Is it the end of recovery or beginning of taper?

Today I ran my one and only long run between Big Sur and Steamboat: A 17-miler. Since I had run a hard 10K race yesterday, I knew this would be a bit of a challenge, made even more so by the warm weather, about 65 degrees at the start and closer to 75 or 80 by the finish, with lots of humidity.

I met up with the DART group at 7 a.m. as usual. Jeremy had already run 7, Todd was up for 17, Matt and Tim only wanted to do 10, and new runner Heather was interested in 10 as well. After a minute or two, Chad showed up, having run 3+ miles from his house to the start, and already drenched in sweat. We decided to run a 10-mile loop, then go for 7 more with whoever was still interested. Despite the heat, it was a gorgeous morning, and we all chatted about our races the previous day and got to know Heather, a former college cross-country racer who was starting to move up to longer distances. Chad and I tried to take it easy, both having raced the day before and knowing we had a long day ahead of us. Despite our best efforts, our first 10 miles were a little fast, between 8:20 and 8:30.

Back at the CVS, we hydrated as much as possible. I refilled my fuel belt and Chad bought two bottles of Gatorade to add to the two water bottles he was carrying. Since all the Gatorade wouldn't fit in his bottles, I took several big gulps of one of his bottles. I didn't want to drink too much because Gatorade doesn't always settle well in my stomach.

Todd, Chad and I said goodbye to the rest of the group and decided to run on hilly Grey road for those last 7 miles. It was now quite warm, but at least there was a breeze to cool us off a bit. Our pace now slowed into the 8:40s as we went up and down the hills. When we got to the top of the last hill, we took a break and I drained my two 8-ounce bottles of liquid. We were soaked through with sweat. Then we turned around and headed back to town, trying to push the pace where we could but slowing a bit on the hills. We ran the last mile at a 9:26 pace. Surprisingly to me at least, it didn't feel any slower than the other miles we had run -- we were simply that tired.

After the obligatory coffee at Summit, I gave Chad a ride home and then headed home myself. As I peeled my shoes and socks off I saw that my toes were wrinkled, as if they had been sitting in a bathtub for a couple of hours. Which, I guess, in effect, they had.

Starting this week I'll begin a full taper, with Steamboat just two weeks away. Weekday runs will be shorter and easier, and next Sunday's long run is only 13 miles.

Details of today's workout are below:

Race Recap: The Siskey Y 10K

My workout schedule called for a 10K tune-up race today in preparation for the Steamboat Marathon in two weeks. I decided to see if I could round up a few DART teammates to join me running the Siskey Y 10K, and Mark Ippolito, Tim Richter, and Terry Ake signed on. Unfortunately Marc Hirschfield was a last-minute scratch due to illness.

The DART crew post-race

The race had an early start: 7:00 a.m., which meant that Mark picked me up at 5:10. As we soon discovered, that's 20 minutes before Starbucks opens. After driving to Starbucks and waiting for it to open, we finally got on the road to Matthews, NC at 5:35. Fortunately there wasn't any traffic at that time, and registering for the race was a breeze.

We had enough time for a quick warm-up, and the first thing we discovered is that the start of the race isn't exactly downhill, as I had thought in Thursday's strategy post. To the contrary, it was the steepest uphill segment on the course. Here's how my Garmin profile compares to profile I'd planned for (the course repeats the same 5K loop):

Above: my planned profile; Below: The actual profile

As you can see, the start was quite different -- it was roughly a 50-vertical-foot climb in about a third of a mile. After that, the course was pretty much as expected, with nice, gentle rolling hills. My goal was to run a 7:00 per mile pace, for a 43:30 overall time and a personal record. Back when I thought Mile 1 was all downhill, I had been hoping for a 6:40 first mile.

As we lined up for the start, there was another surprise -- pace teams! I'd never seen a pace team at a 10K before, but given the fact that there was a 7-minute pace team, I figured I'd join up. After a "ready-set-go," we took off, up that tough little hill. My hopes for a 6:40 first mile were dashed almost instantly. Instead, I struggled to a 6:58. Mile 2 was mostly uphill, but there were some small bits of relief, and I ran it in 7:01. I knew Mile 3 would start with a downhill section but end with a long uphill, so I just hoped to hang on until I could make it to mostly-downhill Mile 4. I passed a couple people heading up the hill, but as I neared the crest, one woman passed me back. She was a 5K racer, and sprinted to the finish while I headed back up the steep hill we had started on.

My time for Mile 3 was 7:06, but I was tiring fast, and as before, I hadn't really counted on the steep uphill start to Mile 4. At this point I had dropped the 7-minute pace team -- I guess they couldn't quite handle an actual 7-minute pace! There was no one in sight ahead of me; I knew there were at least three runners in front, but I also knew there was no chance of me catching them. The new goal was to avoid being caught! When I finally reached the downhill section of Mile 4, I knew there was no chance of making up time; I just had to hang on. Mile 4 split: 7:11. I still had some gas in the tank, but I wasn't sure I could hang on until the finish without slowing more. During Mile 5, I spotted the two race leaders, who turned out to be Jason Holder and Aaron Linz, guys I had seen at races and on Facebook but didn't really know. They had already finished the "lollipop" loop at the end of the course and were heading back on their final mile, looking strong. I pushed onward, finishing Mile 5 in 7:19.

One mile to go, all I needed to do was hang on. Mile 6 starts with a downhill, and I tried to cruise as fast as possible while still taking a bit of a breather. Now there was just .7 miles, uphill, to the finish. I pushed as hard as I could, around a corner beyond which I hoped to see the finish line. The hill just kept going up. I slowed a bit, then reminded myself that there was surely less than a half mile to go. I pressed on harder. The last little bit of the course was a slight downhill, and I tried to pick up the pace even more as I raced to the finish line. I was disappointed that I wouldn't make my goal, but I knew I had run a solid, hard race.

Then, surprisingly, I saw the timer at the finish register just 43:00, less than 100 meters away. It ticked 43:17 as I crossed the line! Somehow I had run sub-seven-minute miles even though my only sub-seven-minute split was a 6:58. It took a few moments for me to remember to stop my GPS, and it had only recorded 6.07 miles, not 6.21-mile 10K. So the course was probably a little short. Still, Garmin recorded my average pace as a 7:09, which would still be a PR for the 10K distance.

The official results are here. I got credit for a 6:59 pace, and finished in fifth overall out of 62 participants. Tim ran a great race and finished third, while Terry placed first in his age group and Mark was third in his group (I was first in the same group). A great day for DART!

I actually got a $25 gift certificate for the age group win, so this race was effectively free for me (assuming I make my way down to Charlotte to cash in my prize). Not bad for a morning's work!

This was a well-run race with good timing and excellent support on the course -- there was never any question which way to run. The only thing I'd suggest to make it better would be to place mile markers on the course and make sure it's a legitimate 10K distance. And maybe smooth out some of those hills!

The details of today's race are below:

Strategy for the Siskey Y 10K

On Saturday I'll be running my one and only tune-up race before the Steamboat marathon, the Siskey Y 10K. Marc Hirschfield has made a map of the route on MapMyRun.

The 10K simply repeats the 5K loop twice -- both the 5K and the 10K start at the same time.

If the elevation data from that site is to be trusted, the loop has two hills, each of them relatively small. The 5K has a cumulative gain of 105 feet, for a 210-foot gain for the whole route. That's quite similar to the 6.38-mile DART loop I run several times a week. The link takes you to MapMyRun of that route, which gives a 200-foot gain. That's not nearly the 338-foot gain of the UNCC Homecoming 5k, but it's still a fairly hilly route. On the plus side, the hills seem quite gradual, with each of its two climbs rising about 50 feet in around .7 miles (again, nothing like the 140-foot climb in Mile 2 at UNCC). Here's the elevation profile of the 5K loop:

Siskey 5K elevation profile

One thing I don't like about this race is its downhill start. I'd much rather have a flat stretch or even a gradual uphill to get warmed up. And the steepest uphill on the course (albeit gradual) is reserved for the finish. But all in all, I don't mind this sort of gradual hill. It's what I work out on all the time:

The DART loop elevation profile

Note that we're talking about much bigger hills here -- each gridline represents 50 feet in this graph, and only 10 feet in the Siskey profile. But the hill that starts at about Mile 0.7 on the DART loop rises about 50 feet in .7 miles, just like the Siskey climbs. So, how do I run this race?

My goal is to run it in 43:30, which is a 7-minute-mile pace. For a race this long, I figure a steady pace is best, but since Mile 1 is downhill, I should probably take it faster than 7-minute pace. I think I'll shoot for about 6:40. Then I could run the remaining miles in 7:04 pace and still meet my goal. Mile 4 (the first mile of the second lap) is downhill as well, so depending on how I'm feeling, I might pick up the pace again there, or use it as a recovery mile to save something for the finish.

Weather for this race looks to be about 60 degrees, which is a little warm for me, but I think I'm better prepared for warm temperatures than I was a couple months back at the St. Leo 10K. I'm looking forward to this one!

Impromptu speed work

I'm not sure what exactly I was thinking this morning. The plan was to run into town and do the regular 6.38 mile DART loop at a pretty quick pace, maybe even 7:30 miles. When I arrived, however, Chad and Jeff were there and neither one of them was interested in going very fast. Jeff only had time to do four, so I decided I'd run four with them and see if Chad was interested in doing a bit more later. After 3 miles at about an 8-minute pace, I decided to see what I could do on the final mile, so I took off and hit the "lap" button on the GPS. As it turned out, there was only 0.79 miles left on the loop, so I got a 1200-meter speed workout. My pace: 6:29/mile. I took a cooldown lap around the block and met back up with Chad and Jeff.

Here's the graph of my pace for the whole run. It's pretty obvious where I started to push the pace.

Someday soon I need to see if I can maintain that pace for a full 5K -- 6:26 miles gives you a sub-20-minute time, which I think I might be able to do if the stars align properly.

Chad and I both needed some more miles, so we ran down to the Davidson College Trails and did the 5K loop at a moderate pace. This gave me a chance to get a good GPS recording of the route. Over at the DART Blog, I've been cataloging our favorite local runs, and this morning I added the trails to the list.

Below are the details for the two runs:

How much noise does GPS correction remove?

A few weeks ago I wrote about how elevation measures on GPS devices are notoriously inaccurate. Correcting the data based on more accurate geographic surveys can fix some of problem, but can also introduce error. For the most part, however, the corrected data seems to be better.

But when I'm running a new race, I frequently use Garmin Connect's Explore feature to see if anyone has shared their recording of the race route. It can be tricky to find an older route (hint -- focus the map on the start of the race and enter the date and approximate mileage of the previous year's run), but when you do, it can come in very handy! In less than three weeks, I'll be running the Steamboat Marathon, and I was able to find this record of one runner's race from last year (Congrats on your first marathon, bhatton59!).

Unfortunately, when you're looking at someone else's route, GPS elevation correction is disabled. That means the cumulative elevation gains reported for the route are likely to be off by quite a bit. But how much? It's hard to know exactly, as each location has its own GPS problems (trees, buildings, mountains, and so on), but I think I have come up with a couple ways to guestimate how much error there is in uncorrected elevation data.

I took my six longest runs (all over 19 miles) and viewed the corrected and uncorrected cumulative elevation data for each. For these runs, the difference between corrected and uncorrected data ranged from 171 to 626 feet. That's a pretty big range! Even when you figure out the difference based on the average correction per mile, there's still a big range. For the Fellowship of the Idiots run, the correction per mile averaged only 8.9 feet, but for a 20-mile training run I did in February, the average was over 32 feet -- that's nearly three times the amount of correction. Overall, the amount of correction ranged from 12 to 42 percent.

So how does this affect bhatton59's elevation data from last year's Steamboat Marathon? Her uncorrected record shows a cumulative loss of 2,128 feet and a gain of 742. Now since we know the race starts at an elevation of about 8,128 feet and descends to 6,728 feet, the true cumulative elevation loss must be at least 1,400 feet. So there's about 728 feet of wiggle room in the record. Based on my data, that 728 feet could be off by anywhere from 12 to 42 percent -- from 87 feet to 305 feet. That doesn't change the cumulative elevation loss much -- it's going to range from 2,041 feet to 1,823, but it means the actual uphill on the course could be anywhere from 664 to just 437 feet -- that's a big difference from the uncorrected 742 feet of gain reported on the Garmin site.

Another way to guesstimate the uphill on the course is to look at bhatton59's player:

Garmin Connect actually allows you to click on any point along the graph to get the elevation and distance information. In this way, I could click on the obvious major hills and avoid data points that look like they may be noise. Adding all these points up, I came up with a cumulative loss of 1,961 feet and a gain of 563, which is right about the middle of the range predicted by my initial calculation. That's a lot of downhill, but actually about the same as the corrected total elevation loss I recorded at Big Sur: 1,863 feet. So I should probably be able to handle the downhills, and the total of around 563 feet of climbing shouldn't add too much difficulty. My major worry will be the hill from Mile 20.23 to 22.27: a climb of about 186 feet, on tired legs. There was a similar hill in a similar spot at Big Sur, and I slowed from an under-8-minute-pace to a 9-minute pace, and never recovered. Hopefully this time around, with better hydration, I'll be better prepared for a hill in the closing miles of a race.

Details of yesterday's workout are below:

A Downhill Speed Workout

Yesterday I had a "rest" day so I took my first-ever spin class. It was quite a workout: You ride stationary bikes to loud music with a group of people while a leader guides the pace. For this workout, after a warm-up, she had us imagine climbing a steep hill. You can adjust the resistance on your bike, so as we rode, we gradually increased resistance until it was so strong we had to stand up. After riding standing for what seemed like forever, she announced "three minutes to go!" I couldn't make it, so I ended up sitting and decreasing the resistance for a bit, then standing for the last two minutes. "Okay," she said, "you're done standing, but you're STILL CLIMBING! Decrease the resistance, but pedal faster. If this isn't harder than the first part of the hill, you're not doing it right!" This went on for seven or eight more minutes, until finally we were allowed a couple minutes of recovery before heading up the next hill. One thing I noticed over the course of the entire 55-minute workout: We never went "downhill" -- it was either up or flat the whole way, preferably with an imaginary headwind.

So, inspired either by that workout or by the fact that I'll be running a mostly-downhill marathon in just over three weeks, today I decided I needed to do a downhill workout. The plan: Run my 8-mile hill route, but take the downhills as fast as possible, while recovering (as much as possible) on the uphill segments. I figured I'd probably be doing the downhills at about a 7-minute pace and the uphills at 9- or 10-ish.

After a short warmup, I hit the first downhill stretch (which as you'll see below, doesn't register as a hill on Garmin. Trust me, it's a hill). I managed a 7:20 pace. Not bad, but I need to do better. After a block of uphill, it was back downhill for a quarter-mile. I only managed a 7:30 pace here, perhaps partly due to the fact that half of this section was on trails/gravel roads. After nearly a mile of rolling hills that I counted as uphill (net 58-foot elevation gain), I hit the first major downhill: 7:10. That's more like it! After another long uphill stretch, I hit the second long downhill, a mile with a flattish-to-uphill section in the middle. I counted it as all downhill, 7:01 pace. Then it was back to the top of the hill, nearly a solid 150-foot climb with a short downhill in the middle.

Now it was time to turn around and head back down what is really two chunks with a slight uphill in the middle, a little under a mile long. I decided to try to maintain an equal effort on the uphill section. Chunk #1, 6:54, uphill, 8:00, Chunk #2, 7:11. Just one major uphill left, a half-mile long. After topping that one, I decided to run hard to the finish. First, .87 miles of rolling-but-mostly-downhill: 7:41. Then, .58 miles with a 62-foot climb (including that last hill that my Garmin counts as zero): 8:28. Then I jogged around the block for a .46-mile cool-down.

I was definitely spent, and absolutely sopping with sweat. I was a little disappointed in my "all-out" final legs, but I chalk that up to the high humidity and my intense spin workout the day before. I felt good about how I handled all that downhill running, at faster than marathon pace.

Just to geek out a little bit more on this, here's a graph showing my pace and the hills for the run (I still say leg 2 is downhill, despite what Garmin says):

As you can see, I sped up dramatically for all the downhill legs. It's also interesting to see the graphic representation of my disappointing uphill leg 19 (the final hard leg before cool-down on leg 20). In that context, you can see I was working much harder on that hill than on the other uphill legs. The difficulty of this workout showed me that I definitely don't want to be doing 7-minute miles at Steamboat, despite the downhill. I'll have some posts on strategy as the race approaches.

Today's workout included 604 feet of downhill over 8 miles, which works out to 1,978 feet when stretched over an entire marathon. The Steamboat marathon includes about 2,100 feet of downhill, so that's not a bad approximation of what I'll be experiencing there. Of course, at Steamboat, you only have to climb about 700 feet, so overall other than the fact that it's at 8,000 feet elevation and more than three times as long, it should be a little easier than what I did today.

My overall pace was 8:39, but it was 9:51 on the uphills (4.42 miles including the cooldown lap) and 7:13 on the downhills (3.76 miles).

Below are the details of today's workout:

Back up to speed

As I continue to recover from the Big Sur Marathon, I've done a couple runs now at faster than recovery pace, but nothing I could consider "fast." This morning, the plan was to actually do a tempo run, of sorts. I didn't want to kill myself, but I definitely wanted to push the pace.

I got up at 5:30, so I'd have enough time to eat a banana and do an easy 1.3-mile warm-up into town. At the CVS were Chad, Jeff, and Adam. The last time I ran with Adam, we did the loop at a 7:20 pace -- quite a bit faster than I wanted to go today. I asked him if he was okay with a 7:45 pace, and he said that sounded good, so the four of us took off. Adam and I quickly pulled away from ultra-runners Chad and Jeff, for whom a 6.3 mile run is a warm-up for their warm-up.

By the way, Jeff is going to be doing a 24-hour (!) run to benefit Batten Disease research in June. Check out his web site, and give generously. If you're in the Davidson area on June 4 or 5 you can join him and run a few laps, or even get him to run a portion of the event in a silly costume: "If you want to come by and pay for me to run with a rubber chicken on my head this will be your lucky day."

Adam and I started off quickly, with a couple 7:22 miles on some mostly downhill segments. Then the uphill came, and with it the rain. On the hills, we slowed to about a 7:50 pace. Concord Road added an extra challenge: Dozens of branches weighted down with rain made running on the sidewalk an obstacle course. You could run in the street, but then you risked getting hit by a car in the dark morning rain. We ended up settling for the sidewalk, dodging branches as we went. I don't have a good recording of the whole run, but I think we averaged about a 7:40 pace, maybe a bit faster.

After the run, Adam needed to take off right away, so I waited for Chad and Jeff. Since I was soaked to the bone, Chad let me borrow a shirt and Jeff bought me a cup of coffee. I ended up leaving the GPS on in the coffee shop and messing up my recording, but for what it's worth, here's the record of today's run: