On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

I had my misgivings about the Ohlone 50k on Sunday, for which I'd registered. I wasn't sure how I was going to get there. I'd tried going down the entry list for other runners who live in San Francisco, checking for them on Strava to see if they lived close, and none did. So I tried to send messages to those I could find on facebook to see if we could coordinate somehow a ride out. But I got only one response, in the negative. He was staying in Pleasanton the night before, relatively close to the "finish" in Del Valle where we were to meet for a shuttle ride to the start of the point-to-point run. Maybe I should try to get a hotel as well, I thought. Then I could ride to the finish on my bike. Or, more fun, I could try camping out in Del Valle. But that involved carrying a tent and sleeping bag and making reservations which probably weren't available still. It all became irrelvant when I checked the event website to see that the run had in fact been ...

It seems every time I do a trail race there's something I forget. So I'm making a list: Clothing: trail shoes light socks compression calf sleeves (I don't know if these do anything, but maybe) underwear compatible with running (some, err, rub the wrong way) running shorts: super-short won't work well but extra-long shorts waste energy: you've got to lift that material every foot stride. I like pockets for stuffing gel wrappers. Body Glide on nipples and other bits which may abrade. technical running shirt (these do tend to abrade somewhat, hence the previous. sun screen everywhere which might get exposed something to wear over running clothes before or after race running cap contact lenses belt for holding water bottle. optional pouch for belt: good for storing Clif Bloks, Endurolytes. Possible light gloves and compression forearm sleeves if it's cold Make sure laces are tied well. I generally leave my laces knotted and slide shoes on off, tied. I like th...

Last year I did the Inside Trail Racing Woodside Ramble 50 km and it was for me a very successful race. That race was broken down into 6 segments: up Huddart Park, along Skyline Ridge, down into Wunderlich, back out of Wunderlich, back along Skyline Ridge, and down Huddart Park (with its infamous mini-climb just when you think you're close to the finish). That's two primarily-climbs, two primarily-descents, and two rolling sections. I'd trained hard for the ride, ramping up my distance as I should have done for my previous long races, both marathons, none of which went as well as I'd wanted. The key for me is to get solid blocks of consecutive long days, for example 10 miles or more four days in a row, to really build endurance for the longer distances. And for trail races it's important to train hilly trails, not just flat runs. This year my running suffered from the distraction of the San Francisco Randonneurs brevet series, first the 200 km at the end of J...

On Wednesday morning I had oral surgery, getting an implant installed. Fun, fun. But the procedure was a lot easier than I had anticipated, so relatively easy I questioned my decision to get anesthetic, something I normally decline during fillings, for example. It hadn't even occurred to me to ask, as I expected such a scene of blood and gore that no rational human could survive the untempered pain and still maintain either consciousness or sanity. But I suspect it would have gone okay. The worst part was at the end when I was strictly advised "don't do anything to raise your blood pressure for the next 5 days, including any vigorous exercise." No vigorous exercise for 5 days? But I was approaching the end of a recovery week after a solid block of work in Switzerland, and I was ready to get moving again. In particular, Saturday was the Low-Key Hillclimb up Welch Creek Road. But that would be only 73 hours post-implant: too far short of the 120 hour recommendat...

In the Woodside Ramble 50 km my Forerunner 610 was powered up and recording for almost exactly 5 hours before it powered down, 4:47 into the race and 32 minutes before my finish. This was, needless to say, a downer. The watch is rated for 8 hours, not 5. So what went wrong? Battery fatigue? False marketing? Accelerated draw due to a challenging GPS environment? A personal curse that I shall always get sucky batteries? Well, this last option has proven likely with various cell phone and laptop batteries in my personal history. But in this case, I stumbled across the simpler explanation when reviewing DCRainmaker's "in depth review" of the Forerunner 610 . One-second mode. I had the unit on one-second mode to give better time-resolution on Strava segments. I looked at the Smart Sampling mode for the Forerunner 610 here . Sampling times blew out to as long as 7 seconds in smart sampling mode (a few longer, but those intervals may be due to signal loss), while ...

After months of carefully tracking my training metrics to ramp my volume up to where I thought it needed to be for the Woodside Ramble 50 km race, my first race over marathon distance, my training had been diverted off-course by 12 days of fatigue after a relatively innocuous tooth extraction. This had left me just a week and a half until the race. So after an test run on a Wednesday, I did a solid 3 days on Thu-Fri-Sat, the last of these a 31.5 km run through the Marin Headlands. This was a very important test for me, as it included 1300 meters of descending (and, less importantly, climbing), and my legs survived running all of it. This was 90% of the descending I'd need to do in the 50k, where I'd have the additional advantage of fresher legs. But that was it: my last chance for training. Instead of a controlled taper in the last two weeks, I had one week to get my legs into something resembling race shape. I did a series of short runs until Friday, when feeling fat an...

Training for the Woodside Ramble 50 km race, while not without hiccups, was going nicely to plan. I'd plotted a gradual increase in my simplified running form of CTS, ramping 0.43 km/day per week, and I was sticking to that schedule, initially by increasing the length of my runs, but later transitioning to an increase in frequency. I was tired, of course, but a good tired. I was pushing my limits, as one must to get them to shift, but it seemed to be working. The problem with simplified training stress metrics is they exclude stress from other sources, and in this case the big ugly stress source was oral surgery. A tooth broke and the dentist gave me the sobering news the next day: it should be removed and replaced with an implant. So the tooth came out, a process involving the expenditure of extremely few kilojoules on my part, but which nevertheless left me very, very tired. Initially I persisted in my plan to run every day. Length didn't matter, speed didn't mat...

Another day past, and another day less until the Woodside Ramble 50 km race. I've been focusing on plots showing weighted average distances (which I refer to as ATS, CTS, after the cycling power metrics of the same names), and to number of runs per week. These plots have been guiding my training. An example is the following: But long run distance is important as well, and that's been increasing. This hasn't been as much planned as it's been based on what I can do: I like to run long, and if I feel good, I try to extend my previous distance a bit. Here I plot the distance of my runs versus the date relative to 18 Mar, where I label training runs as crosses, and races as stars: The long run distance has been steadily tending up, but not fast enough to approach 50 km by 13 April. I've run 3 races so far this year. The first was just 4 km (listed as 4.5 km here because of warm-up). For that race, distance wasn't a factor; I'd already done runs twice the ...