon distance! I wonder why... the longest they recommend is 23 miles!

3. Greg McMillan has a very interesting strategy about long runs, he splits the goal of the long run into two

a) Long, Slow Distance Long run with the following objectives

1. Burn fat
2. Strengthen legs
3. Deal with mental and physical fatigue

b) Fast finish, Long run

1. Practise marathon goal pace
2. Practise equipment, nutrition, pre-race routine
3. Learn to run fast when tired

I like the second set of goals and here are the guidelines

1. Start easy but finish with last 30-90 minutes averaging marathon goal pace
2. Run last 1 to 3 miles as fast as you can
3. Complete 3 to 5 times before the actual race

11km slow run this morning

It was a nice slow run this morning for about 11 km, did a couple of hill workout during the run. Here is the split of the run by km:

The average pace was 5:26/km, which is the pace in which I ran my longest training run yet...

I'm a Runner: Jon Cryer from RunnersWorld.com

My favorite shows "Two and Half Men"'s one of the main character Jon Cryer is a Runner... he has done 15 triathlons! impressive I'm a Runner: Jon Cryer from RunnersWorld.com

Midnight Run - 10k PB 46:03

Reykjavik Marathon Association organized a Midnight run (starts at around 10pm) yesterday. I ran the 10k race and finished it in 46 minutes and 3 seconds. Here is the official result. This is my personal best in a 10k race and I improved on my previous best by 4 minutes! It is an amazing feeling to really see improvement after training really hard. I feel that I could have pushed myself a little harder in a couple of laps but I guess that is how you feel after every run... maybe thats what keeps us going.

Strategy during the run

I had a simple strategy to run as hard as I can for a lap (I have my Garmin, set for autolap on every 1 km) and try to keep it under 5 min/lap. It is amazing when you can set a goal and threshold... here are the splits:

Longest training run yet: 36.07 km in 3hr 16min

Started running at 7:22 am on Sunday, the goal was to run 36 km but I did not have time goal... coming to think of it I should have. I ran the first 15km at an average pace of 4 min 54 sec, which I presumed was good enough to keep my overall average around 5:15 but I ended up doing 11 seconds slower. The average pace was 5 min 26 sec not terrible but still slower than I thought I would do.

Another thing I noticed was that I was much more tired during the run than I was in my previous long runs, I think the reason is due to lack of proper sleep. We just got a 8 week old black labradore puppy and she has been keeping us up in the night.

New running strategy

I had a great run this sunday, I started at 7:30 in the morning and did 32 km at an average pace of 5 min 13 seconds. But I found a very interesting thing about myself and my running strategy... I ran almost 20 km at an average pace of less than 5 min and I was not that tired even after doing that and the rest of the 12 km I was all over the place on pace depending on the terrain, if it was hilly I slowed down and if it was down hill I sped up net-net I only lost 13 seconds in my overall pace... what was even more interesting is that my average pace was 5:08 until the 29 km, I lost another 5 seconds per km in the last 3 kms.

New Strategy

Well, I think if I run as hard as I can in the first leg of the race and cover as much distance as I can then I can actually afford to slow down in the latter half and it does not affect my overall time that much. I am going to work on my speed and improve my fast pace say to around 4 min a km, I have a way to measure this during the Yasso Speed work, I am doing about 3:15 for 800m... I need to pick that up to 3:00

My first Yasso 800 track work

I followed up on the plan and did my first Yasso 800 speed work this afternoon and here is the result:

As can be seen I did 800 meters in

3 min 15 sec

3 min 12 sec

3 min 18 sec

which tells me if I can continue on this form and run the 800 meters in similar time when I repeat the Yasso runs with 5 laps and 10 laps, I should look for a finish time of 3 hours and 15 min for the marathon!

If I can accomplish that I can qualify for the Boston Marathon! Lets see how my training progresses... lots of "Ifs" :)

Running Goals

I have set some personal goals related to my running:

1. Register and run Chicago Marathon and New York Marathon

2. Qualify for Boston Marathon

3. Compete in Iron Man in 2012

I think all the goals are acheivable, if I am going to put in the work.

So, what are the challenges?

I need to improve my Marathon time by over 45 minutes to qualify for Boston

I need to learn swimming as I can barely survive in the water

Plans

I am running Chicago Marathon this october, and my goal there is to see how far I can push myself towards qualifying for Boston. In order to increase my time I am planning to do a lot more track runs. The plan is to start to do some track work today, I am going to run 3x800 at a pace of about 3 min 20 sec as recommended by Yasso below.

Copenhagen Marathon 2008

I finally went and bought a memory card reader and was able to get the pictures loaded onto Picasa. Ragnar was my running partner during the training and on the marathon. I had written about my result last year in another post. I completed the marathon in 4:08:00, my running partner on the other hand did much better he finished in 3:45 or something like that. I was very happy for him. Overall it was a good experience. The Copenhagen Marathon route was very interesting as well, the buildings, the water cannals and parks were very pretty but I remember the weather to be little chilly and windy.

I remember keeping up with Ragnar until the 25th km and we were averaging a pace of 5:24 min/km, which would have been a great race completion pace. I am hoping to better my PB in Berlin in the coming Chicago Marathon.

Chicago Marathon 2009 - October 11

I have registered to run the Chicago Marathon on October 11, 2009... I will be using this blog instead of my other blog to chronicle my preparation