It has been a long 16 weeks of training and progressing a bit faster than I should to try and get on track with my 20 week 50k training plan from UltraLadies. I'm about as ready as I am capable of being. Nothing I can do now to get ready except to stick to my taper. Which apparently for me means running in the Cascades 10K and getting another PR*. All I need to do now is finish The North Face Endurance Challenge 50k and that will make three PRs in three weeks.
* It is always a PR the first time
I just ran a new Half Marathon PR!
The Plan: I have been comfortable doing around 9:45/mi pace on longer runs and decided that since 9:45 would shave about a minute off my last half I would try for something like 9:30 expecting to lose some time on the hills, make up a bit on the decent and hold steady on the flats. I would be running with the Nathan as that is the plan for the NF50k but wearing road shoes instead of trail shoes.
Pre-Race: I had gotten a little wet warming up and felt chilled prior to the start at the last minute I decided to run with my PI mesh back cycling vest, this would turn out to be a mistake. The anthem by 'Maxx Factor' was the best pre-race anthem I have heard at any race this year (with tempo and spirit, not your country singing debut and they knew all the words).
The Race: At the request 'Lets get all the 5:00/mi runners to the front' most people backed way up. Maybe I should have gone further. My first mile was fast at 8:55 and my HR was a bit higher than hoped I checked and saw low 8s a few times and backed off. The first hill I noticed came around 1.5mi when I decided that I was getting hot and walked while I adjusted my clothes.
Then came the dilemma that I faced throughout the rest of the race. WTF do I do with these downhills? I ran them but I kept wondering if I needed to slow down, was I going to burn out my quads? If I slowed down would that burn out my quads? I think that by mile 3 there had been a good .5mi of downhill just in time for the first real climb.
On the first climb 3-3.5 and through the climbs to 4 I took a couple of short walking breaks to control my HR. From this point to next big climb was fairly uneventful. I managed to clip a puddle and splash my right foot, noticed that my HR was remaining higher than I would generally have liked but felt fine in spite of that unexplained data. In retrospect I should have put it together with maintaing a few sub 9:00/mi splits.
The start of the second climb reminds me of Forsythe Ave in DC, took a walk to try and lower my HR but didn't want to slow down too much and kept to a fast walk (10:58/mi split). From here to the end of mile 10 I took a couple more quick walks resulting in two 09:09:04 miles before the real downhill.
Mile 11 to the end the race is advertised as a an easy downhill two miles to the finish, it is downhill. However, I found the 8:12/mi to result in a creeping HR 170-178bpm and while I tried to back off in mile 12 (9:26/mi) even taking a quick walk to lower my HR and combat a bit of rising gorge I felt like I didn't have anything left for the last mile. Apparently I was wrong finishing mi 13 in a slower but still better than target 9:19/mi. The race finishes on the horse track where I almost bit it slipping in some extra wet sand.
Post-Race: Walking around the track to get the race medal was a nice forced cool-down walk. Plenty of helpful and friendly volunteers to remove timing chips, hand out water, snacks, mylar blankets and medals. I had a free muscle milk...yeah I don't like it even in chocolate malt. My recoverite tasted really good (dehydrated, really?) The bacon egg and cheese muffin I had tasted really good as well. The festival looked fine but I wasn't really interested and the music was overly loud for me.
Thoughts: I'm in the middle of my taper for the North Face 50K and I just ran a PR Half Marathon taking about 8 minutes off my previous PR at LAWS on April 18th. I am happy with the results and think that it is a great confidence booster, but I do have some concern about the pacing/effort as related to what I need to do for the 50K.
I spent slightly less than half the race in zone 3 the rest in zone 4 except for a brief foray into zone 5 to the finish. Finishing with a new PR of 2:02:58. I drank about 1L of Perpetuem mixture (of the 1.5 I carried, this is still a problem). I wasn't really feeling dry while running but I was dehydrated at the end and carrying .5L of water and fuel! I don't think I can maintain those effort levels for a 50K, I can't afford to dehydrate and carry effectively useless weight for what I expect to be at least 7 hours on the trail.
It was a down week in my training schedule for the Mid-Atlantic Regional North Face Endurance Challenge 50K. On June 5th I will have 9 hours to complete the ~31 mile course.
Saturday was a good 12 mile run with Mandy and Cherry from Great Falls to Algonkian Park on the Potomac Heritage Trail which makes up or at least parallels a fair amount of TNFEC DC route. The weather was beautiful if slightly chilly and a little windy. We finished faster than I had previously done that section ~2:30. I didn't feel at all bad letting them head back to and around Great Falls for another 14 or so miles. This was the first time out with the Nathan vest and I have to say I like it. Sunday was the Loudoun Abused Women's Shelter (LAWS) Half Marathon. I had planned to go out easy, continue on and finish that way, a nice easy supported training run. Having reviewed my results from my first running of the event in 2009 I knew that I needed to beat a 10:15/mi pace to PR and decided to see how I felt in the morning after an early start, trip to Columbia and a Caps game in DC and late celebration at the Irish Channel for the Caps second game against the Habs the day before.Race day, it was cold when I woke up at 6 after about 4 hours of sleep. I had pre-mixed fuel in my new Nathan HPL 020 with its HydraPak bladder to replace my older leaking CamelBak with its taped patches, pinned on my number, attached my timing chip, laid out my clothes and set the coffee maker to start brewing at 5:50. I rolled out of the house about 7:15 and arrived in the parking lot around 7:30. I mustered the will to get out of the car and into the cold wander into the hall, chat with Conan and eventually back out for a lack luster warmup only to find that my Garmin would not turn on even though I took it off the charger right before I left the house. Oh well, I have RunKeeper which works well enough if my phone can get GPS signals.
At almost exactly not quite 8:30 the race started after an abysmally down tempo rendition of the National Anthem. In the first half mile I felt horrible and thought to myself that if I hadn't crossed the starting line I could just quit. It's one thing to not start but another thing entirely to DNF and I wasn't going to start doing that now. At mile 1 I got the first and only split until after the turn around. 00:11:49 eh, I thought so much for a PR. Got to the first water at about 1.25mi skipped it but took a drink from the pack and a walk to adjust the shock cord on the Nathan, it was managing to brush me right on the funny bone every so often.
Around mile 3 I loosened up and started enjoying the race, around 4.5 the leaders on the road started passing on the return leg. Then I had to stop and urinate the second of three times during the race, I guess that is a good sign for getting re-hydrated after Saturday but it seemed ridiculous. I started passing some people who had gone by in the first three miles but still took it easy with no real idea of pace or HR. A few times I noticed that my breathing was a bit labored and backed off to easy again reducing pace on inclines and just going with the flow.
At mile 7 the second split on the course I got ~1:11:30 and realized that even with the horrible beginning, a bit of walking and running easy I was close enough that the ~10:14 I would need to make a PR was in reach if I kept it up and maybe pushed a little on the down hills (forgetting that the return really seems like it is mostly long slow climbs). I rolled on with renewed enthusiasm. From 7 - 12.1 my split was ~2:01:?? and I thought, holy crap I just flew through those miles like nothing, even with another pit stop all I needed was nice fairly easy 10:00/mi to be sure of a good PR. A short sprint up the last little hill and across the line left me with a new Half Marathon PR of 2:10:37 down from 2:14:17 in 2009.
Equipment thoughts
The Good:
The only OK:
Food I packed way too much food, baking meat into bread seemed like such a good idea. The trial run went well but on the trail the amount consumed was less than expected and the results turned out dry. ~ 3,000 Cal (~1lb) of trail mix ... this seemed reasonable at the time but I never went into the bulk storage bag consuming only the 4 servings (640 cal , ~.25 lbs) in the ready access bag on my belt over 1.5 days. In retrospect this alone would have been good for ~1 day eating almost nothing else. ~1,250 Cal (~1lb) dehydrated fruit, see above. I did consume the two servings in the bag on my belt (~220 cal) ~9,700 Cal (~3.5 lbs) of meat roll (2 lbs flour, .5lb meat .5lb cheese, 0.11lb olive oil, water) without double checking my math (which I clearly didn't do before hand for weight or calorie density. Consumed ~3200 cal) ~1,100 Cal (~.6lb + ~1.5lb water) pre-mixed Hammer Perpetuem (Sitting in the fridge from last week, needed to be consumed) ~1560 Cal (~1lb) Perpetuem powder as emergency just add water food ~340 Cal (100g) Recoverite powder. Consumed ~170 Cal at end of day 1. Additionally, we had planned dinner in Sharpsburg Day 1, Lunch outside Boonsboro Day 2, Dinner at Gathland Day 2, Brunch Day 3 why did I take none of this into account when planning food? I have no idea. ~ 4.75/6.75 lbs of food that I did not consume. Had I not abandoned the hike I would have needed food for the rest of a day of hiking and breakfast the next day (at most one more day of food), fail. 2.5 miles before lunch on day 2 we stopped at an Ice Cream Parlor where I got a Chocolate Malt! Then at the Old South Mountain Inn a burger with great fries.
In a recent NY Times article on the R data analysis language Anne H. Milley implied that her personal happiness stems from quality of jet engines that can only be achieved through the use of commercial software.
If I were in Ms. Milley's position I too would be happy if people were paying to use my product. What does not particularly matter to me is the cost of software which is used to design those engines. What I truly care about is the quality of the engineering, construction and validation procedures. In any case as a passenger I am unsure how I can determine if the equipment I am flying on was designed using free software or not. I will have to settle for being happy if my flight is on time, security lines are short and I get home to see my wife.
“I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”
[From R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts - NYTimes.com]
Given the implication that happiness, value and quality are only available for products designed using commercial software; I find myself retroactively saddened by all of the things that I have seen which were designed before commercial software packages were available. I would like to thank Ms. Milley for sucking the joy out of my life.
