Blog Title: Run to Win

Running From An Angel 50 Miler (2009) » Training Schedule

This Autumn I concentrated on running a fast 5k, a goal that I was only moderately successful at (given the times that I wanted to run versus the times that I did run.) At the beginning of October, I switched my training over to get ready for my first 50 mile race which was at the beginning of January.

My first week was a recovery week from my Summer and Autumn training schedule, and I only ran a couple of times that week. Then I began to build up my mileage in preparation for the race. I did very little speed work outside of a few tempo runs. You can see my weekly mileage for the latter quarter of 2008 here:

After one good week of training (53 miles, about on par with what I had been doing in my 5k training) I got pretty sick and took 5 days off in the third week. I felt really good from there though and built my mileage up into the 60s and 70s for the bulk of my training.

There were a few races thrown in, but none of them were at full effort. I ran the Windham Lions 5k in the middle of a 15 mile run, I ran the Wicked Creepy Halloween Trail Run on an unfamiliar trail in the dark, and I mostly just ran with my camera filming the Blackstrap Hell Trail Challenge. I still got official times for them all, though.

My general philosophy was to get a mid-week long run in as often as possible and to run back to back medium/long to long runs on the weekends, building up as the weeks wore on. I did really well with my mid-week runs, with a lot of double workouts to get mileage in on some weeks (including one triple) and with a straight up 12-15 miler on the other weeks.

On the weekends, I didn’t do so well. I wanted to get at least one 30-35 mile run in, but my longest run wound up being just over 24 miles. I also never got any back-to-back 20+ mile runs in. I think that having those would have helped me in the 50 miler.

I did try to get as many hills into my workouts as possible. The race looked like it was relatively hilly when I first checked out the elevation profile:

There is 4,277 total feet of ascent (with a net of zero as it was an out and back) over the 50 miles. It looks intimidating, until I realized that some of my long runs at Pineland Farms were getting me around 2300-2500 feet of total ascent over less than half that distance. The actual grades of the road were only about 6-8%, so it’s actually a pretty easy course in terms of the climbing. I still tried to integrate as many hills into my long runs as possible, though, especially my mid-week runs on the roads that were 12-15 miles and anything that I did on the trails that was over 10 miles.

I had 2 weeks that I think were the cornerstone of my training. The first 7 weeks were basically training for these 2 weeks worth of workouts, building up a good enough base that I was able to accomplish them.

The first cornerstone week was reaching 100 miles in a single week for the first time since I graduated from college. That week I just had a huge volume of mileage with 4 individual runs over 10 miles and only 2 days during that week where I (barely) didn’t run at least 10 miles.

The week following that was scheduled as a cutback week, where I intended to run about 50 miles, but between Thanksgiving and some sore legs I only ran a little over 20. That let me rest up and recover from some of the damage of putting in a 100 mile week.

The second cornerstone week was actually a 5 day span of workouts that started at the end of week 10 and ran into week 11, where I ran 3 runs over 20 miles.

• Saturday: 20 miles on trails followed by a 150 minute nap.
• Sunday: A 90 minute nap followed by 7 miles on roads.
• Monday: 21 miles on roads.
• Tuesday: 5½ miles on trails after working a full day.
• Wednesday: 24 miles on the roads (my longest run leading into the race.)

So in 5 days I ran 77 miles, 65 of them in 3 of the runs. Individually, none of the runs were particularly difficult, but that last long run certainly had my legs feeling pretty similar to what I could expect around 35 to 40 miles into the 50 miler.

From that point forward, I was concentrating on recovering from as much of the damage that I had done to my legs as possible. The Monday following that 5 day streak I did a short 5 mile tempo run, which felt nice for stretching my legs out. From there my mileage dropped off pretty fast. I only ran about 45 miles the week before Christmas and about 30 miles the week of.

As my friend Ian reminded me, you aren’t going to improve in the last few weeks before an ultramarathon, you can only sabotage your race by doing more work than you need to.

The 50 Mile Diet - Don’t Knock It ‘Til You Try It

Yesterday, I ran 50 miles. At once. Yeah, strange thing to do, but it seemed like a good way to finish off a vacation.

At a very rough estimate, I probably burned around 5500 calories or so in the 8 hours that that took. Here is everything that I consumed before and during the race:

Pre-Race

• 1 banana (105 calories)
• 2 wheat rolls (~85 calories ea / ~170 calories)

Breakfast total: 275 calories

Race

• (Lots of) Water (0 calories)
• 2 pouches of Hornet Juice - start & @ mile 19 (60 calories ea / 120 calories)
• 12(ish) cups (2oz to 6oz) of Heed (100 calories per 16 ounces / ~300 calories)
• ~70 Black Forest Gummi Bears (120 calories per 17 bears / ~500 calories)
• 6 Crank Gels (150 calories ea / 900 calories)
• 12 pretzels (24 calories ea / 288 calories)

Race Total: 2108 calories

Consumption Strategy

In all, I consumed less than 2400 calories, which gives me at least a 3000 calorie deficit by the end of the race. That would explain why I’ve been so hungry for the past day or so, I guess.

My general strategy was to eat what I had available for breakfast, and to make sure that I had plenty of water during the run. I wanted to eat gummi bears regularly throughout the run every 15-30 minutes and a gel packet every 45-60 minutes. Since Heed was available, I took a cup of that at most of the aid stations, being careful to space out my gel packets and my Heed consumption since I didn’t think those would mix too well. I also grabbed a few pretzels from the aid station tables on 4 separate occasions, 3 at a time.

I also started with a water bottle full of Hornet Juice which I refilled at mile 19. I meant to refill my sandwich baggy of gummy bears at mile 36, but I got busy reapplying sunscreen and forgot to grab them. I only ran out of water once, but I knew that there was an aid station coming up within a quarter mile so that worked out fine. I did dump quite a bit of water on the ground, though, because “1/3 to half full” apparently meant “so full you can’t screw on the top” to most of the volunteers at the marathon aid stations. That was fine, though, better too much than too little.

This strategy kept me going. The majority of the calorie consumption came early in the race, since there was way I was going to be able to process everything late in the run and I knew I wouldn’t be able to take in as many calories as I was using. I just thought it would be interesting to find the specific deficit, especially since I could still remember everything I ate during the race and thought to jot it down.

Specific details on the race will be going up over the next few days, including plenty of pictures. I carried my cell phone with me and snapped photos of (almost) all of the 50 milers as well as plenty of the beautiful surroundings that are to be found at Lake Mead, although I did not get any photos of the coyotes. (They sounded like they were just on the other side of the hill that I was running around, although they were actually across a river that was on the other side of it.) The crows didn’t excite me enough when they came visiting late in the race for me to take the energy to get the camera out.

Winter Running Apparel For Visibility In The Dark

All of this week I will be sharing some tips on Winter Running Apparel, with some strategies on how to keep yourself warm, safe and comfortable in cold and dark running conditions. Today is the 6^th of 6 videos, with strategies on how to stay safe when running in the dark.

Hello. This is Blaine Moore from RunToWin.com and I’m going to show you a few things about winter running apparel so that you can go out and be prepared for the colder weather as it comes in.

Your Visibility

One problem with running in the colder weather is, it tends to be darker earlier and get lighter later in the morning. So you are going to want to make sure that you are visible. Like right here, these are not good clothes to be wearing if you are going to be running in the evening or in the early morning. This is only good if you are running in a lot of light.

There are a lot of good options for wearing things that are reflective. Like this jacket here from Nike has a lot of reflective strips on it. It’s very visible, a very obnoxious color. So even in the middle of the day, it’s a good one to wear, especially if it’s foggy out or snowing. People are more likely to see you.

As much as you can wear that is reflective, the better. A lot of tights and pants that you get these days have reflective designs and that’s not quite as important because realistically if a car’s coming at you, they’re probably not going to see your lower body no matter how reflective it is. So really concentrate on getting your head and your torso especially to be as reflective as possible.

Another option is to wear lights. So this is a cheap bike lamp that I got. It’s just a tail light for a bike. There’s a couple of options for that. I can wear on my arm as I’m running. It also comes off the strap and you can just clip it right on to the back of your pants. And that’s very good for grabbing attention.

You’re definitely going to want to get a headlamp. Not just so that you can see but also so that you can be seen. You can wear one headlamp on your head and in conditions especially when it’s foggy or if it’s raining and you have the light reflecting off of the water droplets right in front of your face you might want to wear another headlamp on your waist. If you have a tri-belt they’re really easy to attach to the tri-belts and they are easy to put on and off. Otherwise as long as your strap is big enough you can just step right into it and put it right around your waist.

A lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll take my light, and even if I don’t need it to see, I’ll adjust it so that it’s got an obnoxious blinking. And that’s very visible to traffic so that they can see me coming like quarter mile away. They may not know what you are but they know that you are there. That’s the important thing.

If you don’t have one then it’s certainly worth picking up a reflective vest. You can throw this over anything you’re wearing, no matter what time of the year. And these are always very visible, very reflective, that’s the whole point of wearing them. So I highly recommend getting something like that.

Winter Running Apparel For Your Feet & Skin

All of this week I will be sharing some tips on Winter Running Apparel, with some strategies on how to keep yourself warm, safe and comfortable in cold and dark running conditions. Today is the 5^th of 6 videos, with strategies on how to keep your feet warm and firmly planted on the ground, as well as how to protect your skin from the sun.

Hello. This is Blaine Moore from RunToWin.com and I’m going to show you a few things about winter running apparel so that you can go out and be prepared for the colder weather as it comes in.

Your Feet

Once you get down to your feet, you have couple of options. You don’t want to wear cotton socks for the same reason you don’t want to wear cotton anywhere else. I really like Thorlos socks. They are nice and thick. They’ll keep your feet very warm. If you have shoes that are really tight then they are not very good for those kind of shoes because they are pretty thick. You might also want to wear some socks that ride a little bit higher up on your legs and then you can wrap them underneath your pants or under your tights. And Wright Socks makes really good pairs of those.

If you are running in icy conditions you are going to want to have a good grip on the road. So one thing to consider is putting something like Stabilicers or Yak Trax on your feet. Basically what the Stabilicers are it’s a crampon for your shoes that you wear and it’s just got some screws down at the bottom that give you a good grip. The problem with these is that can collect snow underneath of them. And they are heavy and they can fall off of your feet. I don’t run in these anymore. I liked them a lot when I did use them, but they’re just a little bit too heavy for me now. So I only wear them on my boots when I’m shoveling the driveway.

What I like to do is put screws directly into my shoes. It’s much lighter, it’s much cheaper and it’s a lot more effective. So I have a video on runtowin.com already on how to put screws in your shoes. It’s really straightforward. Just buy some sheet metal screws, screw them right into the bottom with the head of the screw facing down. It will give you some great grip.

Yak Trax are another option. I’ve never used them. I prefer just using screws so I go with that method.

Your Skin

One other thing you might want to consider is to make sure that you have sunscreen on. Even though it’s the winter time, the sun can still be very bright and especially if you are running on snow or if you are doing any kind of lake running, then the sun can be coming down at you from above and reflecting off of the ice or the snow into any exposed areas of your skin. Which can warm you up quite a bit as well as give you a good sunburn.

Winter Running Apparel For Your Legs

All of this week I will be sharing some tips on Winter Running Apparel, with some strategies on how to keep yourself warm, safe and comfortable in cold and dark running conditions. Today is the 4^th of 6 videos, with strategies on how to keep your legs warm.

Hello. This is Blaine Moore from RunToWin.com and I’m going to show you a few things about winter running apparel so that you can go out and be prepared for the colder weather as it comes in.

Your Legs

For your legs, depending upon how cold it is you can go with just shorts. The next step up from shorts is you might want to put some running pants on. So these are some good pants for running in, made by Sport Hill, they are very comfortable, they don’t rub up against each other too much when you’re running. One thing you might want to avoid is wearing cotton sweat pants because they’ll get heavy and they’ll get wet.

And some Ski pants or warm up pants are good for if you are at a track meet, and you want to go out and get a quick warm up there, you want to stay warm between your events, something like these that are lined are really good. But when you are going out for a long run, they just really get heavy and they rub up against each other and they can cause chafing. (And it makes a really annoying noise when you run.)

For the really cold days you can wear tights, which will give you more of a compression effect. And they’ll also keep your legs a little bit warmer. Underneath of the tights you can either wear briefs or running shorts, or if it’s not super windy out then you could just go with just the tights.

If it is really cold out, you can wear regular shorts over the tights just to give you another layer of protection. Or you can wear something like the tights underneath the pants. Or even put some tights on that will only go to your knee or down to your calf as that base layer and those work out pretty well for keeping the wind away from the sensitive areas.

Winter Running Apparel For Your Torso

All of this week I will be sharing some tips on Winter Running Apparel, with some strategies on how to keep yourself warm, safe and comfortable in cold and dark running conditions. Today is the 3^rd of 6 videos, with strategies on how to keep your torso warm.

Hello. This is Blaine Moore from RunToWin.com and I’m going to show you a few things about winter running apparel so that you can go out and be prepared for the colder weather as it comes in.

Your Torso

For your torso, it’s all about layering up. On the outside you want to have some kind of a windbreaker, whether it’s a full zip or some kind of a half zip that only goes down to your chest. The nice thing about the half zip’s and the full zip shirts are that you can regulate heat really well. On the colder days when you first get out running and you haven’t warmed up yet, you can zip up all the way to protect your neck, not so much for this jacket, but you get it over your face or sometimes your nose as you are running and once you warm up you can let some of the heat out just by unzipping it.

Underneath of that you are going to want to wear at least one if not two shirts. I like to have a long sleeve and then a short sleeve underneath. This is good for as you warm up, you can strip off a layer, you can take your jacket off or you can take one of these layers off from underneath or push your sleeves up.

I recommend against wearing cotton, and wearing more technical fabrics instead. And the reason for that is when you are running and you sweat, (even when it’s cold you are still going to sweat,) if you are wearing a cotton shirt and it gets wet, then the water is just going to pool up on that spot, and it’s going to get heavy and it’s going to get cold and it’s going to freeze. Whereas if you are wearing a technical shirt and you get water on it, the water is just going to wick from your skin out and then once it gets on to the shirt it’s going to spread out along the fabric. So it’s not all concentrated on one spot so you wont get as cold. And if you have a good shirt, like this one, it will bead up and it will just run right off of the shirt and it will barely get wet as you can see. Most of it has wound up on the ground.

Another option for the torso is, for just keeping your torso warm, you can wear some kind of a vest as a base layer or as an outer layer. That’s good for protecting you from the wind and those kind of situations.

Winter Running Apparel For Your Hands

All of this week I will be sharing some tips on Winter Running Apparel, with some strategies on how to keep yourself warm, safe and comfortable in cold and dark running conditions. Today is the 2^nd of 6 videos, with strategies on how to keep your hands warm.

Hello. This is Blaine Moore from RunToWin.com and I’m going to show you a few things about winter running apparel so that you can go out and be prepared for the colder weather as it comes in.

Your Hands

When you get to your hands, they also are going to get really cold. A lot of times, one pair of gloves is usually going to be enough, but if it’s really cold you might want to wear a second pair of gloves. These gloves here you’ll notice are half mittens, they keep the fingers near each other so that they are a little warmer. And on the cold days, what I’ll do is I’ll actually wear these on the outside and then I have a pair of smaller gloves on the inside. Then I can just either carry these gloves once I’m warmed up or I can put it into a pocket or throw it on the side of the road to pick up later.

New Year’s Running Plans

Is there a better way to celebrate the New Year than by heading out for a run? Whether you motivate yourself with resolutions or not, getting out and pounding the pavement or trails or ice is a great way to start the year; I find it difficult to think of anything better.

Last year, I took part in the Resolution Run from the Maine Running Company. I’ll be in the wrong part of the country this year, but if you are going to be in the Southern Maine area than this is an ideal place to get your workout in.

The Resolution Run starts at Maine Running Company and ends at the Great Lost Bear, which is a few hundred feet across the street. There will be people there that are doing 5 kilometers, and people running 10 kilometers. There may even be a few people running further than that, and there will definitely be people that limit their running to the couple of hundred feet to get from the store to the bar! Note that this is not a race; it is a group run so there is no pressure.

The run starts at 11:30, and the first 30 or so people to arrive will get a free technical shirt. There is no cost to take part in the run, although any donations will be part of the Extremities Drive to help underprivileged Maine children get hats and gloves to keep them warm this Winter. If you have any old hats or gloves that you don’t need anymore, feel free to drop them off at the store or bring them along with you to the Resolution Run.

After the run, more shirts and other prizes will be raffled off at the Great Lost Bear. I remember winning a pair of gloves or something like that last year, but I traded them for somebody’s rice that they weren’t going to eat!

If you do take part in the Resolution Run and want to write about it, shoot me an email and I’ll put a post together about it next week. It was a lot of fun last year.

For more information: mainerunning.com

(Don’t worry about me finding somewhere to run for the New Year - I’ll be in Vegas, and will be taking part in a Las Vegas Hash with my wife and some friends!)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all of you, I hope that your holidays have been joyful.

USATF Amends Headphone Rule

I heard rumors last week that the USATF had changed their stance on headphones, and they have finally published some confirmation.

Headphones will still not be allowed in championship racing, but personal audio devices may be used at race director discretion as long as they do not allow communication. So iPods will be okay for most runners, but cell phones will still be banned.

The amendment is to Rule 144.3, and now reads as follows:

“(f) The visible possession or use by athletes of video, audio, or communications devices in the competition area. The Games Committee for an LDR event may allow the use of portable listening devices not capable of receiving communication; however, those competing in Championships for awards, medals, or prize money may not use such devices.”

Be sure to check with your individual race directors about whether iPods and other devices are allowed in their races, but there is no longer a blanket rule that they are expected to enforce on the matter. I know that this will make quite a few people happy.

That said, I will continue to race without them.

(More Info: USATF)