Tag: Marathon

2019 week forty five

Book Read
None

Kilometres Ran
week forty five – 70.1

2019 to date: 2,321 KM

I didn’t read any books this week but I read some other stuff. First was a Vice article called I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb and Airbnb really doesn’t seem to care. Whether or not you use Airbnb it’s an interesting article, and if you do use it there are some useful tips to watch out for when looking for a place to sleep. Most of the rest of the stuff I read was also about sleep after my physiotherapist suggested I try paying some attention to the Orthostatic HR Test. I’m not very good at it because when my wake alarm goes off at 5:10 a.m. checking my heart rate is the last thing on my mind. Anyway, the test goes like this:

HR1 = HR on waking (or resting completely for 15 minutes)
HR2 = Stand-up, pause for 15 sec then take HR again
HR2 – HR1 = X
If X is >15-20 beats per minute difference, you’re likely not fully recovered from the training of the day prior and should take it easy.

It’s not an exact science especially since I only just barely trust the optical heart rate monitor on the back of my Garmin Forerunner 235. But at 5:11 Thursday morning, after getting smashed on the track at the Mile2Marathon workout the night before (the Kipchoge Special: (2,000 / 400 / 1,000 / 200) x3) and then not getting to sleep until well after 11 p.m. it pretty firmly suggested I take an easy day.

Along with the heart rate math, my physiotherapist sent a couple article on sleep. The first, a pretty easy read titled Sleep, Recovery and Human Performance, which is pretty high level. The biggest take away being that I need to find a way to convince my employer that I need to take a 15-30 minute nap between 2 and 4 p.m. And I am seriously considering giving up my lunch break for some quiet time in the afternoons. The other is the opposite of high level – IOC consensus statement on relative energy
deficiency in sport (RED-S): 2018 update from the British Journal of Sports Medicine. I was pretty tired (no surprise) when I started reading it on my phone so suffice it to say I’m going to need to revisit it.

Tiiii-yerd.

Then because the world seems to want to hammer this sleep idea home, and the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon is real, Alex Hutchinson’s Sweat Science column in Outside this week was 5 Laws of Sleep for Athletes, which among other things reaffirmed that I need to nap more. In the article there’s a link to a sleep questionnaire from the Centre for Sleep and Human Performance. I completed it and scored 7, “which indicates that you have mild clinical sleep difficulty.”

So with four weeks to go until the California International Marathon I have one really hard week and then one pretty hard week and then a sorta hard week-ish and then a taper and I am laser focused on the task at hand but I will also be trying really hard to spend at least 56 hours per week for the next four weeks horizontal.

2019 week nineteen

Book Read
21. Dear Current Occupant – Chelene Knight

Kilometres Ran
week nineteen – 26.4

2019 to date: 931 KM

Dear Current Occupant is an award-winning creative non-fiction memoir that I had in my poetry pile to read during National Poetry Month and then found that it’s not actually poetry, but it has some poems sprinkled here and there. Knight traces her childhood growing in Vancouver by retracing the places she lived and writing to people currently living there. I don’t know if she ever actually gave any of the writing to the current occupant. It doesn’t matter. I liked this book. It’s a bit weird to me that such a Vancouver-centric book has a Toronto publisher. It does make me wonder if it was turned down by any local publishers. And then it goes on to win the 2018 City of Vancouver Book Award. I liked this book very much. If you follow the link above you can see a video of Knight reading from it. And then you can roam around the Book*hug website because don’t let Toronto fool you, they’re pretty great.

BMO Vancouver Marathon 2019, at about 37.5 KM just before Lumberman’s Arch. Other than the salty shoulders I look way better than I felt. Photo by Taylor Maxwell

A week ago was the BMO Vancouver Marathon and I’ve spent most of the week riding a rather high runner’s high expecting a crash that still hasn’t come. One reason for the continued high is the number of people that sent photos from the race. The BMO Vancouver Marathon uses the running photography cartel Marathon-Photo but I often get suckered. There’s usually one or two that are just okay but on the whole the photos are terrible. I don’t know how they manage to be so terrible so often. So I am so extremely grateful to the people who saw and recognized me on the course and snapped a photo and then sent them to me or posted them online. I’ve reposted a bunch on my Instagram but included my three most vanity stroking selections above and below.

In the finish area, post-race-drunk-talking to Debra Kato and Walter Downey. When I first saw these photos I couldn’t remember this moment at all. Bits are coming back now. Photos by Debra Kato.

I didn’t run much this week but I managed to put around 115 KM on my bicycle. I ran Wednesday and today (Sunday) and both days the legs were lead but the runs were really enjoyable, especially considering the last time I ran a marathon I could barely walk afterwards, and couldn’t run for nearly a month. In three days I’m getting on a jet plane and flying to Paris and then getting on a train ride to Basel, Switzerland where in seven days I’m running the Dreiländerlauf half marathon, which starts and ends in Basel and passes through France and Germany. How cool does that sound? It doesn’t look like a very big race but that suits me just fine. It does look pretty flat, though it’s a couple hundred metres above sea level. Maybe those factors will even out? Maybe there’s a new HM PB? Maybe I’ll just go have fun? Definitely I’ll let you know how it went next week.