Sunday, July 20, 2008

Running Summary - 7/20

Monday - REST.
Tuesday - SOAP. (Get it? But seriously, more REST.)
Wednesday - 5 x Yasso 800s @ 2% incline. 5 Miles total.
Thursday - 5 1/4 miles.
Friday - REST
Saturday - 3.5 miles and then threw in a 3:30 800 at the end for 4 miles total.
Sunday - 10 mile slow run.

Total: 24 miles.

Don't know what my pace is on the 10 miles though it felt like I had more energy than last weekend's 10. Could be I'm just taking it a little easier. Send Brandon my GPS watch so that he could track every mile of his crazy 50 mile run in Leadville so no geeky data. This is probably a good thing since whenever I have the watch, I monitor it like crazy and try to beat my current average pace. Yes, that's a problem because it means I'm forever trying to speed up on my long runs which is bad. I don't think average pace was slower than 10/mile though so I'm happy.

And tired.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Jargon - 1

Co-opetition. Seen as a title to a book that is referenced in a footnote of the introduction to Competitive Strategy by Porter.

Similar words: Stag-flation. Sup-ferior. Rej-doption.

Sunday, July 13, 2008


10 miles.

95 minutes.

Feel like a man.

A man who runs slowly.

And whose calves are completely exhausted now.

And well ok it was actually about 9.85 miles so a man who rounds up to the next integer.

But a man who is now up to 20 miles for this week.

A man who's careful about ITBS.

A running man with a goal.

Less than 4 hours.

26 miles.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Two Bags

I don't travel all that much but I fantasize that I will do a lot of it at some point during my life. Preferably soon. I'm also a fan of being prepared and thinking things through, which means that I need some durable luggage options for traveling. Finally, I'm sucker for luxurious detail for its own sake. It's really fortunate then that I'm thinking about these things because I just have too much money sitting around and I really must spend it. So, for shortish travel, I think a nice Glaser duffel bag will do.

But what about work documents, laptop, pens, and the like? Surely I won't put them into a duffel bag? OK, maybe I will since Glaser does offer modular organization inserts for their hand crafted and customized bags but I wouldn't want to put in my 1 hour of work per week as the head of Making Lots of Money, Inc. carrying around a duffel. How crass! This is where the Rocket Bag comes in. Yes, it sounds a bit like the briefcase of a certain improbable jet-pack aided Disney hero from the days of yore (yore mama!) but it's actually quite a bit less cheese and quite a bit more Le Grand Fromage des Kings et les Hommes avec Way Too Beaucoup de Money, Edition Limité. Regardless of your gender and sexual orientation though, you are a metrosexual if you get one of these:
See what I mean? You do. The bag of French yuppie kings.

Both of these options are supposed to survive a million miles of air travel, various kinds of weather and adversity, nuclear blasts, and come through it all looking as good as, if not better than, the day you got them. Also, you'll travel much lighter with these bags because they'll take care of that annoying extra wad of cash you've got in your back pocket.

Now I wonder if the 7x7x7 fits into the Rocket Bag...

Sunday, July 06, 2008

The Plan

I read about Yasso 800s so I knew what they were. Idea is you take your goal marathon pace and substitute "minutes" for hours. You then take those minutes and run 800m intervals (with 400m jog in between). So for a 4 hour marathon, do 4 minute 800s. 3:30 marathon, 3:30 800s, and so on. You work up to 10 of those during your marathon training along with distance runs and such, and you're ready to do the marathon at your goal pace. Simple, really.

Sounds sort of easy but it's pretty brutal when you're on your last set of 800s, whether it's 3, 4, 5, or 10. If I do them right, my diaphragm hates me and it takes a little while to recover. Afterwards, I don't really want to puke but I can tell my abs are a bit overworked. That's what they feel like.

I'm toying with the idea of running the Santa Barbara Pier to Peak half-marathon (all up hill, about 4k feet elevation, end of August) so Brandon clued me in on hill workouts: run up a steep gradient hill hard for 2 minutes, jog back down for 3. I haven't scoped out the good hills around where I live so I go to the gym and set the treadmill for a 10% uphill gradient for the uphill bits and 0% gradient for the "downhill" bits.

For both the Yassos and the hills, I'm getting about four repetitions before I'm beat. I'm still getting used to it too so it takes a lot out of me and my long runs on the weekend suffer unless I rest for two days. All part of re-learning the process I guess. Big overall plan is to push up the hill repeats and alternate between Yassos and tempo runs. Once I get comfortably back in to the double digits (still at 8 miles for the long runs), I might do more hills and long weekend hills. I'll be pretty happy if I can finish the Pier to Peak without breaking my legs again. And then, I don't know, the Shanghai Marathon?

Saturday, July 05, 2008