Geo-Runner

It is probably apparent from this title that I am burned out of thesis work and running has fought back my studies and crept back into my thoughts, and I hope as of tomorrow, I will be cleared to run. I did not get any running in this weekend like I had hoped in my previous blog entry. I did eat a lot of turkey and had a subsequent triptophan coma. This is my second Canadian Thanksgiving and it felt like Thanksgiving this year I had a great holiday. I am currently wearing my Holter heart monitor as I write this. I turn it in to be analyzed and then hit the treadmill first thing in the morning. Tomorrow will be my first time running since my incident. I am so anxious it feels like the night before a big race. My research has settled down a bit and a change in timing for committee meetings has altered my deadlines, so I will actually have some time to think about stuff other than rocks. As my blog implies I would like to talk about several (of many) trail running heroes I have and why, o...

Well this has been terrible to not be able to run for three weeks now. I don't know how people can stand to not be active. The sedentary life sucks! More than once I have thought about running against Doctors orders just because I would rather die running than rot away sitting around not achieving physical goals and potential. I have felt terrible as a result of not running. It is the least running I have done in years (other than a few injuries early in my running pursuits that put me out for 6 weeks). It has been traumatic to feel my fitness draining, at first slowly, and now exponentially. Perhaps most challenging is the fact that the weather here in Victoria has been brilliantly clear-cool fall weather. The perfect time to crank out some serious distance is during the vibrant colors of fall in brisk air from the ocean. Following Thanksgiving on Monday, I will do the 24 hour Holter test and the day following I will do the treadmill test. I expect nothing more than both ...

I went for my Saturday morning run today just like any other weekend run in the past. I had planned on running with a small group of people in the morning but thought I had missed them when I noticed their cars were at our meeting spot but no one was around, so I ran on by myself and thought I would see them along the run. I felt pretty good this morning and had a really fast pace. I haven't been sick this week but I could tell I was just a bit off the last 3-4 days. I blamed it on stress from writing my PhD proposal but now I am wondering. I saw someone running quickly about a full Km ahead of me (it is a very straight and flat course). I thought I could catch them in the next 10 minutes so I pushed pretty hard. I met my goal on caught the runner about the time I veered off to run a different side trail. I hit my turn around point and decided to cruise back to my car. I was only running 6 km in the morning and was planning on a steep and technical 20 Km run in the evenin...

I just passed my month mark (20 th ) of seriously training. In the past I have yo- yo'd in mileage from almost no running to about 50 miles. This last month was the first time I have ever tried hitting weekly distance/time goals. I am using a training program that running coach phenom Aurthur Lydiard came up with through experimenting on himself, and used the techniques on his athletes. The gist of it is to obtain as high an aerobic threshold as possible through maximum mileage bombardment week after week. His suggestion is 100 miles a week. He calls this phase "conditioning". The goal is simply to: grow new capillaries, strengthen the heart, improve running form and efficiency, burn fat efficiently, and improve pulmonary O2 uptake. By running this kind of weekly distance your speed and times slowly increase as your body slowly makes the changes necessary to maintain the distance. As you run as hard as your aerobic ability allows you to each week you improve and you r...

This last week was a great week for running. I cranked out some great mileage and started running on Mount Doug again. Mount Doug is an amazing chunk of rock to run on. It has over 15 miles of single track trails. The trails are varied from soft, wide, and flat to rocky, rooty and steep. I think I can do just about any work out I'd wish on the mountain, from speed work and intervals to hills and long distance. Since I have moved to UVic it is a bit further away. It takes 2.5 miles or about 4 km of running just to get to the trails. Once I run to the mountain from my house, I have been running a very simple trail that circum-navigates the base of the mountain for now. It is a simple route with little elevation and steepness but it is just right while I am building my base. In a couple of weeks I will start incorporating the full 11 km Mount Doug gutbuster route (almost 20Km total distance round trip from my house) once a week and then twice etc. It is a nice way to snag 20 Km on, an...

Since today is a holiday (BC day) I slept in a bit had a good breakfast and hit the trails at 10:00 am. I was just going to run a slow 8.2 Km or two laps around the university. I felt really heavy at first and my speed felt much slower than the effort I was putting into it. It was considerably cooler today than the past two weeks but I was still feeling a bit slow. I decided to crank up my effort from my average 5 (on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being race day effort), to about 8 or 80% of race day effort. So I really began to crank. I finished my first lap and hit my split button on my watch and kept going. I was pretty tired but was still giving a good effort. I checked my split time and realized I had finished lap one less than 22 minutes which is a first since starting my intense training schedule. I decided not to stop at lap one but to keep my effort up around 8. I saw quite a few people on the run so I began to use them as an excuse to really crank, you know, so I could...