Virtual Races

Without almost any in-person races going on, many are turning to virtual events. An event I've been doing is the (not) parkrun. Parkrun is a free 5K run every Saturday in various places around the world. Laura and I used to do one in Eagan, Minn. fairly regularly. Now, without the in-person event, parkrun has started the (not) parkrun. In the (not) parkrun, one submits her or his time to the website to appear in the results.

Before this year, I did one virtual run over ten years ago, the Global Warming My Ass Run (not an anti-science run, just a nod to beating cold weather). My race report can be found at: Virtual Race Report: GWMA. I enjoyed it and enjoyed writing a race report about a course I created myself.

There are two things I enjoy about virtual runs. First, you can pick the course and make it as hard or as easy as you like. Secondly, in most events, you can pick the day and time. This means you can work around your schedule as well as the weather.

Some of the downsides of virtual runs include the lack of race day excitement, no crowd support, no finish line fun, and no physical competition.

Another downside I've run into is the ease one can give up on the race when having a bad day. One day, I was planning on doing a (not) parkrun, but just wasn't feeling great. After running two miles and looking at my pace, I decided to bag the run and "drop out" of the virtual race. Had it been an actual race, I almost certainly would have toughed it out and finished, even if my time wouldn't have been great.

There are many virtual races out there, some free and some at a cost that includes swag like medals, hats, and shirts. I decided since I already have a crap ton of running gear and medals, I'm going to stick to the free 5Ks. I'm also signed up for the free version of the Marathon Training Academy's Social Distancing Run. I'm planning on making it a marathon that I'll run around my 38th birthday.

Anyone run a virtual race this year or thinking of running one? What do you think?

Workout of the Week

Most of the training plans I write are pretty similar. I set up three harder days each week and the rest of the runs easy to very easy. Some plans only have two harder days per week (or none if it's a plan for a beginner or someone returning from injury), but three is standard for someone looking to run a fast race. Of those three workouts, one is a faster workout done around 5K pace, one is a tempo (sometimes called threshold) workout  done around half marathon to 10 mile pace, and one is a long run.

Structuring my week with those three workouts has worked well for me in the past, so I figured on this training plan I'd stick with it.

A key workout this past week was a tempo run. The workout consisted of one mile of easy running followed by 30 minutes at tempo pace and finished off with about two miles of easy running.

The workout went great. I ran the 30 minutes of tempo pace at 6:19 per mile.

While I'm glad I hit my pace, I don't worry as much about pace during a tempo workout. Instead of having a set goal for a set distance like an interval workout, I tend to do my tempo runs more by feel. I like to call tempo runs, "comfortably hard." When I do a tempo run, I'll often not even check my pace until halfway through or so. Instead, I'll run what feels like a pace I could sustain for about an hour. I also use my breathing as a guide and sometimes check in by making sure I can say a couple words strung together but not more or less.

These workouts have been going well for me and that has me feeling good about my goal of breaking 18 minutes in the 5K. I'm also planning on a virtual marathon, and after a couple more weeks of training and seeing how my workouts are going, I'll have some ideas of what I'm capable of in the marathon.

Workout of the Week

A couple of weeks ago, I started doing some workouts. Before that, it had been all easy runs. My goal for the year of breaking 18 minutes in the 5K led me to start doing workouts again.

In the past, I’ve shared my training log, but from now until I run a virtual marathon in November, I’ll share a key workout I’ve completed each week. Last week I did a tempo run and an interval workout. Both went great, but I’ll share my interval workout since it went particularly well.

When training for a 5K, I’ve set up interval workouts that best mimic the effort of racing a 5K. The key workouts in my progression are 6 X 0.5 miles at 5K pace with two minute recoveries, 5 X 1K at 5K pace with two minute recoveries, and 3 X 1 mile pace with two minute recoveries.

Last week my workout was 6 X 0.5 miles at 5K pace. I’ve been a little discouraged because my goal of breaking 18 minutes in the 5K has been looking unlikely based on my previous attempts, but this workout gave me a lot of confidence.

After a warmup, I jumped into the intervals. Here’s how they shook out according to minutes-per-mile pace.

1 - 5:49 / mile

2 - 5:38 / mile

3 - 5:26 / mile

4 - 5:40 / mile

5 - 5:32 / mile

6 - 5:28 / mile

The big pro from this workout was that I ran every interval but one at a pace fast enough to run a sub-18 minute 5K. It’s exciting to me that those intervals didn’t seem overly taxing — I wasn’t completely spent after the last one and the next day I wasn’t really sore. 

The con coming out of the workout was that I wasn’t very consistent.

After running this workout, I had some confidence on my next 5K attempt. I managed an 18:08 — a big improvement from my previous season best of 18:45.

Next week I’ll share another workout. I’m hoping it goes as well as this one.

Training Plan

 It's actually been about three years since I wrote a training plan for myself (besides a plan I didn't end up doing due to injury). In that time, I've written quite a few plans for other people, but I have just stuck to flying by the seat of my pants with my own training. Part of that came from when I read the book "Run: The Mind Body Method of Running by Feel" by Matt Fitzgerald. "Run" devotes an entire chapter to "winging it." This does not mean no structure at all. In fact, in that chapter Fitzgerald writes, "Training without a plan... is not exactly training without planning."

However, I do not use plans from books or websites. I would recommend that if you're newer to running, you use a pre-written training plan and eventually get an idea of what workouts are like and what workouts work best for you.

What I've noticed is that my best race performances have come when I have had a written training plan. I've done training plans from several different books along with one website, and I feel like I have a good idea of how to structure my training. But, instead of completely flying by the seat of my pants, writing a training plan based on what has worked for me in the past along with improving my weaknesses should give me a better chance at success.

The training plan I've written is a little wonky. I really want to get as close as possible to meeting my goal of breaking 18 minutes in the 5K, so I have a lot of 5K-focused workouts. I also want to finish a marathon as well as I can, so I've got a good amount of marathon-focused workouts as well.

I'm hoping my training plan leads to some success. The past few weeks of running has been going really well, so I'm hoping that momentum carries into completing my training plan leads to some big gains in my performances.

Home Update

Since Laura went back to work after maternity leave, I’ve been home with the kidddos for six months now. Though it can be challenging sometimes, for the most part the kids are pretty easy. The four-year-old is good at listening and sometimes keeps his sister entertained while I take care of something. He has a very cute song that he wrote himself that he likes to sing to her.

It feels good that I’ve been home with the kids this long. Four years ago, when our first one was five months old, I was going to stay home with him for the summer. Unfortunately, shortly after starting the summer with him, I started to have some moderate bipolar symptoms that kept me from being able to take care of him, so we had to send him to daycare.

On this go ‘round, I was more than a little nervous about taking care of two. If one was difficult, two was going to be even harder. I worried that my bipolar symptoms were going to crop up, and I didn’t know what we were going to do if I was unable to care for them.

Fortunately, for the last six months my bipolar symptoms have been in check, and I’ve only had a few rounds of depression and hypomania, both of which were mild enough that I was still able to care for the kids.

We’ve stayed busy while at home, and every day goes by quickly. I made the older one a couple pictorial schedules, so every day he knows what we’re up to. He really enjoys the schedule, so when I thought that after doing the schedules for a while he might want to just do our own thing, he said he wants to keep the schedule. Here are some fun things we’ve been up to:

The littlest one still enjoys crawling under things. She’s was doing mostly army crawling, but it the last few days she's been regular crawling.

We’ve started solid food. She does a nice job of trying every food, but she hasn’t been eating a whole lot:

A big game changer for me has been getting them both in the double jogging stroller. It's not actually that bad to push around, and it's a nice way to get us all out of the house as well as getting to parks that are a little out of walking distance.

Besides the jogging stroller, the older one can ride his bike for a while while the little one rides in the stroller. It's not the fastest way to run, but it's fun. Laura even finds time to run with them as well. 

That should do it for my home update. Stay safe out there!

Running Injury Prevention: Slowing Down

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Earlier I wrote about things I've been doing to reduce my risk of running injury, but I wanted to spend a little more time on running easy. Since restarting my running life in 2009 and reading many books and articles on training, I've known that easy runs are supposed to be just that — easy. I hadn't, however, realized how easy. 

I was listening to a podcast that said you should be doing your easy runs 90 - 120 seconds slower than your marathon pace. I don't think I've ever done my easy runs that slowly. I tried running that pace for a while, but it felt really slow. There are other formulas for easy runs, so I checked out McMillan's running calculator and Jack Daniels' running calculator, both of which I've used in the past, to get get a range of paces for easy runs. McMillan's fast end was a little fast, so I decided to go with the Jack Daniels' range of paces when 90 seconds slower than my marathon pace is feeling a little too slow.

Besides using pace, I also use a method I read about in Matt Fitzgerald's book, 80/20: Run Faster and Race Stronger by Training Slower. He writes about running easier than the ventilatory threshold — the pace at which your breathing becomes labored. He suggests that 80% of training should be done easier than ventilatory threshold, and he gives some advice on determining and staying within one's ventilatory threshold. The method I use is to say the Pledge of Allegiance. If it's not too hard to say, then I'm running easy enough.

The only negative to running so much slower is that I'm able to run fewer miles with the time I have. I used to knock out eight miles in about an hour and now it can take me as long as an hour and twelve minutes. Really though, it's not that much of a negative because decreasing mileage reduces my injury risk too.

After all the research I've done on running easy, I'd recommend it to anyone — not just to prevent injury but also to get faster.

Stay healthy.

Running Injury Prevention

In a previous post, I wrote about my training errors that have led to running injuries. In this post, I'll outline how I plan to reduce my running injuries.

Looking at the list injuries I've had could make me depressed and think there's no hope for running injury-free. I've joked before that running is something I do between injuries. I've been to physical therapy quite a few times, and each time the PT recommends at least one exercise, and it's usually two and as many as four. If I did every PT exercise I've been prescribed for injury prevention, I would have daily sessions that last between forty-five and ninety minutes.

As I've mentioned previously, I've started a program called Foundation Training. The premise of the program is to improve functionality of the posterior chain to reduce or eliminate back pain (something I also deal with) and to improve daily activities and athletics. The FT Streaming service has exercises specific to running, and they seem to help. The amount of time spent on these exercises can be as short as eight minutes, so since I've started this program in March, I only missed a few days of doing a Foundation Training routine.

Along with Foundation Training, I've also been running significantly slower on my easy runs than I ever have. I'll explore that in more depth in a future post.

In addition to Foundation Training and running slower, I'm using three other injury prevention tools. First, I increased my weekly mileage at a painfully slow pace. Second, I started my running after a long break in March by running five minutes and walking five minutes. I slowly worked my way up and landed on taking one minute walk breaks every 15 minutes. I've now switched to walk breaks only on my longer runs. Honestly, I don't know if that's frequent enough to make a difference, but it doesn't seem to be hurting.Third, I've increased my running cadence.

I've been running injury-free since I started up my running again in April. Whether that's because of using run/walk, increasing my mileage slowly, slowing my easy runs, increasing my cadence, doing Foundation Training, or all of the above isn't clear.

Here's hoping I can continue injury-free running.