The day before Lake Chabot

Lake Chabot

Tomorrow is the Lake Chabot Trail Run by Inside Trail Racing. It will have been 5 weeks since I ran the half-marathon at their race on Montara Mountain, the Pacific Foothills Trail Run on 18 Jan. I hope to make a good effort, so the question is whether my measurable fitness has improved sufficiently since then to make the 42% jump in distance.

So to check, I consider my tracking metrics, ATS and CTS, shamelessly stolen from Coggan and Allen's analysis of cycling power data. Instead of TSS I assign the stress to each day's work equal to the distance run or hiked, not including regular walking. I include today's anticipated 8 km run distance:

plot

So for the past 5 days I've done a mini-taper by stabilizing my CTS at its present peak value of around 6.1 km/day. This has allowed my ATS to recover a bit from its peak of past Sunday without losing and CTS in the deal. Then after the race I'll take a week of recovery before looking forward to 50 km in April.

So going into Foothills my CTS was 3.9 km/day. So compared to that 6.1 km/day is a 56% increase, more than enough to cover that 42% increase in distance. That suggests to me I should be able to race this, not just run it to finish, similar to how I ran Foothills.

But I'm already looking ahead to that 50k. That's a 67% increase over the 30k. So if the CTS of 6.1 km/day works out for me here, that might suggest a CTS of 10.0 km/day would be good for that race. My ATS is already close to that, so I don't need to increase my training volume much from where it's been recently to get there. But I definitely need to stick to it, as my CTS trend line of 0.4 km per day per week in the 7 weeks before that race won't quite hit it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc
Read more