Running Shorts

2/26-3/04 Monday: 16 miles in 1:51:01 Tuesday: 9 mile fartlek in 56:03 Wednesday: 6 miles easy Thursday: OFF Friday: 6 miles easy + strides Saturday: 11 miles total - 5k race, 1st in 16:06 Sunday: OFF TOTAL :  48 miles in 5 days This week started well enough, I got in the long run I missed on Sunday and then a true fartlek workout on Tuesday. My plan had been to alternate longer easier days with shorter faster days in classic Lydiard fashion, and that's how this week started. I ran slow for my long run, but that's the only gear I had. For the fartlek I just ran hard for 30 seconds to 2 minutes whenever I felt like it. I felt more fatigued as the run went on, so this one was a mistake -- especially the day after the long run. I should have taken an easy day instead. I needed all easy days the rest of the week, especially since I had a low-key race that I was nervous about. I was planning on a longer marathon-effort tempo on Thursday, but I just didn...

GEAR CHECK is another semi-regular-when-I'm-feeling-it series like the WORKOUT OF THE WEEK and various race recaps. There's a ton of different products out there marketed towards runners, so I wanted to highlight some of the things that I use and what I think about them. It might also be telling the stuff I don't use, but that's a whole 'nother topic. This trusty ol' watch came back from the dead yesterday. Running is a pretty simple sport; at least, that's the way it should be. In the modern era of mass marketing, the amount of stuff  that you're told you need  to have to be a real  runner is astounding. In my opinion, all you really need is a good pair of shoes and a watch. That's it. Of course, even then the industry will find ways to inflate your purchase. How about $160 shoes or a $300 watch? (Side note: that price for a GPS watch is in the mid-range of all available! How insane is that?!) Screw that. I prefer a watch that is reasonabl...

May 28, 2017 Burlington, VT 2:45:32 -- 17th Place Another marathon, another disaster. At least I finished this one. The Flying Pig Half beat me up more than I thought it did, and I never really recovered. Enter a marathon a little over the edge, and you'll end up with thigh smash before mile 10 and pitiful walking breaks after mile 20. But I don't want to dwell on this one too much. Lessons learned, for sure, but I'm really trying to approach my running from a much more positive mental framework. So this recap is going to be slightly different: I'm going to focus on some of the things that went well over the course of the whole spring season and then pick out some new things to work on over the summer and fall. POSITIVES Found joy in running again.  Stayed injury-free. Actually, my Achilles felt better as the season went on. Won the premier local race in an event record time. Returned to the same fitness level pre-injury. Refined what works for me in t...

Not racing for all of the last fall season got me thinking: do we race too often? Like most running-related questions, the answer is simple; but unfortunately, that's where it gets complicated. I decided to break this down into two parts with two different answers. And really, I think these parts speak to the divide between the competitive sport and the participant activity. Part one focused on high school and collegiate cross country and track athletes. This one will cover more of the road, trail, and ultra racing scene. So. Do we post-collegiate (or non-collegiate...or heck, let's just call it "open" runners) race too often? No. In fact, I don't believe we race often enough. [He writes, with a 5k last weekend and a marathon this one.] Back in the day, athletes like Bill Rodgers might race nearly every other week, at any distance from the 5k to the marathon. Seriously, scroll down to the bottom of his 1977 log -- he competed in an astonishing 26 races, in...

Flying Pig Half Marathon 1st place 1:08:32 -- event record Well, I finally finished a major Flying Pig race -- I just had to drop down to the half. Actually, I did this race more out of a feeling of local obligation than true motivation. My focus really remains on the Vermont City Marathon, which is now less than three weeks away. But a minor race can be a great tune-up for a goal race; in fact, I think it's often the best preparation. (Just wait for my next blog post to explain that.) And that's what this race really was: a tune-up, practice for the real deal in Burlington, VT. So instead of focusing on the mile-by-mile details of the race (I pretty much ran solo the whole way and won by something like three minutes), I want to focus on my plans coming into it and how successful I was at executing them. 1. Run the first 9-10 miles at a controlled effort and then shift gears to race the last 5k. On this one I was very happy with my execution. I didn...

Not racing for all of the last fall season got me thinking: do we race too often? Like most running-related questions, the answer is simple; but unfortunately, that's where it gets complicated. I decided to break this down into two parts with two different answers. And really, I think these parts speak to the divide between the competitive sport and the participant activity. The first one (this one) is a scholastic edition, focusing on high school and collegiate cross country and track athletes. The next one will cover more of the road, trail, and ultra racing scene. So. Do scholastic athletes race too often? Yes. Absolutely unequivocally 100% in the affirmative. Ok sure there are a select few elite NCAA teams who have the luxury of resting their top athletes for most of the season until conference champs and NCAAs (then I think the case could be made for racing more), but the vast majority of the rest do, in fact, race too often. Think of the high school team which, duri...

Ok wow, it's been a while. I have been running, I promise. Last fall I got so frustrated with my nagging Achilles injury that I just had to completely shut down. I got stuck in a cycle of: start running again, feel good, slowly feel that goodness deteriorate, end up back at square one needing more time off. Nothing seemed to be helping, so I finally just checked out of running entirely. After a few weeks in a walking boot, I decided to give it a cautious go one more time (this is around the beginning of November). I played it very safe, running without a schedule and entirely by feel, and by the end of December I was able to hit 60+ miles per week. Most importantly, though, I was simply enjoying running again. My goal for January and February, then, was to work in aerobic base training while gradually increasing my mileage and re-establishing some semblance of consistency.  I mostly succeeded -- my mileage didn't make it up to where I wanted it, but my base training went ...

Now that it's the heart of fall racing season and I'm getting antsy not  being able to race, I thought it'd be a good time for the first in a new series of posts. I write a lot about various aspects of training that go into race day and I also recap race efforts fairly often, but I haven't written much about the strategy and tactics  that go into each competition. In fact, not many people do talk about tactics. If anything, they get a bad rap in running circles -- as in a sarcastic, "oh great, another tactical race." When you hear people talk about tactics, they do so in a negative tone: a tactical race is one that is slow, where the runners just jog around for 90% of the time until someone finally sprints to the finish. Sit-n-kick. Of course, this is  one tactic (an effective one, at that) and one you see often in championship-style races, where place matters more than time and most athletes are of about the same fitness caliber. But race tactics can be m...

With Cincinnati's very own Queen Bee Half Marathon coming up, I wanted to get this out there: I absolutely abhor all-women's races. I don't think they should exist. I don't even think they should be called races. I'm not going to link to any race websites because I don't want to give them the dignity. They may be worse than color runs and other novelty events in my book. Before you call me a sexist and a male chauvinist pig, hear me out: I don't think all-women's events are necessary any more . This isn't the era of race directors physically pulling Katharine Switzer out of a race specifically because she's a woman; rather, women make up the majority of participants in running events today. Thirty or forty years ago, when road running was an all-male endeavor, women's-only events definitely had a place. But now, nearly every race is a majority female affair. Road races are already women's races -- making some specifically only  for wo...

This is a post for all you high school track and cross athletes looking to make the leap to the next level. This is a post for all you collegians at that level, shooting for the next step. This is a post for all you post-collegians eyeing the next Olympic Trials. This is a post for all runners, of all ages and abilities, who want to PR, PB, BQ, OTQ, or any other acronym you can think of. You want to get better? You can put away your training manual. Set aside the Hanson's program, or Pfitzinger, or Daniels or Higdon or Galloway or anyone else who writes a mass program. Most importantly, if you own Run Less, Run Faster : burn that crap. There is only one Way. Here it is: You need to run more. How much more? I don't know, but definitely more than you're doing now. Could be 30 miles a week. Could be 120. That part's up to you. It can't be that simple, can it? It is. For real. Running is a simple sport; stop trying to make it more complicated than it nee...

Suffering from post-Olympics withdrawal? Turn on USA channel to find Law & Order instead of table tennis? Don't know what to do without sports on 24/7? Unsure of how to schedule out a day that doesn't revolved around a combination of live streaming, DVR recording, and spoiler avoiding? Yeah, me too. Which means it's the perfect time to talk about the Olympics that just happened! One week out, here are four of my biggest takeaways -- two about Athletics in general and two about the distance slate specifically. 1. Athletics (because that's what the rest of the world calls it) remains the premier event in the Olympics.  While in America NBC played up the swimming and women's gymnastics competitions -- because American dominance plays into the "America #1 heck yeah!" narrative -- the Athletics events were by far the most prestigious of the games. From the iconic marathon final on the last day (with the medal ceremony at the closing ceremony) to the Wor...

A word of advice: don't get out of shape. Once you are, getting back in shape sucks. And patience is hard. Coming back from injury, I've been running for three weeks; this current week will be my fourth. My progression has been as such: Week 1: 17.5 miles on 5 days (4.5 mile longest run) Week 2: 27 miles on 6 days (7 mile longest run) Week 3: 37 miles on 6 days (8 mile longest run) Week 4: GOAL 45-50 miles on 6 days with a 10-mile longest run Right now I'm just running to return to a semblance of fitness. It's base training for base training. No special workouts, and the only think I'm doing faster than easy runs are the occasional set of four strides at about marathon effort. It's tough. Progress is slow. My Achilles feels great some days and achy other days, so I have to really pay attention to it. I feel aerobically fit to run more and faster, but neuromuscularly my legs haven't caught up. I find myself almost holding back on most runs, b...

With the Olympics coming up in a couple of weeks, I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It would be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps. A New Calendar of Competition This proposal to fix the sport is going to focus on track and field; specifically, the outdoor competition schedule. Or, rather, the lack thereof. The current calendar is...a mess, to put it mildly. Once every four years there is an incredibly important global championship -- the Olympics. In odd-numbered non-Olympic years, there is another global championship, albeit somewhat less meaningful. In even-numbered non-Oly...

In trying to capture the running spirit of days past, I've been especially interested in reading about some of the historic greats. Ah who am I kidding? I'm always interested in learning about running history, but allow me to indulge myself a bit. My interest in doing this particular one was piqued after reading a thread on the r/running  subreddit (yes, I'm a redditor) that was about New Balance shoes. New Balance recently launched a new line of shoes named " Vazee ," and the poster mentioned he had no idea where that name came from. Turns out the name is in reference to a French slang term, " vas-y ," which essentially means "Go!" or "Go for it!" Having worked at a running store, I'd heard this spiel before, but I had to learn more. Not only is the name a fancy French word, but it is also a reference to a popular cheer for former mile world record-holder Michel Jazy (the rhyme really is catchy, it's easy to see why it be...

In 2013, I ran the Boston Marathon, finishing in 2:28:28 for 67th place. I was student teaching and training on inconsistent 60-70 mile weeks. Even though I wasn't in great marathon shape, that race still stands as my personal best. For comparison's sake, here are some historic results of similar placings (Boston's archived results are nearly impossible to find - I'm not even sure they exist online). 1993: 67th place - 2:32:01 1989: 50th place - 2:30:14 1983: 83rd place - 2:19:51 (a 2:30 would have been over 300th place!) 1980: 54th place - 2:25:47 1979: 50th place - 2:19:28 (source: http://www.coolrunning.com/boston/results3.htm) The general trend seems to be that as we look at results from further in the past, race results actually get faster! How does that make any sense? Since then, training methods have improved, performance technology has improved, prize money has improved; so why haven't we improved? While road races have flourished in the dec...

...when you completely bomb a race? What do you do when your pour your heart and soul into training and come up empty on race day? What do you do when you're in the shape of your life, but it doesn't show in the results? What do you do when, on the biggest stage of your career, you choke? Do you give up? Do you sulk? Do you wallow in self-pity? Do you hang your head in defeat? No. Hell no. You race again. You rest, recover (physically and psychologically) and then you get after it. You don't let all that training go to waste. You don't let that disappointment consume you; you use it for fuel. You pour gasoline on the fire that's still burning -- faintly, smoldering, but still burning. You don't let that fire go out. You're better than that failed race. You race again, and again, and again; until your feet are bleeding and you physically can't push your legs one...more...stride... These races are validation and vindication. Validation for the ...

Yes, this is a selfish post. I mostly train alone; as it turns out, so do most of the post-collegiate runners in the Greater Cincinnati area. It's time to change that. Cincinnati is way too small of a town for us all to be doing our own thing, only to meet on race day and maybe the occasional long run. When you consider that many of the best runners train in groups, it makes sense that we ought to start training together. I get that everyone has different schedules; I'm not saying that all us runners need to live and run and hang out together all the time. All I'm proposing is a track workout on Tuesday. a tempo/threshold run on Friday (or Saturday), and a nice hard long run on Sunday. That's it, just three days. Three key workouts on three days, each week, every  week. I get that life gets in the way and you won't be able to make it every time, but you wanna get better? You gotta train consistently. Who better than training partners to keep you consistent? ...

Some days you have it, some days you don't. With training and tapering, of course, you hope to have it on race day. On February 13th 2016 in the heat of Los Angeles, I most definitely didn't have it. On a day that was a battle for everybody, I was one of the many riding the struggle bus. About 60 of the 160-ish men that started the race did not finish, myself included. I made it about 10 miles into the race before calling it a day and stepping off the course. I actually felt pretty good on my short warmup jog. I fell into aerobic threshold effort real easy and was primed to go. The first two miles, even in the mass of humanity, were right about where I wanted to be: 5:25 and then 5:18, right on. I latched onto a group that felt like it was going the right effort, ready to hang on for a ride to a solid time. But by the time we got to 10k, I knew I was in trouble. That's a scary feeling when you're hurting and you realize there are still twenty miles left in the ...

So take this with a grain of salt: I haven't raced a marathon in nearly three years, and of the two that I've finished neither have been particularly noteworthy. When I was in college, the 10,000m folks on Xavier's team had a saying about the 10k on the track: "controlled aggression released over 25 laps." For those who've never had the distinct pleasure of racing the track 10,000, you're not really missing out. On a bad (or even mediocre) day, it consists of a special kind of hell involving monotonous, mind-numbing misery. When you're off your game, the laps drag by. When you're on, they fly. Keeping that attitude ("controlled aggression released over 25 laps") helped keep us present in the race. Staying patient, racing in the moment, not thinking too far ahead ( don't think about the finish before the final mile... ) combine to create a positive experience. You focus on the race at hand -- not the finish -- and the results will ...

Welp, T-minus one week 'til race day . "Are you nervous?" I've been getting this question a lot lately. I suppose every one of the 450-ish OT qualifiers has as well. Heck, anyone who's ever trained for a race has probably gotten that question from someone . "Well, are you?" The truth is, no, I'm not nervous. I've put in the work, I'm confident in the workouts and long runs I put in this winter, and I can't wait for the starting pistol to go off. Depending on how the race goes, I feel like I could reasonably run anywhere between 2:15 and 2:25. Obviously the faster end is better, but even at the slower end I'm running a significant PR and fairly respectable time. I'm in much better shape than I've ever been in before a marathon, so if I go out and race (not pace) then I know the results will take care of themselves. The truth is also, yes, I'm nervous. It's been nearly three years since I've run a marathon....