Another 11

Hit the metro park this morning and did my now-standard second 11-miler of the week. It was upper 30's when I started so I brought out a hat for the first time this fall and opted for track pants and a long sleeve. Still not cold enough for the windbreaker yet! Pretty windy so I kept it nice and easy and didn't push at all. I ended up about two minutes slower than Tuesday's run, but it felt right for the day. The current schedule I'm on is all about getting in the easy miles with a key stress workout or race on the weekend, so now easy run heroics! I'm tentatively planning on a 20 minute tempo in spikes on the grass perimeter loop at Lakewood Park Saturday. This will get me into an XC frame of mind without trashing me. I'm learning that I don't need to kill myself in workouts to stay fit. Right now I'm think of racing one more time before Club Nationals, most likely a 5K on the fast Lakewood Park neighborhood course on Dec. 4. It will be a good reference point for me too as I ran 17:32 there at the beginning of October.

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Excellent masters training article

Masters runner Rich Stiller recently published an excellent article on how he came back from the dead in his mid-forties and managed to run some very impressive races on half the mileage he had been previously training at. Entitled "How Jeff Galloway and a Heart Rate Monitor Saved a Runner," this piece pretty much sums up what I have been going through this year first with constant quad issues in the Winter/Spring and until recently, various stomach ailments. If your running is in a rut, I highly recommended this article!

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10 miles @ 70%

Usually I only wear a watch to make sure I'm going fast enough on interval workouts or tempo runs, but I'm trying to keep my non-stress days at 70% of my current 5K fitness so I took out the watch today to make sure I wasn't going fast. 70% of 5:38 (the pace of my 5K race last month) equates to just a touch slower than 8:00 miles. Today I hit 8:05 pace give or take on my standard metro park out and back 10 miler. I was a little sore from Saturday's tempo but felt good and relaxed. Overdressed a bit by opting for tights in upper 40s temps but the compression felt good on my calves and quads so no complaints.

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Ouch!

"Listen to your body" is an oft-heard phrase that is rarely heeded in running circles. We get so obsessed with our training logs and mileage targets that we're afraid to recover. So here I am two days after a hilly 10K and my calves are shot. I was limping around the office yesterday and still gimpy today so I'm just going to wait until I feel like I can run again. If you're too sore to walk much, why run? Lesson learned from ignoring my quad injury this Spring.

Pete Magill just published an excellent article about post-race recovery for masters runners in the new issue of Running Times. You can find it online here.  As Pete puts it:

Most masters runners treat training as if it were a bank account.

We believe the more distance, tempo and interval work we can deposit into our training logs, the more we can withdraw come race day.

Only one problem: Our bodies aren't S&Ls. They're complex organisms. We don't "bank" workouts; instead, we use them to stimulate physiological adaptations that lead to better running performance. And these adaptations can occur only with proper recovery.

Read the article. I feel like I quote Pete all the time on this blog but he really knows his stuff!

This brings me to a final point, however. Simply put there do not seem to be that many good resources for competitive masters runners. I love the profiles of elite masters runners in Running Times, but those guys and gals are the rare exceptions, world class performers who typically age grade in the 90-95 (or higher!) range. On the other extreme magazines like Runners World are geared to fun runners who just want to be 'fit.' Nothing wrong with that, but it would be nice to see more articles geared to the more 'mortal' competitive masters runner.

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