A letter to my running partner

Dear Ben,

I know this isn't the type of post you envisioned for this blog, but every time I start to type, everything seems insignificant because all I can think about is how thankful I am for you.

First of all, I am abundantly thankful that you are home.  It actually brings tears to my eyes because I know that this picture could look far different.

There are sailors right now stuck on a ship and can only email their family...we've been there and I Praise the Lord that I got to cook dinner with you and hear your laugh and see you snuggle our kids this week.

I'm so thankful to have you as my running partner.  You are more than a person that runs alongside me; you encourage me when I'm feeling insecure or super tired, you let me vent my frustrations on long runs and you try your hardest to deceive me into thinking our pace is "just right for you" when I tell you to run ahead.  And even though I struggle to admit this, I'm thankful that you never, ever leave me on a run.

Thank you for making your health a priority.  Perhaps others see it differently, but I see your fitness and healthy eating as a treasure.  First of all, Lord willing, it means I get to spend more of my life with you.  Second, you are leading our family in health.  When you make time for runs, it shows our kids that fitness can be fun and enjoyable and it's important to make it a priority.  And when they see you cooking healthy meals, it's shaping how they will eat as adults.

 See?  This is proof that your actions make an impact on our kids:

Alison ran a 1 mile kids race before Ben's half marathon

Thank you for helping me out of running ruts and always making sure I get runs in, even with holidays and family visiting.  You are the one who hands me my running shoes and tells me to get outside- "I've got the kids"- when my mommy heart thinks I shouldn't leave.

Thanksgiving run together...the grandparents babysat for us!

I am so thankful for this "sweaty" life we've built together and God has blessed.  I pray often that others would have someone as encouraging and supportive as you in their life.

Love always,

Jen

P.S. If you could let me run more miles than you this month, that would be great :)

Week In Review

What a great week! I got to run multiple times with Jen and I got to eat lots of good food. After the half marathon last Sunday I was ready for a week of food and down time. However, the weather here in Virginia has been so warm it just seemed a shame to not go out and run.

Who needs to workout? Make some food!

I got some great new cold weather running gear from my Mom and I can't wait to try it out. It just has to get cold first. On second thought, maybe the cold can wait a bit longer.

Yummy apple tart!

My thought for the week was; be thankful for what you have.

Monday - rest
Tuesday - 6.24 miles at 7:22 pace
Wednesday - rest
Thursday - 6.25 miles at 7:50 pace
Friday - 6.25 miles at 8:19 pace
Saturday - 5 miles at 8:24 pace
Sunday - rest

Total miles:  23.75

Harbor Lights Half Marathon Race Report

When I signed up for this race I figured it would be a bit cold, but I didn't expect it to pour rain the entire race.  The weather at the start was 49 degree with showers. This presented the dilemma of what to wear. I choose shorts, a very light weight long sleeve tech shirt and a very light weight rain/wind jacket. I debated the jacket but I was glad to have it. The start of the race was also delayed about 15 minutes due to traffic issues on the course. My goal for this race was to beat my previous PR of 1:42:46, and hopefully go under 1:40.

Cold and wet but not too crowded at the start.

My strategy was to take the first three miles at a 7:30 pace and then evaluate how I was feeling. In my head I knew I could probably just keep that pace and then kick it up the last 3 miles. That plan didn't work. I made a critical mistake. At mile 5 I grabbed some water to drink. I don't know why, I wasn't even really thirsty. The water was cold. I gurgled it down while not really stopping because I like water-boarding myself and then at mile 5.15 I felt a cramp coming on. This has happened to me before so I knew what to expect. And what I expected was pain. That pain was a side stitch to be more accurate. It kicked in full gear and it literally staggered me. If you've never had one it feels like someone is taking a rake to the inside of your ribs and it's almost always on the right side of your body. Oddly enough scientists don't even really know why they happen. But they do happen and glugging water, like I did, is a known cause.

Pay no attention to the heart rate. I don't think it works well when it's raining, it messes up the optical sensor.

I had to slow my pace considerably. I even walked for a few seconds which is humbling. This happened in my last half and I remembered that it DOES go away after a while. And by a while I mean a few miles. While extremely painful it doesn't cause any injury. So I tried to relax, I went slower, and I simply ran through the pain. You can see on my pace chart (above) how my pace (in blue) dips hard when the cramp hit. Little by little was able to work myself back up to my goal pace, but I did lose valuable time, and it hurt.

Around mile 8 I felt like I could run normal again. However, the cramp feeling never went away and always seemed to be threatening to return. Even with the cramp in the background I was able to plod through the remaining wet miles. I even managed to run a pretty fast final mile!

Look! My feet aren't touching the ground!

My sweet wife came out in the rain with our three kids to cheer me at the finish. There was hardly anybody there due to the rain and cold. She is truly amazing and I'm a blessed man to have her support and friendship.

16th place in my age division out of 121. 124th place overall out of 2122 people.

My official time was 1:40:32 which is a new PR for me! I'm very happy about making a new PR. However, I am also left wanting a bit more. I feel very confident that if I could have avoided the cramp I could have ran a sub 1:40. Oh well, that just means I have to try again!

Update: I looked at my GPS again and it says I actually finished a Half in 1:39:46! While that's not my official time, I'll take it!

Oh, and about my goal to run the tangents? I think I did pretty well. My Garmin reported I ran 13.13. Several people around me had their watch's mile lap alarm going off 10-20 seconds before mine the whole way. I even heard one woman report she ran 13.41!

Tl:DR Rained the whole race, got side cramps at mile 5, recovered and still PR'd. 

 

It's Science

Ever wonder why you run faster during a race? Or why you just seem to fly off the starting line during a 5k even though you told yourself before the start to 'take it easy'? Well it turns out it's science. A recent article in the Physiology & Behavior journal looked at "the influence of the presence and absence of competitors on pacing, overall running performance, and mood state during a self-paced run". Basically they compared how amateur runners (like me) ran 3 km alone verse being in a group. The results are not particularly surprising. The runners ran faster overall, faster during the first 500 m, and perceived the effort/fatigue level at the end as less than when running alone.

I'm on the far right in the green. There's nothing like the pre race jitters.

The findings of this study suggest "that the presence of competitors induces a fast start, which results in an improved overall performance and reduced post-exercise vigor scores, compared to an individual run." There is something going on in the brain that makes us able to run faster, do better, and feel less tired about the whole experience when we have competition. In other words if you want to become a faster runner it's a good idea to run more races!

Look at these silly boys madly charging up the hill as the gun goes off.

For shorter distances, like a 5k, it's not always beneficial to fight the "run-fast" urge at the start. Going out fast against competition doesn't necessarily mean you will run slower overall. In fact the study indicated that running the first 500 m fast is part of how you end up with a faster overall time. Everyone seems to talk about how beneficial negative splits are. They certainly are the goal for longer races but not necessarily for the 5k. Other studies have shown that running the first mile of a 5k 3% faster than goal pace is the optimal pacing strategy. Forget trying to achieve a negative split, just run fast the first mile....but not too fast. How fast is too fast? If the first mile is run more than 6% faster than the goal pace you are likely to crash and burn. So if you're running a 5k, don't feel so bad about going out fast, you just might end up with PR.

In other news: I am enjoying enduring my taper week. Not running is actually harder than it sounds. I also have the strong urge to go pick up heavy metal things and put them back down in an attempt to build muscle, but I am resisting that urge so my body is rested, recovered, and ready for the Half Marathon on Sunday.

Marathon training for the spouse

I stand corrected; humble pie is your husband running more than double the miles of you in a week.

People often neglect the fact that training for a race is a sacrifice.  It's a sacrifice of time and energy and money.  However, even more neglected is the fact that it is a sacrifice for the spouse of the one training.  Perhaps it means giving up something financially so you can pay for the race or maybe it means giving up a Sunday afternoon together so they can get in that long run.  At this stage in our life, Ben and I have found it nearly impossible to run races together because of our kids.  They are too young for us both to sacrifice time and energy and we can't just leave them home alone to go to the race early in the morning (plus, who wants to babysit at 5 am?!).  We've run one half marathon together and it required my mom flying in all the way from Kansas to help us out.

The Crawlin' Crab half marathon

It can also be really hard not to get jealous of Ben.  Sometimes I'm jealous of the time he has to run or the pace he can keep or even how good of shape he is in now.  I want to be there too.  He gets to write fun posts like 'My Week in Review' and my week in review is no where near exciting or impressive.  It's humbling, to say the least, but in spite of all this, I firmly believe these sacrifices are worth it.  They teach our kids that we support one another and loving someone means sacrificing for them.

Ben's had his fair share of sacrifices over the years.  I hurt my ankle during our one half marathon together and Ben had to sacrifice placing in our annual hometown 5k race to run with our daughter the following weekend.  That was a painful sacrifice...3 miles in 50 minutes=pain!

He also made sacrifices for me when I was training for my first half marathon.  He brought the kids down to cheer for me as I crossed the finish line and it is a moment that I will never forget.  I know getting our kids up at 6 am and driving an hour and sitting in traffic and navigating crowds is not something he was excited about doing, but he did it for our family and I am so thankful they were there!

Sixty Four

Sixty four is the number of turns in the Harbor Lights Half Marathon. Ouch. It's like they gave a crayon and a map of downtown Norfolk to a child and asked them to draw a race route. I guess the turns will keep me from zoning out and going into cruise control mode. Though the course is very flat the number of turns makes me think it won't be a naturally fast race.

My strategy is to run the tangents. A tangent is simply a straight line that just touches the curve. In other words, run the shortest distance possible. If done correctly you can shave off a good amount of distance and it is completely legal to do. The idea is to not 'swing out' before a turn, or cross to the other side of the road too early. Simply run the shortest distance possible from one point to the other. Not only is this good advice but it is actually how race courses are measured. If you don't do this you will probably run more than the actual race distance. The USA Track and Field Course Certification Manual says that "a race course is defined by the shortest possible route that a runner could take and not be disqualified." This route is actually very difficult to follow due to the throngs of other people. In fact USATF also states that "most runners don’t actually run the SPR (shortest possible route), so the distance recorded by their GPS device will usually be longer than the certified length of the course." They don't care though. The point of the race certification is to make sure you run at least the distance the course is certified for. Thanks a lot.

People smarter than me have done calculations to see how much distance you lose if you run the outside of a 90 degree turn verse the inside. It comes out to about 40 feet. So there are 64 turns in this race. That means there is a possible variance in distance from the turns alone of 2560 feet or 0.48 mile! That could easily be a 4-5 minute swing of time just by running the corners smartly.



Red turn = good, blue turn = bad

The main enemy of this strategy for me is People (because they won't just get out of my way for some reason), pot-holes (I like my ankles working), and the simple fact that I just don't ever think about this when doing my regular runs during the week. I'll be sure to post what my GPS watch says I ran for the race when it's all over.

In other news I ran four miles at lunch on my normal at-work run route. It's an out and back that has about a two miles through the woods on a trail.  On the way back I saw a snake, screamed like a girl, and pranced around for about 10 seconds. Snakes aren't cool. They should stay off the running path.

Cheerios?

General Mills, the company that makes Cheerios, is being sued for false advertisement and misleading labeling. The issue has to do with the Protein Cheerios. Apparently the box claims it has 7 grams of protein per serving. Regular Cheerios only has 3 grams. But the serving size for Protein Cheerios is 55 grams while the serving size for regular cheerios is 28 grams, see the problem? The box claims it is a high protein variant of cheerios, but you are only getting more protein because you are eating twice as much per serving! Not only that, Protein Cheerios has a whopping 17 grams of sugar per serving. Compare that to normal cheerios with just 1 gram of sugar per serving.  To put it into perspective 4 grams of sugar is equal to about 1 teaspoon of granulated sugar. That means that a serving of this stuff has over 4 teaspoons of sugar dumped on! They should have called it 'Cheerios Sugar'.

Protein is very important for muscle recovery and lots of companies are trying to 'cash-in' on the protein craze. You should eat a good amount of protein, especially if you are active. Many experts suggest around 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight.   But you don't want that protein accompanied by a bunch of unnecessary sugar. The point to all this is make sure you read your nutritional labels carefully. Just because it says 'protein' on it does not mean it's healthy.

And just because it's vegan doesn't make it healthy either.