Shamrock Marathon

The 2009 Shamrock Marathon was held on a gorgeous spring day. In Virginia Beach it was clear as a bell. The whole weekend probably had 15-20,000 people attend; i think the biggest draw was the half-marathon on Saturday. Maybe 3,000 people competed in the marathon on Sunday.

At the 8am starting time it was 35F in the bright sunshine with just a very slight breeze. It warmed up about 5 degrees each hour, so that soon it was 45, tailing off to reach a high just over 50F.

I ran instrumented and was very happy with the results. I managed my oxygen debt well and took short slow-down breaks when it was getting too high. I was very pleased with that. I figure it added five miles to the race for me.

I ran well through about mile 21, but then i was just pooped and started taking regular walk breaks. That corresponded to the start of a hill on the second half of the race, leading out to Fort Story (a working US Army Fort) and an old lighthouse. We gained about 50 feet in altitude - not that much, but enough to really drain me.



My finish time was 5:10, for an average pace of 11:37. Not what I would like, but certainly what I had expected. Too many cookies and not enough long, slow runs will do that. Now that the weather is getting nicer I can fix that easily!

Confuseled

I'm being confuseled by the Suunto. According to its auto-calculate, it puts my experience through its formulas and tells me I'm a national-class athlete. Wouldn't THAT be nice! When I take any single workout I've done and analyze the numbers against the tables, it tells me that I'm a typical weekend warrior. There's a world of difference being able to keep up a 5.5 min/mile pace for 12 minutes, and keep up an 8 min/mile pace for 12 minutes.

I don't know what gives. I'm inclined to use the lower numbers for conservatism' sake. The downside there is that I won't improve as fast if I am always setting the bar low so that every effort looks like a huge percentage of my capacity. On the other hand, I will needlessly tire myself out and not recover sufficiently if the number is too high. It will be like "oh, you only need a day to recover from this 80-mile death march, plan on more the next day". And I will get injured and go nowhere.

There's lots on the internet about how use the older t6 model, but not very much on the t6c. I don't have a good sense on how similar they are in terms of data and algorithm.

I hope that Shamrock will provide me with some good data points to use that I can make some sense out of.

Morning workout

Definitely one downside of getting more fit is that it takes more effort to really put my body under stress.

This morning it took me all of 35 minutes of hard running (treadmill, mind you, but still) before I could finally eke out a 4.0 Training Effect. In January that would have been 20 minutes at that pace. The good and the bad, all at once.

Good, because I'm in better shape
Bad, because now I have to work harder.

Suunto running

I had a wonderful run this afternoon. Five miles out and about, 45F, a slight breeze. It was amazing.

I kept an eye on my Suunto t6c watch, which was set to monitor my heart rate, EPOC level, and pace. The heart rate and EPOC increased rapidly during the first mile - much faster than I would have guessed. I was moving along at a rapid pace, but I didn't feel tired, or winded in the least, but the rate of change would leave me winded in a very short time. This was fascinating!! I've never been able to watch my body reacting to the stress of running before, in a kind of detached, objective way.

When the EPOC level got near 100, I walked. After a few moments my heart rate began to drop and then my EPOC level began to drop. Once EPOC was under 90, I started running again. My heart rate picked up and the EPOC also rose, but not nearly as fast as it had. When it went over 100, I walked again. And kept on run/walking. And after three miles, my heart rate didn't rise very much and my EPOC level stayed mostly flat, so I only took one more walk break.

At the end of the run, my legs were a little sore as they would be from any workout. But the rest of my body felt just fine, like I'd been out for a brisk walk. I was hardly perspiring at all. I felt like I could easily run another 20 miles. And overall my pace was still just over an 11 minute-mile.

It amazes me that I can react to how my body is handling the run and keep from getting exhausted by slowing down before I near the exhaustion point. And that means I can probably complete the 100 mile run in July. Woo-hoo!


(EPOC: Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption, a measure for the amount of Oxygen that the body needs to recover from physical exertion. Describes the accumulating training load. More-fit bodies produce lower EPOC levels at the same amount of exertion. When the EPOC level gets high enough, over several hundreds, the body is too tired to go on.)

George Washington's Birthday Marathon

Last Sunday I completed the George Washington's Birthday marathon in 5:17. All-in-all it was a fun time, but there were definitely pros and cons to the event.
* It is a combination three-person relay race and a full marathon. I had run the third leg of the relay about 10 years ago, but I remember it being a mostly flat course. I don't know where i got that idea from because it is certainly not true.
* The course is in Beltsville, MD near the USDA research farms (ignore the nuclear corn stalks). It is definitely rolling farmland - up one hill, down the next. I think there is a flat place around mile 4, but hard to tell for sure.
* The race had I believe a bigger marathon relay contingent than the regular marathon. There were several Reston Runner relay marathon teams there. I had forgotten about their relay team until I ran into a couple of people.
* My finish time is five minutes slower than my Goofy time, but this course was a lot tougher. So I guess I'm happy with the time.
* The race had a very nice bronze or copper-colored finisher medal, and a great looking light blue technical running shirt.
* the course was chilly and fair - about the best weather anyone has a right to expect in Beltsville, MD in February.
* The course has only gatorade and water - it is just a marathon, after all. The after-race food was pretty much picked clean by the time I got there. A few bananas and the odd cookie. They had said they had Hard Times Cafe chili to serve, but apparently some people had several helpings so they ran out.
* the main part of the race is an isosceles triangle, laying on its side. The top part of the course (north part) was a good 8 to 12 degrees colder than the south side. it was shadier and windier too. I could tell for sure because I had taken the watch off at that point and was holding it in my hand, so the watch was recording actual temperatures vs. body temperature.
* I used my new Suunto technology the entire way. Interesting, the watch is losing the signal from the heart rate monitor when i turn my wrist. I need to figure out if this is a battery issue or a user issue. The "training effect" meter pegged me at 5.0 before I was a third of the way through the race. By mile 12 I had definitely hit a wall, and I stumbled through some negative karma until about mile 16, when I really got it all back together. My pace records show it.
* I need to learn to keep an eye on the Suunto numbers and back off my pace when they begin to elevate. I can always put myself into full burn at any time, but it would seem reasonable to save it for later in the race. No point in killing myself for each race - it takes so long to recover, it would be great if i can show incremental progress without the recovery time wasted.
* I saw Tammy M. at the race - she looked great, and told me a fabulous Rocky Racoon story about her huge improvement over last year. I am so thrilled for her!

Next up: Shamrock marathon in Virginia Beach, VA
See you there!

In other news

Lisa C. has registered to run the Seattle RnR marathon with me!! I am so jazzed I can hardly stand it. I haven't seen her in ages in person, though the pix I saw of her and her family are just wonderful - they are a great looking bunch. So she is going to run her first marathon and I am going to help her train long-distance.

She runs about 4 miles she says at a 10-minute pace, which is a bit faster than I do now. She sounds like she is in pretty good shape. On the one hand I hope that I can keep up with her - I might train her long-distance for her first marathon and then have her leave me in the dust. On the other hand I've seen enough first-time marathoners start off their training with self-assurance and good intentions and end up with the usual problems, so we will see

Beltsville is coming up this next weekend, so this week will have some taper elements to it. I think this week will be Training Effect 2s and 3s only - no 4s. On my 6 mile run today, that was a 3.4.

My 90 minutes in the attic today shoving blown insulation around and insulation bats was a 3.2, which I found amusing. When I consider the times I had been up there for 6 hours in the heat of the summer, that must have been a 5.9, which explains why I felt soo exhausted afterwards.

A taste of spring

A taste of spring arrived today. Mid-50sF, low humidity, bright sunshine, a mild breeze, just a wonderful day. Ran 6 miles from the house down to and onto the W&OD and then back.

I had all the gizmos of my Suunto working. I learned that the heart rate monitor strap needs to be tighter than I had been wearing it. Turns out that when I am breathing hard and I fully exhale, the shape of my deflated chest causes momentary loss of contact with the strap sensors and that causes a false or no heart rate reading. So I stopped and tightened it up and that seemed to solve that problem.

The GPS pod (about the diameter of a large-ish store-bought cookie) comes with an arm strap, but i found that the pod will lose coverage quite easily that way. When Suunto says that the pod works best when pointed at the sky, they mean it. Next I'm going to try the pod laced into my shoes. If that doesn't produce good results, I'm going to secure it to my hat. It might look a little odd, but it won't get any better reception on any other part of my body. There's a running hat I might get which comes with a little pouch to hold some gel shots, and that should be just the size to hold this pod also. So it would just sit up there and receive data. Nothing to be done about trees and other obstacles, but there is no clearer line-of-sight than the top of my head.

The watch continues to function flawlessly as a watch, also. No one has said anything about it. I thought for sure someone would come up to me by now and say "Peter, you haven't worn a watch since I've known you, and now you have this one all the time. what's up with that?" but no one has. So as I usually do, I don't mention it unless someone asks.