Week one in the can

Last Sunday, I met my bud David Weaver at the Rock for a 9.5 run to Mt Bonnell. Weaver used to run for the Univ of Kansas 20+ years ago and seems to be in great shape always, regardless of whether he's actually training. Apparently, it takes me exactly 7 days to get out of shape, because this run hurt. Afterwards, I stopped at the Shell station for a 20 lb bag of ice; no doubt the first bag of many this summer.

Monday morning, I got to Barton at 7:00 thinking that I'd miss the Firecracker bunch - I was oddly sore from Sunday, especially in my ankles, and didn't really want company. As it turned out, Fletcher was a late starter as well, so he and I ran 7.5 fairly easy and taked about how old we are.

On Wednesday, Greg Thomas conned me into doing the Sunstroke 5k on the Townlake trail. It started at 7:00 that night; very warm but not too humid. Lots of familiar faces - Leslie, Nancy Dasso, Kirsten. I told Greg I'd pace him at around 19:30, but he flew past me and finished in 18:59. My 19:18 nearly killed me. On Thursday, I braved the 99 degree heat in the afternoon and limped around the trail to rack up another 7.4 miles before dashing home to soak my ankle in ice. In the bathroom cabinet I found a big box of vitamin packets and decided that I need to add take vitamins to the list of Tahoe preparations. I grabbed a can of soup for lunch the next day and found two more big boxes of vitamins in the kitchen. When I got to work on Friday, I tossed the soup can in my desk drawer right beside two more boxes of vitamins. The auto-ship with Purity Products was clearly a bad idea, but I'm determined to work my way through the pile.

On Saturday morning, I ran with Greg. Mike McNeil and Roger Isern. They've planned 14 and I'm thinking bad idea, but it turns out okay. Slow but okay. Afterwards, I drank a chocolate Slimfast and took a 20 minute ice bath ...and then a long nap. The vibrating cell phone woke me up. I made the dual mistake of leaving the cold water in the tub and the phone beside the tub, so the phone vibrated its way into the tub and sat at the bottom while I figured out whether I'd get a big shock if I reached down to get it.

Sunday, I pumped up the tires on my 20-year old Rock-hopper mountain bike, planning to ride up and down a big hill in my neighborhood listening to my MP3 player, but got curious about how my body felt after the 14.6 miles the day before ...and the next thing I knew I was running down Southwest Parkway adding another 5.3 to the weekly total and figuring that I'd take Monday off.

But Monday, I met Mike and Roger at Zilker for another 11. Probably another bad idea, but after a soak in Barton, I felt better than I'd felt in ages. In fact, I joined 24-hour fitness that night (free one-year membership) and lifted some leg weights, even though I have no idea what I'm doing.

Good start.

The Plan

I've been running competitively since August 1997. By competitively, I mean caring about my race time, buying shoes designed for running and actually training for a race instead of huffing and puffing my way through the Cap10 once a year. The hardest part about running competitively for so long is staying motivated. So, this year's plan is to run the "Tahoe Triple" in September. The appeal for me here is that ...I'm not really sure I can do it. I hate long runs, hate training in the heat and have been swearing off marathons for years. So, it makes perfect sense to run three marathons in three days at 6,700 feet elevation. And since I'd never be satisfied with just finishing, my goal is to average 3:30 ...no, 3 hours and 25 minutes per 26.2 mile stretch and finish in the top 10.

I haven't run more than 120 miles in any month since January and I took 7 days off after Chuys. My highest mileage week ever was 70 miles. I've had no more than a dozen above 60. The latest nagging injury is ...both ankles. Not sure what's up; they just feel pounded.

I printed out four months worth of Outlook calender pages at lunch last week, and tried to write down a schedule that I could roughly stick to. This is what I came up with -

Every other week is a heavy mileage week. The meat of the plan is three consecutive days of long runs (Sat/Sun/Mon), starting with 30 this weekend and working up to 60 by early Sept. The remainder of the "hard weeks" will consist of two or three days of 7 or 8 mile lake loops. I might substitute intervals on Wednesday's ...for no reason other than I like intervals. The "easy weeks" will include one long run of no more than 14 miles and another four or five days of lake loops and Wednesday intervals. The flexible plan will look something like this -

Week 1 - 42 miles
Week 2 - 36 miles
Week 3 - 48 miles
Week 4 - 38 miles
Week 5 - 56 miles
Week 6 - 40 miles
Week 7 - 64 miles
Week 8 - 40 miles
Week 9 - 70 miles
Week 10 - 40 miles
Week 11 - 74 miles
Week 12 - 40 miles
Week 13 - 78 miles
Week 14 - 40 miles
Week 15 - 80 miles
Week 16 - 40 miles
Week 17 - 82 miles
Week 18 - 40 miles
Week 19 - 84 miles
Week 20 - 40 miles
Week 21 - 14 miles