Running To The Crawl

I thought Road to The Crawl was dumb so it's Running to The Crawl. So since the Sham was cancelled and I have all this fitness with nothing to do, I decided that I would train for the Crawling Crab held in October. I thought the race was in Norfolk, VA but apparently it's in Hampton, VA. Makes the hotel plans a but more complicated since the Sham doubles as a kind of beachfront holiday.

Currently the Vomeros are showing wear, particularly on my left, problem, foot. For such expensive sneakers to be showing more wear at half the mileage of my cheaper sneakers is not confidence inspiring. The Pegs await fast days and race days so I'm not worried about that pair. But I'll clearly have to invest in another 2 pairs of sneakers prior to October.

On the training front I'm "flattening the MAF" as in I'm dropping my average slow pace heart rate for the slower runs. Instead of trying to push to MAF and stay there, I'm allowing myself to run at a lower rate, not necessarily slower pace. I'm currently testing out a Mi Band 4 which does not have an always on screen. So I have no idea how fast I'm running except for when I get to a mile marker. I recently ran a 12 mile PR under these conditions, which previously required me to run *very* fast for the last two miles. So not knowing how fast I'm running during a run, but only knowing my heart rate, is proving very beneficial.

Lastly, I'm working on my cadence. My band, and watch, has been saying that my cadence is 167 which is very low. Since both of these things do not accurately measure my heart rate I'm concerned that it may be low. So I'm going to do a test to count my cadence. Experts say that I should be at 180. Taller people, like myself, tend to have lower cadences so if I get into the mid 170s I'd be happy. Unfortunately the metronome app I have conflicts with the music app sooo running in silence would be required. I don't like running in silence.

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No One Said You Had To Use Both

So in my "Closed" post I mentioned that I would attempt a run with the new insert in my left sneaker and nothing in the right. Seems to be a win. I discovered that I was feeling pain at the top of my right foot when I had the insert in. I did an 11 miler today and no pain in the right foot. No pain in the left foot and no pain in either knee.

While I was researching shoes I ran across an article in which a podiatrist said the worst thing about shoes is that they come in pairs. I guess I learned first hand what he meant.

Of course that means I have paid quite a bit for a single insert. Anyone want a right foot stability insert?

Road To The Sham: Local Run

So I ran the distance today which would have been race day. Results:

1) 1:41:01 for 13.22 miles. So 1:40:30 ish for the 13.1 distance Average of 7:38/mile. a full 2 seconds off my per mile pace for my PR. Booo.
2) This would have been a Sham PR which was previously 1:42.

Some caveats:

1) Of course since this wasn't a race there wasn't the pack of people that can cause you to run faster (for better or worse).

2) My nutrition plan went to hell. I have two waist bottles. One had water and the other an electrolyte and sugar mix. At mile 4 I discovered that the electrolyte mix bottle was empty. Apparently it sprung a leak. So I was running without half of my rations. Not good. I started to really feel it around mile 10. My heart rate was higher than training and I was having problems producing power at lower heart rates which cost me average speed.

3) Since this was an out and back run, there was a severe slow down at the turnabout. This kicked up the average time for mile six by a significant amount of seconds. Not making excuses, just saying.

Road To The Sham: Closed

And so the Road to the Sham ends with a cancellation of the race due to Wuhan Corona virus AKA: COVID-19. Don't let these folks bully you into not saying Wuhan virus. All current evidence says it started in Wuhan China and it's not racist to say so. If they want to go down that hole then they need to call the Spanish Flu by it's "science" name, H1N1. But that's not really the point of this post.

Anyway. Months of training for this particular event was not in vain. No, I won't be racing so I won't get the PR, well, shot at the PR, but I am much fitter than before and I've had eye opening experiences some of which I'll review below:

1) Current MAF training results: I have dropped between 30 seconds to a minute on my MAF runs. Hills that spiked my heart rate well over MAF limits are now manageable. That is I still slow down but I no longer have to walk to maintain my MAF number.

2) I have been able to run over 100 miles a month without injury. This is something that was impossible to do prior to MAF training and being very strict about speed during rest days. Matter of fact HAVING rest days. Now the pros are doing 100 miles a week. I'm not there yet particularly since I'm not doing marathons, but I'll definitely be doing more mileage as the months go along to maintain this fitness.

3) I have a bad arch in my left foot. In February I purchased a new sneaker: Nike Vomero 14.

This was the first non-stability shoe I have run in since the early 2000s. I got into stability shoes after knee, Achilles and a heel spur. Looking back I figured that it was my sneakers rather than my form (I heel struck). In the past 5 years or so I adjusted to a mid-foot strike but I still wore stability shoes with inserts. Problems went away. So I thought that perhaps now that I was running in better form that I could wear a neutral show. Yes I did try the Vaporfly 4%. It was very springy but had nothing under my arches. I thought it to be a bad idea to spend on that if I couldn't run in it for long due to arch issues. Glad I didn't.

Anyway Vomeros were and are very comfortable. Very springy and make my stability shoes feel like well...shoes. Since I was still comfortable I got the idea to get a lighter shoe for the faster runs and race day. I settled on the Nike Pegasus Turbo 2.

Soooo..very light. Very springy. Even less arch support.

Did a few tempo and threshold runs in them. Great.

Then the pains started. Particularly in one foot. Exactly what I was afraid of. I noticed at the end of the run while walking that my left foot was collapsing inward. Something that doesn't happen in my stability shoes. Boooooo. I put my old insert into the Vomeros but they made the problem worse because now the shoe was too tight. But that's when I noticed it was only one foot that had issues. Just to confirm, I put the inserts into my stability shoe, which I had stopped using since they felt like garbage compared to the Nikes, and took another run where I found the inserts helped with the impacts, making them closer to the Nikes but now I had no foot pain (which honestly usually went away after a mile or so in the Nikes)

My next experiment will be to put the insole into the left Vomero and nothing in the right since that foot doesn't seem to have problems. But now that the race is cancelled I don't need to wear the faster shoes since given the current public scare it's unlikely to be running any races until the fall. Perhaps this will give me the chance to get custom inserts from one of those stores that I can use in the Nikes.

Right now the summer plans are to go heavy into the MAF training, including my bike rides in order to increase my aerobic capacity. The faster I can run at low heart rates the faster I can run in race conditions.

Thanks for following.

The Peak Before The Taper

So the Sham is March 20, or 5 weeks out. I hit max distance 2 weeks ago so by the time it's 2 weeks out I'll have done the distance, and most importantly, the time quite a few time. It also means speedwork is on the table. One of the things with heart rate training is that there are a LOT of miles where you are running well below race pace so fast running becomes foreign. Running by feel becomes slow because you "feel" fine. So speedwork is what's on the table. Essentially all runs from now on will be half MAF running and half race pace or better. Listening to the body so that I don't get injured. Speaking of which, the huge benefit of my current training is that I have totally avoided the injuries I usually have by now (usually knee pain but sometimes foot too).

What's also nice is that I now know my expected heart rates for different paces and supposedly I can keep out of the red at a pace that's about 20-30sec/mile faster than my target pace. This means there is a strong chance of a PR. We shall see.

Road To The Sham: Hitting Sevens

So we had a bit of warm weather which allowed me to run in less clothes. Mid 50s is great running weather and it showed. On a previous post I noted that my "street MAF" average time was 9:20/ mile. Well yesterday I ran a MAF of 8:16/mile with many dips into the 7s. I won't do a track test until March. The great thing here is that I'll likely be able to maintain my target speed at a low heart rate relative to last time. If so, I should be able to hit my PR. The one "problem" now is that I'm running faster than I intended to. I may end up having to actually slow down on purpose as to avoid injury as I'm now over 100 miles/month (which I've only done 3 times before).

Road To The Sham: Polar Moments

On suspicion that my Amazefit Bip was not accurately measuring my heart rate, I purchased a polar chest strap. Today on my treadmill run I was pleasantly surprised to see that my monitor connected to the machine. Found out that the Amazefit was off by as much as 22 BPM!!!! With an average of 12 BPM

Here I was thinking I had the aerobic fitness of a 90 year old.

So the lesson here for people getting into heart rate training is to get the chest strap monitor.