Sunday, February 18, 2007

Week of Feb 12 - 18

Total Miles For Week (Year): 131 (757)
Long Run: 15M

This week is encouraging, particularly because I never really felt "great" the whole week. Of course I never really felt awful either. It was just a run of the mill week and that is what is so encouraging. When a 131M week feels ordinary life is good. The only weekness I can see in the whole week is that I didn't have a run over two hours. I did have two pretty good workouts, so I'll say that balances it out. I plan on running 40 miles this coming Saturday anyway.

5 comments:

Eric said...

Nice week. Cool that it's not beating you up as well.

Is this mileage level part of the build up for a 100k race, or is this the mileage you have built up to for general aerobic base prep? I know absolutely nothing about ultra training--just curious.

Anonymous said...

Good luck with the 40-miler! You're totally killing me mileage-wise. I just set a weekly "PR" of 97 and can't imagine going above that anytime soon....

Patrick said...

eric,

Ideally I would have liked to get higher volume 110-120 with 2 or 3 35-40 mi runs in Dec and Jan, but life/health/weather just didn't allow that to happen. This would have been the traditional Lydiard phase with strides,hills and weights. Consequently I'm just trying to do a continuous buildup of mileage and intensity to early March and then cut back gradually leading up to the 100km champs in April. My thinking is I'm just going to get in the best shape I can, run a US Team qualifying time of 7:20 or better, take April and part of May to recover and then try a more traditional approach for the World Cup in September.

Generally I like to be doing some sort of workouts year round, but vary the nature of stimulus intensity and frequency.

Ultra training (by this I mean road ultras = fast) isn't really any different from marathon training. If you have a car that tops out at 70 mph and one that tops out at 170 mph which one is going to run better at 50 mph? Threshold and V02 workouts are still paramount. The only differences are: 1) Really long runs every 2-3 weeks and 2)eating/drinking on the run is essential. If you bonk in a marathon you've got 10k to go. AT last years World Cup I hit the wall with 50k to go. Pleasant.

That was longer than I had planned. Sorry for the babble.

Patrick said...

Greg,

I'll take 40+ mi runs at 6:20 over 130 mpw any day. I don't think the weather is going to cooperate this weekend (wind and snow/rain) so I might not be running for pace as much as just survive 4x10mi loops. I'm glad to see you're doing the 50k Champs. I was thinking about it because I thought it fit well in the schedule, but travel gets so darn expensive and I'm a homebody in a lot of ways anyway. Its also good to see that Jurker is running. I like to see the crossover. FYI- my plan right now is to run 6:35-6:40s at the fastest for the first half. I would like to keep you company, but I need to run a solid race just for confidence sake. I took my chance at Worlds last year and it didn't work out so well. BTW - 97 miles with a new born has to be a non-Culpepper record. Good job.

Anonymous said...

Regarding your 100K pacing plans: bummer for me! But you know what you've gotta do, and I can't argue with that. Maybe Howard will keep me company.... Or maybe I'll just crash and burn all by myself.