On And On : trifuel.com

On And On

And on, and on. This is our racing season.

First off, thank you so much - so very much – for all the great comments on my race at Timberman. What a great world of people I know through triathlon. It was a great race for me, made even better by such encouraging post-race remarks.

I can tell you that life here in the Northeast after the Timberman has been just fantastic. The raw New England weather continued to stick around all week and through the weekend, making it a bit damp and cold, but at the same time convincing my mind that Fall is coming, and it’s time to officially switch gears a bit and focus on all the glory that is running and marathon training. For some reason, after a week of recovery from my A-event, the combination of brisk weather, light rain, and plenty of early morning slippered walkarounds avec moi French Roast has helped me re-center and look forward to starting the final stanza in the Chapter of my life entitled: My 2006 Racing Season.

After a couple of days of lounging around and eating us out of house and home, I resumed my workouts again. With no structure at first, I took a great little trail run with Liz on Wednesday afternoon to get the legs loosened up a bit, and to get out and smell the woods. Liz has been running a lot lately – dare I even say “training” – for some local run-events coming up this Fall, and I can tell you that she has made enormous gains in her ability as a direct result. I’ve always enjoyed integrating my workouts with Liz’s, and now that her run speed and endurance have picked up to the point that we can almost do some of my scheduled workouts (in their entirety) together, things are even better. Some may disagree, but I think there’s no better running partner than your spouse – so major kudos to Liz.

Thursday it was time to get back into things a bit… To prime the training pump. I hit the ground running on another early twilight evening through the woods to do a 45–minute trail run at tempo pace. The legs were super-good, and I can’t believe how fast I felt after coming down from an A-event. Keeping things up in my tempo zone, I wove my way through the thick of the local single-track, threading the needle through the trees, and just barely made it home before the sun was completely down… Which is suddenly much earlier now than it has been in recent memory.

Friday was an easy day with some core-work and the resuming of my weights routine. I’ve found that doing weights-work throughout this entire season has had a seriously positive impact on my training and race performance. If you’re a little guy (or girl, I suppose) like me (err, if you’re little, like me, not if you’re a girl, like me, as I’m not) and you’ve ever noticed that you lose some of that “power” or some of that “snap” late in the season (especially on the run, or in the water), then I suggest you give the year-round weights idea some thought.

Saturday kicked some serious tail as I set out to do a strong hour at up-tempo on (yup, again) the trails. I wanted to stick to trail running during this time of recovery until I made a full return to training just to save the legs a bit and avoid the pavement pounding. One thing that hit me like a ton of bricks was the pain in my quads while running the half-Mary at Timberman after about mile 7. And so I’ve wanted to make sure that I allow those muscles to fully recover – and to live it up while they can before we bombard them with marathon-specific run-training in the weeks to come. Anyhow, with regards to the run on Saturday, my run speed was fully back, and it truly felt great to get out there and push the pace for such an extended period.

Pulling back on the reins a bit, Sunday I had planned a light, but relatively long run to fully round out my one-week recovery period. Liz and I went out onto the road – in the crisp Autumn-like weather and misty rain - to do an hour of running structured as 9 minutes at long-run pace, 1 minute at up-tempo. This was actually one of Liz’s first long and structured runs in a while, and once again, I was completely amazed to see her run a great pace during the 9–minute pieces, and to embrace the one-minute work intervals by shifting gears to up-tempo and obeying the rules of Fartlek by resuming her original pace (i.e., no full recovery) afterwards.

On, and on, and on. It’s now a new week and I’ve resumed what I consider to be full-on training towards my late-season run-races. I’ll be easing up on the swimming for the near-term, and throwing in only a couple of rides per week (which will remain unstructured - and for that reason, enjoyable) while the rest of my weekly volume will be filled to the brim with run-work. The marathon I’m training for is one I competed in last year; a local affair on completely flat terrain that also happens to be a Boston qualifier. Last year I crammed a summer full of long-runs into a 5 week period to prep for it (do as I say, not as I do) and wound up posting a blistering first half-Mary, followed by an abysmal follow-up half-Mary to add up to a 3:45:00 marathon. This year, I’ve intelligently thought about the marathon all summer and have been training accordingly up to now, but it’s time to shed some of that bike/run combination speed for some pure run speed. I’d like to go sub-3:20 (as, believe it or not, that happens to be one of the only remaining un-met goals for my 2006 season!) which will take not only some serious training between now and then, but also one hell of a tailwind on race day. Going sub-3:20 won’t send me to Boston, but it sure will send me into the winter months in a better mood. Boston qualifying for youngsters like me requires a sub-3:10, which right about now seems about as insurmountable as the prospect of me voluntarily giving up coffee… But, hey, Anything is Possible, I suppose.

Thanks for reading.