Found a fascinating piece (at Dubious Quality… thanks Bill!) in the New York Times — written in 2006 but new to me — about a Slovenian ultra-endurance cyclist. Jure Robic wins ultra-endurance cycling events like RAAM and Le Tour Direct. He’s won them for years. These are multi-week, non-stop events. He also has the world record for the longest distance covered in 24 consecutive hours: 518.7 miles. By every measure he’s likely the greatest living ultra-endurance athlete. I’ve labeled this “inspiration” and it is in some ways, but it could also be construed as a cautionary tale as well. You see, he’s a bit crazy.

The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback.

‘‘Mujahedeen, shooting at me,’’ he explains. ‘‘So I ride faster.’’

I recently mentioned that I needed to find a way to keep going when my body tells me I shouldn’t.

It’ll require me to rethink my own limits of pain and the amount of effort I’m willing to exert. It’ll mean convincing myself not to give in when everything is screaming that I should. In short, I have to find someone inside myself that I’ve never found.

Maybe I need to find a little bit of Jure Robic in me. Not much; I don’t personally desire to be chased by Mujahedeen. But I know when my mind is telling me to quit I’m nowhere near my body’s limits.

Today was scheduled for a simple 3 mile tempo run at 7:52. But I had other ideas, especially with my lack of leg workouts in the last two weeks and my 5K this weekend: hill repeats. Don’t know what a hill repeat is? Simple.

1. Pick a decent hill.
2. Run up the hill.
3. Jog back down the hill.
4. Repeat steps 1 through 3.

Hill repeats are classic running workouts. If you’re training for a hilly race, obviously hills should be a big part of your training. However, hill repeats have benefits even on the flat races. If you don’t like to hit the weight room — or, like me, have difficulty working gym time into your schedule — a hill workout constitutes a great workout for improving leg strength as it’s related to running. It has the added benefit of being a serious cardiovascular workout as well.

I admit I haven’t done many traditional hill repeats, but that’s changing as it’s vital to both get faster and — duh — get used to hills. In accordance with my other dictate about increasing my foot turnover I started off with the 175 BPM Podrunner track going. I did okay at 172 and figured this would be a good jump. I warmed up pretty fast at an average 7:42 pace — more about that later — and maintained that on my first hill repeat. The hill I was targeting is right near my usual lake lap, so I warmed up around the lake which brought me to the beginning of the incline. The hill is right at 1/4 mile to the apex which is a good distance for a medium hill repeat; the elevation change is about 100 feet for about a 7.5% grade. I managed 4 repeats before my form started breaking down, with splits of 1:58, 1:54, 1:58 and 2:03.

Overall, a fun and challenging workout.

Thoughts on foot turnover

175 is fast. I believe that’s as fast as I’m going to try to push it except for maybe mile time trials. My warm-up at 175 SPM was quite fast as it’s really tough for me to go slower than about 7:45 with that turnover. It’s far easier maintaining closer to 7:00 pace at that turnover rate… which is great if I’m shooting for that pace but I’m not even at that pace for 5Ks yet. I’ll almost certainly try for the Second Empire Classic this weekend, but we’ll see. I don’t think I’m going to go higher for right now until 175 doesn’t feel like so much of a stretch.

They say that 180 is where the elite athletes are which I believe. I suppose there’s another side to that coin: unless you’re turning 4:00 and 5:00 miles like elite athletes it’s a bit harder to hit that turnover rate. For my near-term marathon and half-marathon paces even 175 is likely high. Or it could simply be that I’m not used to it yet. It’s interesting trying it, though, and seeing how my body and paces react.

Next stop: The 10th Annual Second Empire Classic 5K! Race report on Sunday or Monday. With hopefully good news… though the weather outlook is deteriorating rapidly. The high is currently up to 93 degrees. It was 89 yesterday. At this rate by the time Sunday dawns it’ll be 105.

I was hoping to run the 10th Annual Second Empire Class 5K — touted as “one of the fastest 5K courses in the Triangle area” — but it looked as though we would be having Julia’s birthday party that day due to scheduling conflicts. A bit disappointing, but there’s no race in the world I’d skip my daughter’s birthday party for. Now the party is being held on Saturday, though, so my Sunday suddenly opened up.

I’d love to PR this race but one factor may limit my chances somewhat; 90 degrees tends to hamper the performance a bit. It’s not like this is a morning race, either. It’s held right in the perfect time for heat, 2:00PM. Sadistic race directors.

I’ll have to go out a bit conservatively and see how I feel; maybe shoot for a 7:30 split for the first mile and adjust accordingly. I’d like to think I could do better than that, but that heat is the wildcard. I know how I react during the heat: poorly. If humidity stays low it shouldn’t be completely brutal, but 90 degrees is still 90 degrees.

Keeping my fingers crossed!

Interval day! I tend to look forward with almost sadistic glee to interval day. I don’t have the intervals set up in my calendar so I pull up the training plan right before I head out to see what the day holds. Longer intervals cause anxiety so I typically have a knot of nervous energy in my stomach as I pull it up.

Today wasn’t so bad: 4 x 1000m @ 7:05 pace with 400m recovery intervals. Under 1600m per interval doesn’t cause me too much stress, though it’s entering that wheelhouse between 800m and 1600m where depending on the day it can go great or it can be ugly. Today would be good, though, I knew. The weather had cooled off to below 70 with a light breeze, mostly cloudy skies.

I am also fully in turnover rate ramp-up mode. I planned to start at 165 and see where to go from there. That’s 9 strides per minute (SPM) over where I started this process. During my warmup I wobbled a bit on pace trying to get the turnover firmed up along with the pace. One thing I’m discovering is that those higher turnovers are almost impossible at lower paces like my typical marathon pace. I’d be shuffling along like a spastic monkey trying to turn a 9:00 mile at a 182 SPM turnover! So my warmups at 165 were run faster than usual at around 8:00 pace. I did my first interval then bumped up to 169 SPM. Following the second I bumped up to 172 which is where I stayed.

The results were pretty good. It’s truly hard to determine efficiency, though. If I had really paid attention to my stride rate previously I’d be able to make some direct comparisons, but I didn’t. I assume my stride rate on interval days are faster with me paying more attention, but the simple fact is I might always have increased my stride rate as my pace increased. But I don’t think so.

Here’s the best comparison I can make. Here’s the workout today:

And here’s a similar interval workout from March during Shamrock Marathon training when I wasn’t working on turnover.

My scheduled pace today was 7:05. I had splits of 7:03 (165 SPM), 7:06 (169 SPM), 6:49 (172 SPM) and 6:51 (172SPM). For the run in March I had splits of 7:16, 7:19, 7:14, 7:15, and 7:15 at whatever stride rate I hit back then. So, a bit faster pace today. My average heartrate for the intervals today were 169, 169, 169 and 173. For the slower intervals they were 165, 160, 162, 164, and 166. About the only stat that looks favorable is maximum heart rate, with it being the nearly same at 174 and 175 both days.

What does that mean? Eh, a whole lot of nothing, really. I think a higher turnover will be an important part of meeting my goals. I’m not at the turnover rate I’ll eventually get to so everything now is just getting used to it. Perhaps this weekend if I do the 5K I’m thinking of doing I’ll have more concrete results… like a PR.

So my long tempo run was the first attempt at increasing foot turnover. I didn’t really know what to expect. In practice it was actually painless. Of course, I’m only bumping up a little bit at a time. From my baseline, plodding 156 BPM I started the first half of my scheduled 8 miles at 161 BPM. I warmed up with some butt kickers and high knee raises to get the legs moving and then headed out at the trail with the 161 BPM Podrunner track playing in the Clip+. It was a bit strange at first, making pace determination tricky. I finally got dialed in at the appropriate pace and stride rate, but my breathing was all over the map since it felt like I was working harder.

Eventually I got things sorted out. I was scheduled for an 8:22 pace but was amenable to lower. For the first 4 miles I averaged an 8:07 pace. I felt really good overall. For the back half I kicked it up one notch to 162 BPM. Obviously that’s not going to feel very different over 161, but I figure a gradual increase over my next runs will be easier than big jumps. I was trucking pretty well on the return trip and kicked it up to around 5K pace over the final mile. I finished with an 8:01 average pace over the second half.

So, experiment successful?

There’s a lot to digest with that run. For one thing I haven’t run an actual 10K race in well over a decade or even two. However, I know I broke my PR — seems like it was near 54 minutes — during this 8 mile training run which is pretty amusing to me. I think the biggest mental hurdle I’ll have to leap is my breathing pattern. I mentioned that I typically, on longer runs, have a set breathing pattern I try to maintain.

I hit the next splits in 8:58, 8:59, 8:59, 9:00 and 8:58. That gets us to mile marker 17 and the end of the good portion of the race. The rest of the day was a giant pile of suck. I hit about 17 and a quarter and didn’t feel right. I normally maintain a 2-steps-in-3-steps-out breathing cadence when I’m at pace except for hills. I couldn’t do that anymore.

Well, during this tempo run I was 2-in, 2-out the whole way. And that’s okay. That’s the adjustment I need to make. Prior to this, if I couldn’t maintain my 2-in, 3-out I considered that over-exertion and figured I was about to die. When in fact it’s probably a good thing to increase the oxygen input and carbon dioxide output as I’m going. Trying to force my body to a slower breathing rhythm was likely sapping energy. If I’m going to get faster and maintain faster paces I’ll have to get used to a 2-in, 2-out breathing pattern. And possibly even faster during the sprints at finishes.

Tomorrow is interval day and I’ll likely try to work at 164 or 165 BPM, then get 167-168 on short tempo day on Thursday. I’m fairly excited to see how my body reacts.

Right now I’m bumping up against the ceiling in my performance on various workouts. I don’t have any more aerobic or muscular capacity to get more gains in speed. I can improve my aerobic and muscular capacity which is a long-term goal, obviously, but if I’m going to make the kind of drastic gains necessary to reach Boston, I have to find another way to improve and that’s running economy. I’ve never really thought about running form much before. But now that I’m trying to become a faster runner I have to start looking at every aspect of my running and find those areas that I can improve if I’m going to reach my goals. Thankfully, I know precisely where I’m starting from: I’m a plodder. I make no bones about it.

I remember being amazed when I realized that one of the songs on my usual heavy playlist synchronized perfectly with my typical running gate. Slipknot’s Wherein Lies Continue popped up and my feet just meshed of their own accord instantly.

That song is approximately 156 BPM, making that my typical running stride. Frankly, not atypical for the average recreational runner apparently. The vast majority of elite runners — and possibly all of them — by contrast have an average stride rate of right around 180 per minute. That higher stride rate yields considerably more efficiency than my slower, plodding rate. Think about it this way: the more strides per minute for a particular pace the shorter the distance between each stride. That shorter distance per stride can be achieved with a stride that is lower to the ground so that you don’t have to put as much spring upwards into each stride to make the foot go that distance in the air. That extra spring upwards required for taking the longer stride is wasted energy. That’s energy that I expend just to run at that pace whereas if I increase my stride rate I’ll expend less energy to go the same pace. Put even more simply, I can work less for the same pace, or I can increase my pace with the same energy expenditure. Also, that foot has to land at some point, too. Which do you think is harder on the body, landing from lower in the air from a shorter stride or landing from higher in the air after a longer stride? Yes, shorter stride wins again.

Here’s where I need to be. Eric Johnson’s Cliffs of Dover is right around 182 BPM.

I know what I need to do, how do I get there?

This will be a hard change. That stride rate is pretty well ingrained at this point. My stride rate is intimately involved in my breathing rate. It’s just natural. So I’ll have to improve slowly. There are some drills to improve stride rate that you can find described in great detail elsewhere. And I’ll start working those in at the beginning of workouts.

I’ve also got some supporting material loaded up on the Clip+. If you haven’t heard of the Podrunner podcasts, go take a look. Hour long techno mixes at specific BPMs. I have every mix from 156 all the way up to 180 loaded up on the Clip+. So as I’m running, I’m going to work up the BPM playlist a little bit at a time, working to become comfortable with 3-5 BPM faster per week. A gradual improvement. Let my body get used to it as I go.

Got my long run today. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I read something today that helped me along a path. I mentioned even before Shamrock that I was having trouble deciding on long-term goals.

But after that? I’m unsure. I have two goals competing in my head, both of which are substantial and separate.

• Work toward a Boston qualification. This would require a lot of work and a lot of pain. And I might not make it. Given a single marathon under my belt with a 4:30 time it seems improbable in the highest degree. But with enough work and smart training it might be possible. If I reach my relatively moderate time goals at Shamrock I’ll have a better idea of the feasibility of this.
• Shift to triathlons. Obviously the ultimate goal would be a full ironman someday but it might have to wait several years simply due to the training amount. I’d be happy starting with Olympic distances and working towards a half ironman for a more short-term long-term goal. Swimming will be the biggest hurdle though I’m not much of a cyclist either.

I completed Shamrock while not quite meeting my time goals. But I improved. However, it’s hard to go from that level of improvement to a jump to “I’m going to qualify for Boston”. Is it even possible for a 4:00-and-change runner to somehow ratchet it up enough to reach 3:20? This guy did it. Yes, he’s younger. Yes, he’s likely a better runner; he went from a 4:53 first marathon to a 3:50 second marathon in comparison. But even so there’s hope.

I know it won’t happen this year. I know it likely won’t happen next year. It’ll take the most concerted effort I’ve ever put forth toward anything. But I believe I can do it, one step at a time. It’ll require me to rethink my own limits of pain and the amount of effort I’m willing to exert. It’ll mean convincing myself not to give in when everything is screaming that I should. In short, I have to find someone inside myself that I’ve never found.

It’s scary, yes. But I think that guy is in there somewhere, and he wants to come out and run Boston. There’s only one way to do that, and that’s stop screwing off and do it.

In the meantime…

I’m not changing anything shorter term. My goals remain the same there: get faster on my 5Ks. Frankly, that’s a precursor to anything else. If I can’t get faster at shorter distances I’m not going to maintain the necessary 7:38 average pace to qualify. So still 5K-focused training — though with longer long runs to prep for my half in May — increasing my hill work, shooting for those 5K PRs. Over the course of the summer, I’ll transition back to marathon training but at faster paces.

Wish me luck.

As part of my commitment to not get caught out by hills anymore, I will no longer avoid the rollies on my tempo days. That started today for my scheduled 4 mile tempo run at 8:07 pace after a mile of warm-up. There’s a course that I used to follow earlier in my training last year that has some reasonably challenging rolling hills that I decided to hit. Of course, when I was running them last year it was at Galloway marathon training paces of anywhere from a low of 8:30 up to 10:00.

Honestly, it felt good to do the hills and do them at pace. I also practiced some will power, trying to override my recent tendency to let up and either slow down or walk. I had to stop at one particular road crossing going and coming, but it only gave me about a 5 to 10 second reprieve. I finished with an overall pace of 7:53 with a final half mile at an average 7:30 pace.

Hopefully throwing in some more hills — and adding some real hill repeats — will keep me better prepared for the gnarly rollies than I was for St. Timothy’s.

Back in January I started doing P90X. Well, let me rephrase that. I added P90X workouts to my workout regimen and created a kind of hybrid P90X/FIRST marathon training program. I didn’t do the aerobic workouts espoused by P90X because I was already doing my 3 running workouts a week. I used the upper-body workouts of P90X to primarily tone up and lose weight, and I didn’t use the leg workouts because, frankly, my legs weren’t responding well and I didn’t want to injure myself before the Shamrock Marathon. I wasn’t shooting for being “ripped” or getting extreme, I wanted a decent workout. P90X delivered that, although I have since switched to circuit training in the gym with several exercises inspired by P90X still in the mix. I just got bored with the same workouts in my bonus room.

One thing I took a shine to was pull-ups. I bought a pull-up bar off eBay. You’ll want to be careful about which kind you buy, as there are some made with lighter gauge steel that I wouldn’t trust. The one I ended up with is stout and heavy. I’ve added some felt around the ends that touch the doorway to limit the damage that it does. It works flawlessly. Having so many grip positions is fantastic. Mixing things up is simple.

So now I find myself doing pull-ups and chin-ups at random times during the day. When I have a free minute I’ll head upstairs to where the bar is and do a set of pushups. Any kind will do: standard, wide, diamond, decline. Do a set to failure. Then pick a grip and do a set of pull-ups or chin-ups. Mix up your sets: reverse grip, wide grip, hammer grip. That’s it. 1 minute and you’re done with both. On an average day I’ll get maybe 40 extra pull-ups and 100 to 200 pushups sprinkled throughout the day.

Pull-ups are fantastic upper body exercises, but they’re hard. “I can’t do a single pull-up! How am I going to do this?” When I first got my bar earlier this year it was my weakest exercise. On standard width, front-grip pull-ups I could maybe do 2 with anything approaching correct form. Reverse-grip chin-ups are easier and I could do perhaps 5. Now I’m up to over 10 of any kind. So, how do you improve if you can’t do any? 2 primary ways:

1. Work the negative. If you can’t pull yourself up even once, use your legs and push with your legs or jump to the top to the finishing position. Then let yourself down slowly. By going slowly downward — “working the negative” — you’ll work the same muscles. Eventually you’ll be able to pull yourself up.
2. Do “assisted” pull-ups. Get a chair and put it in front of you when you’re standing at the bar. Grip the bar and use one leg to help yourself pull up to the top. Only use as much leg as you need. Need to increase the difficulty? Move the chair a bit further away. You can use this chair to increase the number of reps you perform as well. When I first started I would do as many as I could without the chair, then use the chair to get an extra few reps.

Combine those and soon you’ll see incremental improvement. And you’ll definitely notice a difference in your arms and back.

For those of you who don’t know, I follow the FIRST training plans as described in the book Run Less, Run Faster. The book is decent but arguably has too many “I followed this plan and it worked!” stories and too little actual content. But the content that is there seems solid enough. The essential tenets are running fewer but higher quality workouts where every run counts. There’s 3 days of running per week: interval, tempo, and long runs. The nice thing is that the workouts are different enough week to week to keep it interesting.

While doing the marathon training at the pace I was training for the intervals were fairly easy. Now that I’m trying to speed up a bit in my 5K training they’ve gotten challenging. And by “challenging” I mean “why hello, max heart rate.” I know that this will help my ability to run faster for longer but it sure does hurt while doing it.

One thing that’s difficult for me is judging those paces when I get my legs going. I tend to oscillate over- and under-pace as I dial it in for any particular interval. I’m sure this gets easier with practice as I can already tell a difference when I’m given, say, a 6:52 pace for an interval and I get going and look down at the Garmin to see it closing in on that. I can’t imagine how folks pace themselves without GPS units, but I suppose it requires running on measured distances. I’ll take the Garmin over that any day.

The recovery intervals are tricky too. Do I walk them or do I jog them? Honestly, it depends on how beat I am. On the pyramid yesterday I was able to jog the recovery intervals following the 200m, 400m, 600m, and first 800m intervals and get my heart rate down enough to prepare for the next interval. However, following that I was too winded to recover my heart rate enough before the next interval while jogging, so I walked a bit until my heart was under control a bit then started jogging. That’s the best thing I can come up with and seems to not be cheating too much.

Here’s the workout as recorded by the Garmin.