Sunday, August 22, 2010

Good run and recapping the week

Great run today, but more about that in a minute...

Continuing with last week's runs:

Thursday: (8.85 1:13 8:19/mi avg) I couldn't get out to run at lunch so I ran after work. I ran the standard loop out to the Bridle Trails and back. I took a pretty easy pace to save my legs for speed work on Friday. Nothing too special about the run.

Friday: first run: (6.0 0:44 7:20/mi avg) I went to the gym for mile repeats on the treadmill. I did a short warm-up and then ran 4 x 1mi @ 6:00 pace. The pace was pretty hard for me and worked up a good sweat with the lack of air rushing past my head as I spun the hamster wheel. I was walking for a quarter mile between the repeats to recover. I just didn't have the energy to jog between them this time. I'm torn on what pace to run mile repeats at. 6 min/mi would be great for a 10K pace but totally unrealistic for a marathon pace. I'd be better off running at 7 min/mi for marathon training. I want to concentrate on 50K and longer events but still want to retain some speed. I guess it comes down to thinking about what I'm training for at the time and my ego.

Friday: second run: (9.9 1:24 8:32/mi avg) I had the chance to run more on Friday so I did. I ran a "recovery" 10 mile run out past Grass Lawn park and then around to the Bridle Trails for a loop and then back to the gym. It wasn't much for recovery but was mostly just to pad up my weekly miles and get a weekly number in the range of 50 miles. I'm hoping that running 50 mile weeks consistently will help me better handle longer races. The run itself felt pretty good. I ate enough and even carried a gel flask with 3 shots of Hammer Gel in it. (Espresso flavor, my current favorite) to see how uncomfortable it was (a little).

Sunday: (15.0 in 1:53 7:32/mi) I'm between long run weekends so I had 15 on the schedule. Having taking Saturday off from running I planned to see if I could complete the miles in under 2 hours. I ran an out and back to Sehmel rd so that I could even go for a negative split if the legs felt good. I started out with a little pain on the bottom of my left foot but that went away after maybe 2 miles. My legs felt really good today. I easily kept all of my mile splits under an 8:00/mi pace except for the second one which went up the Tunnel Trail. My back and shoulders felt relaxed and never bothered me. I had no trouble pushing myself to keep the pace going up the hills.

I tried to keep on top of my nutrition today as well. I carried a flask of gel again and put 100 Kcal of Carbopro in my bottle along with a Nuun tablet for flavor. I carried a bag of 100 Kcal of Carbopro and a Nuun tablet to refill later when I got to the store for more water. I at about 600 calories on the run which is a pretty good ratio for my weight. I'm reading about Nutrition and run across articles stating that most people can process at most 240 Kcal per hour during continuous exercise. I know that it's much easier to process liquid calories than calories from solid food. Thus my plan to get calories from either liquid or gel sources today. My stomach doesn't work as hard and doesn't have to divert energy away from running / sweating to digest those solids. I burned about 1250 Kcal / hour but only replaced 300 of them. The "unlimited reserve" of calories from Glycogen and fat stores worked like a charm. So did the large portion of homemade Strawberry Shortcake that I had after dinner.

Weekly miles: 50.25
Monthly miles: 147.7 with 9 days to go.

If I can average 6 miles a day I'll break 200 for the first month ever. Bring it on!

2 comments:

Holly said...

With all this running and only replacing 300 of the 1260 calories you burn for each hour you run, are you dropping weight? You'd have to eat a LOT of strawberry shortcake to make up the difference for all the running you do.

nrmrvrk said...

I'm dropping a little here and there but between the shortcake and DQ visits it's going pretty slowly.