Brandon Fuller

Weekly Training Summary (52.45 miles / 8:00:24)

Comprised of 2 trips up Green, a well done long run, and nice tempo run. Decent miles on the easy days. And a rest day on Sunday with the snow. Sounds good? That total looks pathetic though. However, it is just February I suppose. And those trips up Green eat a lot of time but not much mileage.

I feel like I am firing well and not too fatigued. Tracking that TSB number a bit now to see if it correlates to how I feel.

I moved up into a new section of the training plan. They removed speedwork and put in the hills now. I am not doing the hill repeats though. I like to think I get the same thing out of a Green Mountain trip — maybe more. Opinions? In any case, hoping to put down a few more doubles this period so I can keep up when JV returns from hiatus.

Run: Easy 7M (7.02 mi @ 08:59)

Snowing and cold. Bailed on the long run. Just put down an hour to stay loose. More tomorrow? On the bright side, this should dress the hills back up.

I went 7.02 miles with an elevation gain of 222 feet in 01:03:09, which is an average pace of 08:59. View my GPS data on Garmin Connect.

Performance Management

One of the charts that Neal put up at the lecture was a Performance Management Chart. The idea was that you could track your effort and workload in such a way that you could measure your “form”. Form = Fitness + Freshness, where fitness is result of training stress and freshness is the result of rest. Let’s see how I rate right now since the beginning of the season on January 1st.

The purple line, known as ATL, is the acute/short term effects of training. Workouts done in the last 14 day

The blue line, known as CTL, is the cumulative/long term effects of training. Workouts done 15 days ago and older.

The yellow line, known as TSB, is your Training Stress Balance. If it is positive number, then this would mean you would have a good chance of running well and would suggest that you are both fit and fresh. While if your TSB was a negative number, then you it would mean that you are most likely tired from a high training load, which could possibly consist of both your CTL and your ATL being high.

I like what my ATL and CTL are doing. Up and to the right. Load is increasing meaning I am working harder. But it isn’t very periodic. There should be ups and downs according to Neal.

So where is my TSB now? -74 today. The lowest of the season was -104 right before surgery. I had run 22 days non-stop. I felt fatigued. Did Green 2x in one day just before that. The rest days got me back to a -43. Do I feel like a -43? I don’t know — probably. I wanted to run this morning but my legs were tired when I thought about it laying in bed. Today is a rest day on the plan. So I think I will take a rest. This chart helps enforce that and back it up with a visual trend.

More examples and information on how to read this chart here.

There is more analysis to be done with this tool but I thought this one was cool right off the bat.

Thoughts?

Calories

As mentioned, I have been counting calories — meaning I write down what I burn and what I consume. I have done no modifications to my diet during this period. I still ate what I normally would. I just observed. The goal was to understand my caloric intake a bit better. How much fuel does that meal give me for an hour run? Let’s find out.

Some items that you should be aware of:

• I used a tool called MyPlate at livestrong.com. Its free for 45 days of rolling data. They have an iPhone app too for $3 that I bought. I thought that would come in handy but wasn’t as much. Easier to do the full analysis once per day back in front of the computer at night.
• Eating at small non-chain places is brutal for this process. The local Italian place and Snarf’s (sub shop) we go to has no nutritional information available. They aren’t “bad” places as far as the nutrition goes but I can’t tell what I am eating. For those, I had to substitute in something I thought was comparable but it could be way off. For instance, I used Subway’s turkey sub instead of Snarf’s. This made me gravitate towards wanting to eat things that had numbers.
• Eating at home takes more work. When Kim would prepare a meal, I would have to type in all the ingredients, measure out portions, and record an approximate. The MyPlate tool helps you do this nicely and records the meal so you can reuse it later or share it.
• I let Garmin tell me how many calories I burned each workout and I guarantee it isn’t right. It just uses some generic formulas. We are all different. Newer HR monitors take your HR into consideration when calculating calories burnt. My watch does not. It is only time and distance.

So here is the chart that I plotted out for the time period:

Calorie Goal: The tool sets this based on how much weight you want to lose. I put in that I wanted to maintain my weight at 145. This gave me a daily baseline on what I could eat if I just sat still. You could pick your daily activity level which I set at sedentary/office worker. Your workouts aren’t in this. My number was 2054.

Calories Consumed: The blue line was what I ate day to day. The average was 2693. So 600+ above what I could consume a day with no exercise.

Calories Burned: I had a 3 day dip to 0 during surgery. Liken those to normal rest days. Thought it would be good to see if I overate on those days. Average was 1323 not counting those 3 rest days.

Net Calories: The big money! My number was 1603. Remember the goal was 2054 in order to maintain my weight. So this says I was 451 calories short on average per day. If I changed my goal to lose a pound a week, the daily calorie goal is 1554. Just below what I was putting down. So my guess is that my deficit was causing me to burn about 3/4 pound a week.

Did that line up? No. I haven’t lost any weight. I am hovering (frustrating!) quite nicely at this weight. I see dips through the week but I haven’t seen anything I would call a trend.

I am not out to lose massive weight right now but dropping a fraction of a pound a week sounds good to me. Over the course of a season/cycle, I should see a dip then. I hope to get into the 130s at some point and then hold that for the rest of my adult life.

The other thing the tool does is give you daily breakdowns. Here is a random day so you can see. I am not smart enough yet to know how to manage this. That would be a whole new dimension. Getting the calories but making sure they are the right breakdown.

Conclusions:

• If you really want to track calories, specifically calories burned, you need a method that uses HR to help make the data more accurate. Otherwise, you are not going to accurately know what you burnt. If you are trying to lose small amounts of weight per week, the inaccuracy of the numbers will factor in and frustrate you.
• There is no possible way for a person to lose weight if you don’t exercise. Oh, I know that’s not true. But looking at my calorie intake — small breakfast (200 calories) and controlling portions, it wasn’t enough to get under my calorie goal for the day. A “normal” lunch and dinner blows you out of the water. And you haven’t had a snack! So if you want to lose weight happily, exercise. Run. It is the biggest bang for the buck around. It litterly gets you an entire meal and a snack.
• Counting calories is easier than it used to be but still is tough unless you live by things you can measure.
• I was under my FDA fiber every day by 50%.
• I am under-eating — just slightly. A GU (100 calories) and a Gatorade (200 calories) per run would top me off. I need to get better about eating pre and post run. Not a huge amount but making sure I am replacing the calories right after the workout.

Not sure if I am going to continue logging. It is easy but I am not going to collect data just to collect data. I got the picture of how I am right now. That is what I was after and I learned a lesson and will make a small change. Otherwise, unless there is other big no-no’s in this, I have other areas that I can spend time in for improvement.

Thoughts?

Now Playing Facebook Support Updated

The “API gods” over at Facebook have decided to once again change the world by removing the ability to update profile boxes via the API. They seem to be locking down the profile by only allowing some type of tabs to be created. I am bored. Too many changes.

Given that and the difficulty in setting up profile stuff, I am bailing on the profile support and giving in to the demands of my users that have asked.

Now Playing does status updates or publishes news feed items!

You can choose between status updates or news feed items. Here is what a status update look like this. Text is fully configurable.

However, if you want a juicier post, you can go for a news feed item. If you get an Amazon match for the track, you will get a prettier display with album artwork. I am not supporting custom album artwork here because most people can’t get it right (read too hard to support). The message part of the post is configurable but the rest is not — for now.

You will have to grant Now Playing another Facebook permission to make this work. The best bet is just to repeat the setup process on the plugin configuration page.

I also brought over the recent Twitter changes I had put into the Mac edition. Now all editions have the same functionality for Facebook and Twitter.

Hope you enjoy the new stuff. Let me know how it goes.

Run: Green Mountain (5.74 mi)

Ran from the bottom to the 4-way with no walks today. Even up that last steep slope. Calves were burning. I tend to stay on my toes on the uphill I noticed. Is that good or bad? Put some speed back into my downhill successfully today.

Kind of thinking about getting another in tomorrow…

I went 5.74 miles with an elevation gain of 2,610 feet in 01:19:22, which is an average pace of 13:50. View my GPS data on Garmin Connect.

BTR Speaker Series: Training Intensity

Last night, I went to see a presentation put on by Neal Henderson. Neal is the director of the Sport Science department at Boulder Center for Sports Medicine and an elite coach. He has been named USA Cycling’s national coach of the year in 2009 based on his work with multiple-time world champion Taylor Phinney. Given that resume and a free lecture, how could you pass up this kind of knowledge?

I opted to eat at Larkburger beforehand. Ran into Justin there. He was coming/going from a massage nearby. Headed over to Sherpa’s and waited while 30+ folks finished up their dining on the Napali and Indian buffet before we got started. Neal is a Boulder guy so he had plenty of anecdotes about locals and would throw in stuff like “…when you are running up Sanitas”. Right up my alley!

He went over a lot of information on training methodology. Most of this stuff isn’t radically new information to me. You pick up up over time reading here and there. But it isn’t often put together in such a way with a qualified professional spoon feeding it to you slide by slide and answering your questions. I didn’t try to capture every slide he put up instead I was really trying to digest everything and see how I compared.

Over the hour+ Neal spoke, he covered a lot of data. I collect a lot of data on myself day to day but I never exactly know what to do with it. Look at my HR graph. Pretty. Next. Well, Neal gave some insight on what things you should be looking for and how you can take that data and do more with it to understand your body and your training cycles. He would share anecdotes about a situation with a world-record level athlete and then some random 10k runner from Boulder. They see all kinds and while there are different levels of athlete at play, the variables are all the same.

After the presentation, I headed over to Boulder Baked to get a box of custom made hot and fresh cookies for Kim upon my arrival home as a thank you for letting me escape my nightly kid bedtime ritual. As I was walking to my car, I walked by the Tesla dealership and gazed at some car porn for a few seconds. I didn’t get as big of a hard one as I did the first time I saw this car. It seems so small now. But I still love it and once I turn 40 and can show I have the kid’s college money in the bank, something at this caliber will probably be parked in my garage.

Oh, I almost forgot — what did I learn? Where do I begin! In no particular order and only as far as I recall…here is a random list of things. Some of this I already knew but it was clarified or further explained through data.

• Choose Your Parents Wisely: Some people are gifted at the sport and others are not. This is a major factor. Don’t let it stop you but understand that you are not like everyone else. Some people get more fast twitch muscles. Some get more slow twitch muscles. If you understand your strengths, then you have more informed knowledge about choosing events that cater towards your strengths. Meaning a slow twitch guy isn’t going to get the WR in sprinting but has an advantage in longer endurance events.
• Overtraining is a disease: If they see one thing more than anything at the Center, it is people that overtrain. Neal showed plenty of graphs to illustrate this. One tool he showed took your GPS/HR/etc. data and converted into power and fatigue numbers. Then when graphed, you could see peaks and valleys. Neal talked about how people in the valley tend to show psychological signs of fatigue (like being pissy). His goal was to balance their training out. People who had hit the wall have come to him for this analysis. They often end up running less for 6 months and then breaking their PR with proper coaching or insight.
• You probably do more high intensity work than pro/elite athletes do. He showed some good graphs that broke down every workout by zone 1-5. Over the course of a year, these elites were doing 0.5-2% in zone five for the year. Not much at all. Low minutes a week if that. The majority of the time 40-60% was all zone 1 stuff. Running slower is a major component to running faster. I personally got this concept last Fall training for Denver. Much slower in training, yet 20 minutes faster on the PR.
• Lactate Threshold is important. We spent a lot of slides on LT. Neal explained exactly how they test and measure this on you if you come in. I finally got a solid answer on how they know the moment you cross LT. The graphs showed what your lactate levels do after LT. Hockey stick baby! He backed up the recent article I read saying lactate is not evil. There were 4 lines on that graph and I forgot to snap a photo of that one. Great to visualize that data.
• Training just below LT is much better than training just above LT. He explained psychological reasons and physiological reasons on why this is. Overall, you get more bang for the buck being on the low side. But you have to know where that is.
• Nutrition is important. He showed slides on how various athletes burn carbs vs. fats at various paces. Many graphs were like this where they took pace across the X-axis and started you slow and kept increasing in steady increments. You could see how the mix of carbs to fat burnt changed at each interval and how it correlated back to LT. You could find crossover points. You could take those paces and those amounts burnt and calculate for your given race requirements what it would take to get to the finish line. They discussed short races, marathons, and 100 mile races and how the requirements change because of the time you have available to feel the effects of what you are consuming.
• Training cycles should include rest. Neal seemed to gravitate towards a 16 day on period followed by a 5 day rest period. That makes 21 days or 3 week in a period. Multiple periods for a cycle. If rest isn’t a part of your training plan, then you are wrong from the start. He explained that he takes your event date and first works backwards to insert the rest periods. Then starts coloring in the workload. Rest didn’t mean do not run of course. Active recovery was well advised. But cutting down your workload by up to 50% was. Workload was the term often used…not miles or time. He had a formula for workload and it involved time, effort and frequency. So your mileage should drop of course but might not be by 50%. If you can drop your workload but still get miles, you might be better served.
• Peaking? He touched on it but didn’t detail it. We were over an hour at this point. He could have done another whole hour (or more) on that topic alone. I got the feeling that he could easily teach a one hour class on this stuff and you still wouldn’t get through it all in a semester. I guess that is why there are coaches! They do the brain work while you spend all your time outside running around the block.
• Barefoot running? Neal asserted that there is something to it during a quick Q and A session.
• Going to sea level to race? I asked this question to see if he had any advice for Boston. He gave me 2 tidbits that made a lot of sense. One costs money and the other is free. I may do both.

Good news is that I was on to most of that stuff already. I am not really respecting the rest as I should be though. I need to chart that out some more and plan for it better. See where it really is. I felt totally drained before my surgery from those 22 days straight of good workload. Then 3 days off then a few days easy and I was back faster and better. The data is all there and my geek brain needed a push to get me to the next level in analyzing it all.

Part of me leaves a session like that and thinks “I should get a coach!”. But then I realize that 1/2 the fun in this for me is that I do it on my own. I use friends and community as resources but I feel like if I had Chris Carmichael on the payroll and then finished 10th at Leadville, everyone would go….did you see who is coach was? Duh. But if I finish deeper in the pack on my own, I will feel more satisfied with my achievement. That being said, I can see taking advantage of one time consulting sessions with experts like Neal to get a 2nd opinion on what you think you are doing. I might not be able to spot something as quickly as a trained professional even though it is in my own body. Frankly, we are sometimes the worst judges of our own abilities.

The “marketing message” out there is train harder and train more often. OK, yes but the part they leave out is “train smart” and that involves not training at all — sometimes.

Thanks to BTR for a great evening.

Now Playing Twitter Support Now On Mac

When I started seeing this phenomenon, I knew I had to get back to work on my Mac OS X version of Now Playing.

I added Twitter support for my Windows editions back in 2007. However, that was before Twitter was Twitter and nobody knew what to do with it. Fast forward to today when people are manually typing in their personal “now playing” messages. How barbaric!

I wasn’t going to add Twitter support on the Mac edition because of the lack of usage I saw on the Windows side. However, with this #nowplaying trend, it got me excited about giving it a go. Not too much to code other than all the required OAuth stuff that I had to put in. Got that going which has the added benefit of putting “Now Playing” as the source of the tweet. See?

That is a hyperlink to the plugin too. Very cool. Hopefully that raises awareness.

I just pushed out the update today after working on it over the course of a week. So to all you faithful plugin users, get your update on and start #nowplaying!

Download here.

Run: Slow 11M (11.19 mi @ 07:34)

First 15 minutes were bumpy. Effort was lower than it should of been till I got warmed up and convinced myself to go. Ended up locking into the Slow zone which means max 148 HR. Started finding myself below PR marathon pace while in the slow range. WTF? Sweet. Legs were warm by the end and I was dipping sub-7 while staying at 148 bpm. It all came together today.

I went 11.19 miles with an elevation gain of 330 feet in 01:24:41, which is an average pace of 07:34. View my GPS data on Garmin Connect.

Run: Green Mountain (5.67 mi)

Sydney wanted to go out for breakfast this morning so we did. I usually don’t eat much pre-run but I had a few hundred calories, including chicken, egg, and a bagel. I wasn’t sure how it was going to sit given I don’t run well on a moderately full stomach. But I figured with the uphill today, it wouldn’t be so constricting.

Hit the trailhead at the normal time and started up Gregory. Decided that I was going to try something different like I had on Sanitas before. Instead of attacking the start, I was going to rate limit my HR to about 155. I usually will spike to 160-165 and then blow a lung and have to back down for a few to get it back. So staying lower should help me stay more consistent on the effort. I ran everything but 2 spots: the big rock face that is all bulletproof ice right now and the steps by the telephone pole. Hit the lodge in about 20 flat. A little slower than recent splits but I took the downhill into the lodge pretty slow.

From there, I headed up and knew this section would be tougher to hold the goal. Saw AK on his 30-ish summit. Made it to the Greenman junction with no issues. Got up to the ridge with no issues. Then comes the big climb. We need a name for that next section. It is straight up. I was burning up my calves but I kept on the run. I made it up to the top of that climb and I was still on it. Sweet. Keep on the run all the way up to the next ridge and all the way into the switchbacks. Gave up the run when I hit the final snow covered pitch. It is probably too steep to run anyway. Hit the 4-way in 20 and change. That was a good split for me. A minute off the other days 2-3 minute PR.

Up the stairs nice and easy. Probably should drop my spikes at that point. Topped out with a nice time for me. Happy that I ran so much of that thing. Keep that up and then bring in some speed. Took a breather at the summit and then headed down. Took it super slow just for the sake of my right nad.

Felt like doing more distance but needed to get back home and get rolling on the day.

I went 5.67 miles with an elevation gain of 2,993 feet in 01:24:38, which is an average pace of 14:55. View my GPS data on Garmin Connect.