Praying and Running

What can you say about a 15-mile Tuesday morning run? I can say a lot. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I can say about a 15-mile Tuesday morning run on more 15-mile Tuesday Morning runs than I can count. You see, they are a main stay of the marathon training plan that I use. That plan being Pete Pfitzinger’s Advanced Marathoning 18 week 70-85 miles per week plan. The first thing I can say about the Tuesday morning 15-mile run is that it’s not a long run. Pete clearly defines long runs as starting at 16 miles. So, the 15-miler that begins so many Tuesdays of my life is not a long run. I mean, who ever heard of doing a “long run” on a Tuesday morning. That would just be insane. Being that it’s not a long run I can’t do all of the things that I do around a long run. I can’t obsess over the weather for the 15-miler, I can’t eat extra carbs in preparation for the 15-miler, I can’t expect my family to give me deference and make accommodations for me ...

Training for the Carmel Marathon on April 4th, 2020 in Carmel Indiana Goal: 2:51 Week 2 Runs: 8 Weekly Milage: 72 Cumulative Milage: 139 Workouts / Long Run: 17 with 8 at Marathon Pace Performance Management Chart for the week showing my running fitness progression from the beginning of the cycle through the current week. The main focus this week was just building my milage a little from last week, about 5 more miles, while being ready for my first MP workout. I am pretty focused right now and I struggled some last week with wanting to do more that the plan called for. I really wanted to add in a threshold workout. Marathon training is about discipline and long term thinking though. I could have added in some threshold miles and it probably would have been ok but doing the plan the way the plan is written will get me where I want to go and will keep me feeling on track and help me from wavering in the other direction as well. I'm doing the plan, period. I ran my fi...

April 4th 2020 Carmel Indiana Goal: 2:51 This Week's Training Runs: 7 Milage: 67 Workouts: 4 mile threshold (6:20 --> 6:04) Long Run: 17 miles with a fast finish Week 1 for the 2020 Carmel Marathon is in the books, so to speak. My primary goals for this week were just to get back into the training groove and get a decent amount of milage in while getting back to the 7 day a week running thing. Honestly, it feels like I just raced a marathon about a month ago...... The biggest challenge this week was probably the 7 day a week running. I haven't run on Sunday in about 5 weeks and I kind of got used to having a day off. But days off don't help you run fast marathons, at least they don't help me run fast marathons. The other challenge this week was the threshold run. With the short turn around I was a little afraid that I wouldn't do very well. I really didn't feel like I needed to knock that workout out of the park but I also didn't want t...

On November 9th, 2019 I ran the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon (IMM). The short report is that I whined a lot during the build up and incessantly complained that I had gotten fat and slow but on race day, a semblance of my old self showed up and ran 1 hell of a race crushing my stated goal of 2:57 by nearly 4 minutes. The long report follows. I really had kind of given up on ever running a fast marathon again. After my back issues last year I just never got going full steam again. Instead I had gotten fat and slow because I let my diet slide and put on about 15 pounds and I was trying to run without fully committing to the work of marathon training. This summer I had decided to just maybe, kind of run the IMM for fun and not really lose my summer to training for it. But then Chad, a friend of mine who runs with a group on Sundays that I sometimes go to, asked my if I wanted to do my long runs for IMM together. I reluctantly agreed. Chad and I put up a couple of solid long...

I am involved in my first native IOS development project. Because I am kind of excited to be working on this project I wanted to play with the code and the development environment some this weekend. When I opened up Xcode to get stated I changed 1 line of code and did a build. What did I get for my enthusiasm? A failed build with "exit code 1." With such a helpful error message, I went straight to google. I saw a lot of posts on stackoverflow.com pointing to problems with the certificate. We've done enough mobile app development for me to know that IOS certificates can be a royal pain. But the project built fine on Friday I hadn't changed anything with the certificate. Being the weekend, I wasn't up for the frustration of tracking down a vague error code so I shut my MacBook Pro and went back to my weekend. When I came in to the office this morning and did a little more googling. I found this thread on the apple developer forums with a suggestion fo...

IRONMAN training calls to mind a lot of things: long days of grinding on long rides or long runs or long rides followed by long runs, early bed times for early mornings at the pool, jam packed weekends of training, and of course weight gain. Wait, weight gain? That's right, weight gain. I know this from experience. Before I started training for IRONMAN I didn't believe you could workout 15-20 hours per week and gain weight. But since IRONMAN races last all day long, one of the biggest challenges for an athlete is being able to take in and digest a days worth of nutrition while cycling and running. Like all other facets of IRONMAN, this requires training. So unlike marathon training where I finish my workouts in a calorie deficit and once or twice a week in a large calorie deficit, I finished a lot of my IRONMAN workouts in a negligible deficit and I was always eating either in preparation for a workout or for recovery from a workout. All that being said. I am up about 8 o...

It's been 3 weeks since IRONMAN Louisville (read the race report here ) and I'm tired of watching my fitness slide. I have laid out my plans for 2018 and I am recovered so this morning it was back to work. First I have to preface the "I am recovered" bit. My fatigue has returned to a state that will allow me to resume hard training. My left knee on the other hand, is still a bit cranky. I can ride my bike, no trouble at all but I can only run for about 20 to 25 minutes at a time before my knee gets really mad and won't let me go any further. I'm planning another post about my goals for 2018 but, in the interest of brevity here, the first goal for the year is to go after a half marathon PR. My current PR is 1:18:56 and the course I set that on seems to have been a bit short. My goal race is the Sam Costa half-marathon on March 24th, 2018 . That course consistently measures long by GPS. It's certified though and we all know GPS is not as accurate as the ...

On Sunday, October 15th, 2017 I raced my first full distance Ironman in Louisville Ky with about 2300 other people. I didn't post much about the training leading up to it because quite simply I didn't have the time or energy. So for a quick recap of my training; Training started on May 1st. I am always in marathon shape and haven't needed to build up my long run in years, however, I was basically starting at 0 with the bike and swim. That being the case, my main focus for both was simply building up the specific endurance needed to complete a 2.4 mile swim and a 112 mile bike ride in a reasonable time. The weekly training hours ramped up from 12 to 20 over the course of the cycle.  Fast forward to October 15th, 2017 4:00 AM. I slept like a baby and felt good when I woke up for breakfast. I had taken stuff to make peanut butter banana overnight oats. I use  this  basic recipe from fitfoodies with 2 exceptions; I use real milk and powdered peanut butter. I also had...

Training Details 20 Weeks Total 1453 total miles 3 100 mile weeks 3 full distance training runs (2 at actual marathons) 7 20+ mile runs Race Details Finish Time 2:51:31 77th Overall 72/2412 Men 12/413 Men Age 40-44 First Half 1:23:55 Second Half 1:27:37 The short description of this race would be a solid 23 mile race and a really, really bad 5k. The long painful story follows. First of all, I was very happy to line up healthy this year and finish the race. Last year I pinched a nerve and was unable to run the race after the best training cycle I have ever put together . The heart ache lasted for weeks and the disappointment was nearly unbearable. So, while the rest of this report may sound like a pity party, it's not. It's just an honest review. My goal back at the beginning of this training cycle was to get back to the shape I believe I was in last year. I was pretty sure that a 2:47:00 marathon would have been a walk in the park. I think that if I was feeli...

A couple of years ago my uncle, who lives about 30 minutes from Detroit, invited me to come run the Detroit marathon and stay with them. It wasn't going to work for me that year and it didn't work out the next year. But this year, everything came together and I was able to put it on my schedule as the final long run in a build up to the 2016 Monumental Marathon. Planning started about 8 weeks ago. The marathon begins in Detroit and crosses into Canada for a few miles. That being the case you need official credentials to cross the border. I haven't been out of the country in years and so didn't have any of the various options. We decided to go ahead and just get full passports in case we decided we wanted to fly to France for dinner some evening. While the State department recommends 6 week lead time to get your passport we actually received ours in about 2 weeks. It was a pretty simple process. The race was scheduled for 7:00 AM Sunday, October 16th, 2016. We headed...