Pre-Covid training update

Note: This is a long overdue, pre-Covid training post. It was tempting to abandon the post, in light of everything going on. But, it's a part of my learning process, and I realize my learning process might be helpful to other masters runners figuring out their own training puzzles. A post-Covid training update will follow.

I'm happy to report that, at the beginning of 2020, I had ten weeks of the most solid training I've had since 2015. My focus for this block was mechanics, overall strength, and mileage. I wanted to put together a really strong foundation for my goal races in July and August, and I also wanted to be running well. In other words, no slogging, no aches and pains, and running fast should feel good.

After a couple of weeks getting back to running every day and doing a couple of speed/strength workouts per week, I shifted into a 2 week training cycle. The two weeks are not vastly different from each other, but different enough to allow me to get in a great mix of workouts and also to keep making small increases to my overall mileage. 

Week 1: 

M - medium-long easy run (7 miles, increasing to 11 miles in 1/2 mile increments per week)

T - speed at the track (full warmup, moderate strides, drills w/ fast strides, 1 mile or less of work at ~800m pace, a few 200m extensive reps, then a few strength/plyo exercises)

W - easy run (7 miles early, increased gradually to 8 miles)

T - medium-long easy run w/ 2-3 miles of MP effort towards the end (note "effort", no watch on this)

F - easy run w/ a little bit of stair bounding towards the end (7 miles early, increased to 8 miles)

S - long run w/ moderate progression in pace by feel (gradually worked up to 14 miles & stayed there)

S - 2 mile jog around the neighborhood, followed by pre-hab strength

Week 2:

M - medium-long easy run (same as Week 1)

T - easy run (7 miles early, increased gradually to 8 miles)

W - "normal" track workout - continuous workout (on efforts w/ float recoveries) in sets, alternating weeks at 10k, 5k and 3k efforts, with a little bit of plyometric and strength work afterwards

T - easy run (7 miles early, increased gradually to 8 miles)

F - easy run (same as Week 1)

S - long run (same as Week 1)

S - 2 mile jog around the neighborhood, followed by pre-hab strength (same as Week 1)

Mileage progression over 10 weeks: 47 miles to 62 miles (mostly in 6 days)

While I never had eye-popping workouts, I also never really started to feel run down. There were some tired days, for sure, but my overall trend was feeling stronger each week. After 5 or 6 weeks, my long runs started to feel downright enjoyable. Running ~60 miles in singles over 6 days is not something I've done before. In the past, when I've wanted to average more than 7-8 miles per day, I've switched over to adding short morning runs. Doing increased mileage in singles turned out to be very enjoyable. I keep coming back to how strong I felt. I'd go out for an 11 mile run on a Monday, and it would just go by, even at a leisurely pace. It became my new normal.

As a result of all this great training, I was really looking forward to getting into a race. With my previous goals, and the fact that I was in such a solid training groove, I decided to pass on February races and target mid-March. (Oh, hindsight, you're a devil.)

My first race was supposed to be the Teddy Opener at Roosevelt on March 7th. I was going to get in an early season 2k steeple, and I was really looking forward to it. But then some last minute work travel came up, leaving a few hours before the meet, and of course, by the time I got back, the world was a different place.

Coming next: training in the Covid world.

Training Update - Trying Some New Strategies

Most races classify runners as masters when they hit age 40, but I think most runners would agree that masters running really starts somewhere between ages 42-46. If you stay healthy, you can roll through ages 40 and 41 without losing much, and you might even think, hey, this masters business isn't so bad. Some lucky ducks manage to keep rolling a little longer, but eventually there's a shift.

I was no different. I was in the best shape of my life at 38-39, had a brief lull for iron issues at 39-40, and then was running pretty solid at 40-41. Late in 2015, still at age 41, I developed a nasty case of high hamstring tendinopathy, and there ended the honeymoon phase of masters running for me. Two and a half years later, when I was finally able to do something approaching normal training, it was like I was a completely different runner. Now it was mid-2018, I was turning 44 and I had zero fitness.

A frustrating year followed, with some progress and hopeful moments, interspersed with slow racing, poor recovery, minor aches and pains, and hormonal ups and downs (hello perimoenopause!).

All the while I was doing my best to pay attention and learn from the things that weren't going well, and when this last spring/summer season ended with one of my most disappointing races yet, I decided it was time to make some more significant changes.

One of my main goals for the fall season was to only do training that I could recover from. Sounds obvious, but for me that meant dialing things down and keeping them dialed down. Really erring on the side of caution, instead of just thinking about how it would be good to err on the side of caution. The other main goal was to work on strength/pure speed for the first portion of the season, even though taking the time to do that would leave me with a very short regular season.

I'll spoil the ending here and tell you that there was no big triumphant race at the end of the fall season, no magical moment that showed I had finally figured out the secret path to fast running in your mid 40s. In fact, the only race I ran this fall was a bit of a letdown. But I did learn some things, some of which were kind of surprising, and somehow I ended up cautiously optimistic that next year will be better. And so here are the highlights, presented as bullet points in an attempt to keep it concise.

• Started With a Speed Base - Using the workout structures from Pete Magill's speed book, I did 2 workouts a week for 4 weeks. The workouts included drills, strength exercises, plyometrics, and only a little bit of running (although I did run for warmup and cooldown). It turned out to be a fun change of pace, and one of the early workouts was challenging enough that I was sore for 4 or 5 days afterwards. One of the surprising benefits of these workouts was that my easy running days started feeling better. I was just moving better. I felt more comfortable at all speeds, and going out for an easy run become enjoyable in a way that it hadn't been in quite some time.

• Changed the Distribution of Easy Mileage - Previously a normal easy day run had been 6 miles (4 days a week), but this season I bumped that up to 7.5 miles and ended up keeping it there. This wasn't something that I planned on doing ahead of time, but early on I was trying to increase my overall mileage to normal levels while doing the aforementioned speed workouts which had very little running in them, so I started adding a few minutes to each of my easy days each week. I thought I might go back down to 6 mile easy days once I finished the speed workouts, but I found that I really enjoyed the longer runs and also that it made me feel stronger overall. Also, at the time we were going surfing for a couple of hours early on Sunday mornings, which meant I wasn't going to be much use for running that day. I ended up not running at all on Sundays, and the result was that my overall mileage was about the same, just done in 6 days instead of 7.

• Changed up the Track Workouts - I experimented with the "New Interval Training" style of workouts (http://www.newintervaltraining.com/) and found that approach to be a nice change of pace. In keeping with my goal of only doing training I could recover from, I kept the volume of these workouts conservative. I felt like I recovered completely each week, which was terrific! In the future, I will consider small increases in the volume on those.

• Reduced the Intensity of Long Runs - I only do 2 quality days a week, and one of them is my long run, which I usually do as a progression run by feel. I start very slow on those, but often I am going pretty darn hard at the end, especially as the season progresses and I'm gaining fitness. The last time I did one of those where I really hit it hard at the end, I was exhausted for the rest of the day and I felt like I didn't recover the whole next week. So all this season, I let myself progress only to a moderate effort level (aiming for 80% of how hard I might have gone in the old days), and then I made myself hold there. It worked, in that I got some work done, and was fully recovered by Wednesday's track workout. Similar to the track workouts, I was probably a bit too conservative on where I held my effort level, but that was the whole point: to establish some baselines. I already knew what too much was, now I needed an idea of where too little might be.

The thing I didn't do well? Besides race?

I let my prehab strength routine slide. While I had intended to keep doing it once a week, I was also trying to maintain mini versions of the early season strength workouts, and in the end, I didn't make space in my schedule to keep doing my prehab strength on a regular basis. By the end of the season, some mild soreness in my glute/hamstring had become a bit of an issue, so I decided to skip the other chance I had to race, and I promised myself that I would get back on the prehab strength next season.

That's it. Pretty simple and hopefully effective changes.

Going in to a new season, I'm planning a few more adjustments:

• Since my goal races are way off in the summer, I'm going to try a bit longer, more traditional base cycle than I typically do. 
• Adding a short, shakeout run on Sundays (at least until surfing gets going again), and doing my prehab strength routine twice a week.
• Field event Sundays! As soon as I get a few weeks stronger, I'm going to spend a little time on Sundays playing at track and field. By that I mean throwing, jumping and hurdling for fun. If a convenient opportunity arises, I'll hop in some field events at a meet, but really it's just for the enjoyment. Because after spending too much of the last few years frustrated with running, I think it's important to remind myself that I love the sport. 

Race Report - Officially done with Run Like Hell

This morning I ran the Run Like Hell 5k in downtown Portland. I had paid $45 for the entry. In return for my $45, there were zero mile markers on the course, no course marshalls at several unmarked turns, a mistake in the overall race results, and an awards ceremony that took place one hour after it was scheduled (or longer, we had to leave before it took place).

That made me angry.

Was the course at least accurate in the end? I have no idea. I went off course following the lead motorcycle at one of the unmarked, un-course-marshalled turns.

That made me really angry.

Now I know the boilerplate response from race directors when this happens: "it is the responsibility of the participant to know the course, blah blah blah". I did, in fact, know the course. I looked at the map just this morning. The course was new this year, so I made sure to have a picture of it in my head.
And that's why, when the lead motorcycle turned right where I thought we'd be turning left, I was confused.

Let me back up just a sec.

This was at about 2.5 miles into the race. At around 2 miles, I had passed the two guys right in front of me, moving into 3rd place overall. The first 2 guys were together a little ways off, but I could still see them and the lead motorcycle. As I struggled to maintain a hard effort, tunnel vision started to creep in. For a few blocks, I turned my focus inward to keep myself from slacking off, and without even realizing it, I wasn't looking at the leaders anymore.

Running north through the park blocks, I came out of my mental cocoon and started looking for the anticipated left hand turn, but what I saw instead was the lead motorcycle turning to the right.

I was confused. There hadn't been any arrows on the course map....   maybe I had misunderstood the direction of the loop around the park blocks? I looked up ahead and to the left. I couldn't see the leaders anywhere. There were no course marshalls anywhere either, none at the turn the lead motorcycle had taken, none at the next block in front of me (where the street came to a tee, forcing a turn one direction or the other).

I was fast approaching the corner where the motorcycle had turned, and I was getting increasingly frantic, looking everywhere for a clue. I threw my arms out to my sides and screamed at the top of my lungs "WHERE IS THE COURSE?!?!?!?!?"

No answer, no nothing. There were no course marshalls to answer me.

At the last second, I turned to follow the motorcycle. I came to a dead stop about 15 feet later when I saw the cop sitting at his bike at the next intersection. I started to turn back, paused, started again, then Joe came running around the corner the same way I had turned. I yelled to him, "is this the course?" He didn't know either, he'd been following me. I started toward the cop, yelling, "WHERE DOES THE COURSE GO?"
I was yelling. LOUDLY.
The cop just looked at me. Did he think I was joking? Or that I was nuts?
Finally he started making a gesture at me. For some reason, instead of just telling me where the course went, he was making hand signals at me that I could not understand. I yelled, "WHICH WAY IS THE COURSE?" Again.
Finally he responded verbally to go back the way we had come and turn right.

I have no idea how long this all took, but it felt like three years. I took off running back to the course, and I was so angry I almost burst into tears.
I don't know exactly how I was doing to that point, SINCE THERE WERE NO MILE MARKERS ON THE COURSE, but I was trying hard. I had possibly gotten just a bit complacent in the middle mile, but I had been rallying, and I had really been trying to get myself into a discomfort zone in the 3rd mile. There was spit flopping out of my mouth, I was talking to myself, it was going to be an effort I could be proud of.

But man, this is a 5k. You don't have 5 seconds to give, let alone 20 or 30 or 40 seconds or whatever I wasted not knowing where to go.

So when I started racing again, I was deflated in a big way. I tried to keep running hard, tried to pretend it didn't happen and focus on running as fast as I could in the moment, but it was pretty useless. I couldn't get much out of myself that last half mile or so.

I was angry afterwards. Angry angry angry. And disappointed. Really disappointed. I've been running a lot the past few months, working really hard to try to get ready for a marathon in November, and this was my only real tune up race. I knew the time wasn't going to be awesome, but I very much wanted to see what it would be. I wanted some objective feedback.

Plus, damn it, I wanted to race! The first two guys ended up separating sometime in that last mile, and now I'll never get to know if I would have reeled one of them in, or if I would have at least gotten one of them back in my sights. At least I wanted to try.

All of this brings me to a larger point.
I am really tired of race directors using the whole "mass participation" thing as an excuse to put on shitty races. The handful of people at the front of the race are not the only people that care about a course having mile markers, and a course being accurate, and being to follow the course. If you pay $45 for a race, you deserve all those things. If you pay $10 for a race, you deserve all those things.

I'm not one of those people that thinks mass participation is, in itself,"ruining our sport", or whatever it is that people say. But I do think race directors are under the impression that all people want are gimmicks, and that they don't care about anything else as long as they can get a free beer after the race. I think that's bullshit.

An accurate course, mile markers, and course marshalls are the things you should have first. Those should be mandatory. If you want to have a 3 ring circus above and beyond that, knock yourself out. But don't insult the runners by calling your event a race if you can't even provide the basics.

Redemption! - Masters 3k at USAs

This past weekend I ran the masters exhibition 3000m race that was part of the USATF Nationals in Eugene. It was a pretty darn cool experience.
There was a lot to it, too much for my usual blow-by blow accounting, so I'm going to try and summarize the highlights:

• I was chilling in the shade of one of the athlete tents before my race, and I glanced up and saw David Oliver walking by. Oh, hello there, fastest hurdler in the world! You know, no big deal. 
• Once your race has had its final call, you are then escorted everywhere you go. Escort to the call room. Escort to the start line. Escort off the track. Escort to the awards stand. Escort back on to the track for a group victory lap. Escort off the track again. And finally, escort to the media tent, where you are finally released on your own recognizance. 
• There were start line introductions. This was so foreign to me that I didn't even hear my own. I assume it went something like this: "Wearing hip number one, running for Oiselle out of Portland, Oregon, Andi Camp. She's a runner too!"
• There were beautiful, gigantic digital clocks at both the finish line and the 200 meter mark. They were mesmerizing enough to be distracting. You could also read them from very far away. When I looked over for my mile split, I saw some numbers that were very impressive until I realized that I was still about 75 meters away! 
• Having fans at a track meet is pretty great. My TRL friend Tim was in the stands on the home stretch, and I could distinctly hear his voice every lap. A group of Oiselle ladies down from the nest in Seattle were clustered at the fence on the far side of the first curve, and they were banging on the fence and chanting my name every single time I came by. It's hard to not be inspired by that kind of enthusiasm. There was even an unidentified cheer-er on the back stretch. It all helps.
• The USATF officials and volunteers are just plain good people. With all the controversy and shady doings at the top of the USATF food chain over the last couple of years, it can be easy to forget that the vast majority of the organization is made up of really cool people that just plain love track and field. A significant number of these people do not get paid, yet they're friendly, patient, and happy to be out there. They rock. 
• Watching a track meet in real life rules. I was only able to hang around for a few hours afterwards, but it's so much more impressive seeing the athletes right up close than it is watching them on a tv or computer screen. Being at Hayward Field is magic.

And the race itself? 

You know, it felt very redemptive for me. After a pretty grueling 3k a couple of weeks ago at PTF, I made some dietary changes that had an immediate positive effect. I had a couple of great workouts and was feeling much more positive going into this race. Maybe I didn't run a pr or blow people out of the water, but I showed up and ran smart in difficult conditions (80+ degrees and humid!). I had a plan and I executed. And that felt pretty darn good. 

Everyone else went out too fast (with the exception of the eventual winner, Sonja Friend-Uhl, who was in a class by herself), so I hung off the back in dead last (9th place) and waited. By 600m I had moved up to 4th place, settled in to a rhythm, and was feeling confortable, and so I started to ratchet my pace down little by little. At around 1400m, I moved into 3rd place, and with 1st and 2nd way out in front, I ran the rest of the way all by myself. Each lap was progressively faster until the dreaded 6th lap, where I faltered a bit and lost a few seconds, but I pulled myself back together for a respectable last lap and secured a spot on the podium. 

Lap splits (courtesy of fancy modern technology!): 44.1 (200m), 88.1, 89.5, 87.6, 86.1, 85.99, 87.8, and 83. something.

Oh, and one other thing: masters events are the best. Even when the masters race is held in conjunction with a major pro meet, the masters athletes are friendly and welcoming (without losing any of their competitive drive once the gun goes off). I don't know why more women don't show up for masters track events. I don't know if they're not interested or if they're intimidated about getting back out on the track, but if you're at all interested, just show up. It's fun and there's nothing to be intimidated about. You'll meet people who have been doing their events their whole lives, and others who learned to hurdle at the age of 60. 

Everyone is welcome.

PTF 3k Race Report - Out of the gate with a whimper

Having a bad race sucks. Beyond just the actual end result of not getting the time/place that you wanted, bad races are physically and mentally harder than good races. Putting out a race effort when your body is not up for it is about the hardest thing that we runners do.

So I'll say it again.

Bad races suck.

I had a bad race last night at the Portland Track Festival Masters 3k, and true to form, it sucked.

The masters womens 3k was run at the same time as the "open" 3k (open in this case meaning high school girls). The start list had been released prior to the meet, and they included seed times. There were to be 8 ladies total in the race, 4 open and 4 masters. The four high schoolers and one of the masters ladies had seed times in the 10:10-10:20 range. Mine was 10:52, and then there was an 11:00 (Jen Seibel), and another a little slower than that. The woman with the last seed time was a DNS.

In other words, there was going to be a race up front, then a gap, then the last couple of us well behind. 

Also, knowing that these were high school girls, my assumption was that they would go out fast. 

Off the line, they did just that. I was well in last place by 50 meters in. I took a split at 100m just to make sure I wasn't crazy, and it was about 18 seconds, or 72 second quarter pace. A 10:00 3k is 80 second quarter pace, just for reference. I backed off another notch and settled in to wait.

But let me back up just a second. I have very little experience at this distance, so I actually wrote out splits on a piece of paper for four different lap times, 84-87. I wasn't expecting to memorize any of them, I just wanted to have a range in my mind of where I might be. I'd also been thinking about strategy in a more general way, trying to figure out how best to run this distance, how to break it up in my mind, pacing, all that stuff. I decided that laps 5 and 6 were the key. It seems like the best thing to do is get through the first mile at just the slow end of goal pace, dig in and press for laps 5 and 6, and then hang on for all you've got for the last 600 meters. 

Knowing that I wasn't in the best racing form yet, I was really only looking to run an 86-87 pace, but I was hoping to finish strong off that pace. Or at least not die off that pace.

My lap splits did not all stick in my memory, but the first was a little fast, the second a little slow, and the 3rd about 86. At 1200 meters in, my total time was in a good place, but I was not. The pace did not feel sustainable and I was "concerned". (That's the nice way to put it.)

I went from last to second-to-last when I passed Jen about 600 meters into the race, but she was only behind me a couple of seconds. I know she's a good runner, so I wasn't expecting her to just drop off the back. The big gap to the front group had materialized, as expected, so it was just the two of us bringing up the rear. It had occurred to me that if some of those girls in the front group had gotten in over their heads with the fast start, they might come back to us later in the race and give us something to chase down, but I could already tell I wasn't having the kind of day to make that a possibility. 

The 4th lap dropped to 89. As we crossed the mile, Rick (TRL/Jen's coach) yelled out, "ok, now's when the race starts". He was right about that. Unfortunately, at that point I was sapped. I was tired, I felt flat, no spring in my legs, no joy in the running, no nothing. But there I was, running in this stupid race anyway! And it's really hard to justify dropping out of a 3k, so I pretty much had no choice but to soldier on the best I could. 

I pictured getting passed and falling even further behind. Negative brain was definitely winning at that point. But when you tell negative brain that whatever happens you're still finishing the stupid race, he pipes down for a while. 

Either lap 5 or lap 6 was a 91 (!!! Really?! what the fuck, Andi??). Jen had moved up close behind me during lap 5, but was apparently not interested in passing. I guess I neglected to mention that there was a pretty good headwind on the back stretch. Also I'm taller and wider than she is, so I imagine I made a pretty good wind break. In fact, she was so close to me that she clipped my heels 3 or 4 times in laps 5 and 6. She apologized each time, and I know she meant no harm, but I was pretty irritated. I was struggling mightily, having a painful off day, fighting the good fight, all while also doing the work for a freeloader behind me, so I felt like the least she could do is not fucking touch my feet while I'm trying to run with them! (It's possible I was also a little grumpy.) In the 6th lap, I briefly considered slowing down a bit to force her to lead and then outkicking her at the end, but that's not really how I roll. This was not some big championship race where finishing place was everything. I needed to see where I was fitness-wise and get more of a feel for the race distance, and to me that meant grinding it out as fast as I could until the bitter end. 

With 600 to go, Rick told Jen to pass me. I believe he said, "she's dying, go around her" or something to that effect. As a small aside, I find that kind of during-race coaching to be kind of funny. First of all, let me say that it's accurate that I was dying. I was sucking big time. So I certainly don't fault him for saying that. But at the same time, he knows I'm also right there, right? I can hear him just as clearly as she can. So does she really need him to tell her to pass me? And is it the best idea to announce that move to me before it happens? I don't know, I just find stuff like that amusing. He's a great coach, by the way. And it's something that a lot of coaches do. And maybe it works well for a lot of people. What do I know?

Anyway. 

She clipped my feet again as we rounded the turn into 500 meters to go. But now I could almost feel the end of the race. She was probably not feeling that terrific either, but feeling like she should make a move. As we hit the bell lap, I felt her start to move up on my shoulder. I let her run out there around the turn, increasing my pace just a teeny tiny bit to keep her out there, and she followed that up with sidling up next to me on the backstretch. Another tiny pace increase held her out there in lane 2, and then, finally, we only had 200 meters to go, and my brain woke up. I'm not going to claim I put on some beautiful, awe-inspiring kick, when it was really just increasing from a terribly slow race pace to the pace I probably should have been running the whole race, but I think I put 2 or 3 seconds on her in the last 200 meters. 

My finish time was 11:0-something, and I was spent. It was a good 20 seconds slower than I'd been aiming for, and it had been a struggle most of the way. Not a good day at the office. But in my brain I was able to walk a little taller for not giving up. I probably should have found Jen and made sure she understood that I had no hard feelings for her drafting off me and clipping my feet, (the former is just the smart thing to do, and the latter was not intentional), but I was hot and tired and yes, a little grumpy, and I needed to get a jog in and be across town for a show in 30 minutes.

So what happened exactly? Why the crappy result?

That's what we always wonder after a bad race, right? If you can resist beating yourself up too much about it, figuring out what might have gone wrong is very useful. A lot of it is conjecture, of course, but it's a good chance to get positive things out of a negative experience. 

In my case, it could have been any or all of a number of things: 

• I'm only a few weeks into my season, and the reality is that I'm just not very fit yet. 
• I've had some digestive issues the last couple of weeks which culminated in gut pain throughout my race warmup. 
• It was too warm for me. Low 70s is probably considered to be "not too bad" for a lot of runners, but I am someone who typically doesn't even race in the summer because the heat is so awful for me and who would choose 45 degrees as the perfect race temperature. 
• Low iron. I hope this isn't a contributing factor, because I am ridiculously tired of it being an issue, but that is my lifelong weight to bear. Last time I was checked (~6 weeks ago), my ferritin had dropped to 37. I expect it may have dropped further since, but we'll see.

In the immediate aftermath of this race, I found myself wondering if maybe the 3k is just not a good race distance for me. I haven't run it much, but each time has been a significant under-performance. I wondered if I should skip the upcoming exhibition 3k at USATF Nationals. 

I don't know. I'm usually pretty good at sticking with things long enough to learn how to do them. I'll keep following my plan, get my iron checked, and take it from there.

Oh, and one other thing..
Playing a super fun show is probably the best antidote ever to post-race malaise. Seriously. So cathartic.

One Season Ends, Another Begins: the review and the preview

Shaking off the Dust (Last Season in Review)
It wasn't the season I expected (is it ever?), but it was the most solid training & racing I've had since the fall of 2013, and that leaves me feeling hopeful.
It was also good because I trusted myself to make some adjustments on the fly, both to my training and to my racing schedule, and those changes worked well.
And you know what else? It was just plain more FUN to be a runner than it has been in a while.

TRAINING highlights and lowlights:

• January sucked. I made a concerted effort to consume more iron from food sources, overdid it, and suffered through a couple weeks worth of digestive woes before I could get myself back on track. I lost a couple of weeks of mileage and workout progression in my early season build, and canceled my early February rust-buster as a result. Not a great way to start.
• During the season, I made a couple of small but powerful adjustments to my training and they were pretty terrific. 
• I had noticed that I was no longer physically comfortable running at fast speeds. I felt awkward and sluggish, despite doing strides twice a week and running a good mix of speeds in my workouts. I just felt slow. I decided to try 200m repeats. My idea was to do them in sets, mostly to avoid boredom, where I would run one set on the track, then jog up to Terwilliger and do one set uphill, and then jog back down to the track for the final set. The first set on the track was dismal (200s in 42-43, which I believe is about my pr pace for 5k). I felt awkward and slow and the effort wasn't right. I was already discouraged when I jogged up to Terwilliger for the uphill set. But then a funny thing happened. The uphills were great! I was running them only a couple of seconds slower than the flat ones, and my body was being forced to get itself back into speed form. All of a sudden I felt a million times better. When I dropped back down to the track for the last set of 200s, my times dropped to 38-39, still not terrific but at least better. And it was actually FUN to run fast again. I've never been a believer in any particular workout being a magic bullet, but for my exact circumstances, this workout was just that. I repeated this workout twice more during the season, adding repeats each time, and getting faster and more comfortable each time. Hallelujah.
• I added doubles two days a week, in the form of a very short (3 mile) early morning run. It's harder to pinpoint what specifically prompted this, I was mostly following a hunch that I needed a few extra easy miles per week, just a little extra endurance stimulus, in order to absorb my workouts better. I tend to be an all or nothing kind of person when it comes to doubles, meaning my mileage will either be in the 80s when I'm running twice a day (during marathon training), or high 50s when I'm running once a day (the rest of the time). Twice a week doubles seemed to work out pretty well, though, it was a good balance. My long runs finally started to come around, and everything felt just a bit better.
• I added a new strength routine twice a week. This one: Dobert strength routine. I kept all my usual routines (dynamic warmup, yoga, myrtl, foam rolling, stretching), but adding this short new strength routine did a bang-up job of getting some more intensity to my core and upper body. It was challenging yet manageable, and I could feel it working. I will definitely be carrying this over to my next training cycle. 
• I weaned myself off the TCM herbs I'd been taking. I did this gradually, and as I did, I felt better and raced better, but my ferritin also dropped. Jury's still out on that one. Not to get too far off track here, but I think this is something I will always struggle with. I have to remind myself sometimes that I was a 17:40 5k runner before I ever started getting IV iron. That's still pretty good. Sometimes I think the best solution going forward is to eat (and be) as healthy as I can, and accept, at least to a degree, the limits of my physiology in regard to iron uptake. Like I said, jury's still out. 

RACING highlights and lowlights:

• My racing plans changed significantly during the season. Originally I had only 3 races on the schedule: rust-buster 5k in February, Shamrock 5k in March, and Vernonia Half in April. I skipped the rust-buster and significantly under-performed at the Shamrock 5k, and then all bets were off. I ended up adding 3 races to my schedule on the fly, and finishing my season by racing 4 weekends in a row. And it was ok. It was fun, even. This will probably NOT be a new way of doing things for me, but it feels good to have recognized the situation at hand and adapted accordingly.
• 5ks: I ran 3 of them: Shamrock in March (19:15), Hop Hop in early April (18:45) and Race for the Roses in mid-April (18:33). That's a decent but not spectacular progression of times, and I would still be a little disappointed (workout fitness was pointing to low 18s, not mid 18s) if not for the specifics of the last one, the RFTR 5k. In that one, my first mile split was ~5:50, the fastest I'd gone out in a 5k since late 2013, and I responded to that first mile split by speeding up for the second mile, running closer to 5:45 for the second mile. Those first two miles put me about 20-30 seconds ahead of two miles in any other 5k (again, since 2013), and I wasn't dead, I was just normal hurting for 2 miles into a 5k. Obviously I lost some time in the last mile, but there's also a pretty mean little hill about 600m from the end. On a flat course, I'm sure I still would have slowed in the last mile, but the hill cost me at least 10-15 seconds (it chewed me up and spit me out!).
• Vernonia Half: I wrote a race recap of this one already, so let's just say it was damn good.
• TRACK!! It seems like every spring for the past few years I've been meaning to get back to racing on the track, but it never pans out. This year was looking to be more of the same, but then I found out that there's a 3000m masters exhibition race at USATF Nationals this year (conveniently held in Eugene). That means you get to run at the pro-level nationals meet at Hayward Field. Even though the exhibition races generally take place before the main meet starts, it's still pretty cool. The only caveat is that you have to have a qualifying time to get in. I've only run a couple of 3ks in my life, and the last one was in 2010 (too long ago to count). So I found myself down in Eugene for the Hayward Classic, on what would be the 4th weekend in a row of racing for me. The qualifying time was not particularly fast relative to my fitness, so I mostly wanted to start learning how to race the 3k. I'd been hoping to run 10:40 or under, but I settled for 10:52. My focus during the race was mediocre at best. I got stuck in a little gap behind the fast dudes and ahead of the rest of the field, and I didn't have the mental fortitude that day to run well by myself. I'm ok with it, though. The last 1k went by faster than I thought it would, and that's important to remember for the future. Most races (5k and shorter in particular) are about trusting that you can handle the pace even though it will seem too hard too early. That takes experience and now I've acquired a bit more.

Onward and upward! Hopefully! (Next Season Preview)

My next training block is 10-12 weeks long. I kept my break shorter (2 weeks) and more active (maximum 2 days off per week) than other recent breaks, and I feel pretty good about that. The first 6-7 weeks will be geared a little more towards speed, culminating with (hopefully) a couple of 3ks on the track, followed by a month or so of higher mileage and strength work, leading up to a half marathon. It's a slightly shorter training block than typical, but that's the length that lends itself best to fall marathon goals.

Along the way I'll be making a small adjustment to my transition workouts (first 3 weeks of the block). Instead of my usual casual strides during a run on Tuesday followed by a fartlek on the roads on Wednesday, I'm going to be doing some low volume 200m repeats (uphill followed by flat) on Tuesdays followed by fartlek on Wednesdays. 

Unfortunately, I'm already being tested in my first week back. While I enjoyed the back to back "workouts" (both were pretty short) in the first half of the week, I was then hampered by an allergic reaction to the lidocaine hidden in the aloe vera gel I was using on some slightly over-exposed areas of my skin (uh... what?!?!). I was too slow to figure out what was going on, unfortunately, as the more irritated it got, the more aloe I used in a vain attempt to stop the horrid itching. The result was a really gross infection spreading all over the skin on my chest and belly, 3 missed days of running, and general fatigue this morning as I tried to get back into it. Also, I am now on the dreaded antibiotics (oh the horror!!!) and all I can do is hope that they don't fuck me up for an additional three weeks like they did last time I took them. 

Ah well, it's never simple, right? 

Vernonia Half race report - a pretty darn good day

Let's get one thing out of the way up front: The Vernonia Half is a net downhill course. The first couple of miles had some uphill and some downhill that was a little too steep for my taste, but then there were 4-5 miles that were a mix of flat and gentle downhill, followed by 6 miles of flat to the finish.

So this was a pretty fast course. On the other hand, my go-to strategy for the half marathon is the big negative split: super easy first couple of miles, easing down to a decent pace, running the middle at something resembling goal pace, and then cranking out the last 5k like my pants are on fire. That's how I like to run a half marathon. Unfortunately, you can't really get away with that when the fastest part of the course is the first half. Not that flat is generally considered slow, but if you run more or less downhill for 4 consecutive miles, when you then hit the flat, it's hard to turn on the jets.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It was almost perfect weather this morning. The only thing that would have made it better was a strong north wind, because this was a point to point course, going pretty much south the whole way. The predominant wind direction this time of year is south, though, so really I should be thankful that the wind wasn't stronger.

The race was put on by ORRC, which, in my limited experience, means that it will be relatively small, but very well run. Low emphasis on swag and glitter, high emphasis on accuracy, professionalism, and ridiculously reasonable prices. All of that was true today.

We started up in Stub Stewart State Park, with the first couple of miles on the road up there, and then just after 2 miles we merged onto the Banks-Vernonia Trail, which is a paved bike path, rails to trails style.

Off the start line, there didn't seem to be any women around me. The first couple of guys took off like they meant business, but a pretty decent sized smattering of guys remained in my general vicinity. About a mile in, one guy pulled up next to me and said hello. I gave a non-committal nod or whatever until I recognized him as the guy that had finished one place behind me in last weekend's Hop Hop 5k (hey, I don't name the races!). We chatted a few minutes and ended up running the next mile or two together.

Right about the same time, a woman appeared on my right and rolled right by me. She had one of those arm band ipod things, and I didn't recognize her, but she rolled on by like she knew what she was doing. Huh, I thought, interesting. Either she is more serious than she looks, or she'll be coming back to me in a few miles. I don't spend too much time worrying about things like that in a race, though. I may not be a seasoned half marathon runner, but I've run enough of them to know that you can't win the race in the early miles, you can only lose it. I didn't let her go because I didn't take her seriously, I let her go because I didn't want to run that fast in the 2nd mile of the race.

At two miles, I was already averaging 6:45 pace, which was quite a bit faster than I planned to start, so I made a concerted effort to check my effort level and relax. By the third mile, the guy running next to me had moved off ahead a bit and I was glad. I need my own rhythm in a race, especially a long race, and it's harder to find with someone right next to you.

Even with relaxing and letting the guy go, I found I was still running faster than expected. But I stopped worrying about it and just ran. Whenever the trail would straighten out a bit, I would see the woman who had passed me up ahead, maybe 100 meters or so. She had fallen in with a small group of guys. I was starting to get genuinely curious if she was going to tank or not. But I refused to chase. Way too early for that.

I was in a good place. I was feeling smooth, I was not labored at all, and the miles started clicking by. I was grabbing my mile splits, and was slightly startled to find that I was averaging sub-6:30 pace. Guys had stopped passing me by about 4 miles, and one by one they were starting to come back. From mile 4 to around 7 or 8, I probably passed 4 or 5 guys, one at a time, spread out quite a bit. It was good though, gave me something to focus on.

And still, I'd get glimpses of the woman and the little pack in front of me. I concluded that they were definitely not putting any new distance on me. They seemed to be running about as steady as I was.

Just after mile 7, when the downhill section is just about to end, the trail comes out of the trees and goes right through the middle of a big open field. That's when I first noticed the wind. There hadn't really been much of any wind in the tree covered sections, but now it was smacking me in the face. And I was all alone and my competition was up in front of me, tucked in behind a pack of guys. Nice going, Andi, I thought, way to be the lone wolf. 

At the same time, I couldn't help but think that I was starting to gain on that group. Were my eyes playing tricks on me? I didn't know for sure, but as the trail finally flattened and my legs said, uh, hello up there? flat feels like uphill now! we don't like this!, I knew the real race was finally starting.

As we moved into the flats, I dialed up the effort level a notch. Free and easy was back there with the downhills, now it was just work. Through 8 miles I was still under 6:30 pace. I had a buffer of about 20 seconds (total). By the way, 6:30 pace was not specifically my goal going into the race, but it is awesome because the math is so easy even a race brain can do it.

At nine miles, I was still under, but I'd lost a few seconds of my buffer. I was slowing, but remarkably very little. And the gap was shrinking. Inch by inch. But it was also getting harder. Breathing was getting questionable, legs were starting to get heavy...  I know from past experience how much the wheels can come off in the last couple of miles of a half marathon, and I still had 4 more to go..  but what the hell, I was already in 2nd place, I had nothing to lose by pushing through.

I started moving myself into the one-mile-at-a-time head space. I told myself how 10 miles was double digits, and that would make it feel good to get there. And instead of thinking that I will still have 3 miles to go when I get there, I told myself that it will then only be two miles to the end of the trail, and that the last mile on city streets will go by way faster because it will be different.

At ten miles, I was still 17 seconds under 6:30 pace, and I'd gained a few more precious feet on the pack in front of me. 6:30 pace started to become this magic number. All I had to do was get to the next mile marker without losing my buffer, and then repeat.

Things were starting to get ugly, but I wasn't slowing much. A line of cyclists came by in the other direction, and the guy in front said to me: she's right up there, you can catch her! 
Every time I felt myself losing momentum, I'd re-focus and think, just don't slow down yet. Just run this speed a little while longer. 

At 11 miles, my buffer was down to 7 seconds, but I was now probably only 30 meters or so behind the group I was chasing. Things were getting grim. Just one more mile to the end of the trail, I thought. And now I really felt like I was chasing. My form was getting questionable, my breathing was starting to get crazy, my legs were all kinds of pissed off at me, but I was gaining, damn it, I was gaining.

I started to be able to see the end of the trail, like a light at the end of a tunnel. Buckle down, Andi!, I thought. At the 12 mile marker, I looked at my watch to see that my buffer was gone, but exactly gone. I was dead nuts on 6:30 average pace at 12 miles. (I should note here that I didn't even know what overall time 6:30 pace would yield, but I figured it had to be under 86, right? And low 86 had been my A goal coming in, so I was clinging to that 6:30 number like it was a lifeline.)

Where the trail ended, we had to make a right turn followed by a quick left on to the sidewalk of the main drag through town. To my dismay, the lead woman, now probably only 20 meters in front of me, turned to look back and see where her competition was. Fuck, I thought, so much for sneaking up on her. I could see her give a little surge, but damn it, I'd made it this far, I wasn't going to just give up.

Unfortunately, we were now running down somewhat narrow sidewalks, and up and down curbs, and that's actually way more challenging at the end of a race than it sounds. I'd gain a few more inches, then I'd lose focus and stop caring for a few seconds, then I'd look up and re-focus, and then I'd get hit by a wave of fatigue and stop caring again. When I'd stop caring about catching them, however, I'd remind myself that I was running a pretty damn good time, and that even if I didn't catch them, I needed to get my ass to the finish as fast as possible.

Finally I could see the school. I didn't know exactly what the finish looked like, but I knew we had to run most of a lap around the school track to finish. I fervently hoped that we weren't taking some convoluted route to get to the track. My legs were nearing a full revolt. Please let the track be very close to the street, I thought.

We hung a ridiculously sharp left turn into the parking lot of the school through two rows of cones (seriously, do you race directors know how sharp turns like that feel at the end of a race??). Across the parking lot and there was the blessed track. I was so tired that I spent the few seconds across the parking lot hoping that it was only a half lap on the track, because a full lap seemed ridiculous.

I had once again stopped caring about the woman in front of me until we got on the track. She was maybe 20 meters in front of me as we entered the track. But then we were on the track. The track! I love the track! I thought, damn it, Andi, just try! who cares if you don't catch her, just try!

So I tried. I dug in and started "sprinting", and for about 3 seconds it actually felt kind of good. I don't know if someone yelled to her or what, but she looked back again and saw me. Again I thought, FUCK. She looked once more. She started to speed up a little, and my legs turned to bricks. I felt my speed slow drastically as my legs refused to participate in this foolishness anymore. Down the back stretch I wobbled (because yes, it WAS a full lap around the track, and in the 3rd lane, no less!). As I hit the 200 mark, I gathered myself one last time. I knew I wouldn't be catching her at that point, but a race is a race, and even an awful sprint is better than no sprint. As the clock came into focus, I saw 85:0X ticking away, which made for some very bittersweet last few strides. I was stoked to be seeing 85, but totally bummed that I'd not sneaked in under.

My official time was 85:17. The woman who won crossed the line about 8 seconds in front of me, although I found out later that she had also chipped me by quite a bit, and her official time was 84:59.

Still, I was pretty happy. I have no idea why I was able to overachieve (based on my workout fitness) for a half marathon when I've been completely underachieving on my recent 5ks, but holy cow does it feel nice to have a decent race result.

As we "walked" (Paul walked, I wobbled) to the car, I can say without a doubt that I ran my freaking legs off today, and that is something I have not been able to do in over a year and a half. Is it premature to say that it feels good to be back? Does this mean I'm BACK? God, I hope so.

Iron Absorption and Hepcidin (Hep-si-what?)

It's a race eve for me, and I had planned to sit down and write up a little mid-season racing report, but instead I got caught up in one of those interweb research black holes, chasing links around and shoveling my way through scientific papers, past those big research study words, looking for the little snippets of information relevant to me. (ME ME ME, right?)

It started with a rather innocuous statement on an iron supplement website talking about why their iron was better for athletes than other companies' iron. It talked about the hepcidin response to intense exercise, and how elevated hepcidin inhibits iron uptake. In other words, after a hard workout, a person is considerably less able to absorb iron.

I was floored by this. In all the years I've been dealing with my iron issues, and all my attempts to find the actual mechanism(s) responsible for my poor absorption, I'd never seen this little nugget before.
As it turns out, this is relatively new information, with what seem to be the best studies coming from 2014.

I'll spare you the details of the whole information chase, and cut right to the good stuff. (And again, in case you missed it the last 18 times I've said it in an iron-related post, I'm not a doctor or a scientist or a physiologist or whatever other kind of expert, just a person who can read, and thus this is my attempt to distill complex information of someone else's specialty down into basics usable for us common folk.)

When hepcidin is elevated, iron absorption goes down. Two things that elevate hepcidin are intense exercise and inflammation. (I realize there's some overlap there, in that intense exercise causes inflammation, but my point is that other sources of inflammation also cause elevated hepcidin.)

So for someone like me, with celiac and a natural tendency towards bad gut bacteria balance and intestinal yeast overgrowth, I'm getting hit twice. I'm always battling gut-related inflammation and I'm training.

Another important implication of recent studies (at least for me me me), is that the hepcidin elevation gets, at least to some degree, worse the higher your iron stores are. In other words, if your iron stores are low, your hepcidin response will be inhibited (by something or other), because your body knows you need some more damn iron. But if your iron stores are above certain levels, your body lets the hepcidin go up and do whatever it's supposed to do, while simultaneously wrecking your iron absorption.

I feel like that type of behavior might explain the way my ferritin would, after getting sent soaring into the 100+ levels by a dose of IV iron, start dropping steadily until it got all the way back down to where I started. I mean, yes, I'm using the iron up as I go, but why, when I'm eating a pound of chicken livers each week, couldn't my body get a toehold in at some higher level of iron and maintain that shit, right? Sheesh. I'd always suspected that the constant way way up and then plummet down cycle was making things worse in the long run, like my iron absorption mechanism just took a vacation and forgot how to do its job, and this new information seems to support that possibility.

One last point: the iron supplement that started my little information chase claimed that since its iron was completely heme-based iron, it was not affected by elevated hepcidin, and thus could be fully absorbed by the body, even after intense exercise. I did not find that fact substantiated in anything I read, so I don't know if it's true. In defense of the company in question, I couldn't get at all of their references, because they were behind paywalls and I wasn't willing to pay, so perhaps there is good evidence to support that claim.

And I don't know yet what, if anything, specifically this means for me me me. Maybe I need to try even harder on the gut-health angle? I'm not sure. I like understanding things more, though. Understanding is good.

Let's Hear it for Fuzzy Goals!

People talk a lot about goals. About how necessary they are and about how to set them:
Be very specific!
Write them down!
Make them public!
Have A, B, and C goals!
Dream big!
But have definable, smaller goals along the way!

I'm not here to say any of that is bad advice, or that I never use any of those techniques, but as it is the time of year for goal/resolution-oriented posts, I've been doing some reflecting on my own goal-setting techniques.

The thing is, my best running results have come when I threw the specific time goals and race goals out the window and focused only on process. That is a 100% truth in all of my seasons of racing, in every running era of my life. The vaguest goal of all - To Train Well and Hopefully Run Faster - has been the one that has worked best for me.

There was one spring season where I really wanted to break 18 minutes in the 5k. I felt like then my life would be complete. I thought about it a lot, I knew the splits, I visualized, I wanted it very much. I ran some good races, and some prs, but in the end I came up about 5 seconds short. In the ensuing off season, I focused on working on some weaknesses, and early the following season, with no specific time expectations, just wanting to see where I was, I hopped in a 5k and ran about 17:45. I blew through that 18 minute barrier without even thinking about it.

One fall I was training for a marathon. Every amateur marathoner wants to break that 3 hour barrier, but I thought I probably wouldn't be ready for another year or two. Instead of training for a specific marathon pace, I focused on doing my long runs by feel and letting my body figure things out. By the end of the segment, it was apparent that I was in killer shape, and that running under 3 hours shouldn't be a problem. But instead of going out at sub 3 pace, I ran by feel, starting well slow of that and easing into it, just like I did on all my long runs. I ran by feel and crushed it, running 2:56 on a big negative split and feeling like a million bucks.

After that race (a 14 minute pr), all of a sudden the Trials standard (which at the time was "only" 2:46) seemed, well, if not reasonable, at least a possibility.
Naturally I thought that I just needed to do a little bit more in my next segment. I am not one of those people who has to be held back all the time, but I still managed to get myself in just enough of a hole to cause a hormone imbalance and overtraining, which sidelined me from serious training for 6 months.
My next segment after that, armed with new knowledge about what I needed for recovery and nutrition, and eager to get back on my Trials quest, I attempted to run through this little nagging pain in my arch. The nagging little pain turned into full blown Plantar Fasciitis, and my foolish attempt to run through it sidelined me for another 6 months after the marathon (that I had to drop out of anyway).

Yes, I was learning my limits, but the point is that I had been blinded by that "dream big" goal. I wasn't being smart. I wasn't focusing on staying healthy. Distance running is a long term endeavor. The single biggest thing that helps you improve is consistent training. I knew all that and still I was blinded by how awesome it would be to qualify for the Olympic Trials! Holy cow, what an awesome goal, right?

Having goals like:
doing my stretches after every run
remembering to stand up more at work so I don't get desk-job hamstrings
going to bed by 10 pm on weeknights

is not very exciting.

Process goals generally aren't very exciting. And maybe I'm just getting old, but over the last few years I've finally learned that process really is almost everything good about running. Races are fun and are a nice reward for hard work, but you have to love the process to love running. And you have to work on improving your process if you want to improve.

So, with a new year upon us, I'd like to give a big shout-out to the often under-appreciated small, boring, process goals. Because 95% of running is the process.
And to vague, fuzzy goals. Because "Run Faster" can handle modifiers (than last season, than last race, than ever, etc), and because in the big scheme of things, that's all any of us really wants, right? We just want to run faster.

Closing out the season on a low note - Jingle Bell Run race recap

This morning I finished up my racing season at the Jingle Bell Run 5k in downtown Portland.

Here's where I would normally give you the blow by blow race account, but there's just not that much to say about it. It was boringly not good. Pretty disappointing, actually, but there wasn't much I could do about it today. I didn't do anything stupid, no major meltdowns. I went out like I planned to, at just under six minute pace for the first mile, which was supposed to allow me to be relaxed and ready to step on the gas, but I just didn't have anything after that. I slowed a bit over the next two miles and came home in a crappy 19:05.

It was kind of confusing.

Just before my last race, I'd started to feel a little more like myself in workouts, and that last race felt like a turning point as well.
And since that race, I've had some drastic improvements in training, most notably in recent long runs. I'd closed out a couple of 15 milers comfortably at 6:45 pace, and last weekend I included a 7 mile progression run in my long run where I just set the effort level and ran, and every single mile split was considerably faster than I expected.

At the same time, it hasn't all been roses. I had some workouts that felt harder than they should be, and one week I had a single travel day for work that totally messed me up. A single travel day should not be that hard to recover from.

It finally occurred to me that I'm still in what I like to call "the grey area" as far as iron goes. I've been in this place before at least once a year, but this is the first time I've ever experienced it on the way up, so it feels a little different.

You see, with my previous method of obtaining iron (by IV), my iron would go way way up, and then it would start dropping as I used it. So I went from a bad place to an awesome place very quickly. At some point on the way down, I would start to feel less good. There's a range there, which for me I have estimated to be a ferritin level between 60 and maybe 75, when things are not awesome, but not yet awful.
The grey area.

When you hit it on the way down, it first manifests as the occasional "off" workout, or maybe just not quite feeling as recovered as you normally do. The occurrence of "off" days gradually increases until you realize what's going on, but it really does take a while for things to get all the way bad. And since you were fit and doing well before, you can sometimes ride it out for a little while.

Now, for the first time, I'm experiencing the grey area as my iron is on the way up.

I got my ferritin checked about six weeks ago, and it was 60. That was great news. It meant that my iron had stopped plummeting, leveled off, and then started to rise again, all without getting the ol' IV iron. It had taken a couple of months for that to happen, but hey, the TCM was working, so I was pretty stoked.

And when I started seeing those recent improvements in my long runs, I thought, ok, now we're talking. Based on the workouts that had gone well, I felt like I was going to finish off my season with a 5k around 18:15, and then I'd reset and hit the ground running next season.

But, you know, there's that pesky grey area. The reality is I'm still kind of rolling the dice whenever I set out to do a hard effort. I never know how it's going to go. Today I rolled the dice and lost. I think in another month or two I'll be solidly in the "go" zone, but for now I'm just going to have to accept that there will be off days.

So yes, I'm disappointed not to end my season on a good race, but I'm pretty excited to put this last running year behind me. While there were many other good things in 2014, the running part fucking sucked. Until just these past few weeks, almost all of it was hard. HARD. And not the challenging, good kind of hard, but the banging-your-head-against-the-wall kind of hard.

I am ready for a fresh start. I am ready for a nice, iron-filled running year that includes real training and real racing. Time to get back to setting PRs.

Bring it, 2015.

Earning it - Veteran's Day 5k Race Report

On my comeback trail this fall, I've been doing a series of 5ks. The idea was that even though I'm a ways off from PR fitness, running some races would keep things a little more fun and help me see my progress. Progress is important.

The truth is, with the exception of the road 800m, the races haven't been that great. Sure, winning races looks good on paper, but sometimes something is missing. It's tough trying to get into 5k racing headspace when you're grappling your way back to fitness. When you're fit and racing, and you see a 1 mile or 2 mile split that is the fastest you've ever run, it's exciting. All of a sudden you have something to lose. All of a sudden you have a very positive motivation to test yourself, to dare yourself to put it all out there.

Conversely, when you're not race-fit, it's easy to fall into negative places in your brain. It's hard to get excited when your splits are 20-30 seconds per mile slower than your PR pace. It's hard to feel like you're even racing.

This week, though, I felt like something might have finally shifted for me. I've been seeing regular, small improvements over the past couple of months, but something about my mid-week workout this past week was different. It was nothing earth-shattering, just 5x1k with short rests. Cruise intervals. But they felt less ragged, less forced, than the rest of my workouts have been this fall. I might stop short of calling those cruise intervals smooth, but they were definitely headed in that direction.

After that workout, I opened up my training paces spreadsheet to see where my workout times were putting me, and I came up with 18:25-18:35. I let that sit in my brain for a minute, and I thought, yeah, that feels about right.

The past couple of days I noticed something else: I was actually a little excited about the race. It felt so strange it made me realize that I haven't been excited at all for the other 5ks. Nervous, yes. Anxious, yes. But actually excited to race? Not so much.

This particular race is a brand new event this year. It's a two loop 5k held out at Camp Withycombe in Clackamas. The course is pancake flat, but it has (12) 90-degree and (1) 180-degree turns. Each Lap. The longest straightaway on the course might not even be 400 meters.

The downside of that is the obvious slowing at turns, but the upside is that you're always doing something, which is a lot easier on your brain than having a 1.55 mile long straightaway to contend with.
I was curious to see how I'd like it.

The race was small, but I was not expecting it to be an easy win. The registration page allowed runners to see the predicted times of everyone in the race, so I knew there were a couple of other women there who could easily beat me on any given day. It was going to be interesting.

The one thing I definitely did not want to do was repeat my mistake from the last race of getting caught up in someone else's pace and going out too fast. Going out too fast sucks. I need to respect the fact that my fitness is really uneven right now and be a little cautious in the beginning.

So when the race went off, I let the two other fast ladies go in front of me, but kept contact. As we settled in to the race, I couldn't figure out how I felt. My legs were a little stiff and un-awesome, but it didn't feel like we were going super fast either. I decided to just hang there for a few minutes and wait til I got a better read on things.

By about a half mile in, there were four of us running in a group: the three of us ladies, and the father of one of said ladies (she was only 15 years old and he was pacing her). I was still on my wait-here-and-see approach, but I should clarify that it did not feel like we were running easy.

As we were nearing the 1 mile marker, my watch beeped at me, and when I looked at it, I saw that I had not started it! Ahhh!!! It was beeping because it was about to turn itself off. Crap. I readied myself to start it at the 1 mile marker (so I would at least get splits for the rest of the course), and when we got there I asked if anybody had the split.

The father of the young lady said, "yeah, I got it, 6:10". I was like, 6:10?! What the...? And I started speeding up immediately. I didn't feel that awesome, but I didn't get up early and drive all the way out there to run 6:10 pace, for pete's sake. The young girl and her dad came along with me, and off we went.

The young girl seemed to handle the pace change pretty well, and by the time we came alongside the finish to start the second lap, they had passed back in front of me. I tucked right in behind them, feeling a little fatigued, but not ready to concede yet.

The next minute or two, though, I did kind of feel like conceding. In fact, I thought I might be giving up the win a little, but I maintained contact just long enough to ride that out. We hit the 2 mile mark and I got a 5:54 split. That was good to see. Quite a bit faster than mile 1. Good news.

And then an odd thing happened: I sped up again. I'm not sure I consciously decided to, but some kind of racing instinct took over. Maybe I sensed that the young girl was tiring, maybe I was just starting to feel the finish, who knows? I made the move, though, and she wasn't able cover it.

Her dad was doing a damn good job as a pacer. I heard him move into the gap that was forming behind me. If she keeps contact with him and he keeps contact with me, she's still right there. It was a good strategy. I also heard him encouraging her, telling her that if she could just ride out that little bad spot, she would feel better in a couple of minutes. That is also very sound advice, although damn hard to act on sometimes. I also briefly wondered if she was finding him helpful or annoying.

I didn't totally drop them, but I kept inching away. I'm not going to say that I was super confident that I could hold my surge the rest of the race, but I went anyway. And it felt good. It felt hard and tiring and I wanted the finish line to come faster, but it felt good. I was racing! Not just running hard in a race, but RACING. Man, it felt good.

I kept right on digging in and digging in and soon enough my watch beeped my 3 mile split. I usually don't hear that one because I'm too focused on getting the hell to the finish line, but I looked and it said 5:47. Yes! 5:47! Faster still! Haha!

And as I made the second to last 90-degree turn, I said to myself, out loud, "Come on, Andi!"
Yeah! Talking to myself out loud in a race! That's what I'm talking about. That is when you know you're racing. I'm still missing that super awesome finishing kick, but I did bring it home strong.
Unfortunately, the finish clock said 18:50-something as I was finishing, and that was very confusing to my fatigue addled brain, but I knew I had run well. I could feel it in my body.

I looked down at my watch and it said that I'd run 2.20 miles since the 1 mile mark. Huh, I thought. Was it long? Or was the 1 mile marker in the wrong place? I waited for the next women to come in to congratulate them. The third place woman, Deanna, said to me, I don't know, the course felt like it was long. I asked her what she had on her Garmin, and she said she wasn't wearing one, the course just felt long. I also asked my friend Joe, who had come in 2nd overall, and his watch came in at 3.09.

On my cool down I looped around the course again with my Garmin on to check it out. I got 1.6 miles per lap, or 3.2 total. In fairness to the race directors, there's a good possibility that, given how turny the course was, if they measured the course the way you're supposed to (taking the absolute shortest possible route), the course may have come out just right. And that's fine. That's what you're supposed to do.

But what matters to me the most right now is how long it took me to run however long I actually ran. I want to know how fast I was running. I want to know what my fitness is right now. So when you do the math, my "corrected" 5k time is 18:21, and that's great for me at this point. Maybe the 18:21 is not perfectly accurate either, but the race definitely felt more like an 18:30 than a 19:00. I ran just over 19 minutes at the race in Longview a couple of months ago, and there's no doubt in my mind that this one was significantly faster.

And here's the thing: no matter what place I came in, no matter what my official time was, I earned that race.
And it felt fucking terrific.

Race Report: the ups and downs of the weekend double

Round 1: An 800m road race down in Springfield, Oregon on Friday night. A straight line drag race, aka the most fun ever.

Is driving 4.5 hours to race for ~2.5 minutes worth it? Hell yeah it is.

It's only been 3 or 4 years since my last 1500, but it's been 22 years since my last 800. Wait, 22 years?! Yes, 22 years. Wow.
And, to make things worse, I'm not fit right now. I'm not even remotely race fit.
But I couldn't resist signing up for this race. How many chances do you get to run a road 800? One a year. That's it.

I had a good long warmup (the shorter the race, the longer the warm up), during all of which I felt awful. This is common for me, but it is still unnerving. Once I was hanging out in the start area and doing strides, though, my legs started to wake up. They actually felt kind of light and springy. It's been a while since I've had that feeling.

I was nervous at the start. Super nervous. Probably the most nervous I've been for a race in the last couple of years. The only thing I felt certain of was that I would go out at the wrong pace (whether it was too fast or too slow), since I no longer have any feel for this race distance. The race director was nice enough to put signs up at 200, 400, and 600, but I had doubts about the accuracy of the placement (well founded doubts, as it turned out).

They had merged the mens and womens masters heats into one heat, which I was pretty stoked about. Now I would definitely not be leading. Also, a couple of the fast men lining up in front of me were friends I hadn't seen in a while. It's fun to chase your friends.

We finally lined up to go. I reminded myself to breathe, since if I forgot, it would be too late before I realized it. A guy next to me inquired as to my goal. I told him 2:30 was probably optimistic. He said he would love to run a 2:30. (By the way, people at master's events/races are just as competitive as anyone else, but they are often about 10 times friendlier than anyone else. It's a fact. Google it.)

TK turned around and gave me a fist bump and then off we went. Pack of 4 dudes instantly in front, followed by me and a few guys on either side of me. I had no idea how fast I was running, but it wasn't so fast that I was worried about it. I was instantly breathing hard, though. We passed the 200 sign, I glanced at my watch and saw 43. What? Well, that sign was obviously wrong, but it was still a little disconcerting to see. I stepped on it a little, and the guy next to me said something about us being on 5 minute pace. I assumed he was reading that off his GPS, but I wasn't buying it. I thought we were probably slower. At any rate, I was speeding up and people next to me began to slip back.

Right about this time, I was overwhelmed with this weird wave of muscle fatigue. It rolled over me like some sort of shock wave to the body, and for about 3 seconds I thought I was going to tie up 1/4 of the way through the race. But then it passed, somewhere something in my body said, man up, legs!, and off we went, actually feeling ok.

At the 400 sign, my watch read 83 or something like that. Again, definitely wrong, and this time I felt more confident that they were just all going to be wrong so to hell with the signs.

And this is where I went a little wrong. Even though I surged a little bit at the 400 sign, I also felt myself hesitate. I had no muscle memory of this kind of effort anymore. I doubted myself.

I didn't slow down. I just didn't go for it.

And I know this because when I passed the 600 sign, I stepped on it again. I asked my body to go go go!, and it actually responded. I found the next set of gears so easily that I knew I had been too cautious. There is no time for hesitation in a race that short. If you have it at halfway, you'd better damn well start using it.

It made for a fun finish, though. One guy ahead had fallen off the front pack and I briefly entertained visions of catching him as I dug for the finish (he was actually still well ahead, but it always helps to put a target on the back of the next person in front of you). As the clock came into focus, I saw the 2:30 mark slip by, but not by too much.

It's hard to explain how fun that race was. Here's the best I can do:
I walked out the chute, spent a minute or so catching my breath, and then I turned to the guys and said: ok, let's give ourselves about 20 minutes or so to rest, and then let's go do that AGAIN!!

It was that fun. I can't think of another race ever where I've crossed the line and wanted immediately to jog back down to the start line and do it again. And this was a race where I'd technically run pretty poorly (my all out 800 time was almost exactly the pace I ran for my mile pr a few years back).
But even though the downer part of my brain could point to the numbers as proof of sucking, I didn't care. It was the fastest I've run in the shitstorm of a running year I've had since the great norovirus incident of October 2013. And it was FUN.

The whole event was fun. Right after our heat, I got to watch the open heat, where my Oiselle teammate Liz Anjos kicked some serious ass, looking totally relaxed while running a big PR and grabbing the win. Then there was the elite mens race, where we got to watch some Olympians tearing down the middle of the street in front of their friends, teammates, and the locals.

Despite the fact that the race is located in a town full of elite runners, for the second year in a row there was no elite womens race (because no one signed up). I find this interesting and unfortunate, but I guess not too surprising. There were quite a few elite women at the race, but they chose to run with their teammates as a centipede and not race individually.

Round 2: Small 5k in downtown Portland Sunday morning. The course was flat, and an out-and-back.

It's only been two weeks since I ran my starting point 5k, so I wasn't expecting a big drop in my time. I figured I would probably run maybe 10-20 seconds faster, mostly because I'm feeling physically more comfortable running at higher speeds, not because I've made any great fitness gains in the past two weeks.

But on race morning, my mindset was not that great. I wanted to be going in to the race relaxed and just looking for a little improvement. No big deal.
Instead I was a little tense and grumpy.

The race went off. It was indeed a small race, and right away there was only one woman near me, and maybe 7 or 8 dudes ahead. I tried to settle in and relax, but the one woman was running just a couple of steps ahead of me, and I found it hard to let her go. (Not having the confidence to run your own pace is the first sign of impending race fail for me, by the way. When I'm feeling good and confident, I'll let everyone go at the start because I know most of them are coming back. When you try too hard too early, you're only making things worse for yourself.)

I kept trying to ease back, but the woman and the guy she was running with were just a teeny tiny bit faster and I let it mess with my system. My watch beeped one mile at 5:52 (there were no mile markers), which was about 10 seconds faster than I'd been planning to start. Not good. My legs have started to feel better recently and thus they're trying to get back to the 5:35-5:40 5k pace I was running a year ago, but my fitness is way out in nowheresville and cannot even begin to keep up with them.

Plus, it was not a comfortable 5:52. I was not even remotely relaxed.
Trying not to panic at the thought of how awful the next 2 miles were going to be, I said to myself, "ok, what's done is done. Just relax. If we just back off a little, we can still keep it around 6 min/mile, and that will be just fine."

I labored along for a few more minutes, and then the turnaround was up ahead.

The course was an out-and-back of the most literal nature. The start and finish were right next to each other, and you stayed on the same road the whole time. When you hit the turnaround, therefore, you could look at your watch, multiply by 2, and see what total time you're on.

I'd been thinking about that as I approached the turnaround, because I was already struggling and I wanted to look at my watch and see some positive feedback. I wanted to look and see something like 9:15, or 9:20, so I could remind myself that I was still on track. Instead I saw 9:37. I was like, wait...  what?!? How am I at 9:37 if my first mile was 5:52? I went out too fast and I'm only on pace for a 19:14? Sure, I backed off a little after that first mile..  but...  my head was spinning trying to do the math on how much I must have slowed down. But the people in front of me weren't really pulling away either, and I hadn't been passed..  it just didn't make sense.

Now normally, I would have jumped to the most obvious conclusion right away, but as I alluded to earlier, I was not on my mental game this morning. So within minutes of the turnaround, my brain plunged into negativity of the most deleterious sort. I felt awful, I hated racing, I hated my low iron, I hated my body for not being able to absorb iron from food, I hated it all. (This might be a good place to point out that I also got my period the night before this race. So, you know. I was ripe for hating.)

So deep in this useless negativity was I that when my watch beeped my second mile split of 6:07, I still was unable to jump to the obvious conclusion. 5:52 + 6:07 = sub 6 pace. NOT 19:14 for 5k, in other words.

Then my running really started to suck. The third mile was most definitely slower, on the order of 20 seconds slower. It was gruesome. Sure, some of this was physical, but at least 10 or 15 seconds of it was mental. The last mile of a 5k is all about staying focused. I had no focus.

The one thing that finally snapped me back to reality was watching the woman in front of me. She was still running with the guy, but she kept veering slightly off the course: outside the cones at an intersection, up onto the sidewalk, and then finally, she pulled off and stopped. She wasn't registered for the race. She was helping the guy with his race, and she did the right thing and stepped off the course a couple hundred meters before the finish.

So all that time I was feeling sorry for myself, I was technically winning the race. Yeah. That made me feel like a jerk. But it also allowed me to wake up and make a little push for the finish.

The clock came into focus with appalling numbers ticking away, 19:30 something, and then 40 something, and then I finally finished. I was too discouraged to even bother stopping my watch, but I did look down at it. And what did I see? 3.26 miles. Duh. The course was long. Of course it was long. Any other day, when things like mile markers and turnaround cones are placed at locations that don't make sense with what I see on my watch, I assume that the mile markers and turnaround cones are in the wrong place. (See Round 1 above!) Garmins are not accurate to the .01, of course, but when you run a short, relatively straight race, they're going to be pretty close. Plus, you know when a course is long or short. You just know.

So, while it's difficult to understand how you can mess up measuring such a simple course, I put most of the blame for my crappy attitude on myself. When I hit the turnaround, my confusion should have quickly turned to irritation that the course was long, and then I should have re-focused myself and charged home as best as I could. I've done that before. You can always do the math and figure out your real 5k time later.

The good news is that even with the too fast start and the mental disaster of the second half, my adjusted time was about 18:49. That's fifteen seconds faster than I ran two weeks ago. Yes, it's still well over a minute slower than a year ago, but all I'm looking for right now is a little sign that I'm moving in the right direction, however slowly.

Harvest Classic 5k Race Report - Getting a Starting Point. And winning a bucket!

I'd had this race on my radar for a couple of months, but after the recent ferritin nose dive and its attendant fatigue issues (see most recent post), I was on the fence about running it. Since my doctor adjusted my herbs a couple of weeks ago, I have seen marked improvement in how I feel, but I haven't been able to tell if I'm feeling genuinely better or just less bad. I definitely can't tell if I'm going to keep improving indefinitely, nor can I tell what will happen if and when I start training "for real" again. And even though I'm finally able to do something resembling workouts, there's been nothing that screams "hey, get yourself in a race so you can kick some ass!!!"

But then this past Monday I was out on an easy run, just a typical 6 mile recovery run, and somewhere in the second half, as I was jogging along letting my mind wander and looking out over downtown Portland, it occurred to me that I was running effortlessly. !!! Hey, wait, is this true?, I thought, Am I really running completely comfortable and easy? Yes. Yes, I was. And in that moment I was flooded with bodily memories of how fun running can be when your body is healthy. I also realized that I genuinely cannot remember the last time running felt truly effortless. It's possible it was late October of 2013, almost a year ago. 

That run made me decide to stop stalling and sign up for the race. It's hard to explain why, but I just wanted to. I'm usually content to wait to race until I have some semblance of fitness, but this time I didn't want to wait. I wanted to get out there. I wanted a starting point for my comeback. 

This race is not a large or super competitive event, but it is a pancake flat 5k. No hills, no trails, and it's not some race distance that I never run. This is a fast course at my best, most often raced distance. There would be no hiding from or excusing the slow time that I was bound to run. 

I decided I was ok with that. The comeback that I'm on right now, provided it keeps going, may take quite a while. Now is not the time to be too proud to race.

The race was up in Longview and was very small. It had that great small town race feel to it. 

As we lined up, the race director made sure to tell us that the roads that we'd be running on were not going to be closed to traffic, and that even though they would have volunteers holding up traffic at intersections, it was our job to be careful and not get ourselves killed. 

Off we went. Within half a mile or so, I had moved my way into a position about 20 meters behind a pack of 5 or 6 dudes, with one considerably faster guy well out in front of them. I settled in there, expecting at least a few of those guys to come back to me later on.

I also discovered that in Longview, just because the roads are not closed during the race doesn't mean you don't run right down the middle of them. Seriously. Right smack down the middle of these huge wide streets is where we ran. There weren't very many cars out, and no one seemed to be pissed off or anything, but still, it was pretty strange. At one point, we were running down a two lane street, with a left turn coming up and a car coming up behind us, and we all edged over and ran right on the yellow line so that the car could pass us on the right. Weird. 

Before the race, I thought that my absolute best case scenario would be 18:30, but that 18:45 was probably more realistic. I was hoping to run low 6's and maybe get a negative split off that pace.

There were no mile markers on the course, but my Garmin gave me a 6:10 first mile. That was a little disappointing to see, because the effort felt about right if not the pace, but that mile was in the past so I just tried to relax and push a little more. 

At about 1.25 miles, there was a very short out and back, and to my surprise I saw that there was another woman not that far behind me. And to me she didn't look very tired. She looked a lot less tired than I felt. Great, I thought, now I really have to get my shit together or I'm going to get passed in the last mile.

Over the next mile, I picked off a couple of guys that had fallen off of the little pack in front of me. My second mile was a little faster by my Garmin (6:04), but nothing spectacular, and I was starting to do the 5k struggle. As we entered the last mile, we turned on to a main street that actually had traffic on it, and were relegated to the thin space between oncoming traffic and parked cars. 

This stretch was 3/4 of a mile long. The only time that 3/4 of a mile seems like a long distance is when it starts at 2.25 miles into a 5k. I caught myself slacking off a couple of times, but managed both times to regain my focus pretty quickly. The pack of dudes was still in striking distance and one more guy had fallen off the back. With less than half a mile to go, I passed the one guy, but I did not seem to have it in me to make a final push to those last 3 guys.

I dug in as the final turn appeared, and tried to will myself to sprint the last couple hundred meters. It wasn't much of a sprint, I'll admit that. It was a slight increase in speed, at best. The announcer started saying something about me being the first female or something and then when I was about 10-15 meters from the finish, he said, "You've got some heat coming down on you", which meant that the last guy I had passed was running me down. Only then did the next gear kick in and I found a little speed to prevent myself from getting nipped at the line. I give that guy full credit for the sneak attack. He was quiet. If the announcer hadn't said something, I probably wouldn't have heard him until he was already passing me.

But then this happened:
I crossed the line about half a step in front of the guy, and since the race was chipped, our names and times popped up on the screen and the announcer read them off. He called out the dude's name and said he ran 19:04, and then he called out my name and said I ran 19:21. Um, what? I hadn't stopped my watch right at the line, but I had taken about three steps past it, put my hands on my knees and then looked down at my wrist to see 19:08 turning to 19:09. I figured they must have read off my time wrong or something. 

After I cooled down I went over to look at the official results screens, and it said 19:21 for me. I printed it out and took my slip over to the timing guys and explained to them that my result was wrong. They were very nice and said they'd look into it, but I checked the results later and they hadn't fixed it. 

Now, just to be clear, this is not something I'm furious about, and it's not something I'm losing sleep over. I know what time I ran, and it's not like I need the official result for anything. But being the person I am, I can't help but wonder about it, because I have no idea what the mechanism could possibly be that would cause only me to magically lose 17-18 seconds on my chip. Both the start and finish were chipped, but it was the system where they don't use mats on the ground. They use some kind of wireless signal I guess, I'm not really certain what the exact technology is. I was standing right behind the first row of dudes, so at most there would have been a second or two lag between gun time and chip time, except these guys (Uberthons) don't even use gun time. They only have chip time. And I was not doing strides off the front of the line before the start (and even if I was, I wouldn't have been doing them 17 seconds before the gun went off). Even if I started my watch a little late, it would only be a second or two. It's just weird. And how could they not notice when they called out our times as we crossed the line together that they were calling out times 17 seconds apart? There was a 20+ second gap both in front of us and behind us, so it's not like it was hectic. 

But anyway, it was a nice race. They didn't really have "prizes" for the winners (other than plaques), which is understandable given the size of the race and the fact that it was a benefit, but they did do this thing where they let the winners pick out one of the unclaimed raffle prizes to take home. I thought that was a clever way for a small race to be able to offer a little something to the race winners without dipping into their race budget. The leftover raffle prizes were all set up on display on a table, and it was a little overwhelming trying to assess which was the most awesome. I felt like I was on a game show. Ultimately I chose the prize with the biggest volume: a bucket (!) filled with... things. Yes, a bucket! Filled with things! We had much fun in the car afterwards sifting through the prizes in my new bucket. There was a giant mug filled with chocolates, a Starbucks card, a candle, a travel mug, a gold styrofoam pumpkin (yes!), a giant bottle of water, a dishcloth...  it was great. (I hope it doesn't sound like I'm being sarcastic about the bucket, because I'm not. The bucket is the bomb. I love the bucket.)

Buckets and timing issues aside, I'm glad I raced. Trying to get back to healthy without the use of IV iron could end up being a long, slow road instead of the quick jump I've gotten used to. I may need to settle for baby steps along the way, and there's a good chance I won't be seeing 17:xx on the clock anytime this season. But that's ok. If I end up with stable iron for the long term, it'll be worth it.