100.5 km in the week of June 28 to July 4th

One of the goals that I set out to do this year was to increase my weekly mileage to reach 100km+, I achieved that goal last week. I did 100.55 km in 8:20:51 @4:59/km and I burned a total of 8568 calories! It feels great to have achieved one more milestone in my running activity. I also did a Yasso 800 during the week and here is the details of the track work.


when I compare this to my first Yasso 800, I see some improvements, on an average I have improved about 8 seconds on the 800 and I was able to do 5 laps out of the door now compared to only 3 last year. In addition, my Max heart rate did not cross 175 where are last year it was 177 so 2 heart beats slower and 8 seconds faster.

Based on the above, my average speed split pace for 1 km is 3 min 51 seconds, which extrapolates to 2 hours 42 min 31 seconds... for a marathon. Of course we cannot do a linear projection. But I am sticking to this projection as my best effort time.

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.