Weekend Training Review, Part 1

I was feeling optimistic about my run on Saturday morning. I keep thinking that with the stretching I've been doing, the track workouts, the improvement in my nutrition and aerobic conditioning...I should be able to run the 12.5-mile Waterton Canyon loop in under 2 hours. I felt good enough when I woke up that I considered that goal to be a real possibility.

Well, it's not the first time I've been wrong, is it?

If there has ever been a more inconsistent runner, I don't believe I've heard of him. My speed curve was all over the place. That's understandable, of course, if you're running hills (or have some other environmental anomalies)...but the slope of this particular road is pretty gentle and consistent. I just have some problems.


Seriously, what's up with that? I mean, I can understand having a run where one mile is slower than another, but what could possibly cause so many radical fluctuations when the elevation is consistent? I am apparently possessed by some sort of lower-body Jekyll & Hyde syndrome. I'm a human yo yo, only without the sense of joy and fun that a real yo yo provides.

Oh sure, the bigger spikes can be explained by walking, stopping to stretch, or the spot where I stopped to take off my jacket. But there's no good reason for all the other sine wave fluctuations, other than some sort of physical or mental condition. Perhaps I'll become a famous clinical case study, and they'll name my condition "Waterton-wobble syndrome".

It's frustrating. I don't do that in the pool -- I'm pretty smooth there. At least I think I am...

But I didn't make my 2-hour goal. It was closer to 2:15. Ugh. As a runner, I felt like hanging up the spikes, burning my jockstrap, and donating my stick of BodyGlide to some up-and-coming young punk while giving him sage advice like "Keep pushin' the envelope, kid". As a coach, though, I'd have told myself to take away the good points of the day's run -- I did burn quite a few calories, covered a pretty good distance, and ended up cranking out a pretty decent tempo for the last mile or so. As a coach, I'd tell myself to go home, take a hot bath, drink some electrolyte-rich fluids, and spend the afternoon stretching, so I'd be able to come back and run even better the next day.

OK, coach, I can do the bath thing. I can also drink. And I'm pretty sure that sitting on the coach watching the SciFi channel is almost as good as stretching, right?

But the weekend's exercise wasn't over. I'll tell you more about the rest of my training in the next posting.

Have a great day!

(By the way, I've never actually worn running spikes -- that "hang up the spikes" thing is just something that real runners say when they retire. Or so I've heard. But with all the ways I can find to injure myself with regular shoes, I always figured that adding sharp, pointy things into the mix was just asking for trouble. Wouldn't you agree?)