Saturday, March 3, 2018
Running Goals in 2018
(Fair warning, this post is all about running. I plan to run a 100 mile race in the fall of 2018, I would also like to write up a race report about that experience. Having never blogged before, I thought that I would write up a few "practice" posts to get the hang of it. Any feedback with or without accompanying ridicule would be much appreciated.)
At some point in 2017, I realized that if I was ever going to run a hundred mile race, I'd better do it soon because I wasn't getting any faster or younger. Since I may only want to run 100 miles once, the race I'd choose could only be the Hawk Hundred, put on by the Lawrence Trail Hawks, a group that has become like a family to me and a race that I look forward to all year long. The schedule didn't work for me in 2017 though, so I decided that 2018 would be the year. I first bounced the idea off Deanna, when she didn't say no (she's talked me out of dumber ideas), I decided that I'd give it a shot. I began telling my plan to folks in my running tribe, the idea being that once I had publicly committed, there'd be no backing out.
For the past several years I intentionally start cutting back on my mileage in the fall and running much less for the last two (or so) months of the year. I like having a break, to run only when I feel like it, and not worry about monthly mileage. This gives me a bit of a mental/physical reset and allows me to ask the question, "Do I really want to do this?", so far the answer has always been "Heck yeah, what do you think?" (Napolean Dynamite). So, each New Years Day, I begin the struggle to get in shape for the 20 mile version of the Psycho Wyco in February. If I train right, I'm normally fairly well prepared for the Rockin' K Marathon, which is always the first weekend in April. By then, the weather is warm, which means I'll run at any given opportunity (#teamsummer!), so it's pretty easy to be ready for the Night Hawk 50k at the end of June. After that, if I'm not injured I set my sights on the 50 mile version of the Hawk Hundred in September. There are a few shorter races that I love to do in late September (Konquer the Konza 25k) and October (Randolph's Revenge Half Marathon), but after being in 50 mile shape for the Hawk Hundred, I don't really need to train hard for either of these. That's pretty much my usual race calendar for the year.
I've really enjoyed this schedule for the past few years, but I don't think it's challenging enough to properly prepare me for my first hundo attempt, so I decided I'd change things up. In 2017, I didn't dial it back at the end of the year, October through January, I averaged around 160 miles per month. In January and February, I'd run long outside on trails on the weekends, but the weekday workouts were strictly on the treadmill.
I don't mind the treadmill at all in the winter. To me, it's so much easier to just put on a pair of shorts and head to the basement after work than it is to figure out how much to layer up, put in contacts, and mess with a headlamp. Not to mention the cold temps, dogs, sometimes icy conditions, and wondering if the cars really see me as I'm running on the shoulder of the road in the dark. It's just too much hassle for an hour or so of running. The treadmill also forces me to think about what I'm trying to accomplish with each workout (i.e. what settings to choose for speed and incline). Over the years I've gotten so that I don't really like running on the treadmill on a fast setting, so for most of my workouts I leave the speed set at 10 minute miles and adjust the incline to vary the intensity of the workout (8 degrees gets intense pretty quickly). I do bump up the speed on occasion, but not for too long. I finish nearly every workout by maxing out the incline setting and hiking for a half mile just as fast as I can manage. I tend to think of the Three Sisters (three really tough hills towards the end of the 10 mile loop at Psych Wyco) and the Big Bluff Loop section of the Rockin' K Marathon while I'm doing this powerhike training.
To help prepare for my 100 mile attempt, I decided that I would run the longer distances of my usual spring races, the Psycho Wyco (50k instead of 20 miles) and the Rockin' K (50 miles instead of a marathon). Not only would these longer races help prepare me physically for The Hawk, but also help prepare me mentally for the long hours on the trail, at least that's the plan.
The mental side of running 100 miles is what concerns me the most. I'm fortunate in that I haven't really had any injuries that I couldn't manage and I am pretty reliable about putting in the training sessions, but how will I respond to running all day and all through the night? I've run 50 miles on a few occasions, but going twice that distance will be totally new to me and I want to prepare myself as well as I can. Running a third (10 mile) loop at Psycho Wyco and a second 25 mile loop at Rockin' K seem like good ways to do that. I want to push myself to a place where I mentally want to quit, at that point is where the mental training begins, that's what I'm calling adversity training. (I doubt that I invented that phrase, but I don't know where I first heard it either.)
As I mentioned earlier, I didn't cut back on mileage at the end of 2017. In fact over the break between Christmas and New Year's I ran 6 out of 7 days. The weather was cooperating, so I took full advantage. My Psycho Wyco training through January and February seemed to go pretty much as planned, I felt ready to go as Feb 24th approached, I plan to cover how that race went in another post.
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