On Boston Training, and General Fitness

Hello and welcome to Day One of Boston Marathon training!  I, for one, am glad it's here.  While I am, generally speaking, not one who needs a goal race as a motivator for fitness, in my efforts to not burn out on running after my two-marathon fall, I may have slid too far in the other direction (that being, in the direction of snooze alarms, bacon-egg-and-cheeses, and wearing sweatpants because they are more comfortable than real pants, not because I am intent on doing any sweating).  I'm ready to chase 3:20 again.  Also, I need blog fodder.

While my weekly mileage since November has been... laughable, my overall level of fitness hasn't seemed particularly diminished.  The 15-20-ish weekly miles I have been running are in the neighborhood of 7:45 to 8:20/mile, and I've kept up weekly cross training (and money spending) in the form of Soul Cycle.  Imagine my surprise then, when I hit the squash court yesterday and was doubled over gasping for breath about 5 minutes in.  My opponent?  Not so much.

In my defense, I had never picked up a squash racquet before yesterday.  In my opponent's defense, I can run for nearly 6 hours at a time, so 5 minutes of squash really shouldn't leave me sucking wind.  Not only was I flirting with "pretending to tie my shoes so I can take a break" levels of fatigue, I couldn't believe how sore my butt got.  My butt!  Something I actually use in my chosen sport! 

It is my sincere hope that my soreness ("squash butt" is evidently A Thing) does not inhibit me from pursuing my Boston Day One workout with gusto.  Or at the very least, with ease, since the prescribed workout is indeed 6 miles at an easy (8:20) pace.

A word about those prescribed workouts: once again, I'll be using a Training Peaks plan.  For a number of years, their Intermediate Marathon Training plan did not fail me.  For this fall season, I bumped it up a notch and went with their Break 3:15 plan.  I failed to break 3:40 in a marathon I'd rather forget about. (though I linked to it there because there is nothing people love more than reading about other people's shortcomings).  But I don't think that was the fault of the plan - I felt adequately prepared and confident in my ability.  To that end, I'll be using the Break 3:15 plan again this season (A Break 3:20 plan is not an option).

That said, I also know Boston is not an easy course.  Net downhill, schmet downhill.  While I'll be training to break 3:15 on Monday, April 21st, I'm also registered for the Sugarloaf Marathon on May 18th, lest the hills of Newton get the best of me.

In conclusion, neither a lifetime of tennis lessons nor 18 races of marathon distance or greater prepared me for 5 minutes on the squash court, and I hope that's not some sort of omen for the Spring racing season.  See you in Hopkinton!

Merry Christmas from PDX

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday with family and loved ones. And alcohol.



I don't hate the beers available in the Pacific Northwest. I also don't hate drinking as early as 9am, because it's noon according to my New York-based body clock...


Super foggy, super hilly Christmas morning run.


Do good, be good, kick ass. Words to live by.

Adventures In Blood Doping

First and foremost, a huge thanks to everyone who came out to Saturday’s “We’ll Run For Beer!”  Despite a couple of snags (running directly through the holiday market at Columbus Circle wasn’t my best idea…), I think we had another great event.  I’ll do a full recap as soon as I have photos (no seriously, I will. Not like how I said I’d write a recap of a fancy gym I went to in September, or a marathon I paced in October…).

Today though, I want to talk about blood doping.  Sort of. 

Back in October, I went to the doctor for a routine physical.  My results were by and large fine (the doctor was most concerned by the cuts and scars on my back and chest from my sports bra chafe), though my blood work did come back a bit abnormal.  My potassium was elevated, and my B-12 was low.  Having gone in for this physical the morning after I ran my second marathon in 8 days, I wasn’t all that surprised by the potassium imbalance; I was surely dehydrated, and had been subsisting on a diet of Gatorade and bananas for 48 hours.  I was instructed to drink water, take a B-12 supplement, and return in a month.

On my next visit, the potassium issue had rectified itself, but even after 4 weeks of supplemental B-12 (4 weeks of having it in my possession, about 4 days of actually taking it…), my B-12 was still low (230 somethings per something; the doctor reported less than 350 somethings per something as being low.  Also the doctor probably knows what the unit of measure is).  The doctor asked that I return for a B-12 injection.  I laughed, because it reminded me of the term “hot beef injection,” and I’m a middle school boy.

Upon regaining composure, I went to the internet to see what B-12 deficiency meant, because, obviously.  B-12 deficiency can have some unpleasant if benign sounding consequences, including numbness or tingling in the arms and legs, weakness, and loss of balance (Source).  Oh but also, it could be a sign of pernicious anemia, which results in diarrhea, constipation, fatigue, loss of appetite, pale skin (um, hi), problems concentrating (that’s the internet’s fault), shortness of breath, swollen and red tongue, bleeding gums, confusion, and depression. And also you need red blood cells if you want to live.  So there’s that.

But perhaps most interesting was this tidbit: “Except in people with a vitamin B-12 deficiency, no evidence shows that vitamin B-12 supplements increase energy or improve athletic performance.” (Source)  EXCEPT IN PEOPLE WITH A VITAMIN B-12 DEFICIENCY.  That’s me!

Eager to test out my newly acquired, B-12 resultant super athletic prowess, I hit the treadmill after work yesterday evening for a little fitness test.  Oh just kidding, that was my plan but then I wanted to eat hummus on the couch with my cat instead.  So much for B-12 increasing energy in people with deficiency...

But then this morning, having given the B-12 a full 21-ish hours to kick in, I headed out for a run.  I’m not currently training for anything, and have tried to indulge my inner lazy fat ass a bit in the weeks leading up to Boston training (which kicks off 12/30!).  My weekly mileage has been hovering around 20 miles for about the last 8 weeks (hence the lack of blogging – nothing to see here).  If ever there were a control for an experiment in athletic ability, I should think this is it. 

I decided I’d run a full loop of the park, for a total of about 8 miles door to door.  That’s a couple miles more than I usually run during the work week, but nothing crazy enough to land me another stress fracture.  I also decided I wouldn’t look at my Garmin for this endeavor, and instead see how I stacked up post-run, as compared with my paces for my usual morning runs.  So my metrics were: a) how do I feel, which is not a metric, and b) how do my paces compare to paces on other runs on different routes and different times and during different weather conditions.  Clearly this was a very scientific study.

Here is this morning's run:

Don't use these maps to stalk me - my mom gets scared about that.  Anyway, my B-12 boosted run resulted in an average pace of 8:13.  I felt delightful for the first 5 miles (possibly because I was running an average of 8:13 minute miles...), and decidedly less so for the final 3.

By contrast, here is a run Tuesday morning of last week:

7:49 average pace.  As for how I felt, I don't really remember anything noteworthy about this, but according to Dailymile, I felt "great" and my comments were "great running weather this week!"

To ensure these results weren't a fluke, I decided to check against one more morning run, this one from two weeks ago:

Average pace: 7:52.  According to Dailymile, the morning I ran this, there was a "real feel" of 16 degrees.  I still gave it the toothy "great" smiley face.

In conclusion, B-12 is a hoax and has only deleterious impacts on athletic performance.  That said, if anyone from Aetna is reading this, please cover the cost of this injection anyway.