d2, w22

Tuesday track workout consisted of 3 miles WU run to the track, 3*200 build to fast end of a race closing pace but not an all out sprint (37 sec) with 200 recovery. 7*1000 (3:30) with 600 recovery. Then 3 miles home. Workout was great and I ran the 3 miles home in under 21 minutes but it hurt. "As it is supposed to"

I was talking to my our running coach after practice about the 30 k that is coming up and he had some good advice. Go out to run the race, don't worry about the marathon in 4 weeks run the race you in that day for those conditions. Race to win, if you can't try to place as high as possible. Tom has run a 2:19 marathon, so I have a tendency do as much of what he suggests as I can with out putting my self in a place to get injured. Tom wrote the book, literally, he wrote the book -The Boston Marathon- and couple others he coauthored. He has trained and run with many of the olympians of his day.
He asked me what my mileage had been for the past 5 weeks.
I told him about 60-65/wk with one or two 70-75. I justified this by saying, but only on 6 days of running. He kind of looked at me and said "why are you only running 6 days".
I said "well I like to take one day of recovery/ rest during the week".
He basically said that" I can't possibly reach my full marathon or racing potential on that kind of mileage. It does take time/ years to be capable of running huge mileage weeks but that is what it takes to truly maximize racing potential. That in combination with running fast and practicing to run fast, with racing being the best practice".
He noted that when he was in his prime he was always tired, most of his training runs were hard. Some of them were uncomfortable for the entire 2 hours of the run. "This is how we are supposed to feel during training".
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This morning he emailed me this column he wrote a few years ago which I found to really put things into perspective.

------The Medicalization of the Marathon


You don’t climb mountains for your health. Yes, you have to be healthy to climb mountains, but you climb them for the challenge, because it is hard, because it is dangerous, and, of course, because they are there. Why should it be different for marathons? Mountains, marathons — same thing: because they are there.

But every year we hear more jargon and medical terms applied to the marathon. I am afraid we have made the most simple of sports too complicated and frightening. It seems we have equated the marathon with a disease when we use the word “recover” to apply to the time a runner rests after a hard effort. Rest is a fine word. After a long, hard race, you rest, but after a disease, you recover.

Another obscure term to replace “rest” before a marathon has surfaced: taper. The jargon for resting on both sides of a marathon may be self-aggrandizing or may serve to intimidate those outside the sport. “Tapering” and “recovering” sound much more professional and serious than resting, which may be confused with laziness and goofing off. So regarding the terms “taper” and “recover,” let’s just let it rest.

In addition to resting, humans eat and drink. The new marathon lingo has elevated those historical human activities to “nutrition” and “hydration.” Michael Pollan, who wrote “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food,” keeps it simple as he sums up all the patter of nutritional counsel: “Eat food, mostly plants.” Other than in response to disease or deprivation, that advice is enough. Nutrition is an important field of study for scientific and health reasons, but the morbid need to fret about every vitamin, calorie, or electrolyte is unnecessary for people already healthy enough to be athletes. Yes, branded products proliferate: energy bars and energy drinks, for instance, are only over designed, overpriced food and somewhat salty, sugary water. The most important active ingredient in these sports drinks is water — the same stuff that flows from the tap at a tiny cost. The sugar and salt added are in your every bite of food. The advertising and promotion of such products does turn a profit, so the sellers keep pushing them, but you can get what you need in your own kitchen. Eat food. Drink water.

Gizmos make more profits than do specialty athlete foods. Beyond the silly sight of men with heart-rate monitors holding them tight to their chests with man-jog bras, they are expensive and unnecessary. It may be interesting to know your heart rate at a particular pace, but you can learn how to feel your heart rate with great accuracy and value by stopping while running a known pace and taking your pulse using a wristwatch. (I like wristwatches.) After doing this for a few runs and at different paces, you will be able to read your body and know your heart rate from the feel of it beating in your own chest and be able to correlate a number to it. That little biofeedback study can save you a lot of money with which you can buy food.
A runner I coach recently found that the beeping of a global positioning system strapped to a runner alongside indicating constant deviations from the programmed pace was annoying to almost homicidal limits. Do you really need to be attached to 24 orbiting satellites 12,000 miles up to tell you how to place your feet on planet earth?
From your feet to your nose — they want us to buy strips of tape to stick on our noses to flare our nostrils as we run. These may help old men who snore or make you look like a raging bull, but they won’t help you run faster. There seems to be no end to products or raging bull —.
There’s another way they want to tell you to get nutrition: without eating or drinking. A company sells a dual-layer strip that you place between your cheek and gum (like chewing tobacco?) to get electrolytes into your bloodstream faster so you can remain hydrated. It sounds good, but it is not necessary. Any well-trained athlete needs only water to produce sweat during a marathon (water being the active ingredient of sweat). Simplicity is the word: if you are thirsty, drink water. But don’t drink too much. The necessary electrolytes should already be stored in your body from previous meals.
The new emphasis of medicine and the marathon has produced hyponatremia, or water intoxication. Well-meaning nutritional and medical advisers told novice runners to drink lots of water during a marathon. But their poorly trained bodies sweat out too many electrolytes. Then the medical advice to drink diluted the electrolytes in their bodies and gained water weight as they ran. Medical advice was no replacement for training during which the body learns how to sweat. The excess water leaks into the brain. In the worst cases, their brains swell up, resulting in confusion, coma, and even death. Ironically, many of the people who suffer during a marathon run for a reason other than the challenge, such as to memorialize someone or to raise money for a cause, often of the medical variety, or to celebrate a personal recovery from a personal problem such as drug or alcohol abuse. Of course some just race to win.
But elite athletes have their own demons of the medical variety in the pharmacopeias of performance-enhancing drugs and medical industrial devices, from ice tubs, to gravity-reduction treadmills, to massage, physical therapy, chiropractic, oxygen-reduction rooms, altitude training, or other products or techniques that in some cases work or may be cheating or are quackery. Or as someone else said, some are good, some are bad, and some are bogus.
Our sport is simple. It is beautiful because it is simple. If you want to get good, run a lot, eat food, and drink water, and when you get tired, rest.