SBR Utopia Season II - OPEN (Page 106)

Chris - just because I am old, slow and fragile I do almost all of my long runs on trails and forest service roads, which around here for the most part means hilly-to-mountainous and sometimes fairly rugged. So I agree 100% to the "not sure why I don't do more trail races." So, this coming season we actually have a fair number on the calendar, most of which are xterra brand. After 3 years of IM focused training, I really want to see how much speed I can get back, but honestly was having a hard time getting jacked up for road racing. So I have some 5k road tests sprinkled through the season (starting last weekend), but the real focus will be on the trails. Now if only we could get our federal parks opened back up.

And oh, I cannot remember if I posted it here or not, but after I recovered from my back injury and was cleared to run and swim again, I was on the verge of signing up for Miami with you guys. Let me say that without a doubt not doing so was the smartest thing I have done in a very, very long time...! 

Did you include the rest?

Not to steer the conversation away from the bike discussion, but even though my training has been herky-jerky of late, I have been able to begin to incorporate some much harder runs than usual in. Until today it has all been pace-intervals on the road, but today I finally got sent to the track for the first time in 3 years for a short little ladder workout.

25 minute warm up, 2x400 @ 6:30 pace to dust the legs off, then:

(3x)
100 ON
100 off
200 ON
100 off
300 ON
200 off
400 ON
400 off

ON pace was set at 5:05, which turned out to be flat-out on my 400s

20 minute warm-down.

I have had jelly legs all day. it is glorious.

In.

Thanks! End of that route goes up a mountain as well, 900 ft climb and it doesn't play nice.

Would love to try the challenge you put up, but am having trouble really pushing the effort again, since the last race. Have to build up for awhile. Some respiration issues and some with metabolizing the energy. Go too hard too fast in a workout and everything shuts down even though I could have progressed well past that building up more slowly. Everything will be some type of progression for awhile. The way you did that seemed almost like one of the Training & Racing w/a Powermeter workouts. If I remember right, it goes something like 1 hr sweet spot, 1.5-2 hr 70-85%, 1 hr 90-94%. That was a solid challenge. I didn't quite make it through the hour as my feet were getting too sore (trainer), but 45 min isn't too bad. Loving the big sets they have in there.

Good time to ask a run question.  I'm in week 6 of the BarryP plan to run 6x per week, and increase the mileage - should be somewhere around 33 miles this week.  So far so good, except last week was a cutback week and I got sick, so it got cutback even more than intended, an yesterdays run showed I'm not fully better yet.

Anyway, the question is this.  Should I stick strictly to running easy for the full 12 weeks as prescribed in Barry's plan, or can I/should I ramp up the intensity every once in a while.  I'm running the 3 shorter runs a little quicker than recovery pace, the two medium runs are right around 8min pace which is right in the middle of my easy pace, and the longer run I tend to push the pace just a little faster/harder (we're talking in the high 7's).  Paces are all spit out by McMillan.  I'm getting very comfortable running easy, but maybe I'm getting a bit too comfortable?? That said, it hasn't been an issue to keep running day in day out, and I haven't really felt the mileage increase in my legs (but I've also been off my bike the entire time).

Neil, where exactly are you seeing that, to make sure we're looking at the same thing? From what I've read of BarryP, it tends to be more a lot of guidelines.

I don't know the ins and outs of BarryP but given that you are coming off an injury I would stick with a whole lot of easy.  I do a lot of easy runs and they definitely fall into what I would consider very comfortable.

Unless I read it wrong, I took it as phase 1 should be a minimum of 12 weeks, and it should all be easy.  Extend phase 1 as long as possible, and then transition into the other phases geared towards a specific race and then start to add in the intensity.  I'm basically only at week 6, plus my running was shall we say "light" the past few months.

I agree with this, but wondering about the point to start it off. Arend mentioned coming off injury, but I can't remember much about it. Has your weekly mileage leveled off? Are you putting in the time that you can? Do that first, spend at least a few weeks there, hitting the mileage every week. And then consider adding in effort. I would suggest some strides a few times before the tempo, probably a couple weeks of them. Then for the first time or two run more M to HM pace (as best you can tell) instead of all the way up at threshold.

Good thoughts all - I will aim to start this off easier than I would have in the past.  The injury is much earlier in the year, and I've been healthy for a while, but my weekly mileage only averaged around 20 miles/week from March-August, with different highs and lows along the way.  This week I should hit about 34 miles, and have been slowly building since the beginning of September keeping to the idea of no more than 10%/week total increase.  By early/mid November I'm hoping to be up around 40 miles/week.

We were looking at Sam Gyde's profile before, but one of the guys is claiming 327 NP for 4:32 (Sam was 288 NP). His linked file is set to private, so can't see it. Sound like it's Josh Beck (Lake Placid and others) from Kyle Yost's posting.

Josh Beck and Sami Inkinen were the only ones to ride 4:32 so the odds are good.  327 NP seems like a lot for that time?  Unless he's an aero brick or had a lower AP / huge VI that skewed the NP to speed?