Random Banter

 Another week in the books! I want to try and make this a bit more interesting, not that anyone reads this, but I have yet to figure that out! So once again I'll go day by day...or something like that.  Monday/Friday - These are weightlifting days and this new training is taxing me a bit more than the last one was. So it's a good thing.  I wasn't as sore on the day after, like last week, but they were still a bit taxing. Hopefully I'm getting stronger and it's helping my running.  So far I have not had lower right back issues on the long run like I have had in the past.   Tuesday was the typical easy run.  Like last week I ventured outside. And like last week it was freaking cold!  I felt like I was getting ready to go skiing with the amount of clothes I was putting on.  OMG! Thursday is workout day.  I did a repeat of last weeks workout but hopefully dialed it in a bit more.  I did one long threshold run for 22 minutes. The goal wa...

  I'm going to try and find some way to make this more interesting but for now you are just going to get a recap of my week in workouts/running!   Monday - This is a weight lifting day.  I don't enjoy weight lifting as much as I used to (I used to power lift back in the day) but I know it's important for my thyroid condition so I do it.  Possibly dropping one day for running more in the summer but we shall see.  But this was a new   routine and it left me a bit sore but nothing to bad.  Tuesday - First run outside! It was dark and cold and a little bit windy. But I got it in.  I'm still basing my runs, for better or worse, off of heart rate.  This one was an easy run and the heart rate was a bit higher than on the treadmill but not by the much. Which was surprising.  I think the colder weather might have had something to do with that. We'll see how this weeks outdoor run goes.  It was a whopping 2.4 miles outside! Thursday - Run wor...

 I'm back! Well I've been back but I've not been doing any writing.  This is usually how things go for me with writing.  I'll really be on it and then nothing...for months...even a year plus in this case.  And honestly there's no excuse for it! So my last post was from the middle of October 2024.  After I did my sub 2 hour half marathon. I'll try and catch you up.    At the end of 2024 I did a little bit of running trying to keep up with my fitness from the half marathon but I had lost the desire.  I still did a few bits of running here and there but just was not into it as much.  It could have been because I was no longer being coached or it might have been that my thyroid was super stressed at this point.  I'm not sure but I was definitely not running as much as I had been previously.  Enter 2025.   The first few months were a continuation of the last part of 2024 and then April came.  It was at this point that my b...

  Monday - Easy run on the treadmill.  Wanted to do strides at the end but my hip was bugging me so I just did 1 and shut it down.  Tuesday - Nothing.  Was dead tired on Monday night so skipped Tuesday.  Wednesday - Workout.  Wasn't sure if the hip would hold up but it did.  Not really sure why but it felt fine.  Ended up doing 1 minute fast, 1 minute recover 6 times.  Paces were from 8:40 to 7:46.  They felt appropriate.  I didn't really look at my watch and just did them as I thought a 5K - 10K would feel! Thursday - Uphill treadmill walking for 20 minutes and some various weights/bodyweight stuff for another 20 minutes.   Friday - Easy run on the treadmill with some strides.  Saturday - Long run.  76 minutes total with some steady time at the end to finish.   I'm a bit late posting this so I know some things that I wouldn't have normally posted if I'd posted this when I wanted to! Right now it doe...

 It's been awhile since I've posted here, for just myself, but I thought I'd go ahead and get this down as it will help with my thought process as I move through this off season.   But first lets look back on this season.  This was probably our most successful season.  The biggest takeaway was the half marathon PR of 1:59.04 in late September.  I'd like to say that I knocked off some stuff in regards to the 5K distance but it just didn't happen (only 1 5K race!).  I'm fairly certain that it would go down right now, without a lot of specific training, but we will leave it as it is.  I also set a new PR in the 8 mile Antelope Trail race distance.  Just by a few seconds but a PR is a PR and I'll take it. For whatever reason that course always gets me! And now we begin the off season.  No races have been thought about or planned so I'm considering this the start of my off season and my big goal for this next year is to just get faster. And t...

 The last race I did was a half marathon at the end of March and for my speed it was more of a shuffle than anything. This was my first race since then and with my coach.   The couple of weeks prior to this race we had backed off of the long runs and did some specific running focused on the 5K speed.  I had dreams of setting a new 5K PR at this elevation (I set a 5K PR at a much lower elevation that I hope to break some day!).  In order to set a 5K PR I needed to average a mile pace of something like 8:15 or less.  I was optimistic to start with but after a workout or two of trying to hold that pace I knew it wasn't in the books.  So I re-adjusted and just wanted to beat my time from the previous year (27:10).   It was kind of odd because the race was on Thursday rather than a Saturday when most races are held. But it is what it is.  The weather turned out to be pretty good because we had been having some high temperature's leading into ...

 As is usual I'm really only writing this for myself but I do enjoy writing, it provides and outlet, so I'm gonna put down a few thoughts.  My half marathon on March 24th went better than expected, finish time of 2:26:50, which is better than the previous one I had done.  Despite doing the majority of that training on the treadmill I'm pretty happy with that.  I do plan on getting another one one the list, for the fall, and will hopefully getting close to 2 hours.  I'd love to go sub 2 but we will see.  Along those lines I have hired a coach to see if they can help me go to the next level.  For the past few years, in my mind, I have been stuck at this level.  Just never able to take the next step to more volume and getting faster.  This coaches philosophy is a lot of very low intensity training with one really hard day thrown in.  So I'm running slower than I was previously most of the time but there is one really hard day...or we will g...

 It's been awhile but I wanted to get this out more for myself than anything.  This Sunday the 24th is my half marathon.  Starting off the year with this race.  I'm not considering it an A race by any stretch of the imagination.  It was more of a race that I was using to keep active through the winter.   On reflection I'm not sure it was the best idea.  My time might have been better spent doing some training and maybe pushing things a little more.  However I did run the longest I've run in a couple of years which I think is needed.  Having said that I didn't do anything that got me close to a half marathon distance. So Sunday will be interesting to see how it goes.   My goal is to try and run somewhere around 12:30 to 12 minute miles.  The one thing I have going for me is that this race is at a slightly lower elevation but not much. I'm fairly confident in this because on my last long run outside I was just just running f...

 Today was the long run.  I wasn't sure what to expect on this but I was going to concentrate on keeping my heart rate low. And overall I think I did a pretty good job.  My intention was to run for 65 minutes but as I hit 65 minutes I was still feeling good and was still a bit away from home. So I ran for a few more minutes and went slightly over 70 minutes.  Which I'm really happy with.  At 55 minutes I picked it up a bit.  While I'm trying this slow running I think having some speed in there is important.  Lets call it a fast finish.  So I ran 10 minutes at a faster pace and then had 5 minutes cool down. Overall a great feeling and I'm excited to run again.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do this next week. Maybe some strides on Wednesday but we will see.  I have some vacation time so I might be able to do a bit more! Here's a screenshot of my long run. As you can see not super long and not a lot of power but I'm not worrying about tha...

 It's been a few days...a little over a month! I'd like to say that I've been doing something great but that's not the case. Here's what I think I've done in that time period.  I did the 5 days a week of running and found after a few weeks I just didn't have the desire to run anymore. So I cut it back to 4 days a week, which is what I've mostly been doing, and it's been good but I also feel like I haven't been running enough...LOL!   Last week I attempted to start up a Stryd half marathon training plan but also stopped that.  I did the first two days came down with something, not to bad thankfully, and just had no desire to continue it. Based on these two things I think it shouldn't surprise you that I find it really hard to run or find motivation this time of year.  So for now I'm just running.  More focusing on building that base...the aerobic base that is.  I still have plans to do the half marathon in late March, haven't signed up...

Today was the day I had been thinking about for the past 5 weeks or so.  It was race day! My last race, to recap, was the trail race at the end of August.  It went well but I came out of that race kind of down due to expectations being set to high and it messed with my head a bit.  I did get over and it's helped me reframe how I think about racing. Racing shouldn't be worrying about what place you will get or even what time you should get (mainly for trails I've discovered) but should be about you versus the course. So that's how I went into this race.   As I mentioned in my post last week my critical power did go down but I thought that was a mistake.  However I thought about it all week and thought maybe it was correct.  On Monday I did a work out of 6 times 2 minutes with 1 minute recovery which was about half of what I had done the previous Monday and I have to say it felt relatively easy.  So heading into the race I told myself that I was goi...

 I logged into the Stryd Powercenter yesterday after my long run to update my run with my thoughts and I noticed that my critical power, CP, had dropped.  It went from 322 to 312 (Stryd has a few bugs in their little graphs...they say it went from 325 to 312 but it was really 322!).  Which caused me to pause for a minute.  I should have known with running more on the treadmill and not doing any long hard runs that it would drop.  But after pausing for a moment I got it back together and told myself that I'd run what I had planned on running this next Saturday.   The race plan.  The Stryd race calculator says that I should race a 5K at about 319 watts and that will put me somewhere in at 27:37 which will not be lower than my summer 5K.  This might be subject to change but I think what I'll do it set my watch to run between 320 and 340 (Coros watches only do 10 watt increments).  My runs in the 330 area have felt really good.  I don't...

 I haven't posted here for a few weeks due to real life!  But I've been running and getting ready for this upcoming race in 2 weeks time.   Things have been going well...until recently.  I've been running 5 days a week and getting a couple of workouts in each week.  One workout is hard and the other isn't as hard.  However the last two times that I've run I haven't been feeling it.  Just felt kinda blah.  I got the runs done but on today's long run I cut it short by about 4 minutes and did not do any faster paced work which I've been doing on most of my long runs as of late.  I have a few theories as to why this might be the case.  Since I've started running 5 days a week my body hasn't caught up until now.  I've actually been gaining weight the last couple of weeks so I wonder if my body is under a lot more stress with this additional day or running.  So I've backed off trying to lose weight and am just going to try and m...

 I didn't expect to race again this year but there was a race that came up for early November so I went for it.  In all honestly I needed this.  It's a very long stretch from late August until sometime in the next year to not have something specific to train for. So this race was put on the schedule.  It's just a 5K race but it's reinvigorated me to get training for something specific.  Here's my plan.  This next week I'm just going to run like I have been running. So that means on Monday it will just be a very short run (25 minutes most likely) on the treadmill. Tuesday will be an outdoor workout of some sort.  I'm not sure what that will be but it will done at lunch time during work...if the weather permits.  I will run either on Wednesday or Thursday just depending on how I feel.  It will be another session like Monday. Friday will be the same.  On Saturday where I usually have a long run I will do a critical power (CP) test to see wh...

If you read my post from last week you know that I was not feeling my best towards the end of the week. That continued at the start of this week and I decided to error on the side of caution and not do any running until Thursday.  So I only ran on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.   Thursday and Friday were very easy running.  Just 25 easy minutes on the treadmill.  I should also mention that I stopped following the training I was following from Stryd.  Being sick and this upcoming weeks possible disruptions I decided it just wasn't the best time to follow it.  I probably won't be following a program until the middle of October.   Saturday's run was a long run of an hour.  I had planned on doing closer to 70 minutes but my brand new treadmill started making a knocking sound when I went above 6 MPH and at a incline of 2.  So I cut it off at an hour and then spent the next hour or so seeing if I could figure out why it was knocking....

 So I only got in 4 runs this week. It should have been 5.  And I started to get down on myself for that.  However I had to keep reminding myself that I am not a professional runner and life gets in the way.  So let me explain.  My wife hadn't been feeling well on Wednesday and on Thursday, after a rough day, she decided to take a COVID test. Well it was positive.  All week long we had been going to bed early but I didn't think a whole lot about it because we had been up earlier than normally (for my wife's work!).  But when she tested positive for COVID things kind of fell into place. Even though Friday was a super easy day (just 20 minutes running with a couple of 10 second speed ups) I decided to call it and not run.  Saturday morning I also ended up calling my long run, and I really wanted to do it.  However by the evening I was feeling a bit better.  So this morning I did get on the new treadmill and have myself an easy 25 minute ru...

 I've done the easy running before and it feels great for a few weeks but then there is no progress!  You have to have some sort of speed in there.  Just running slow and easy does not make you faster no matter what people say.  I do believe that 80%+ of your time/miles should be slow and easy but if you want to get faster, and who doesn't, you need to have that 20% where you are throwing in some extra stuff. So after 2 weeks of easy running, or doing nothing for the first week, I'm going to be starting a program tomorrow to maintain what I have.  I'll run that for about 10 weeks and see where were are at.   This last week was the first time I've ran 5 days in a week.  Everything went fine.  There were a couple of times where I wondered about getting up so early but I did manage to get it done.  My right calf, at times, when I run gives me a bit of issues but I can't put my finger on it. So for now I'm using the massage gun on it and hop...

 I took this week off from doing mostly anything.  I did ride a stationary bike one morning and I did run on Friday morning because I woke up early but otherwise it was nothing.  Today, a week after my race, I did go out and do some easy running.  I suppose you might call it shuffling!  I think for the next 6 weeks or so 90%+ of my running will be easy as I work towards running 5 days a week.  One day I intend on doing some more speed work but since I don't have anything on my schedule I don't need to do anything serious.  If I get to bored I'll add in a second day.  One day will be short harder stuff and the 2nd day will be more tempo type of work. But for now I just want to be consistent with running 5 days a week! I don't know why but running 5 days a week just seems horrible but I also know if I want to run some of my longer races I need to start getting faster and running for longer.  So 5 days a week it is.  But that's it.  I ...

 Maybe at some point someone will read this but in the mean time this is here for me to come back to.  Yesterday I did my A goal race.  It was a new personal best on that course which I'm so thankful for.  But I have a few things to say that I'll hopefully remember the next time that I run this course! What I'm going to say here is going to come across as negative, I believe, but I mean it more as a way to learn and move forward.   Going into the race I wasn't sure if I had trained enough.  I had been training but for some reason it just didn't feel like enough. Despite this feeling we still bettered our personal best by a couple of minutes.  And that's what we need to focus on.  Not the other metrics that told us we would have a better time. Better to think of, on trail races, that it's a time trail against the clock and not where you are going to place among other people. That's probably my best take away.  The 10 days leading into thi...

 Another week in the books and another critical power test done! This was the 4th week of training and thus had one less day of training.  I didn't run on Monday but ran Wednesday and Friday.  Wednesday was a 35 minute easy run and Friday was also 35 minutes easy but with a couple of strides thrown in.  Both of the runs felt good and are probably what was needed.  Once again I've hit the dog days of summer or of training or something.  I just wasn't feeling the training this last week and the idea of getting up early to go running is just getting to me.  But I'm pushing through for the next couple of weeks and then will have some vacation time where I'll be able to run in a new location and at different times.   I wasn't sure what to expect coming into this critical power test.  I was nervous about doing it because it was in the heat or more in the heat than my past CP tests.  I almost tossed in the towel to put it off a week but I ...