10 Days Left until the Akron Marathon Relay

[seventhe]

There are 10 days left until the relay. This week has started my wind-down / taper / whatever:

• 6 mi, 4 mi tempo
• 4 mi easy
• 8-10 mi very easy
• 4 mi easy

...putting me at ~22 miles for this week.

I've worked as hard as I can for this race, and I've run more miles than I did training for the half marathon, so I am really hoping that I'll do well.

However, based on yesterday's run -- a 6 mile run (actually 5.7, I had to cut it short because it got too dark to see on the towpath) with 4 miles at "tempo" pace of ~9:20/mile -- I'm not going to be running my leg of the relay at a ~9 min/mile pace like the training plan seems to think I will.

Even 4 miles at 9:20/mi was exhausting, and that's only half of my leg. At the end of the 4th mile, my heart rate was 181 bpm - that's way too fast especially for an asthmatic; that's really close to the "max" that's "healthy" for me to hit, basically, ever. There's no way I could have done ONE more mile at that speed, let alone FOUR. It isn't going to happen.

I realize that on race day there will be adrenaline, and there will be a different kind of warm-up, and that I'll be going all-out, and that's fine, I understand that. But the plan implied that I'd be running 9:09/miles at the end of it, and that just literally isn't going to happen.

It's okay - a 9:30/mile puts me in at 75 minutes, which cuts 5-6 min off of my time from last year, and I'll be more than happy with that. It's just sad because it proves that my stupid asthmatic body needs to train differently than 'normal' runners to get faster.

Comments

[darcenciel]

Good luck!! The last training week is always kind of exhausting. Your body is like I WANT TO SLEEP AND EAT CHIPS ON THE COUCH.

[jennyclarinet.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you'll do great on the race. Those training plans don't account for a lot of things: your body type, how your body is feeling on a given day, etc. I was talking with one of my students' mom, who is a physical trainer, about how you can only change your body to a point. Some people are built to be fast runners, some people have the ability to bulk up while others do not, no matter how much they lift weights. I will never be a fast runner because I'm not built to be one. Case in point: Kurt rarely trains and can still run at least a minute faster per mile than I can.

But I think we will still kick ass next week. I just got back from a kind of crappy run (with one fall!), but I know I'm doing better than I was this time last year with my race training. And you are too, obviously. Go team J-Squad!

[first-seventhe.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I signed up for a "very hard" training plan, like level 5/5 difficvulty, the hardest I could get, because I really wanted to challenge myself. But, as it has turned out, parts of the training plan were just really hard for me, almost too hard. I would get assigned something like "warmup 1 mile, run 4 miles tempo, cooldown 1 mile" and while I could (BARELY) make it through the hard miles, I would be dead at the end and have to walk a lot of the cooldown. Or, I'd be doing intervals, and I'd have to take almost double the time in-between the intervals that the plan told me to. A lot of it is my asthma -- I am sure generic training plans don't take that into account, and I have to fit in extra lung recharge time after every hard run to avoid completely shutting down. Still, it is disappointing to not be able to run the plan. (Especially when Jeff made a similar plan for himself and he has been able to do all of it!)

I still think we're going to be a lot better than last year though - we are all training more and we're all more experienced. Plus we have awesome shirts!