Sunday, February 15, 2009

Saturday: 9 mi FF; Sunday: treadmill hills

Yikes! It has been one week since my last post. Here is the recap from last week.

No running during the week. Lots of alibis. Cold weather. Snow on Friday. I did do 20 minutes of strength training MWF during lunch.

I missed a planned easy run with drills and a cruise interval workout.

Saturday I decided to do a fast finish long run, but only had time for a little over an hour. I did 6 miles easy (avg 7:30 pace), then 2.5 fast finish, followed by a half mile cool down for a 9 mile total. The splits on the 2.5 mile finish were 6:07, 6:04, 3:02. Total time for 9 miles was 1:04:26 (avg pace 7:09). It was a great morning for a run except for the patches of black ice on the road due to the freezing temps Friday night (slippery).

Sunday I only had some time while the boys were napping to hop on the treadmill. Today was a scheduled hill repeats workout so I tried to mimic that. The design worked out well. I did a 3 mile warm up at 8mph (7:30 pace) on an incline of 3. Then increased the incline all the way up to 10 (the maximum). I proceeded to alternate 1 minute at 9mph with 2 minutes at 3mph for the next 30 minutes (10 total repetitions). The incline stayed at 10 even on the rest periods. The first 6x1 minute hill repeats were at 9mph, the next 4 were at 9.3mph. The last one went on for 1.5 minutes as I wanted to see what 10mph felt like on an incline of 10 (that is pretty fast, no joke). I cooled down at 7 mph with a total distance of 6.5 miles.

On Jack Daniels PhD. treadmill chart, for 9mph at 10% grade the equivalent effort on level ground is about a 4:10 mile, no wonder I was spent after 1 minute at that pace!


Dean Karnazes posted some of the information he collected at the Running USA conference last week here. The stat that I find most interesting is that of runners that run more than 100 times a year, 94% of them are college educated. I guess college is teaching us something.

Finally, Mark Denny PhD. wrote an article on the ultimate limits to running speeds for humans. I don't know how he formulated the results but they are interesting to think about none the less. Also, amazing how close Paula Radcliffe's marathon record is to the upper limits for females. He predicts that there is only room for .36% improvement on her women's marathon world record. Check out his predictions here.

Have a great week.

1 comment:

Daniel said...

Hey Karl - I enjoy seeing your splits and workouts...always inspiring. You've probably covered my question in blogs past, but I was curious how you keep such accurate splits while you are working out. Tom once told me that you run w/ a GPS. If so, what brand/model do you use? Any recommendations? Thanks! Happy Running!
--Dan