July 13, 2009
And The Journey Continues
I remember not being able to walk right for days after a marathon. That doesn't seem to happen anymore. Better shape or just not pushing it as hard? Still hitting my massage today though!
Still catching up on video, race reports, tweets, and other odds and ends from the race. I have been contacted by a variety of people who read my report or watched the video and vice versa. Always new friends to meet. Rumor that my photo with the kids might make the Leadville paper which prints Thursday. We will see.
Upon more review, I found that my Leadville Marathon pace was just seconds slower than my Leadville Heavy Half Marathon pace of 2 years ago. I didn't think that was going to happen going into the race but it did. I guess it isn't a bad thing. Sort of mentally telling myself I doubled the distance at the same pace in only 2 years. However, it is really clear to me now that I ran the race like an ultra and not a marathon. I didn't attack the course when I should have.
On the body issue, I am encouraged by Leadville in that I didn't feel terrible. I nailed my salts I think. Hoping I am working through this. Going to stick to the no caffeine and no diet drinks for some more time and let it play out. Also heading into a series of colon hydrotherapy sessions this week. Clean it out. Hoping it jump starts a cleaner GI tract. Otherwise, not sure where to go yet.
Just less than 100 days until the goal race of the fall running season...the Denver Marathon.
I have run Denver every year since its re-birth. Why the goal race for this fall again? Because it is my steady fitness gauge. Not the fastest course but it is the one I am working to master. Going sub 3:30 this year is the A goal. The B goal is getting as many minutes shaved off that as possible to get close to the new BQ time of 3:15 that I get on my birthday this year. If I get something I am pleased with, I may take a chance and drop to sea level-ish in December and run at the Cal International to see if I can BQ.
How to achieve this? Well, I am following the lead of my local running brothers and moving to HR instead of pace training for this cycle. I always use these tools to help generate my training schedules. Given various books, I don't stick to them like gospel but I used them to help take the guessing out and give me a plan. I normally plug in my goal pace plus some prior race data and generate. It has worked out in the past but now I want to go this different direction and see what changes occur. Looking at the schedule, the workouts are all HR zone based so I have to keep my heart in range or the beeping begins. I am used to that with the pace schedule but this will be weird doing it with my heart instead. I could be running much slow or much faster at times. All in all -- it will be good training to get this variable to be very scientific. Here is the initial zone layout. Might tweak.
I ran an easy 3+ miles on this new pace today. OMG...it was slow. I had to keep my hard 125-135ish. Bounced around at first but after I settled into it, I could have ran that pace for 1000 miles. I am usually -- easily -- 1 minute faster per mile on easy days than today. This experiment is going to be fun.
We have a lot of warm days left though so I would like to continue training in the hills as well even though I have no more hilly race targets this year. I look at the people I want to run with/like and that's where they train, so I will continue to integrate my road runs with the hills.
Oh, and a motivational note from Tony on his blog responding to a comment I left him:
And really, the only Leadville race you have left to do now is the 100...start planning for 2010!
Right on.
