Unrunnable

I've had about a 1/2 dozen titles for this post. The one above is simply what I happened to think at the time I started typing. It's been 5 weeks since my last venture on the Sakonnet Greenway Trail. Life's been busy. February's ALWAYS the toughest month of the year for me. Sh-t happens. But the latest Nor'easter had passed and it was clear, albeit windy, and I NEEDED this run to regain my emotional balance. I started off okay this last week, but it started to go downhill and by Friday I was done. Rather than risk an unfortunate comment to my family last night, I opted to avoid and go to bed at the same time as the kids. You see I needed TODAY.
Well I got to the trail head and sure enough my head was telling me, "You can't run that! It was crusty snow over snow drifts separated by muddy marsh-like stretches of muck and all in 20mph winds. I had not gone a quarter mile and serious thought about calling it. Maybe put the road shoes on and run road. NO! Just get tot he bottom of the hill. It's probably better (it wasn't). But I got to the bottom and actually had a very normal turnover albeit at a slower pace.

"Okay, let's keep going."
"No not sloppy wet feet!"
"Shut up head."

And that was the thing, it was my head. My body, if this makes sense, didn't mind the circumstances. Snow drift? Don't puss out. Drive your foot in like a man! Much better footing. Much better control and rhythm. Water? No worries. There's solid footing underneath it. And so it went, and as I let go I kept extending the time I planned to be out there. First it was try to make 90min. Then 100. Finally, screw it I can make the whole trail in 120min. And I had given myself the extra time this morning to fit that in, so that "I have to get home to take the kids" excuse was just bunk.

This run was amazing. I had the only human footprints on many parts of the trail. There were LOTS of coyote tracks. Absolutely fascinating how they travel single file and step EXACTLY in each other's prints. You can't tell how many there are until they finally separate and you see 3 or more distinct sets. And the birds, I've always loved birds of prey, far and away my favorites. They were out in force because the crystal clear skies and fresh blanket of snow must have made this a hunter's paradise. I came around a corner and there was a giant barn owl on a branch in front of me. There was a pair of red tailed hawks circling above. And a couple miles later, something bigger than the red tails. And to think I almost missed all this because my head was telling me "you can't."

http://app.strava.com/activities/43711073

And that's the point. There's so much of life just there to be seen if you will just ignore the voice saying you can't. My head thought this trail was unrunnable. My body and spirit thought otherwise. Thankfully I listened to them!

Training your mental core

Most people think of "mental toughness" as conscious thoughts which you can use to help control or persevere in a situation. By conscious thought I mean things like "Say to yourself you've done more than this is training, so I can do this here." And while those conscious thoughts can help you during extreme efforts, I've always found they are not enough. So how do you improve mental toughness? Consider this:

I can improve as a runner by working on my legs and other running specific activites. More miles, lifting exercises for legs, calf raises, etc... all make me more efficient. And then I take it to the trails: snowy, muddy,  soggy trails, and guess what? I get torched. My shoulders ache. My posture is poor. I'm scuffling my feet because I can't lift my legs up. Sure I can still drive them down all day long, but I can't get them up to drive them down in the first place. The problem here is despite having leg strength, if I don't have core strength eventually I will hit a situation where I cannot succeed. Where everything breaks down and goes to sh-t. The core gives you the platform from which you can use those peripheral muscles to excel.

So what's the analogy?

You need to strengthen your mental core, and for most people that means understanding and find it in the first place. My mental core is that area where I just "Know" something as opposed to "know". It's the area that seems to defy logic at times. Numbers, figures, HR, miles, any performance measure you can imagine: those are the domain of the head and the lower case "k" know. What is the upper case? Belief. I've said it before, to find your true mental strength you need to find that thing in which you have full, unquestioning belief. And this can be tricky because it can be different for everyone. In fact some people may have unwavering belief in the numbers, for others (such as myself by the way) there needs to be something else.

At work my belief, as egotistical as this may sound, is my unwavering belief that when dealing with logic based systems I can always fix anything I break, if I break it. It gives me great freedom to be creative and use my higher brain functions because worst case scenario is that I have to fix it, and I can ALWAYS fix it. A similar situation exists racing. My favorite Ironman ever was Lake Placid in 2008. I clearly recall going over my race plan and estimates with Tim before the race day. Based on all my numbers, the relative brevity of my preparation (I had focused on the Boston marathon that spring so didn't start Ironman prep until May),  he had my projected race performance at 10:50ish. I looked right at him and said, "I'm going under 10:30." I knew I would. I had no doubts. It didn't matter what the higher brain told me, what the facts and figures said, in my soul I knew I was going to bring it. On race day I went 10:22.

So how do you train the core? I can't really prescribe exercises. I don't think it works that way. Rather the challenge is identifying that core belief. That unshakable something. It might be your coach, or yourself, or your religion, whatever, but you need to find it. Maybe numbers are your religion. That is fine. It can be anything. And the way to find it is to look deep inside yourself for the thoughts that make you calm not tense. You can use race visualization here. Picture a situation. Run it through your mind over and over handling it differently each time. Find the one that brings you calm and ease. That's the one in which you truly believe. Your training races and performance numbers allow you to change or increase the number of scenarios you visualize, but it is the calming visualization that points to your mental core strength. Build towards that.

People say I'm good at pacing a race. This is why. By race day I've "raced" hundreds of time. I typically follow my own strategy, the one which leads me to a sense of calm. I'm analytical so the strategy is based in realism, e.g. if I start the swim very slowly I'll create a deficit I'll need to make up elsewhere. My visuals of race legs are relax/cruise, stalk, hunt. Because at the end of a long day I truly believe, I "Know", damn few guys my age can outlast me on foot. Doesn't matter what the numbers said. I won't break. Over my lifetime I too have been through some things, and this is nothing. I know pain and distress and can handle it. Physical pain is easy. I believe.

Answer the "why"

This sounds like it might be a self-help post, and I wish it was. Actually some may find it as such but really because they looked inside themselves and helped (thus self...help...), not because I did anything...and that's as it should be. It's said that nothing worth having comes easy. Well yes and no. Depends on your definition of easy I guess. Consider this. If you could do an activity, something that you can do without any significant instruction or effort to learn, and then just do it over a long period of time, would that be hard or easy? Even better, just avoid doing one thing, especially in a world where there is sooo much, possibly too much choice for alternatives. Is that hard or easy?

My thought: the activities, or lack there of, are incredibly easy. And yet so many people have such a hard time doing precisely this. Cleaning up a diet or exercising are very easy, even instinctual. Persisting the behavior proves to be daunting. And for me this comes down to the why. Why do it? Why exercise? Why eat better? As long as we're going there, why be faithful to a spouse?

Because.

I wish to be happy and relaxed. Running regularly helps me feel relaxed which makes me happy. I wish to stay healthy so I can be the support for my wife and kids. It's my role in my life. My strongest supporting thought is to be able to be at my kids' weddings. It is a more powerful image than any other. As someone who annually deals with emotional balance, it is vital to have the one overriding thought. No matter what else happens we stay on track for that.

Five fingers, ten toes

In the latter half of my "run streak," I treated myself to a pair of Vibram Five Fingers Bikilas. I'm not some crazed, go minimal or go home, runner but I was intrigued by a few aspects of barefoot, or rather near barefoot, running. As excited as I was to give it a go, I was also nervous about what might happen. Why? Hell I don't know. It's just different...unknown. The anxiety actually started before I bought them. As I quickly learned, there's more than one model of Vibram Five Fingers. What? Yup. There's thems for walking, and thems for running. Thems with laces, kangaroo hide, for cold weather, for hot weather. And then there's the Bikila, the one for barefoot running. Huh? Thought by design they all were for "barefoot" running. Apparently not though, or not as much. Well I wanted the barefoot experience. Hell if I was going to look like a baby Sasquatch out there, I wanted the fully Monty.

Fit:
The first thing I noticed is that they're very difficult to get on. At least they were the first day. The sizing is based on the actual length of your foot and not your shoe size. For me this meant a size that's about two sizes smaller than my normal shoe in European sizing, ie a 41. And for me it was not that easy to get my toes in the little individual toes spaces. My toes don't like being separated and I struggled to get them on. It was a little frustrating at first. However once they were on they fit like socks. In fact at first I thought they were too small. However, after my first run I realized they needed to be that way.

The run:
The first run was at Prospect Park, aka the bunny park, with Laddie. The outer loop is about 1/2 a mile mixed grass and coarse blacktop, with some soft spots, railroad ties in the ground, and lots of branches as the park had not been fully cleaned up since Sandy. Here's the deal with these shoes, you instantly run on the balls of your feet. No gradual "promotes a forefoot strike". Let your heel hit, especially on the pavement, and there is a shock wave that races through your spine to your brain! However, this modified foot strike was easy to adapt, as if this was really how I was meant to run. It was cool. The first run was 1.5 miles and the thing I notice most at the end was increased fatigue in lower leg muscles. No pain, just fatigue. Over the next couple of weeks I stretched the length of the runs to about 3.5 miles, mostly on trails. I did run on the road a few times, but frankly I just don't enjoy the road and it has nothing to do with the shoes. After the "run streak" which was mostly trail, it's just not the same.
Then came the real test. I was not feeling the same degree of lower leg fatigue anymore, presumably because the muscles were adapting, so I went for a ~7 mile run, all trails, plenty of muck and standing water. The run was a loop and I contemplated having a change of shoes in the van if I felt I needed it, but then decided no. I was running the whole thing "barefoot" or I wasn't finishing the run. I was curious about two things: could I do it and would the pace be different than in shoes. Here's the run data (no heart rate, I need a new strap) ->   http://connect.garmin.com/activity/250205867 . Bottom line, I have never run that loop that well. Granted I may have run it that well on that day in shoes too, but I doubt it. There was quite a bit of mud and standing water, and unlike shoes w/socks the Bikilas have so little going on they did not gain any noticeable weight. They had excellent traction. And remember that snug fit? They did not move around at all. The best words to describe the feeling of the run are "swift", "nimble", "fleet". I still am who I am and I know that shoes will not change my top end speed, but in this instance they allowed me to flow through the obstacles with ease.

Protection:
A big concern for me was how painful would it be when I stepped on obstacles. I didn't want to spend entire runs on the lookout for debris. With two exceptions, they were fine. In fact they handled a packed gravel path, easily the most uncomfortable section of one of the trails, with ease. The path is sort of like running on a runaway truck ramp, but I cruised through it. I believe the reason for this, and for the improved traction overall, is that as your feet land your toes more or less wrap around whatever they hit. With shoes the angle of your foot is going to be whatever it is and so you may well hit in with a sub-optimal orientation. When your feet become and integral part of the stride, you are more "dynamic". As I mentioned there were two notable exceptions to the decent foot protection. The first was a branch that found its way between two toes. This is the most vulnerable spot of the Bikilas as there is only a thin piece of lycra between the toes. Yes that sucked. The second was a stray chunk of granite. I got me square in the arch. I believe I saw God for a moment there! :) However, had I hit that in my Sketchers Go Runs, I think it would have sucked almost as much. Anything short of trail shoes with a rock plate would have failed.

Overall:
A month later I really enjoy running in these. Running through forests or through fields feels so natural, primal. That said there are still spots in my running shoe line up for traditional shoes. They have there purposes as well. But like a cyclist with lots of bikes, there is always a favorite, and these are rapidly becoming my favorites. Oh yeah, and for the first time in years I can spread my toes!

Are you measuring the right stuff?

(heavy geek alert!)

We have a saying in analytics: "The easier it is to measure the less valuable it probably will be." This isn't always the case, but a large chunk of the time it will prove to be true. Counts especially are one of my least favorite measures (as any and all of my co-workers will attest!). Case in point: We were building a new datamart at the bank. We had a group reporting that they had successfully loaded data for all but 3 customers. In other words, out of maybe 80k - 100k, only 3 had issues. The ratio was so great, hell, probably not even worth tracking down the others, right? I mean it would take more time than it was worth. Our set was good enough for management reporting... or was it? As the duly appointed namer of elephants in the room, I asked which 3 had not loaded. Two were insignificant, but one was the bank's 4th largest customer and by law had to be reported to Federal agencies. Uh, hmm, maybe this issue is a show stopper.

The moral here is that the easy metrics, the count, the loaded ratio, are worthless. When matched with the actual requirement even missing 1, if it was the wrong one, was a fatal error. Conversely, you could probably drop 30k of the smallest and still be fine. The measure needed to be based on something else, in this case customer ranking in terms of the bank's total credit exposure.

So how does this carry over to you, the athlete? Pace, distance, number of workouts (a count), even HR, all taken in isolation tell you very little about what you really want to know: am I getting better? They need to be taken in combination, cleansed for outlying activity, etc... My Garmin 305 tells me the average pace for my run. Today it told me 7:30/mi. A week ago it told me 7:06/mi. So I'm getting worse? Obviously we need to know more. Last week that 7:06 was over 7 miles. This week the 7:30 was over 15 miles. So was it better or worse? Uh maybe, but if I'm honest I have no idea. Sort of apples and oranges. So we standardize on workouts of a similar duration and compare again. A month ago I went 7:57 for 1:25. Today 7:30 for 1:52. Okay looks like I'm doing better. But honestly when building a metric I still like more relevance. 

Personally I sometimes have a hard time getting going on Saturday morning (it's that pushing 47 years old thing!), so I'll take the first 30min of the run and just go easy, whatever easy is for that day. This creates an outlier in the paces. In other words that first 30min is not indicative of where I am overall, just how I'm feeling that day. So for longer runs I tend to focus on average effort (HR) and paces AFTER the first 30min (in one mile segments). My run score measure is based on the relationship of pace, HR and time. And rather than focusing on the actual score, again something heavily influenced by things like a rough week at work, I'll focus on the slope of the score for the miles after the first 30min (Garmin autolap at 1 mile). 

So put more simply, the measure for long/endurance runs is as follows:

The change in run score after the first 30 min. The training scorecard is the trending of the average change in the run score measure over time.

I get that this is not in everyone's wheel house, so to speak. Hopefully it is something your coach would understand. I know many who do. And if your's doesn't? Well hmm, do you know any good data analysts? :)

PS: I also love trending average score for the final 3 miles of a long run over time (weeks/months). Correlates to the ability to finish out a long event!

I may be crazy, but I'm not nuts!

Are you ready for it? Here it is: I have a secret man-crush on Justin Timberlake. Actually had it for a while. He's just so damn talented. And here's something else, something amazing I discovered, or more accurately re-discovered, over the past 5 weeks or so: I love running.
I set off on this little mini challenge, this quest, with no real expectations. The goal was simple: run every day for 5 weeks...no excuses. The runs were not training runs. There were no "rules" for minimum distance, duration, etc... I just had to go out and run every day. Make time, even just 12min with the dog, every single day for 5 weeks. I had no idea what, if anything, I would discover. Frankly I figured there was a 50/50 chance I would get tired, and then get more tired, and it would feel like work and even if I made it that would be all she wrote. I did expect little nagging injuries to creep in. I expected soreness in my ankle and feet. Maybe numbness in my toe, the usual things I felt during my "training." To mitigate this I spent a large percentage of the time on trails, well for that reason and because I need to run more trails to get ready for the North Face Endurance Challenge at Bear Mountain, NY.
A typical week was a few runs in Fairhaven at lunchtime, a few runs with Laddie, one very long run on the Sakonnet Greenway, and a moderate run again in Middletown either road, trail, or mixed. Total mileage was roughly 25-30 miles per week, so nothing drastic. Mileage began to creep up towards the end of the 5 weeks as I started stretching the 2nd run of the weekend. Also towards the end of this time I decided to try full-on minimal running in Vibram 5 finger Bikilas. More on that in a future post.
So what did I discover? In short, Joy. Yes joy. It didn't happen all at once, in fact the first two weeks were the most difficult, especially Tuesday and Wednesday. I was getting more and more tired, though interestingly it was not the long Saturday trail run that left me the most tired. It was the faster runs in Fairhaven. It took me about a day longer to get 3.57 miles @ 6:16/mile out of my legs than it did 13 miles on the trail @7:55/mile. What the trail runs did tax far more than the road were my core and shoulders. By the end of the 5 weeks my legs more or less ran on autopilot, not even noticing the miles whereas I still feel fatigue in my core and shoulders because of the far greater stabilization requirements when running on the trails. That discomfort peaked in the third week. Other than that my body actually started functioning better, not worse as the miles accumulated.
The "Ah ha" moment occurred over Thanksgiving. I was out running on a wonderful trail in Shelton, CT. I was a bit fatigued and would have had no complaints if I had found a gel packet lying on the ground somewhere. Then I hit this section that passed through a large stand of pine trees. Maybe it was the lack of nutrition or maybe something else, but I suddenly flashed back to childhood. I mean not just a "I remember when I was a kid," but rather I was no longer a 46 year old running on a trail in Connecticut. I was backpacking with my Dad.
When my Dad and I went backpacking, or canoe camping, I would often run ahead down the trail to the next stopping point to see how far away it was, and then run back. There were no thoughts of conserving energy, avoiding bonk, etc... just the pure joy of being out in the wilderness. I liked getting to places where there were no more human noises and stopping and then trying to see how many distinct sounds I could hear and if I could locate the source of those sounds. I'd image all sorts of things. I loved those moments and I hadn't had one of those moments in literally decades...until that run in Connecticut.
It only lasted a brief time, only until the group of walkers with their dogs came around a bend, but for a moment all cares were gone. And the best part is "the hangover" from that run. I remember.
Equally significant was the run before that run. It was the first time in years that Leanna and I have run together, this time with Laddie. The last time was when we lived in Newport and we ran from our apartment to 1st beach. Didn't go so well. This one was different. It was very special.
The 35 days ended Wednesday. I took the next day off, but that was it. I've run the last 3 and will be going again today. I don't feel I "have to" go out. I want to. I'm not technically "training", though obviously this will transfer into preparation for Bear Mountain. My running stride is incredibly smooth right now and I'm very efficient as evidenced by the fact that despite all the miles I still gained a few pounds!
But I love going out on the trails, and am content. I'm actually passing on a running race today, to go run elsewhere. I'm not feeling the need to compete. Actually I'm not even feeling a "need" to run. I just want to...

7 days and counting...

The goal is 35 days. Very arbitrary. And there's no plan, no "optimal" training methodology in play. Just looking to see if I can do it. Oh wait, you don't know what "it" is?

I'm running for 35 days straight. Now before you start with all the "that's a good way to get hurt" and "it's been proven that doesn't make you faster", let me say:
1) some of these runs are simply about a mile and a half of jogging with Laddie. In fact if you looked at my total mileage for the first 7 days, I still come in at under 30 miles. Not high mileage.
2) I'm not trying to get faster. In fact in a way I need to get slower, though even that is not a goal for this effort. No, this effort is just because... I want to see if I can.

When's the last time you did something for no reward other than to prove to yourself that you can?