It’s been two weeks since I wrote anything and three weeks since I posted my pace charts. I’m getting lazier by the week when it comes to writing a training log entry. I’m working on something to simplify my workload, but it’s rather foreign to me, so there’s a steep learning curve.

Anyways, the weeks have been getting hotter by the day. I’ve been comparing the tempuratures registered by my car’s thermometer when I get in after riding in the vanpool and it went from the low 90’s to the upper 90’s, and now it’s been breaking over 100oF everyday. The heat is getting oppressive. After about a mile, every step is sweat dripping agony. I worked hard to maintain my pace under ever increasing distances but it’s growing harder and harder to even move.

I read and interesting article on NY Times about how people in the north have been dealing with the heat and it’s rather comical. Of particular note is the following quote:

On June 7, over 4,000 women ran the New York Mini 10-K race in Central Park. When the race began at 9 a.m., it was 71 degrees and the humidity was 78 percent. The winning time, 32 minutes 43 seconds, by Hilda Kibet, was the slowest in a decade.

“From the beginning, my legs were not really moving,” Ms. Kibet told The New York Times.

That same day in similar weather and humidity, in Cambridge, Md., nearly 1,400 athletes raced in the Eagle Man Half Ironman — a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike ride, and a 13.1-mile run. Among them was Amy Roth, 32, the director of corporate partnerships at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan. She had trained hard, but the run, in particular, was difficult in the intense heat.

“I felt like I was dragging along but I couldn’t move any faster,” Ms. Roth said.

Still, she ran at a mile pace of 8:07.

“There were very fast people, very good athletes, who were walking, who just couldn’t do it,” she said.

Afterward, some posted comments, agonizing over their sluggish times, on Slowtwitch.com. “You could see the neuroses: ‘Oh, my God, am I getting slower? What does this mean?’ ” Ms. Roth said.

The next day, 190 professional cyclists started the Philadelphia International Championship, a 156-mile race. It was 79 degrees at 9 a.m. start, and 94 degrees when the last cyclist finished in mid-afternoon. About half of the competitors dropped out. The winning time, 6:14:47, by Matti Breschel of Team CSC, based in the Netherlands, was nearly a half hour slower than last year’s time, when it was cooler and drier.

I can’t help but say these people are a) ill-prepared for a possible weather scenario, in the summer, and b) are just whining and looking for an excuse. Don’t get me wrong, when your body runs hotter than you’re used to, it can be grueling to do much of anything, much less run a race. This seems to be an egregious case, especially the 10K-ers, of pinning the blame on heat and not poor training.

I also fiddled with the Garmin on 30 June 2008 by accidentally deleting a lap while a workout was in progress. This results in the workout being stopped. Doing this twice means I ended up with three GPX files that needed merging. GPSBabel and was more than happy to solve this problem for me (still had to remove the track divisions so they were all part of one track point collection).

Anyways, I ran the annual Too Hot Too Handle 5K again this year. It’s the third time so far with my previous times being 31:06 and 27:51. This year I obviously had a late start in preparation, what with the qualification exam and all. I have been working real hard to not run and hide from the heat and learn to thrive in it; I was sure I’d be ready this year.

Sunshine and I headed out a little early so she could get some coffee while I picked up some batteries for the camera. About half-way to the venue, I realized I had left my bib on the dining table and we didn’t have enough time to turn around and pick it up. I figured I couldn’t possibly be the first person to forget a bib, so we forged ahead. I was right; they had a form to fill out. It actually worked out for the best because I was able to go to the end of the chip table, where there was no one trying to get the chip of such a high bib number, and snag my chip replacement in a hurry.

They decided to line up the 15K crowd with the rest of us 5K-ers, which meant there was surely going to be a strange split at about 1.5 miles. I wanted to try and push myself the best I could to beat last year’s time but I realized that might not happen with the mere 2 months of training. I was right again; about a mile into an 8:30 pace, I was huffing and puffing. My legs were stiff and my chest was already tired.

Not to disappoint, there was a redirection for the 5K route to go up a hill into the neighborhoods. Great, this was all I needed. My legs weren’t going to be able to handle a ton of hills and the first hill was brutal (as you can tell from the elevation chart). I walked it with great pride and a lack of knowledge as to whether this would be the last hill. It was and I was able to coast down for a while. I was really tired near the end of 2 miles. I had stopped to walk briefly too many times but I knew I had to just suck it up and finish strong. I finished with an official time of 28:31, just 40 seconds off last year (or about 13 seconds per mile). Not the greatest, but good considering. At least it was better than Keep Austin Weird and now I know I am catching back up to last year’s performance.

Sunshine and I enjoyed some freebees. I picked up another free Brooks shirt for being decked out in Brooks gear. I also enjoyed another beer; Stampede beer has now offered up free beer at 2 events I’ve attended and I always love to partake in free booze. We took some great pictures and I hope to get the photo publishing aspect to my site working soon.

I just wish I could mentally push through pain like this man.

I didn’t get to posting the previous pace chart logs, so I’m lumping the last 2 weeks into a single post here. Yes, I know it’s already Wednesday. Yes, I know I’m getting lazier and lazier. In all fairness, Sunshine had 2 exams last weekend, so I picked up the slack around the house so she wouldn’t have to do any of the chores.

I blatently ignored the PA’s recommendation to not run with the fresh stitch. I did take off the following day and skipped the interval run, but I figured I’d give the extended interval a try and see if I would pop the stitch. Everything was fine, so I continued throughout the week at a slightly slower pace than usual.

That weekend I went to meet a new potential running partner but he had to bail on me. I ran a really good 7 miles at a decent clip (compared to recent performance). I usually don’t have trouble with irritable bowels or weak bladders. In fact, I rarely ever suffer while I run other than being constantly out of breath. Well, that weekend, I suffered a miserable 7 miles. I woke up with an upset stomach (maybe Mexican food wasn’t a good idea), downed some Pepto and hoped for the best. The best never happened. I wanted to vomit every step of the way, but I couldn’t. That must be what hell is like, perpetually on the verge of relief. I sucked it up around 3 miles when a woman passed me. I told myself I just wanted the agony to end but I suspect my ego had something to do with it.

Last week’s runs were tough. The heat is starting to pick up just as my distance is starting to amount to something substantial. I’m starting to suffer from cotton mouth and my sweat is evaporating before I finish. The temperature is near the low 90’s when I usually head out and I think it’s starting to climb upwards.

Speaking of temperature, I ran the Keep Austin Weird 5K last weekend. I mentioned the idea to my brother and he leaped at the idea. When I tried to bail out, my Mom dropped a guilt bomb on me. I signed up and decided to drive down by myself (Sunshine had exams). By time I got down there, he had picked up the packet and went out to buy some running clothes. Apparently, he had been getting very excited at the idea of running the event with me, which was ironic because we fought like cats and dogs as kids.

Needless to say, the event lives up to its name. All of the oddballs come out of the woodwork. The costume contest is usually a big draw and the live music afterwards is usually a pleasure. Unfortunately for me, this was the first 5K I’ve done all year, especially after the hiatus, and it was not a good confidence building race. I should’ve known better when the event started at 6 PM.

According to weather.com, the event took place in about 100^o F heat. That made things very difficult. Around 1.1 miles, I started suffering. The first water stop wasn’t until 1.6 miles, if you discount the icecream at 0.8 miles, and there was no shade. It was excrutiating and I didn’t appear to be the only person suffering. Everyone who wasn’t in a costume looked like Death Warmed Over. I think I was starting to overheat near the end because I stopped sweating and started getting cold chills. I wasn’t alone; I passed at least one person that needed EMS attention. The heat was too intense; I will probably costume it next year.

The uptick is my brother was boasting that he’d be doing 6:30 miles. Turns out he finished in about 28 minutes, a mere 1.5 minutes before me. If I had been having a good day, I could’ve beat him. This is significant to me because he’s always been the athletic one of the family and I’ve always been the family brain (shut-up, no comments). As much as he had always ragged on me for being bad at sports and overweight, it sure felt good to know that I was within reach of being better at a physical activity than my 1% body fat brother. Hopefully he’ll want to do more events in the future because I did have fun lining up with him.

Well, without further ado, here’s the bigger than usual list. Note that the 20080628 event is the race.

So there’s several things on today’s discussion agenda. Let’s get right down to business.

First up, I made a minor change to the site. I am now sifting the main content feed through FeedBurner. This means I will hopefully get a better idea who’s reading the blog. All I know right now is the tiny bit of information from the WordPress Stats plugin and that Google Reader thinks my blog is the most obscure thing I read. You may have also noticed that I updated the plugins and fixed the obsocialbookmarker plugin to provide links to some of the aggregators I’ve heard of. If I’m missing your favorite, do tell.

Also, I hit a milestone with my last post; it marked my 500th blog! That’s right, I’ve written way too many words that way too few people read. I’ve had some ups and downs, a few contintributors who have long stopped contributing, even watched as my wife set up her third Blogger account. Here’s to the next 500 posts!

The reason why I have not posted recently was more out of a superstition. Monday night was an incredibly intense game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Red Wings and the Penguins. It lasted for well over 100 minutes, into three overtime periods, and ended with a disappointing goal by the Penguins. Fear not, the Red Wings went back to Pittsburg to steal the cup from them on the Pens’ own ice. The celebration afterwards was riddled with boos and hisses, but it was still a sweet victory to see my boys bring The Cup home for the 4th time in 11 years.

Lastly, I never got to posting last week’s pace charts. Monday was tough because I stupidly decided to run in the afternoon and it easily broke the 90’s. The other runs were tough but managable. I’m still struggling with the long run. I felt better than last week, but only slightly. I think I am going to try and focus on maintaining a pace for a long time because I see to have trouble beyond 3 miles. Hopefully, this is just a decreased stamina due to the extended break and not loss of ability. I also need to see about excluding the walk breaks during the intervals as it greatly skews the graphs, so I decided to change to a non-continuous bar graph so it would display something useful.

I’m blathering, so here are the charts:

So this week, I ran a total of 6 times. That’s right, 6 consecutive days, I managed to lace up and run. In fact, I even created a schedule to follow which will allow me to rebuild my abilities and prepare for some races.

I decided to start by doing 2 extended interval runs a week before I go to the gym. What I’m referring to as an “extended interval run” is a run where I lump multiple intervals together and run them back-to-back without rest. Of course I can only run a few this way, but I will work my way up to running as far as my body will carry me. I ran 4 continuous quarter mile splits at 800 meter pace, which made for an 8:15 pace. I had struggled to do this last week, but succeeded both times this week.

I did manage to still get to the gym for a 30 minute workout twice. I spent 10 minutes on the stair machine, ten minutes on the rowing machine one day and bike the other, and still did a tough core workout. I have to admit, it was very gratifying to show up already sweaty, as if I am always busting my hump. It garnered interesting looks from the twenty-something girls at the checkin counter.

I also was able to hit my target pace during the intervals on Monday. Started out doing just the 4 800 meter intervals, which grew progressively slower. As you can tell from the pace chart, I walked the rest periods, which seems to greatly scew the chart. I’m not very happy with SportTracks and I’m growing increasingly frustrate with its complete lack of openness. I realize that these are the types of things that will never be fixed and asking for such changes usually results in the overly Windows forum community to write you off unless you’ve donated (read: bought the software). Downloadable shareware that’s closed source? Seriously? Hey Zone Five, 1994 called, they want their business model back.

Saturday was hell though. I made it though about 2 miles without any challenges, but started to find my heartrate had climbed up there and was not relenting. I was struggling to breath and my quads were starting to ache. It didn’t help to realize I had 4 miles left. I stopped about a half dozen times or more, as you can tell from the jumps in pace. However, there were about 3-4 times where I got lost because I decided to explore a neighborhood I had never been in. Getting lost can really take the wind out of my sails. I also made the mistake of thinking I wasn’t hungry when I left the house. I wasn’t, but quickly ran out of gas on the trail. After all of the hills, getting lost, draining my energy, and the complete frustration of not being able to keep pace, I ended the run early as to avoid continuing the horrible experience.

In the end, I think I may scale the Friday easy run back because I don’t think it helped any. It may in fact increase my risk for injury so I think I will scale back by a mile next week. Since I cut back a mile off the 6 miler yesterday, I’ll have to repeat this week next week to make sure I can continue the plan.

Here’s this week’s pace charts. I changed them to graph pace against distance since time doesn’t really help much.

Geez, that took forever to manually add each individual chart to a post like that.

You better believe it buddy, the Red Wings advance to the Stanley Cup Finals. Lets hope we don’t have to wait another year to see them win the cup.

With Chelios and Franzen out, the Red Wings still managed to mop the floor with the Stars. Good thing too, because I didn’t want the Stars to be the third team to ever come back from trailing 3-0 in the series.

The finals against the Penguins will be a good set of games.

So for the last few months, I have been really dodgy on my running. I haven’t kept any schedule that remotely resembles regularity. My running partner moved away to California for a new job and I’ve been struggling keeping myself motivated and accountable. I also have a terrible habit of pacing too fast, feeling like crap, then pausing the GPS unit while I catch my breath. I really want to break this habit.

Today is a new day. From here on out, I will start posting my pace charts. Since I am currently using Sport Tracks for my training log, I can generate the pace chart as a PNG directly. From there, I use F-Spot to tag the image and then upload it to my NextGen gallery. Every week, I will post the week’s worth of images and summarize how the training towards a sub-2 hour half-marathon.

I should note that I got this idea from Thomas Bubendorfer, who’s excellent blog I have become an avid reader. He also posts his heart-rate graphs, but I only have the Garmin 205, so no heart-rate.

So to kick things off, here is this week’s training. I had the Qualifier this week and I’m going to a funeral here in about an hour. So training early in the week didn’t happen, and I won’t be able to train again until I get back on Sunday evening (probably just go to the gym instead). I decided the quickest way to force my body and lungs to get accustomed to the pace I want to run is to just do it and progressively extend the distance. For the first week or 2 my intervals will be a single 1 mile sprint. I can’t do a long run this weekend, but I was start again at something less than 8 (probably 6 next week).

Without further ado, here is this week’s training:

I should also note that it does not appear that the NextGen gallery supports adding the detected tags to the official WordPress taxonomy. For the time being, the image tags will not appear in the tag cloud, so I won’t duplicate the tag by creating one now.

Also, you might notice a few significant drops in the paces. The bad habit I mentioned that I want to break. Basically, I stopped the watch to catch my breath, then started it back up. This habit can make a 30 minute run stretch on for upwards of an extra 15 minutes and it really bugs me that I do it. By posting these pace charts, I’m hoping to train harder and stop pausing the watch (unless I have to, i.e. for traffic or water).

I am now one month away from my next major race. I am planning on running in the AT&T Austin Half-Marathon on Feb. 17. I have been training for the last two months for this and I hope that all of my hard work pays off.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

–M. Kathleen Casey

Now that my GPS obsession is passing in favor of my new toy (more later), I am back to focusing on what matters: running hard. I’ve been following the Ryan Hall training plan and it is definately a good plan. You could probably even extend this out to a marathon plan. I have been struggling to get through all of the speed work like the grueling 5×1200m repeats and the long racing simulations (i.e. 12 miles, 6 easy and 6 at race pace).

I will definately make sure to post any pictures taken. I’m still waiting for proper EXIF support in NextGen and F-Spot.