Ilanarama!

In just one week - on Sunday, January 15th - I'll be running the Houston Marathon. (Gulp.) Actually, I am quite excited about this, because unless I get injured or sick in the next week (KNOCK ON WOOD LIKE WHOA) I will be better-prepared for this one than for any previous marathon I've run. More miles, better fitness, a solid 10K six weeks prior. (BTW, I have added links to two race photos to my Winter Sun 10K race report - or you can use this Flickr Guest Pass to see them, along with the photo from The Other Half I'd posted before.) Fired up and ready to go!

My bib number is #3060. I believe you can track me, or at least check my results afterward, at http://alerts.houstonmarathon.com/. There is also a team competition, which is scored as (age group placement) / (number of people in age group) * 1000 for each person (so for example, if I come in at #10 in my AG out of 300 people, which incidentally is about how I expect to finish, my score would be 33), and the lowest three scores on each team of up to 6 people are added for the team score. I'm on a team called The Competitive Jerks, but my score is unlikely to count as everyone else on my team is a lot faster than I am (likely to get single digit scores). That's okay by me, though - it means the pressure is off!

Well, sort of. Because of course I have goals, and I am going to do my best to meet them. These are:

I think these are realistic goals. My 10K PR points to something between 3:25 and 3:35, depending on what kind of assumptions one makes (it was downhill, but at altitude while the marathon is at sea level, my endurance tends to be pretty good, but I have only been running more than 50mpw for a short time, etc). I spent a week around New Year's in Bakersfield, CA, which is at 400ft, as Britt's working on a solar installation project there, and I did a test "marathon pace" run, 2 easy miles followed by 10 at MP (I was striving for between 7:50 and 8:00) - my average pace was 7:55.5 and my heart rate was perfectly flat at 76%HRR, or the low end of marathon pace HR. This, for those of you less geeky than I am, is a very good sign. Of course, the downside is that I was running in this:



Can you see the mountains in the distance? I didn't know they were there until we drove over them the next day.  But Bakersfield has the worst air quality in the US - just this morning our local paper ran an (AP) article about the horrible air quality there, with the helpful information that this year is the worst in over a decade, and that pollution has exceeded federal health standards nearly every day - and I was seriously wondering how much damage I was doing to my lungs.

Speaking of Bakersfield, ( some nattering about weight... )

Incidentally, that article about elite marathoners (here is the link outside the cut for those who don't want to read about weight issues) also listed the following breakdown of their mileage:  70% is slower than marathon pace, 10% marathon pace, 10% tempo (between half marathon and 10K pace), 6% 10K pace, and 4% 5K pace.  I looked at my own mileage and did the math:  even if I start counting in early October, when I started including some faster running, I have run 89% of my miles slower than MP (I used 8:10 for this, even though I'm hoping to actually run 7:55-8:00 pace), 5% at MP (7:50-8:10), 4% tempo (7:25-7:49) and a grand total of 2% faster than 7:25 pace.  

Counting everything since I started running again in August (and adding the miles I'm expecting to run this week before the marathon) I will have run around 828 miles this training cycle.  Yowza!  Of course compared to the elites this is peanuts, but it's been a good cycle for me.  The past eight weeks have been: 56, 61, 47, 51, 66, 66, 52, 54, and next week will be around 20.  (The taper looks odd because I ran last week's 16-mile long run on Monday; if I swap Sunday and Monday the last weeks are 66 and 42.)

Today I ran my last long run before the marathon, which was not long at all, only 12 miles - and I went up and over the mesa, which is about a 600ft climb/descent, which is probably more than twice what I'll have in all 26.2 next week.  Felt good, felt fast.  Now it's time to taper hard and rest up, and get ready to run a marathon.

Of running, that is. Although the week's awesomeness was enhanced by Britt arriving on Thursday; he's been out of town on a work thing for the last two weeks, and I have missed him. (And not just because having him gone means I have to kill ALL the spiders and wash ALL the dishes.) We spent the afternoon cutting firewood on his folks' ranch, then joined them for a lovely Thanksgiving dinner.

But I want to talk about running. ( The story so far: injury, recovery, another injury scare, and getting back on my feet. )

( So, my awesome week. )

Next Saturday is the Winter Sun 10K. It amazed me last year how fast I was able to run it; the combination of the downhill course and the lower elevation meant that I could sustain paces I just can't run in training here. So I'm still a little dubious that I can run it EVEN FASTER. But...maybe I can. I'm feeling good, I'm feeling fast, I'm feeling strong. And I could really use even a measly PR, since so far this year I am 0 for 4 in my PR goals. So, I'm going to give it a really good try. And we'll see what happens.

Gorgeous, gorgeous day (my apologies to folks in the Northeast shoveling out and cleaning up), so I decided to take the camera along on a trail run. Wanna come along?

I started up the trail behind my house which joins with the Nature Trail; I went up one switchback and then took this picture:



( More... )

[pre-race report]

Cliff notes version: 1:43:54, my worst time on this course and only 23 seconds faster than my spring 2009 half, my first race after getting serious about running, but I'm happy with it as a comeback considering I only started running again after my stress fracture ten weeks ago. (Also, it barely qualifies me for the NY Marathon for the last year before they tighten their standards considerably. I might have to run it next year.) 6th in my AG (out of 123), 30th woman out of 1144, 127th human being out of 1733.

( The play-by-play )

This was my third Other Half, my sixth race put on by the Moab Half Marathon organization, and the first in which I did not take home a trophy or medal[*]. And I'm okay with that. Comparing my run this year with the previous two years, I don't see anything I could have done differently. I paced reasonably. I worked at an appropriate effort level. I raced with what I had on the day, and that is all I could do.

( The post-game analysis )

So I know that this year's racing season is a work in progress, and it's barely begun. The Winter Sun 10K is in seven weeks. We'll see what happens.

[*] Well, actually, I did get a medal, as The Other Half gives finisher's medals to everyone who runs. This year's medal is not only attractive but useful, as it's a combination race medal/bottle opener! (Photo courtesy of my friend Paul, paulbe.)



And that reminds me that in fact I DID get a PR this year. One reason I love this race is because the Moab Brewery supplies free beer (in souvenir pint glasses) at the end. I learned last year that all Utah beer is 3.2 (that is, relatively weak) due to Utah's bizarre alcohol regulations. But I don't mind, because that means I can drink a whole lot! I had three pints direct from the tap, plus two other people decided they didn't want to drink and I got half of each of their beers, for a total of four. That is a post-race Beer PR! (And I still felt entirely sober driving home.)

From my legs, that is. Tomorrow morning I'm driving to Moab, Utah, and on Sunday morning I'll be lining up at the start of my first race since...the last time I was in Moab, in March. Yikes.

I almost didn't sign up for The Other Half this year, as you, O Constant Reader, know. But in the last few weeks I have gone from "just finish it, and enjoy it" to "okay, maybe I can run it at MP as a workout" to "RACE THAT PUPPY!!!1!one!" I mean, I know I'm not going to PR; I'm definitely not in PR shape. But I am going to run it as fast as I can.

The past three weeks I have averaged 41mpw, and I'll match that this week after the half. My easy pace has floated down to the 9 minute range, and I even ran a "hard end of easy" run at 8:42, which is the sort of run I was doing just before I was injured. I have run a tiny amount of speedwork - a threshold run of 2x1.5 miles at 8 minute pace (which gratifyingly did not hit my LT heartrate, so I am pretty sure I can run faster than that for a half) and 6x half miles with 2 minute jog recoveries, which averaged 7:25 pace. Now, last spring before I was injured I did a similar workout in 7 minute pace, so clearly I'm not in that kind of shape yet, but it's really encouraging to see that I seem to be getting back more quickly than I had hoped.

It's really hard to talk about goals for this one, though. Race-day magic nearly always surprises me, with paces better than I ever run in training; I guess I need the adrenaline of actually being in a race to run my best. Moab's lower, so I get the altitude advantage, but on the other hand this is a rather hilly race. I know I said I was looking for 1:52-1:58, but I think I can do better. So I'm going to say: stretch goal is sub-1:41:44 (my slowest time on this course, from 2009), A goal is sub-1:44:18 (my slowest half since getting serious about running), B goal is sub-1:46, C goal is sub-1:50. And of course, overriding goal is don't hurt myself.

143 miles run in September! Hello, triple digits! It's been so long since I've seen you!

I know that to some of you that sounds impossibly huge, and to others it sounds ludicrously small. I usually strive to run more than 200 miles/month, so to me, it feels inadequate, especially since I'm hoping for a marathon PR in January. But I'm on my way! Last month I ran just over 52 miles. The month before, 8.5, in combination with a lot of walking. (I'm not counting pool running.) So things are looking up!

My tracking program also tracks my other activities, like walking, mountain biking and pool running. (I don't track rafting, skiing, or hiking/backpacking, though.) Interestingly, when I add them all together by time (since pool running and elliptical don't have distances associated with them, I can see that even though I spent a lot of time being active over the months of rehabilitation, my total active time is still a lot higher when I can actually run. I think that's because I like going out on long runs, and hate spending long periods of time in the gym.

I've got just under 31 hours of "workout time" this month - so basically, I spent on average just over an hour every day doing some sort of exercise. Hooray!

Ah, Labor Day. The day on which we celebrate not laboring, by doing stuff like this:



We wangled an invite on a Rio Chama trip for Labor Day weekend; the plan was to meet on Saturday, rig our boats, and do the car shuttle, then put in early Sunday which was the first day that no permit is required for the 31-mile section below El Vado dam. As this is a scenic and not too difficult stretch, it's quite popular, and we anticipated a lot of river traffic. Our group comprised eight people on six mostly small boats: Britt and I on our cataraftlets, three duckies (inflatable kayaks), and one large cataraft. We set up all but the big raft on the bank the afternoon before, so in the morning we were more or less ready to go.

( Read more (and see more pictures)... )

This is the town of Papallacta, on the east side of the Andes, from the road to the hot springs. Isn't it pretty?



( Saturday, July 30 (Papallacta): in which we freeze our butts off on the equator )

( Sunday, July 31 (Papallacta to Quito): in which we take four paragraphs to do nothing )

( Monday, August 1 (Quito to Roatan): in which we go the wrong way )

Just the photos, plus a couple more, at Flickr

Arrived back home just before midnight Sunday after two weeks in Ecuador and Roatan. High points were hiking, rafting, and eating extremely delicious trout, low point was getting dosed with neurotoxins from a Portuguese Man-o-war while snorkeling. (Okay, literally the high point was the summit of Rucu Pichincha at 15,413 feet, low point was ~70 ft below sea level while scuba diving.) Weird point was losing my karaoke virginity with (*covers face in shame*) "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in a bar in Tena. Longest time to travel shortest distance was TWO AND A HALF FRAKKIN' HOURS in the immigration line in the Quito airport.

I promise a full and lavish trip report soon (for some value of "soon"). Pictures, too.