Grace, Pace and Space

There's also a new post over on Run Drink Repeat... about my first eight miler...

OK, a quick note on pace. Again, on your long runs, unless I tell you otherwise, you want to be going easy. I'm horrible at this - I'm checking my watch, every mile. I'm basing my expectations on what I know I've done before at this level of conditioning, but it's still not the smartest way for me to be training myself.

Look in any running book or website, and they'll tell you that a good training program has you doing "LSD". Sweeeet. No, you hippies, that means "long slow distance". You have to remember that "running" is not just one thing, one strength. It's a combination of elements, all of which we try to address in different ways.

Basically, you want to reach and sustain a pace that keeps you in the realm of aerobic energy production. Naturally, your muscles, your skeleton, your cardiovascular system, even your energy production at the cellular level, will respond.

A lot of this is because of fuel. Think of yourself as a car that some gearhead has stuck a nitrous tank on. At easy speeds, like when you're working aerobically, you go well enough on gasoline, the way you were meant to run. When you push the speed past a certain point, you hit the nitrous to add some boost to the fuel, which will now burn hotter with the same amount of oxygen. The problem there is, that boost is short lived, and has consequences, like voiding your warranty and possibly causing you to blow a seal, which is and isn't as nasty as it sounds.

Thing is, we're better than cars, because our bodies can respond and improve themselves.

In response to the increased, prolonged oxygen demand of lengthy runs in the aerobic zone, your body will build new and more extensive capillary beds in your muscles that are critical for the delivery of oxygen.

Your cells will produce greater size and number of mitochondria, the little guys that are responsible for energy production, which in turn will enable you to actually maintain a faster pace, even in shorter races. On top of that, the enzymes in the mitochondria responsible for energy production become more active, leading to even more efficiency.

Your body will learn to conserve its primary fuel - glycogen. When you're out of glycogen, your time on the road is drawing to a close. Your body will respond to greater fuel consumption by burning it more efficiently, and storing more of it in favor of increasing its use of another fuel for energy - fat. If you keep your speed under control, your body will read the writing on the wall, realize you're going to continue to do this stupid running activity on a regular basis, and it will use more fat and less carbs on a regular basis. Result - you'll go longer without bonking, and you'll look hotter. Those are both good things.

Somehow, in ways I don't understand, your musculoskeletal system will even become stronger to put up with the repetitive impact and stresses.

There's a bunch of other crap that happens - fast-twitch muscles changing teams to slow-twitch, something about Mia's globes... uhh... science... Whatever.

Finally, a lot of what we're getting into is the mental aspect of simply enduring the distances and the times involved. At some point, you will have been running for an hour and a half, two hours, then realize you've got another hour or two to go. You only learn to cope with that by doing it, by putting in the time - without an iPod, I should add.

Now, if you go too fast in your long runs, you push out of the aerobic threshhold, and all those systems don't have to respond, they don't have to improve. You may be able to run a distance, but you've missed out and being better, faster, less... hurty.

Go too hard too much of the time, and you dramatically increase your risk of injury, even burnout. You won't feel like a bad-ass watching in February, if you're wondering if you screwed yourself up. And running yourself so hard that you peak right around National Bicarbonate of Soda Day (that's December 30 for you people without decent calendars) does you no good on February 15, either.

Go fast on Tuesdays. Bump up the pace a little on one of your solo weekday runs - Monday, perhaps. Bump up the pace for the last mile or two of your Thursday run, which will be the longer of your solo runs. In a couple of the long runs, I'll ask you to run MGP or HMGP for a certain number of miles, usually near the end, where you'll hate me the most for it.

All my coaches tried to pound patience into me, but I was in too much of a hurry to listen. I still wrestle with the siren's call of the stopwatch, but I'm a better runner when I win that struggle.

Now, by the same token, you don't need to be just dogging it out there. If your buddy is a lot slower than you, then you need, to some extent, to do your own thing, or find someone different to run with, and hook back up afterwards. You may also be forcing them to run faster than they should, so you're not helping them, either...

I also mean to enforce less loitering, slacking, dallying, dawdling, loafing, frickafracking and general lollygagging at the water stops. There'll be none of that at the races, so you need to start minimizing your inactive periods.

Alright. Get running.