The Need for Speed

"I feel the need... the need for speed!"

If you are of a certain age – and I am – you don’t just know this quote and its context.  Oh no.  You’ve repeated it a few hundred dozen times.  You’ve performed the accompanying ‘round-the-world-over-the-shoulder high five.  You’ve also referred to your good buddy as your “wingman.”  And, chances are, you can sing every word of You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.”  You know – with feeling.

I digress.

I’ve been feeling the need for speed, now that my stupid IT Band seems to more or less have accepted that it’s going to run, whether it likes it or not.  Thanks to my piss-poor lungs, I’ll probably never be a fast runner, but I’d sure like to be faster.  So my training plan for the Tower of Terror10-Miler and Halloween Halfathon includes some speed training stints on my non-long run weeks.  And I got started on them recently.

First up was a session taken straight from Jeff Galloway’s Time Improvement plan for the runDisney Tower of Terror 10-Miler: run 800 meters at a pace 15 seconds faster than race goal pace, walk 3 minutes to recover, repeat for a total of four times.   Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I am a sprinter by nature.  Not a super fast sprinter, mind you, but a sprinter – I love to run at top speed for short stretches.  Distance training has been sort of a downer in that regard; I’ve been so busy building base mileage and nursing injuries, I haven’t had an opportunity to go fast in over a year.  So I was pretty psyched to tackle my first speed training task.

I have this awesome little outdoor, paved track near home.  It circles a pretty lake surrounded by trees, so much of the track is shaded – a huge plus this time of year in Florida.  I took a trip around to warm up properly and started in.  I’d set up my Runkeeper iPhone app to four interval sets of 800 meters followed by three minutes walking and wore my Garmin 10 to pause during recoveries and check my pace on the fly. 

So how’d it go?

No, no – I’ll tell you… it was GREAT!!!  Really amazing.  I don’t know when I’ve felt better in a run.  Forget 15 seconds faster than my 12:00/mile goal pace – I ran 800 meter splits of 11:05, 10:33, 10:44 and 10:42.  Up to a whopping 1:27 under goal pace!  Pretty comfortably, too; I really felt like I could’ve pushed harder, but didn’t want to invite problems unnecessarily.

Two weeks later, it was time for hill repeats.  Now, if you’ve followed my blog for a while, or if you live in the southern half of Florida, you know that there is a distinct lack of hills in the area.  But here in coastal Florida, we have many bridges connecting the mainland with our barrier islands.  Since my knee had been acting up the previous week, I opted for the lower of the two bridges near me and vowed to kill it.

I started out on the flat beach road, turning in a mile warm-up before getting to the bridge.  I then ran up, walked down the other side, turned around and repeated that the other direction.  Twice, for a total of four ascents and descents.  Going up a fifth time, the bells began to ring, alerting all that the draw bridge was being raised to allow a sailboat to pass underneath.  I took it as some weird sign to pick up the pace and beat a couple of teenaged girls to the top before turning around.  And I did.  Pass them. 

Once more I ascended and turned around, then finished with an easy, flat mile for recovery.

I must say that I’m loving these speed workouts!  Which is really making me think about next year’s race schedule… perhaps a bit less distance and more 5Ks?  We’ll see.  For now…

Make a New Plan, Stan... er, V.

So, having registered for the Glass Slipper Challenge… which comes on the heels of the WDW Half-Marathon… which is preceded by a late October Halloween Halfathon… which immediately follows the Tower of Terror 10-Miler…

I need a PLAN.

Not just any plan.  A Plan that’ll get me through these races without injury.  A Plan that’ll prevent physical and mental burnout.  A Plan that helps me improve my pace.  A Plan that also allows for a social life outside of convening with pavement.  (Not that I have one of those – a social life – but I’d settle for some nap time in its place…)  In short, I need a Plan with the strength and precision of a D-Day invasion.

I got to work on creating said Plan before I even registered for the Glass Slipper Challenge (GSC).  I started with Jeff Galloway’s Time Improvement Plan for the Wine & DineHalf-Marathon (I’m not racing that one, but it’s near the date of my October half, so it seemed like a good pick), and cross-pollinated it with his Tower10-Miler Time Improvement Plan.  Then, I added a layer of his Dumbo Double Dare Plan (because there isn’t a plan yet for the GSC), and filled in the small gap between it and the Wine & Dine Plan with Galloway’s WDW Half-Marathon Time Improvement Plan.  Finally, I sprinkled on top a bit of Hal Higdon’s distance training plans and filled in my own cross-training/strength training regimen.  And…

Voila!

Note how I’ve pre-scheduled myself at the ER every other week.  That’s pro-active, baybee.

No, no, I’m not really planning on being in the ER!  Not that often, anyway.

ER = Easy Recovery run

ST = Strength Training

Hills = bridge repeats… we don’t have hills here in coastal Florida

MM = Galloway’s “Magic Mile”

I’ll make the final call as I get to that time, but my thought is to race the 10-Miler for time, spend a couple weeks recovering well, race the Halloween Halfathon hard for time, recover and build up again to race the WDW Half for time, recover and build again to race the Enchanted 10K hard for time and go easy on the Princess Half the next day.  We’ll see.

Anyone else getting their Plans in order? 

It's the Journey

Okay.

I’ve had a couple weeks to ponder my disappointment after the Tower of Terror 10-Miler and I’ve come to some conclusions:

True, it wasn’t the performance for which I’d trained… but it was the training that enabled me to cross that finish line, injured or otherwise.  The super-fly, glowy-in-the-darky medal doesn’t represent my efforts on one night, but the efforts put in over several long, hot, sweaty months of running, cross-training, eating right and getting it done, even when life stood in the way.  And the running, cross-training and eating right has resulted in a 41-year-old body that feels strong, efficient, and healthy.

In the heat of the moment (literally – what was the race temp? Somewhere between “Amazon” and “Hades”?), I couldn’t see beyond being let down by an injury.  But I’m finding now that it was the journey to the race that matters most and that, if I may be so immodest, I ROCKED that journey.  So I now look at my medal every day with pride, awe and amazement… little ol’ me finished a 10-mile race.  Cool.  Way, way cool. 

Now it’s time to move forward and face my next goal… the BIG goal… the 2013 runDisney Princess Half-Marathon.  My training plan (thank you, Jeff Galloway!) has already begun, and you know what?  I’m actually feeling pretty good about it.  I’m going in with the mindset of enjoying every moment of the journey to get there, not just the couple hours it takes to finish the race.  Let’s DO THIS!

My daily motivation - bling and a new sticker for my car.

Slow Down to Speed Up – Fuzzy runDisney Math

Shout out to my dear friend Lauralee, who taught me the surprisingly accurate mantra,  “You’ve got to spend it to save it!” when it comes to vacationing at Disney.  Between the two of us and our fellow Disney travelers, we’ve made a fine art of budgeting our many Disney trips using Fuzzy Disney Math, or FDM.

FDM works like this, when applied to how long one has to wait for the next Disney vacation: current day, day of departure, weekends, national holidays, random days off from work and school, birthdays, anniversaries, dentist and doctor appointment days,  and pay days do not count.  Using this formula, our next runDisney event, the Expedition Everest Challenge on May 5, is only 24 days away… which is only 10 days more than 2 weeks, so it’s really like almost 2 weeks from now!

Applying FDM to our next Disney vacation budget: we’re staying on my Disney Vacation Club points, which are basically free because I’ve already paid for them and their annual dues and anything paid in the past is already gone and not part of the vacation budget.  Tickets are free, too, because we already have our Floridian annual passes.  Race registration’s been paid, so, again, free.  Food isn’t free… except that it is when I pay for it with my Disney Visa rewards!  The reward points won’t cover all of our food intake, but the rest will go on my Disney Visa, which I just converted to a Premiere card, which will earn 5% in new points with every dollar spent… which means free food on the next-next trip!  In conclusion, the total budget for our Everest Challenge weekend is $0 in FDM.

Okay, now that you’ve got a handle on how FDM works, let’s look at FrDM – Fuzzy runDisney Math.

Image: http://www.beautyinbalance.net/the-tortoise-and-the-hare/

I’ve been diligently trying to increase the amount of each run interval and reduce the amount of each walk interval in my training and the results have included injuries, low energy and diminished recovery. Not to mention an injured knee.  So this past week, I tried slowing down to go faster.  This isn’t my idea – I’m following Jeff Galloway’s training programs and his suggested bump-up from :30/:30 run/walk intervals is to 1:00/1:00, not the 1:00/:30 intervals I’d been pushing for.  With thoughts that a slower pace might be better for my knee, anyway, I gave it a try, doing 1:00/1:00 for my two mid-week training runs and my weekend long run…

WOWSA!  First, going “slower” really did make me “faster”: those longer walk breaks gave me better recovery, leading to much stronger – faster! – run intervals.  Second, because I was recovering better, I had a whole lot more to give in the last segment of each run; my pace there improved quite a bit.  Third, I finished strong and not feeling run-down.  Read: instead of an all-day nap, I followed my long run with lunch out with my boy, shopping and a little Frisbee in the backyard.

I’m sold.  I’ll stick with the 1:00/1:00 intervals for a while before bumping up to whatever Mr. Galloway suggests next.  For the record, I’m in no way being compensated to sing his praises… I’m just happy to have found a training method that keeps me pain-free!