The new schedule

Posted on October 10, 2018 by tpowers123

I kicked off my new schedule (see previous post) with a 3-mile run today. Or should I say “run” because I walked part of it? Again, it’s amazing how much fitness can degrade even when one is still running occasionally.

The good news is that I’m back to taking care of myself in terms of exercise. My plan is to get in a 3 mile run with intervals either tomorrow or Thursday, then do a longer run on Friday. However, given that I’m just getting back into running, I might need to reduce my mileage this week to ensure I don’t get injured — which is fine.

Gearing up for the Santa Run in just 2 months!

Corporate Challenge, Round Two, Part Two

Posted on September 12, 2017 by tpowers123

Well, managed to finish another round of the Corporate Challenge. Can’t say it was particularly good… after effectively not working out between the Bloomberg race and this one, I felt pretty out of shape and my time of over 29 minutes (for a 3.5 mile course) reflected that. Hope I have a chance to rebuild in the next few weeks.

First bike in SF

Posted on September 4, 2017 by tpowers123

Routes with bike lanes in SF

Today, I did my first bike ride in SF since moving here.

The prep

I looked online for a list of good routes. Most pages I found seemed to be about good routes outside of the city, which wasn’t very helpful to me. I live near the center of the city, so I needed to know how to get out there. I found this map showing roads with bike lanes to be very useful, and I’m going to try to explore the main ones in the future to see which ones I like best.

The route

I eventually settled on commuting up and down Polk Street, a main N-S road in the city. The path unfortunately reminded me of Massachusetts Ave a bit — a road somewhat in need of paving with plenty traffic lights and stop-and-go traffic. You could easily spend 45 minutes getting across SF with this route, with a not inconsiderable amount of danger (there is a decent amount of hoping that people won’t open their car doors). However, all in all, things weren’t that bad — there is, in fact, a bike lane through the entire road, which you can’t say about many places.

The bike

Took my Specialized Allez out for the ride. This is my road bike, and the one of my two bikes that has been repaired — my Fuji tri bike needs some serious love, but I still haven’t decided what to do with it (maybe will sell it and get another tri bike that is higher quality/fits me better).

The fit of the bike was noticeably bad — I was putting nearly all my weight on my hands, rather than on the seat. That made it hard to control the bike and also to safely take my hands off the handlebars to signal turns, etc.

Was the fit always this bad? Possibly — during my half ironman, my hands started going numb. And I’ve always found it hard to balance on, and signal from, this bike. Possibly it’s simply too large for me, and so to reach the handlebars I have to move my center of gravity far too forward.

The plan

Biking during the work week is probably going to be too time-consuming, so I’ll keep it as a weekend activity.

I’ll also probably take the bike back to the shop to get it properly fitted, that is, if I can improve the fit much myself fooling around on my trainer.

Relaxing run

Posted on September 2, 2015 by tpowers123

Intervals August 30th

Posted on August 30, 2015 by tpowers123

This summer, the university has been renovating the parking area near the track. While I was away from running, they planted new trees, but they yet haven’t filled the root areas with dirt.

Is this a liability issue?

They’ve also started to sprinkler the “grass” (which seems like synthetic wood chips for now, likely surrounding seeds?) aggressively. I was not above getting sprinkled on the way back.

I did 2 miles of intervals today, my standard 0.25 mile intervals. My target pace for each quarter mile is 1:30; I’m still a bit above that. I was hitting max HR during the intervals, so I feel pretty good about that.

Overall, I spent about 24% of my time in interval mode, and 76% of my time in recovery:(This breakdown is by pace, rather than heart rate, which, due to lags, doesn’t correlate well with the actual amount of time I spent in each cycle.)

Morning Mile

Posted on August 29, 2015 by tpowers123

After yesterday’s workout, which hit my heart rate max for a long period, I decided to do a short one today. A shorter run would help me recover, and also help me spread my mileage across the week. Ideally, I’ll run 7 miles this week. It wouldn’t do to ramp up too quickly and get injured.

Today’s mile time of 7:16 was a bit slower than usual. The above plot shows basically no improvement in my mile times over the last two months, measured over a consistent course. Hopefully I’ll be able to break out of this rut, which to some extent was created by my Ironman training/getting distracted by work.

Back to running

Posted on August 27, 2015 by tpowers123

After a week of post-Ironman sunburn recovery, I reintroduced myself to running. My performance was pretty bad: I did 3 miles at a 10-minute pace. (This compares to, for example, a recent run of 4 miles at an 8:31 pace.)

I’m not too worried about this blip in underperformance. It’s sufficiently bad that it was probably just an off day for me. Maybe I was dehydrated, hungry, etc., various reasons for randomly bad performance.

I also know I pushed myself just the amount I wanted to, actually even more. I originally set out with the goal of doing an easy three-mile run, but as I wasn’t running too fast, an otherwise-easy pace actually ended up hitting my heart rate max of 180 for most of the run. (My watch tells me not to work out for another 3.5 days!)

Note that my pace is usually faster than 10″-mile in the above diagram, and pretty steady, but the average pace over the run is lower because of the times I stopped at traffic lights.

Speaking of traffic lights, I find that they provide one of the most interesting physiological sensations in running, and not in a good way. Somehow it is possible to hit my heart rate max and temporarily “tune out” my suffering. But if I stop short, I suddenly start feeling just how hot it is outside. A terrible feeling passes through my circulatory system like I’ve just floored the gas in a car with its emergency brake on. And my legs start freezing into a standing position, motionless. If possible, it seems preferable to slow down gradually rather than stop short.

I also felt another interesting but unpleasant feeling I haven’t felt for a long time, whose source I’m still trying to understand. When getting out of breath, my face starts feeling awfully painful, like my teeth are being extracted. Is this because of a lack of blood to the face? Or maybe too much blood (blood pressure?). Actually, this feeling has become quite rare for me, and I associate it with the days before I started working out.

The current plan is to train toward two things:

Running a 6-minute mile. (My record now is 6:41, so I still have a ways to go.)
Doing a 5k. I’m not going to train toward this explicitly, but since most of my workouts will be in the 2 to 3 mile range, I expect to have decent prep toward that. My goal is 24 minutes.

Base Miles

Posted on June 30, 2015 by tpowers123

Ran 2 miles this morning, not too fast, just to build up my weekly mileage. After taking a brief stop to add stadiums to my routine, I’m ready to get back to expanding mileage, slowly.

Low running volume and slow increases in that volume seem to be working well in preventing the running injuries I had before. I’m gonna stick to that plan for the foreseeable future.

Intervals tomorrow, possibly stadiums on Thursday, and perhaps a swim sometime on the weekend.

So ready to break 6:30…

Posted on June 29, 2015 by tpowers123

Did another mile run this morning in 6:52.

Funny how quickly the hedonic treadmill works. I was elated to break the 7 minute barrier 2 months ago, but now just another sub-7 minute run is “slow”.

As Scott Adams puts it, if you have a “goal-oriented” lifestyle, you spend almost all your life feeling like you’re underperforming. In this case, my next milestone is a 6:30 mile, so if I go out there thinking I want to do that, and end up going backwards in terms of performance, well…

Still, I feel pretty happy this morning. I think being below the 7 minute barrier is psychologically very helpful for me, since I feel like “at least I’m an objectively fit person, just having an off day.” Being at this level of fitness is new for me, and I’m still enjoying it.

Much progress on running

Posted on June 24, 2015 by tpowers123

I set a new PR for the mile on Monday: 6:40.

For whatever reason, my recent running workout regimen has been working out well, in terms of reducing my mile times. I thought I would document my running past, present, and future.

A bit of history

I began running more seriously in September 2013 after I sprained my thumb and had to stop lifting. I did my first 5k that month. I did a half-marathon in November 2013. I did a marathon in November 2014.

I’ve compiled the following graph of my run times, using runs of approximately 1, 2, and 3 miles (times are all minutes per mile):

The main takeaway is that I haven’t improved much over this time period — although it’s a bit unclear, due to data problems. (I certainly improved my distances, which are not shown, but it’s not so clear about my times.)

A big problem with this data is that I don’t really have run times for these short distances around the times I was running intensively, to prep for my half-marathon and full marathon. Also, the observations we do have are sometimes instances where I got tired and had to pack my run in early — so they’re deceptively slow.

This underscores the importance of having some kind of standardized run to track one’s progress.

The present

More recently, since I’ve been doing mile runs, I have standardized tracking, and it’s clear that I’m getting better. So it’s not necessarily clear that my new regimen is helping particularly — although it certainly feels like it is — but we do know that it is a regimen that works.

I generally run 1 mile on Mondays (say at a 6:45 pace), then do 2 miles at the track doing intervals (alternating quarter mile laps of running at a 6:00 pace and walking/slow jog). I also do a longer run later in the week, at this point around 4 miles. I’ve been throwing in stadiums in the last couple weeks, and I also try biking a bit if I need a fourth or fifth workout. (I often do four.)

Future plans

Going forward, my goal has been to increase mileage by approximately 10% per week, to avoid injury (I feel like rest has helped me sustain a relatively good pace of improvement — this may also be key.)

So here are my recent mileage totals, counting stadiums as 3 miles (due to lots of injury potential):

May 25: 6.2

Jun 1: 6.8

June 8: 6 (low bc first time doing stadiums required recovery)

June 15: 5.1 (low due to carelessness)

June 22: 3 so far, will pick up another 3 on Friday due to stadiums + long bike on Sunday. Perhaps an additional easy mile run on Saturday. That will add up to 7, perhaps.

Tom Goes Running

Category Archives: My Workouts