June 2017 Running Challenge

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  • cburke8909
    cburke8909 Posts: 990 Member
    todays run 3.6 on machine with heavy resistance. total for month 88.3/150 61.7 miles to go.
  • KatieJane83
    KatieJane83 Posts: 2,002 Member
    @critterfull1220 welcome to the most awesome group on MFP, and congrats on your quarter mile, that's fantastic!!!

    @need2move2 welcome to you too! If you are doing any of your workout at a run then congrats, you are a runner!
  • cburke8909
    cburke8909 Posts: 990 Member
    Pastor Vincent I might do ok with the up hills. When I train on the treadmill, I have the incline up to almost maximum for most of the run, but the treadmill cannot replicate the downhills and I find those challenging when I do my road runs. Obviously my pace is fine going downhill but the wear and tear on my legs is noticeable.
  • PastorVincent
    PastorVincent Posts: 6,668 Member
    cburke8909 wrote: »
    Pastor Vincent I might do ok with the up hills. When I train on the treadmill, I have the incline up to almost maximum for most of the run, but the treadmill cannot replicate the downhills and I find those challenging when I do my road runs. Obviously my pace is fine going downhill but the wear and tear on my legs is noticeable.

    When I get forced onto a dreadmill, I set it to "average 5%" (4-7% is the options I think) and then let it randomly vary the hills. I pick some famous trail and follow that so maybe not really random but seems like it. I find that feels more like a "real" run.

    --
    Pastor Vincent
  • PastorVincent
    PastorVincent Posts: 6,668 Member
    edited June 2017
    need2move2 wrote: »
    Hi
    I am new to running. My <3 wants to be a runner but my body is not there yet so I am a walk/runner. I would like to set a goal of 60Km for the month of June. Here is too a successful month good luck everyone! B)
    I will clock my km's weekly.

    June 9 - 20 Km
    June 16 - 15 Km
    June 23 -
    June 30 -
    June goal 60km

    Welcome to the group! Run/walk is a great way to start. Heck, I have seen people do marathons using run/walk.

    --
    Pastor Vincent
  • karllundy
    karllundy Posts: 1,490 Member
    6/1 - 4 miles
    6/2 - Pre-race rest day. Ate some donuts for national donut day / carb load :wink:
    6/3 - 13.2 miles. Damn HOT Dam to Dam half marathon! Race report forthcoming.
    6/4 - Ow.
    6/5 - Still ow. Had hoped for a recovery run, but decided against it when I got up.
    6/6 - 4.3 miles.
    6/7 - Unplanned rest day due to son's strep throat :-(
    6/8 - 5 miles.
    6/9 - 5 miles.
    6/10 - 6.2 miles.
    6/11 - Rest day.
    6/12 - 5 miles. 78° and humid at 4:45 a.m.!
    6/13 - 4.1 miles of track/speed work with a group. Then quick upper body weights. Again, 78° and humid.
    6/14 - Rest day. Semi-planned.
    6/15 - 5 miles.
    6/16 - 5 miles.

    exercise.png
  • girlinahat
    girlinahat Posts: 2,956 Member
    SpiritHippo wrote: »
    Since everyone here seems to be very consistent with their running workouts, is there any insight you can share in terms of what you do to make sure you don't miss your runs/ skip running workouts/ get behind? Sometimes I am on point with making every scheduled run for a few weeks straight but then something seems to happen either with scheduling, motivation, or desire to do a different workout. I need to be more consistent and it looks like all of you have it figured out so please let me know how you keep at it :smile:

    pretty much what everyone else has said. I’ve never been a morning person, but I made myself get up early to run. I get out of the house before my excuses can form in my head. I can put together a far greater range of excuses at the end of the day.
    I also try and get up and do something daily. If I have too many days off, then the excuse ‘I’ll stay in bed and go tomorrow’ is almost guaranteed to keep me under the covers. Some days I may literally walk around the park rather than run.

    But it is very easy to fail on consistency. Life gets in the way. I find I end up canning at least ONE of my planned runs, terrible I know. Having a race planned also helps. I am a member of a local running club which is good – but again there are excuses I can make such as ‘my legs can’t handle the distance tonight’ or ‘it’s the other side of town’. Joining a running club is great – ours has a suggestion that you should be able to run a twelve minutes mile pace, and the short runs are 4-5 miles so as long as you can do that, great. They also sheepdog to not leave anyone behind.
  • karllundy
    karllundy Posts: 1,490 Member
    VydorScope wrote: »
    Stoshew71 wrote: »
    At least 80% of all your miles (or minutes if you go by time) should be easy or recovery (no faster than conversational pace). If you do any more, it's a recipe for burn out and will stunt your training.

    Interesting. This is the first I have seen anyone suggest this. My plan for the summer (well until this blasted heat wave hit) was to do my 3 to 5 "short" runs (6-8 miles) each week at race pace+a little (trying to get faster) and my long run at a slightly-harder-than-easy pace. Which without doing the math is probably way more than 20% at a hard pace :smiley:

    Is that a bad plan?

    --
    Pastor Vincent

    Doing as much as you suggest at race pace is much more likely to result in injury. The 80/20 rule is pretty solid. For example, if you run 5 days a week, you might have one day of speed work or a tempo run, three days of easy/base pace running and one day of hills at easy/base pace or lower. Simply adding that one day of speed work will, over time, help all of your regular/easy runs become faster.
  • WhatMeRunning
    WhatMeRunning Posts: 3,538 Member
    edited June 2017
    VydorScope wrote: »
    DANG. So I was wondering if I do a lot of hills and looked at the Strava MFP group... and umm... I took the leader board last week, by OVER 1200 feet.

    I am a slow runner compared to many of you, but I wonder how y'all would hold up in my neighborhood! :lol::wink:

    --
    Pastor Vincent
    I saw your elevation, and I am very impressed. In past weeks I made all of my runs as hilly as possible. I would typically take the leaderboard. While I did not run these hills as much this past week (I am running on the track for my intervals now and reduced mileage this last week), I was getting a little over 3200 ft of elevation gain on Strava for my 41.5 mile per week efforts for a few weeks. Again, that is as hilly as I can make it out here! :lol: Your 3811 feet beats that! Although you did it with 49.5 miles, so perhaps per mile mine was slightly higher on average, but I suspect if you targeted hills like I did you could probably average higher still. If @ROBOTFOOD ever starts back up again with a ton of running though, watch out! He can give you a good challenge. He was doing some seriously ridiculous stuff for a while.
  • WhatMeRunning
    WhatMeRunning Posts: 3,538 Member
    need2move2 wrote: »
    Hi
    I am new to running. My <3 wants to be a runner but my body is not there yet so I am a walk/runner. I would like to set a goal of 60Km for the month of June. Here is too a successful month good luck everyone! B)
    I will clock my km's weekly.

    June 9 - 20 Km
    June 16 - 15 Km
    June 23 -
    June 30 -
    June goal 60km
    Welcome runner! Believe me, you are a runner. If doing walking mixed with running is not considered running, then that makes me NOT a runner, and I take exception to that personally. It's fine if you believe that, just don't try telling me that unless you want the middle finger and a challenge to at least run as many hours per week and as many hills, etc, before you are allowed to be condescending about it. :smile:

    Again, welcome to the group!
  • lporter229
    lporter229 Posts: 4,907 Member
    @VydorScope - It certainly is easy to get confused in all of the numbers. So many chiefs out there with different definitions of training zones and what not. At the end of the day, they all work out to be pretty close. I like to use plans that are centered around lactate threshold rather than max heart rate, just because it is easier to estimate, IMO. If you ran a 10K in 51 minutes and your average HR was 162, that is probably pretty close to your LT. Did you feel like you could sustain that pace for maybe another 9-10 minutes or were you completely spent? If you were spent, you LT may be a little closer to 160. Otherwise, 162 might be a good estimate. The important thing is that none of this has to be exact. It's more about getting an idea of where you should be training and trying to hit it rather than missing the target completely.

    When I first started with 80/20 Running I was 42 years old. I did the treadmill LT test in the book and determined my LT to be around 160. That set my easy zone to 138 max. Hitting 138 was HARD. Very hard. Especially if you train on hills, because it's nearly impossible to maintain a steady HR, so that makes getting an avg HR in a zone that much harder. I really had to work at slowing down. But the thing is, it didn't take long running at this slow pace until I was finding that my previous pace was now achievable while staying in this lower HR zone. You make progress really quickly. If you commit to it, you will be surprised by the results.
  • lporter229
    lporter229 Posts: 4,907 Member
    @MNLittleFinn - Eeek...I am getting excited for you!!! I may not check in again until Monday, so I just wanted to be sure and say good luck to you tomorrow! I hope you can get a little extra "push" knowing that 100+ people that have never met you will be at home cheering you on!!!
  • PastorVincent
    PastorVincent Posts: 6,668 Member
    lporter229 wrote: »
    @VydorScope - It certainly is easy to get confused in all of the numbers. So many chiefs out there with different definitions of training zones and what not. At the end of the day, they all work out to be pretty close. I like to use plans that are centered around lactate threshold rather than max heart rate, just because it is easier to estimate, IMO. If you ran a 10K in 51 minutes and your average HR was 162, that is probably pretty close to your LT. Did you feel like you could sustain that pace for maybe another 9-10 minutes or were you completely spent? If you were spent, you LT may be a little closer to 160. Otherwise, 162 might be a good estimate. The important thing is that none of this has to be exact. It's more about getting an idea of where you should be training and trying to hit it rather than missing the target completely.

    When I first started with 80/20 Running I was 42 years old. I did the treadmill LT test in the book and determined my LT to be around 160. That set my easy zone to 138 max. Hitting 138 was HARD. Very hard. Especially if you train on hills, because it's nearly impossible to maintain a steady HR, so that makes getting an avg HR in a zone that much harder. I really had to work at slowing down. But the thing is, it didn't take long running at this slow pace until I was finding that my previous pace was now achievable while staying in this lower HR zone. You make progress really quickly. If you commit to it, you will be surprised by the results.

    Just started reading the 80/20 book last night. Read the intro and chp1. So pretty much just the sales pitch so far. Plan to skip the few chapters where he does nothing by present proof and jump to instructions. For me, the proof will be in the real world test, with my sample size of 1. :)

    So 138/160 = 86% - are you basically using lactate threshold as your max heart rate?
  • PastorVincent
    PastorVincent Posts: 6,668 Member
    lporter229 wrote: »
    I would love to hear the experiences from others in their 40s or older who are either still continuing to see improvement or have really leveled off. What should we expect as middle aged runners? Maybe it's more about altering our approach to training, cross training and recovery. I do know for certain that rest and recovery are more important now than they have ever been in the past.

    I am 42 and feel like I am still gaining, hit 2 PRs this year. But definitely gaining slower. Probably just the Law of Diminishing returns though. I am hoping to PR the Marathon next year. We will see.
  • girlinahat
    girlinahat Posts: 2,956 Member
    just been ploughing through about 100 messages......

    @MNLittleFinn good luck at the weekend!! You'll be fine.

    I have a little off-road adventure on one of our long-distance paths here tomorrow. My friend is doing the whole route as a charity walk split over weekends. I'm starting at the end of where she plans to stop tomorrow night, and running to meet her in the middle, then will walk back with her. So am expecting 8 miles of running followed by another 8 mile walk.
  • lporter229
    lporter229 Posts: 4,907 Member
    VydorScope wrote: »
    lporter229 wrote: »
    @VydorScope - It certainly is easy to get confused in all of the numbers. So many chiefs out there with different definitions of training zones and what not. At the end of the day, they all work out to be pretty close. I like to use plans that are centered around lactate threshold rather than max heart rate, just because it is easier to estimate, IMO. If you ran a 10K in 51 minutes and your average HR was 162, that is probably pretty close to your LT. Did you feel like you could sustain that pace for maybe another 9-10 minutes or were you completely spent? If you were spent, you LT may be a little closer to 160. Otherwise, 162 might be a good estimate. The important thing is that none of this has to be exact. It's more about getting an idea of where you should be training and trying to hit it rather than missing the target completely.

    When I first started with 80/20 Running I was 42 years old. I did the treadmill LT test in the book and determined my LT to be around 160. That set my easy zone to 138 max. Hitting 138 was HARD. Very hard. Especially if you train on hills, because it's nearly impossible to maintain a steady HR, so that makes getting an avg HR in a zone that much harder. I really had to work at slowing down. But the thing is, it didn't take long running at this slow pace until I was finding that my previous pace was now achievable while staying in this lower HR zone. You make progress really quickly. If you commit to it, you will be surprised by the results.

    Just started reading the 80/20 book last night. Read the intro and chp1. So pretty much just the sales pitch so far. Plan to skip the few chapters where he does nothing by present proof and jump to instructions. For me, the proof will be in the real world test, with my sample size of 1. :)

    So 138/160 = 86% - are you basically using lactate threshold as your max heart rate?

    Not max HR. His zones are set up based on % of LT, not max HR. It allows you to avoid the pain of trying to find your actual max heart rate, as this is a difficult test and estimated calculations can be way off. If you do the test to estimate your lactate threshold, you are likely to get closer to the mark with a lot less effort. The speed workouts (intervals) that his plans have you doing will have you running over 100% of lactate threshold. FWIW, as your fitness increases, the gap between your max HR and your LT HR will decrease. You will want to re-evaluate your LT HR every so often. I usually try and do it once a year or so. I have found the Daniels Tables (I think somebody posted a link somewhere above) to be surprisingly accurate at estimating LT HR based on race paces.
  • WhatMeRunning
    WhatMeRunning Posts: 3,538 Member
    edited June 2017
    @lporter229 - I am 45 now, was 42 when I started running. Up until last summer before my stress fracture I had been slowly getting faster and faster, targeting new PR's, similar to what you just described. This year though, I am SO much slower than before, despite building up a level of endurance that honestly impresses me. I am a more durable runner this year than last, I have no doubt about that. In my case, it's the weight slowing me down and the calculators all show me running at new PR paces without the added weight. But I am so slow I can't even hit the cutoff times for a lot of half marathons! That is a mental struggle.

    One thing I have noticed this year at 45 that I did not notice in prior years is that simply working on my base and building up endurance has not made much increase in my pace at all. Again, if I lost the weight I would be faster, but even then the gains are not there. It all comes down to weight, and is no longer about just running far and slowly getting faster.

    So I am feeling this plateau.

    It is what has driven me to work on my high end cardio and starting to work on these sprint intervals and focusing on 5k's at the moment. This is an area I have not focused on in this way before, thus it stands to reason that I have room for gains here. These gains at shorter distances can translate out to further distances, but first I have to get faster at these shorter distances. I am seeing gains in just this first couple weeks already, so I am hopeful.

    It's possible that once I get any gains from this, and then after several weeks going back to base building to translate all of that effort out to longer mileage and faster paces on those longer, slower runs, that I might just see myself with very little to no gain. I might also see some gains but never again see such gains in the future because part of aging is slowing down.

    I may seem young to many at 45, and I am. But this is when this stuff first noticeably hits people is right here, at this age. The fact that I'm coming back from injury and losing weight is probably the only reason I will see temporary gains, but the big question is, will I ever beat my half marathon PR of 2:17 again? There is a chance I might not, and I have to be ready to accept that.

    I know @Elise4270 wiped out her PR's in Garmin to start over. I have not done that yet as I still wish to beat those times someday. If I get back down to last years weight at my current level of fitness which is higher than my fitness last year, but still can't beat that time, then I know I had an age-adjusted peak when I got that PR and will let go of it, perhaps then wiping out my old PR's and just work within the new numbers.

    Use it or lose it. Even if I continue to get slower, I hope to keep myself moving based on that mantra. If I give up, I am giving up a lot more than just running. This mantra is also making me rethink fitness outside of my "long distance running". You already do swimming and other things. This is great! You will be doing those things while some of your peers will say they are too old to do that any more. RUBBISH! You do it! I love running some sprints right now out on that track knowing I am getting some weird looks from people wondering why some middle-aged guy is doing sprints. Aren't I too old for that? :smile: Well, I'm doing it. You tell me how I can be too old for that when I am actually out there doing it.

    In fact, perhaps if I think I'm too old for anything I should just do it. In regards to fitness and health, that is. I'm not going to try and drink a 21 year old under the table or anything stupid like that. I just mean, if I avoid doing an activity that is supposed to build and maintain fitness because I feel too old to do it, it's not that I'm too old. It's because I gave up. and whatever systems/muscles/joints/etc receive benefit from that activity will not get those benefits and age.
  • skippygirlsmom
    skippygirlsmom Posts: 4,433 Member
    @whatmerunning I hate to admit I got lost the first time I ran here by work, I worked in this park for like 7 years at the time. Here is a overview - scary huh? ha ha I actually have a great sense of direction.

    1hjwo8b399aq.jpg

    I've never eaten while running, but Doug, who used to post here stopped during a HM or full that he was pacing at McDonald's guess he was hungry :smiley:

    Didn't run this morning - have my 5K tonight.

  • skippygirlsmom
    skippygirlsmom Posts: 4,433 Member
    @MNLittleFinn best of luck tomorrow, I can't wait to hear all about it!!! I'll give you all the cliche sayings "the hays in the barn" "trust your training" "you got this"

    xx4salijttcs.jpg

  • RespectTheKitty
    RespectTheKitty Posts: 1,667 Member
    @MNLittleFinn I'll be thinking about you tomorrow. No matter what happens, you are an amazing runner. Now go own that 26.2!
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