Week #16: keep going

Summary for week ending Sunday, April 17, 2016:

Number of workouts: 6
Total miles run: 51.48
Average miles per run: 8.58

Miles in April: 127.11
Miles in 2016: 721.53

Mixed running on trails and paved paths. Managed not to fall again on the trails (though had a close call on Friday), leg though scraped up did not bruise as badly as when I fell in February so is not as uncomfortable. Weather very much improved over the week, warming to the 60s and 70s. This did bring out a lot more people to have to run around but I'm feeling magnanimous so won't kvetch (too much) about them walking three across, forcing me to step off into grass. (How can even two people manage to take up the entire width of the path?!) Satisfying tempo workout on Thursday (2 mi E + 3(10 min T) + 2 mi E where my legs felt better with each T segment -- the new normal seems to be that it takes me a few miles to really feel good and in the groove. The T didn't feel quite as free as on Sunday but not a reach to keep appropriate effort. Very glad I decided not to do the trail race on Saturday as that Thursday workout left my legs tired and Saturday morning's easy run was a drag.

Long run on Sunday ended up being 17 instead of 19 with 12 at MP rather than 15. Discovered a new place for flat long running: the Michael Castle Trail along the C&D Canal. It was very sunny and warmish -- in the 60s. Starting at Biddle Point, I ran easy east toward Delaware City until the trail ends (for now -- it's clear they are working on extending it all the way to Delaware City), about 1.8 miles, then turned back and picked up pace while running west past my starting point toward the US13 / DE1 bridges. I thought I'd run that direction for 2 miles and then turn back, stop at the car for water and a gel. That would be around 7 miles, I thought, just about when I like to take my first gel of a long run. It turned out to be too long; I should have stopped for water when I was on my way past the car around 3.5 miles. I had considered it, but didn't want to take a break after having only done about a mile or so at pace, just getting started, preferring to get a little more at pace in before stopping. MP had started out feeling pretty comfortable but by the time I got to the DE1 bridge, it was starting to feel more work-y and I was thirsty. The trail is totally open to the sky, with no cover whatsoever -- at least on the 4-5 mile stretch of it I was on -- except for those brief moments passing under the bridges, which are negligible -- and that was great for the Garmin and being more accurate with apparent pace, but it was not great for physiology. The sun was very warm and took a tough toll, one that I have not experienced yet this year. Because I had never run here before, I was not familiar with the landmarks, so even though it was out-and-back, I did not really have a good sense of how much I still had to run until I made it to the car. It wasn't very enjoyable, but when I saw the beat-up looking dock next to the trailhead, I was elated.

It's so very hard not to guzzle water when you're at such a point. I sucked down a gel and washed it with a few more swallows of water, managing to restrain myself. It felt like enough, and then I started running east again. It was not long before I felt thirsty once more.

The damage had been done. If I had stopped for water at 3.5 mi, it might have mitigated the effects of the sun and heat early, and I might have gotten another couple solid miles at MP in. As it was, it was all I could do to get in 11, and I barely count the 12th because I was fading fast. More liquids, another gel, and I even carried a water bottle with me for the last 3-4 "easy" miles. (Very uncomfortable, very hard not to hammer the whole bottle at once.) Given how awful I felt, I was satisfied enough with what I ended up having done. I had started to feel a little like the way I did in Boston 2014, when I had to drop out: stomach feeling a little queasy, never getting better and even a little worse even after drinking. In the 2014 race, I quit at mile 18; Sunday, I quit at 17. More lessons learned (the hard way, unfortunately): water is more important than getting in time at pace. If I could drink on the fly in training the way I can in a race, it would be easier, but unfortunately, unless B rides a bike right along with me (which he has done a couple times in the past), I'm stuck having to take short breaks. (I won't wear one of those fuel belts with bottles.) Funny how every year, I run in sun and warmth, but the first times of the season often catch me off guard and I don't do it right. A day with weather like Sunday's is deceptive; just standing around, it was pleasant, a nice breeze, even maybe a slight bit cool, but running with no shade was down right hot. 60s and 70s are extremely lovely, but too warm to be "great" for running at elevated efforts over long distances.

07:44.8, 07:42.4, 07:45.6, 07:42.6, 07:42.1, 07:45.5, 07:48.5, 07:45.5, 07:40.4, 07:41.1, 07:49.2, 08:00.7

The trail along the canal is great though -- absolutely sea level with only a little rippling that you barely notice (except when you're exhausted -- somehow even the smallest ups and downs are hard then). There were a lot of people out on bikes enjoying the pretty day, but no one interfered with my running at all, and I only saw two other runners; a handful of walkers, but the majority of users were on bikes. Early in the run, a ship turned into the canal under the DE9 bridge and cruised along parallel to the path. It was the Demeter Leader, and, according to Google, is a vehicles carrier from Panama; myshiptracking.com indicates it docked at Baltimore at 21:37 on Sunday. It made almost no sound as it passed by, pretty much only the whush of the water in its wake. It was amazing that such a gigantic beast of a ship could make less noise going by than a car. It was also a little eerie because there was no sign of people on the ship, so it was just a silent, almost alien-seeming long and huge blue and white box moving by. Other than that, only speedboats and other personal watercraft whizzed by occasionally. Mostly it was quiet but for the sounds of birdlife. Except for feeling pretty cruddy as I went on, I enjoyed it there. It's another place for pace work to keep in my pocket. Closer than the Schuylkill trail and better, actually, because of the openness.

Upcoming week: days of easy mileage and then Saturday morning is the Tommy 10-miler in Lewes. Longest long run on Sunday.

My beating heart

After last Sunday's physically and mentally tough long run, I felt I had rebounded by Tuesday, feeling like myself and running comfortably at a pace I would call "honest" -- not easy, not hard. A kid made a comment to his mother as I passed that irritated me, and for a while I ran faster than I needed to. By the time my temper had cooled off, it had been a couple miles and now my mental treadmill was stuck at that pace. Wednesday, I ran similar pace -- that "honest" one, but it did not feel quite as free as Tuesday. I also had another HR monitor episode that really got me concerned. Tuesday's HR data had looked pretty normal, but Wednesday's ended up baffling me again.

It looked a lot like Tuesday’s, up until between 4.5-5 miles, when it appears to have gone up over 160, maxing at 180 at 5 miles then hovering between 170-175 until 5.5 miles, when it dropped, suddenly and precipitously, to the low 140s. (I believe I was going downhill at this point.) It climbed back to the low 160s for the last half mile, but during that point, I was climbing as well, up the steeper long hill in the park. So while that it sense for my heart rate to go up while I went uphill, the values didn't make sense and the prior sudden leap to >170 and the sharp drop back to what I’d consider “normal” does not.

Nothing made me mad on Wednesday, so I didn't have anything to help float me through a few of those miles, and as I went on, I felt more and more glad that I was only doing 6 miles. As I worked up the last hill at the end of that 6 miles I felt quite done enough, thank you. Ok, so I did feel like I was working a little more than on Tuesday, but did I feel like I was working 180 bpm? I just don't think so. I’m thinking back to a month or so ago when I was doing hard intervals at 7:00 or better. My HR never hit even 170, let alone 180, during those intervals. These relatively-easy running periods with allegedly high heart rate were bothering me. I don’t feel like my heart is working that hard. When I was doing hard workouts where I’d expect my heart rate to be high, it was accompanied by everything you’d expect to feel from working your heart rate up that high while running: increased and heavier respiration, fighting against tiring legs, etc. I did not feel those things in that 170-180 period. I just felt like I was in the last mile or so of a run where I’d been going around under 8:15/mi. No elevated breathing. No rapidly tiring legs. And it just doesn’t feel like my heart is racing that fast. Can it beat that fast and just not feel like it??

Thursday I ran a T workout that felt more tough than usual. I'd like to blame it on longer T segments, but I wasn't even halfway through the first 15 minutes when I knew I wasn't going to make another 15 and a 10 as scheduled. I worried about my heart rate, but it was mostly my legs that were simply unresponsive, and I was crashing and burning just to make it through 10 minutes as the second interval. I even struggled through 1.1 miles as a cooldown. I worried about what my heart rate was during all this (I couldn't really keep track while I was running hard).

Looked fine. Normal range for T efforts, nothing bizarre during the easy segments. Ok ...

So it didn't happen every run. Maybe it was just some technical glitch that happened sometimes. I washed the strap and cleaned the snap contacts and when I went out for an extra easy-peasy trail run on Friday, everything heart-rate seemed to make sense. While I felt awful leg-wise for most of it (so only ran a little more than 4 miles), my heart rate tracked as it usually does on the trails with no outrageous excursions. Ok, that was encouraging.

Though I felt (feel?) reasonably confident it's not me, rather the equipment, I still couldn't help worrying that my heart might be doing wild things without me knowing it. While trying to figure out why the HR data was going so crazy, I wondered if maybe I'm on the verge of overtraining, which might lead my heart rate to start doing some funky things? I have never run so many 50+ mile weeks before so I'm in uncharted territory here. I reviewed what I've been running and decided I am probably running my non-quality days too fast (especially when something makes me mad). Even though the miles at 8:00-8:15 pace feel mostly fine, it's probably not easy enough to really allow me to recover, either from the quality workouts or from all the other days. It would explain why I have struggled to feel good for recent T workouts and have very heavy legs by the end of the week. Whether or not the apparent heart rate issue was real or not, I could probably stand to do easy runs easier and perhaps that would 1) bring any actual heart rate issue back under control by not overtraining and 2) help keep my legs fresher for when they have to run harder. So ...

Today I went out for an easy run and I made the effort to run easy. It's just not easy to run easy, and this is not something I just discovered today. I'm running along, easy, and my legs know they can run faster without feeling a whole lot more effort. So they just naturally want to run a pace that feels comfortable, and running easy does not necessarily feel comfortable. I often feel like I'm applying the brakes the whole time, because my system just wants to do more. I kept an eye on my heart rate today, to keep it from going much over 140. I didn't care what that pace turned out to be; over 140 is where it starts to feel "honest" -- not easy, not hard, but too hard for easy. Except for going up hills, I managed -- but it took vigilance. I did not notice any excursion into way-too-high territory, so I hope that by cleaning the strap I have put an end to this weird behavior.

On the flat, 130-135 bpm was 8:30-8:35 pace. That is plenty fast enough for regular, non-quality mileage. I'm going to make an effort to aim for that on non-quality days, and see if that helps keep my legs from crumbling after the week's miles start to pile up -- because except for next week, the weekly total isn't going to go down, and I don't want to have to back off -- everything I read says volume matters when you want to reach your marathon potential. But if you're not doing it right, you're not going to get there. I need to try to do it right. I'm still learning here, learning on the job.

Next weekend is the Caesar Rodney half. I don't want to pretend like it's just another Sunday run and train through, because I want to make a real effort at racing, so I'm going to back off on the mileage a little this week and not run hard until the race. My schedule had me doing a 12-13 mile run at marathon pace tomorrow, a 15-mile long run next week, and a very tough mix of T and long miles the following week; rather than do three pretty hard and long efforts three weekends in a row, I'm going to switch this week and next week -- just do 15-16 miles tomorrow and do the half as the either the MP run or the following week's T run. I'll see how I feel the week following the race.

Data crunching

I bought my treadmill a year ago, in early February. Up until that point, whenever I needed to get a workout done and was unable to do it outside, I used the Precor machine in our gym at work. I did a lot of quality stuff on it -- many threshold workouts and at least one 19-mile marathon-pace session (2 mi easy + 15 mi MP + 2 mi easy). I ran a 1:34:46 half-marathon off training that involved those workouts on that machine, so I feel they were doing a lot of good. Having done so many miles on it (I can almost guarantee no one else at work ran as much on that thing as I did) I had a very good sense of pace and effort on it; 7:30 on the treadmill felt quite a lot like 7:30 on the track, if not a little harder. Whatever the treadmill said I was running more or less felt like the same effort outside, and when I was doing ~7:10/mi T workouts, I felt comfortable and in control at that pace setting on the Precor.

I was very pleased to acquire my own machine for convenience reasons, but I quickly discovered during my first T workout at home that 7:08 on my Landice felt nothing like 7:08 on the Precor at work. I felt like I was flying, and I had to really, really work to maintain the pace. By this time, I had a heart rate monitor with my Garmin and made sure to use it while running on the treadmill as electronic proof that I had actually done the workout as much as for the HR information itself. I did not have the HR monitor for very many workouts on the Precor (approximately 10) as I have had for the Landice (40+), so there isn't a large bucket of data for the work treadmill. Comparing the average pace/average HR data from both treadmills doesn't show a dramatic difference between pace settings. It may be that the Precor data isn't a large enough sample size to be significant against the larger group of data from the Landice; there is quite a bit of scatter, too. Whatever the reason, this comparison did not show unequivocally that I was working harder on the Landice. I'll admit this disappointed me somewhat. I'd wanted to see those Precor data points way offset, but the results say what they say. Regardless of what the data points told, I knew what I was feeling. The Landice felt fast. There had to be a way to show that.

I set up an experiment.¹ I measured the length of the belt and then timed its revolutions at different pace settings. My first experiment averaged 3 trials timing 5 revolutions at a range of pace settings, from 1.5 mph up to 8.6 mph mostly in steps of about 1 mph to cover what I would ever be likely to run on it. I later also did a trial averaging 3 trials of timing 10 revolutions with a similar range in mph but adding a few more steps in the higher range (8-8.7, where I would expect to do my threshold running); it was easier to time 10 revolutions than 5 at faster speeds. From the time per revolution data, I was able to calculate actual mph and convert to actual pace, which I then compared to the theoretical pace based on the machine's setting.

At all settings, there was a significant delta -- the belt was moving faster than what the console claimed. Aha! So I was not mistaken; what felt faster really was faster. I plotted the data; I was expecting some linear dependence where I could calculate some constant I could use to estimate how fast I really ran (e.g., if, based on treadmill settings, I ended up with an 8:15 average mile for my workout, what was my real average pace?), and was confounded when the plot did not show any such dependence. See below (plot from the 5 revolution data set).

The plots for both the 5 and 10 revolution experiments have the same features, so I expect what I see is real. At low mph, there is a very large difference between the setting and calculated pace (more than a minute per mile); the difference jumps up between 1.5 and 2.5 mph, then, as mph increases, the delta decreases -- to a point, where it stabilizes between 5 and 7 mph; a slight increase at 8 mph before suddenly stepping down again at mph greater than 8, where it appears to stabilize again.

Well, this all looked weird. How should I treat this odd relationship? I never, ever run below 5 mph on the treadmill as part of the recorded workout, so in coming up with a correction factor I could ignore that region, which includes the curving part. The great majority of the miles I've put in on the treadmill are below 8 mph (only T workouts go faster, and they are not generally representative of the bulk of the running I do inside), so I could set aside those strangely-offset data points too. I'm left with data points that form a basically straight line with a slight upward slope due to the slight increase in difference at 8 mph.² (See below; plot from the 10 revolution data set, similar obtained for 5 revolutions.)

Using the slope of that line, I calculated adjusted pace for each mph setting; then, I plotted expected pace and adjusted pace for the range of mph settings I typically use to obtain a correction factor (the equation of that line):

Even though the calculations confirmed what I felt to be true, that the treadmill is faster than it says it is, I still thought that somewhere in the heart rate data would be the smoking gun to prove the calculations represented something real. Over the year-plus that I've had the Garmin with the HR monitor, I've racked up about twice the amount of HR data from running on the roads as I have from the treadmill. I've had fun playing with that data too -- correlating HR to altitude, temperature, etc. There is considerable scatter due not only to those factors, but others such also to terrain differences³ -- for example, some times I was in better shape than others or not recovered; some of those workouts are hillier than others, which can skew HR depending on whether I try to run even effort or even pace. Even with all the scatter, there is still a general slope correlating HR with pace. I wanted to compare road HR data (where, assuming reasonably accurate GPS, the reported average pace can be assumed to be actually what I ran) with the treadmill HR data. To cut down a little bit on the scatter, I limited the road data set to runs done in Delaware. The trend is still obvious regardless of the remaining scatter. By plugging in the as-obtained average treadmill place data into the equation from the correction factor plot, I obtained adjusted pace data, which I then plotted with the road data. The treadmill points fall right into the thick of the road points.

The calculated pace of the treadmill looks like it's comparable to the road pace, based on my heart rate. At last: I'm satisfied, and when I'm aiming at a target pace running inside, I can adjust the treadmill mph in good faith.

See anything I missed taking into consideration in my data crunching? Please let me know!

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¹Note: experiments were performed with no one running on the treadmill. It can be expected that the weight of a person running would create some drag on the belt, slowing it relative to no weight on it at all. I cannot judge how significant that would be for me at 110-115 pounds. All data analysis treats this as negligible. Perhaps in the future, in the interest of scientific accuracy, I'll redo the experiment and have someone else do the timing while I'm running those speeds.

²Perhaps someone with experience/knowledge of motors could explain to me why it would work so inconsistently in this fashion.

³I deliberately treat trail workouts separately (due to GPS accuracy issues, mostly).