Another setback

I slept in Sunday, waking up at 8:30 to head out for an 18-mile run. It's Laramie, it's February, so I figured it would be cold, maybe a little windy.

Yep, I was right. I still set out in shorts, UnderArmour, vest and gloves. I went south with it in mind to run out for 1:15, back in the same time, barring wind. Within 20 minutes I was plodding forward at about 11 minutes a mile, leaning into the bitter wind, and my left arm was numb. I headed back after 30 minutes, went to the apartment, zipped the sleeves back on my vest, put on tights, and headed back out again. This time I headed back after 37:30, turning around at the legendary steakhouse, The Calvaryman. As it happened on the first lap, my heart rate dropped 10 beats (167 to 157) within two minutes of regaining the tailwind.

So I don't know what I gained from this. Poking around on MapMyRun, I figure I did between 14 and 15 miles, but I don't think bailing on a long run two weeks in and 10 weeks out is going to break my marathon. Next week I plan on running 16 on some trails above Laramie -- another 1,000 feet above Laramie. I'm not making up mileage; I don't believe in obsessively trying to hit a mileage target every week. It just seems like a good idea to get off the asphalt and see if I can go a little longer than the 14 regularly scheduled, and especially in the thin air.

Otherwise, I just finished a book called "Running with the Buffaloes," by Chris Lear, a chronicle of the 1998 cross country season for the University of Colorado men's cross country team. While the greatest insights came from what forges a top-level team comprised of bad-ass Division I-calber distance runners (100 miles a week? In college? Seriously?), there were so many copy editing errors it was hard to take the book seriously; the editor never sleeps, you see. Dick Patrick of USA Today said the book is to college cross country what John Feinstein's "Season on the Brink" was to basketball, and I agree. Hell of a season to cover.

Last night, I couldn't sleep at all (Yes, the Fifth Dimension reference was intentional) so I typed up a list of all the triathlons and marathons I've done. You probably know me well enough to know I have a mind like a steel trap, so with few exceptions I even knew the distances of those races. Could've been wrong, though. Anyway, the count is at 38 triathlons in 16 states over the course of 20 years. Including Ironmans, I've done six marathons in six states. The goal is 50 states on both counts, but as for sheer numbers I'll stop when someone in a white lab coat holding a clipboard tells me to. No, scratch that. I'll stop after the third medical professional tells me to. I'm stubborn like that.

And the lack of sleep plus a night assignment today scrapped my easy four-mile run for this morning. I might do it on the dreadmill and then show up all stinky for my night assignment. Wouldn't that be professional of me?

Minor setback

The skeleton of my training schedule will follow so you people know how I'm beating myself down on a day-to-day basis.

Saturday, for example, are the gold coin into the savings bank of my training -- the pace run. The thinking behind PMP training (proposed marathon pace, per Runner's World columnist/Brigham Young track and field coach Ed Eyestone) is getting your body used to that race pace. In my case, that's 7:27 a mile for a Boston qualifying time of 3:15. There. I said it. Karma is now banging on the door, demanding reparations.

The first few of these (last week's 3-miler, today's 4-miler, and the next two, possibly) I'm running on the treadmill at the gym, in part because I have very few routes mapped out in my new surroundings and in part because after 25 years of running I still don't know what a 7:27 mile, let alone 26 of them, feels like. So I get on the treadmill, dial up the pace and hammer away.

Last week I had no problem putting down three of them, all the more impressive considering I'd run 14 miles the day before. Well, today I pulled up at 2.5 miles, walked a bit, then cranked the pace back up before finally bailing at 3.7 miles. My breathing was shallow and my heart rate was in the red zone. Given a recent revelation that Ironman and marathon training are all about pushing the red line out further and further over the course of several weeks, I can't help but be disappointed.

Tomorrow's an 18-miler though I don't know if I'll go that far. It's cereal time now.

Monday: 4-mile recovery run, easy jog on the treadmill until I get some more post-work daylight.
Tuesday: Speed work. Plan calls for intervals and repeats instead of tempo runs. Hmmm.
Wednesday: Bike ride
Thursday: Long-ish run of between 7 and 12 miles.
Friday: Swim.
Saturday: Pace run, starting at 3 miles in Week 1, up to 12 miles 10 days before race.
Sunday: Long run, 14 miles every week save for a few variations, including 22 miles four weeks out.

Things you see

Facing a long day with a possible evening assignment, I did Thursday's 8-mile run before work. No, I don't reap the benefits of 45-degree days in February, but I get out of the vicious afternoon wind, which at this point is more important to me.

This was not the first time I'd been up before the sun. When I moved here, my sense of location was skewed enough that I didn't realize I was a mere mile from my office. So for the first month I woke up at 6:30, had a leisurely breakfast and then walked to work, getting there much earlier than I needed to. I shifted my wake-up to 7 a.m., but for the first couple weeks of January there still was little light in the sky. During my walks to work I'd have seen a sunrise were it not for the mountains, trees, houses, and campus buildings, but I won't begrudge the infringement of civilization on nature's big moment.

So I ran west from my house and crossed the bridge that spans Curtis Street, high over the train yard that bisects Laramie into east and west. At the apex of the bridge I saw the day's first light over the Laramie Mountains behind me. And ahead of me the Snowy Range was illuminated in orange. Both beautiful sights filled my spirit as I strode through the run.

At about mile 3, the Laramie River Greenbelt feeds on to a street briefly before returning to the scrubby savannah that occupies the geographical middle of town. In one yard I saw an absolutely ingenius contraption -- a mountain bike with an old-school push-mower where the front wheel ought to be. Basically, this homeowner hops on his bike and mows his lawn. Someday I'll take a camera along in the hope that this machine is still there, because it's damn sure not available in stores.

The out-and-back run otherwise finished without incident. I had the path practically to myself, save for a woman in a black beanie towing a golden lab along for the run. Breakfast, showering and stretching followed before I made the stroll to the Bureau of Mines Building, where my office awaited.

As a sidenote, when I haven't been working out with music, the song most prominent in that jukebox in my brain has been Ziggy Marley's "Into the Groove." It's more appropriate than you can imagine.

Take it outside

With a couple of night assignments today I had no choice but to brave the cold before work. It was 21 degrees, but no wind. And thanks to a recent thaw there was some pavement to spare.

That pavement led me to Labonte Park, a pond-centered green space around the corner from my house. There's an asphalt path around the perimeter of one side of the park, and a city sign at one corner of the park says "One lap = .623 miles," or .002 of a mile longer than one kilometer. That's the distance between two young cottonwoods on the north side of the park along Shields, a good place to begin and end my intervals.

I jogged 1.6 miles for a warmup and dove right in. The workout was 3x1km at 10k race pace; for me, that's around 4:20. I ran them in 4:20, 4:13 and 4:27 with about a half-lap jog between each repeat. Here I was hoping the monitor would tell me what my heart was doing on each rep but I just now noticed that's not the case. Still, it does say I maxed at 181 beats a minute, four beats short of my max, which would have been exceeded easily a week ago.

Point here, through all the technical jargon, I'm getting in shape. I'm not saying I wasn't winded this morning, but my body is starting to accept the task at hand -- altitude, weather, training intensity, end goal. It should be a trip down memory lane for my heart and lungs, and the coming weeks will reveal what they remember and how to process it.

Holy cats, what a weekend

The plan to run at race pace did not backfire. Quite the opposite.

I woke up this morning and the quadriceps minors on both legs were still tight. I read in one of my fitness-related publications that one of the causes of such tightness (or the feeling like they've been dipped in concrete, as it were) is increasing distance or intensity too soon. Well, no shit. Nothing that my nightly stretches can't heal.

That said, I still trudged up to Half Acre and found myself a nice treadmill next to an attractive lass running (as it turned out) as hard as I had planned to. I warmed up at 6.5 mph and once I'd covered 10 minutes, I cranked it up. The workout called for three miles at race pace — for me, in the neighborhood of 8 mph, or 7:30 per mile. Mission accomplished. Furthermore, my heart rate stayed under my max for the second day in a row; I knew something was up when my heart stayed under 150 for most of my 9:00 per mile warmup. The total time was around 22:59. Should have been 22:30 but I wussed out and did a half mile or so at 7.9 mph. It was tough, but worth it.

The questions facing me this week: How wise would it be to move up to 18 miles per my schedule for Sunday's run? And how many miles will I face before I sac up and go outside, leaving the womblike cocoon of Half Acre? 

Bottom line, I needed this. Badly. In a previous post I talked about how my goals for St. Louis get more and more "realistic" every day. Now I feel like I can go back in the other direction.

The playlist: The first nine tracks of 1:45 Playlist B

"Suckerpunch," Bowling for Soup

"Army of Me," Björk

"Say Goodbye to Love," Kenna

"Big'uns Get the Ball Rollin'," Stanton Moore

"Vapor," Soulive

"Sexx Laws," Beck

"Into the Groove," Ziggy Marley

"Shu Ba Ba Du Ma Ma Ma," Steve Miller Band

"Travelling Riverside Blues," Led Zeppelin

I wear shorts — period

At the same time as I laugh at my sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephew for driving great distances to find running and cycling trails, I have no problem making a 132-mile round trip to get in a long run. If Fort Collins is going to be 15-20 degrees warmer with a third as much wind, I see nothing wrong with putting the mileage on my car.

Besides, days like these illustrate perfectly why I live here. The closer you get to the mountains, the more of the wind gets blocked, the more the sun can warm you and your surroundings. Without an alarm I woke up at 7:15 a.m. and headed south shortly thereafter. On Friday, I spent a little time at work researching the thriving (based on the number of people I saw today) Fort C running scene, and found the Spring Creek Trail. It runs south of downtown along a dribbling little creek that feeds the Poudre River, starting at Cottonwood Glen Park at the end of Overland Trail. I drove down and found the place perfectly. A couple of ladies directed me to the start of the trail and away I went.

First of all, let me explain why I pushed the first long run of this training cycle to Saturday, and the three-mile pace run to Sunday. I think most training plans are fluid, and some "real-world" adjustments are entirely appropriate. When I saw that it was going to be nice on Saturday, not so much on Sunday, I figured I'd move things around — especially when I saw Fort Collins was supposed to be 50 and sunny with light winds.

I'll spare you the gory details of the run. Because I tried to run on the grass, gravel and dirt instead of the concrete, my wobbly strides pushed my right foot into my left calf a few times, rubbing some hair off that part of my leg. I saw every kind of neighborhood, from sprawling one-story ranches to massive cookie-cutter tracts on cul-de-sacs to trailers to duplexes to dilapidated off-campus ghetto near Colorado State. As I said before, the trail wasn't packed but when I approached any Fort Collins' parks I definitely wasn't alone. Better still, about 90 percent of the people out there offered some sort of greeting — a wave, a nod, a "good morning." That never happened on the Duck Creek Trail in Davenport.

What's more is my heart rate stayed somewhat reasonable. Where my heart raced in the past month in Laramie, averaging nearly in the mid-90-percent range of my max, today's 2-hour, 3-minute jaunt kept me at 90 percent (avg 167, max 177), and I didn't go over 170 until the second half of the run. Bear in mind Fort C is more than 2,000 feet lower than Laramie and I could feel my body drinking up the extra oxygen (such as it was) like a desert-stranded vagabond. Perhaps with all this extra oxygen my body just worked more efficiently today, giving me a new batch of hope for the rest of the spring.

And I wore shorts. When I left Laramie I guessed the temperature to be in the low 20s. When I arrived in Fort C the first couple of runners I saw were in shorts and long sleeves. I figured I'd warm up plenty so I left the wind pants in the car. Couldn't have been a better move. My legs are stark white but their muscular. And they gained a little color today — which I will promptly lose over the next couple of months, until I can expose them to the world again.

As of this writing I don't know how far I went. I followed a proscribed 12-mile route I stole from MapMyRun and went a little farther. Out for an hour, back for an hour. Killed the outside muscles of my thighs in the process. Tomorrow I'll do the 3-mile pace run; wouldn't it be wise to know how it feels to run race pace with tired legs? Thought so. Back to the dreadmill I go.

The vagaries of the heart

Admit it. You thought I was going to write some overwraught screed about love and the human condition. That makes one of us.

No, I've put my heart under a bit of scrutiny with this latest bout of training. About a year ago, with my 2007 REI dividend I bought a Polar RS200 heart rate monitor to tell me what my heart's doing while I destroy the rest of my body. Interesting stuff. There's this baseline test you're supposed to take with it, which I didn't do because I wanted to get at it. And I thought I knew everything. Maximum heart rate = 220-age. The manual says otherwise, that Polar's test is more accurate. And I'm wondering if that's the case.

For example, last night I hit the bike trainer for an hour-and-a-half, watching St. Croix Half-Iron 2005 and Ironman New Zealand 2005 (you'll get to know my VHS collection well if you stay with me for a while) while killing my hearing with another one of my self-labeled cool playlists. I don't think that has anything to do with what my heart does during the course of a workout, but at some point I'll investigate a possible cause-and-effect relationship. Moving forward...

The max heart rate was 157, and the average was 142. In fact, I've averaged 20 beats higher on any of my runs than any of my rides. At times I was working pretty hard last night. What I do is this: Keep it on the small ring with a high turnover while the race is going on, but shift into bigger gears when commercials come on, then back down when commercials end. Some shows have longer commercial breaks than others, but that's the nature of a real bike ride or the bike portion of a triathlon. Sometimes you've got to put the hammer down at unfamiliar intervals, which is what I try to do during these winter training sessions.

Now, I just had this thought that perhaps the scenery at Half Acre Gym, where I do my running, adds a few beats to my pulse. Not a chance. There's some nice scenery in these races I've taped , too, and I'm not talking about the sky-blue Caribbean waters of Christensted or the soaring mountains around Lake Taupo. Stuff like that doesn't get to me. I'm a pretty cool customer in such situations, so let's just eliminate this factor now.

Again, the question remains. Why is my heart rate that much higher when I run than when I ride? And will this continue to be the case when I move my training from my living room and Half Acre to the roads of Albany County?

Ah yeah, the playlist. My favorite part of this whole ordeal:

"Cochise," Audioslave
"Ignition," Brian Setzer's '68 Comeback Special
"Baton Rouge," The Nixons
"I Ain't Goin' Out Like That," Cypress Hill
"Click Click Boom," Saliva
"Mr. Brownstone," Guns n Roses
"Serpent Boy," (hed)pe
"Headspace," Velvet Revolver
"The Distance," Cake
"Feel Like I Wanna Feel," The Bella Fays
"Greater Than/Less Than," Saliva
"Roll Right," Rage Against the Machine
"A Song for Sassy Baxter," Hollywood Superstars
"Heart Attack Man," Beastie Boys
"Bring the Noise," Public Enemey
"Warped," Red Hot Chili Peppers
"Jimmy Olsen's Blues," Spin Doctors
"I Make My Own Rules," LL Cool J feat. Flea, Chad Smith and Dave Navarro
"I Come From the Water," The Toadies
"Business as Usual," Blues Traveler
"My Wave," Soundgarden
"The Only Way to Be," Save Ferris
"Can't Get Enough of You Baby," Smash Mouth