Run to Win

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Refracted Moments™

• This week last year, I claimed that caffeine is worse for you than alcohol or tobacco. I fully admit that I’m prejudiced, but at least here in the United States I think that caffeine poses more of a public health issue than either of the other two drugs.
• I also listed my 6 favorite inspirational running books, each belonging to a different category. I represent how to manuals, retrospectives, essays and fiction in the list.
• I made a pretty big mistake with my training in the pool, and realizing what that mistake was instantly doubled how far I could swim on my lunch breaks. Not too bad…
• This week two years ago, I demonstrated how to do a 1 arm dumbbell bench press, reviewed Mead Memo Books and their applicability as a training log for the weight room, and discussed how exercise can prevent depression.

This week last year was a busy one, with a lot of quality articles on a wide range of topics. News bites were mixed in with training advice, and a good description of toys was mixed in with reader questions.

• The week began with a discussion of a number of different types of toys that runners use when then are training. I covered watches and pedometers to GPS receivers to technical fabrics and water bottles. This article was a continuation of on the Equipment series between Run to Win and Straight to the Bar.
• I posed the question, “When does your week begin?” My week begins on Monday and ends on Sunday. It makes it easier to plan my workouts and gives me a better idea about how to interpret my weekly mileage in a more useful manner.
• I offered one of my favorite racing tips, which I coincidentally included in my new book that I am publishing next week. This tip teaches you how to race with courtesy while gaining a competitive advantage over the other runners.
• Wes was getting ready for a new racing distance, and wanted to know how to hydrate for a half-marathon. He has since moved on to running full-length marathons and is actually running tomorrow morning at Walt Disney. Good luck, Wes!
• Is it possible to run under 2 hours in the marathon? This was a question that I was pondering a year ago when Paul Tergat still held the world record. Now that Haile Gebrselassie has run 2:04:26 and may make another run for a new record in Dubai this Friday, the sub-2 hour mark looks like it is becoming more of a reality. I really hope that we get to see it in the next decade or so.
• This week two years ago, I demonstrated how to use a machine that I don’t even plan to bother with again, the leg press sled. I just stick to doing squats these days. Tomorrow is also the 2 year anniversary of the death of Frank Fixaris. He was a Giants fan, so if he can he’ll be looking over them in their game against the Cowboys.
• This week two years ago was also when I had a great run in an unseasonably warm January, which was not unlike what the weather has been like for the past week here. If I can avoid it, though, I’d like to avoid breaking my neck again. Not that I did, but when I first sprained my neck getting out of bed on my birthday, it sure felt and sounded as though I had broken it.

When all of your training consists of one activity, it is easy to compare your workout load from week to week. If you are only running, you can compare your total time ran or your total mileage. The same goes for biking and swimming. However, when you cross train or train for different sports, how best can you compare your weekly workload so that you can see your progression in your training log?

My principal sport is running, so that is where most of my work gets done and how I think of how much I am working. My weekly mileage is one of the most important metrics that I use to tell how much work I have done. My weekly mileage does not include how many times that I lifted weights or how much I swam, though.

If I were to track how long that I worked out for, then I could say that I got X number of hours of exercise in for any given week. However, an hour running at 7 minutes per mile is much different than an hour running a fartlek or doing quarter mile repeats (nestled into a warm up and cool down). Lifting weights does not really tell me very much time wise, because how much and how often that I rest makes a big difference in terms of my workload.
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Photo by richelleantipoloDuring the week, I have about 30 minutes at lunch time that I can swim and still get back to work on time. I usually swim 24-25 laps in that amount of time. It is a 25 meter pool. That means that I have been swimming 600-625 meters for each 30 minute pool session.

I realized today that my math was a bit off due to faulty assumptions. I did not think about the fact that the length of the pool is 25 meters; each lap is actually 50 meters. I have been swimming 1200-1250 meters, twice as far as I thought I had been. I am still a slow swimmer, but at least now I know that I am not nearly as slow as I thought that I was.

It is also good to realize that I can swim most of a mile without getting too tired. Should I actually get around to competing in a triathlon this year, I will not need to be nearly as frightened of the swim leg. If the swim leg is a mile in the water, I will now base my training off of the hour or less it will probably take me rather than the hour and a half to two hours I would have thought that it would take based on 600 meters taking me 30 minutes in a pool.

The moral of this story is to pay attention to the actual work that you are doing, because thinking that you went for half the time or half the distance that you thought you did can make a big difference in your assumptions and training logs.

My calendars always consider Monday as the first day of the week. I began tracking my weeks this way as a convenience, and have kept it up that way because it made planning and analyzing my workouts so much easier. My wife disagrees with me and thinks that it makes more sense for the week to start on Sunday.

From a training stand point, I find that it makes much more sense to consider Saturday and Sunday as part of the same week. In general, most of the races that I compete in are on Sundays, with Saturday taking the bulk of the remaining races. On weeks where there is no race, the majority of my long runs will take place on the weekend. By putting Saturday and Sunday in the same week, I can plan my workouts leading up to those two days. I can then consider them as one unit and best decide how to utilize the two days that I generally do not have to work and will have the most time available to get in quality workouts and races. It allows me to have a set Monday through Sunday schedule for considering my weekly mileage.
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The Mead Memo Book is a small spiral bound notebook that is just the right size for recording workouts. It is what I use for recording my weight lifting workouts. I record what I want to do before I go to the gym, writing the day on the top. I record my warm up just below the date. Each exercise gets its own line. I clip a mechanical pencil to the spirals to make it easy to carry around, and as I finish a workout on the right page I tear off the corner to mark my page. The notebook is very conveniant for looking back on what I have done in previous workouts to help plan future workouts. Best of all? It costs less than a buck. The specific one that I like to use is 4″x6″ which leaves plenty of room for an entire workout, and has 40 sheets of paper. That means that it will last for over 6 months of working out 3 times a week at the gym.

I am beginning to test layout ideas for the website. Obviously, it is in a very rough state at this point, and it is not going to be a huge departure from normal. I only have a few goals I want to flesh out, and then I am going to adapt a skin for the blog to be encompassed by it, and I will leave it be until I actually have some content for it.

The general idea will be for a logo to show in the top left, and an ad or picture to show in the top right. The navigation will then go below those. There will be a footer the full width at the bottom of the screen.

The main content will either have a sidebar on the left or right that is a fixed width, and then a variable width content window that will work with most web browser sizes dynamically. I may limit how wide it can grow, but I probably will not. I may make a choice for where the sidebar goes, or I may let the user decide in their profile. The side bar will have dynamic content or extra navigation based upon what area of the site you are in. If I get fancy, I may make the side bar a constant on the side or just have the content area scrollable, but I am not sure yet if I will get that fancy and that can wait until after I have something useful.

The general exercise here is to see what sort of constraints I will have, and to start getting something solid. I am still waiting on a friend to provide the logo for me. The DB design is beginning to get fleshed out, but I want to make a few mock up pages before I set anything in stone so that I can help solidify my thinking.

I got to thinking today about the structure of how I want the training log to work when I write it. A feature that I definately want to have is a place to keep comments in a journal type fashion about the workouts themselves. When I was in college, that was the best part of the training logs the few of us that kept them had. We did not really care what the workouts were; we were running between 85 and 105 miles every week and the details were just that: nothing special. The journal aspect, such as Fuzzy swimming in the goose pond, or Cam shucking his shorts to chase camel cow, or the famous “We can’t get any wetter than we already are” run, those are the things worth remembering.

So, if there is a comment section to make comments on the run, and it is going to be labeled as a journal section, why not keep them seperate with a mere mechanism to combine them? I am just getting into the blogging, but I can see this as a powerful medium. A lightweight journal/blog with its own RSS feed for each user: that could be a nice feature.

Just a thought that I am toying with. If I do decide to run with it, I have to decide if I am going to put a full engine there to be used, such as I have for this blog, of if I will home grow a solution. If I use a precanned solution, then I will have to make sure I stay on top of security updates and that it fits seamlessly into the workout section (which will be the focus of the website). If I home grow the solution, then I will be severely limited in options. Which may or may not be a bad thing, depending upon how I want to go about it.

This bears considering. What are your thoughts?