Tucson 1/2 Marathon Gang

Reading the running and tri sites, I came across a link to this product whose opening flash is awesome. Note the name of the product being advertised.

link

Allen asked a couple of questions the other day one of which focused on fatigue. I always thought fatigue was like pornography, hard to define but you know it when you see it. It turns out that there is at least some objective criteria behind it invovling lactate levels. Note that this is totally unrelated to the lactation room down the hall.

I think this is the simplest of the 3 sites (link) basically saying that your threshold is probably around 85% of max heart rate and to improve it you should run at that level (but not over) on some 'tempo' or 'cruise' runs. Note that the durations they give are for experienced runners and would wipe out one of us beginners. A nice tempo run for us would be 5-7 minutes at 65-70%, 10-15 at 85% followed by 5-7 at 65-70%. A cruise would be a bunch of 3-5 min. runs at 85% with maybe 1-2 mins at 65-70% in between. I think you would need to get 5-7 cruise periods in the run to make it beneficial.

This site (link) has a good overview of what its about and what to do with it. If you don't know your 5K pace you can either go run 3 miles and find the time or take some guess that you could do it at like 10:30 to 11:00 minute miles and add from there. The way I used this calc was to find my time, add the number, run that pace for 20 minutes and see what my heart rate was.

This link (link) is pretty intense (remember Krebs cycles from Bio 1,000 years ago?) but if you make it through

There are not quite 8 weeks till we start but if you are starting from scratch I would reccomend this training program to get you ready.

Link

Darren and I talked today about his concern that he hits a brick wall at 2 miles running at his current pace. I had the same problem when Collier and I initially started running. It was right around 2 miles that I would start to really feel the fatigue to the point that it was tough to even finish the 3 mile course I was training for.

I got a heart monitor and followed the advice from a site like this one (link). Basically I stopped worrying about how fast I was running and focused on keeping my heart rate around 75%. It didn't take long before I could go much farther and could then start to work on building speed. To build speed I do interval runs were I will go at 70-75% for 5-10 minutes then 1-2 minutes at 90% and repeat that cycle for 30-40 minutes. Again it didn't take long to see real results.

The Heart Rate Monitor really helped me improve and go farther. I have a Timex Ironman right now which works very well but I am looking at upgrading to the Garmin 301 Forerunner (link) because it adds the GPS capability as well.

I have this dream that we can get a set of t-shirts for training. I found a cool site that makes the design easy but can't decide between all the good ideas submitted so far. Let me know what you think of the following and feel free to make your own and post links as comments here. I want to try to order them in August so we can all have them to start training in September.

Shirt 1 (link)
Shirt 2 (link)

We plan to follow Hal Higdon's 12 week Novice Training Guide (link) which means you have to be able to run 3 miles 3-4 times per week starting Monday September 12 2005. This should give you plenty of time to get ready. 3 miles is really not that far (I know that if you are starting from 0 it seems insanely far) but after 3-4 weeks of doing it consistently 2-3 times per week it will be cake. prycly

Schedule

We will schedule at least 1 long group run per month (in red) but there are also a few public events we can join that fit in the schedule pretty well. So far the tentative dates I have are:

September
Week 1 Monday 9/12 Start Training
Week 2 Sunday 9/25 1st Annual William Hung 4 miler 'I already gave my best....'
Week 3

October
Week 4
Week 5 Sunday 10/16 AIDSWalk 10K (the Kramer decision)
Week 6
Week 7 Sunday 10/30 1st Annual Kerpal Challenge 7 miles 'You know damn right!'
Week 8

November
Week 9
Week 10 Sunday 11/20 1st Annual Run for BBQ 9 miles (NFL and BBQ at the finish line)
Week 11

December
Week 12 Sunday Run the 1/2 Marathon

We are going to run in the Tucson 1/2 Marathon 7:00 AM December 4 2005. (link)

By we I mean me and whoever else is willing to put in the work to accomplish this. It always helps me stay focused when I am on a team so I am asking that if you join up you commit to going the whole way through training and the race.

I made this site so we can track progress and discuss training. Send me an email if you want to be on the team and I will give you access to the site so you can post.

I posted a couple of articles about tentative training schedule and some t-shirt designs. Let me know what you think.