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 ...

I love VeloViewer , which does amazing things with the Strava API. In this case, it plots my accumulated over the course of each year in each of various activity categories, like cycling, running, walking, and hiking. I am interested most right now in running as I prepare for the Ohlone 50 km. This first plot shows total distance (km) running per year since I started using Strava in late 2010: There's three periods where I've managed to sustain a relatively rapid rate of distance increase. The first was towards the end of 2012, when I'd decided I was going to run the California International Marathon. That didn't quite go as well as I'd hoped, with leg problems kicking in near mile 20. But from the plot it doesn't seem like there was a shortage of training: I ran close to 1100 km starting in September. But the marathon caused damage. I tried to continue running after, but I just couldn't get rid of the nagging pains and stinging numbness I felt at 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...

Today was my first running road race in quite awhile. First since CIM? Maybe. Time really flies. Anyway, I did the Dolphin Southend Running Club's 10 miler at Sierra Point, running out and back along the Bay Trail, past Genentech. The run was in the morning fog, reducing visibility to only a few hundred meters. The trail would appear ahead without long-range context. We started at the Marina, but the boats were only visible on the water well within the final kilometer. The race was a certified 10-mile course. That means if you run the trail, hitting all the tangents, running the minimum distance consistent with remaining on the trail (which was mostly paved, the sole exception being a very short dirt section), you went 10 miles to measurement precision. This was a bit of a fiction, however, since with the out-and-back course, near the turn-around point there were oncoming runners, so basic courtesy required staying to the right of the path. This added a small bit of distan...

Strava challenges are fun, motivating getting out on the bike or for a run when otherwise you might not want to, for example because it's cold or windy or raining. On the other hand, they're distortionary: any time you measure and rank something that thing you're measuring or ranking tends to get more focus than things which aren't measured or ranked. For example, at present Strava challenges are running-based or cycling-based. You get points for running in running challenges, for cycling in cycling challenges. Mixing running and cycling tends to result in mediocre results in both competitions, with nothing to reward balance, which is otherwise probably healthy. Certainly I've enjoyed mixing up running and cycling since I started running in 2008. So how to reward both? I recommend a multi-sport challenge. For example, on a distance basis, use a conversion factor for run miles to cycling miles. For example using Ironman distances, running miles would be equi...

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...

Today, as I'm typing this, is the Boston Marathon. If I'd been 40 seconds faster @ CIM 2012, I'd have had a qualifying time and maybe I'd be running the streets of Boston instead. But rather than running Boston I'm a week after meeting a New Year's resolution, to run my first ultra, the Woodside Ramble 50 km last Sunday. I'd had a training plan for the race, and it crashed and burned when 3.5 weeks out oral surgery left me fatigued and prone to allergies. My running came to a virtual halt for 12 days, leaving just enough time for a brief test run and 3 decent volume days before I had to taper for the final week before the big day (indulging in a 17-km test run 3 days prior). This completely blew my plan to do big volume up to 2 weeks before, then taper in: maintaining CTS the second-to-last week, then letting it slip slightly that last week to come in with an optimized combination of freshness & fitness. CTS is a metric of chronic training stress, ...

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...