Sandwiching

Training continues to be good, my paces are still dropping, the achilles seems to improve and I'm feeling great. It's probably time something would knock me back a rung or two, but until then I'll continue to feel great.

Monday was a fairly unremarkable 11 mile run. Last week this was an extremely slow run, I still had Sunday's pace effort in the legs and needed a solid recovery effort. In comparison, yesterday was great, I managed some decent pace without straining and it still felt like a recovery run. The weather has improved by several magnitudes, there is no more rain and the wind is definitely manageable. The sky is clear, but that has also brought a drop in temperature, though compared to anything they have to put up in Canada, it's nothing, The temperatures in the morning are just below freezing, nothing I can't handle.

Actually, those temperatures did cause a problem today. There are several sections of the Caragh Lake road that are usually covered by a small trickle of water. Normally you hardly notice it, but today they were frozen solid, and the ice was extremely slippery (as well as hard to see). Twice I started slipping and sliding and very nearly fell, then I wised up a bit and brought the tempo down a notch whenever I encountered one of these patches. On a different day I probably would have been more careful to start with, but on my tempo days I usually try to focus on my pace and forget everything else.

I will make one change to my training starting this week. As Mike pointed out several weeks ago, ultra training usually involves running two long runs back-to-back, something apparently called a sandwich. Up to now I have been doing standard marathon training, but from this week I'll switch Wednesday and Thursday around, which will mean two 60-minute runs on Tuesday and Wednesday, followed by two long runs Thursday and Friday. As a side effect this will cut down the number of tempo efforts from three to two, because Wednesday's effort will be slow. I don't think it would be too clever to run two back-to-back tempo runs immediately followed by two back-to-back long runs. This week I'll keep my mileage at the same level as in the standard training plan, meaning 15 miles on Thursday and 20 miles on Friday, but I hope to gradually increase Thursday's mileage until I end up with two 20 milers back-to-back. I will see how that goes. I had initially planned on doing that sandwich last week, but decided to wait one more week because I wanted to get a solid 22-miler under my belt first. I expect Friday's long run to be tough, but that's the whole point of it, isn't it?

On a completely different note, Andrew had mentioned something he called parrot predictor a few weeks back. It's something I've heard several times before. Some people say your true marathon time is the fastest 26.2 miles you run in your normal training week. For a lot of runners this is an amazingly accurate predictor. Well, I calculated my times based on my recent training; two weeks ago the predictor came up with 3:08:55, and last week that dropped down to 3:05:05. Wow. Unfortunately, I don't think I would be able to run a 3:05 marathon at the moment. Why? Because I haven't done any long MP pace runs, and I think those are vital to develop your stamina to the level required to sustain your pace for the whole distance. Of course I'm not even training for a marathon at the moment, so it's a rather pointless exercise. I still like those figures though.

For the first time this winter the weather forecast is benign. The next few days are all supposed to be dry, if a bit cold (that's relatively speaking. Don't laugh there in Maine, Canada, Minnesota, North Dakota, ... and even Tucson). I might even have a few moonlit runs under the stars. That would be really nice.

22 Jan: 11 miles, 1:31, 8:16 pace, avg. HR 144
23 Jan: 8.5 miles, 59:11, 6:57 pace, avg. HR 157